The Night War by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Author:Kimberly Brubaker Bradley [Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-eight

“Not gardens,” I said. “Gardens are about growing things. They’re about life, and—and happiness.”

Madame Simone adjusted her skirts. “Formal gardens cost an enormous amount of money to create,” she said. “Diane’s garden in particular—building those high walls alongside the riverbank, filling them and leveling the dirt. It took five years of constant labor. Destroying it would have been foolish. But to build a second garden, a lovelier, costlier, more intimate and wonderful garden—to put it right beside Diane’s garden so that anyone with eyes could see Diane’s vision had been lacking by comparison—that showed who had more power. That showed who was truly the mistress of Chenonceau.”

Her eyes blazed with strange intensity. I smothered a grin. The Germans might think themselves in charge at Chenonceau, but Madame Simone would not have agreed.

“This is where I want you and your friends to work,” she said. “Right here. Diane’s garden can wait.”

“I thought you wanted us to work in the kitchen garden.”

She frowned. “No, of course not. You can do whatever you like in the kitchen garden, but the work I want you to do for me is here.”

I looked around. It would be an enormous job. She could call it intimate all she liked—it was a huge space, and weeds had flourished unchecked in it for two years. I could barely tell the far edge of the garden from the scrub forest bordering that side.

“I love this garden more than anything else in the world.” Madame Simone stood and walked a few steps. The castle glimmered behind and above her. “There should be a wide gravel path around the entire perimeter, with narrow cultivated beds on either side. White gravel, neatly raked. Smaller paths like spokes on a wheel leading to the fountain. Each bed carefully planted with the finest rare specimen flowers. All the open space beautifully tended lawn.”

I started to be able to see the garden through her eyes, how it used to be—alive, flowering, beautiful. “On the far side,” I said, “we could plant hydrangea bushes against the edge of the woods. In the summer they’d be covered with blooms.” Like my garden in Berlin, my secret spot beneath the white flowers.

Madame Simone pursed her lips. “I’ve never heard of those. But bushes? I don’t want bushes. I want elegant. A garden for royals, not commoners.”

I supposed that made me common. “Can we plant geraniums?” I asked.

“What are geraniums?”

“Round flowers made up of bunches of smaller blossoms,” I said.

“Like alliums?”

“I don’t know.” I’d never heard of alliums. “We had a geranium at home, bright red, only it smashed when the soldiers—” That sound, and the pot exploding. I had to stop and blink back tears.

“We can discuss the flowers later,” Madame Simone said. “Roses, lilies. I used to have orange trees.”

We’d never find orange trees, not during a war. “It’s a lot of work,” I said.

“What else have you to do?”

Find Nora. Escape to Zurich.

I dropped my head, suddenly overwhelmed. Find my parents. Monsieur and Madame Rosenbaum. Atone for all I’d done wrong.

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