“Do you think you could find the entrance again?”
She avoided the look James gave her but she could feel it, and the anger that this was to be the end of it, that it had gotten too dangerous to continue. Four people were dead, and with the information Danny had provided, that danger might be close, too close. And what about Valentine and her grandfather?
“I could take you there,” Valentine spoke up.
Her grandfather frowned at her, and said something that could only be disapproval.
“You are not the only one who has been there,” she told him.
“It was the last summer before I went to university. Several of us decided to go there. It was grown over, but it wasn't caved in. We had no flashlights and decided against going inside.” Again there was that shrug, typical of her grandfather.
“So I never said anything to you about it,” she explained to Albert. She looked over at Kris. There was excitement in her voice.
“We could go tomorrow. Perhaps you will find one of those marks,” she gestured to the letter that Micheleine had hidden decades earlier.
“Then you will know if that is the place she wrote about.”
“No,” Albert said quietly. “It is too dangerous.”
Valentine knelt in front of her grandfather's chair. “How many times have I listened to you say that no one today wants to know what happened then, no one understands, and soon no one will remember.” She took his hand in hers.
“If we can find one of those marks, if the tapestry is there, it would be a way of remembering what happened, the sacrifice that was made to keep it safe.”
“And if there is nothing?” he asked her.
“Then there is nothing,” she replied. “But we have to try, we have to hope.”
Kris saw the way his expression changed on that one word. Hope.
“Stubborn,” he told his granddaughter. “You use my words against me.”
“Like someone I know very well,” she told him.
Albert looked over at James.
“You will go with them.” When James would have objected, Albert shook his head.
“You must go, you must keep them safe.”
“You don't understand.”
“I understand very well, my young friend.” It was there in the expression on his face, in his eyes. The same expression when he had seen the tattoo of the sword and recognized a kindred spirit.
Kris saw the anger, the conflict, his eyes dark when James finally looked at her. Nothing was said. It wasn't necessary.
“It was my grandmother's room when she was a little girl,” Valentine said as she retrieved wool blankets from the chest that sat against the wall and laid them on the bed.
And Micheleine's, Kris thought.
The metal frame bed sat against the end wall in the second-floor room, tucked under the eaves of the farmhouse. A tall, old-fashioned dresser with hand-painted flowers that sat against the wall beside the door, like the table and chairs in the kitchen, had faded over time. A straight-backed chair and small writing desk sat under the window. A half dozen wooden pegs lined the wall adjacent to the door, a woolen neck scarf thrown over the one atthe far end. Wood frame windows covered with chintz curtains were closed against the storm, icy rain pelting the glass.
This was where a young girl had spent her childhood and watched the signs of war that eventually took her father and both her brothers. And then her.
She imagined generations of children over two hundred years earlier who lay on cots or blankets beneath those same eaves, whispering in the dark when they should have been sleeping, planning their next adventure. Then another generation, listening for other sounds, of an automobile on that dirt road, voices in an unfamiliar language, boot steps on the wood floors below.
Micheleine Robillard had returned that last time, Albert told them, wounded but alive, hiding from enemy patrols after the Allied invasion. They had spoken in that very same kitchen and he had shared a piece of bread with her, all he had for a meal. She had asked about friends, neighbors, people from the village, then about her mother and sister.
“Tell them I am well, and give them my love,” she said as they parted that last time.
