The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020)

by Lester, Natasha

  ‘If the guards are agitated, the Allies must be near,’ was all Caro whispered after one particularly hard blow to the shoulder that had her coughing blood, not blaming Skye, still trying to find the splinter of sunshine to warm the bitter winter.

  Besides that, all Skye remembered was the constant need to hide as general Appells were called more and more often, and the women were made to walk naked past the guards. Those with sores on their legs, or legs too thin to have any strength left, were herded to one side and taken to the death-buses parked in the woods outside the camp gates, buses from which the rumour of gas escaped. Buses from which nobody returned.

  Skye couldn’t walk naked past the guards because then they would see her baby, would see the blood still running down her legs and the fact that she was almost too weak to stand. So, during the selections, Margaux and Caro handed her over to the French doctor, Loulou Le Porz, who hid her in Block 10 – the infectious diseases block – because no guards ever went in there. It was the biggest risk – that the baby would catch something and die – but she would certainly die if the guards saw her so it was the only risk that held within it a grain of hope.

  So abrasive, those grains of hope, Skye thought as she sat on the floor of the death block with her baby, waiting for the Appell to be over. They had scoured her away almost to nothing. She tucked her finger into her daughter’s fairy-size fist and whispered over and over about houses on clifftops, a soft blizzard of petals, and a dark-haired man whom the baby would one day call Daddy.

  Then the largest hallucination: Liberty. She appeared on the Lagerstrasse one day, smiling a vicious smile at Margaux.

  Margaux stepped in front of Skye. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked Liberty.

  ‘I’ve been in quarantine since June,’ Liberty said.

  Quarantine. One of the camp’s darkest places. Skye shivered.

  ‘Why did they let you out?’

  The suspicion in Margaux’s tone was apparent even to Skye in her disordered state. She tried to speak, to tell Margaux to look behind the smile and hear what Liberty was really saying. But the effort made her cough, a sound so familiar to the baby that she didn’t flinch at all now when she heard it.

  The noise caught Liberty’s attention. When she saw her sister, her smile collapsed. She flung herself on Skye, embracing her in a way they’d never embraced before, squashing the baby, which yelped. Liberty’s eyes grew large.

  Where is your baby? Skye tried to ask but it was hard enough to draw in breath let alone force out words.

  After that, Liberty appeared on and off for days. Skye overheard snatches of strange conversation: Margaux telling Caro she’d discovered, in the administration block, that Liberty had been in quarantine because the Germans knew she was British; that she’d been let out because she was helping the guards, telling them who were the most powerful members of the Resistance, and which women in the camp had lied about who they really were.

  She’s a spy, Skye wanted to say. She’s just pretending.

  But when Margaux levelled her accusation at Liberty, Liberty admitted that she had given the guards two names.

  ‘They were so sick they were to die soon anyway,’ Liberty said, her voice cold. ‘And they’d been feeding information to the guards themselves. You should be glad I gave them up before they had a chance to tell the guards anything about the two of you.’ She indicated Skye and Margaux.

  Skye passed the baby to Caro before she threw up bile. How much longer could it go on: the bleeding, the coughing, the fever, the threat of Liberty?

  That was the start of the worst time: hours of delirium during which she heard Margaux and Caro telling her her own story, about Skye and Nicholas on a Cornish beach with cowrie shells beneath their feet. Sometimes Liberty was there too, smiling too nicely at the guards and trying to feel Skye’s ferociously burning forehead, but Skye turned her head away.

  Never, during all those delirious days, did she see Nicholas again.

  Then came Good Friday: a day of more death, heralded in Ravensbrück by a whipping of sticks. A rumour tore through the camp that there were more vans parked in the woods, and the rounding up of the women began. Just the Frenchwomen though.

  ‘Hide,’ Margaux told Skye, and Caro as well this time because Skye could no longer move without help.

  Then Liberty was there, pointing Skye out to the guards, her voice strident. ‘You should take her to the Revier. She’s sick. Feel her head. See the blood. She had a baby and you didn’t know.’

  The Revier. A place where people went to die.

