The Paris Express

10. 1215 p.m. Depart Surdon

12:15 p.m. DEPART SURDON

Tarde venientibus ossa.

(The late are left nothing but bones.)

LATIN SAYING

Henry Tanner’s dying. Halfway to Paris, in the arms of a stranger, her handkerchief scarlet with his blood. Dizzy, tingling from shoulders to fingertips, his heart a hammer clanging on the anvil of his chest—

“Sit up straight,” Marcelle de Heredia instructs him.

She’s switched back to English for his sake, he registers.

“Head down a little.”

Henry tries to obey. “You must pardon me, miss—mademoiselle.”

“Shh. There’s no need. It could happen to anyone.”

He’s able to press her handkerchief to his own face, so she sits back in her corner of the carriage.

Gradually Henry feels his pulse decrease. He forces himself to break the silence and confess, “I’m bedevilled by nosebleeds at moments of… well, at random moments. But today, really, I’ve never felt anything like this.”

“Nervous agitation can produce symptoms that perfectly mimic a heart attack.”

His face scalds. “You must think me very timid for being thrown into such a state by the guard’s questions.”

“Not at all.”

Marcelle’s calm air of authority is too much to bear. Henry lifts away the clotted handkerchief experimentally and sniffs hard. The bleeding seems to have stopped.

She takes back her ruined handkerchief, showing no sign of disgust.

He manages to find his own handkerchief and mops his face with it. He decides he must level with her. “I’ve always had a particular dread of public transit.”

One perfectly formed eyebrow tilts up. “Dread of an accident?”

“No, no. Of being challenged. Ejected.”

She takes his meaning at once. “But that wouldn’t happen in France,” she protests.

Henry makes himself tell the story. “When I was only one year old, we were living in Virginia—one of the Southern states?” Yes, she seems to know what that means. “Before Christmas, my mother took me shopping in the nation’s capital, Washington, DC.”

Marcelle nods.

She probably knows all the capitals of the world, he realises. “A storm blew up, and we had to get home, but the streetcar was forbidden to us. My mother decided to pull a veil over her own head but leave my rather lighter face and my reddish curls exposed. In any event, a man on the streetcar stared at me, then yanked up my mother’s veil and cried, What have we here, it’s a —” Henry’s throat locks on the slur. Well, Marcelle doesn’t need him to say it.

Her expression is stony.

“So the driver slammed on the brakes and ordered us out in the snow. My mother had to carry me five miles home through the storm.”

“Oh, Mr. Tanner.” Her brown eyes are liquid with compassion.

Henry touches his chest. “Even now when I let myself think about it, heat surges here.”

“Fury?”

“And hatred.”

She doesn’t cavil at the word. “Hatred of the driver? Or the man who insulted your mother?”

“Both of them, and the passengers—those who stood by and said nothing.”

She nods. “Strange you remember it so well even though you were a baby.”

“Oh, I’m afraid it’s a false memory,” he admits, “based on what my mother told me much later.”

“Not false,” Marcelle objects. “Handed down.”

Henry likes that way of putting it, as if the pain is a family treasure. Or at least a useful tool.

“In situations when your agitation rises due to past distress,” she murmurs, “perhaps you could remind yourself that this is not then? And that here is not there?”

Here is not there , Henry repeats in his head, and this is not then. This young lady is balm to his heart.

She suddenly changes the subject. “You asked what set me on the track of studying physiology. The truth is, it was the day my brother drowned.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” How funny that Henry’s bleeding all over her seems to have made intimates of them. He watches, listening hard; he knows Marcelle’s honouring him with this confidence.

“We were on holiday in Calais.” She gestures north, across green fields. “I remember Papa on the strand trying to get the water out of Henri’s lungs.”

So Henry has the same name as her brother. “What age—”

“Thirteen. Henri, I mean. I was nine. I stood there staring at my father pounding and pounding my brother’s back. I supposed that if I looked away, Henri would die.”

His voice is hushed when he says, “You didn’t look away.”

“But he died anyway. He had already died,” she corrects herself. “That was the day it seeded itself in me, the curiosity.”

