“Bettina?” Eva panted, interrupting his terrified train of thought. Her eyes were wide and worried. “Mario?” The fact that neither had returned was an alarming indication that the bombing had wreaked death and destruction in the streets, but Angelo had one goal, and he would worry about Mario when Eva was no longer in danger.
“I don’t know, Eva. But I’m here. Everything will be okay,” he soothed. The fear inside his belly was so great it had congealed into a massive rock, but he would be calm. He had found her, and she was having his child. He would be calm.
Eva smiled, just the smallest wisp of a smile, and she nodded, believing in him like she always had. Then her eyes filled with tears as the pain built again, making her chin sink to her chest and her back bow in protest.
“Tell me . . . ,” she panted. “Tell me how you found me.”
“I heard you were sent to Bergen-Belsen. After the Americans liberated Rome and then Paris, I went to France and began following the army up through the country, trying to find a way to get into Germany and up to you. I have been so frustrated. There were days I almost set out on my own, but Camillo always held me back.”
“My father? What do you mean?”
“Camillo went to Austria and never came home. I knew I would never see you again if I wasn’t prudent. Every time I wanted to rush in, it was like he stood at my shoulder, directing my paths.”
“He was with me too. If it hadn’t been for him, I would be in Bergen-Belsen now. I dreamed about him, and he told me you were with me. Inside me. I didn’t understand what that meant until I found out I was pregnant.”
“How did you end up here? In Belgium?” he asked, trying to distract her from the building agony. He sat at her back, letting her lean into his chest, turning her face into his neck as she tried to escape the waves of pressure.
“I jumped.” She groaned out the words, tucking her face into him as she began to shake. “I jumped, and then I walked.” She stopped talking then, speech too great a task, and he could only marvel at her words.
She jumped. And then she walked.
Her contractions seemed to grow until there was no relief, no brief moments to regroup and quietly rest, and Eva began bearing down helplessly, her body demanding that she push. It was an onslaught, a blitz, and one hour grew into another and then another as the world beyond the shattered windows continued to burn, and the woman he loved begged for deliverance. Angelo moved her bed beside the fire and nailed blankets over the windows to keep out the worst of the cold and to block the light in case the German bombers returned, but conditions were far from favorable. Bettina had brought in plenty of boiled water, and Angelo kept the area as clean as he could and Eva as comfortable as he was able, when finally, as midnight neared, she reached the end.
A surge of blood-tinged water soaked the sheet beneath her as she groaned in agonized protest. She bore down, pushing and crying with an endurance born of love and little else. Angelo, on his knees before her, begged the Madonna for intercession, and a little baby boy, conceived in love and tribulation, came into the world on Christmas Day. The baby’s cry broke the sacred stillness of the moment, his little arms and legs kicking in outrage as his father greeted him for the first time.
“It’s a boy, Eva. It’s a little boy,” Angelo cried, overcome. In a bombed-out village, in a foreign land, a tiny leaf had appeared on a new branch, a new sun dawning on a day when so many sons had slipped away. Shaking and afraid of his own emotion, Angelo carefully laid the baby across Eva’s sweat-stained chest and cut the cord that connected mother and child. Eva’s smile was weak, but her breathing was deep and her face serene. She covered her son with a clean towel and searched his tiny face with glorious eyes.
“He is here, my little Angelo Camillo Rosselli Bianco.”
Her baby stopped crying almost immediately and stared up into his mother’s face with curious wonder, making Eva laugh even as her tears continued to fall, unabated. And then she started to sing, more a whisper than a song, and Angelo bent his head near hers to listen to the carol she’d sung exactly a year earlier in the cab of a delivery truck, wedged between Angelo and Monsignor O’Flaherty.
“Oh, my divine baby
I see you trembling here,
Oh, blessed God
Ah, how much it costs you,
Your loving me.
Ah, how much it costs you,
Your loving me.
Dear chosen one, little infant
This dire poverty makes me love you more
Since love made you poor now.
Since love made you poor now.”
Angelo kissed the tears from Eva’s face and tasted them on her lips. Love had not made them poor. Love had made them wealthy. In that moment, they were royalty, a king of fortune and a queen of destiny, embracing a tiny prince of peace. Angelo still had no idea where Eva had been, how she had ended up in a town called Bastogne in the middle of a firefight, but he’d found her.
He’d found her.
And there was no man on earth or angel in heaven who could convince him that miracles did not exist. For once, God had not been quiet.
