The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “What do you mean?” Kat said pleadingly.

  The woman frowned. “It’s late. You’ve taken me by surprise. Come back tomorrow at ten. I’ll talk to you properly then.”

  * * *

  Kat’s mind was spinning as she and Elliott walked away, past a yard full of chickens, then a row of beehives, and finally alongside the lake with the rope bridge.

  “That was unbelievable,” she said at last. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Elliott admitted. “Do you think we can make ourselves comfortable at your grandmother’s house tonight so we can be here again in the morning? I’ll go into Porthleven and buy some food. And I’ll definitely get us a bottle of wine. Then we can talk about it properly.”

  Kat nodded, grateful that Elliott had come up with a plan. All her mind could focus on right now were those shocking words: I’m Margaux Jourdan. She managed one question. “I don’t suppose two women called Margaux Jourdan worked for the WAAF?”

  “The records only show one.”

  Of course.

  As Elliott drove away, Kat climbed the stairs and told herself to forget about both her grandmother and the woman next door until dinner. Instead, she inspected a couple of rooms before settling on one with an incredible view over the ocean.

  In a wooden box still smelling of lavender she found sheets that, once she’d taken them outside and given them a good shake, were relatively free of dust. The bed had been covered with an old bedspread, which had kept the mattress clean. She tore up another sheet and used it to wipe over everything, even giving the windows a rub. As she worked, she heard Elliott return and soon a delicious smell of food filled the house.

  At last she sank into the window seat and admired the room, which looked cozy and inviting now. The window was gently curved and let in the smell of the ocean. The bed was decades old but, set against the floorboards and the antique dresser with its comb and mirror set, and made up with the clean white sheets, it looked like something from an interiors magazine.

  Why do you have this house? her mind asked over and over, as if her grandmother could somehow hear her. Who had owned the brush and mirror set, the jewelry?

  On impulse, she stood and opened one of the wardrobes in which the Dior gowns were kept. She searched until she found the one she wanted. A soft red this time, carnelian, its brightness tempered by the satin, which caught the shadows, deepening the skirt’s hue to garnet. Aladin the dress had been called when it was first shown in 1947. It had perplexed some with its apparent simplicity, its echoes of a housecoat, but its deep V-neckline was anything but homely and its belted waist and full skirt were undeniably feminine.

  She changed into it, wanting to feel closer to her grandmother after the day’s events had made it seem that Margaux was moving further away.

  Kat jumped when she heard Elliott. “You look like you’re miles away,” he said, leaning in the doorway and smiling at her.

  “I was,” she confessed. “Sorry, I’ve left you down there cooking while I’ve been daydreaming in window seats and trying on dresses as if I’m Cinderella.”

  “I mean this as a compliment: you’re no Cinderella.” He walked over to her and stroked her hair.

  In jeans and T-shirt, barefoot, with dark stubble on his face, relaxed and so obviously and unselfconsciously himself, Elliott looked even better than he had in his tuxedo the other night. Or perhaps that was just because Kat knew him more intimately now, knew that everything inside matched or bettered the promise of his striking good looks.

  She slipped her arms around him, smiling too, running her hands up his back. “I suppose we should eat,” she said. “I don’t want to ruin the dinner you’ve made.”

  “I suppose we should,” he murmured reluctantly. “But we are definitely coming back up here after dinner. And I am definitely taking off my T-shirt.”

  She laughed. She loved the way he always tried to make her feel better, while at the same time accepting her confusion and her fear, loved the way he sensed and sensitively considered her feelings.

  She took his hand and followed him downstairs where she found he’d done the same as she had in the bedroom: wiped down the table, washed the old crockery and cutlery, and set everything out in such a way that it looked like something from a magazine spread.

  She sat down, sipped the wine, then tried the lamb salad, which tasted of coriander, ginger and a hint of chili.

  “It’s very good,” she said appreciatively. “Almost good enough to make me forget what happened this afternoon.”

