by Fiona Valpy
In the newspaper there were increasingly frequent reports of Resistance activity – bridges and railway lines had been sabotaged, and the food depot outside Coulliac raided. While such stories described the incidents in the most disapproving terms, they also gave many hope that the tide of the war might be turning. But the subversive acts never went unpunished: people were taken for questioning by the Milice and the Gestapo. Some returned to their homes, beaten and broken, unable to look their neighbours in the eye, having been forced to divulge snippets of information – true or surmised – under torture. Others never returned. Sometimes whole families were rounded up.
And in the distance the trains still rumbled by, ominously, heartlessly, laden with their cargos of human suffering.
That spring, France began to reverberate with rumours of an imminent Allied invasion. The occupying army remained on high alert, forced to remain stationed in France, while the Russians launched concerted attacks on the eastern front. But the weeks wore on and no invasion came. Eliane sensed that the soldiers occupying Château Bellevue were becoming increasingly tense, although they still appreciatively downed bottles of the count’s wines from the cellar with the meals that Madame Boin cobbled together from whatever food was available.
The country was starving now, and there were frequent power cuts. Food prices were sky high, but the Martins continued to make ends meet by trapping fish in the sluice channels and foraging in the woods and hedgerows. Soon, though, the relative bounty of spring dried up in the harsh glare of the summer sun. Only Eliane’s bees continued, unaffected, as they busily harvested nectar from the wildflowers that were resilient enough to withstand the heat.
‘Papa! What are you doing here?’ Eliane was surprised to see her father when he appeared at the kitchen door of the château. He was breathing hard, as if he’d been running, and sweating in the heat. A powdering of flour stuck to his clothes, which hung loosely from his once-sturdy frame, and there was a smear of dust across his face.
He leaned against the doorframe for a moment to get his breath back. ‘Monsieur le Comte – is he here? I need to speak with him, urgently.’
‘Why yes, I think he’s in the chapel.’
‘Can you go and get him for me? It’s safer if I wait here in case anyone’s about.’
Eliane presumed that by ‘anyone’ he meant the Germans, a few of whom were off duty that afternoon and had retired to the shade of the terrace off the drawing room to drowse after lunch.
She nodded and hurried across the yard to the chapel door, knocking and trying the handle, but it was locked. She heard the faint mutter of voices from inside again, and then the scrape of a chair and the count’s footsteps coming slowly up the aisle accompanied by the tap of his cane on the ancient flagstones of the chapel floor.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, m’sieur, but my father is here. He says he needs to speak to you urgently.’
The count nodded, pulling the thick wooden door closed behind him and locking it with a heavy iron key, which he replaced in his jacket pocket. ‘Lead the way, my dear.’
At the kitchen door, Eliane hesitated, unsure whether she should leave them to talk in private. But the count ushered her in. ‘We may need you to walk again, Eliane. And anyway, by now I think you’ve guessed much of what is going on.’ He smiled at her, kindly, and she nodded.
‘It’s Jacques.’ Gustave spoke with no introduction, as if this were a conversation that they were already in the middle of. ‘He’s compromised.’
The count nodded. ‘We knew it was probably only a matter of time. The Milice have been sniffing around for months now and, as we know, their methods of extracting information can be brutally persuasive.’
‘We need to get him out of Coulliac immediately.’
‘Where is he now?’
Gustave glanced at Eliane. ‘Up in the hills today – he had a rendezvous with our friends there. He should be on his way back now, but the Germans are waiting for him at the bakery. I went to deliver flour and saw them. There was a Gestapo officer watching from the window of his apartment, and soldiers in the square.’
‘In that case, it’s imperative that we let him know. It’s not too late for our friends to intercept him. Eliane, would you mind taking a little walk?’
She didn’t reply, but simply untied the scarf from around her neck and fastened it over her hair.
‘It’s going to be a different pattern from the usual today,’ the count explained. ‘I’d like you to go to the far side of the garden wall and walk back and forth. Please do so continuously until I come and tell you to stop. Can you do that?’
