Part of Rosalyn wanted to flee the dusty attic—now that Blondine had put the fear of fire in her head, she felt a certain sense of urgency—but another part of her wanted to sit and sort through these boxes. Because while it was junk, it was oldFrenchjunk.
“We are looking for a big black trunk, yes?” Blondine asked, noting her distractedness.
“Right. According to Madame Bolze, it should be in the corner.”
“There are four corners.”
“True. Divide and conquer,” Rosalyn replied. “I’ll take these two corners and you take those two.”
At long last, they located the steamer trunk hidden beneath a pile of old curtains.
It took both of them to lug the heavy trunk a few inches away from the wall so they could open the lid. Rosalyn unlatched the big clasp, then paused.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Blondine.
“I don’t know, really. I just needed a moment.”
“Take your moment, then,” Blondine said. “But the sooner we open it, the sooner we can get out of this firetrap.”
“Fair point,” Rosalyn said, and lifted the lid.
The trunk was packed full of items, which they lifted carefully, one by one, and set aside. There were books, journals, and old papers; several pairs of black leather button-up baby shoes; a christening gown of silk that now hung in shreds; carefully folded linens and quilts that had once been beautiful but were now decaying.
“I think we found what we were looking for,” Rosalyn said as she perched on a footstool and started sorting through a stack of antique documents bound with ribbon. Many were written on ornate letterhead marked:Orphelinat de Champagne: pour les orphelins de guerre.“The Orphanage of Champagne: for the war orphans.”
“I don’t see any letters from an Australian woman,” said Blondine, digging deep into the contents of the trunk. “Isn’t that what Emma was hoping for?”
“Yes, though I’m not sure why they would have ended up here, anyway,” said Rosalyn. “I think we’re looking for any link at all to her great-aunt, Doris Whittaker. Yet another wealthy widow.”
“Oooh, look at this,” said Blondine, paging through a thick leather-bound ledger. She handed it to Rosalyn. “It’s a roster of the orphans.”
Rosalyn balanced the ledger on her knees and skimmed the handwritten entries. As in Émile’s letters, the old ink was fading and at times was hard to read, but at least the ledger hadn’t been subjected to Anastasia’s scissors.
“All those poor children,” said Rosalyn, running her fingers lightly over the dozens—hundreds?—of names meticulously recorded:Louise Rose Beaulieu; Reims. Paul Marc Martin; La Neuville-aux-Larris. Clement Luc Laurent; Épernay. Jean-Claude Travers; unknown origin; Augusta Page Mercier; Cuchery. Some entries included the names of deceased parents and other family members, or the names of those who adopted the children; others simply listed the child’s name and origin, with no clue as to what had happened to them.
“Sometimes I think we’ll never get over it,” said Blondine. She set down an ancient pair of baby shoes and came to join Rosalyn, who was flipping through the pages. “So many of these little ones grew up and were sent into battle in the next world war, just two decades later. And the young adults who survived the First World War had to send their own children to fight—and to die—in the second. Something like that must live on in the national consciousness, don’t you think?”
“Yes, of course. To be occupied, and brutalized over two generations... That’s got to leave a scar. A deep scar.”
“Champagne has always been a theater of war. There were the Gauls and Romans, and then the Hundred Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, and then two World Wars. All of them right here, on these lands. Some say this is why the grapes began to fizz, to bring us joy, to balance things out.”
Blondine dove back into the trunk, leaning over, ostrichlike, rummaging through the contents.
“Look at this!” Blondine handed Rosalyn a manila envelope full of ancient sepia-toned photographs.
There were several of children playing in the courtyard of whatwas now Madame Bolze’s house, and a few individual photos of children with their names scrawled on the back. Most astonishing was a handful of photographs of the schoolrooms that had been set up in the champagne caves.
“These are amazing,” said Rosalyn. “I tried looking this up online, but I didn’t find anything like this. So they really did have schools in the caves.”
“Can you imagine? It must have been so hard down there, no electricity, no fresh air....”
“And no plumbing.”
Blondine wrinkled her nose. “I never thought of that.”
“I imagine things got pretty basic at times,” Rosalyn said, studying a photograph of a schoolteacher. She was unsmiling, clothed head to toe in black, but she stared at the camera with a steady gaze, a determined tilt to her chin. “But they persevered. They taught the children. They brought in the harvest. They didn’t just survive. Theylived. Astonishing.”
“Why would these photos be included with the papers from the orphanage?” said Blondine.
