"Madame Aumer! Madame Aumer, wake up!"

Erik shook me insistently as I stirred slowly into wakefulness, confused by my surroundings before I remembered laying on the sofa to rest my eyes for a moment. I must have fallen asleep… what time was it? Andre would be worried sick.

"I'm awake," I promised groggily, sitting up and rubbing my eyes with one hand while Erik pulled me to my feet by the other.

"You have to hide!"

"Erik, what's wrong?"

"Mama's home!" He hissed, and suddenly I was wide awake.

I was far more worried for his sake than for mine; he had told me he was not allowed to so much as open the door. If Madeleine knew he had not only let me inside, but for how long I had stayed… what would she do to the poor child?

Suddenly I remembered the evidence of my visit. "Erik, the bill and the cake –"

At five years old he was already far more clever than I was in my twenties. "You slid the bill under the door, and there never was any cake," he insisted, and I nodded my understanding; I didn't know what he had done with the cake, but I sensed his mother would not have been pleased with him if she discovered he had eaten so much as a bite without permission.

Erik pulled me into the kitchen and all but pushed me out the back door of the cottage before pausing and hugging me tightly around my legs, pressing his little masked face hard into my lap. My heart ached and I crouched to hug him properly before placing my finger under his chin to bring his odd yellow eyes up to mine. "You're a good boy, Erik."

"Please come and see me again," he begged.

"I'll do the best I can," I promised, wishing I could promise him more. I would have promised him anything he wanted if I thought I could make it come true, but I was woefully limited and dared not make a promise I could not keep; the last thing this child needed was a broken promise.

Suddenly he stiffened and pushed me away again, disappearing behind the kitchen door. I heard Madeleine's muffled voice from inside and moved quietly around to the front of the house and through the garden, grateful for the curtains concealing my exit from the woman inside.

Andre was not alone when I arrived home. As soon as I opened the door he all but collapsed in relief and a pair of men in uniforms glanced between one another. "Thank God you're all right! Where have you been? I've been worried sick, I went to the police –"

I kissed him soundly to attempt to reassure him. "I'm fine, Andre. Erik was at home alone, I couldn't just leave him to fend for himself."

Andre sighed and turned back to the officers in our home. "Everything is fine now, Messieurs. Thank you for your time."

The look that passed between the men spoke volumes; they clearly had their own opinions about where I had been all night. My husband must have seen the sour look on my face, and he kissed the top of my head. "You should have come to get me, I would have stayed with you. Or we could have had the boy over here to stay."

"I wish we could have, but the poor thing was terrified about his mother finding out I had been over at all. He's not allowed to so much as open the door. Andre something is very, very wrong. When I left this morning he hugged me like I was the first person to ever show him a lick of kindness. And he was still wearing that little mask! Why would he wear it at home alone if he were just an ornery child? He was perfectly sweet with me. Timid, but well mannered –"

"Collette, what do you propose we do? He's not our child, Madame Renard can parent him as she sees fit. We've been living here for three weeks and you've only seen the boy twice. We don't know the whole story, not even close."

My husband was the smartest man I had ever met. It was part of what I loved so much about him; he had been the top of his class all through his education, including veterinary school. When he wasn't tending to patients and their owners he was continuing his education by reading and attending symposiums given by his peers. He was up to date on the research in his field and so many others. Andre had a big mind and an even bigger heart but unlike me his heart rarely got in the way of logic.

"Of course. You're right," I conceded with a small sigh and sat, glancing out the window. And he was right – it was none of my business. Wasn't this sort of nosiness what I resented the food-bearing women for? So why couldn't I shake my feeling of unease?

Then it hit me so suddenly and so hard I nearly cried at the realization. "It's just… She's a horrible mother to him, Andre. A horrible, horrible mother who probably never wanted him in the first place. Why does she get a child while I… while I..?" I choked, and immediately my husband was at my side wiping at my tears with his kerchief.

"Collette… Letta, darling, it's going to be all right. We'll have another baby. You're going to be a wonderful mother someday. Everything is going to be fine. Perfect, even. It just takes time," he promised pulling me against him comfortingly.

The following day Andre and I attended church for the first time since moving to Boscherville. In Paris the service was a wonderful chance to visit with old friends, meet new ones, and to keep one's fingers on the pulse of the city. I was happy to find that was one thing the little village had in common with the city we hailed from. Men talked business, women chatted idly about their children, husbands, and other women both before and after the service. The quiet hum of gossip just outside the walls of the abbey was comforting up until I became able to hear exactly what was being said.

"Three weeks and already they've been inside. What do you think happened?"

"Well, she has a dog, and the husband is a veterinarian – maybe it was sick?"

"Or maybe the child was sick and she couldn't find a real physician to treat it," one woman remarked, and I instantly knew who they were speaking of.

