Cradle to the Grave

Chapter 1 —

Isabelle Pov.

The last letter Fleur sent me arrived on a Tuesday.

I know it was a Tuesday because I had flour on my hands when the postman knocked — I remember brushing it against my apron and leaving two white handprints on the fabric, thinking I would wash it before she arrived.

Fleur was supposed to arrive on the Friday.

The letter said she would be late.

The letter said not to worry.

That was three weeks ago.

I have since stopped making bread.

France in October 1918 smelled like two things: mud and burning. The mud was the war — four years of it soaked into the earth, into the roads, into the walls of every village between Paris and the front.

The burning was newer.

The burning was the plague.

They called it the Spanish Flu in the newspapers, which was the first lie. It had not come from Spain.

It had come from everywhere at once, or that was how it seemed — one week the papers were reporting isolated cases in port cities and the next week the isolated cases were your neighbor, your baker, the woman who sat three pews ahead of you at Sunday mass.

The newspapers stopped calling it isolated after that.

The newspapers stopped saying much at all about it after a while, because the men who ran the newspapers had other concerns, and because the truth of what the flu was doing to France was the kind of truth that could end a war effort simply by being spoken aloud.

I knew what it was doing to France.

I had watched it take Madame Colette from the house at the end of our lane in four days flat — strong woman, healthy woman, the kind of woman who carried her own coal — and I had watched the burning start when nobody knew what else to do with what was left of her.

I knew what the flu could do.

What I did not know, standing in my kitchen on a Tuesday with flour on my hands, was what it had already done to my sister.

I left on a Wednesday.

I did not tell anyone where I was going because there was no one left in the village worth telling.

Our parents had been gone six years — Father first, then Mother eighteen months after, as if she had simply decided she was finished once he was.

The neighbors had their own concerns.

The war had taken most of the men and the flu was working through what remained with a quiet efficiency that I found, in my worst moments, almost administrative.

I packed one bag. I took the letter.

I took the small knife from the kitchen drawer that had been Father’s, the one he used for everything from cutting bread to fixing fence posts, the one that still had the particular heft of something that had been held ten thousand times by hands that loved it.

I took fifty francs from the tin behind the loose brick in the fireplace.

I did not take the bread I had not finished making.

I left it on the counter. I did not look at it on my way out.

The road north was empty in the way that roads in dying countries are empty — not peacefully, not the emptiness of early morning or of a Sunday, but the emptiness of subtraction. Of things removed. The carts were gone.

The horses were gone.

The young men walking to market were gone.

What remained was the road itself, the mud of it, the particular grey of the sky above it, and me moving through it with one bag and fifty francs and the absolute certainty that my sister was still alive.

I could not have explained the certainty.

It was not logical.

Three weeks without word from Fleur was not nothing — Fleur wrote twice a week without fail, had done since she moved to the city two years ago, cheerful letters full of small observations about her neighbors and the price of coffee and the particular way the light fell on the Seine on clear mornings.

Three weeks of silence was not Fleur being late.

Three weeks of silence was something else.

But she was alive.

I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat — not by thinking about it, just by the fact of it, constant and unargued.

I walked north.

The first village I passed through was Véry-sur-Marne, or what remained of it.

I had passed through Véry-sur-Marne twice before the war, on trips to visit Father’s cousin in Épernay — a pretty village, I remembered, with a good well in the square and a bakery that made the kind of brioche that justified the detour.

The bakery was gone.

The well was still there but the square around it had a quality that made me walk faster without quite deciding to. Something about the silence.

Something about the way the shutters on three of the houses were not quite closed — not open, not shut, the particular angle of something interrupted.

I did not stop in Véry-sur-Marne.

I stopped half a kilometre past it, on a bend in the road where an oak tree had grown at an angle over the verge for what looked like a hundred years, and I stopped because there were rats.

Not many — a dozen, perhaps fifteen — sitting in the road in a loose cluster, not moving. Not foraging, not fleeing, not doing any of the things rats did in roads. Simply sitting. Watching, if rats could be said to watch.

Their attention had a direction and the direction was me.

I stood very still.

They sat very still.

I took one step to the right, toward the verge. As one body, slowly, they shifted. Still watching. Still not moving.

I told myself this was the plague.

