It a matter of hours, everything had changed. Talk of joining the Resistance was talk no more. Preparations were made. Her mother washed and dried clothes she would need, the rifle her father had left behind was cleaned once more and secured in a leather scabbard he had made. Her hair was braided and then tucked under her cap. Then it was time to go, young Cousteau's knock at the back door of the farmhouse.
Contrary to her mother's stoic announcement and all the preparations that had followed, Simone Robillard had pulled her into her arms and hugged her fiercely.
“If you see your father and brothers...”
“I will tell them you are safe and well,” Micheleine finished the thought, her mother's brave smile unable to hide the tears.
“And you...”
“I will stay safe,” she promised, brushing a kiss against her mother's cheek.
Cousteau was waiting for her at the corner of the house. No words were exchanged, he simply nodded, then started off through the orchard to the forest beyond.
She would have been a liar if she said she wasn't scared, as she glanced one last time at the single light from the oil lamp on the farmhouse that had seen several generations of Robillards.
The farm itself was nothing special, a small wood and stone structure with a loft, that had once been a barn before it was converted into a home for her grandfather and his family, the loft divided between sleeping areas for the Robillard sons and daughters who had followed.
The orchards and the gardens had sustained them three hundred years before, and now with the cellar that her father had the foresight to dig and then line with stones left behind at the quarry.
Thinking back on that now, the memory of the last sight of the farmhouse was as strong as ever. Special. It kept her going, kept her fighting.
Her mother and sister were safe, according to the last word she had before leaving. They had survived the disaster of Dunkirk, occupation by the German army, and now they had received word through their sources that the Allied Invasion was on.
She remembered going through the mental checklist her father always insisted on. The rifle, she knew, was loud and drew too much attention, only to be used as a last resort. The knife she had carried that day, was the preferred weapon, silent if messy,but not if one used it correctly. And who would suspect a young girl to have such a knife, much less use it?
That long-ago day, she and Cousteau had met up with another man who led them to still another, a careful arrangement to protect those involved. They were masked, then taken to an encampment. There they trained over the next few weeks. Missions were planned, then they were sent out, with one objective—to disrupt communications, gather intelligence on German defenses, provide first-hand intelligence information, and if possible, get back alive.
Some made it back, many were lost. The fight went on, hiding by day in the loft of a barn, or the cellar of a house by night, sleeping in shelled-out buildings, caves, the hollow of a fallen tree, or the burned-out hulk of a tank that had been abandoned.
She dreamed of the sun filtering down through the branches of the trees in her father's orchards, the way it was before the war with the taste of an apple as she bit into it, juice running down her chin, and the warmth of the soil pushing up between her toes as she ran barefoot through the fields with her brothers.
Of their friend Anne Marie and her new baby, her mother and father, and the faces and names of those who were lost. They were always followed by dreams of blood and death, nightmares that wakened her suddenly in a cold sweat, and haunted her for hours after.
She wasn't an innocent young girl any more. She had lied, stolen, and killed. Time condensed into just the next moment, the next mission, a few stolen hours, a stranger's gentle touch against all the days, months, and seasons that might never come again.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
PRESENT DAY
The village of Montigny lay between rolling hills that spread toward the forest in the north and rows of orchards to the west.
Once a medieval town, an agricultural center, then almost forgotten in the centuries since as the larger, more prosperous city, with its cathedral and commerce, grew to the south with major roadways that connected it to other French cities to the east and coastal ports to the southwest. And this small village, all that remained of the medieval town with its typical slate-roof houses and ancient church, was where Micheleine Robillard had once lived.
Kris imagined it was little changed since those medieval times, the sun poking through clouds as the road wound north, orchards with trees covered in the last months of fall with yellow leaves, the fall harvest over.
Had Micheleine run barefoot through her father's orchards, she wondered, picking low-hanging fruit, munching on an apple as she day-dreamed, time moving slowly as summer drifted into fall?
What where her dreams? Were they any different from other young girls, safe, the outside world and the looming war distant, not even a reality yet?
That would have been before the war, before her father and brothers joined the Resistance, before a girl of fifteen followed them and became a symbol of hope to the people of France in a dangerous time; not unlike another girl centuries earlier. A girl of fifteen who became known as Jehanne.
When she was fifteen, the world was safe and secure, and the most important thing was keeping her grades up so that she could qualify for the girls’ soccer league. Her brother had coached her that last summer, before his first tour.
“Keep your eyes down field!”
How many times had she heard that?
