CHAPTER ONE
Jean-Baptiste Mallet, Corbie, France, July 1913
SOME DAY HE WOULD STEAL a boat and row all the way to the sea. He sat on the bank of the river, where willows trailed on the surface of the water and where carp sometimes basked—a flash of silver just under the surface—and he threw a stone into the tiny scum of broken leaves and twigs caught in the river’s slow bend. In high summer, everything here was green—the water, the trees, the bright duckweed—and the smell: the beginning of slightly rotten vegetation, the deep smell of mud and fat eels who lived on flesh, and everything mad with growing. He liked the river here where it broadened, like a man describing the hips of a shapely woman with his hands, and, where the small island was left in the middle, dense with trees.
In the rushes was the boat. It was a small, tidy boat, well kept and covered with a canvas tarpaulin, held down by rocks in case of rain. Inside lay two new oars, and fishing tackle was stowed under the seat. It was called Sans Souci and belonged to Vignon, the doctor. When the roads were bad, Vignon sometimes rowed out to patients; but mostly he used the boat to fish. There was never such a man for fishing, Jean-Baptiste’s mother said. There was never such a man for Madame de Potiers, either, Jean-Baptiste thought. He had watched the doctor’s astonishingly hairy backside moving energetically between Madame de Potiers’s white knees and spread skirts, forcing himself down repeatedly as if he was driving in a wedge to split a log, roaring as he went. It was always on Thursdays, Vignon’s day off, that the boat would be moored on the far side of the island. Jean-Baptiste had started by swimming across in curiosity to watch the doctor’s fishing. The doctor did fish, afterward, as he could always be seen with two or three pike, singing (in Italian, some said) as he walked back to his house. He sang only on Thursdays—and sometimes on Sundays in church, of course. Perhaps he is singing a song about fish, the women said, as Vignon returned, his trouser knees stained green, to the neat red-brick house with its railings and its pear trees on the edge of town.
It was Vignon’s boat that Jean-Baptiste planned to row to the sea. Meanwhile he exercised to strengthen his arms and chest. His mother thought he was doing it to join the Army and sometimes felt the muscle of his upper arms approvingly as she passed behind him while he was chopping kindling. A strong son made a widow’s life easier. She dreamed that Jean-Baptiste would march away a cuirassier and return a moustachioed sergeant like the picture that had hung in her bedroom all Jean-Baptiste’s life. It was more likely that when he turned twenty, he’d be pitched off for three dreary years on the eastern borders with Germany and live on weevils in the rain. That’s where most of the conscripted Corbie boys went. They came back with moustaches and harder faces, and they spoke of women. But he and his mother both knew that he was lucky to have been offered a position in the forge of the widower Godet, the blacksmith. Their busybody of a neighbor, Madame Laporte, whose son Lucien’s early career had reached its highest point when he was the school bully, had also told anyone who wanted to listen that Jean-Baptiste was lucky to have a handsome mother, and smirked. Lucien was a lumpy, pale boy who now passed his time drawing obscene pictures on walls around town and, rumor had it, was responsible for the number of dead cats and hens that were found, mutilated, on people’s doorsteps. Now it was Lucien who was off to be a soldier, which seemed to offer him undreamed-of opportunities to pursue his hobbies.
“Good riddance,” Jean-Baptiste’s mother had said. “The boy’s funny in the head. In a bad way.”
Jean-Baptiste offered to take Dr. Vignon on his riverside rounds, hoping that he could learn to row better. Vignon was no great rower and seemed relieved. Once he was sure that the boy could master the currents and use the oars without splashing them both with water, Vignon relaxed and usually sat back and smoked. After a few weeks, Jean-Baptiste couldn’t resist asking whether the doctor would like him to row him to the island on Thursdays for the fishing. Vignon’s eyes narrowed. He drew hard on his cigarette. “How old are you now?”
“Fifteen.”
“You need to see more of the world,” Vignon had said, and his gaze never left Jean-Baptiste’s face. “There’s more to life than Corbie.”
Jean-Baptiste had come to like, even admire, the doctor with his singing, his sweet-smelling tobacco, his neat, glistening black beard, his hairy arse, and his possession of Madame de Potiers’s perfect, aristocratic thighs, even if he was from Paris; but he couldn’t tell the doctor, of course, of his plans to do just that—to see the world by stealing the doctor’s boat. But he had made his plans. The river’s history was as long as the world’s, and it could be relied upon to bear him north but no more: it had its own loyalties. When the curé had been a boy, two Englishmen had found mammoth bones and a huge flint axe in the river bank near Amiens, and they had tried to claim that these monsters and these fighting axe-men had been here before anyone thought God created the earth. Then they had been taught at school that the Duke of Normandy had invaded the English from the harbor at St. Valéry, and the river had played its part, first in beating the English at Crécy but then helping them win at Agincourt. It had let the Spanish advance into Corbie, but seen them beaten off by forty thousand men sent by Louis the Just.