4. Helene
4
HELENE
Rouen rose in vertical lines, its ancient spires and towers soaring toward the sky. As Helene made her way off the train and out of the station, the city stretched before her, with cobblestoned roads that curved past in graceful arcs, elegant stone buildings stacked neatly in shades of cream. At the edge of her line of vision cars rushed by on one of the main boulevards.
Her hand was sweaty as she gripped her suitcase.
“Helene? Helene Paré?”
She startled at the sound of her name and shielded her eyes from the sun as she looked around for the source of the voice. There was a tap on her shoulder. She turned to find a young woman standing there, her round face flushed, a few brown curls visible from the white cap that covered most of her hair. She wore a gray dress cinched at the waist, with a stiff high-buttoned collar that went all the way to her chin.
“Yes,” Helene said. “I am Helene.”
“Then follow me, please,” the girl said, her expression bored, and pivoted toward the street.
“Sorry,” Helene said, her feet throbbing, her dress itchy and uncomfortable under the summer sun. The bustle of a larger city disoriented her, and she had been expecting a family greeting, not some rude stranger. “I was expecting my cousin, Cecelia.”
“Sister Cecelia is busy. Like the rest of them. That’s why they sent me.”
“And who are you?”
“My name is Elisabeth,” the girl said. “I’m a probate nurse at the H?tel-Dieu. Please follow me.”
For several minutes they walked down the city streets in silence, Elisabeth’s pace brisk. As they moved farther from the station, the street grew quieter and older, the modern stone buildings giving way to peeling old houses, their facades streaked with crooked wooden timbers.
“Are you from here?” Helene asked as she tried to keep up.
“No,” Elisabeth said.
Helene waited for her to elaborate but nothing else came, and so they lapsed back into silence. After several minutes Elisabeth stopped abruptly. “And here we are,” she said in a flat voice.
They stood next to a pair of iron gates, the rigidity of the city giving way to a lush, park-like space beyond the fence, a sprawling courtyard dotted with trees and formal gardens. Helene peered closer through the bars of the gates, unable to comprehend that the building in front of her was a hospital. It looked more like a castle, with three vast, stately wings that surrounded the courtyard in a perfect U-shape. Its stone facade held what seemed to Helene like a thousand windows, tidy rectangles that swept out in all directions. She let her hand rest on the cool metal. This place was nothing like the modest country hospital she’d envisioned. It was a fortress, an entire city unto itself.
Elisabeth cleared her throat. A German soldier was walking toward them from the courtyard.
Helene hadn’t expected soldiers to be stationed at a hospital that housed a convent. In the days leading up to her departure, her grandfather, a devout Protestant, had said she would likely be at one of the few places in France the Germans had left alone because of the Catholic Church’s cooperation with the Nazis.
“They allow evil at their door as long as they can keep their churches protected. They are as bad as Vichy,” he had muttered. “Puppets. All of them.”
“Don’t be stupid. Just do what he says, answer his questions,” Elisabeth said now.
Helene nodded.
“Mademoiselles.” The soldier was short, not much taller than Helene, with a lean build. He gave a brief, perfunctory nod toward Elisabeth before turning to Helene.
“She’s a student nurse,” Elisabeth said, her gaze on the ground. “Here for training.”
The soldier eyed Helene. “Identification papers?” he asked in French, the words mangled by his thick, heavy accent.
Helene removed her creased papers from her pocket. She had been told so many times she would be safer in Rouen, and yet it seemed her mother had sent her off to a place where Germans would dictate her every movement. If anything she was less safe here, miles from the protection of her family.
She passed her papers through the gates. After studying them he handed the papers back and swung open the gate. Helene and Elisabeth stepped into the courtyard.
“You are here as a nurse? And only a nurse?” His expression was hard, and Helene was suddenly aware of the pistol that hung at his side, its black metal, the long wooden point at the end.
“Yes, sir.”
A large scar ran down the side of his face, covered in places by the strap of his helmet. It was still red, the flesh not fully healed. There were dark circles underneath his eyes, but his skin was smooth, unlined. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five.
The soldier leaned so close that Helene could smell his breath. “Open it,” he said, gesturing toward Helene’s suitcase.
Helene’s mind immediately went to her mother’s journal. Would he be able to read the French? What would he think of the pages of notes, the detailed family tree of healers that went back generations, or the description of their magic itself, her mother’s words, written on the very first page: “We don’t heal the body. We heal the soul.”
“They fear what they don’t understand,” her mother always whispered to her, whenever she held open the journal under candlelight as she mixed up broths or cups of tea for her sleeping patients, or when she placed her hands on sweaty brows to ease fevers. “What they can’t control. Men. Doctors. Churches. Governments. They’re all the same.”
