“What will you do after the war?” she asked.
What would he do? Not weddings and birth announcements. The war had changed that.
“I would like to see the Highlands again.” Didn't everyone want to see home again?
For him, the Highlands would always be home, no matter how far or how long he was away. It had a way of imprinting itself on you—the jagged peaks, misty glens, with rainbows forcing their way through the clouds. And the smell of it.
It was there even over the smell of that home-cooked meal and the haze from the wine, the memory strong.
“It is like the forest, I think,” she said. “Different from the city. It reaches inside you and won't let you go. I remember the smell of the grass in summer when the sun is hot.”
“You're from the country?”
She'd told him little about herself in that way that people protected that part of themselves, especially in war.
“Oui!” she said with an impassioned laugh. “My father's farm at the edge of the forest, very much like this. He raised sheep. We had a garden. It was my mother's home, from her family many generations back. Very quaint, you would say. Provincial.I hated it growing up, so far from everything. But we explored everything, all the old places. Now, I miss it very much.”
Growing up? She was all of nineteen, yet years older in experience he knew. They all were.
“Tell me about the Highlands.”
Where to begin, he thought.
“It is a wild place,” he said, remembering the last time he and friends took a motorcar far into the north, past the Cairngorms, into those wild places.
“There is a certain smell of it—the land, mountains green in the summer, snow in the winter, and the sky changes from one moment to the next—so blue it makes your eyes hurt, then the clouds come rolling in and the water churns with magical creatures in deep pools—water horses,” he said with a mock serious expression.
“Water horses?”
“Of course, they're magic. And then there is the heather, the hills full of it in spring. But the winters, they are my favorite, fierce, powerful, storms crashing down from the mountains and you can hear the spirits crying on the wind.”
“Spirits crying on the wind?” she asked with an amused expression.
“Well, that's the way the old folks tell it. And the finest whisky in all the world, made from the water that comes down out of the mountains with the smoky taste of peat and just a wee bit of spice. Very different from your wine.”
The wine was gone.
“There is a room at the back of the house, an old storeroom with an outside entrance.”
She stood and held out her hand, that smile and a question in her dark eyes.
“What about the owner and his wife?”
Her hand tightened around his.
“They will not bother.”
The room was small. Shelves against one wall held spices, canned foods, powdered milk, and fresh food—baskets of carrots, potatoes, shallots, and several bottles of wine.
“I see that they have enough food when I am here,” she explained. “In exchange, they report on things they hear and see, and hide our people.” She set her backpack on the chair.
A bed sat against the other wall, with a worn but clean coverlet. Extra clothes, simple garments one might find among the people in the French countryside, hung on hooks. A basin with a pitcher sat on the washstand. There was a small cast-iron stove for heat. She lit it, carefully setting the wood, then closing the door.
Did she know what those simple things meant? Simple things that weren't a cot or bedroll on the ground, a porcelain basin that wasn't a helmet that he'd shaved and bathed from, a roof overhead that wasn't a tarp or lean-to after weeks sleeping out in the open.
“Micheleine...?”
She pressed her fingers against his lips.
