It was caked with soot and grime over the centuries. She scrubbed at it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and bottled water.
“Defacing an historic artifact?” James asked. “There's undoubtedly a stiff fine for that, possibly a little prison time.”
“A little light housekeeping.” She scrubbed the jagged cuts, each one precisely made to form a unique design.
It might be nothing more than leaves like the carved garland that ran up the sides of the hearth, or it might be the mark of the stonemason who had set the stones or the artisan who had carved the images, like signing a painting.
She scrubbed harder, the image slowly emerging.
“Everything Vilette told us is true,” she said, taking a half step back, staring at the image.
“What is it?”
“Isa Raveneau lived in this house.” They exchanged a look.
They heard voices approaching. Kris pulled her phone from her pocket and took several shots of the keystone, and the image that was carved in the surface—a trinity knot wrapped around a Scottish thistle.
“Evening mass should be over now,” James commented as they left the rest of the tour.
They followed signage that indicated the direction to the abbey church at the top of Mont St. Michel.
“A thousand steps, just a walk in the park,” James commented as clouds gathered out over the water.
“We might just make it before that storm breaks.”
The island fortress had been built over a thousand years earlier with granite rocks mined and cut on the mainland, hauled in carts across the causeway at low tide, and then winched to the top by a sophisticated hoist system, layer upon layer, buttresses and chambers, storerooms, residences for the monks built at the lower level to support the weight of the abbey above, then upward, providing the foundation for the abbey church.
It was an architectural and engineering marvel that had withstood assault and invasion, and provided a haven for pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, that apparently included Isabel Raveneau and James Montfort, according to the story Vilette Moreau had told them.
“Bloody Christ!” James swore as they began yet another flight of stairs carved in granite, the town at the base of the island spreading out below them.
“Careful,” she warned, trying to catching her breath before staring the next part of the climb.
“You don't want to piss off Saint Michael.”
He made some other comment, lost on the wind at the battlements and the roar of the ocean as it crashed against the rocks below.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
JULY 10, 1944, COAST OF FRANCE
They'd been on the march for over a month, a handful from their company along with Americans and Canadians.
At night, they hid in the fields, barns, and behind stone fences that had stood since the time of the Crusades, with the roar of the ocean when the guns fell silent, an invasion army by day, pursuing a dangerous enemy, exhausted, eating field rations, grabbing a few hours’ sleep at night with their rifles beside them.
Paul Bennett had been given no instructions on the pictures he was to take.
“Send us back what you can,” the editor of the Daily Mirror had told him. Then, “You come back to us, lad.”
He went on instinct, shooting pictures that were stark contrast of an invading army against the French countryside in the midst of summer, that was at times picturesque and at other times heartbreakingly destroyed—the chaos of a looted, burned-out village against the bucolic peacefulness of cattle grazing.
And then there were other shots—the casualties, those who had pushed ahead of them, soldiers from every Allied nation determined to take back seaports, at the same time liberating the people of the French countryside, pushing back the Germanswho were determined to destroy everything in their path, and other shots of the men, gaunt-faced, exhausted, resolute, with quiet conversations or no conversations at all over meal rations quickly consumed, weapons braced across their knees, then moving on, always moving.
Home for all of them, no matter where they were from, was a far place that all of them wondered if they would ever see again.
Click, click. Rolls of film carefully wrapped in waterproof pouches. And then a new roll of film. And the boy.
