Read Online Two Crosses by Elizabeth Musser - Free Book Online Page B

and the delicious smells escaping from its door. She slipped inside and waited behind two customers.
    “ Bonjour, mademoiselle ,” the hearty baker greeted her when her turn came.
    “ Bonjour. Yes, I’d like a baguette and, and a … now what did he say? Oh yes, a ficelle! Yes, that’s it.”
    The baker, dusted in flour, reached behind him to where loaves upon loaves of bread in all shapes and sizes stood lined neatly in wire racks. He retrieved an especially long and narrow one and placed it on the counter. “A ficelle, you said?” His heavy eyebrows rose.
    Gabriella blushed. “Yes, a ficelle. And a baguette.”
    “You are sure?”
    “Yes, quite.” She placed the ten francs on the counter and waited for the change before picking up the loaves of bread, which the baker had wrapped together around the middle with a thin piece of tissue.
    Moments later she and David met in the open square and compared their purchases.
    “Well done, Gabby! Enjoy yourself, and when you return, I’ll have the most delicious sandwich that your mouth has ever tasted waiting for you.”
    Gabriella walked across the drawbridge, which had once obviously led over a moat, and passed through the heavy gates of the tower. The main floor was empty except for a young man in a dark-green shirt. He stood in the center of the circular room looking up at the vaulted ceiling. Reading from her guidebook, Gabriella walked around the room and felt the cool stones. A prison.
    She found some spiraling, narrow stone stairs and made her way up, letting her imagination take her back several centuries. The second floor was where the female prisoners were kept. In the medical school in Montpellier she’d seen a painting of the women huddling together on the tower roof, but standing here, it all seemed more real.
    The room looked like an exact replica of the one below. In the middle of the floor was a round opening covered with steel grating. She sat down on a curb of raised stones surrounding the hole and ran her fingers along the top of the curb, noticing what seemed to be writing on one stone.
    She let out a small cry. This was it! This was where Marie Durand had scratched the famous word with her fingernail in the stone: Résistez . Don’t give up, hang on, endure to the end! Taken prisoner when she was nineteen years old, she lived in this tower for thirty-seven years, standing firm in her faith and encouraging the other women to do the same. Gabriella sat in awe. Marie Durand couldn’t have imagined that her single word in a stone would outlive the cruelty of the kings who tortured and killed their subjects in Aigues-Mortes.
    After a while Gabriella looked up and saw an old worn banner hanging against the rounded wall. In the center of the banner was the Huguenot cross. Instinctively she moved near it, pulling her own cross out from under her blouse and holding it delicately in her hand to inspect it.
    It was the same, the thick sides of the cross turning inward like four arrows pointing to the center of a target. In between, touching the sides of the arrows, was a fleur-de-lis, the symbol of royalty. A dove hung from the southernmost arrow.
    So engrossed was Gabriella in her thoughts that she didn’t notice the young Frenchman until he stood inches behind her, peering over her shoulder at the cross in her hand.
    “Interesting,” he whispered in French.
    Gabriella turned and let out a sharp cry. “Oh! You frightened me!” she said. “Excuse me, I shouldn’t have screamed.”
    “On the contrary, mademoiselle , it is I who need to ask your pardon. I thought you heard me come up.” They stood for a moment in awkward silence until the young man ventured, “I couldn’t help but notice that you wear the same cross as the one on the banner. Such an unusual design. What does it mean?”
    “Oh, yes … it’s the Huguenot cross.” She talked quickly to cover her embarrassment. “Do you know the history of the Huguenots? They were hunted down and