Could curiosity really be the English word she meant to choose?

“I wanted—no, I needed to know what the difference was between my brother after and before. What makes a body lie inert or move.”

Henry’s wondered something similar about the people in his paintings, because sometimes they’re fake, made of flat pigment, but sometimes they flicker to life. He can’t know in advance; he can only paint and wait and see.

“Thirteen seems so young to me now,” Marcelle marvels.

“Your vantage point has changed.”

“In another ten years, perhaps Henri will seem like a son to me.”

Henry would very much like to know how wide the gap in years is between him and this lovely young Frenchwoman. “I’ve been working on a Lazarus,” he mentions.

She looks startled; probably she didn’t expect the American’s work to be in the religious genre, even if he is a bishop’s son.

“His resurrection,” Henry spells out. “I’m envisaging Lazarus as a shadowy figure with a slab of light at his feet. I got the notion from a Rembrandt in which the only plausible source of illumination is the grave itself.”

She nods, grasping what he means.

The radiance is of course the miracle-working love of Christ. The challenge for Henry is to paint this in such a realistic way that it’ll move the doubters and even the godless. He doesn’t say any of this, because Marcelle de Heredia may very well be one of those scientists who have left the consolations of religion behind.

“I suppose we always remember our dead in pictures,” she murmurs. “Static, fixed, rather than moving. When in fact they’re moving further from us every day.”

She checks her watch; it’s well past noon. She takes out her lunch—a jar of cold potato soup and a chicken fricassée—and offers to share. Henry counters with his Camembert, rye bread, and apple tart, so they make a small feast of it all.

Blonska’s somehow uneasy about this Mado Pelletier. Earlier in the day, she thought she had a good grasp on her type: naive, a little hotheaded, an idealist. Not unlike Blonska at the same age: a compulsive reader, a solitary, a freethinker who wouldn’t stand for injustice.

Such an odd thing the girl demanded of the guard at Surdon, though. What could it matter to Mado Pelletier where on the train any of these deputies are to be found? Surely she can’t mean to confront one of them on the platform or bang on his carriage door and shout, Down with bourgeois pigs!

Also, while the rest of the passengers have been eating what they’ve brought, Mado hasn’t touched a bite of her lunch. Solidly built, she’s clearly not one of these young people always in motion who have to be chivvied into eating. She’s lifted her lunch bucket onto her lap now and she’s looking down at it as if it’s a tired, tearstained baby. Or a lover she fully expects to break her heart. Something sorrowful in her gaze but also elated.

No.

Shock catches in Blonska’s throat.

Not that.

She rebukes herself for even thinking of such lurid possibilities. She’s letting her imagination run wild. She’s just tired from her cold night on the platform in Granville followed by this long, rattling journey.

It’s not possible. For all her talk, Mado Pelletier would have to be unhinged to bring such a device onto a train.

Call it what it is: a bomb.

Except that it’s not. It can’t be. It’s a lunch bucket, that’s all. Probably warm cabbage soup in there.

But what’s that Mado said, earlier? Knowledge is not the only kind of power.

Wait—no, no. There are those who take that terrible path, but they’re wild-eyed madmen, aren’t they? Past the reach of any appeal to reason or conscience, so intoxicated with conviction that their ears are sealed shut. Dynamitards who’ve despaired of fixing society and so have decided to smash it.

Mado’s no killer, surely. Round-faced, only twenty-one. Full of righteous wrath, not ruthlessness; only passionate, not insane.

But no; Blonska realises she’s fallen into the trap of conventional thinking—underestimating what a girl might become if she’s sensitive enough to the wrongs of the world. Hasn’t Mado spoken from the heart today, as if wanting someone, anyone, even some old Russian, to understand what she’s about to do and why?

Blonska wonders when the bomber means to set it off, then, this possible-probable-almost-definite explosive device in a false lunch bucket. Will it be at the next station—will Mado do something to ignite it, then race out of the carriage to save herself? (But that would be a cold-blooded massacre, and Blonska can’t believe it of this girl.) Or will she jump down onto the platform and hurl it through the window of one of the First-Class carriages that hold these deputies the guard spoke of? Blonska’s mind is gelid with panic; she finds she can’t remember the name of the next stop.