She nodded and picked up her basket. ‘If anyone asks, I’ll be gathering sweet cicely. It grows along that side of the wall. We could do with some more, in any case.’ Madame Boin used the seeds and leaves in place of sugar, to take the edge off the tartness of any fruit they managed to get hold of.
Beside the path that ran alongside the garden wall, the white flower heads of cicely foamed above the fern-like fronds of their leaves. They were just beginning to set seed and the narrow green spears sat proud of the flowers. She walked back and forth, back and forth, hardly pausing as she harvested the plants and placed them in the basket that she carried over her arm. Back and forth she walked again, holding her head high.
The land fell away steeply on that side of the château and the valley below was covered with dense woodland which could conceal . . . What? A band of maquisards? Or a couple of miliciens? A patrol of German soldiers? Or Jacques Lemaître? She tried not to think about who was watching her. On the far side of the valley, the hillside rose steeply again, the trees giving way to the dry scrub – the maquis from which the Resistance fighters took their name. As she walked, she thought she saw a flicker of light from the high ground, as if something had reflected the afternoon sunlight, momentarily, back towards the château. Shortly after that, Monsieur le Comte appeared, leaning on his stick.
‘Thank you, Eliane. Have you collected a sufficient harvest to keep Madame Boin happy?’
She showed him her basketful of greenery.
He nodded his approval. ‘Take it back to the kitchen now, my dear. Your father has gone home. All is well.’
He walked away from her, towards the chapel again. Despite the heat of the afternoon, a slight shiver of foreboding ran through her as she watched him go; he looked so frail, all of a sudden, such a vulnerable old man to be engaged in untold acts of courage beneath the very noses of the mighty German army.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary when she walked along the track to the mill house that evening. Beyond the barbed wire, the river flowed quietly on its way and the evening insects floated in the last rays of sunlight above the surface of the water. Every now and then, a fish rose to catch one of the tiny flies, disappearing as quickly as a dream and leaving only a circle of ever-widening concentric ripples as evidence of the act.
But when she entered the kitchen, Gustave was pacing to and fro, in an agitated state.
‘Oh, thank goodness, there you are at last, Eliane!’ he exclaimed.
‘I’m no later than usual, Papa,’ she replied, smiling calmly.
‘I know. But the Milice are sure to come and pay us a visit this evening. They are trying to trace the whereabouts of Jacques Lemaître, since he didn’t return to his apartment above the bakery this afternoon. They will particularly want to speak to me, I’m sure, but they may want to question you and your mother too. It would be better if you weren’t here when they arrive.’
‘Where is Maman?’
‘She’s upstairs, putting Blanche to bed.’
‘But Papa . . .’ Eliane began to protest, and he silenced her.
‘No objections, ma chérie. In any case, I have another job for you to do. I need you to help hide Jacques.’
‘But where? And where is he?’
‘He’s in the barn. We need to get him out of there, right now.’
‘And where can we hide him?’
Gustave smiled, a little grimly. ‘We have the perfect place. And it’s right under the feet of the Germans.’
‘The tunnel?’
He nodded. ‘The tunnel. Come, take this basket of food that your mother has prepared. There’s a bottle of water in there too. We must go. Now.’
At the barn, he pulled open the door and called softly.
‘Hello, Eliane,’ said Jacques as he emerged from the dark interior. ‘You did well today. I owe you my life.’ He was carrying a suitcase that appeared heavy, its weight making him lean slightly to one side.
‘You managed to get some of your things out of the apartment?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘No, Eliane. This is a radio transceiver. Fortunately, we were using it to transmit messages to the network this afternoon so I had it with me. They wouldn’t have found anything suspicious when they raided the apartment. We’ve managed to save a valuable resource, as well as to conceal a piece of very incriminating evidence.’
