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Rosalie sits in a corner of the little church with Oscar and André. She touches Oscar’s dirty hair and tries not to look down at the blood staining her clothes, but the knowledge of it sits with her, wells up as grief, makes tears prick behind her eyes again.
She licks a corner of her ratty handkerchief and tries to clean some of the filth off of Oscar’s ashen face.
She’s still pretty like this, she thinks distantly, fingers brushing over the hole in her uniform where the medal declaring her rank used to hang. Dashing, even, perhaps now more than ever. The type of person she wishes every noble was capable of being.
Things wouldn’t have had to come to this, then.
The church is filled with the dead, piled under and on the pews. Oscar’s corpse lies half on André’s to save space.
She can’t look at him; he looks the part already and it’s hard for her to reconcile it with the man she knew. The kind one, the sweet one, who warned her against her feelings for Oscar even as he struggled with his own, not wanting her to experience the same impossibility for the rest of her life.
A part of her wishes she could go back to that night, hold his hands a little tighter, and tell him that everything will work out. She can’t, of course. All she can do is sit here with him and try to think of better days: the many times she danced with him at a ball, the firelight reflected in his dark eyes during an etiquette lesson. The sound of his voice, his laugh, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes creasing with every smile.
All gone, now, thanks to an ill-placed bullet.
His dark hair is dusty, but even now, looking more than simply dead, he almost appears to be smiling.
Oscar only looks asleep, perhaps a little pained. Rosalie rubs at a splatter of blood on her cheek, wishes she’d listened when Bernard told her to flee the country—wishes she’d convinced her to go, to take André with her, to get out of there and never ever look back.
Never seeing her again would be better than saying goodbye.
“I knew I’d find you here,” a voice says. She looks up, sees Bernard standing beside her.
She bows her head a little, returns to her worthless work. “Yes.”
“You said they wanted to be buried together?”
“Because they’re husband and wife,” she says, nodding, and pauses to peer back up at him. “Like us.”
He holds his hat in his hands; she watches his fingers squeeze it too hard. “Like us,” he echoes.
He told her about André’s death the night before, about how he was blind and kept it from Oscar, about how she ran out into the street the moment she realized he was gone and begged to have her life taken, too.
He held her afterward, let her fall to pieces in his arms.
“Poor André,” she remembers having wailed, the sound muffled against her husband’s warm shoulder. “And poor Oscar.”
She can’t claim to know everything about them, but she knows enough. She knows their lives were spent together. She can’t imagine such a thing, herself, has no scope for comparison; she’s never known anyone more than twenty-five years. But to have that kind of closeness with another person, to know them so intimately, everything about them, and then lose it all in an instant—she imagines that is what anguish feels like.
Bernard stands with her in silence for a little while, lets her clean Oscar’s face even though they both know it doesn’t matter. It’s something to do; it’s something for him to watch. It’s a way to process the grief and everything else.
“We can’t send her body to her parents,” Bernard says.
Rosalie’s voice catches in her throat, makes her words weak. “I know. They won’t accept it, anyway.”
“Alain said she threw away her connection to them—her title, too.”
She wishes she had been there to see such a splendid thing—wishes it hadn’t ended like this, with two of her favorite people dead. People who shaped the course of her life, who changed her as a person, who were kind to her even when they didn’t have to be.
She blinks back tears. “Between them, they had a little money.”
“You went through their pockets?”
“Yes,” she says, stopping to dig in her own for the coins. She holds them out, watches Bernard take them from her. “Is it enough to give them a proper burial?”
“Yes,” he says softly. “A quick one, even.”
That’s what’s most important in this heat, she knows. She nods, strokes back Oscar’s hair like comfort is something she can still feel.
“Do you know if they might have a preference for burial?” Bernard asks as she straightens Oscar’s bloody uniform. “A place?”
“No,” she says. It’s not something they ever planned for; she certainly would have never thought to ask; she was so certain until this morning that Oscar would live another thirty years—perhaps more. “But André is from Arras. I think his mother is buried there.”
“It’s quite a distance,” he says, but when she turns pleading eyes up to his, he crumples his hat a little more in his hands. “We’ll get a wagon today. Should I invite Alain?”
Another pair of hands digging would be good, she thinks. And he was there for both of their deaths. That must mean something. “Yes, ask if he’d like to come with us.”
He touches a hand to her head, pulls her against the side of his leg, strokes her hair for a long moment. “I’d best see to it, then,” he says.
She wants to cry. “I’ll wait here,” she manages, pressing herself closer for just a moment.
But then he needs to pull away and does, and after she hears his footsteps clear the front of the church, she lets her tears fall.
She spends the long trip in the wagon with Oscar and André’s wrapped corpses trying not to cry and failing.