Victor Garnier chews his gritty lip. They’ve been running seven minutes behind ever since Briouze; they haven’t been able to make up a single one.

Engine 721’s not gasping yet, but two-thirds of the journey’s done, so she’s going to need water soon. Here comes the highest point of the whole route, Authieux-du-Puits, where the line dips under a picturesque bridge and plunges into the darkness of a tunnel. Once the train is past the spire of Sainte-Gauburge, Victor recognises the familiar line of the river Risle descending to cut the plateau. There’s a trough coming up, a narrow reservoir of rainwater that runs for half a kilometre between the rails. He catches Guillaume’s eye and tips an imaginary glass into his mouth, meaning Time to give her a drink.

The driver nods and nudges open the regulator to increase speed.

The Brits, as much as they lack all systematic thought, do have a knack for practical inventions, and the railway water trough is the best of them. When Victor remembers all the time the crew used to waste at country halts waiting for station men to wheel up a cistern and fill the tank by hose… imagine if he had to do that today, how many more minutes the Express would lose!

Here comes the white rectangular signboard with a black horizontal zigzag to mark the start of the unseen trough. Victor shoves on the handle to lower the scoop, letting the train’s own forward thrust force the water up the pipe. He leans out to the side, his coat flapping up behind, the back of his hair lifting in the wind; he locks his eyes on the pointer attached to the tank’s float. The split second the arrow reaches the fifteen-thousand-litre mark, he ducks back onto the footplate and yanks up the scoop.

Now the water jacket around the coal bunker is heavy with liquid, which adds maybe ten tons to the train’s drag but should brew up enough steam to power them all the way to Montparnasse.

In Rear Third, Maurice Marland is yawning, eyes brimming. He looks up from his story, blinks hard, and reads the dozens of brand names pasted to the walls. He wants to ask the priest the time again, but the old man’s head has tipped onto his chest. Maurice finds tiny children (such as the one still sprawled across her nurse’s lap) sweet when they’re asleep, but with old people, he always worries that they have died.

The nurse and the young missionary are chatting in Norman; Maurice can understand the odd word. He is picking up English already, as there are so many Anglos in this region. If his parents let him stay at school until he’s sixteen, he could even learn Latin. He wants to learn all the languages there are in the world and all the skills and grow up to be of use, somehow.

The priest’s head lolls back now, his open mouth like a skull’s. His watch is dangling from his belt with the cover open. Maurice stands up and twists his neck around until he can read it—not touching it, so no one will think he’s a thief. Half past twelve; almost another two hours until Dreux. (His papa waiting for him in the cart, the adventure over.)

A couple of people have unwrapped their food, so Maurice asks a man to get his schoolbag down from the net and takes out the squishy package in waxed paper. Hard-boiled eggs that Georges already shelled and salted. A barley bread sandwich, which he peels apart to see what’s inside—a generous piece of horsemeat. A pear too! Maurice eats every bit as slowly as he can, to make it last, with sips of milk.

He reads more of his Around the World story, but his eyes keep closing, somehow heavy and fluttering at the same time, so he allows them to rest for just a minute…

Now all the passengers around John Synge in Middle Third have pulled out their lukewarm cassoulets, garlic and sorrel sausage, cider and marc; the convivial fug thickens. He opens his own meagre bread and paté. Annah Lamor is feeding crumbs of pastry to her monkey. It must have taken weeks for her to sail or steam from wherever in the world she started out, and John wonders if she brought the pet with her on the ship.

The oysterwoman drinks from a rattling flask that turns out—John can’t stop himself from asking—to contain water fortified with rusty nails. She shucks her wares at a gouger’s price of ten sous each, and Dois the delicatessen owner soothes the grumblers by sharing a whole boxful of nougats. The two students unbutton their stylish false collars to save them from stains before they eat cold chicken and share a cigarette with John.

