by Manda Scott
They climb on. Sophie is first up the final stretch and so she turns right, follows a path through heavy undergrowth and finds that the ‘cave’ is a jagged horizontal rift in the mountainside, less than a metre high, with a patch of soft earth about two metres wide at the front.
Kneeling, Céline studies this for a minute or two. ‘We’re clear. Nobody’s been. Come on in.’
‘How?’
‘Like this.’ The Englishwoman slides her Sten onto her back, lies down and wriggles on fingertips and toes, like a rather lengthy crab, in through the letterbox gap. A grunt, a stamp or two, and: ‘Come on. You can stand up in here. It’s not as small as it looks, and it’s not as dark inside as you’d expect. There’s a hole in the roof somewhere that lets in the light.’
Sophie goes down on her belly into the flat, hard mud and crawls sideways under an arm’s span of solid rock into a grey-green opacity of dusty light and the sharp, peppery scent of crushed lichen.
‘Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.’ Bat-like, the echo swoops over their heads. Sophie presses on her palms and stands up. The roof is high, high over her head and its central part is a vein of greenish light. Céline is sitting on a natural shelf in the rock with one of the new, lightweight wireless sets at her side. Her hair is ghostly in the grey light. Her smile is richly warm.
‘The only problem with this place,’ she says, holding out the aerial, ‘is that we need to string this up outside or we don’t get a signal. Would you mind terribly taking it out again and hanging it off a tree or two?’
So Sophie wriggles out and wriggles in again, and in between she loops the length of wire across some branches and, at twelve minutes past four, the signal comes in, clear and clean.
They have played scissors/paper/stone for the right to take it and Sophie has won. She transcribes the Morse and Céline has the harder task of deciphering it. The result is shorter than any message she’s worked on since she came to France.
‘Slainte?’ Sophie runs her finger under the word. ‘Is that right?’
‘It’s Scottish. It’s what the boys say when they’re drinking whisky.’
‘I never heard them.’
‘I didn’t either. But my cousin evidently did.’
‘The Patron is your cousin?’
‘No. My cousin is the one sending the cipher. Laurence Vaughan-Thomas. I thought he’d gone to train with the Jeds, but evidently he’s wormed his way back into the Firm for this one. I suspect our uncle is involved. It’s amazing how previously rigid rules bend like India rubber in his presence.’ Céline leans back against the wall, her face bisected by the strange, slanting light from the ceiling. She catches sight of Sophie’s expression. ‘What?’
‘Laurence Vaughan-Thomas is your cousin?’
Céline sets down the ciphered script. She explores one tooth with her tongue, then: ‘Either the echo in here is slow and selective or my French is worse than I thought. Shall we start again in English?’
‘Not unless you want to.’
‘I don’t. So, yes, Larry is my cousin. Do I gather you know him?’
‘If he’s the Boche-blond RAF officer with the crippled hand, he trained me.’
‘Did he, by Jove? I expect that was an excoriating experience. So we’ve established that you now know more about me than you should and it would be useful if you were not to mention this to the Boche if caught. That apart, we are also agreed that all three of us want to free your Patron from Kramme’s attentions as a matter of urgency, and we can explore our individual motives later. Would an air raid work, do you think?’
‘To kill him? I think the cellars are too deep.’
‘You are desperate to see him dead, aren’t you? I was thinking more whether it might lure the Boche away from the prison, and break down a wall or two so we could get in.’
‘We?’
‘Really, this constant echo is particularly tiresome. You didn’t think I was going to let you go in there alone? They might be looking for one dark-haired nurse. They won’t be looking for sisters, particularly not if we both look suitably Aryan. How good is your German?’
‘It’s not.’
‘Pity. How good is your coding?’
‘Average.’
‘Well, it’s your turn. I did the incoming. My silk’s there, under the box. I’ll write the plain text, you turn it into something we can safely send.’
Céline writes swiftly, neatly. Her handwriting is like her face, all angles and lines, perfectly symmetrical.
