The Nightingale(16)

She was still walking hours later when night fell. Her feet ached; a blister burned with every step. Hunger walked beside her, poking her insistently with its sharp little elbow, but what could she do about it? She’d packed for a visit with her sister, not an endless exodus. She had her favorite copy of Madame Bovary and the book everyone was reading—Autant en emporte le vent—and some clothes; no food or water. She’d expected that this whole journey would last a few hours. Certainly not that she would be walking to Carriveau.

At the top of a small rise, she came to a stop. Moonlight revealed thousands of people walking beside her, in front of her, behind her; jostling her, bumping into her, shoving her forward until she had no choice but to stumble along with them. Hundreds more had chosen this hillside as a resting place. Women and children were camped along the side of the road, in fields and gutters and gullies.

The dirt road was littered with broken-down automobiles and belongings; forgotten, discarded, stepped on, too heavy to carry. Women and children lay entangled in the grass or beneath trees or alongside ditches, asleep, their arms coiled around each other.

Isabelle came to an exhausted halt on the outskirts of étampes. The crowd spilled out in front of her, stumbling onto the road to town.

And she knew.

There would be nowhere to stay in étampes and nothing to eat. The refugees who had arrived before her would have moved through the town like locusts, buying every foodstuff on the shelves. There wouldn’t be a room available. Her money would do her no good.

So what should she do?

Head southwest, toward Tours and Carriveau. What else? As a girl, she’d studied maps of this region in her quest to return to Paris. She knew this landscape, if only she could think.

She peeled away from the crowd headed toward the collection of moonlit gray stone buildings in the distance and picked her way carefully through the valley. All around her people were seated in the grass or sleeping beneath blankets. She could hear them moving, whispering. Hundreds of them. Thousands. On the far side of the field, she found a trail that ran south along a low stone wall. Turning onto it, she found herself alone. She paused, letting the feel of that settle through her, calm her. Then she began walking again. After a mile or so the trail led her into a copse of spindly trees.

She was deep in the woods—trying not to focus on the pain in her toe, the ache in her stomach, the dryness in her throat—when she smelled smoke.

And roasting meat. Hunger stripped her resolve and made her careless. She saw the orange glow of the fire and moved toward it. At the last minute, she realized her danger and stopped. A twig snapped beneath her foot.

“You may as well come over,” said a male voice. “You move like an elephant through the woods.”

Isabelle froze. She knew she’d been stupid. There could be danger here for a girl alone.

“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

That was certainly true. He could have come upon her in the dark and slit her throat. She’d been paying attention to nothing except the gnawing in her empty stomach and the aroma of roasting meat.

“You can trust me.”

She stared into the darkness, trying to make him out. Couldn’t. “You would say that if the opposite were true, too.”

A laugh. “Oui. And now, come here. I have a rabbit on the fire.”

She followed the glow of firelight over a rocky gully and uphill. The tree trunks around her looked silver in the moonlight. She moved lightly, ready to run in an instant. At the last tree between her and the fire she stopped.

A young man sat by the fire, leaning back against a rough trunk, one leg thrust forward, one bent at the knee. He was probably only a few years older than Isabelle.

It was hard to see him well in the orange glow. He had longish, stringy black hair that looked unfamiliar with a comb or soap and clothes so tattered and patched she was reminded of the war refugees who’d so recently shuffled through Paris, hoarding cigarettes and bits of paper and empty bottles, begging for change or help. He had the pale, unwholesome look of someone who never knew where his next meal was coming from.

And yet he was offering her food.

“I hope you are a gentleman,” she said from her place in the darkness.

He laughed. “I’m sure you do.”

She stepped into the light cast by the fire.

“Sit,” he said.

She sat across from him in the grass. He leaned around the fire and handed her the bottle of wine. She took a long drink, so long he laughed as she handed him back the bottle and wiped wine from her chin.