Chapter Twenty-Four
Mathilde and the children stayed in the forest until the following afternoon.
Paulette went back to the chateau a few hours after Esmé was born to report the happy news, promising to return the next day and let them know whether the Jew hunters had gone and the coast was clear.
Mathilde could have spent months in the wood, getting to know her baby; she had no interest in rejoining the real world.
Their first night together was magical. Esmé seemed to know exactly what to do and was already suckling at the breast before Paulette left.
Mathilde marvelled at such perfection on a minuscule scale: tiny fingernails, the intricate whorl of a minute ear, the merest suggestion of eyelashes.
Esmé might have been small but she was certainly determined, her head bobbing towards the scent of milk with a desperation that wouldn’t be denied.
‘That’s right, little one,’ Mathilde whispered, guiding her to latch on. ‘Take what you need to grow big and strong.’
The next day, they both drowsed in the warmth of sunlight filtering through the canopy of green leaves overhead, entertaining visitors. The children greeted the new arrival with varying degrees of interest, Stefan and Anna seeming particularly moved.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Stefan kept saying, shaking his head and beaming. ‘She is a special child to be born in this way.’
Anna had tears in her eyes when she looked at Esmé. ‘Are you all right?’ Mathilde asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wiping them away. ‘I’m thinking of my little sister. Half-sister, actually: my father was killed and my mother married again. Lena will be one next month and I miss her.’
‘Where is she?’ Mathilde asked.
‘Warsaw, in the ghetto. I escaped through the sewers but they could not.’ Anna’s eyes were haunted. ‘My mother told me to go but I should have stayed. How will they manage without me?’
‘You were right to leave if you had the chance,’ Mathilde told her. ‘It’s what your mother wanted. But what a long journey it must have been! Why did you come all the way to France?’
‘I had an aunt living in Paris,’ Anna replied, ‘though I couldn’t find her. My whole family has gone.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Mathilde said. ‘Would you like to hold Esmé for a while?’
‘No, thank you,’ Anna replied. ‘It is too sad. But I am happy for you.’
So much grief alongside her joy: Mathilde was overwhelmed.
Yet she couldn’t afford to wallow in emotion now that she had a child to look after.
When Esmé was sleeping, she went to see what supplies remained in the camp in case they had to stay for a while.
It had clearly been occupied since she’d last visited, the year before: there were hardtack biscuits among the supplies that couldn’t have been more than a few months old, and emergency ration tins stamped with English wording and the date 1942.
When she’d taken them all out, a picture on the newspaper that lined the base of the trunk in which they were stored made her gasp.
Her fingers shaking, she seized the yellowing sheet of paper to look at the image more closely, although it was seared into her memory.
There was Jacques, lying in a pool of blood on the cobblestones – yet the caption beneath the picture stated the dead man was one Auguste Marchand, a Communist who’d been shot by the police for evading arrest. And the newspaper was dated 2 December 1940, well before the date of Jacques’ supposed death.
Mathilde stared at the picture, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
Her tired, fuddled brain took a while to come to the only possible conclusion: the Gestapo officer in Avignon had tricked her, trying to break her spirit with the photograph of a man who might possibly have been Jacques.
He must have assumed she wouldn’t recognise the picture but she’d obviously seen it in the newspaper at the time and stored it away in her subconscious.
The image had come back to her on that last night in Paris, when she’d been so worried about leaving Jacques: a dark-haired man around the same age and build, who could so easily meet the same fate.
She sank to her haunches, realising what this revelation meant: her husband might very well be alive.
Yet what was to be done with her newfound knowledge?
She couldn’t think about the implications when her future was so uncertain anyway, and for now, her priority had to be looking after the children.
So she and Anna opened the ration tins and gave them a strange meal of corned beef, biscuits and a creamy chocolate which rendered them practically hysterical with delight.
Then Anna took the little ones off to splash in the stream while Stefan led a foraging party to search for mushrooms. Mathilde napped again with Esmé close beside her, waking to find Paulette cradling her baby.