Max Jacob says he has followed his brother into colonial administration, but he’s studying law at the same time. “Couldn’t decide between them, so I’m currently failing at both.”

“My friend is in fact devilishly clever,” Kiouaup says, touching a handkerchief to his lips.

“Something examinations inexplicably fail to measure,” Max adds in a droll tone.

Kiouaup tells John that since he came to Paris eight years ago, his fees at the Colonial School have been covered as compensation for his father—the governor of a province called Kampong Tralach—having died for France.

John’s not sure whether to congratulate or commiserate. “You must be eager to go home by now?”

Kiouaup shakes his elegant head. “In fact, I would prefer never to do so.”

“He’s an utter Parisian,” Max puts in.

Yes, John’s encountered many expatriates who seem to have what he lacks—bountiful confidence in the position they occupy in the city—because they know exactly what’s drawn them to this crossroads of the modern world.

“Far more Parisian than I’ll ever be,” Max says out of the side of his mouth.

John’s not sure he follows. “Because you’re from Brittany?”

“No, because I was born foreign.”

“Foreign to… France?” It’s easier to ask probing questions when you won’t meet any of these people again.

A theatrical sigh. “Foreign to life. I first tried to hang myself when I was thirteen.”

John’s eyebrows shoot up. It may no longer be a crime, but he’s never heard anyone admit to such a thing. “D’you mind my asking—”

“Oh, it probably had something to do with the Jew-baiters punching me in the head at school.”

John cringes in sympathy.

“My father found me dangling by a necktie from the window hasp, and all he said was Do stop fooling around . My mother told me I could always kill myself later, which I found more helpful.”

Oh, the poor boy. John’s heart hurts for him.

“Just last spring, a dear friend, the genius of our lycée, threw himself in the river for love.” Max’s voice is suddenly husky, all sarcasm gone.

Annah Lamor is listening in. “Don’t do it.”

Max rolls his eyes.

“Don’t let them win.”

“Who, the tormentors? Very well, mademoiselle, I’ll drink to that.” Max leans across to clink his wine tumbler against hers, and John does the same with his water.

As the mood in the carriage turns more festive, John plucks up the courage to ask Annah where she does her act.

It turns out to be a damp cellar in Montparnasse called the Cabaret of Nothingness. John’s heard about these death-themed cafés, very up to the minute, fin de siècle —which is a silly phrase, it strikes him now. Nothing changes just because a century is coming to an end. Besides, don’t the Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Chinese have different calendars? (And the turning globe doesn’t know or care what year it is.) But in recent years, the educated of Europe have started describing everything as fin de siècle ; it’s meant to capture a certain exhausted melancholy.

Annah’s cabaret has coffins for tables, chandeliers made of fake bones, jokes about death on the walls, and two men dressed like monks droning plainchant. “I pour drinks, then the illusionist makes me rot.”

“He makes you… I beg your pardon?”

“They see me like this”—she gestures impatiently at her orange dress. “Then in a bag thing, wrapped up—”

“A shroud?” John suggests. “A bag for a dead body?”

A nod. “Then all rotted. Then just a skeleton. He uses mirrors.”

“Gracious me.”

Annah wants to know how the Dubliner spends his own days.

He’d much rather listen than speak of himself, but he admits that he’s been studying music in Cologne and is now taking courses in French and medieval literature at the Sorbonne.

“What’s wrong with Ireland?” she demands.

“Nothing. It just rains a lot, and my lungs…”

“Rains in Paris too.”

“Yes. Somehow it can be easier to be yourself abroad.” Why is John attempting to explain his inchoate feelings to a creature of the night from the other side of the world?

“Because nobody knows you?”

He nods, glad of her quick understanding.

“Where you staying?”

He flushes, which is ridiculous; it’s not as if this bird of paradise is going to hunt him down in his attic room. “Ah, just north of the cemetery.”

“Montparnasse?”

When John nods, Max asks, “What’s the only street in Paris that nobody lives on?”

This non sequitur makes him frown. “I don’t quite—”

“You’re close.”

But John hasn’t said anything.

“You’re lodging around the corner from it, in fact. Rue émile Richard, the one that cuts through the graveyard. Nobody lives there at all!”