Sophie says, ‘Don’t we have to wait for your sending sked?’
‘In theory, yes. In practice, if we send it fast enough, they’ll still be listening. Trust me, I used to work there. We always stayed on the wavelength for ten minutes, just in case.’
‘Nobody ever told us that.’
‘They don’t want anyone to abuse it. But it’s true. If you can do the cipher in time—’
‘If it’s more than about six words, I can’t. Nor can you and you’re a lot faster than I am. But if you’re his cousin, we don’t have to cipher it. You can write something only he will understand.’
Silence, and a long look, softening at the end. ‘You know, I could. I really think I could. What’s today’s date?’
‘The fourth of June.’ Three days to go, and how is she going to kill Kramme now?
‘Right.’ Celine does some calculations involving fingers and silent counting. The old message is crossed out. The new message is this:
Sophie reads it once, twice, a third time, looks up. ‘Well, I don’t understand a word of this and the Boche certainly won’t. We can send it in plain text and I swear Kramme won’t be any the wiser.’
Céline clasps her shoulder. ‘You send it – they’ll know your fist and that way they’ll know we’re together without us having to say so. Larry’s there, obviously. We should get a reply.’
And they do.
Proud. I am the Wild Card and I have failed. Kramme is alive. The Patron, whom you loved, is held captive. There is nothing of which to be proud. Sophie sits in the mellow light and watches her hands shake. Céline sits behind her, out of sight.
In the end, because she can’t bear the silence, Sophie says, ‘I never thought of myself as a shrew.’
‘You’re quite the opposite, that’s why he said it.’ Is that a smile? She turns. It is. Céline says, ‘It’s an English thing, peculiar to the upper classes.’
‘Like J’s day?’
‘No, that’s the date a mutual friend was killed in a bombing raid in Cambridge: the twenty-seventh of July. C’s day refers to a second cousin of ours, who was killed on the twenty-first of the month. One month before Julie died is the twenty-seventh of June; and minus Chris’s day is the sixth, which means we’re on two nights from now, basically.’
God. Two more days in which the Patron’s every hour is a living hell. Sophie closes her eyes and cannot bear what she sees. Opening them, she asks, ‘And three little pigs?’
A dry smile. ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down. And before you ask, nineteen twenty-eight was my uncle’s fiftieth. Laurence’s father. He hosted a bonfire party at their house in Grantchester, near Cambridge. It went down in the annals of our relatives as The Biggest Family Bonfire ever seen. God help Patrick in the meantime, but this is the best we can do.’
Patrick. The Patron’s real name is Patrick. She isn’t supposed to know these things, but it helps, in the next few days, to have heard it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
5 June 1944
‘LES SANGLOTS LONGS, des violons, de l’automne …’
On the radio, the message all of France has been waiting for. The violins sob, and thus is it known that within twenty-four hours, somewhere on the coast of France, men by their thousands, their tens of thousands, will race for the sand, the turf, the embankments, the gun emplacements and the bloody, desperate towns and villages, against gunfire and rocket fire and tank fire and everything the Luftwaffe can bring to bear. They may
succeed.
At the end of the longest set of BBC announcements ever made comes this: ‘A Hermès de Juno – trois petit cochons vont danser dans le salon des cousines.’
Outside the cave in the mountains of Morez, Céline blows smoke rings at the sky. This, Sophie is realizing, is her equivalent of dancing a jig. ‘God knows how they managed it: planes must be worth their own weight in gold tonight, but we’re on. Couldn’t ask for a better cover than an invasion.’ She spins, arms outstretched.
Sophie is not in the mood to dance any jigs. Losing herself in business, she winds up the aerial, slithers back into the cave and hides the radio on its shelf at the back.
Céline helps her to her feet as she emerges. ‘You’re not happy?’
‘Kramme’s had him two days now. And René.’
‘We’re doing what we can. It might be enough. We have to hope so. Come on. Let’s go and break the good news to the boys.’
