She kissed it and said, speaking fast, ‘I am a partisan, Father. Germans have arrived and I had no time to hide my rifle elsewhere.’
‘It will be safe, daughter,’ he said complacently. ‘Many rifles have been hidden in this church. Always when the Germans come I step outside so that, if they should wish to speak to me, God’s house is not polluted by them. It is my advice to you also.’
Together they made their way through the gloom to the church door and stepped out into the brilliant sunlight.
A small flatbed truck and three jeeps were parked in the square, and the square was a hive of activity, with a dozen soldiers watching eagle-eyed as the village women ran to and fro, loading the back of the truck with hard-worked-for produce.
The last remnants of Nikoleta’s tension vanished. All she had been told was true. The Germans had no suspicion at all that they were in a resistance village.
‘Mehr Pflaumen! Mehr Pflaumen!’ one of the soldiers called out, and a woman as old and wizened as Zenobia hobbled with difficulty across the square with another giant bag of plums.
Another soldier came out of one of the houses with a cageful of complaining hens. As the cage was thrown on top of the fruit and vegetables, Heracles joined Nikoleta and the priest in front of the church.
‘There is nothing we have that they do not take,’ he said fiercely. ‘All our sheep they have taken and our goats. Now they take hens, and soon there will be no hens left. Thieves, the Germans are. Thieves and devils.’
The priest adjusted his black soft-sided cap and did not disagree with him.
Only when the women had parted with all their produce did the hurried toing and froing across the square come to an end.
‘Do not worry, Kyria Nikoleta,’ Heracles whispered. ‘The rest of our fruit and vegetables are in an underground pit outside of the village, where they can’t be found.’
The relief was palpable, as two of the Germans climbed into the cab of the truck and the rest, apart from the officer in command, vaulted into the jeeps. As engines were revved, the officer paused, one foot on a running board.
Because of the visor on his peaked cap, Nikoleta couldn’t see his face clearly, much less the expression in his eyes, but he was obviously looking in the direction of her and the priest and Heracles.
Suddenly he took his foot off the running board and began striding purposefully towards them.
‘Do not worry,’ the priest said, sensing Nikoleta’s alarm. ‘It is me he will wish to speak with.’
But Nikoleta, the pupils of her eyes huge in a face that was stark white, knew differently. Now that he was nearer and the visor was no longer the same handicap, she recognized him, for, when she had been one of General Müller’s maids, he had been one of the general’s staff officers.
‘Sie!’ he spat, pulling his pistol from its holder and halting in front of her. And then, shouting to his men, ‘Dies ist die Villa Ariadne Spion!’
There was no escape. There hadn’t been even before the barrel of his pistol was jammed into the centre of her forehead.
As the men sprinted to surround her, Nikoleta could hear Heracles shouting distraughtly, ‘No! No! No!’, although she couldn’t see him.
She couldn’t see the priest.
All she could see, her arms now wrenched behind her back, her head yanked at an impossible angle, was a sea of grey uniforms and a dozen pair of eyes as hard as splintered slate.
‘Was machen wir mit ihr?’ one of the soldiers asked. ‘Nehmen Sie das Mädchen zu Ayia?’
Nikoleta didn’t speak or understand German, but Ayia was the name of the notorious Nazi jail in Canea, where hundreds of Cretans had been tortured and executed, and she knew what the soldier was asking. He was asking what they were going to do with her. Were they going to take her to Ayia jail?
‘Nein! Wir töten sie hier. Und wir lehren das Dorf eine Lektion. Bringen Sie mir ein Dutzend Frauen und den Priester.’
As half a dozen of the soldiers began rounding up screaming women at gunpoint, Nikoleta didn’t need to understand what he was saying to know what was about to happen. She was going to be executed – and, because of her, so were totally innocent wives and mothers. And the tally didn’t end there, for with gut-wrenching horror she saw that the priest also had a pistol jammed against his head.