I told myself the plague had done strange things to animals — I had heard stories, everyone had heard stories, cats gone strange and dogs disappearing from villages overnight.

I told myself the rats near Véry-sur-Marne were simply plague-addled, simply confused, simply doing what confused things did which was fixate on the nearest moving object.

I told myself this and I believed most of it and I walked on.

The rats did not follow me.

But for the next two kilometres, at intervals I could not quite predict, I would hear them in the verge alongside the road — the particular rustle of small bodies moving through dead grass — keeping pace.

I did not look.

I walked north, toward Fleur, toward the city, toward whatever had happened to my sister in the three weeks since she had sent a letter telling me not to worry.

The sky above me was the grey of November coming early.

The road ahead was empty in the way that meant something rather than nothing.

My bag was light enough and my fifty francs were folded against my ribs and Father’s knife was in my coat pocket where my hand could find it without looking.

Somewhere behind me, in the village I had not stopped in, a shutter moved.

The sound of it carried in the still air — wood against stone, a small complaint, nothing more. I did not turn around.

There was nothing behind me in Véry-sur-Marne that I wanted to see.

There was only Fleur ahead of me, alive, waiting, three weeks silent and not by choice.

I had flour on my hands on a Tuesday and I had not washed the apron and I had left the bread unfinished on the counter and none of that mattered at all.

I walked north.

The road bent east before it bent north again and it was on that eastern stretch, where the tree line came close on both sides and the light went thin and cathedral-quiet, that I heard the first one.

Not a rat. Something larger.

It came from the tree line to my left — a sound that was almost breathing, almost not, the kind of sound that made the small hairs on the back of your neck make a decision before your mind did. I stopped.

My hand found the knife in my pocket. I did not draw it.

The tree line was still.

Then it was not.

He came out of the shadows between two beeches at an angle that suggested he had forgotten how angles worked — sideways, then correcting, then sideways again, his feet finding the road with the concentration of a man relearning something.

He had been a soldier once.

The uniform said so.

What the uniform did not say, what the uniform could not say, was what he was now.

His eyes were the colour of old milk.

I had heard about the Revenants.

Everyone had heard about the Revenants in the same way that everyone had heard about the rats going strange and the dogs disappearing — in pieces, in whispers, in the particular register that people used when they were not sure if they believed a thing yet but could not quite dismiss it either.

The man who delivered coal to the village had said his brother’s whole company had turned on the Somme.

The priest had said it was God’s judgement and then the priest had stopped saying anything because the priest was gone.

I had heard about them.

I had not seen one.

He was perhaps thirty years old, or had been.

He moved toward me with a patience that had nothing human in it — not slow, not fast, simply inevitable, the way water moved toward a drain.

I did not run.

I do not know why I did not run.

Some part of me that operated below thought, below decision, below anything I could have named, simply planted my feet on the road and held very still and looked at him — at the thing wearing the soldier — and something moved through me like a current finding a path through water.

He stopped.

Four metres away, in the middle of the road, in the thin cathedral light of the tree-lined eastern stretch, the Revenant stopped moving.

His head tilted.

The milky eyes fixed on me.

His hands, which had been reaching, went still at his sides.

I held the stillness inside me like a breath I did not know I had taken.

He stood there for a long moment — five seconds, ten, I could not have counted — and then very slowly, like something winding down, he turned and walked back into the tree line between the two beeches and was gone.

I stood in the road for what felt like a long time after.

My hand was still on the knife in my pocket.

I had not drawn it.

I did not know what I had done instead or how I had done it.

I knew only that something had moved through me and the Revenant had stopped and now he was gone and the road ahead was empty again.

In the verge to my right, very softly, something small moved through dead grass.

I took my hand off the knife.

I walked north.

Historical Note

The Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 remains one of the deadliest disease events in recorded human history, killing an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide — more than the First World War itself. France was among the hardest hit nations. The French military censored early reporting of the outbreak to protect wartime morale, meaning the civilian population received little warning and less accurate information about what was spreading through their villages and cities.

The name “Spanish Flu” was a misnomer born of wartime censorship. Spain, as a neutral country, had no restrictions on its press and reported the illness freely — giving the false impression that the outbreak had originated there. The true origin of the 1918 strain remains debated by historians and virologists to this day.