She struggled to her feet. ‘What’s the matter? Give her to me!’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Paulette replied, smiling. ‘Her eyes were open and I couldn’t resist. Here, Maman.’ She passed the baby over.
While Esmé fed again, Paulette relayed the news.
The Jew hunters had left that morning, having only managed to arrest one teacher whom they’d discovered to be working with false papers, and the widow at whose house he was lodging.
They’d searched the chateau but hadn’t found anything – and only now did Mathilde remember the gun and map hidden under her mattress, the wireless set tuned to the BBC – while Madame de Courcy treated them with icy contempt.
‘They didn’t seem to know about the children,’ Paulette went on, ‘so that’s a relief.
I don’t think anyone had tipped them off.
Of course, the doctor’s wife is happy now she has those little girls to look after.
That was half the trouble, if you ask me: they’ve been married for nine years with no sign of a baby. ’
Mathilde yawned. ‘Sorry,’ Paulette said. ‘You won’t want to hear about all this. Odile and Her Royal Snootiness can’t wait to see little Esmé, so I suppose we should round up these scallywags and take them home.’
‘I suppose we should,’ Mathilde said with a sigh.
Paulette helped Stefan and Anna tidy the camp so no one would know they’d ever been there, sweeping the ground with branches and hiding the remains of the fire in the undergrowth.
Mathilde bound Esmé to her chest with the shawl Paulette had brought, unhitched Mascotte and tacked her up again for the return journey.
They set off through the wood, their raggle-taggle party larger by one member. The idyll was over.
Esmé turned out to be almost as easy a baby as Irène, which, as Odile said, was just as well. She took to breastfeeding with great enthusiasm and appetite, latching on with a fierce grip and suckling voraciously.
‘I swear you can see that baby growing day by day,’ Odile commented, and Mathilde felt ridiculously proud of herself.
Doctor Pailleau pronounced mother and child fit and healthy, which was a wonder, according to Odile, and Mathilde went back to work a week after the birth with Esmé strapped to her back.
‘Like a peasant,’ Odile sniffed, but Mathilde didn’t want to let her baby out of her sight.
She couldn’t shake off the fear that somehow she would end up losing this miraculous gift she didn’t deserve, despite the complication Esmé brought to her life.
The idea that Jacques might one day learn she’d had another man’s baby was so distressing she tried to think about it as little as possible.
Work distracted her. Although she wasn’t yet up to heavy digging, she could manage pruning, weeding and fruit picking, and in the afternoons she went back to working inside the house with Odile and Ernestine, cleaning and mending the children’s clothes while Esmé slept in Irène’s pram.
(Now Irène was coming up for two, she took her nap on the kitchen couch.)
Madame de Courcy often joined them on those afternoons and would sit at the table, unravelling the knitted bathing suits to make baby bonnets and cardigans for the winter ahead.
The other women gradually became used to her presence, although the conversation was a little more restrained when she was there.
She must have been lonely, Mathilde realised, and wondered again whether seeing Esmé would make the countess think of her own grandchild, and realise how much she was missing.
Life seemed settled and within a few weeks Mathilde couldn’t remember a time when Esmé hadn’t been somewhere close beside her.
She’d become obsessed by this tiny creature, unable to spare a thought for anyone or anything else.
Esmé was so adorable, they were all won over – apart from Georges, who wouldn’t look at her.
There was no judgement in anyone else’s eyes, so far as Mathilde could tell: her daughter received just as much loving attention as Irène, if not more.
Maybe that would change as the girl grew older, but for now, she lay at the very heart of the chateau, which seemed to have come to life with the arrival of so many children.
And then one afternoon, a traveller came by who was to shake Mathilde out of this dreamlike state and make her face up to reality.
People often knocked at the kitchen door, selling anything from soap to corn dollies, or asking whether there was any work available or a crust to spare.
Odile usually did her best to oblige, depending on her mood, though food was in even shorter supply these days now the children were here.