  “It must be good then,” he said, sipping his wine too. “I’m kicking myself for not coming down here earlier in the year. When I called her she told me she was forty years too young to be the woman I was looking for, and I believed her. Why would anyone lie? But if I had come, I wouldn’t have found your Margaux. Which means I wouldn’t have found you,” he added with a brief smile that made Kat’s stomach leap.

  She realized that, in spite of the attraction she felt for him, they’d passed the whole afternoon and evening attuned to one another in a tender way rather than a sexual way. For a relationship that she’d thought simply a fling, it confused her. She’d liked coming downstairs and seeing how thoughtful he’d been about dinner. She liked sitting with him now, talking. She liked that he was with her while she was feeling so unnerved about her grandmother. But those were the kinds of things that happened in a relationship, and what she had with Elliott was anything but, surely—she was only in the UK for ten days.

  She touched his hand and he threaded his fingers with hers, waiting, giving her the space to think and to say whatever she needed to, not letting his research and the questions he must have take over from her feelings.

  “I guess the question is: which one isn’t Margaux Jourdan?” she said quietly.

  He nodded.

  “Part of me wants to believe the woman we met today is lying,” Kat said, trying to sift through the worry and apprehension she felt. “Then my grandmother can remain who she’s always been to me: Margaux Jourdan. But that still isn’t a satisfactory answer because the Margaux Jourdan I believed my grandmother to be and the Margaux Jourdan you’ve described are two different people. So, either way, it means my grandmother lied about something. And I don’t know why.”

  “Maybe your grandmother didn’t lie. Maybe she just couldn’t talk about the past.”

  “Because of the concentration camp,” Kat heard herself say, even though she was afraid to know more. But if there were women in her past who had spied for their country, risking their lives, didn’t she owe it to them to be a little bit brave? “Can you tell me about it now?”

  Elliott clasped his hands under his chin and leaned his elbows on the table. “Margaux Jourdan was captured by the Nazis in July 1944. Just after D-day, in the most bitter irony. Freedom was so close, but not for her. At the time, German outrage against the Resistance was at its height and Margaux was sent to a place where she would never be found. Ravensbrück concentration camp. Have you heard of it?”

  Kat swallowed and nodded. “I don’t know much about it though.”

  “Most people associate concentration camps with the Holocaust. But this was a camp for women.” Elliott spoke slowly and quietly, as if he understood how hard it was for her to hear this. “Some were Jewish. Many were resistants, or other so-called undesirables: gypsies, communists, prostitutes. There were Poles, Frenchwomen like Margaux, just twenty British women and a few Americans too. It was a very long time before anyone realized the camp existed, and even longer before they realized SOE agents had been held there. The women in the camp were gassed, beaten, shot, worked to death, and deprived of almost everything a person needs to survive. It was a place of slow extermination, a historian once said.”

  “That’s awful,” Kat whispered. “Why . . . why were the SOE women sent there?”

  “Some because of bad luck, and some because of their superiors’ incompetence. It wasn’t until September 1944, n
ot long after Paris was liberated, that the section of SOE responsible for agents dropped into France knew it was missing one hundred agents out of the four hundred it had sent over.”

  “But that’s a quarter of them.” Incredulity rang in Kat’s voice.

  “I know. The Executive Director of SOE said, not long before D-day, that it was inevitable that the organization would suffer a huge number of casualties in France.”

  “But they sent the women over anyway?”

  “They did.” Elliott frowned and pushed his wineglass away. “And, what’s worse, they dropped the women into circuits known to be compromised.”

  “What do you mean?” Kat asked tremulously.

  “SOE ignored suspect radio transmissions from their agents, which should have alerted them to the fact that the Nazis knew of the circuits’ existence and that some of their agents had already been captured. SOE kept deploying men and women into France, letting them walk into what was, in effect, a trap. Some of the women caught by the Germans were taken to Ravensbrück.”

  Kat studied Elliott’s somber face. “What else? I have a terrible feeling there’s more . . .”

