by Erika Robuck
They walk to the farm, where Edmund’s cousin has shooed away her children and waits, regarding Virginia with curiosity. Léa wears a floral apron that looks funny with her farm boots. She has reddish hair parted down the middle, fair skin, and clear eyes.
“Diane,” says Virginia, extending her hand.
“Welcome,” says Léa. “I have a room for you on the second floor.”
“I’m happy to stay in a barn,” says Virginia.
“The barns are occupied, I’m afraid,” says Léa. “By Dédé and a few others. But don’t worry about us. You have other safe houses, yes?”
“We’re working on that,” says Edmund.
“Work faster,” says Léa.
* * *
—
Edmund leaves them that afternoon to keep searching for safe houses. The children are sent to bed early. Only Virginia, Léa, and Dédé are left around the dining table.
Virginia is ashamed of how quickly and how much she eats, but Edmund was right: Léa is a wonderful cook. Mushroom soufflé, salad greens drizzled in oil, and a golden liqueur over ice chips that tastes as fresh as the mountain air.
“Verveine du Velay,” says Léa, pointing at the drink. “My husband used to get us bottles from Le Puy, until his capture.”
“Don’t waste anything so precious on me,” says Virginia, pushing what’s left in the glass toward her hostess. Léa slides it back.
“Not wasted. We don’t normally eat like this, but you need strength.”
You have no idea, Virginia thinks.
“Are you even allowed to drink?” she asks. “I hear this is a conservative place.”
“We all have our little secrets,” says Léa with a wink. “And your arrival is a special occasion. We’ve been waiting so long for you. Now we can celebrate.”
“Decide if you want to celebrate me after the job here is done. I tend to leave a path of destruction in my wake.”
“Destruction with a purpose,” says Dédé. “You’ve armed and organized the Cosne Maquis, and a scout brought us news of their fine work cutting off transportation and communication lines in their region.”
“Do you have news of any individuals? Any casualties or captures?”
“No specifics.”
When Léa stands to clear the dishes, Virginia tries to help her.
“No,” Léa says. “You two: Go, make plans. Leave the domestics to me. That’s an order.”
They thank her and head to the barn where Dédé resides. The sky is pink and orange in the fading light, and the air is full of frog song. Inside the barn, a corner has been swept clean. A straw mattress rests on a crudely built platform next to a lantern on an overturned bucket. Dédé closes the door, locks them in, and unearths a map he spreads on a table, holding down each end with a stone. He lights the lantern and hangs it on a hook above them. Virginia appreciates his security measures, and how he gets right to business.
“Simon and the other Maquis leaders in the Haute-Loire are working on setting up central command at the Château de Vaux,” Dédé says, pointing to the location on the map. “All of us should eventually convene there. What do your commanders wish for us to accomplish?”
“Sabotage,” she says. “Destroying strategic points on the rails, bridges, and tunnels, cutting off Le Puy.”
He points to the most strategic places, and she begins to make a mental map to report to HQ. They discuss the need to keep one road from Le Puy open, not only for their men or the Allies to drive into the city, but to trap the Nazis if and when they try to retreat from the garrison there. Once they’ve selected the route they’ll preserve—a road that runs low, with hills on either side that will allow the Maquis to have the high ground—she turns the focus to Chambon.
“In terms of protecting the town,” she says, “once the Nazis are on retreat, we’ll need to secure Chambon and the surrounding villages outward, ensuring they’re swept clean.”
“Can we kill any stragglers?”
“That depends. If they’re retreating in large groups, no. You and your boys aren’t yet armed for battle. But if any linger—especially on an individual level or in small groups—yes. As long as they can be eliminated without a trace. Then they’ll simply be thought deserters.”
“Can we kill the ones left at the hospital at Chambon?”
I wish, she thinks.
“Not yet,” she says. “As they’re rehabilitated, they’re being transferred out. But once I get word that all the able-bodied Germans have been ordered to the garrison at Le Puy, any Nazis left you may either dispose of or take prisoner.”
“Are you under Geneva protection?” he asks. “Because I’m not. Not as a guerilla. Not without a uniform. I don’t think you are, either, as a uniformless woman. So, if we aren’t protected upon capture, why are they?”
“That’ll be for you and your boys to decide. What can you live with?”
“I’ll tell you. I have no family left. My father died when I was a child. My mother was shipped out to a work camp as punishment for my Resistance activity. I escaped capture and found my way here. It’s my fault she could be dead. The question for me is not if I can live with myself having hurt Nazis, but can I live with myself having not avenged my family and my country?”
She stares at Dédé a long moment. His dark-lashed eyes are black and fierce. He looks older in the shadows cast by the lantern light. She places her hands on the map.
“I can’t bring back your mother,” she says, “but I’m certain: You’ll have your country back.”
Chapter 30
In the dream, it’s 1934, and her prosthetic leg had finally arrived. She’d held up the seven-pound bundle to the light.
“I’ll name him Cuthbert,” she’d said, much to the doctor’s amusement.
“Dindy is so grateful,” Virginia’s mother said. “She can hardly wait to try it, once she’s fully healed.”
