This was where God would prove himself to be just like her father, right? He wouldn’t show up. Or He would, on the wrong side. Maybe He meant to answer the prayers of those German soldiers instead of theirs.
The engine grew louder, rumbled past, faded off again. But it was no reason for relief. It was after they’d found their friend that there would be trouble.
The engine roared into hearing again, from behind. And a minute later, the wagon slowed to a halt. German shouts filled the air, though they didn’t turn off their engine.
Willa pulled her knees up to her chest under her mound of hay, but it did nothing to ease the helplessness. In her mind’s eye, though, soldiers were already coming at them, bayonets affixed to their rifles so they could stab into the hay in search of them.
The farmer answered the Germans in a voice loud enough to be heard over the engine. All she could make out was “Nein, nein . . .”
And then a miracle. The engine roared off again, back in the other direction, and the farmer clicked his horses back into a walk.
“He told them that he just entered the road half a mile back, from his farm,” Margot whispered. “That he has not seen anyone else on the road yet except them, but that he’d noticed two men walking toward Brussels as he was hitching up the wagon.”
Two men—Lukas plus one to hit the other across the head. The farmer was quick on his feet. And they may just owe him their lives. If Lukas had any spare coins from the Davieses, he ought to impart a few more to that man.
No other engines interrupted the jostling, jolting, uncomfortable hours of the ride, though they passed a few other wagons. Still, it would have been foolish to relax their guard for even a moment. Which meant that by the time the farmer pulled to a halt in the market district of Antwerp, Willa’s nerves were jangling and her stomach was as clenched as after two days without food.
They slipped out of the hay under the cover of an awning and took a few minutes to pick the remnants of it off their clothing before they emerged to give the farmer their thanks and another coin—she hadn’t even had to mention it. Then Lukas led them away from the market stalls and toward the docks.
Willa’s chest tightened with every step. Perhaps it was just residual anxiety from the road, but she didn’t think so. Something was wrong. Off. Skewed. She couldn’t say what—she didn’t know this city or who should be out and about at this time of day, but shouldn’t there have been more of a crowd?
It was wartime in an occupied country. Surely that accounted for the largely empty streets and the sullen looks of those they passed.
The logic did nothing to ease the constriction. She met Barclay’s gaze and noted that his jaw was clenched just as tightly as her own. His eyes darted to the left, blinked, then moved to the right.
She nodded and grabbed the elbow of Lukas’s jacket to slow him down. Stretched up on her toes so she could whisper into his ear, careful to smile enough that it would look flirtatious to any passersby. “We need to split up. We’re too noteworthy in a group this large.”
Perhaps she had expected him to argue. Instead, he merely nodded and reached for his mother’s arm.
Willa shook her head and leaned close again. “No. If anyone is looking for your family, they will be looking for you together. You and Barclay each choose a separate path. I’ll stay with your mother and sister. Three women will draw little undue attention.”
He didn’t like it—she could tell by the way his hand fisted. But the logic must have been clear, because he just jerked his head and leaned over to whisper the plan to his mother in Flemish, then spun away.
Barclay peeled off too, leaving Willa with the De Wilde women.
She wove her arm through Margot’s and had to make an effort to keep their pace measured, slow, and their heads down as they retraced the path toward the docks that Willa had taken before with the men. Occasionally she would catch sight of Barclay or Lukas, a street over on either side, walking parallel to them.
Then, finally, the tang of fish in the air shouted how close they were. Her eyes scanned the docks as they drew within sight—and snagged on the unbelievable.
Cor Akkerman was actually there, lounging against a wooden crate and in animated conversation with the fisherman he’d pointed out to them yesterday—the one taking them back across the Channel. He laughed, as did the captain of the rusty, rattletrap steamer they’d be boarding.
She looked to her left and saw Barclay emerging onto the pier from his street. To the right, Lukas was already approaching Cor and the captain.
