Dark and Deepest Red(28)

“But why here?” Lala asks. “Why a place where they walk the streets with such hate in their hearts?”

“There is hate in all hearts.” Tante takes Lala by her sleeve. “I should think you would know that by now.”

“And in your heart?” Lala asks. “What do you have for me and Alifair?”

Tante’s gaze sharpens. Not in anger. More like Lala has caught her attention.

“I heard you,” Lala says. “Four years ago. With the elder.”

Tante looks not even a little surprised.

“The only defense you had for Alifair is that he hadn’t touched me,” Lala says. “So what is your defense of us now?” Her voice grows defiant. She knows she sounds younger but she cannot stop it. “What is it you think of us now?”

“I think it is against Romanipen,” Tante says. “And I think you know that.”

“So is your remaining unmarried.”

Tante’s stare grows hard edges. “And I have not judged you, or him. So don’t you dare stand in judgment of me.”

Lala feels herself both shrinking and returning the glare.

With a sigh, Tante’s face softens. “I have only feared for the lives you will have. They are difficult enough each on your own. But together”—she pauses, closes and opens her mouth, as though collecting her words—“what is it you want me to tell you? What fairy story do you wish to believe? That you two being together would lessen your burden? That you both carrying something you must hide would make this life easier for you? That is not the way the world works. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many of us who feel we have no choice but to marry gadje.”

“Why is it that you have choices more than the rest of us?” Lala asks. “You do what you like.” It is times such as this that Lala feels how small the years between them are, the gap more between an older and younger sister than between a mother and daughter. “You never have to draw yourself back or hide anything.”

“I am with child,” Tante says.

The words cut off any Lala has left. They drift away as quietly as woad seeds on the wind.

So much of the strangeness comes in the sudden remembering that her bibio has a whole life of which she knows nothing. She does not know whom Tante admires and whom she despises, not beyond what Tante tells her. Lala has been too caught in the weave of her own worry.

“Who?” is all the answer Lala can manage.

“Onfroi,” Tante says.

It takes Lala a moment to place the name.

“The flax farmer?” she asks. She has rarely thought of the man by his Christian name. “But … he is so old.”

“Everyone looks old when you’re sixteen,” Tante says, as though she herself is eighty. She is young enough and beautiful enough that boys Lala’s age leer at her.

“Did you want to?” Lala asks, and even as she says the words she hears how clumsy they are. She does not know how to ask any other way.

“Yes,” Tante says. “I did.”

Lala falls into relief and then wonderment. The man is quiet and plain as a pail of milk, so what could Tante have seen in him? Does she watch him scattering the flax seed in April, stooking the sheaves in September, and find it graceful as a dance? Does he stroke her hair like the pure strands of linen combed from the stalks?

“Then you love him?” Lala asks.

Tante gives a small shrug. “I am fond enough of him. And he is a dear friend.”

“But do you love him?”

The roll of Tante’s eyes flutters her lashes. “Yes, a love to move the heavens, he and I.”

The things Lala comes to understand in a single instant knit themselves together.

Her aunt has lain with a man she perhaps cares for, but does not truly love. Whether it happened once or a dozen times, it has got her a baby. This is why she has taken to her bed so often, a week’s worth of mornings. This is why she cannot stand when the air inside grows stagnant and ripe, why she refuses the lift of thyme and marjoram, the fresh sharpness of parsley for the settling of her stomach.

She will not eat greens, because she will not risk the life of her baby.

This is why she would not join everyone else at the city dance, for fear of losing a child. With as many souls as have leapt into their own graves, Tante would not risk dancing to nothing the life inside her.

Lala’s fear spins into a desire to pack as many of their things as they can, take Tante’s and Alifair’s hands, and pull them out of Strasbourg. She would take them to the far meadows of the Alsatian countryside, the forest, or the low, green mountains of the Vogesen. Or deep in the Black Forest where Alifair was born. Anywhere free from dancing plagues and suspicious eyes.

Lala looks for a rise in Tante’s stomach. Her skirts and apron are loose enough, and Tante holds herself upright enough, that if she had told Lala nothing, it might have been another month before she noticed the slight curve.

The only further reply Lala can manage is, “When?”

“October, I think,” Tante says. “Maybe November.”

Autumn. They will welcome this baby into the world amid the amber flurry of beech leaves tumbling from their branches.

If they all survive until then.

Not just Lala and Alifair and Tante, but now the small life inside Tante.