At first she couldn’t find him when she wheeled her bike into the shed. There was no sound, and he didn’t answer her when she called his name, and she suddenly panicked thinking that they had found him and taken him, and then she saw his eyes in the moonlight, staring at her.
“Hi, Jacob,” she said. “I brought you some dinner.” She took it out of the basket and held it out to him, and slowly he approached. He ate all of it, and drank some of the water she had brought for him. She stayed with him for an hour, wrapped him in the blanket with her coat, and left the thermos of water with him. She told him that in the morning, he would have to go down into the cellar in case someone came, and she showed him how to open the trapdoor. “I’ll be back for you first thing tomorrow,” she promised him, and he pulled something out of his pocket right before she left and handed it to her. It was a piece of paper with an address on it, and looked as though it had been written in haste. “What is that?” Gaëlle asked him as she stared at it and then back at him. She could read it in the dim light but didn’t know what it meant.
“I don’t know. My mama said to go there if someone found me.” He hadn’t mentioned it till then. But it told her that his escape through the window must have been orchestrated by his mother as the gendarmes entered their home.
“We’ll go there tomorrow then,” Gaëlle said calmly, wondering what she had gotten herself into, but there was no turning back, and she didn’t want to. She wanted to do this for him, and for his mother, and all the others like them.
“Will my mama and papa be there?” he asked her with a look that went straight to her heart.
“I don’t think so. But if your mama said to go there, I’m sure it’s a safe place.” He nodded, satisfied with her answer, and she tucked him into his makeshift bed on the floor before she left, and then rode back to the château, sure of herself now.
Jacob had become her mission, and she would get him to safety for this woman she didn’t know. It seemed like a small thing to do for them, and she didn’t care about the risk to herself. What difference did it make? What future did any of them have, and who were they as human beings if they didn’t at least try to help? She slept in her clothes that night, so she didn’t have to waste time getting dressed in the morning when she got up, and she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed about Rebekah. She was smiling at Gaëlle in the dream, and Jacob was standing beside her. In the dream, Rebekah said they were waiting for Gaëlle to come.
Chapter 4
Jacob was still asleep when Gaëlle slipped into the shed just after dawn the next day. She had stolen a few more crusts of bread for him on her way past the pantry when she left, and no one would miss it. She had brought some gardening tools so she could say she was tending to her father’s grave if someone asked where she was going, but she saw no one on the way, and she woke the little boy gently. He looked startled when he first saw her, and then he remembered. She let him relieve himself from the doorway, and then gave him the crust of bread. She hadn’t dared consult any maps, but she knew that the address hastily scrawled on the piece of paper was in a small town two villages away, and she knew how to get there.
“Do I have to go in the cellar now?” he asked her, and she shook her head.
“No, we’re going to go to your mama’s friends.” She helped him into the basket, and covered him with the blanket, and left the gardening tools in the shed. She had decided that going in broad daylight would look less suspicious, and she estimated that it would take them a little over an hour to get there. She had her identity papers, and her permission to circulate freely in the county, and as long as he didn’t make a sound or move in the basket, she thought they would get there without any problem. The local soldiers never bothered her, although she was a pretty girl, since they had been warned to treat the local women respectfully. The commandant of the area didn’t want reports of abusing women to get back to headquarters in Paris, and he had been strict about it. And it was obvious that Gaëlle was from a respectable family, and her address was at the Château de Mouton-Barbet, where the commandant was billeted.
She checked on Jacob in the basket one last time before they left the shed, and she took off then on the back roads, and eventually joined the road that was traveled more frequently, where she would be less noticed among others going to the next village, to work, or to market. A few people smiled at her along the way, and she saw no soldiers until they’d been on the road for almost an hour, and they didn’t stop her or ask for her papers and just waved her on. She was so Aryan looking, no one was ever suspicious of her.
It took them less than two hours to get to the address on the scrap of paper. There was no name on it, and she rang the bell at the gate when she got there. A tall young man came to answer it a few minutes later, and looked at her suspiciously.
“Yes? What is it?”
She wasn’t sure what to say. She had no code word, no instructions, or the name of who to ask for. “I have a package for you,” she said simply, glancing at the basket on her bicycle, and he stared at her with a question in his eyes that she didn’t dare answer.
“What kind of package?” he pressed her, as she fished the piece of paper out of her pocket and handed it to him, in case something about it looked familiar to him, and he reacted immediately. “Come inside,” he said curtly, and once they all were inside the gate, he directed her to a garage behind the house. He followed her, and in the garage she prayed that she was doing the right thing, as she gently lifted the blanket off of Jacob, and he sat up and stared at them. The fierce-looking young man smiled as soon as he saw him, lifted him out of the basket, and held him in his arms. “Welcome,” he said to the little boy. “We’re going to take good care of you,” he assured him.