Her stomach was as tight as a pauper’s purse strings. So many soldiers were out and about—normal these days, she knew from when they’d landed. Normal, but dangerous.
Cor greeted Lukas with a nod and ushered him onto the boat. Barclay hung back for a minute before making his way there too, and also boarding.
Margot tugged on her hand, and Madame De Wilde increased her pace. Willa matched it, but her stomach didn’t ease any. Not given the tiny little smile at the corner of Cor’s mouth. He was up to something. She would stake next month’s take on it.
But Barclay reappeared at the ship’s rail and, as agreed upon to signal all was well, lifted a hand as if greeting someone far off.
The captain came toward the three of them as they neared, offering a warm, familiar greeting and going so far as to kiss Madame De Wilde’s cheeks, as if she were a sister. Lukas’s mother played along, laughing and tucking her arm into the man’s, letting him lead her toward the boat. Turning to motion Margot to hurry.
Cor stepped into Willa’s path. She released Margot’s arm so she could keep pace with her mother and met his grin with an arched brow.
“It seems we work better together than you thought we would, ja?”
Her throat went tight. His words were friendly, almost teasing. But in English, as they shouldn’t have been. And his eyes positively gleamed with hatred.
She stepped to the side, meaning to pass him. But never got the chance. As his lips bloomed into a full, nasty smile, the world exploded. Shouts, whistles, running feet. Every street-bred instinct she possessed screamed. Her muscles coiled, she sprang—but there was nowhere to spring.
Soldiers were everywhere. She saw clouds of uniforms, flashes of gleaming buttons. Heard the terrifying, earth-shattering sound of a gun.
It mixed in her ears with her own name, called out in a masculine tone. Barclay? Lukas? She lunged for it, but something collided with her back and sent her sprawling onto the damp, cold wood of the dock.
“Lukas!” It wasn’t Willa’s voice, though she’d been poised to shout for him. It was his mother’s.
Willa tried to lift her head, to find him. She thought that maybe, perhaps, she saw familiar shapes on that rattletrap fishing boat. But she couldn’t be sure. Her ears were too full of German shouts. Her lungs had no air. And a strange stinging warmth was clawing at her side.
And then him. Cor pushed through the soldiers, still grinning. He crouched down until he was just above her, his mouth hovering over her ear. “I told you, pretty Willa, that you ought not to cross me. Now look at you. Captured on suspicion of espionage.” He clucked his tongue.
She bared her teeth, a retort curling her lips. But then pain exploded through her skull, and fog rolled over her vision like a dream before she could get out a word.
Twenty-Seven
Margot curled into a ball, trying to slow her breathing. To count it into submission. But it was no use. It heaved and gasped, and mathematics could do nothing to calm it.
She was gone. Willa was gone, and now they were gone, chugging their way away from the wharf.
“Willa!” her brother bellowed, struggling against the hands holding him down. He was bleeding everywhere. It originated at his shoulder, but it had soaked his coat sleeve and had somehow gotten smeared all over his neck, his face, their mother—whose hands were among the ones trying to calm him.
But his eyes were still trained on the distant shore. “Go back. T
urn back. We cannot leave her there.”
Another round of gunfire sounded. Too far away to hit them, but it served as punctuation on the growl of the captain. “If we turn back,” the old man said in heavily accented French, “we are all dead.”
“Then put us off at the next stop.” Lukas batted away his mother’s hands and pushed to his feet. Or tried to do so, though he swayed.
Margot curled a little tighter into her ball. It shouldn’t have been Willa. She wasn’t the one they wanted. They’d realize their mistake soon.
It wasn’t that they’d then come after them that she feared, particularly. It was what they might do to the Englishwoman in the meantime. And upon discovering she had nothing to offer them.
Barclay all but shoved Lukas back down. His face was blank, but it couldn’t be lack of feeling that made it so. Too much, perhaps. When he’d first stumbled against the rail as the boat charged from its dock, she’d thought he would leap into the river and go after his sister.