Gustave had already thrown open the rough wooden door of the pigsty and was pulling aside the stack of wooden planks and corrugated-iron sheets that leaned against the back wall. Behind them was the makeshift door, set into the rock wall at the back of the small cave where the pigs used to be housed. He took a key out of his pocket and fitted it into the rusty lock. With a bit of effort, it turned and he pushed the door open, beckoning them to follow him. On lighting an oil lamp that sat on a shelf hewn into the bedrock, they could make out the stores of wine and flour hidden there – sadly depleted now. There was no more ham left in the secret storeroom and the jars of pâté and grattons had been finished long ago.
At the back of the small room, a narrow opening led off into the darkness. Gustave handed Eliane the lamp and pointed. ‘Follow it upwards. It twists and turns. When you reach a fork, keep to the left. Eventually you will come to the big cavern that sits directly beneath the château. Stay there. There’s enough oil in the lamp to last you for a couple of hours and there are matches and spare candles in the basket. We’ll come and get you when it’s safe again, Eliane. But be prepared to sleep the night there if need be. You know how persistent our friends in the Milice can be.’
He kissed her and held her tight for a moment. She noticed how thin his arms were now; and yet they still had a steely strength, which gave her the courage she needed to take the lamp and lead Jacques into the darkness beneath the rock face.
Before he left them, Gustave pointed to a sturdy bolt on the inside of the storeroom door. ‘Lock that behind me,’ he told Jacques, shaking his hand.
Jacques nodded. ‘Bon courage, Gustave.’
‘And to you too.’ He turned abruptly and left them.
Once Jacques had bolted the inner door, they slipped through the opening at the back of the storeroom and entered the tunnel, where the path began to climb steeply. Eliane held the lamp aloft to light the way. The tunnel was narrow here and, behind her, Jacques had to carry the heavy suitcase awkwardly in front of him to squeeze through. But as they climbed, sometimes following a smooth path carved into the limestone millennia ago by flowing water, sometimes negotiating steep, rough steps hewn into the rocks by the hands of men, eventually the tunnel began to widen. The darkness was silent and cool, and they seemed to have travelled a hundred miles from the warmth of the evening outside in just a few hundred steps, but the atmosphere was surprisingly dry. They came to a fork in the tunnel, just as Gustave had described, and went left, carrying on upwards. The tunnel grew wider and the gradient less steep, until they were able to walk almost upright along the limestone path that had been carved and smoothed by an ancient river. Finally, it opened out in front of them and, lit by the light from Eliane’s lamp, they found themselves standing in a spacious cavern. The floor was dry, powdered with a fine dust, and the rays of the lantern illuminated a curving, vaulted ceiling several feet above their heads.
‘Oof!’ Jacques grunted as he set down the radio set, flexing his fingers, and stretching to ease out the stiffness in his back from carrying the heavy case through the tunnel, stooped over for much of the way.
At the far end of the cavern, more rough steps were cut into the bedrock, leading steeply upwards. Eliane walked over to them and lifted her lantern. She smiled as she saw the curved staves of a wine barrel covering the opening at the top of the stairs. She put a finger to her lips, motioning to Jacques to keep his voice down and then pointed upwards.
‘The château’s wine cellar: the kitchen is just above that – and the Germans, too.’
‘Don’t worry; they won’t be able to hear us. There’s several feet of solid rock between us and them, as well as the cellar space.’
The light from the lantern cast shadows across his face as he smiled at her and took her hand. ‘What a place! It feels as if we’ve stepped out of the real world and into another completely separate one. How strange – and how wonderful – it is to be cocooned here. And yes, you’re right – underneath the noses of the German army! Are you sure no one else knows about the tunnel?’
Eliane nodded. ‘Only the Comte de Bellevue has been down here in living memory, and that would have been many years ago. There’s no way he could manage the stairs down to the wine cellar these days, never mind those steep steps in the rock. Papa uses only the first few metres of the tunnel at the end by the mill house and, as you saw, he keeps the entrance well hidden. You’ll be safe here until they can get you out.’
