Late June brings Jersey its most perfect and heaven-sent days. The sky is a cloudless blue and the midsummer sunshine casts a warm syrupy glow over Havre des Pas.
Grace La Mottée floats on her back in the saltwater lido after work and listens to the splash of swimmers. High above her, birds perform swooping ellipses. She breathes in, drawing the cool sea air deep into her belly. Salt and vraic. The familiar smells and sounds of her island home. Grace needs the familiar, the routine right now.
It has been one week since the majority of the evacuees left the island. Over 6,500 of them. Over the course of several days they poured out of the harbor in a chaotic tidal wave of human traffic. The dull throb of the coal boat engines belching smoke over the sound of sobbing. And in their wake, an eerie silence has descended over the library. It’s not every librarian who can lose half their patrons almost overnight.
Grace and Arscott, St. Helier’s Chief Librarian, have done what they can to retrieve the books still out on loan and keep their remaining patrons happy.
“People will need books now more than ever,” Arscott, or “Ash” as she calls him, keeps saying. He’s right. People have already been gravitating toward the library, as if the graceful pink-granite building in the Royal Square could wrap her comforting arms around them and throw them the lifeline of books. And so the grand matriarch has remained—for Grace is sure the library is a she—dignified and graceful, with all her treasures locked safe inside.
Now Grace exists in a dreamlike space. Watching. Waiting. For what no one is quite sure. She adjusts her bathing-suit strap and waves away a fly.
A muffled thud shudders the water and reluctantly she lifts her head. Above the horseshoe-shaped wall of the lido, the sea and sky shimmer. A blur of black scratches the egg-shell blue.
The fly buzzes closer, too fast, too dark. The fly has a black cross on the underside of its wing.
“It’s Heinkels,” yells a voice. “They’re bombing the harbor.”
Grace treads water, her mind reeling. Sticks of bombs begin to fall from the undercarriage of the plane, sailing down gracefully, until they hit land and then plumes of thick gray smoke spiral up into the blue. She watches motionless as the swimmers run slithering and tripping from the lido, grabbing bathing towels and children’s hands. She sees their mouths, black empty maws, spilling words, but she can’t seem to hear. Then the noise rushes in, screams, blood hissing in her ears.
Safety. She must get to safety. Grace swims to the edge of the pool and leaps out dripping. She can’t find her towel. There’s no time. The German aircraft are turning, machine-gunning the streets. She begins to run barefoot, past shattered buildings and splintered flesh. The basketworks are on fire. Billowing smoke surrounds the Pomme d’Or Hotel. A woman runs from the ash cloud, the severed remains of her arm twitching. Grace slips on something fleshy. But she doesn’t dare to stop or breathe until she arrives at the library.
“Grace—”
“Ash—”
They speak as one.
She glances down, incongruously she is still wearing her bathing costume and yellow daisy swimming cap on the library steps. Her knee is bleeding. She doesn’t remember falling.
“Go home, get changed, then come back,” Ash orders. “We have work to do. They are coming.”
Her teeth are chattering from the shock. “W-what must we do?”
He is unlocking the library door now, his fingers trembling as he stabs the lock.
“They’ll come for the books whose authors they don’t approve of. We must hide them.”
It has never occurred to Grace that there would be books the Germans didn’t approve of. Later, much later, her naivety and innocence in this moment would be almost laughable, were it not for the horrors that were to unravel.
“Hurry, Grace. There’s no time to waste. The invasion has begun.”