The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  She arrived at the cottage in Tangmere from where the agents departed feeling almost like a rainstorm, as if she were a collection of individual beads—her head was given over to a make-believe person with the code name Odette Legrand, her heart belonged to Nicholas, her soul was Skye Penrose’s—all of them tumbling headlong to earth and how did she know which droplets would slide harmoniously into the river and thus move easily onward and which ones might shatter to pieces on the sharp point of a rock?

  She smoothed her hands over her skirt; it didn’t need smoothing but her palms were damp. Then she stepped hesitantly into the cottage.

  She hadn’t seen Nicholas since they’d returned from leave but now there he was with Margaux. She wanted to run straight into his arms, the one place where her apprehensions might settle, but there were other people around. All she could do was follow him with her eyes, the same way he was following her with his. Soon before dinner was served, he indicated with his head that she should follow him and she did, into a momentarily quiet hallway.

  He placed a hand on her cheek and drew her in close, whispering, “Are you all right? You look so pale.”

  “I’m terrified,” she admitted, words she wouldn’t say to anyone but him.

  I was so scared, she’d said to him once before when the Lancaster had nearly crashed into her in the sky. But that fear was nothing compared to what churned though her now. If that plane had run into her, there would have been an explosion, and then death. A certain outcome. But what she was facing now had no certainty to it at all: if she were caught by the Nazis, all she knew was that death might be something she would pray for because what they would do to her would make her understand for the first time what pain really was.

  She touched the locket at her neck. Inside it was the cyanide capsule she’d been given along with French occupation money and identity papers. Cyanide to bring death on quickly so that she wouldn’t suffer.

  Nicholas drew her hand away from the locket and held it. “You know it’s normal to be scared?”

  She breathed out, and the rainstorm inside her pushed back so that, for the first time since she’d been briefed on what she was to do in Paris, she felt like she knew who she was, and who she needed to be.

  “You’re the bravest person I know, Skye,” Nicholas said, voice a murmur in her ear, “because you do what needs to be done even when you’re scared. And remember, you promised me you wouldn’t fucking die, so you won’t.”

  She hadn’t thought it would be possible to smile at all that night but she did, remembering their handshake at the pub in Hamble. “Thank you,” she said, reaching up to kiss him, just once, because she knew they were running out of time.

  “I love you,” Nicholas said against her lips and Skye said the same. It was their past and their present, and it would be their future.

  Her mother had been wrong. The future isn’t a promise yet to be kept, Vanessa had said. But Skye and Nicholas had made their promise. And even though one part of it was yet to be kept—I will marry you—everything he told her now, his gaze locked in hers, said that it would be.

  * * *

  After a dinner she could hardly eat, Skye and Margaux climbed aboard a Lysander piloted by O’Farrell. All the way to France, Skye could feel Margaux’s eyes on her and she tried not to fidget, tried to take solace from being in the sky, tried to remember only Nicholas telling her he loved her, tried not to think about where she was going—Nazi-occupied Paris. Then the plane landed and it was time to climb down the ladder.

  “Wait,” O’Farrell called to her before she did.

  She stepped up to the cockpit.

  “Liberty’s pregnant,” O’Farrell said, his obvious joy almost outshining the moonbeams around them. “We’re having a baby.”

  “A baby,” Skye repeated, nerves fleeing in the face of this news that was, she now realized—and despite what she’d said to her sister—the best thing she’d heard in a long time and just what they all needed. She kissed his cheek, knowing why he’d told her now, right before she walked away with the reception committee. “I can’t wait to meet my niece.”

  O’Farrell grinned at her, and it was the kind of grin that meant everything would be all right.

  And it was. The reception committee was ready and waiting, grateful for the supplies they’d brought, and quick to send the two women on, in the morning, by train to Paris. Margaux went to have lunch with her Nazi target and Skye met Catherine Dior, a somber-faced woman with startling eyes—like dewy blossoms, but dark now with secrets. Catherine worked with the Resistance circuit Skye was to join as a courier.

  At first, few words passed between the two and Skye wasn’t sure if Catherine’s reticence was just her nature or if she didn’t trust Skye yet. She supposed that was sensible: when so much was at stake, how could trust ever be given freely?

  But their friendship cemented itself that first afternoon when they were walking together to the Métro station. Skye carried a basket covered with a cloth as if she’d just purchased the day’s rations; it really held money and guns. She almost froze when a German soldier approached, could feel Catherine’s aghast eyes on her and knew the other woman thought Skye would fail this, her first test, because she’d been in France for less than a day.

  Instead Skye thought of her promise to Nicholas and her sister’s baby, a child she wanted to meet, and she smiled at the German.