‘And you?’ He caressed her hand with his thumb, trying to comfort her, and she smiled back at him. ‘You’re okay staying here with me, Eliane? I know it must be difficult but, as you know, the Milice and the Gestapo may well search the mill. It’s better that you are not there when they do.’
A look of fear flashed across Eliane’s face. ‘Papa . . . And Maman . . . It doesn’t feel right not to be with them.’
He put a hand on her arm to reassure her. ‘If your parents are questioned, don’t you think it will help them more to know you are safely out of the way? Your father will come and get you when it’s safe, as he said.’
She nodded, reluctantly agreeing that he was right.
Jacques removed his jacket and spread it on the floor of the cavern. ‘Don’t worry, your parents will be alright. There’s no evidence against them. As long as the tunnel remains a secret, we’ll all be safe.’ He put his arms around her to comfort her and then added, ‘I promise I’ll keep you safe, Eliane.’
His chest was broad and his shirt smelled of the forest – of fresh air and pine resin and leaf mould – as she pressed her face against it, breathing him in, this familiar stranger who had come to live among them and was risking so much as he worked to help co-ordinate and strengthen France’s Resistance.
‘Were you with Yves today?’ she asked.
When she looked up at him, his blue eyes were gazing down at her, filled with an expression of such tenderness that it made her heart skip a beat. She’d known they were growing closer, but until this moment she hadn’t realised fully how much he loved her.
He smiled and whispered, as if someone might overhear him. ‘Yes, I was. He’s on good form. He’s one of the more experienced members of the group now. They’re very busy, planning . . . And I can’t say any more than that.’ He stopped short. She could see that he was annoyed with himself for having already said too much. But perhaps he felt, like she did, that there was something about the otherworldly feel of this place and about being hidden safely together that had made him relax his guard.
‘I know,’ she said. And then she stood on tiptoes and her lips brushed his. Cocooned from the war for this brief spell, away from the daily grind of danger and deprivation, she, too, had lowered her guard for a moment. But then she stepped back, confused and ashamed at her own uncharacteristic boldness.
With mock formality, to help cover her embarrassment, he gestured to the jacket on the floor and said, ‘Mademoiselle Martin, please take a seat and let us dine together. After all, we find ourselves in such a very exclusive
restaurant. I believe the food is supposed to be very good here.’
She laughed, relaxing again, and settled herself on the floor, untying the silk scarf and letting her honey-blonde hair fall forwards on to her shoulders. She pulled closer the basket that Lisette had packed for them.
With a lethal-looking commando knife that he pulled from a concealed pocket sewn to the inside of his jacket, Jacques cut slices from a loaf of dense, yellow chestnut bread, and spread them thickly with creamy, herb-flecked goat’s cheese. There were two of the huge red tomatoes that had been sun-ripened in Eliane’s potager beside the river, and he cut slices from these and placed them on top. ‘Your tartine, mademoiselle. I hope it is to your satisfaction.’ He presented it to her with a flourish.
‘Delicious,’ she pronounced, having taken a large bite. ‘But wait a moment, there’s something missing.’
She climbed the rough-hewn stairs and carefully pushed on one side of the barrel’s stout belly until it rolled over slowly and rested against its neighbour. She climbed up into the cellar and, in the darkness that was lit only faintly by the lamp from the cavern beneath her, felt her way along the wine racks. She took a modest bottle – not one of the count’s finest wines, but not one from the despised 1937 vintage either – and climbed carefully back down the steps, pausing to reach for the length of knotted rope attached to the bunghole of the barrel. With a gentle tug, the barrel rolled back into place, covering the stairway once again.
Using Eliane’s penknife, they managed to remove the cork.
‘Now this really is what I call fine dining,’ said Jacques. He put his arm around her again. ‘I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend an evening.’
After they’d finished their meal, they turned out the lamp to conserve the remaining oil for the morning. They lay on his jacket and Jacques held Eliane close to him.