CHAPTER 26
BASTOGNE
In the early hours of morning, Angelo and Eva heard the door downstairs being forcibly opened and feet clattered into the house, accompanied by shouting. Angelo, who had been dozing in a chair near Eva’s bedside, was up and out of his chair instantly and hurrying to the door. He flung it open and moved out onto the landing.
“Mario!” he called, the relief heavy in his voice. “Up here. We’re up here!”
Eva pulled her baby deeper into the blankets Angelo had laid over them, listening as boots pounded up the stairs, and Angelo laughed in sheer gratitude.
The men began talking at once, clapping each other on the back and reassuring each other they were both okay. Then Mario Sonnino was standing in the door, his face black with filth, his uniform splattered in blood and looking like it had survived a direct hit from an enemy bomb.
“Bettina—the woman who told me where to find you? She’s safe. We couldn’t get to you because there was debris as high as my head piled in front of the door. The building next to you took a direct hit, right through the roof. We had to wait for a bit. All hell was breaking loose outside, and none of us could stand out in the opening, clearing rubble,” he explained. He shook his head as if trying to clear his vision, and he rubbed at his eyes wearily. He looked as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
“Hello, Mario,” Eva said softly, and smiled at his awestruck face. He walked slowly to her bedside and knelt beside her with humble deference. Angelo followed him, his eyes on Eva, his mouth trembling with emotion.
“Meet Angelo Camillo Rosselli Bianco,” she murmured, revealing her son’s sleeping face. “Born on Christmas Day.”
Mario just stared, dumbstruck. “How?” he finally uttered, his voice cracking on the word.
“When two people love each other very much,” she said teasingly, “sometimes they have children.”
“How?” he said again, looking up at Angelo, who just shook his head as if words failed him too. Angelo pressed the exhausted doctor into the chair he’d vacated and brought a clean cloth, a bar of soap, and a bucket of water to his side.
“Wash, Mario. And Eva can tell us the story.”
She told them about Pierre, the boy from Bastogne, whose mother had convinced him to jump from the train bound for Bergen-Belsen. She told them how it felt to fly through the air with bullets whizzing around her, and how it felt when she realized she had done it—she had jumped and lived. She recounted finding the sign and realizing they were in Germany. And then she told them how she and Pierre had hid in a church for two days and drank water from the outdoor pump and ate sacrament wafers until the pastor had found them and fed them a real meal before sending them to the next town, clean and more appropriately clothed, with instructions to “find Father Hirsch.”
Father Hirsch sent them to Father Gunther in Gustavsburg. Father Gunther sent them to Father Ackermann in Bingen. Father Ackermann sent them to Father Kuntz in Bengel. They walked or were smuggled toward Belgium, town after small town, relying on the integrity of the Catholic Church, which wasn’t always reliable. One priest had warned them to avoid the priest in the next town, who was a Nazi sympathizer with a brother who served in a high position with the Reich.
When they had reached the border, they were loaded into the back of a cart, covered loosely in a plastic tarp, and manure was spread over them, piled high to disguise their hiding place. A German farmer hitched the cart to his mule and walked sedately across the boundary between Germany and Belgium with nobody saying a word. He took them to the outskirts of St. Vith, and from there they’d gone south, sleeping in the forest one night because they were too tired to walk the final stretch to Bastogne. It took them three weeks to go one hundred and fifty miles, and when they’d arrived, Eva had been sick for two months. After she missed her second period, she realized that her exhaustion and nausea weren’t due to extreme stress and overexertion, but to pregnancy.
“And I have been here ever since,” Eva finished, “hiding. There were still Germans in the area for a while, though not in large numbers.”
“Where is Pierre now?” Angelo asked.
“Bettina and I made him leave when the town was evacuated. He’s among friends.”
“It’s better that he did. I didn’t know what I’d find when I came through those doors,” Mario said. “Bombs were falling like rain. The aid station took a direct hit too. I was in the kitchen in the back. We keep the plasma in the fridge. It was little more than a glassed-in greenhouse. I was blown outward, through the glass. I landed in a snowbank. I have a few scratches. That’s all. But the station caught fire. We pulled a few of the wounded out. The rest were buried by the rubble.”
“You lost your glasses,” Angelo observed.
“But that was all. That was all I lost. One of the nurses—Renee—is dead. She kept going back inside for the wounded. The last time she didn’t come out.”