It. These women thought of Erik as it. A thing, lumped together with Madeleine's dog! The thought enraged me, but they weren't through.

"I heard it's the Devil's child. That's why she never comes to mass. Father Mansart ministers to them on his own time, God bless him, but it's useless."

One of the women nodded eagerly. "Something like that can't be helped. Madeleine should have thrown it in the fire as soon as it was born. I hear its voice seduces anyone who listens, even its own flesh and blood. Such an abomination shouldn't be allowed to survive –"

I was about to interject when Andre took my hand and quickly pulled me away. "Did you hear them?" I hissed violently, glancing back over my shoulder.

"Why do you think I pulled you away?" He pointed out, all but dragging me down the road back to our home. "This is a small town, Collette; we can't afford to make enemies here. Say the wrong thing to one person and the whole village will turn against us. I'm the only veterinarian in town, but don't think these people won't call in someone from Rouen or even further if they don't like us; they got by before and they certainly can again."

I stared at him dumbstruck and ripped my arm out from under his hand. "Your career is what you're concerned about? You heard them and you're worried about who is going to treat their animals?" I demanded.

Andre stopped and rubbed his temples, clearly stressed. "I admire your heart, Collette, I truly do. But that boy is not our problem. The people in this village, however, are. How am I supposed to pay the bills if nobody will hire me, hm? How are we supposed to eat? When we do have children of our own, how will we feed them or cloth them, send them to school? Whatever is going on with that family is strange, I'll give you that. But it's not our concern."

That was the first of many fights about the Renard family. I was torn; on one hand, Andre was absolutely correct about the nature of the village to which we had moved. Social grace was important in Paris, but here it would make or break us. With so few people in the town, one misstep would ruin him and me by proxy. We would have to move, something we neither wanted nor could afford so soon after having left Paris.

On the other hand was the child who had somehow taken such a strong hold on my heart. Erik was smart, prodigal, and clearly desperate for any measure of kindness. He had no allies, not a friend in the world but an aging spaniel. I had already seen what his loneliness could do, the rage it invoked when what little he had threatened to be taken away. He was capable of so much violence it caused two grown women to fear him, and even had Andre and me stepping lightly in his presence… but I could not find it in my heart to feel anything but admiration and affection for the boy. There was something special about him, something I couldn't quite place but that I was eager to protect and grow.

But how could I? I had no relation to the boy. I couldn't even consider his mother a friend; how could I ever be close enough to him to keep him from being harmed by the harshness of the people in this village?

Little did I know Erik was as desperate for protection as I was to protect him. Andre was out of town doing a personal favor for a friend back in Paris whose racing horse was due to foal any day. I decided to stay under pretense of keeping house since he couldn't know how long he would be away, but part of me simply wanted to be alone; we fought more and more often about foolish, meaningless things. It would be good for both of us to be apart for a few days, too long for each other and remember all the things that had made us fall in love in the first place.

I was readying for bed, already dressed in my night clothes and robe when I heard a knock on the window and very nearly jumped out of my skin. When Andre and I were first married one of our neighbors in Paris had been burgled, and the fear of a similar thing happening to us was born. I never even considered the possibility it might happen when I was home alone until that moment. Putting on my bravest face I strode to the window to throw back the curtains to threaten whoever might be outside with my absent husband's rage, but in the window at waist height glowed two yellow eyes like a cat's in the night.

My heart calmed in my chest as I opened the window and crouched to be level with the boy, resting my arms on the sill. "Erik, what are you doing out so late?"

"I'm running away," he announced, seeming proud of his decision.

Erik was not running away. He had no food, no spare clothes, had stolen no money from his mother to get by on. He was smart; even at five years old he would realize these were necessities. He would have planned and agonized over how to get by for days, maybe even weeks if he had time to come to my window and inform me of his departure. If he had decided to run away out of sudden necessity, he certainly wouldn't have had time to stop and tell me about such a thing.

Knowing the boy was not running away broke my heart more than the idea that he might; Here was a little boy so starved for attention and affection he was looking to a complete stranger to give him a reason to stay. "You don't want to run away, Erik."

"Yes, I do," he insisted passionately. "She hates me and I hate her. I never, ever, ever want to see her ever again."

Now the boy was crying. I frowned deeply and reached through the window to cup his little masked face in my hands and wipe at his tears the best I could. When his breathing began to steady some and the frustrating left his stance, I smoothed his hair. "Come around to the front of the house like a proper gentleman and we'll have a cup of tea. Afterwards if you still want to run away, I can at least make something for you to eat before you go."

Author's Note:I was torn between making this a really really long chapter or breaking it into two kind of smallish ones. I'm going to be away from home for a few days, so I decided on two smallish ones with the first one sooner rather than a long one later. The next chapter will be up late Saturday or early Sunday! For those of you state-side, Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you overseas - Happy Thursday! :)