Desperately she tried to see where Heracles was, terrified that as he, too, had been standing next to her, he, like the priest, was about to be shot alongside her. There was no sign of him, and hope sprang into life. If he was no longer in the square, did it mean he was now sprinting up into the woods to tell Sholto and his father, and the rest of the men of the village, what was happening? And if he was, was it possible he would reach them and that help could come, before she and the others were shot?
Her wrists had been bound tightly behind her back, but she was able to dig her nails into her palms and as she prayed, she dug them deep; so deep she drew blood.
Sholto and the men he had gone to the meeting with were already trudging down through steep woodland on their way back to the village when they heard Heracles crashing upwards towards them, shouting, ‘Papa! Papa! The billy-goats are going to shoot people. Papa! PAPA!’
He burst breathlessly into view, tears streaming down his face, the robe he wore as an altar-boy torn and filthy, from where he’d had to scramble on hands and knees.
‘They’re going to shoot Kyria Nikoleta, the British officer’s friend,’ he gasped as his father ran to catch hold of him. ‘They say she is a spy. And they are going to shoot Father Skoulos and . . .’
Sholto didn’t wait to hear who else was about to be shot. He broke into a run, haring down through the wooded mountainside, running with fear in his heart, and running as he had never run before in his life. He had no idea how many Germans he was going to be faced with when he reached the village, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was reaching it before Nikoleta died in a hail of gunfire.
Ahead of him the trees began thinning out. He was nearly at the point where the crag butted out of the slope of the mountain to overshadow the church and village square. It was a point that, on the climb up, he and everyone else had circumnavigated, and it was one to be circumnavigated again on the way down. Sholto didn’t circumnavigate it, though. Instead, as the men from the village continued a furious downhill charge, he peeled away towards it, knowing the risk he was taking.
If, from the crag, he didn’t have a clear shot into the square, then he would have added minutes to the time it was now going to take him to reach the square. If the executions weren’t going to take place in the square, then the same thing applied. And even if the executions were about to take place in the square and he had a clear line of sight from the crag, would he be near enough to get the vital shots? And if he was too late . . . ? If Nikoleta was already dead . . . ?
He scrambled up and on to the crag, his heart slamming in his chest, sweat streaming into his eyes.
From the top of the crag he could see the church; he could see the square. A machine gun had been set up in it on a tripod. Facing it, hands tied behind their backs and their backs against the blazingly white church wall, were Nikoleta, a priest and a dozen terrified women.
With the blood pounding in his ears, he judged the time and distance. The men of the village could now only be five minutes or less away from bursting on the scene, but they were going to arrive too late – as he would have, if he had continued with them.
What he had to do from the crag was shoot the commanding officer and whoever was manning the machine gun. By the time he had done so, the remaining ten men would be too busy firing back in his direction to give a thought to finishing the job of executing thirteen women and an elderly priest.
But could he make the necessary two shots from the distance he was? He’d gone out with the guns on his father’s Highland estate since he was a child. He could judge distances and knew how far he could shoot for the shot still to be deadly accurate. The longest distance, under ideal con
ditions, was three hundred and fifty yards. He estimated the village square to be quarter of a mile away, and a quarter of a mile was four hundred and forty yards.
It was a gamble – the biggest of his life.
With the officer by his side, a soldier knelt in a firing position at the machine gun.
Knowing he had only seconds left, Sholto flung himself full-length on the rock, rammed the butt of his rifle into his shoulder and curled his finger around the trigger.
One of the women screamed and fell to her knees. Nikoleta crossed herself and raised her already proudly held head a fraction higher.
The machine-gunner set his sights, preparatory to firing.
Sholto took careful aim and then, as the machine-gunner made another movement, about to let loose a fusillade of bullets that would mow down all those in front of him, Sholto pulled back the trigger – and did so long and smoothly, and with ice-cold steadiness.
Blood and brains spattered the officer’s grey-uniformed chest.
