The Baker's Secret(16)
Most soldiers were far less gentlemanly than Planeg, Emma knew that, too. There were rumors that a trio of them had forced several women who had been foolish enough to walk alone at night. Whatever the gossip, the women’s bruises were genuine, though that could have been the result of interrogation, or as little as a passing soldier’s bad mood. If anyone was going to ask those women what had been done to them, it would not be Emma.
Whatever the truth, rather than anticipating the loss of her maidenhood to Philippe, as Emma had imagined before the occupation, now she expected to die in the act. In wartime, beauty is a weakness. Be it by one soldier or many, sooner or later an attractive girl of twenty-two will be ground like straw.
Therefore Emma braided her hair in knots, and no longer washed her face in the morning. Yet somehow hunger had made her all the more arresting. Mémé said as much, and so often that the girl determined never to look in a mirror. She wore her grandmother’s skirts like curtains around her waist, careful to offer nothing to a soldier’s suggestible imagination.
How suggestible? Consider the Kommandant. Once he had tasted her bread and pronounced his love for it, not even straw would alter his devotion. And yet, despite her contempt for him, never had Emma wished to please a man more. As long as he and his officers feasted on pope’s noses, it enabled her to divert crumbs to her neighbors, thereby extending the string of life in that village one day longer. Thus she made the bread as fastidiously, as expertly, as possible. Emma had found a form of concubinage after all, mastering the art of satisfying a man while deceiving him.
When she was found out—and Emma never doubted that eventually she would be found out—the only question was what her punishment would be.
Chapter 7
Everyone had jumped when Captain Thalheim pulled the trigger on Uncle Ezra, but pistol fire was not unfamiliar. Before the occupation, no one would dispute it, the best shot in Vergers—and the surrounding towns as well—had been Guillaume the veterinarian. First, he was about at all hours, finding the shortest distance between a farm where he’d been treating an animal and his home, where Marie and Fleur slept. The countryside had rough hedgerows, however: a maze of brambles, webs of branches and roots, a fierce natural fence that lengthened any journey and made visiting a sick cow, or a piglet that refused to nurse, no casual jaunt. Within these tangles, trees stood dark like a sultan’s guardians—huge, mute eunuchs.
Clever villagers knew a few shortcuts, openings a farmer had cut for horse, wagon, or plow, just wide enough to give a person access to his own fields. Later Emma learned all of the openings, but until then Guillaume was the master, and it showed most in his marksmanship. He might cross a horse turnout at dusk and surprise a buck at his watering place, or skirt the edge of a wheat field at dawn and flush a covey of doves. Whether he was on foot or astride his dependable blue bicycle, out would come his swift pistol, the aim of his sure hand, the focus of his sharp eye, and the man would arrive home with breakfast or supper or a month’s good meat. He had no rival.
Second, his gun was an instrument of mercy. A dog might be dragging its hindquarters, a horse limping on a fractured leg, a cow shaking its head over and over in the confusion of skull worms, and the farmer would send for Guillaume. Promptly he would arrive with his pistol and do the work of God.
At the insistence of his wife, Marie, Guillaume had hired an apprentice: étienne DuFour. He was a pale, sniveling weasel, weak in every way that the veterinarian was strong. DuFour’s job was to maintain the doctor’s apothecary, carry salves and bandages, and sometimes sit the night with laboring cows or colicky horses. People wondered why the veterinarian had hired such an insubstantial man, until one day Emma asked him directly.
“Why are you wasting your breath and time on that fool?”
Guillaume was angling a claw hook into a horse’s hoof, digging out a twisted nail. It was farrier’s work but the farrier was itinerant and would not arrive for a fortnight. Guillaume chuckled, resting the hook on his thigh. “Marie believes I can help him,” he answered. “The man tries my patience. But she says I am capable of healing more than animals.”
Then came a week the veterinarian spent away from town. He had offered no explanation, nor warned anyone, nor arranged for anyone to serve in his stead. People knew that his blue bicycle was gone, nothing more. Marie volunteered no information, and beautiful Fleur was too young to be asked.
In the week’s middle, Neptune, one of Pierre’s immense draft horses, caught herself in a hedgerow. He had left the corral gate open in a moment of absentmindedness, and she wandered off into a tangle. Trying to turn in the narrow space under the hedges, she snagged her hoof in some roots, and in yanking on it had managed to wedge herself deeper.
That would have been a surmountable problem, requiring a few minutes’ patience by Pierre as he sweet-talked in her ear and used a rope to work her powerful leg free. For all her size and power, Neptune was a compliant beast. But on that day a thunderstorm blew up from out to sea, swift across the fields till lightning struck close to the hedgerow, and the giant horse panicked. In the attempt to bolt, she managed to break her shin.
When Neptune did not return during the storm, Pierre pulled on his oilskin and went searching. The rain had ended by the time he found her, standing sideways across the path. He knew what the injury was without touching her. He pressed his head to her flank, weeping for a minute, then calming, then ever so gently, as if he were helping a baby to be born, easing her injured hoof free. Much as he hated to abandon Neptune in her pain even for a moment, he strode off, faster than his old man’s balance truly allowed, till he found a boy at a neighbor’s farm, and with a penny for his labor, sent him to fetch Guillaume.