Chapter Six

The next morning, Ellenor distracted herself from thoughts of the fugitive she’d concealed by writing a eulogy for the dead. In a journal bound between rugged hemp covers, she recorded every detail of her modest honey operation. Last year she’d harvested over a hundred pounds from three hives, and after splitting one of those colonies in two, she’d hoped for even more production this time around. But some damn thing had killed half her population.

She’d inherited the bees from one of Father’s aging colleagues, a man he’d met as a young cavalry officer in the Franco-Prussian War, which he still referred to simply as “70/71.” Having learned the art and science of apiculture on the farm back home in the States, Ellenor had jumped at the chance to add honey to the estate’s list of home-grown products, along with grain, root vegetables, milk, butter, and eggs from the dozens of chickens that roamed freely and were occasionally poached by foxes at night. Father had brewed a batch of honey-flavored beer.

Ellenor kept her records in English because it was easier that way; she was fluent in German but had never been comfortable writing it. She kept track of everything: each inspection, every frame of capped and uncapped brood, all the activities that happened when the hive box was closed and only fully understood when it was opened. A healthy queen could lay two thousand eggs in a single day. She mated once and lived her entire life in the dark—except when Ellenor lifted the lid and peered inside. Comparing the notes she’d made yesterday on the hill with those she’d penned after inspecting the dead bees last night, she hoped to find some meaning behind the loss.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Dagmar called from the garden.

“Lovely.”

“I’m terribly sorry about your bees.”

“Thank you. We’ll manage.” Will we? Just because two colonies vanished didn’t mean the other two were threatened. On the other hand, disease could certainly travel between hives.

“Any notion as to what happened?” Dagmar asked, basket in both hands.

“I’m still studying the problem. I’ll let you know.”

“Very good. See you for lunch, sweetie.”

Ellenor smiled in what she hoped was an authentic way. Then she let the smile fall from her face and wrote Investigation ongoing in her field journal. Predators weren’t to blame, as a family of hungry raccoons wouldn’t have stopped until all four hives were disassembled and plundered of their riches. Besides, Ellenor had secured the top covers with wire, and raccoons might be agile little pests but they weren’t capable of outwitting heavy-gauge wire—were they?

She felt the sound before she heard it. The air seemed to quiver slightly. Ellenor looked up from her work, aware that something had changed. She cast her eyes skyward and saw them.

A dozen black shapes appeared below the clouds. The exhaust from their engines marred an otherwise blue sky. From here, the noise was little more than wasps buzzing, but with every passing second, it grew.

Josef emerged from the barn, neck craned back. Karl and Truda ran up, knees dirty, shielding their eyes from the sun. Doors opened in the main house. Faces appeared. Father stood on the library balcony.

The planes came.

The Jasta flew in an uneven formation, each biplane an individual miracle; how those radical, wooden things remained aloft was anyone’s guess. The sound intensified. The men in those planes would now use Father’s estate as a base from which to launch their sorties against the French. Since the war began three years ago, aviation had transformed the struggle. At first dismissed as a gimmick, the airplane had quickly become a scourge. And now the scourge was here.

They flew directly overhead with a howl, twelve dark crucifixes against the sky.

Without speaking, the family members and staff of the ancestral house in the Rhine valley watched the squadron turn, decelerate, and come closer to the ground. There was no particular grace to it; the biplanes shuddered, the pilots at their sticks little more than uniformed boys. And then, one by one, the aircraft touched down in the barley field two hundred yards behind the barn, their wheels kicking up plumes of soil.

Ellenor counted eleven single-seat units and one larger version built for two. They were painted according to the taste of the pilot, with daggers and hearts and wild jolts of color, personalized and cherished. The canvas was stretched taut across their wing decks, mended here and there from enemy fire.

Karl clapped and whooped as only a boy could do. His younger sister also seemed pleased, staring at the machines as if they were pages torn from a book and coming to life in front of her. Men had been flying for only a few years. Truda hoped that one day girls could fly, too.

Josef stepped up beside Ellenor. They watched the planes slow down in the field and form a line facing west, their motors eventually rattling to a stop. One by one the pilots climbed from the cockpits, stepped onto the lower of the wing decks, and leapt to the ground. Incredibly, one of them had a dog.

Josef said softly, “A gast iz vi regen az er doi’ert tsu lang, vert er a last.”

Ellenor kept her eyes on the man in the lead, a figure in a white coat. “I’m waiting.”

“‘A guest is like rain. When he lingers too long, he becomes a nuisance.’”

Father passed by, a happy child holding either hand, on their way to welcome the new arrivals.