  Skye managed the only sound she’d been able to make in days. It was supposed to be a scream; it came out as a moan. Anger, violent and ferocious, roiled through her. Liberty wasn’t pretending. She was everything Margaux had feared.

  And Skye remembered that she’d been waiting, ever since Liberty had turned up on her doorstep at Hamble, for her sister to strike. She had finally done it.

  Skye looked at Liberty properly for the first time since Liberty had appeared at Ravensbrück and she thought she saw her sister flinch. She would never, ever, forgive Liberty if, by her words, Skye and her baby were taken to the infirmary, where the baby would certainly die.

  ‘I’m staying with Caro and Margaux,’ she whispered, and reached out for the hands of her true sisters.

  They held on to her and Skye knew they would thwart Liberty. The guards, weak themselves from lack of food and from apathy and fear, would hardly bother with a woman who was going to fight when there were so many who could not. Liberty would have to choose someone else to send to the infirmary.

  Liberty’s eyes flashed with an emotion Skye did not recognise; an emotion that made her squeeze her own eyes shut so she might never see it again.

  She heard Liberty hiss, ‘Nicholas has married a Frenchwoman. He has a child with her. Even if you and his bastard child get out of here alive, you can’t have him. He has someone else now.’

  You thief of love! What, have you come by night / And stolen my love’s heart from him? The lines Skye had once declaimed on a wall thrashed like the guards’ sticks against her heart.

  The nightmares, the hallucinations, whatever those things were that plagued her every waking and sleeping moment, vanished. Blackness, infinite, descended. She felt her body lifted from the ground and carried away and knew she was being taken to the infirmary but she no longer cared.

  Beside her, she heard a loud scream. A gunshot.

  Was the baby still with her? She scrabbled desperately for her daughter but knew nothing for certain except that, behind her, Liberty would still be smiling that awful smile.

  PART THIRTEEN

  Nicholas

  I always thought ‘missing presumed dead’ to be such a terrible verdict.

  – Vera Atkins

  Thirty-Five

  FRANCE, MAY 1944

  Nicholas flew Liberty into France one night in May, soon after he’d said goodbye to Skye and watched her fly away with O’Farrell.

  As soon as they landed, Liberty scrambled up from her seat and to the ladder of the plane before Nicholas had made eye contact with the operatives on the ground.

  ‘Wait,’ he barked at her.

  Being Liberty, she didn’t.

  She’d been a bundle of jittery energy for the whole flight. Nicholas had tried to talk to her, to calm her, recognising too well the signs of an agent pushed too far. He’d nearly circled around and returned to England, but there was no reason to do so beside his misgivings, and his superiors would scoff at those and accuse him of partiality. And perhaps they would have been right.

  He caught sight of one of the men from the reception committee in the light of the flare path and his insides contracted. It was no one he knew.

  The Germans must have found out which field they were coming to, and which was the right Morse code letter to flash. They’d suspected for weeks that there was a traitor among them, one of the field operatives, perhaps.

  ‘Liberty!
’ he shouted, breaking all the rules by using her name so she would know there was trouble.

  Liberty turned and he saw, sweeping across her careless face, the realisation of danger.

  Jesus, he was supposed to fly off and leave her there. But how could he leave Skye’s sister with the Germans?

  He took his gun and climbed out of the plane.

  They were lucky because the Maquis were hiding in the trees on the perimeter. Gunfire sounded from those trees, aimed at the Germans.

  They were lucky again because, somehow, everyone except the Germans shot true, and soon he and Liberty were being taken to a safe house.

  ‘It’s not the best place to spend a night,’ one of the men warned. ‘The mother is nervy and would most likely crack if questioned too closely by the Boche. But the daughter is charming. And it’s the closest place we know of.’

  Nicholas wasn’t worried. ‘There’s a pick-up operation tomorrow night not far from here,’ he said. ‘We only need to stay until then. If we can get a car to the field – it’s near Orléans – late tomorrow, we can be out of everyone’s way within twenty-four hours.’