Annah produces a professional ghostly cackle.

Max goes on. “You know it was students who named it that, as a joke?”

Now John’s quite lost. “The street?”

“No, Montparnasse.”

“Did they really?”

Max clenches his face around his monocle wisely. “In the sixteenth century the place was nothing more than a mound of quarry debris where our doubleted-and-hosed forebears got sloshed and read one another their poems.”

John enjoys picturing that. He supposes the students wouldn’t have been in anyone’s way sprawling on a pile of rubble south of the city, and, more important, it wouldn’t have cost them a sou. “Mount Parnassus, the hill sacred to the Muses?”

“Exactly!”

“You paint?” Annah suddenly asks him in an accusatory tone.

“Ah… do I look as if I do?”

A shrug. “Posh types, not real Montparnos, bourgeoisie playing at being bohemians—they’re mostly painters. One time I model for a crazy one called Gauguin.” She points up at the bulging net overhead. “That fiddle yours?”

John can’t deny it.

“Play us something,” Kiouaup orders merrily.

He throws up his hands. “Pardon me, I can’t.”

Max claps. “You must, you must. I’d accompany you if we had a piano.”

“No, truly, I have a horror of performing,” John confesses. “That’s why I gave up music—all those eyes and ears on me.”

Annah snorts, and the plumes in her hat shimmy. “People look at me anyway, even if I just walk down the street. Last time I’m in Brittany, they call me a witch and throw stones!”

John grimaces at that.

An unsmiling laugh. “Better to show myself and get paid, I say.” The monkey’s balanced on her shoulder; she feeds it a currant. The creature scratches its belly, its sardonic face a pagan mask.

Annah asks to borrow the fiddle if John won’t play.

“Certainly!” He lifts it down for her.

She plays an uneven, skipping tune with something sad about it—a danse macabre , John thinks. A discarded wine bottle rolls to and fro across the floor.

He taps along and looks out the window to hide his feelings. He longs to wrap Annah in his arms and save her from the merciless world.

He sees a man inching his way along the edge of a field, pulling a cart as if he’s a beast of burden. With a twinge in his gut John remembers, as a boy, begging his mother not to let his brother evict their poor tenants. She asked, If they don’t pay, what do you propose to live on?

He can’t tell Annah that story. She’s already guessed that he’s a posh (if broke) bourgeois, not a real Montparno .

Here’s the famous tower of Verneuil-sur-Avre, tapering like a candle. Annah won’t be interested in John’s thoughts on the Flamboyant Gothic style, and the tower’s already gone by.

As the others in Front Third munch away like sheep, Mado sits exalted. Three deputies on the Express now. That’s not just luck. What was the line old Blonska quoted? No accidents, only fate misnamed. After twenty-one years of muddling along through circumstances of the most arbitrary, thwarting kind, Mado finally finds herself believing in something like destiny. No gods, no angels, but something—the spirit of history?—is cheering her on.

Is this the perfect moment? The very important guests are gathered. If three members of parliament are in the First-Class carriages on the other side of this wall, what can Mado be waiting for?

The lunch bucket stands on her thighs; she’s holding it upright with an iron grip. She tries to think of anything else that could make the disaster huger, more memorable in its effects. If the train’s going through a tunnel, will the explosion wreck the stonework? Or she could do it when they’re next passing over a bridge, when the detonation might toss into the river not only the whole reptilian body of the train but also the bridge itself, leaving the main railway line to the west out of commission.

Beside her, the blonde, Cécile Langlois, shifts uncomfortably and rubs her bulging belly.

It doesn’t matter , Mado reminds herself, looking away. Or, rather, this woman matters, of course—we all matter—but the revolution matters more.