But Willa was already in the hands of the German soldiers. Ten of them, surging and hitting and pulling her limp form along, shoving it into an automobile.
Ten of them. Barclay must have done the mathematics on how unlikely it was that he could fend off ten soldiers and follow a car too. He’d spun back around without a single indication on his face of what he was planning.
Margot scooted back on her crate, until her back curved against the side of the boat. They would have a plan though. They must. That fellow they called Cor Akkerman—this had all been his fault. Urging the rest of them on ahead of Willa, drawing her away a step. Then giving some signal to the soldiers. They had appeared from nowhere.
Why? What lies must he have fed them, that they took the one who had nothing to do with anything and left their true targets unharmed? It ought to have been Margot they sought. And by extension, Maman and Lukas.
Not Willa.
Maman had rushed Margot onto the already-running boat, but Lukas had tried to dash after the woman he’d so stoutly refused to look at. And now a bullet had torn through him, and there was all that blood, and Willa was not here, and the captain looked etched from stone.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Barclay said to her brother in a voice like winter. “You’ve been shot. You go barreling back onto shore and you’re a liability, not a help.”
Lukas grunted as Maman wrestled his coat off his shoulder. “Well, you cannot go alone. You do not speak the language, you do not know the city—”
“You think I’m not aware of that?” It emerged in a shout that ripped the air, interrupted the engine noises, joined with the gulls screeching overhead.
It smelled like fish. And salt. And despair.
Margot hugged her knees tighter and prayed. That, by her calculation, was the best chance of a good outcome from this.
Barclay stabbed a finger into the wind. “That is my sister. You think I plan to leave her there a second longer than I have to? But we have to be wise.”
Maman gasped. “Lukas. What is this?”
Margot craned her neck so she could see an angry scar on Lukas’s bared shoulder, red even when their mother had swabbed away the blood that oozed two inches to the right.
Lukas grunted. “Where I was shot two months ago, trying to find you. It has healed. This one will too.” Though he added a rather colorful opinion of the men who had dared to shoot him twice.
It was Willa who Margot’s eyes saw then, though. She, too, had had red blossoming through her coat as the soldiers pushed her to the ground. Keep her well, Lord God. Be with her. Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four . . .
Maman heaved a sigh. “It went straight through, praise God.”
“Better than the last one, then. I will be fine.” He tried again to push forward, away from Maman’s hands.
Barclay held him down this time with a boot to his uninjured shoulder. “Don’t. Be. An idiot.”
“This boat is not stopping until we reach England,” the captain added in English even more accented than his French. “You think I will compromise my family?” He motioned to a huddled mass of bodies beside him in the wheelhouse.
Lukas’s face went darker than she had ever seen it. He must love Willa. Fiercely. “She could be dead by the time we return.”
“She won’t be.” This Barclay pronounced with calm certainty, his hands fisted at his sides. “We’re going to believe that. And we’re going to go back to England, and I’m going to contact V—”
“No!” This time Lukas managed to lurch free of both boot and mother, struggling to his feet. “Not him.”
“If anyone can get Willa out of their hands, it’s him. You know it is.”
But Lukas shook his head, eyes wild. “No. We will find another way. He cannot know you were in Belgium rather than Paris.”
“There is no other way!”
Lukas’s breath heaved. “Then you wait until I get them somewhere safe. Then you contact him. Tell him the trail led you there, but—”
“You think he won’t discover the truth? That he won’t talk to the people who took us there or wonder how we managed to push so far into Belgium alone?”
Margot scooted to the edge of the crate and let her legs dangle. “Who is V?”
Lukas swallowed but didn’t look at her. “No. We find someone else to help, then. But I will not turn to him. He’ll take her from me.”
Margot stood. The her ought to be Willa. But it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. “Who is V?” she asked again.
Maman put a hand on his arm. Not to urge him back down this time, but to be an anchor to the look she sent him, pleading and somber. “Who is V?”