  But it wasn’t to be. The car never came. Nicholas guessed, after the previous evening’s events, that the Resistance circuit had been captured and dismantled.

  He tried desperately to make other arrangements with the woman, Madame Beaufort, and her daughter, Adèle, but they didn’t have a car. And with the circuit gone, they didn’t have access to a radio to send any messages to SOE to tell them that he and Liberty were alive and needed a Lysander to come and get them.

  Madame Beaufort, desperately frightened by the fact that they were going to be in her cellar for longer than expected, barely spoke to them. It was Adèle who brought them food. She told them she was trying to find another Resistance circuit who could move them on to safety. Nicholas’s guess, she told him, had been correct: the only one in the area had been decimated. She could only make discreet enquiries of people she hoped she could trust; enquiries that had, so far, come to nothing.

  Three weeks passed by in a state of extreme tension. Neither he nor Liberty could leave the cellar. The space was cramped and they barely managed a civil word to one another. He tried his hardest to be patient, to bite his tongue, to tell himself that Liberty was probably scared too.

  Occasionally Adèle joined them in the cellar and Nicholas told her about Skye. Even Liberty was silent then, her face as peaceful as it had once been in childhood when she’d stared at the stone maid lying on the ground in the lost gardens.

  By early June, the lack of Skye was excruciating, as was the seemingly never-ending wait for help. He and Liberty actually agreed on something: they ought to take their chances and leave that night under cover of darkness.

  They both knew that, before they’d left England, the Allied invasion of France was imminent. Which meant they might find another Resistance circuit themselves, or discover that the invasion had taken place and they could meet up, somewhere, with the Allies.

  When Adèle next brought food down to them, they told her of their plan. She nodded and said she would organise supplies.

  Ten minutes later, two sets of footsteps sounded on the stairs. Madame Beaufort appeared with Adèle.

  ‘We have looked after you both for some time,’ Madame Beaufort said, strain evident on her face, hands clasped tightly together in front of her. ‘By having you here, we have …’ Now she sought for her daughter’s hand. ‘We have exposed ourselves to danger.’

  Nicholas put down the plate of food Adèle had given him and stood up from his place on the floor. The things that French people like Madame Beaufort and Adèle had done for people like him made him feel small and very humble. To risk imprisonment or death in order to shelter two strangers – a British pilot and a spy at that – took courage beyond anything. And more so if you were as terrified as Madame Beaufort obviously was. Yet she had done it in spite of her fear.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I know you could have turned us in. You’ve had our lives in your hands. If I can do anything for you, I will.’

  ‘There is something,’ Madame Beaufort said, tears in her eyes, tears in Adèle’s eyes now too.

  She told Nicholas, haltingly, that Adèle was pregnant with a Nazi child. That she hoped Nicholas would marry her daughter to give the child a name, to make sure nobody ever thought her daughter had collaborated with or formed an attachment to a German soldier. The timing would be about right. Adèle had only found out she was pregnant the day before Nicholas and Liberty had arrived. The villagers knew Madame had a pilot hidden in her cellar; it was entirely believable that the pilot and her daughter might fall in love, and marry. Then Adèle and her child would be safe.

  ‘I have a priest here,’ she finished, gesturing to a man who now came down the stairs.

  Nicholas knew it was a believable story – he’d heard about more than one Allied pilot marrying the Frenchwoman who’d sheltered and saved him. He wondered whether Adèle had been raped, or if she’d fallen for one of the Germans billeted nearby. Both scenarios were equally likely, and he understood the way villages worked. Neither story would be palatable, and even the possibility that Adèle’s child was of German blood would mean she and her mother would be ostracised, or perhaps even subject to a kind of tribal justice. He closed his eyes against the image of Adèle cast out of her village, with nowhere to live, and a baby to feed.

  Liberty stood up beside Nicholas and was the first to speak. ‘Nicholas isn’t going to do that,’ she said angrily. ‘You can’t make him feel guilty like that.’

  Nicholas felt not anger, but a deep and desperate sadness. How could he resent Madame for wanting to protect her daughter? ‘Tell everyone it’s my child,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind. But I can’t marry Adèle. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nobody will believe us without proof,’ Madame said wretchedly. ‘It must be marriage.’