According to Céline, the ‘boys’ are twice the number they were even a month ago. The promise of victory has brought men out of hiding, youths out of school, priests from their prayers. The encampment has swollen to an unmanageable size; the latrines alone span thirty metres.
Fabien may look like a beardless youth, but in the time she has been here, Sophie has recalibrated her opinion of him several times, and always upwards. He fights like a rattlesnake, the men adore him and, very clearly, organization is his forte. He has split his group into five and sent men off to build, to guard, to hunt the forest for boar, deer, rabbit, to forage for food and haul water. The weather has been kind and the newcomers think this is how it has always been, a sylvan idyll.
To rein in their hubris, Fabien has picked his best storytellers and they spent the entire first evening telling stories – folk tales, almost – of the early days, when a dozen boys from one of the outlying villages lived for eight days in the forest on raw onions and nothing else, and had to go back into the town on the ninth day, shitting through the eye of a needle and too sick to resist when the Boche bundled them onto a train bound for the east.
They spoke of snow and men losing their vital organs to frostbite, of what it’s like not to sleep for the cold, to have nothing to eat for five days in a row, so that sucking on a lump of ice feels like a feast.
They talked at length and in detail of collaborators who bring the Boche to the mountain and how hard it is to stay awake all night on watch, but you have to, knowing that men will die in their sleep if you don’t; and it is this, Sophie thinks, sitting in the fire’s rich light – the threat of death and cut throats and blood – that makes Daniel draw in his shoulders and shudder.
He brightens, though, when Céline appears: everyone does. She is wearing a pair of khaki trousers and a man’s linen shirt. She has wound a strip of someone else’s shirt round her head as a bandana and her Sten is an extension of her arm. She is beautiful and unobtainable, but they have seen her fight, those who have been here longest, and the storytellers speak of this, too, telling of the many raids in which La Fille Anglaise has played a starring role, but none so heroic as the time when Fabien’s gun jammed and the Boche were about to pick him up – until Céline wrenched a rifle from the man beside her and, standing with her arm braced on a tree, shot every Boche officer who tried to give an order.
One after another, they raise a hand, commence a command and – pouf! – this, the storyteller’s mime: a slap to the forehead shows a bullet between the eyes and they stagger, arms flailing, for death. The magazine was empty by the time the enemy ran, but they did run, and Fabien was saved to lead them still.
And so the men roll over now, and sit up when she appears. And when she climbs onto the remains of a wine barrel and unhitches her gun and fires three single shots up and out into the night sky, they are on their feet before the echo of the third has rattled off the trees.
JJ is in the front row, with Daniel and Vincent, who appeared yesterday, footsore and hungry, having walked from Saint-Cybard. They are quiet, these three, more so than the others, and they are accorded the respect of the newly bereaved. Daniel, particularly, is treated with something approaching awe: his father, evidently, was a Maquis legend – Kramme’s first victim – and the fame devolves to the son.
‘The planes?’ JJ asks, as the last shot fades to silence. ‘Are they coming soon?’
‘They are, but before that is the invasion. It’s happening! The English and the Americans land tomorrow. And tomorrow also, we need twenty volunteers to come with us into Saint-Cybard to open the prison and get everyone out: JJ’s Patron, the boy René, and anyone else alive we can find in there. The planes will be over at eleven o’clock in the evening. We will be in place before then.’
SAINT-CYBARD
6 June 1944
It is dusk. Moths and bats sift through the last shadows. Sophie lies in a musty, dried-out ditch at the side of the road into Saint-Cybard. She is hungry and thirsty and desperate to smoke, and she is hardly alone. Céline, lying to her left, is the same; and JJ, Vincent and Daniel to her right. On the far side of the road, and spread over several hundred metres, Fabien and twenty volunteers from the Maquis de Morez lie similarly hidden.
Ahead and to her left, half a kilometre away, are the remains of the bridge that JJ demolished in their retreat three nights ago. Ruined brickwork stands starkly naked, lacking even a shroud of rubble. The road has been swept clear and German trucks run along it, in and out of the town.