“Stop doing that,” Alain says every now and then, like he’s afraid it’s going to make him cry, too. His arm and shoulder are carefully bandaged and in a sling. He shouldn’t be here; he shouldn’t be lifting anything, not even a shovel.
But maybe he wants to see them buried. Maybe he needs to.
They’re at the cemetery, standing in front of the place they’ve been told should be their grave, when he speaks again, softly, like it’s a secret:
“They were my friends.”
She doesn’t miss the way he blinks rapidly, like he’s hoping to keep his own emotions at bay, but chooses not to comment on it. She just squeezes Bernard’s hand tight, looking for some kind of strength or courage with which to say the right thing.
“Mine, too,” she says, and tears are at the brink immediately. She closes her eyes a moment, feels them fall, turns to press her face into her husband’s shoulder again. “They were both so kind to me.”
But she can’t go on—can’t find the words, can’t speak the memories aloud. They’re too raw, yet, too painful.
“They took her in after her mother died,” Bernard explains. The grove is quiet but for his voice, a gentle wind, a small creek winding through the valley nearby. “Well, Oscar and her family did. André was her partner for learning dancing and etiquette and such.”
“Was that before or after he lost his eye?” Alain asks.
“Before,” Bernard says.
“I wish I had known them, then.”
Bernard doesn’t tell him that he’s the one who blinded André. He just nods, puts out his hand, touches it to Alain’s good arm for a moment. “Me, too.”
“Well,” Alain says with a sigh, grabbing a shovel from the back of the wagon, “graves don’t dig themselves.”
Rosalie watches the men dig for a while, kneels by the grave beside theirs, touches the crooked cross that marks it and the name carved into it—largely unreadable, now, but for a few letters of the last name: Grandier.
She wonders what André’s mother might have been like, how she may have influenced the man he ended up becoming—and hopes her own mother influenced her, too, and that people can see that in her.
When Alain starts to struggle, she takes the shovel from him.
“Feels wrong to let a woman do it,” he says.
An expecting woman, even, she doesn’t say. She just takes the shovel from him, shoos him off to the side to rest in the shade. The spade almost feels good under her thin soles. The cut of the blade into the earth, the effort it takes to lift it.
She needs this; she knows it instantly. She needs to make a place for Oscar and André the same way they made a place for her: with work and with care.
Maybe Bernard understands it—or at least the grief that sits inside her like the tide, right now, rising up onto the shoreline and falling out of her eyes as tears. It helps, it helps.
She thinks about Oscar’s dance with the queen, about André busting into the Palais Royale to save the two of them. Her elegant hand showing her how to hold a blade; his correcting her posture.
Each stab into the earth is another memory considered, each shovelful of soil dumped in the grass a goodbye.
She hardly notices the tears rolling down her face, the dirt as it cakes on her hem, the white of her knuckles as she grips the handle. She’s too busy thinking of them: their help in finding the name of her birth mother, the way he teased Oscar and was the only one who could do so, her laughter, loud and from the belly like she didn’t care what anyone thought of it or her.
She remembers André’s voice the night he admitted his love for Oscar, his compassion for her feelings—his understanding. The lack of judgment in his face and in his heart. Just the hope that she wouldn’t suffer from it needlessly, the admission that it was the path he chose for himself—that he knew would hurt and chose anyway, because he loved her so much.
She thinks of Oscar, desperate to help her, saying she would marry her if she were a man. The kindness of that statement bloomed in her heart like a rose, petals unfurling softly. She knows, now, that it was meant with love—not the kind she wanted, at the time, but love nonetheless. Only a friend who truly loved her would say something like that, would know it would bring her comfort.
She can feel herself sweating, beads of it rolling down her temple, her back.
Alain steps in again, tries to take the shovel from her. “I can do it for a while,” he offers.
“No!” she says sharply, hands suddenly shaking.
He looks taken aback.
“No,” she says again, calmer. “I—this—it’s something I have to do. It’s all there is.”
And maybe he understands the plea in her voice, because he backs away again, shoots a glance to Bernard, sits in the grass nearby to watch her continue her work.
Bernard knows not to talk; he lets her have this—her grief, her process, whatever this is. She presses down hard on the spade, feels it cut through the earth, hefts it up again.
Six feet deep takes a while, and it has to be wide enough for both of them. It’s still better than digging two graves, though. She stops to gulp down some water when Alain brings it, but otherwise can’t make herself give up the shovel or her place inside the place that will become their grave.
Alain wanders off, comes back two hours later with a basket full of sad little wildflowers.
Just the sight of them sets her tears off again. She imagines them covering the bottom of the grave: the bed Oscar will share with André for all of eternity.