Helene gripped her suitcase tighter. She knew she couldn’t trust anyone besides Cecelia with this information, much less a German soldier. Even if the days of witch trials were over, their legacy reverberated. It was the reason Helene’s great-great-grandmother had fled from her ancestral home in Normandy to the mountains, a lesson passed to each generation with the same care as the magic itself.
“Bonjour,” floated a gentle voice from the other side of the courtyard. A nun in a flowy white habit approached. She was one of the most beautiful women Helene had ever seen. She seemed more like a movie star dressed as a sister than an actual nun.
Her eyes moved between Helene and the soldier, who didn’t seem to show her any deference in relation to her status as a sister. “Is there a problem with our new probate, Lieutenant Vogel? Something I can offer my assistance with?” She gestured at Elisabeth. “Did she forget her papers?”
“No, Mother Superior.”
The nun addressed the soldier again. “Sir?”
The soldier watched Helene closely, then finally shook his head. “There is no problem.”
He stepped aside and allowed them to enter.
“Good day, sir,” the sister said, politely, although Helene noticed her shoulders stiffen as she turned away.
They walked in silence for a few moments until the nun fell into stride beside Helene. “Welcome, Helene,” she said quietly. “I apologize for the delay.”
“Are you Cecelia?” Helene asked, hopeful that this beatific, efficient woman was her cousin.
The nun smiled. “I am nowhere near as talented as your cousin. Hopeless truly when it comes to an operating theater. Some call me Mother Superior. But we don’t stand much on ceremony in these times. You can also call me Sister Beatrice.”
They reached an edge of the courtyard, near a large, tiered fountain, and Beatrice stopped. “Elisabeth will take you the rest of the way.” She squeezed Helene’s arm. “We are so happy you are here. Cecelia said you would be a quick learner, a natural.”
Helene didn’t know how to respond. She had never studied a real anatomy textbook, or learned sterile technique, or how to administer antibiotics for an infection. Despite her mother’s brief experience as a combat nurse, the medicine Agnes practiced in Honfleur, the medicine Helene had been taught was the old way, a system entirely anachronistic to the modern world.
Aside from some rudimentary skills, Helene had no training as a hospital nurse.
“I’ll do my best, Mother Superior,” Helene said, trying to match her expression to her words.
Beatrice smiled again. “Of course, you will.”
She nodded to Elisabeth and headed back through the courtyard.
Elisabeth led Helene down a narrow path along one wing of the building until it opened onto a square garden, where several women in white habits picked small red and green peppers and tomatoes from the billowing plants. Helene couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a fresh tomato.
They turned away from the garden and walked through a large arch and up a set of covered stairs. Finally, they entered the hospital through an imposing wooden door. As they trod down a long interior hallway, Helene could feel the cool stone beneath the thin soles of her shoes.
“The living quarters are inside here,” Elisabeth said as they approached the first door on the left side of the hall. She shoved it open with a groan of metal hinges.
They stepped into a cavernous room lined with metal cots on three sides. On the fourth side were a washbasin and several small tables with lamps.
Elisabeth pointed to a cot near where they stood by the door. A thin white sheet was tucked in tightly, a gray wool blanket folded at one end. “This is yours then.” She hesitated before nodding to a cot a few spaces down. “I’m in here too. Not that it matters much. You’ll mostly be in here to sleep.”
Helene surveyed the cot, the enormous room, the tall arched ceiling above them. It was too big, too formal, too clean. She was embarrassed to feel burning at the edge of her eyes as she tried not to think of home, of her little attic bedroom, the dust on the bookshelf and old socks crumpled in a pile on the floor.
“You’ll get used to it,” Elisabeth’s voice echoed as she walked toward the door and left.
Helene sat on the cot and lay back onto the scratchy sheets, her feet and back aching from the journey. She didn’t want to be here, in this massive, vaulted room. She didn’t want to be a nurse, to panic and flounder without the steady hands of her mother nearby. Her mother wasn’t scared of anything. She would stand in place, never flinch. She was the moon for her patients, lighting up even the darkest of their nights.
Helene closed her eyes as her own inadequacy washed over her, but in the end, the exhaustion won out and she felt herself pulled toward sleep.
* * *
“Nurse Laurent may not have informed you of this, but we don’t sleep during the day here,” a loud voice rang out.
Helene’s eyes snapped open, and the room came into focus, the white stone ceiling high above her. She shifted her weight and the hard cot creaked.
“Sleep during the day is only permitted if you have worked in the wards the previous night,” the voice continued. It was deep and throaty, with a rustic cadence that reminded Helene of the way her mother spoke.