Before the officer had time to register the direction from which the shot had come, Sholto re-aimed and fired again.
As the officer fell lifeless in the dirt and dust of the square, blood oozing from his nose and ears, his men reacted as Sholto had judged they would. No one ran to take their comrade’s place at the machine gun. There was instant panic as to where the shots had come from and, in the panic, and no longer held at gunpoint, the village women began fleeing down the little lanes leading away from the square and, as they did so, their menfolk burst into it, rifles firing.
It was too much for the ten remaining Germans. They raced for their truck and their jeeps. Sholto didn’t wait to see the outcome, from his viewpoint on the crag. All that mattered to him was that Nikoleta wasn’t dead; that he and she still had a roller-coaster of a life in front of them – and he was sprinting with the speed of an Olympic athlete to crush her in his arms and tell her so.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
MAY 1945
Daphne was in Cairo, and in a city wild with British relief and celebration. Although no formal announcement had yet been made, the war in Europe was over. A week ago had come the news that, in Milan, Mussolini and his mistress had been shot dead and strung up by their heels in a garage forecourt. Two days later had come the news that in Berlin Hitler had committed suicide. On the second of May all German troops in Italy and Austria had surrendered; two days later all German troops in Holland, North Germany and Denmark had surrendered; and a day after that, on the fifth of May, all German troops in Norway had surrendered.
On mainland Greece, British troops were maintaining order between the Communist-led factions that were jockeying for power, now that peace had finally come, and the non-Communist-led factions. British troops were also back on Crete, and news from the British Embassy was that a British general was occupying the Villa Ariadne.
A formal unconditional surrender still needed to be announced, but even before it was announced, celebrations were rife.
Thanks to her friend, Sir Miles Lampson, Daphne also had other news to celebrate.
‘Sholto has been recalled,’ Sir Miles had said to her earlier that morning over the telephone. ‘He’s on his way back to Cairo as we speak.’
Daphne had let out such a cry of elation that Adjo, usually so imperturbable, had come running, and Caspian had looked up from the Boys’ Book of Adventures that he was reading and said, ‘What’s the excitement, Mummy? Has Mr Churchill declared the war over?’
‘No, sweetheart,’ she’d said, fizzing with expectation. ‘That announcement will probably come later today, or tomorrow. But the absolutely brilliant news is that Daddy is on his way here.’
He’d frowned and said, ‘What if I don’t recognize him?’
It had been something she hadn’t thought of, and it had punctured her elation a little. It had been four years. The last time Caspian had seen Sholto, he’d been three. Now he was just two months from being seven.
She thought of that time-lapse. Four years. It was a long time – and when she and Sholto had parted, it hadn’t been on the best of terms. Together with his wireless operator, Nick Virtue, Kit had been recalled to Cairo a month ago, and when she had prodded Kit for news of Sholto, he had been uncomfortably evasive, except for saying that Sholto was fit and well.
She knew what the evasiveness had been about. It meant that her habitually unfaithful husband was still being unfaithful, even though there were no British women on Crete for him to be unfaithful with, and even though his domestic quarters were either a cave in the summer or a cheese-hut in the winter.
The knowledge neither disturbed nor distressed Daphne.
It was – had been – wartime, and wartime faithlessness was in a category all its own. Quite simply, it didn’t matter. It was something that, not having been a paragon of virtue herself over the last four years, she was quite sure of. What mattered now was the future.
She thought about the future as she waited for a taxi to draw up outside her Garden City apartment. Sholto would resume his life as a diplomat, and she would resume hers as a diplomat’s wife. Caspian would soon, at seven, be going off as a boarder to the same preparatory school that Sholto had gone to. It wasn’t something she liked the thought of, but it was the kind of thing Sholto would be adamant about, and Caspian was a self-confident, gregarious little boy who would no doubt enjoy every minute of boarding with lots of other boys his age.
