The Baker's Secret(22)

“Because Uncle Ezra helped me.”

Emma paused in her work. “He did?”

“Eggs, if he could spare them. Butter. Whenever you made something too botched to sell, he would give it to me. That is how I first bought favor and delay from the soldiers. Lieutenant Planeg in particular loved your éclairs.”

“Too botched to sell?”

“He couldn’t bear the idea of you being ashamed.”

Emma laughed. “Are we talking about the same Uncle Ezra?”

“We will never know his equal.” Michelle sidled to the edge of the washing basin. “But with all my heart, I hope that you will come close.”

With a bow, she swept away.

Emma sat back on her haunches. Uncle Ezra had been helping people all that time? How had she seen only a gruff disciplinarian, a baker more exacting than a physician? And had he aided the others, too—Yves, Pierre, Marguerite?

It was all too much. In the past she could have discussed a quandary like this with Philippe, depending on his patient listening and quiet practicality. Instead she was utterly alone.

Emma frowned at the chore still ahead of her. Clothes drifted in the shallow pool like so many floating bodies.





Chapter 10




Some days, the bread turned out perfectly. The dough was responsive, the oven consistent, the results superior. Some days, events conspired to help Emma’s purposes succeed. That morning she felt the slightest sensation of ease, of generosity.

Perhaps want was not a catastrophe. Perhaps it was foreseeable, a predictable result of necessity, a remembering of when life had been easier.

She stepped out of the baking shed into northern glory: a pale October morning sun, the verdant landscape awaiting harvest, a meek breeze scrubbing the air of all but the fragrance of sea. A bumblebee labored close in curiosity before flying off on his noisy errands.

Emma heard Mémé humming tunelessly in the kitchen. The baguettes were baking, ready in time for the Kommandant’s aide. Here was a moment of calm, a pause, and Emma lingered in the barn doorway, indulging in an arched back, a full wingspan stretch. Which was when she heard a horse flutter his thick lips.

There, his neck craned over the door in the barnyard wall, stood Apollo. She felt an impulse to rub his nose, and she surrendered to it. He held still at her touch, calm and gaunt.

“You, too?” she whispered. “You want something, too?”

The enormous animal did not move, except to cup both ears in her direction. Emma reached to rub Apollo’s withers while her eyes inspected his body: the once-powerful legs now drawn with hunger, the visible ribs, the great warmth that remained to him.

“Somehow the world provides for you, doesn’t it?”

Apollo remained mute. But he leaned forward, pressing against the door. At Emma’s feet there grew a clump of clover, flowering and summer-sweet beside the stone wall, probably the last of the season. The horse stretched his neck toward it, lips smacking, but he could not reach. He tried again, then lifted his head and looked at her with both eyes.

“You are just like all the others,” Emma said. “Everyone.”

She bent and picked a handful of clover, and held it under the horse’s nose. He smelled it, cropped the bouquet with his fore-teeth, and chewed thoughtfully. She held the rest on her open palm.

Maybe it was that simple: she helped the hungry, she fed an animal. One creature’s weed was another creature’s breakfast, and thus could the village be fed.

“All right,” she told the horse, bending to pick, then offering him more clover. “All right.”





Part Three

Cunning





Chapter 11




This was how the network began. She let them in, one by one. Drops into a bucket of need, poured out in providing. Every day it grew: a candle here, a sliver of soap there. Each person traded in his or her own currency, had his or her own wants, and Emma bested them all with her method for bread. And her occasional willingness to steal.

Only from those who supported the occupying army, however. And in a manner so expert and patient, afterward it remained in doubt whether a crime had actually occurred.

The first victim was that sniveling DuFour. Emma studied his work habits at the town hall, the lazy pace, the arrogant displaying of keys as he locked and unlocked his office, the long lunches he took at home each day. This in a time when most villagers lived with hunger of one severity or other. She could have emptied his office entirely, files, fixtures, and furniture, in the time he lounged and ate. But that would have brought suspicion, arrest, execution.

Instead she waited for a day on which it rained. After DuFour puttered homeward for lunch, she snuck into his office as quiet as a deer. Rolling his chair to the hallway, she partially unscrewed the overhead lightbulb. The long corridor went dark. She placed the chair precisely where it had been.

DuFour minced back to work, one hand on his belly, smacking his thin lips. When he entered the darkened hallway, he threw the switch and nothing happened. He tried repeatedly, then rolled the chair himself and tightened the bulb. Of course it lit right up.

The next day of foul weather, Emma made sure her rounds passed town hall at noon. She needed less than one minute to loosen the bulb and make a retreat. Later the clerk pondered his dark hallway a moment, before bringing his chair over again.