The invasion is old news now: the first day’s fighting is over and, if the rumours are right, it all took place on the Normandy coast, which is half a week’s drive away, even under the best of circumstances. The Boche still think this is a feint and the main thrust will come to Holland, but, even so, the German garrison on the edge of town is buzzing like a kicked hive and the rest of Saint-Cybard is curfew-quiet.
The planes of the RAF are due over within the next half-hour. There is no guarantee they will come.
Patrick. Her Patron. She will see him today. If he’s still alive. If he’s whole enough to walk. If the kindest thing, the only thing, is not to put a bullet between his eyes.
Sophie mouths promises to an unheeding god: I will be good; I will kill Kramme. Or if you prefer, I will not kill Kramme. I will be good.
‘Here.’ Céline, at her elbow, pointing. ‘Or rather, there.’
It’s not even fully dark. The planes are a denseness on the horizon, a thrumming, distant gut-churn that grows louder, deeper, angrier. They could be returning Luftwaffe, come to bomb the whole of Saint-Cybard to a bloody pulp in revenge for the Allied attacks on the north coast.
They are RAF. The first flare drops over the fields behind the Peugeot factory. Fabien has not been able to send a man to warn the owner, but at least the guards will have time to get clear.
‘Not yet.’ Céline catches her arm when Sophie didn’t know she had moved. ‘Wait until they hit the prison.’
‘What if they don’t?’
‘Trust, ma petite. Others amongst us have as much to lose as you do.’
She doesn’t want to think about that. She shelves her elbows on the road and peers out into the fire-lit night. Three of the planes turn north and head back the way they have come. Three others veer south, over the city. The searchlights are a net, sweeping the sky. Each plane is caught, lost, caught again.
‘God, they’re coming in low.’ Céline stands up, her hands over her mouth. ‘Take care. Take care. Take care. Strewth. How can they fly so low?’
So low the navigators could read the writing on the newsprint plastering the windows of Raymond’s former office. So low they could shave the grass. So low they can drop their bombs – one, two, three – onto the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles, the delight of fin-de-siècle architecture that may shortly cease to exist.
There is a hiatus, a moment of breath-held astonishment in which all sound drops away. Caught in this bubble, Sophie can hear neither the planes, nor the guns.
There has been no explosion. Hands clamped over
her ears, she is counting: one thousand and one. One thousand and two. One thousand and three … One thousand and eight. Eight seconds and they haven’t gone off. Nine. Ten. Dear God, they all misfired. Surely, they can’t all have—
God.
If he was above ground, he’s dead. She thinks this so quietly, the words barely sound in her head. Outwardly, she’s standing on the road, shouting.
Move! Let’s go! Move!
It’s her own voice, but she can’t hear it. Her hands over her ears were as much use as gossamer against a train. She signals Céline, JJ, Vincent, Daniel. Across the road, Fabien raises his so-young head. She screams at him, voicelessly. He nods, turns, gestures. A mass of men rises from the ground, each one armed. Laden with her own two guns, magazines, torch, other essentials, Sophie runs towards the fires. As hounds, hell-bound, they follow.
In the outskirts of Saint-Cybard, tall, shuttered houses lean in across the streets, whispering one to another of impending doom. Shadows shift in the light of the burning factory, but nobody hides in the dark places; nobody is outdoors at all. Every house is boarded and still. The trucks on the southern road grind through gears and there’s a hubbub of German voices, but they are heading for the fires, not into town. She runs on, left, and then takes the second right at the crossroads by the fountain; into the heart of town.
‘Wait here.’ Sophie holds up an arm. They are at another crossroads, two blocks from the Hôtel Cinqfeuilles.
The streets are clear, except at the hotel. Here, a dozen men play fire hoses onto the flames. They may be Frenchmen and she has promised herself and the nameless god that she will not kill Frenchmen unless they are actively collaborating. Dousing a fire isn’t that, but it’s hard to tell the French from the un-French and there’s no doubt that the latter will shoot without compunction.