  He nodded. “It gets even worse. You’re sure you want me to keep going?”

  It was Kat’s turn to nod.

  “Everyone at SOE thought the missing agents would be held by the Nazis in regular prisons,” Elliott continued. “That after France was back in Allied hands, they’d be set free. In the case of the women, it was a crazy assumption to make because the women had been commissioned into civilian organizations in Britain—not military—meaning they had no wartime status. The Nazis had no obligation to treat them as prisoners of war so of course they didn’t. In the meantime, SOE convinced itself that if they just waited long enough, the agents would turn up somewhere in France. None of them did.”

  Kat shivered. “They didn’t go looking for them?”

  “Not only that, but they refused for a long time to publish the names of the missing or to alert the Red Cross to look out for them. Margaux’s name, and Liberty and Skye Penrose’s names, would have been on that list if it had been compiled. But circulating the names would have meant admitting women had been used as spies. It was apparently more important to hide that fact than to find them. And when Vera Atkins—who was in charge of SOE’s women—asked the Foreign Office for information about a camp she’d heard of called Ravensbrück, the only information they gave her was that Ravensbrück was relatively unknown and there were no British prisoners there. This was in April 1945. One month later, the first female British prisoner from Ravensbrück arrived at Euston Station. All those blunders meant that Ravensbrück and its victims were left out of our war history.”

  “Which is why I don’t know much about it.”

  “It’s one reason why.” Elliott looked across at her, checking again to see whether she wanted him to stop.

  Kat finished her wine. “And the other reasons?” she asked. “I need to know.”

  “Let’s sit over there.” Elliott indicated the seat by the window through which the ocean rolled inexorably on. “I feel like you’re too far away across the table.”

  She followed him to the window seat, curling into his side, feeling his arm hold her tightly to him. She rested her head on his shoulder as he spoke.

  “The French and British women at Ravensbrück were young, mostly in their twenties,” he told her. “The commonly held belief was that men were the lifeblood of the Resistance so, after the war, people didn’t understand why these women had been taken to a camp. The other commonly held belief was that women in camps were raped by the Germans—which many were—and no young woman in her twenties wanted to be seen as ‘soiled goods.’ Ravensbrück had taken so much from these women; they didn’t want it to take their reputations too. So they said nothing.

  “Then the Iron Curtain came down and Ravensbrück was trapped on the wrong side. Nobody—historians, journalists—could reach it. Research became impossible; all the records were burned after the war. The Germans even threw the ashes into the lake, so eager were they that nobody learn what had happened behind the electric fence, hidden in a pine forest. I’ve been there and it is haunted. You can hear the dead crying out their despair—and their anger.”

  Kat saw, suddenly, water, drowned ash, a scream rising from the lake. She shivered.

  Elliott had stopped speaking. He cleared his throat, perhaps seeing something similar to Kat’s strange vision. She couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for him to have visited the place where so much violence and injustice had been inflicted upon so many women.

  After a moment, Elliott began again. “Since I visited Ravensbrück, it’s been my personal mission to write about the women who were held within the camp walls. I’ve been using Vera Atkins’s scant records. Unfortunately she kept most things in her head, not on paper, but she was the only one who tried to find the missing. And even she wasn’t allowed to go to Germany for her investigations until December 1945—months after the war was over. So much information was lost between the end of the war and her trip to Germany. Luckily, I’ve been able to speak to a couple of the women who were imprisoned at Ravensbrück—most of them are dead now, so it’s difficult to get firsthand accounts. At first, they denied they were there. Then they begged me to write about something else. They all say Ravensbrück was too horrific to ever be written about.”

  Too horrific. Oh God.

  “And my grandmother was there?” Kat’s voice was as thin as hundred-year-old voile.

  Elliott nodded, and Kat tried her hardest not to cry. Margaux needed her strength, not her tears.

