Chapter Two

She used a rope and pulley to drag him into the truck.

The simple block-and-tackle rig was something Father had suggested for helping Ellenor manhandle the heavy hives. Each box, when filled with ten frames of honey to be harvested, could weigh as much as eighty pounds. Ellenor depended on physics to assist her, and eventually she winched the foreigner into position just behind the vehicle’s cab. He slept and bled.

She unwound the blue scarf from his neck, intending to wrap the hand she’d shot, but the hole was nasty; it leaked slowly, continuously. Pressure would help, but the man was unconscious and not able to assist in his own first aid.

“Why bother?” Ellenor asked herself. Normally she’d talk with the bees, a delightful chorus of eager girls who reaped nectar and pollen from German wildflowers and ferried them into their homes. But she had no bees other than the dead, their corpses awaiting closer inspection in Father’s barn. Instead, she talked to herself.

“Damned if I know.”

The bleeding had to be stopped. Ellenor took the nearest hive box and removed the frames, wax-filled forms on which the bees constructed their hexagonal treasure boxes. Using a flat-bladed tool, she scraped the edges of the frames, building up a sticky wad of propolis, which was the beekeeper’s term for processed tree sap. Bees used it for mortar and sealant. Ellenor could think of nothing more appropriate for her task.

She smeared the gummy residue across the pilot’s palm, filling the jagged hole. She repeated this on the back of his hand, seeing in her mind how quickly his reflexes had reacted when she’d pulled the trigger. Had he been one microsecond slower, she would have shot him in the face.

She forced the thought away. Satisfied that her impromptu patch would suffice, she bound the long scarf around his hand and tied it off between his fingers.

The truck, as was often the case, failed to fire. Ellenor bit her lower lip and roughly repeated the routine until the engine coughed out whatever had been choking it and rumbled to uncertain life. Horses remained far more trustworthy. Most horses, however, had been requisitioned by the German government, along with the majority of the country’s young men, able-bodied or otherwise. After several moments of uncertain shifting, Ellenor got the vehicle trundling down the hill. She left behind the still-smoking pile of wood and wire that had once been a British plane.

****

War had brought shovels to the Rhineland. Shovels, really, seemed to be more important than guns. Ellenor Jantz had watched crates of them being unloaded from trains, bundles of them cinched together with household twine, crude versions of them hammered into form at the blacksmith’s forge. Countless variations of shovels had been taken west on trucks and motorbikes and hay wagons. The object of this obsession, it seemed, was the trench. Men dug trenches like animals, like demons, like madmen. You dug faster than the French or you died.

Father’s estate was situated just far enough from this furious digging to avoid being enveloped by the chaos but close enough that you could bear witness to the constant back-and-forth if you stood on the library balcony and trained the telescope to the west. Father often lingered there with his schnapps, bent over the eyepiece, thinking his thoughts. Ellenor, who once adored the telescope and the heavens it revealed to her, now wanted nothing to do with it.

She guided the truck to the back of the stone barn, its masonry from a previous generation, its grand loft like something from a child’s tale. Since hostilities had commenced three years ago, Father had dismissed many of his household staff, but the old Jewish stable-master, Josef, remained steadfastly at his post. He groomed livestock for a living but fancied himself an American cowboy. If fate had been kinder, Josef would have been employed in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

Ellenor wasted no time. “Joe?” She hurried into the barn through one of its many well-oiled wooden doors, shifting automatically into German: “Josef, are you here?”

“Yes, Little Fox. Aren’t I always?” He emerged from the tack room, tall and gnarled, his round-rimmed glasses too small for his face. “How’s it look for this year’s honey harvest?”

“I need your help.”

“Since when does the American Joan of Arc need anyone’s assistance?”

“A man was shot down in front of me.”

He removed his spectacles, slowly, giving himself time to process what she’d said. “What do you mean shot down?”

“A flyer. He nearly crashed into the truck.”

“I saw the smoke in the sky but…you’re all right?”

“Josef, please. I brought him here.”

“You—you what?”

She offered no further details. The longer the man lay out there in the open, the greater the chance he’d be discovered. Ellenor might have been brave on certain days, but she had no desire to be accused of harboring an enemy agent. “I need to get him inside, and I can’t do it alone.” She left the barn without waiting to see if Josef followed.

The airman was still asleep, his face drained of color. By the time she got him untangled from the pulley’s rope, Josef was at her side, his agile hands making short work of the rope. Without further question, he gathered the pilot in his arms and carried him into the warm shadows of the barn. Ellenor had known Josef for only a year, but she trusted him as much as she’d ever trusted anyone. On her very first day at work here twelve months ago, he’d doffed his cowboy hat and said, “Howdy, ma’am,” just like a rancher in a dime-store novel. Since then, she supplied him with honey biscuits and he told her Teutonic fairy tales he’d learned as a boy.

Josef settled the pilot to the floor in one of the empty stalls, then brought in a lantern for a closer look. “He fell from the sky, you say?”

“Right in front of me.”

“Those damn flying contrivances are deathtraps. Who is he?”

“He didn’t say.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Briefly. I believe he’s from England.”

“Of course he is. Cheeky bastards are hard to kill.” Josef studied the man’s injuries. “What about our boy?”

“Our boy?”

“The fellow from our side who sent this one here to the ground. Did you see a friendly plane circling overhead?”

“I didn’t really think to look.”

Josef used a rag from the pocket of his thick britches to dab the blood from the man’s mouth. “I suppose it could have been engine failure. Or the propeller could have snapped off. Or a wing could have disintegrated. A man strapping himself into a wooden bird with a motor attached deserves whatever he gets.” He looked up at Ellenor from where he squatted in the straw. “What do you intend to do with him? Tell Father that a puppy followed you home and beg to keep him?”

Ellenor had asked herself the same question on the drive down the hill. She felt like crying over her lost hives. She felt like being sick with the thought of almost becoming a murderer. She felt, most of all, like an outsider. She’d been born in the New Mexico Territory, which wasn’t even a proper state of the Union until five years ago, and she’d spent the last year across the ocean in a country that had charmed her at first but now devoured its neighbors in never-ending war.

“Little Fox?”

“Will he live?”

Josef looked down at the man and shrugged one substantial shoulder. “There is a Yiddish word: bashert. It is difficult to define in German, but bashert is what’s meant to be. There are no coincidences in the universe. If this fallen angel of yours dies, it is bashert.”

“And if he doesn’t die?”

“Same thing.” Josef pointed. “Now pull up that milking stool. You’re going to play like a nurse for a while and see if you can help bashert decide one way or the other.”