“I suppose we’ll see,” Ellenor said.

Josef nodded. “Indeed.”

****

Alec got up from his cot in a windowless shed that smelled of wax and stepped outside.

Even as he steadied himself in the morning sun, aware of every tiny joint in his body, he admitted the loveliness of this foreign landscape before him. The grasses sweeping down the hillside were deeper green than any he’d seen in Derbyshire. Towering beech trees, generations old, stood like thick sentinels, watching him without judgment. Even the track cut into the hill was lovely, a lazy brown lane leading down from his hiding place to the lustrous valley below.

War seemed so far away.

Yet if one mounted a swift motorbike and headed west, in a matter of hours the trees were broken in half by the constant shelling and no grass grew. The zone between the spirals of razor wire—No Man’s Land—was a gray hell of body parts and holes. The men who lived in those rat tunnels were something Alec never wanted to be: the PBI, the Poor Bloody Infantry. They ate shitty stew and slept in mud up to their shins. When their commanding officers forced them to go over the top and charge enemy gun emplacements, half of them were chewed up by incoming fire. The lucky ones got hit by artillery and died instantly. The unluckiest got carried back as a basket case—a living torso and head without arms or legs.

Alec shivered. He was a flyer, and in comparison to the PBI, he lived the life of a god.

Yet even gods fell to earth.

And now, fallen, he had to find his wings. Last night he’d considered venturing to the nearest town and locating the telegraph office. He’d discarded this plan seconds later. Any word to Sarah would alert the Germans of the pending attack, as the telegraph operators at either end would reveal any message that sounded even slightly suspicious. Dozens of French flyers would be met with anti-aircraft fire—the dreaded ack-ack—and never return to their beds. Alec had to get his sister beyond the city of Metz and preferably out of Germany entirely without revealing the raid. And all of this had to happen in the next four days.

When the planes appeared overhead, Alec wasn’t surprised. Miss Jantz had foretold their arrival. He watched them until they sank too low to be seen, their engines fading. They’d landed somewhere near the chateau where Miss Jantz worked as governess or tutor or whatever the devil she was. His left hand still felt on fire. At least she’d not delivered him to the Huns.

For lack of a proper plan, Alec started walking.

Two miles separated him from the house. On a normal day, on level ground, a man on foot could make two miles in only an hour, maybe even less. But Alec was battered; his knee complained with every step, and his spine was akin to an unoiled accordion. So he allotted himself two hours for this slow hike in the German countryside. At least he was moving downhill.

Mourning doves sounded their soft calls from the nearby trees as if nothing was wrong.

Alec’s clothing would not reveal him for what he was. He’d left his uniform at the aerodrome in France, not wanting to risk his comrades if he were captured and interrogated. So as he made his way along the wheel-rutted path, he looked precisely like what he was: a man with a bandaged hand, limping slightly, bearing no ill will toward anyone.

He made it in less than two hours. Keeping to the tree line, he drew as near to the grounds as he dared. Had some observant onlooker seen him skulking about, he wouldn’t have had an excuse for his actions. He looked like a spy. He crouched low in a thicket of wild blueberry bushes and looked upon the future of air conflict.

The newly introduced Fokker Dr.I had three decks of wings, a triplane capable of flying at least a hundred and eighty miles without refueling. The craft possessed equal parts range and agility. Even the propeller was beautiful, eight and a half feet of layered walnut and birch, polished to a deep shine. Mounted in front of the pilot’s seat was a pair of 7.92-millimeter guns, synchronized to fire through the spinning prop. The plane was menacing and honorable and savage, like a waiting wolf.

And there were eleven of them.

“Son of a bitch.” Alec had seen photographs. He’d read the briefs. But only now did he understand why supremacy in the sky was being won by Germany and the Central Powers. In April alone, the Allies had lost two hundred and fifty aircraft compared to the Luftstreitkräfte’s casualties of a mere sixty-six.

As much as Alec would have loved to fly one of those stunning crates, his mission necessitated the two-seat reconnaissance plane parked between the Fokkers—the Rumpler C.IV. The name was not romantic, but that was Fritz for you; the Germans made every word sound like a fist hitting meat. With a wingspan of over forty feet but an overall length of less than thirty, the bird looked dreadfully front-heavy, but Alec knew otherwise. He’d studied enough German planes to know that the Rumpler’s water-cooled Mercedes engine could lift it to an elevation of over twenty thousand feet. It featured two machine guns, one facing forward and the other ring-mounted for the gunner in the back.

It also carried two hundred pounds of bombs.

Alec intended to steal it.