  “Margaux Jourdan, along with a baby, was saved in April 1945 when the camp commandant let the Swiss Red Cross into Ravensbrück,” Elliott said. “That was almost a year after Margaux was imprisoned there. The Red Cross were able to take some of the French prisoners out to safety. Being French-born, Margaux and the baby she’d given birth to in the camp were handed over.”

  Kat tried to picture having a baby in a place like the one Elliott had described, but she couldn’t. She remembered the births of Lisbet and Daisy; both had taken place in a hospital, with midwives and doctors in attendance, essential oils burning, everything clean and sterile and with all of the medical equipment needed should anything go wrong. She’d had her own room, with a double bed, and Paul had stayed with her for a night or two.

  “Vera Atkins recorded a visit she made to Margaux Jourdan in France in July 1945.” Elliott kissed the top of Kat’s head, but shifted his focus to the window and Kat could tell he was seeing the words he’d read about her grandmother, rather than the view beyond. Then he looked down at Kat, compassion in his eyes.

  “Like the other women from Ravensbrück who Vera saw at that time, Margaux was terribly changed,” Elliott went on. “Vera wrote that she estimated Margaux weighed around seventy pounds. Her head had been shaved in the camp, and scurvy and other . . . things . . . had left her body bruised all over. But what you have to remember, Kat, is that despite being imprisoned in a camp built for the sole purpose of stealing one’s spirit and then destroying the body left behind, Margaux left Ravensbrück alive. One hundred and thirty thousand women passed through Ravensbrück. Up to ninety thousand of them died. Margaux didn’t.”

  “Oh God,” Kat said, wiping her eyes, trying to imagine her grandmother so deathly thin. And ninety thousand women dead. How must her grandmother have felt, witnessing death on such an inconceivable and colossal scale? How could it ever have been allowed to happen?

  She stood up, walked to the far windows and touched a hand to the glass. Behind it was near-darkness: dusk and a dark blue sea.

  “My mother died a week after giving birth to me,” she said, and hardly heard Elliott’s sharp intake of breath. Even though she had no real affection for her mother—how could you have affection for someone you had no recollection of?—the story was still hard to tell. The story of a mother who could have been, if only.
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  Kat made herself continue, going back further in time to a safer part of the story. “She was a doctor, doing her residency at a hospital in Sydney. She fell pregnant with me—a fling with a doctor who wanted nothing to do with a child. He’s never been in touch with me, and my mother never told Margaux his name—I suppose she thought she’d have plenty of time to do that later, after I was born, if he decided to become involved. Anyway, she worked right up until the birth, trying to prove herself, which was what you had to do if you were a woman in medicine, especially back then. So I thought maybe it was overwork and excessive fatigue that caused it.” Kat pressed her lips together, breathed in, pushed away the tightness in her throat and the sting of tears in her eyes, then kept going.

  “She died of cardiovascular complications from childbirth. I became obsessed with it for a time when I was studying medicine, looking up all the risk factors—she had none besides the fact that pregnancy puts the heart under more strain. But women with congenital or other preexisting heart conditions are far more likely to have cardiovascular complications. And there’s so much research now that shows a link between fetal malnutrition and heart disease in adulthood. I’m guessing a baby born at Ravensbrück wouldn’t have been well-nourished. Margaux always said that my mother was somewhat sickly, not as strong as others. She took her to lots of doctors, but sometimes heart problems are overlooked if there are no obvious symptoms. And now all I can think is that she probably died because she spent the first months of her life in a concentration camp.” Her voice trailed off.

  “Kat, I’m so sorry.” Elliott was beside her now, arms trying to shelter her from the unrelenting past. “I can’t believe you’re still speaking to me. All I’ve done is throw your life into chaos, and you’ve already had more to deal with than most people ever will. I should let all this go.”

  Kat shook her head. “How would you even begin to do that? You have to write about Ravensbrück. And Margaux. And the others—the Penroses. It’s all connected somehow. There’s a reason why there are two women who live virtually next door to one another using the name Margaux Jourdan. And as one of them is my grandmother, I need to know what that reason is.”