“That’s it, then, Madame Humbert,” he said. “We are out of petrol.”
Patricia looked like a landed fish. “What?”
“I stopped at every chance along the way. You know I did. We have no more petrol and there’s none to be had.”
“But … well … what are we to do?”
“We’ll find a place to stay. Perhaps I can convince my brother to come fetch us.” Humbert opened his automobile door, being careful not to hit anyone ambling past, and stepped out onto the dusty, dirt road. “See. There. Étampes is not far ahead. We’ll get a room and a meal and it will all look better in the morning.”
Isabelle sat upright. Surely she had fallen asleep and missed something. Were they going to simply abandon the automobile? “You think we can walk to Tours?”
Patricia turned around in her seat. She looked as drained and hot as Isabelle felt. “Perhaps one of your books can help you. Certainly they were a smarter choice than bread or water. Come, girls. Out of the automobile.”
Isabelle reached down for the valise at her feet. It was wedged in tightly and required some effort to extricate. With a growl of determination, she finally yanked it free and opened the car door and stepped out.
She was immediately surrounded by people, pushed and shoved and cursed at.
Someone tried to yank her suitcase out of her grasp. She fought for it, hung on. As she clutched it to her body, a woman walked past her, pushing a bicycle laden with possessions. The woman stared at Isabelle hopelessly, her dark eyes revealing exhaustion.
Someone else bumped into Isabelle; she stumbled forward and almost fell. Only the thicket of bodies in front of her saved her from going to her knees in the dust and dirt. She heard the person beside her apologize, and Isabelle was about to respond when she remembered the Humberts.
She shoved her way around to the other side of the car, crying out, “M’sieur Humbert!”
There was no answer, just the ceaseless pounding of feet on the road.
She called out Patricia’s name, but her cry was lost in the thud of so many feet, so many tires crunching on the dirt. People bumped her, pushed past her. If she fell to her knees, she’d be trampled and die here, alone in the throng of her countrymen.
Clutching the smooth leather handle of her valise, she joined the march toward Étampes.
She was still walking hours later when night fell. Her feet ached; a blister burned with every step. Hunger walked beside her, poking her insistently with its sharp little elbow, but what could she do about it? She’d packed for a visit with her sister, not an endless exodus. She had her favorite copy of Madame Bovary and the book everyone was reading—Autant en emporte le vent—and some clothes; no food or water. She’d expected that this whole journey would last a few hours. Certainly not that she would be walking to Carriveau.
At the top of a small rise, she came to a stop. Moonlight revealed thousands of people walking beside her, in front of her, behind her; jostling her, bumping into her, shoving her forward until she had no choice but to stumble along with them. Hundreds more had chosen this hillside as a resting place. Women and children were camped along the side of the road, in fields and gutters and gullies.
The dirt road was littered with broken-down automobiles and belongings; forgotten, discarded, stepped on, too heavy to carry. Women and children lay entangled in the grass or beneath trees or alongside ditches, asleep, their arms coiled around each other.
Isabelle came to an exhausted halt on the outskirts of Étampes. The crowd spilled out in front of her, stumbling onto the road to town.
And she knew.
There would be nowhere to stay in Étampes and nothing to eat. The refugees who had arrived before her would have moved through the town like locusts, buying every foodstuff on the shelves. There wouldn’t be a room available. Her money would do her no good.
So what should she do?
Head southwest, toward Tours and Carriveau. What else? As a girl, she’d studied maps of this region in her quest to return to Paris. She knew this landscape, if only she could think.
She peeled away from the crowd headed toward the collection of moonlit gray stone buildings in the distance and picked her way carefully through the valley. All around her people were seated in the grass or sleeping beneath blankets. She could hear them moving, whispering. Hundreds of them. Thousands. On the far side of the field, she found a trail that ran south along a low stone wall. Turning onto it, she found herself alone. She paused, letting the feel of that settle through her, calm her. Then she began walking again. After a mile or so the trail led her into a copse of spindly trees.
She was deep in the woods—trying not to focus on the pain in her toe, the ache in her stomach, the dryness in her throat—when she smelled smoke.
And roasting meat. Hunger stripped her resolve and made her careless. She saw the orange glow of the fire and moved toward it. At the last minute, she realized her danger and stopped. A twig snapped beneath her foot.
“You may as well come over,” said a male voice. “You move like an elephant through the woods.”
Isabelle froze. She knew she’d been stupid. There could be danger here for a girl alone.
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
That was certainly true. He could have come upon her in the dark and slit her throat. She’d been paying attention to nothing except the gnawing in her empty stomach and the aroma of roasting meat.