The Baker's Secret(23)
The third time, he strolled outside, a pantomime of bewilderment as he examined the roof and scratched his pate. Emma sat in the doorway of Uncle Ezra’s bakery, not looking behind herself, not dwelling on the boards still covering where soldiers broke the glass. She pretended to repair her boot, a stockinged foot on the step. DuFour glanced at her, his face pinched and wrinkled like a walnut.
“Nothing,” he snapped. “Mind your own business.”
As he waddled back into town hall, Emma bit the inside of her cheek to suppress a smirk.
It took two more days of rain, five in all, before DuFour flicked the switch, glared up at the dark ceiling fixture, and marched with his many keys off to the locked storage closet. He returned with a fresh bulb. After screwing it into place, he tossed the old one onto the papers in his tall metal wastebin.
The next day, Emma with her own fingertips spiraled that discarded bulb into the lamp beside Marguerite’s sewing chair. She wished Philippe were there to share the moment, her little triumph.
But the aging woman had furrowed her brow. “Did you steal this lightbulb?” she asked. “Because if you did . . .”
“It was given to me,” Emma reassured her. “Someone didn’t need it anymore, and made a gift. My idea was that one generosity might lead to another.”
“I had not forgotten.” Marguerite opened the drawer in her side table, removing a packet of tobacco that she pressed into Emma’s hands. Next she reached for the Bible and switched on the lamp. “Let there be light.”
The other invisible crime was one that preyed upon the Monsignor. Emma had not intended to involve him in her barter and trade, but Pierre’s fuel supply was limited, and Yves’s second daily fishing would burn through it like a young man with his first paycheck. Already sixty people had eaten some of his catch. The villagers depended on Emma. She needed an alternative before a quarter of a tank became none.
The occupying army possessed fuel, but none of it within Emma’s reach. Captain Thalheim rode a motorcycle, and the Kommandant’s aide used one when he fetched her bread, but neither machine spent any time unattended. Likewise the occupying army kept its trucks and tanks in a motor pool under the snarling supervision of the quartermaster, a growling hogshead of a man, the largest human Emma had ever seen. Pulling her wagon along the bluff one afternoon, she recognized Yves’s boat plying the waves northward, and knew she needed to find another source.
The next morning she became fortuitously aware of a private matter that the priest had concealed from the entire town. Because her deliveries took her everywhere, at all times of day, Emma had grown better informed than the worst gossips. Thus she spied the Monsignor scuttling behind the rectory in the early hours carrying a bucket of something, and peering in all directions to be sure he was not seen. Emma was no more able to overlook those signals than she could ignore an air-raid siren. She returned while he said morning Mass, sneaking in back by the tall grass. Emma was greeted by a clutch of clucking hens, all delighted by the incorrect supposition that they were being fed again already. The priest, bless his miserly soul, had chickens.
It was a treasure, nothing less: chickens each produced an egg each day, self-regulated their quality by pecking to death any among them who grew ill or showed weakness, and when their productive time came to an end, they made several meals and soup. No wonder the Monsignor was fat in a world of slender.
Stealing was out of the question. A missing chicken would bring investigation, with the potential to unmask her entire network. Oddly enough, among Emma’s calculus, the moral prohibition on coveting—particularly the possessions of a priest—did not enter.
On Sundays the Monsignor said Mass for the villagers at St. Agnes by the Sea at nine o’clock, offering a separate celebration of the blessed sacrament for the occupying army at ten thirty. No one attended both services, but everyone wondered whether he used the same sermon for both Masses, or tailored his homilies to the different congregations. More than once in the rations line, Odette speculated aloud about whether the Monsignor might slant the gospels for the occupying army, downplaying the salvation of all humanity by a Jew.
On the six other days of the week he performed the liturgical rites once, at seven thirty, as regular as a metronome. Therefore Monday through Saturday, Emma could meander past his coop, performing reconnaissance without fear.
There were five hens, all good layers. They lived in a small pen for them to wander in the day, plus a hutch in which to sleep securely at night when foxes slunk out of the hedgerows to feed. No rooster stood guard, to make a racket should any person draw near. Chickens, she knew, ate everything, so on each visit Emma brought nibbles of meal or an end of bread, which she arrayed in a figure eight by her feet. Soon the birds grew calm in her presence, puttering around and between her legs. One day, as a hen pecked at a bit of lettuce by Emma’s shoe, she bent slowly, slowly, then snatched the bird up squawking and ran for home.
Emma did not need to leave the hen loose in the barnyard for long. Pirate woke from his slumber atop the hog shed. Cawing, crowing, a rumpus of feathers and strutting, he swooped down, and proceeded to plunder the surprised hen with the vigor of the long deprived and innately unconscienced.
After morning Mass, the gossiping biddies liked to stay late with the Monsignor, Emma had learned from her espionage, in order to debate later whose soul he seemed most assured would enter the gates of heaven. Therefore she left the bird to Pirate’s lustful clutches for a full thirty minutes, bouts of breeding so brutal they made a blur, before hurrying the traumatized hen back to the rectory.