It makes her wonder how the family is doing: if Oscar’s stoic father shed any tears, if he’s even heard the news, yet. Surely they have by now. Oh, and Nanny! Poor Nanny, losing both of them at once. Three more people who treated a stranger with incredible kindness.
Rosalie thinks of the fresh-cut flowers in Oscar’s rooms, the courtyard with its splendid fountain, the brilliant shine of Oscar’s beautiful hair in the sunlight. She has to stop to breathe, but the memories fall around her like raindrops: André chewing thoughtfully on his lip as he writes, the idle bounce of Oscar’s leg as she watches him; carriage rides together, both of them talking at the same time; the quiet morning she made her way outside and saw the two of them just quietly existing together, sitting by the fountain without needing to utter a single word.
She had been jealous of that, then—whatever it was.
She thinks she knows, now.
When the grave is finished, Alain hands the basket down to her. She scatters the pretty little flowers, quite wilted from the heat by now, in the tamped down soil. There are just enough of them to cover it. For some stupid reason, she’s relieved by that; it feels like a proper resting place now.
She passes the basket back up to Alain and accepts Bernard’s help in climbing back out again.
“I can’t believe they were married,” Alain says as he moves to help Bernard back the wagon up closer.
“I don’t know for how long,” Rosalie admits when he jumps down, “but you were there, too: you heard it as well as I did.”
“Sure,” he says, “because we are husband and wife.”
“I’m glad,” Rosalie tells him, swallowing hard. “I’m glad she had that, and I’m glad it was with André.” The one person she knows for a fact loved her with everything he had; the only one who understood her completely; the only one she let get close enough.
It’s almost funny now, to think back on all the times the two of them communicated without saying much—or anything at all. She ought to have noticed it years ago, but she had been lost in her own troubles, then. She wonders if she’ll regret that for the rest of her life.
“I’ve known them a long time,” she says to Alain. “A part of me wonders if they weren’t married in some way that entire time.”
Alain looks like he wants to argue with her but doesn’t. He just bows his head, fingers fiddling with his shirt. “You might be right,” he says.
She doesn’t mean literally, of course, but spiritually. That they let her step into their world and spend time with them for a while—it feels like a dream. Fantastical. The memory of André dancing with her, his hands placed so carefully, twirls through her mind and out of sight again; she can almost hear the music.
Bernard comes to stand in front of her, tips her chin up, pushes back her sweaty hair. She must look at least as dirty as he does, his hands just as blistered as hers feel.
It makes her think of Oscar again, when she fell back into her life after a while apart—how she’d claimed that she was blessed to eat food made by Rosalie’s hands because she’d chapped them working for a living.
It makes her chest grow tight.
Bernard doesn’t smile at her; he just speaks—quietly. “We have to lay them to rest, now,” he says. “I think you should cover your ears, at least.”
She doesn’t argue. She just nods, knowing already that she won’t be able to stand the sound of it. “Let me say goodbye first,” she whispers.
He pulls her head against his chest for a moment, as if to give her the fortitude with which to do it.
Their bodies look worse, now, after another day. André, especially, looks ghastly. But it’s still them—her dear old friends who treated her with love and kindness and showed her a life she never would have known otherwise.
She brushes André’s dark hair back tenderly, touches his lifeless cheek. Does the same to Oscar, her fingertips lingering a moment longer. This is adieu, but she can’t make her mouth form the word. She just feels it, tries to make sure they feel it, too.
She steps back, and Bernard and Alain take André first.
It’s not something she can watch; just the thought turns her stomach. She looks away, covers her ears, doesn’t see them drop his body into the hole—and doesn’t hear it, either. They take Oscar next.
A foolish little part of her wants to beg them not to, wants to plead with them—but for what she doesn’t know. Oscar is already dead, shot so many times she only knows the one to her abdomen killed her because she was there to see the blood soaking her breeches, to watch her fade away.
She seals her hands over her ears until she knows Oscar’s in the hole, too—in her final resting place. With André.
She hurries over to the edge, but both Bernard and Alain stop her, arms out, preventing her from getting close enough to see.
“Trust me,” Alain says, “you don’t want to look.”
It’s hard to accept, but the pain on his face tells her he’s right. Whatever it looks like in there, it’s better for her not to know. She imagines they’re in there neatly, side by side or else holding onto one another, surrounded by what looks to be all the wildflowers in Arras.
Bernard says a little prayer over the grave. She bows her head, closes her eyes, listens to the words.
She feels the grief washing up onto the shore again, but he calls them les citoyens Grandier and the feeling eases, falls back out to sea.