She rubbed her eyes and sat up. At the end of her bed stood a woman in a long white robe and white veil. She was tall and broad shouldered, in her late thirties or early forties, with oval blue eyes that softened an otherwise stern face.
“Helene.”
“Yes?” Helene said, reaching down to loosen her shoes, which she hadn’t even bothered to take off before falling asleep.
“I’m Sister Cecelia. Your cousin.”
Helene quickly unfolded herself and rose from the cot. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was you.”
“You were able to get settled, I see,” Cecelia said without any warmth.
Helene tried to smooth out the wrinkles in her dusty dress.
“Your matron, Madame Durand, will go over everything with you when you meet with her in her office later. However, I felt that as a courtesy to your mother, I would also offer my assistance.”
Helene nodded, her cheeks hot under Cecelia’s intense gaze.
“This is a hospital, but it is also a convent, formed many centuries ago by the Canonesses of St. Augustine of the Mercy of Jesus. You may be here to volunteer as a lay nurse, but every single soul who lives and works within these walls follows the teachings and rules of our order. We are a Catholic hospital, run by Catholic men and women. We care for the poor and the sick, because we recognize the face of Jesus in every person who comes through these doors. You may not have been called to a cloistered life, but your calling as a nurse reflects that same divine imperative. Do you understand?”
Helene nodded again. She wondered what her mother had told Cecelia, if she knew Helene hadn’t been inside a church in years, not since her father died. Her mother had continued to attend. She always said she believed in God in the same way she believed in the power of the moon cycles, a gravitational tide she could feel even if she couldn’t see.
But Helene never could bring herself to go back. God hadn’t saved her father. And God hadn’t eased his suffering in the last, excruciating months of his life. Her mother had.
“We value humility here,” Cecelia continued. “And obedience. You’ll begin your training on the wards tomorrow night after supper.” She stopped, her lips pursed as she inspected Helene. “The following will result in immediate dismissal from the hospital. Smoking in uniform, alcohol use, inappropriate conduct with a patient, or—” She paused once more. “Incompetence.”
She spoke each word with such sharpness that Helene had to chew the side of her lip to avoid flinching.
“Yes, Sister.”
Cecelia finally looked away from Helene, her eyes traveling to the small suitcase on the floor. “Your mother said in her letter that she has given you some training at home.”
“When I can, I go with her on home visits. Mostly with births. But sometimes other things, people who are ill, or hurt. I help, as much as I can. I’ve been practicing, trying to get stronger…better. But I also gather herbs and plants that—”
“Has she taught you anything of nursing care? Not herbs. Not home remedies. I’m speaking of modern medicine. Nursing as a profession,” Cecelia asked in a stern voice, cutting Helene off.
“Not very much,” Helene said quietly. “A little,” she added at the disapproving look on Cecelia’s face. “Bed changes and some wound care. But she hasn’t worked as a nurse since the last war, in Belgium. Mostly she works as—”
Cecelia took another step forward. “I know what she is. A healer .”
“Well, yes…like you,” Helene said, her voice faltering. Her mother had said she hadn’t seen Cecelia since they were children, that she only knew of her whereabouts through Helene’s great-aunt. Agnes had put blind faith in this woman because of their shared blood, but how much about her did she really know?
Cecelia watched her for a long moment. “This is a hospital,” she said. “A modern one. We are nurses here. We practice medicine. We value science and technology. And this is also a Catholic institution. Where we abide by the natural laws of God. Whatever your mother has taught you, this is not the place for it.”
Helene took a step backward, almost involuntarily. She knew Cecelia was a formally trained nurse, working in a modern hospital. And yet she was a healer by lineage. Surely, she hadn’t abandoned her own birthright?
“I took you in here as a favor to your mother. Because she is family, despite—” her eyes narrowed “—our differences. But what your mother does. What you believe you can do, none of that is a part of God’s plan for us. It’s unnatural, and wrong.”
“But my mother said you—”
“She told you I was a healer,” Cecelia said, her blue eyes impossibly bright against the white of her veil, the only color, it seemed, in the entire room. “And I was, or I thought I was, for a long time. I was told that by my mother the same way you were told by yours. But then I became a child of God. And I learned that He is the only healer. The abilities in our blood, the so-called magic we have been given is not of His making. That touch is something else, something dark, and I will not have it used in this hospital. Do you understand me?”
Helene’s heart pounded. “Y-yes, Sister,” she stammered.
“Good,” Cecelia said. “You’ll need to wash up then. And join the other nurses for the evening prayer.” She glanced at the clock that hung on the wall next to a silver cross. “It starts in twenty minutes, and we don’t tolerate tardiness.”