1914
CHAPTER FIVE
Jean-Baptiste, France,
April 1914
IT HAD ALL GONE WRONG because Godet the blacksmith’s reactions were too slow. The old man had no right to still be working; he was getting on and had a limp from an injury back in his youth. Jean-Baptiste’s role in the forge was to provide the strength that Bernard Godet, although remarkable for a man in his sixties, now lacked.
Godet had a flesh-and-blood nephew, but the man had married a mill-owner’s daughter from Amiens and thought himself above the life of a village blacksmith. The mill-owner had built the couple a good-sized farmhouse on rich land near the river on the far bank from Corbie, to make the point that young Monsieur Armand Godet had moved onward and upward. The nephew showed no great skill at farming, Godet had added, and had even been attacked by his own pigs, but no doubt it passed the day.
Godet dealt with the customers, kept the books, chose the metal, kept the fire heated to exactly the right temperature. Jean-Baptiste started by fetching and carrying and holding the horses’ heads, then progressed to operating the bellows. What he’d thought would be easy work, just a matter of pumping, turned out to be a matter of skill: a judgment that had taken Godet half a century of gauging the relationship between fire and iron to perfect. It seemed as if Godet could smell temperature. When they visited farms, Godet drove the cart but Jean-Baptiste did the loading and unloading. They went to the nephew’s once. Over the front door was set a carved stone, with the couple’s initials entwined and the date of their marriage. Bright windowboxes of red flowers made the whole building look like a child’s picture. As soon as the cart stopped, Jean-Baptiste thought it looked all wrong. It was the tidiest farm he’d ever known.
Godet was watching him. “You’re wondering: where’s the shit,” he said. And shook his head as if in the presence of a great folly.
Madame Godet waved at them from the front step, her dark hem bouncing on cream buttoned boots. Her hair was a pile of yellow curls and her blouse a froth of white that was tight to the wrist and rose to her chin, but was somehow still insubstantial. She was unlike any farmer’s wife Jean-Baptiste had ever seen.
“Uncle,” she said, and looked surprised. “Armand’s in Amiens with Papa. He never said that you were coming. I thought you were Doctor Vignon. My chest is not good. Not good at all.” She massaged the relevant area, gave a musical cough. Looked beyond them, back up the lane.
They left two heavy blades for the plow. “Good as new,” Godet said, but she was scarcely listening and didn’t invite them in.
Godet was not above grabbing the bigger hammer when a lady came by, although this was uncommon enough not to threaten his health, but mostly it was Jean-Baptiste who battered the glowing pig iron into submission. Godet told him the best metal came from the east. “Lorraine,” he said, and spat on the floor. “Don’t know what they are: French or Germans, nor which side they’re on from one day to the next, but their iron is rightly French iron, dug from French soil.”
Despite the talk of newly mined iron, most of the metal Jean-Baptiste used was simply melted-down worn horseshoes, broken farm implements, hoops from rotten barrels. Some odd bits and pieces arrived by night, were exchanged for a few francs and then stored in the lean-to shed at the back. When he asked Godet where they came from, Godet just winked. He had never been much of a talker, Godet, not with human beings, anyway, though he muttered gently at the horses. Occasionally he would embark on a single story and then, as if he’d used up some ration of words, not speak for two weeks.
The one time Jean-Baptiste peered into the lean-to while Godet was relieving himself, it seemed to be mostly railings and some pipes. There was a cross like on a wayside shrine and a small iron gate which, if he hadn’t heard Godet returning from the privy, he would have looked at more closely to confirm that it was the de Potiers coat of arms. Doctor Vignon had once explained the crest, which was engraved on the gates to the chateau, the church, the school, and even, strangely, the abattoir. It was a creature with two faces looking in opposite directions and was called a sphinx; this denoted the fact that Monsieur de Potiers’s great-grandfather had gained his rank and estate by serving Napoleon Bonaparte in the Armée d’Orient in Egypt and, it was generally believed, saving his life.
“Why does it face both ways?” Jean-Baptiste had asked.
He was rowing at the time, and it was only when he glanced up that he saw Vignon looked amused as he answered. “Perhaps Colonel Clovis de Potiers needed eyes in the back of his head? The sphinx was said to be exceedingly clever but treacherous. Perhaps, even in his moment of triumph, the colonel needed to be alert to betrayal?”