Months ago Mado came to terms with this. Her own death is required of her today, as are the deaths of even innocents, like this blonde probably is, and distinctly good people, like Blonska. The same goes for just about all the passengers and workers crammed onto this train. They may not deserve to die, but what has deserving ever had to do with death? Wars already eat up so many of the poor, as do mining and factory accidents, famines and diseases, all the poisons that run through the veins of France. Better to die importantly, even gloriously, so the next generation can truly live, no? Better to be blown sky-high in a wreck that will never be forgotten, that will give the powers that be an urgent warning of a new world on its way…

Mado sings that song in her head, the one from the cabaret the other night:

What does it matter

If we fail, if we fall,

Without seeing the future?

The kids will have it all.

“Not eating?”

She stares at her neighbour.

The man in the bowler hat is gnawing on the last of a leg of mutton. “Aren’t you having yours?”

Mado’s holding the handle of her lunch bucket so hard, it burns like a brand. “I’m not hungry.”

“Huh! Got anything nice in there?”

She turns her gaze away from him—

Towards old Blonska, whose eyes in their wrinkled pouches are burning weirdly. Who drops her head, too fast, and works her clacking needles.

And Mado realises with a prickle of shock that the old woman’s somehow guessed.

Her heart goes bam-bam . Is Blonska planning to wait till they stop next, at Dreux, and screech for the gendarmes? But it really will make no difference how many come running. (Mado hates all police, because their main job is to stop those who have nothing from taking anything from those who’ve always hogged everything.)

All the power is in these short, thick fingers of hers, Mado reminds herself. She slides her eyes towards Blonska’s bent, silvery head. Before anyone lays a hand on me, I can blow us all to kingdom come.

How can Blonska, with all the benefit of age and experience, have lost command of her expression? All she needed to do was keep her face calm, her look cool. Now the girl’s guessed that Blonska knows, which makes the situation even more dangerous.

Terror has Blonska in its grip. She’s in the thrall of the object itself, the lunch bucket that’s not a lunch bucket. (Unless it really is? She still longs to be ridiculously wrong about this.) Her breath is coming fast and shallow, and wet’s broken out on her upper lip. Please , she finds herself begging the God she doesn’t believe in. Not today.

Blonska made her funeral arrangements years ago, but now that the end is nearing in a rush, she’s not ready. That interests the analytical part of her mind, the little clock that ticks on through the storm of panic: So those in chronic pain with no family to cling to them are just as unwilling to go as those who have youth, beauty, health, and wealth. It seems life, in any form, is too sweet to surrender. Blonska thinks of all the books she’s left unread.

And of all the other passengers—these already familiar faces in Front Third and those strangers crowded in all the other carriages. The kind maid Madame Baudin; the bumptious oysterwoman; the Granvillais with the bowler hat; the soldier; this poor Cécile Langlois, weighed down by her bump.

Mado Pelletier is a murderous madwoman , Blonska reminds herself. But even through this fog of terror, she’s having trouble hating the girl. What grips her is more like a painful sympathy. Regret, even guilt, that Blonska or someone like her didn’t come across the girl years ago, spot her talents, and enlist her help to mend the world. Instead this young zealot has come to the appalling conclusion that the best use she can make of her life is to throw it like a flaming spear.

Because Blonska’s guessed something else—there’s one part of the deranged plan that’s clear to her. Mado Pelletier has no intention of running away. What a paradox—a killing in which the first victim will be the killer. Blonska’s heard of such a possibility only once before. One of the Nihilists who blew up the czar in St. Petersburg more than a dozen years ago was killed in the blast—some said accidentally, but others said intentionally, offering himself like a lit match to the kindling. Mado Pelletier seems of that kind. She won’t do anything to these passengers that she wouldn’t do to herself. She has the glow of a warrior going into battle.

If Mado doesn’t mean to save herself, Blonska realises, the detonation doesn’t even have to be at a station. Blonska doesn’t know the technicalities but presumes the girl can set off her device at any moment.

She swallows hard: a choking sensation. What to do?

There’s no easy way to summon a guard until Dreux.

If Blonska makes any sudden move—lunging in her stiff way to grab the lunch bucket—well, it will only prompt its owner to detonate it at once.

Should Blonska shout out her more-than-suspicions to the other occupants of Front Third? No; even if she somehow managed to convince them right away, that too would force Mado’s hand.

