Chapter Twenty-Two #2
‘Ernestine never goes up to the attic,’ Mathilde said. ‘I even wondered whether Odile might have blabbed, but surely she wouldn’t have given the game away. Only the Pailleaus, the countess, Odile and I knew he was there – apart from the men who brought him.’
‘Then maybe there’s a traitor in their group,’ Paulette said grimly.
Mathilde’s thoughts flew to Yves, never far from her mind. He must always be crossing a minefield, one step away from disaster. How could she expect him to care for their child when he was leading such a precarious, rackety life? Of course she would have to be mother and father both.
Another Christmas came and went, her second in Provence.
Mathilde remembered the previous year when the world had seemed a more hopeful place.
On Christmas Eve, Renée had brought out the santons, tiny clay figures traditional in Provence, and arranged them into a crèche.
They had eaten what seemed a huge meal of roast chicken and gone to midnight mass with full stomachs for once, muffled against the cold; the next morning, Père Noel had brought Louis a toy car that Pierre had made out of scrap metal.
It had taken him weeks of painstaking labour.
Now Pierre was dead and she had no idea whether Louis had a little brother or sister – or indeed, whether he and Renée were still alive.
Jacques was dead, too, and she was expecting another man’s child.
She daren’t imagine what further turns her life might take; it was as much as she could do to make it through each day and hope for the blessed oblivion of sleep at night.
The weather was cold and clear, and once again the mistral swept down the hillside, stripping the vines of dead wood.
Mathilde moved slowly along the rows, pruning and shaping for new life to come.
She was in tune with the seasons, the baby growing in her womb as the bright green leaves of spring unfurled.
One morning she felt the faintest flutter, as though a feather were brushing the inside of her body, and realised her child must be moving.
She stood with her hand on her stomach, eyes filled with tears because she had no one to tell.
Resolving not to give way to self-pity, however, she told Odile.
The housekeeper had become her unexpected ally, serving her almost as much food as the men and steering her through the bumpy waters of pregnancy.
Doctor Pailleau had examined Mathilde and declared her fit and healthy but Odile wasn’t taking any chances.
She made sure Mathilde was drinking enough and resting for half an hour after lunch with her feet up – despite the countess’s warning that there was to be no slacking – while she regaled her with tales of her own pregnancy and labour.
Mathilde was (mostly) grateful for Odile’s advice, and happy to defer to her experience.
Madame de Courcy seemed to have softened, too.
She would come to the vineyard mid-afternoon with a fresh canteen of water if the weather was warm, and one evening she gave Mathilde a suitcase full of exquisite hand-stitched baby clothes: tiny ruffled bloomers and pintucked gowns with layers of lace that her daughter Amélie must have worn.
‘But I can’t accept these,’ Mathilde had protested. ‘They’re far too good!’
‘They might as well be used instead of mouldering away in the attic,’ the countess had said. Mathilde wondered whether she ever thought of her own grandchild, growing up somewhere far away. Surely this was the child she should be caring for: her own flesh and blood?
‘She never offered those clothes to me,’ Odile had sniffed. ‘Not that I’d have wanted them anyway. Your baby would be a laughing stock, dressed up like Marie Antoinette. We’ll just have to hope it’s a girl so she can wear Irène’s old things.’
Mathilde had become a mascot for the women of Chateau Albertine, her swelling stomach a symbol of optimism and hope in dark times.
Leningrad was still under siege from the Axis forces and thousands of its citizens were starving to death; at a conference in Berlin, the Nazis had declared that the final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ was deportation, followed by extermination.
The underground newspapers Paulette passed on to Mathilde told horrifying stories of the persecution suffered by Jews in the occupied zone.
Further south, the internment camp outside Marseille now held over fifteen hundred foreign Jewish prisoners in appalling conditions.
Emigration was impossible now; they were stuck in limbo.
The only consolation to be found was the fact that, at last, the United States had entered the war, and there was a real chance Hitler would be beaten.
Mathilde clung to that possibility like a lifeline.
Madame de Courcy often entertained the mayor, Monsieur Rochefort, the priest, the winemaker Rousseau and other local bigwigs, in addition to receiving Doctor Pailleau, whose visits were as regular as ever.
She never invited Mathilde to join these meetings but would sometimes talk to her afterwards about what had been discussed: further demands from Vichy about goods for export, changes to the nightly curfew, the current mood in the streets.
Discontent was growing. French Jews in the area were beginning to realise that they weren’t any safer than those from other countries – even if they supported Marshal Pétain.
The Vichy government had agreed to hand over ten thousand Jews to the Germans for deportation and gangs of Jew hunters were roaming the countryside, looking for people they could arrest. With the German stranglehold tightening, people were being pushed beyond endurance and a resistance movement was taking shape.