  ‘I’m already married,’ Nicholas said.

  Liberty stared at him.

  ‘I made a vow to Skye and she made one to me,’ he told Adèle and Madame. ‘We mightn’t have paperwork but I married her bodily and utterly and with a strand of seaweed to prove it.’

  The priest conferred with Madame. Adèle wept silently beside them.

  ‘The man who fathered the child,’ Nicholas asked Adèle, carefully, quietly, ‘did he …’ He paused. How could he ask her if she’d been raped?

  ‘When you’re starving, and your mother is starving, you do things you might not otherwise do,’ Adèle said simply.

  Nicholas felt his jaw clench. Adèle had given herself to a Nazi in exchange for food for her mother, but it was rape all the same. Just as Margaux gave her body to a Nazi in exchange for information. Right then he hated, truly hated, the world he lived in: a world in which women’s vulnerability was used so appallingly by men. He thought of Skye, in France somewhere, vulnerable too, and he had to turn around and hold on to the wall, swallowing down the urge to be sick.

  Madame Beaufort spoke then. ‘We will leave you to think about it. The priest will come back this afternoon.’ She took her daughter’s arm, but before she left, she said falteringly, ‘You said you would do anything at all.’

  Nicholas slid his back down the wall and sat on the floor, hands covering his face.

  After a few minutes, he felt Liberty sit down next to him. ‘Does that mean you’re my brother now?’ she said.

  He looked across at her and she was smiling, beaming, actually. Nicholas nodded and managed to find a smile too.

  ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘Short of locking you and Skye in a room together, I’d just about run out of ways to make sure you ended up together.’

  ‘What do you mean? Are you saying you and O’Farrell …’

  She grinned. ‘The thing with O’Farrell started so that Skye wouldn’t convince herself to fall for him in an effort to forget about you. But now …’ She touched her stomach. ‘Now it’s a lot more than that. We’re having a baby in January. As
soon as I get back to England, we’re getting married.’

  Nicholas stared at her. Liberty married and with a baby. Liberty maybe even in love.

  ‘You look about as gobsmacked as if I’d told you I was marrying an elephant.’

  He laughed. ‘Sorry. I’m really happy for you both.’ He reached over and hugged her and she hugged him back.

  ‘Maybe we can get married together,’ she said. ‘In Cornwall. You and Skye. Me and O’Farrell.’

  ‘I think Skye would love that.’ Nicholas could barely say the words. Skye in a wedding dress. Skye his wife. The forever that was meant to be theirs, that would be theirs the minute he got out of France, the very second the war stopped.

  ‘All we have to do is get back to England. And make sure neither Skye nor O’Farrell do anything stupid. You don’t think he’s …’ She stopped and for the first time ever, Nicholas saw that her eyes were damp and that it wasn’t from fury.

  ‘If my mother could see the future, then wouldn’t I have some of that clairvoyance?’ Liberty went on, swiping a quick hand over her eyes. ‘I don’t feel anything telling me he’s dead. So that means he’s fine, doesn’t it? I don’t think I could bear it if he abandoned me too …’ Her voice cracked.

  Nicholas gripped her hand. ‘O’Farrell’s alive.’

  He needed to believe his words because he’d also tried, each night, to sense Skye somehow. And all he’d felt was an urgent need to get home, never any message telling him to lie down and die because the love of his life was gone.

  ‘We’ll still leave tonight,’ Liberty said determinedly.

  ‘We will.’ He rubbed a tired hand over his forehead. ‘I just wish there was something I could do for Adèle given she’s risked her life for us.’

  Liberty shrugged. ‘There are some sacrifices, like hers with the Nazi, that are never repaid. It’s the way of the world.’

  He thought of Luc sacrificing his life on that lonely field in France. Surely that was for freedom. And Margaux, sleeping with a Nazi – that was for freedom too. ‘Meanwhile, I said I’d do anything for them but it turns out I’m a liar,’ he said bitterly.