Virginia looked up from where the nurse had helped her pull on the sock that would cover her stump. Though there was still a bit of redness and swelling, she wouldn’t wait another moment.
“Show me how to attach it,” Virginia said to the doctor.
“There’s no reason to rush this,” said her mother. “You have nothing but time.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve lost time. I’m atrophying. I need to get back to work.”
“Dear, I don’t mean to be vulgar, but you don’t have to work another day in your life.”
“I do need to work,” Virginia had said. “If I don’t do something of use, I might as well die. I might as well have died in that hospital in Turkey.”
Her mother’s distress was clear on her furrowed brow and in her pinched mouth. Virginia tried to be gentle. She knew her mother almost lost her, but she couldn’t keep her cloistered forever. Virginia passed the prosthetic to the nurse, hopped over to her mother, and knelt before her on the cold tile of the doctor’s office. She took her hands.
“Mother, you must try to understand that I’ll die without occupation. I have so much to offer—so many skills that I can use in the world. You see how restless I am. Besides, I’ve already written to the assistant secretary of state asking to be reinstated to a consular position.”
Her mother cried out and tried to pull away her hands.
“Mother, please. Try to understand. Daddy would. He would have known that staying here is not what I’m made for.”
Her mother succeeded in wresting her hands away from her daughter. Virginia stayed at her feet for a minute more before pulling herself to standing. She hopped back to the chair by the parallel bars and sat.
“Show me,” she commanded.
The doctor handed the nurse the belt and averted his eyes while Virginia lifted her skirt to fasten it around her waist. Elastic straps connected to a corset encircling her thigh and attached to the top of the prosthetic
. Once the nurse had all the belts connected and adjusted, Virginia pulled herself to standing.
“Mrs. Hall,” the doctor said. “Forgive me for saying so, but you must see how important it is for Virginia to get back on the proverbial horse.”
Her mother continued to stare out the window with her arms crossed over her chest.
“All right, my dear,” the doctor said to Virginia. “Let your weight settle over both legs.”
Virginia tried to shift her balance, but she couldn’t. Her face flushed with heat. All the excitement, all the money, all the anticipation, and she felt as if she’d be sick. She tried not to look at her mother. What if she was right, and Virginia wasn’t ready?
“You don’t have to do this now, Virginia,” said her mother.
Defiance rose in Virginia. Her mother only used her daughter’s full name when she was angry with her. Virginia closed her eyes and tried to make her brain connect to the limb. She imagined nerves reaching out from her spine, down her leg, synapses that had been firing at dead ends in the knee for months suddenly finding something to ignite. She imagined the hollow limb electrified.
“Trust it,” said the doctor. “It won’t come off, and you can’t hurt it. You can only hurt you.”
Her heart pounded, her breath was short, her hands sweat on the metal parallel bars. Virginia willed calm, willed trust, and allowed her weight to shift.
Cuthbert held her.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the prosthetic, exhaling with a laugh.
“Do you feel balanced?” asked the doctor.
“I think so,” she said, nearly breathless. “I do. Yes.”
“Good. Now, holding the bars, flex the foot. Get a sense for how it moves.”
It was so difficult to get a feel for something one could not feel. Panic again rose, but reconnecting to the rebellion of her mother’s wishes gave Virginia the fuel to overcome it. She commanded her brain to understand what she was asking of it.
“When you’re ready, holding the bars, you may try to walk forward.”
The parallel bars ran about ten feet in front of her but somehow looked like a mile. She still didn’t trust this leg. How could she? There were seventeen inches between what she could feel and the floor.
Brain to knee, knee to foot, foot to floor.
Step.
She allowed Cuthbert to lead, her full leg to follow. One step.
She gasped, elated.
Then she allowed the full leg to lead, Cuthbert to follow. Two.
Virginia stumbled on her third step but caught herself on the bars. The doctor grasped her arm.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I feel like a baby, learning to walk again.”
Four steps.
Her mother rose and stood at the end, smiling though her tears. Virginia took the last two steps without holding on and fell into her mother’s arms.
* * *
—
In some ways, it’s like she’s learning to walk again at each new field assignment. She’s had practice and should feel most confident here, at her third stop, but she’s plagued by several problems.
First, without news of Mimi and Louis, she feels divided and unable to fully move on from Cosne. She’s been to the Hôtel May several times to check for messages from Estelle, but there’s been nothing. Of course, Estelle would need to keep away, Virginia tells herself, but every time the train arrives, she can’t help but watch for her friend. Virginia doesn’t allow herself to imagine that any harm has come to Estelle. If she did, she doesn’t know if she’d be able to carry on.
The second, deeply unsettling problem is that she has been seen by MP Haas. He has a room on the second floor of the hospital, where his window overlooks the main street. The bandage is off his left eye, and his puckered skin reveals he’s likely blind in it. With his good eye, however, he spotted her while she was on her way out of the Hôtel May. Her shawl covered her head, but he’d still stared. From now on, she’ll need to use the hotel’s back entrance to stay out of his view.
The final problem has to do with Simon and his Maquis.