She lets the men cover them with dirt for a while, unwilling to look into the grave and unable to bear the thought of covering her friends’ faces anyway. But when Alain looks like he might drop, she gets to her feet, comes over, takes the spade from him.
There’s enough dirt inside already to cover them at least, so she can’t see their faces anymore.
“Thanks,” he says, sounding choked up.
“Rest,” she says, “and drink something. You too.” She nudges Bernard.
They both leave to get water and she works at making the mound of dirt in the grass smaller. Alain drops to the ground when they return, in the shade beside the wagon.
Bernard comes to join her.
They work together in companionable silence for a long time, until the dirt is heaped up over the grave. “I’m sorry,” he says, then, and walks over it to push the dirt down.
She’s not sure who the apology is for, though—her or the people in the grave below him.
“They should have had caskets,” Alain says.
Rosalie just nods. One couldn’t be bought for love or money with all the dead piled up, but she doesn’t think Oscar and André will mind.
He helps Bernard grab the cross out of the back of the wagon. He spent most of the journey trying to carve their names into it and hadn’t been able to fit both of their full names, anyway.
It just says: O & A Grandier instead.
It’s good enough, she imagines; at least it’s something to mark their resting place, to show that they lived and died.
It stands straight once it’s in the ground, like it’s guarding the site—watching over them.
Years pass before Rosalie sees the grave again. Bernard stays with François in the carriage. They’re just driving through Arras, and she only wants to stay for a few minutes.
It looks happier than she remembers. The grass has grown over the turned soil and flowers have sprung up, too, even clinging to the cross that looks as straight and tall as the day Bernard and Alain put it in the ground. Dappled sunlight falls through the tree branches that hang overhead, and birdsong fills the air.
It’s peaceful, here.
She stands by the cross and reads the fading inscription, half covered by the climbing flowers, before she lets her hand rest on the top of it for a moment.
She’s thought many times of Oscar and André since laying them to rest. Bernard was even kind enough to let her name their son after Oscar, in some small way.
But she doesn’t often like to think of this place. It reminds her of the freshly-turned dirt, the feel of their hair through her fingers, the warped sound of the world with her hands covering her ears.
The memory of Arras was more of their death than anything resembling peace.
She’s relieved to find that’s no longer the case.
She takes in a deep breath, listens to the birds singing, enjoys the space between the sun and shade. It feels right for them, this place.
A part of her wants to stay an hour or two, talk to Oscar and André like they’re sitting in Oscar’s parlor again at the table, drinking tea while André spills the latest gossip he’s heard and Oscar hides her smile behind a hand.
But they’re long dead, now, and she can relive those memories whenever she wants; she doesn’t need to pretend, here.
She just needs to say goodbye.
It’s easy, this time, in a way it wasn’t before. She’s had time to see the wounds heal, she supposes, or maybe just accept what happened.
She touches their initials on the cross, one after the other, and then, running her fingers over Grandier, she whispers, “Adieu.”
François is asleep when she returns to the carriage. Bernard steps out to meet her. “You can stay longer if you like,” he says. “I know what it means to you.”
What they meant to her, he doesn’t say—but she hears it in the gentleness of his voice anyway, and gives him a smile. “I said what I needed to,” she tells him.
He offers her a hand up and she accepts, and then takes his arm when he picks up the reins, tells the horse to walk on.
“You’re all right?” he asks, keeps his voice quiet so as to not disturb François, who is sprawled out on the little backseat.
She reaches behind them for a moment to brush his hair out of his eyes, then takes her husband’s arm again. “Yes,” she says, quite decisively. “It’s a beautiful place, now. Seeing it—truly, I feel at peace.”
He pulls her arm closer, turns to press a kiss to her temple. “Good,” he says, “I’m glad.”
And she knows he means it, that her happiness is also his.
“Do you remember the flowers Alain brought?” she asks. “They’re growing on the grave, now, climbing up the cross. Of course, they can’t be the same ones we put inside—that would be impossible, so far down. But it’s nice to imagine, isn’t it?”
He smiles. “You never know,” he says. “More wonderful things have happened.”
She thinks of how she fell into Oscar’s life quite by accident, and was taken in anyway. The dresses, the music, the dancing. She thinks of André again, explaining the cutlery to her for the tenth time without sounding the least bit impatient, and Oscar, holding out her arm to act as her escort.
She thinks of their deaths—and how she happened to be there at the end of Oscar’s life to hear her last request, to watch her gaze at that white flag, to feel her spirit leave.
“That’s true,” she says, wrapping her arm all the way around him, pressing close. “And if that’s the case, I’m sure in another few years, all the wildflowers in Arras will be growing there.”
“We’ll have to come back then to see for ourselves,” he says, and switches the reins to his right hand to return her embrace.