She walked out on to a balcony that gave a corner view of the British Embassy. She was thirty-one. Was thirty-one too old to be thinking about having another baby? She didn’t think so, but wasn’t too sure what Sholto might think. Perhaps it might be best to say nothing and just let events take their course. Thinking about events taking their course led her to thinking about bed.
They had always been good together in bed, even when Sholto had been involved with someone else. The only man who had ever surpassed Sholto, when it came to giving her pleasure in bed, was Helmut, and she had schooled herself never to think of Helmut. Thinking about Helmut was too disturbing; too unsettling. Where Helmut was concerned, the most she would allow herself was to pray that he was still alive.
A taxi sped into the street and swerved to a halt outside her apartment block. Without waiting to see who was going to step from it, knowing who was going to step from it, she ran from the balcony and into the bedroom. The big double bed, always crisply made, was even more crisply made than usual – and Daphne had not left it for a maid to make. She had made it herself. There was champagne chilling and she had given her household staff, including Adjo, the afternoon off. Caspian was at Vanessa Dane’s house on Zamalek, enjoying pony rides in a garden that shelved down to the Nile. She and Sholto were going to have all the privacy they could wish for.
The entrance bell rang. She checked her ivory-pale hair in the triple glass of her dressing table, gave herself an extra spray of Shalimar and, with her heart in her mouth, ran into the hall and pressed the button that would let him into the apartment block.
Once in, he didn’t take the lift.
She could hear him running up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
He didn’t knock on the door, either. He simply opened it, let it slam shut behind him and strode towards her.
For a few dizzying seconds she didn’t recognize him.
It wasn’t that he was still dressed as a Cretan, because he wasn’t. He was wearing a shirt, flannels and sandals – though a shirt, flannels and sandals that he had obviously been issued with. Anything Sholto had bought for himself would have been distinctively handmade.
What had disorientated her wasn’t so much his clothes as the sheer unexpectedness of his physical appearance.
From years of near-permanent exposure to a scorching sun, his skin was burned a deep bronze. His hair, always longer than society deemed proper for a diplomat, was now below his shirt collar and he had a full-on beard and moustache. The Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, also wore a moustache, but his was a p
in-neat, pencil-thin line. Sholto’s moustache was luxuriant and untamed.
There was something else about him that was far different from the sophisticated, reckless bohemian who had parted from her in anger four years ago. There was a raw toughness about him that even a dockside brawler would have been instinctively wary of.
For a second the shock checked her rush towards him, and then she was over it, hurtling towards him and throwing her arms around his neck. Sholto didn’t give her the long, deep kiss she had been expecting, but with his head buried in her neck, he did embrace her in a hug so long and tight she could scarcely breathe.
When he finally raised his head and relaxed his hold of her a little, he said emotionally, ‘It’s good to see you looking so well, Daphs. Where’s Caspian? He’s here, isn’t he?’
Laughter bubbled in her throat. ‘If you mean living here, of course he is – but he’s not here at this precise moment, he’s pony-riding and, as I’ve given the staff the rest of the day off, it means we’re going to be able to have a wonderful reunion, completely undisturbed!’
She clasped hold of his hand. ‘The bedroom is this way. I’ve got champagne on ice and . . .’
‘There’s something I need to say to you, Daphne.’
The tone of his voice and his use of her full name represented the moment when she realized things weren’t quite as they should have been. Her instant assumption was that Sholto was crushed with disappointment at Caspian not being there to greet him, and that he’d been expecting Caspian to come sprinting towards him and to throw himself into Sholto’s arms. As Caspian had indicated that he was going to need time to adjust to having a daddy back in his life, Daphne decided it was best to tell Sholto this now. Once that was out of the way, the two of them could begin the long-awaited task of getting into the swing of married life again.
She said, ‘There’s something I should have warned you about, darling. Caspian . . .’
‘Me first, Daphs.’ His voice was tense. ‘Have you any whisky in the apartment? I’d prefer it to champagne. Under the circumstances.’
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 42