Virginia spends most of her time on the bicycle Dédé got for her, riding to and from Simon’s Maquis groups in the region to her safe houses. Edmund found the perfect place for her: an old storage building and barn on the outskirts of town that the Salvation Army isn’t using. Not only is Virginia able to keep her wireless equipment safely hidden in the barn, but the main building has many rooms, allowing the boys in her core team to stay over on the long planning nights. Virginia is still close enough to Léa for the good woman to bring her dinner, but far enough away from her children to keep them safe.
All day long Virginia rides from barn to town to forest to field, noting drop-site coordinates and Nazi movement and numbers, and trying to get to each Maquis group’s commander to schedule training. But some commanders refuse to meet with a woman and, though Simon is the liaison, he often keeps her waiting so long she leaves cursing and unsatisfied. Not only is there unmasked disdain for her, but the political differences of the groups are causing infighting, especially with the communists, who are hated almost as much as the Nazis. There’s mounting frustration that, even though Diane is here, there hasn’t been a single drop. They’ve been waiting by their radios each night listening to the BBC for the code phrase Les marguerites fleuriront ce soir—the daisies will bloom at night—but there are no daisies in bloom, which means there are no weapons or supplies, which makes them resent her all the more.
Her core group of Bob, Edmund, and Dédé is her saving grace. They understand why planes might be tied up at the moment and how a fuller moon makes for better drops. They keep their boys in check and, because of their respectful meetings with Virginia, have come up with means of passive resistance in which the Maquis can satisfy their need for action without encouraging reprisals. She teaches them straight out of the SOE manual on tactics like transposing labels on mail, switching street signs, and more daring deeds like poking holes in the gas tanks of German trucks and unscrewing vital vehicle parts. These pranks frustrate the Nazis to no end but don’t lead to reprisals the way overt resistance does, because they seem natural.
Unfortunately, Simon and some of his peers remain impatient and difficult, which brings out the worst in Virginia. After a particularly grueling day riding the bumpy mountain paths, her leg stump raw, her stomach empty, she heads to Simon and Dolmazon’s farm for the nightly meeting. She’s running late because her tire blew out on a sharp stone, sending her head over handlebars—shattering the lenses of her phony glasses—and she has to drag her bent bike the rest of the way.
When she walks in the door, the group cringes at her disheveled appearance. Dolmazon places a cup of water on the table, but Virginia doesn’t take it. She marches up to Simon until she’s close enough that he can smell her.
“Where were your boys?” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“Drop Company Four was supposed to report to Field D for training at fourteen hundred hours, and they never showed up.”
He looks at his watch. “Criticism coming when you’re an hour late?”
“I fell off my bicycle,” she says through gritted teeth.
He takes in her torn skirts, her bloody cuts, and her bruises, seemingly unmoved.
“How can I order them to show up for training when we haven’t had a single drop?” he says. “Not one. We have no weapons. The boys are running amok, desperate to ambush the Nazis at the hospital.”
“I gave you the okay to allow them acts of passive resistance.”
“Passive resistance—bah! That’s stuff our grandmothers can do.”
He looks her over with contempt and cuts her off when she’s about to protest.
“I keep telling the boys, ‘Wait until we get a drop,’” he says, “but no drop comes. Not last night, not the night b
efore, the week before, the year before. We have nothing!”
“As if I haven’t explained the situation a hundred times,” she says. “Any night now the drops can happen. And once they start, they’ll all be clustered around the full moon. So, all teams will need to be up to speed on procedure.”
“You know I’m dealing with the Lost Boys here. Restless teenagers, half of them, itching for action. It’s exhausting trying to keep their behavior in check. I can’t police them every second, especially when they’re getting nothing from you.”
“They’ll continue to get nothing if they don’t learn how to signal a drop plane.”
“Diane,” says Dédé, placing his hand on her arm. “My boys are ready. Bob’s are, too. We can rotate back and forth if we have to. We’re all willing to lose sleep every night to receive drops.”
“I know you’re willing, but you need to be fresh,” says Virginia. “Once we have the supplies, your teams will be up all night wiring railways. Of course, that’s if I can even communicate with headquarters.”
“What’s that mean?” says Edmund.
“The battery on my wireless is dying. My transmission cut out three times last night, and there’s no power source in any of the barns.”
Virginia unties the orange scarf at her neck—feels the spike of pain reminding her of Mimi’s capture—and uses it to wipe her face. Seeing the old-lady makeup on it when she pulls away, she laughs bitterly.
I’m melting, she thinks. The Wicked Witch of the West.
Dédé hands her the glass of water, and she takes it, greedily finishing in one long drink and flinching when she slams it on the table. Her wrist and elbow ache from the fall.
“You need to get these cuts looked at,” says Dolmazon.
Virginia waves her away and reties the scarf tightly on her throat.
“You must take care of yourself,” says Dolmazon. “Simon, go fetch Dr. Le Forestier.”
He gives Dolmazon a look of aggravation, but the reprimand on her face humbles him. Once he leaves, Dolmazon invites them all into the sitting room to wait for the BBC broadcast. The chair Virginia selects faces out toward the room, and she notices an adolescent boy peer down from the upstairs hallway.