Mathilde was delighted to hear it, though she was frustrated by her growing bulk and the demands on her body, which limited her bicycle trips around the area.
She had visions of resuming them with a baby strapped to her back.
One night, she was woken by the sound of voices below.
Retrieving her pistol from under the mattress, she loaded it and stowed it away in the pocket of her dressing gown before creeping downstairs and along the landing of the floor below.
Madame de Courcy stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding Brioche by the collar as she talked to Monsieur Rochefort.
A movement must have caught the countess’s eye because she looked up and, spotting Mathilde, beckoned her to join the conversation.
Briefly, the mayor explained what had happened.
Railway tracks in the area had been sabotaged and a train derailed; it had been carrying Jewish internees from the camp outside Marseille to a prison nearer Paris, from where they would be deported to Germany.
Several of the prisoners had escaped, including a group of about thirty children of varying ages, mostly orphans.
While the adults had split up and melted away into the countryside, the children obviously couldn’t look after themselves.
Some of them had been placed with various families in Les Roches, but the mayor was asking whether the remaining party could stay at the chateau.
‘We’re talking about a group of twenty children or more,’ Madame de Courcy said. ‘It’s quite a commitment – they can’t be easily hidden. What do you think, Fleur?’
‘We should take them,’ Mathilde said immediately. ‘Who else has room?’ She looked meaningfully at the mayor. ‘As long as you feel they’d be safe in the chateau.’
‘I do,’ he replied. ‘People in the community have been very moved by their plight. The doctor and his wife are sheltering two little girls themselves.’ So clearly he understood what she was implying.
‘At the very least, they may sleep here tonight,’ Madame de Courcy said. ‘I’ll speak to Odile and Ernestine in the morning.’
The mayor let out his breath. ‘Thank you, Blanche. I knew I could rely on you.’
‘Well, I’m not making any promises,’ the countess replied. ‘Where are the children now?’
‘Outside, in a Jeep.’ Rochefort was already backing towards the door. ‘I’ll fetch them right away.’
Madame de Courcy turned to Mathilde. ‘We’ll put them upstairs in the attic for tonight. I’ll help you fetch extra mattresses from the eaves, and we shall need towels and whatever clean clothes we can find.’
‘One of the older girls has taken charge,’ the mayor called. ‘Her name is Anna. She’s Polish and very helpful.’
There were eight bedrooms on the attic floor, including Mathilde’s; four on each side of the corridor.
A couple already contained mattresses and several also held other furniture: an apple press, an ancient crib, a loom and an accordion with the bellows rotted away.
Hastily, Mathilde cleared as much floor space as possible and unrolled the mattresses.
The countess reappeared with an armful of towels and an assortment of motley garments, from knickerbockers and party dresses to knitted bathing suits.
By the time they ran downstairs again, the hall was full of the most bedraggled, filthy children Mathilde had ever seen or could possibly imagine.
They stood huddled together, some silently weeping or staring at the floor, others shooting wary glances around this strange new place as though already planning their escape.
Several had no shoes, their clothing was filthy and tattered, and they smelt appalling.
Most of their heads had been shaved, their legs were emaciated and their stomachs swollen from malnutrition.
Surely even Mathilde hadn’t been in such a state when she’d arrived at the chateau, fresh from prison?
It was the youngest children who really tore at her heartstrings.
A couple of them couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.
They had labels tied around their necks but the writing – their names, presumably – had worn away.
They shrank away from Mathilde when she approached, hiding their faces and uttering small cries of distress.
‘They are tired and frightened,’ said a long-legged girl in a ragged dress who must have been Anna. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Please don’t apologise,’ Mathilde said. ‘I quite understand.’ She stood looking at the wretched group, shocked into inertia.
The countess clapped her hands. ‘Right, you must all go upstairs for a bath. Get into pairs and Fleur will show you the way. Smallest children first.’
Mathilde pulled herself together. With Anna’s help, the children filed upstairs and formed a queue outside the bathroom.
Doctor Pailleau had provided carbolic soap and gentian violet to treat the worst sores, and most of them allowed Mathilde to apply it.
When she had washed and dried the little ones, she left the older children to wash themselves.
The average age of the group seemed to be about twelve, with Anna and a couple of older boys maybe sixteen or seventeen.
She and Anna dressed the youngest children in whatever strange garments were available and led them along the landing to their bedrooms.
Mathilde’s baby kicked in her womb. She longed to cuddle these poor bedraggled waifs, to envelop them in love, but their tense, bony bodies refused to soften against hers. They stared at her with pale, watchful faces and would not be comforted.