one morning she had found a nest of matted hay along the far, rough-hewn wall, and when she lay a hand upon it she fancied it to still be warm from his slumbers. From then on, each night she coaxed Sister Anna-Marie into preparing a plate heaped with whatever remained from the evening meal, and she would set it on a tack shelf in the stable, out of reach of equine muzzles. And mornings she would set out a small loaf of fresh baked bread, perhaps a wedge of cheese, and a small crockery jug filled with wine drawn from the casks in the cellar below their cottage.
The food never went untouched, and not once had she seen whoever came to claim it.
How mysterious. And how thrilling.
“Could it be that your secret friend is a refugee, mmmm?” Anna-Marie smiled impishly at her suggestion, then went back to preparing another evening plate with stewed chicken and vegetables and grapes. She never had to be coaxed anymore. The old nun was likely enjoying the intrigue almost as much as Giselle. “Perhaps he fled one of the coasts.”
Giselle hadn’t thought of that, though it made sense. It was a time of war, but so far Chateau-sur-Lac had seen little of it. To them the war was planes, far overhead. More than two years ago, France had fallen and Hitler had danced his little jig of victory. Marshal Petain had signed his armistice with Germany, and only France’s north and west coasts had been occupied, the interior spared. Father Guillaume had been furious, had called the man a traitor to his people. Giselle had, at the time, only just taken her vows, and tried to deal with it more philosophically. Tried to look at it as she might, say, a drastic measure in medicine … say, cutting off an infected limb to save the rest of the body.
As ones who followed a man who had died upon a cross for no fault of his own, surely they could live with sacrifice.
And so she fell to wondering: What sacrifices had been demanded of her mysterious ward, whom she’d never even seen? Had he been forced to forfeit love and the creature comforts of home and hearth, to rely on the bounty of nature and the kindness of strangers for each meal? Had he been forced to trade the company of his fellow human beings for that of animals, or none at all?
Perhaps he’d been a soldier, separated or deserted from his unit in the confusion of Dunkerque, with no choice but to now live and travel by stealth. Or maybe he’d been an artist, living in some garret on the Left Bank of Paris until he gave it up for life in one of the more peaceful coastal cities — Cherbourg, or Brest — and since the coming of the Germans, had submerged his disillusion with humanity in the countryside.
Oh, she felt she knew him already, knew his story. She had to — she’d come up with so many, it had to be one among them.
And probably she would have been content to continue on his own terms, providing the meals until the inevitable day when he moved on and she found the food cold, untouched … were it not for the gift.
On a chilled November morning in the fourth week since his arrival, an hour past dawn, Giselle wrapped her frayed cloak about her and left the cottage. Behind her, Sister Anna-Marie groaned of stiff knees and wrestled fresh logs onto glowing embers. The heavy door thudded shut and she was alone with the world. On the rear stoop sat bottles of milk and cream, left by one of the villagers. She glanced around, like a wary cat, then dipped her finger in the cream and quickly licked it clean.
Giselle scurried along the path back to the stable. In the distance, a late-rising rooster called. The morning stillness was a fresh and living thing, the air full of mist that clung to the skin and brought a shiver. As far as the eye could see, a pastoral tableau of rolling hills and flat fields, the distant lake that had given the village its name, and woodland that encroached upon it all with the patience of aeons. She would die here someday, Giselle knew, and be grateful for the life spent here.
The path curved back, halfway toward the church and the stone rectory that sat behind it. At one of Father Guillaume’s windows she saw the yellowish gleam of an oil lamp.
In the stable, the horses stood placidly, each with a heavy blanket draped across its back as they breathed out soft moist clouds. She spoke to them, called them by name, then crossed over the earthen floor to the shelf for the empty plate.
Beside it, positioned with such care that it sat perfectly straight, was a doll. With winsome painted eyes, it gazed out somewhere just over her head. For a moment, Giselle dared not violate it, then reached to gather it in her arms. It looked and even smelled of age, with thin, limp clothes that nevertheless retained a certain grandeur of pre-revolutionary court gaiety. Its head and limbs were porcelain, its complexion milk white but for a rosy blush upon each delicate cheek.
A gift? It must be. For her. For her.
“Are you still here?” she called out, and went running around the stalls for the far wall. As she passed, one of the horses whuffled noisily. “Have you stayed this time?”
The nest was empty. Just a shadowed bed of hay, nothing more. And was he even now crouched outside, within some sylvan hideaway, spying for a glimpse of her when she emerged with the doll in her arms?
She fingered her rosary and prayed for a moment. This was coming perilously close to courtship. Worse, in some hidden cleft within, she wanted it to be so.
Giselle knelt beside the matted hay, lay a hand upon it, felt the fading, radiant warmth.
She counted, as she might measure a horse, hand-widths down along the matted area where his back and shoulders would have lain, then the tapering length of his legs. She had thought it before, but it occurred to her once again:
He must be enormous.
When she left the stable, doll in hand, it was with the taste of delicious fear that she was about to surrender to forbidden curiosity.
*
Night, barely a moon, the entire countryside dipped in black that seemed to run and pool.
Giselle had kept herself awake for an hour by pinching a spot on her thigh, and for another hour beyond that simply by lying in the darkness, contemplating her faltering courage, and wondering where it might lead if she really did creep out the door and dare look her refugee in the face. Perhaps he’d entertained similar thoughts, was right now lying out there with a deliciously miserable heart and hoping to hear the sound of her feet.
A few feet away, Sister Anna-Marie snorted in her sleep and stirred, then fell silent.