Is there some way for her to tell the other passengers without Mado knowing so they could all act at the same moment, pinning Mado down and getting the lunch bucket from her, perhaps hurling it out the window? But no—to fail to hear them plotting, the girl would need to be in an enchanted sleep.

The chink in the armour of most criminals is their need to make a getaway. If Mado Pelletier is, in fact, prepared—no, eager—to die… then she’s invincible.

Nothing. For now, that seems the safest thing to do. Blonska’s trapped in her knowledge, unable to act.

Strangely, she finds she doesn’t want Mado Pelletier hurt. Or arrested, even. If the police collar her, she’ll be excoriated in the papers, put on trial, and guillotined like those other anarchists, and in turn she’ll inspire new martyrs. No, what Blonska wants is to call a halt. Now, as they glide through the verdant landscape; now, when no crime has been committed yet, when in fact nothing has happened. If only Blonska could freeze time to make a little breathing space, take the girl’s hand, and say, Please, for all our sakes, hear me out… Is there a brilliant argument that could dissuade Mado, a magic word that could soften her heart? Blonska casts her mind back to when she was twenty-one, with all the gifts and weaknesses of that age. She was so all-or-nothing, so very stubborn, so akin to this French youngster. If Blonska had found herself on the death track, what might have steered her off it?

She finds she can’t think of a single thing to say to the girl. The bomb in its slim metal bucket seems to suck all the words out of her head.

The little round blonde beside Mado lets out a groan. Cécile’s head tips up and presses against the shoulders of the man behind her so her straw hat is driven forward over her eyes.

“Hey!” he objects.

She moans, thrusts out the ball of her belly, and shoves both fists into the small of her back.

Blonska is filled with a new exhaustion. “Madame—Cécile, ma chère ,” she murmurs, “could it be that your time has come?”

“Not till I get to Paris!”

Half the passengers in Front Third have caught that exchange, and it quickly spreads to the other half. Women tut and sigh or cross themselves. Another whimper from Cécile as she arches sharply. The man sitting back-to-back with her stands up, looking alarmed. Mado shrinks away on the bench and turns her face to the window.

Whenever Blonska steps into the fetid apartments of those who need her help, she becomes paralysed for a moment. Her habit is to take a long breath and ask herself what the most urgent matter is, however small, then tackle that. Right now she can’t think of anything to do about what’s in that lunch bucket, so she’s going to focus on what she knows how to do.

She puts her hands on Cécile’s knees, only a few centimetres from her own. “Tell me, how long has your back been hurting?”

A sob. “Just today. On and off for hours, but it’s getting much worse now.”

A sure sign, and one she hid as long as possible so she’d be allowed to make her trip. Blonska sighs. First things first—she must try to get this poor creature off this cursed train. “We’ll set you down at Dreux shortly, and the station guard will call a midwife.”

Struggling to catch her breath, Cécile protests, “My sister’s expecting me.”

“We make plans, and the gods laugh.” By the gods , she means the random forces that govern human lives as casually as the tide shakes up sand in a rock pool, the forces that have put these people in a railway carriage with a bomber who means to kill them all. “I’d say you’ll be having your baby at Dreux.”

“I will not !” Cécile writhes on the bench, her hair escaping her hat like chaff. “What do you know?”

Blonska doesn’t take this personally; she’s familiar with the rage of women enduring these pangs. “From the births I’ve seen—”

A tear plummets down Cécile’s red face. “I tell you, I can hold on till Paris.”

Some of the passengers have looked away as if trying not to hear, but others are enjoying the drama. “Not up to you, ma puce , is it?” asks Madame Baudin.

“My girl came early and my boy late,” remarks another woman.

“Haven’t you heard the proverb?” That’s the oysterwoman speaking over her shoulder from the next bench. “ No one’s born till their time, nor dies neither . Well, it must be this one’s time.”

“Who said anything about dying?” Furious, the words that spray from Cécile’s mouth.

“We’re here.” That’s Mado, in a strange voice.

Blonska rubs her eyes. Could the girl mean that they’ll all help, even her?

But Mado gestures at the window. “Dreux.”