He looked at Maman, then darted a glance at Margot. “He would take her, Mère. Take her and make her a weapon, breaking codes all day.”
Margot could say nothing. She had known—of course, she had known—why Papa’s bragging about his “cypher machine” posed such a danger to her. She had known that she, as surely as Claude Archambault, could be forced to work for an enemy government. She had known that her skills would be sought in this war, even though she was only a child.
But she’d never once considered she could help those opposed to Germany.
The two men were glaring at each other again. Lukas said again, “No.”
Margot’s fingers knotted in her skirt. She shouldn’t want to take part in the war, should she? It was a nasty, violent thing. It meant death and horror and things she’d only read about.
But ending it—ending it could mean life for her neighbors. For Claudette’s family, for Madame Dumont, for Jerome Allard. If she could help put a stop to Germany’s advance somehow with this gift God had given her . . . “Lukas.” That was all she said.
But maybe he heard something more in it. His nostrils flared as he met her gaze, and he shook his head. “No.”
Barclay folded his arms across his chest. “Sorry, Lukas. But it seems to have come down to this: your sister or mine.”
There was only darkness. Silence. And then worse than silence—words she couldn’t understand barely reaching her from somewhere she couldn’t see. Willa sat on a hard chair, her hands tied behind her, and wondered if this was death. Her whole body screamed in pain. Had they struck her? Or had she dreamed it?
How long had she been here? Hours? Days? Forever?
Her lips were dried, cracked. Her fingers could have been lopped off for all she knew—she couldn’t feel them. Her side screamed. Why couldn’t it go numb? Her head throbbed, each pulse an echo.
Alone. Alone. Alone.
Had she thought herself alone before? She’d never known the meaning of the word. Not like this. With the darkness. And the silence. And the worse-than-silence. Alone. No mother. No father. No Pauly. No Barclay or Rosie or Retta or Elinor or Lucy. No little ones.
No Lukas.
She would die here, in this silent darkness. It settled like yesterday in her bones—already known, unchangeable, certain. Whatever made her side scream had taken a lot o
f blood. It was a dried, stiff mess in her clothes. And made her head swim. It wasn’t just darkness and silence. It was swaying darkness and silence.
She would die here. Of thirst or lack of blood. And no one would ever know.
Barclay would try to come for her. Try to find her. But how could he?
Her tongue was swollen. She tried to use it to wet her lips, but it felt strange and spongy.
Barclay would have to give up. He’d have to, for the sake of the rest of the family. They’d never lost one of their numbers before, but they’d discussed what to do if a job went bad on them, if one were already lost.
Cut and run. They’d all agreed the body didn’t matter, not if they were dead—there was no point in the rest of them risking their necks to recover it.
She was already dead. He’d cut and run. He’d have to.
A crash sounded from somewhere in the unbroken night. Echoing. And echoing. And echoing. Thunder?
“Do you really never pray?” His words knocked around inside her aching head.
What was the point? It was like he’d said—she’d be nothing but a street rat petitioning the King. Nothing to recommend her. And no great need of the kind of justice she’d seen Him mete out.
But she was so very alone. Already dead. She’d come before Him in a few minutes or hours or days, anyway. . . .
God, are you there?
No answer came in the darkness. Nothing but a thudding growing ever louder. Her heart, probably, pushing all that life out her side.
Lukas. He wouldn’t come either. He had his mother, his sister. And even if he hadn’t . . . he wouldn’t. Because she was nothing to him now. No, worse—she was her father to him. Someone who took and never gave. Someone who left before ever giving love a chance. Someone who stole the most important thing.
I’m sorry. God, if you’re there, will you tell him I’m sorry? Tell him I didn’t want to hurt him. Tell him . . . tell him that if I knew how to love, he’s the one I’d want to.
A strange smell made her nose itch. Then she went blind. Only this blindness was painfully white rather than eternally black. She winced and turned her head away from the onslaught, but her chin was caught by something hard and fast and unyielding.
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