Free God Speed the Night by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Jerome Ross Page A

which a woman’s hair is cut off at the time of her marriage.”
    Gabrielle wished he would not talk, not knowing how to answer him and unsure as well to what extent it was a violation of her rule to speak at all. The rule of silence prevailed within the convent from final meditation until after breakfast.
    “She was very proud of her hair,” Marc said.
    “So was I once,” Gabrielle said.
    He did not answer, knowing perhaps, she thought, she should not have spoken that way. He seemed a wise man in the way he said things, different from such men as she remembered…except the cure in the village where she had grown up. She tried to stem the memory, but it came welling up: he had been her guide and counsel until one day, sitting opposite her in the cold little office off the abbey sacristy, he had got up and come to her, and lifting her chin with his forefinger, frowning until she was terrified of him, he had bent down and kissed her on the mouth. She reached now for the crucifix, forgetting it was no longer at her waist.
    Marc folded the handkerchief over Rachel’s hair and put it away in the side pocket of the valise. He set the valise on the floor and said, “You had better lie down here and rest even if you cannot sleep. I’ll stretch out on the table. I would leave you alone if I could, but I must stay until a friend comes.” He glanced at her. She was pale and immobile like a waxen doll. “Do you understand?”
    She nodded. She did understand to some extent.
    He came to the table. “If we put out the candle we can have some air in here. We can open the door.” He gestured her toward the bed, and taking off his coat he carefully folded it and put it at one end of the table to serve him as a pillow. “There is no blanket, but the flour sacks will cover you.”
    “I would rather stay here, monsieur.”
    Marc shrugged and took his coat away. Glancing down, he saw Rachel’s shoes on the floor beneath the table. “Don’t the shoes fit you?”
    Gabrielle looked down at them, not knowing what to say because she did not want to offend him. “They have silver buckles,” she said.
    To which he took offense anyway, or chose the biting retort to vent his diffuse anger. “There was a silver figure also on the cross my wife wore going out of here tonight, Sister.”
    Gabrielle bent down silently and put the shoes on her feet again.

9
    M OISSAC WAS ON THE verge of sleep when the telephone rang. He had been several times only to come fully awake again tormented by the recollection of one and then another of the day’s humiliations. He ran to the phone so that it would not waken Maman.
    It was the night man at the desk of the prefecture. A woman identifying herself as a nun from Ste. Geneviève’s had phoned the hospital for an ambulance and the hospital had phoned the prefecture.
    “So?” Moissac said.
    “She phoned from Place de Gare, mon préfet , a public kiosk. It would seem she tried to take another nun to the hospital in a camionnette .”
    “So?” Moissac snapped again.
    “It is thought it might be a Maquis trap—to hijack the ambulance.”
    “It is thought by whom?”
    “By me, mon préfet .” The answer was almost inaudible.
    “It would be easier to hijack an elephant. Order the ambulance to proceed and I shall go there myself.”
    Moissac, having to dress, arrived at the moment they were lifting the stricken woman into the ambulance. He shone his torch about trying to be useful. The sick one was very young and a novice. He asked the older nun if there was any way in which he could be of assistance.
    “The camionnette , monsieur, we must not lose the camionnette. ”
    He promised to have one of his men pick it up.
    The ambulance driver said, “ Monsieur le Préfet , we are going to need Doctor Lauzin.”
    “I’ll bring him at once.”
    “That will be the day,” the driver said and closed the ambulance door. Lauzin was the only really competent surgeon in St. Hilaire, and therefore the most