  “What do you have in there?” he asked, unaffected by her smile.

  Catherine went to speak but Skye interrupted. “Why, things to spy on you with, of course. Who wouldn’t want binoculars to see you up close, a radio to eavesdrop on everything you say?”

  She laughed and the German did too. Nobody in their right mind would tell a Nazi they had such equipment in their basket. So she got away with it, in exchange for a promise to meet him later at Fouquet’s.

  He checked her papers so he knew her name—Odette Legrand—and her address. She would have to go. She waved goodbye with her smile still on.

  “What will you do at Fouquet’s?” Catherine asked gravely. “You know what he wants.”

  “Drink enough of the champagne he’ll buy me to ensure that I’m incapable of anything other than throwing up on his boots at the end of the night.”

  Catherine smiled and the sorrow in her eyes retreated, and she looked, for a moment, like any woman in her mid-twenties: a little too thin, brown hair not as glossy as it should be due to soap rations, a distinct elegance hiding under the serious face. “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  And she did, improving on Skye’s plan by pretending to have drunk too much herself, thus saving Skye from a hangover and allowing Skye to leave early to look after her supposedly drunken friend.

  “Thank you,” Skye said once they were far enough away from Fouquet’s to speak properly.

  Catherine shrugged and Skye thought it would be left at that but then Catherine added quietly, “Thank you.”

  From that night on, Skye and Caro and Margaux, in between drinking too much champagne as a salve for their abraded nerves, did everything they could. Margaux gathered information from her Nazi; Catherine collected intelligence on German troop movements; and Skye, as soon as she discovered that the circuit leader she was supposed to report to had gone missing, found herself managing the Resistance cell—around two hundred people and all of the money—and recruiting more and more French civilians to the cause. Within just two weeks, they had sent vital information back to SOE about the German defense system in Paris and its points of weakness; and had armed and prepared dozens of small groups of fighters who would erect barricades and help take the city when the Allies were ready.

  “We might win,” Skye whispered to Caro and Margaux, believing for the first time that it was possible.

  It was almost dusk and they were walking along the Rue Royale. A heavy wooden door opened and, from the courtyard behind, the scent of jasmine bloomed into the street.

  Caro inhaled deeply, closing her eyes.
“Childhood and summer,” she said.

  “And hope,” Margaux added, smiling a little as she spoke.

  Catherine darted into the courtyard and plucked a handful of blooms, passing some to Skye, some to Margaux and keeping some for herself. “To remember,” she said simply and Skye knew what her quiet, flower-loving friend meant: that every time they smelled jasmine from then on, they would think not of Nazis but of hope.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, Skye and Margaux were in a field in L’Aigle, standing by to be taken back to England. D-day had, unbelievably, just happened; but all of France, beyond a strip of beach, was still in German hands. The two women were to be apprised of new targets and new plans, and would then return to Paris within two days to help the Resistance wreak havoc with sabotage to support the Allied advance.

  As Skye waited with Margaux for the pickup, she felt her excitement at the prospect of perhaps seeing Nicholas buzzing out of her like radio waves.

  “I hope the Germans aren’t tuned in to your frequency,” Margaux said drily as a Lysander circled overhead.

  The plane landed and O’Farrell stepped out, which he wasn’t supposed to do. He hurried over to them, face white, and Skye knew. Nicholas. Margaux fumbled for Skye’s hand.

  “He’s not dead,” O’Farrell said emphatically. “He just didn’t come back.”

  No! That one word, keening inside her, was all Skye allowed herself of heartbreak. She did not weep. She pushed away the memory of the sky she and Nicholas had stood beneath in Cornwall, the one she’d feared because it had seemed without mercy. She remembered instead that he’d wrapped her finger in seaweed and convinced her of a future. It was up to her to make that future happen. She would find him.

  “I’ll tell them it was too cloudy,” O’Farrell said. “That I couldn’t land. Then you can stay and find him. He went down near Orléans.”

  “I’m staying too,” Margaux said.

  Margaux’s words made Skye’s throat ache. She didn’t look at her friend, knew Margaux didn’t want her sacrifice acknowledged; that to her it wasn’t even a sacrifice, but an inevitability.

  Then O’Farrell said, “Liberty’s missing too. She’s with Nicholas. You have to find them both.”

  Comprehension had Skye reeling as she watched O’Farrell climb back into his plane and felt Margaux draw her into a tight embrace. Liberty must have been working for SOE too. Her sister’s drunkenness, her search for solace in O’Farrell’s arms, her spiky attitude to Skye had most likely been the only way she could manage all of the emotion, emotion Skye understood because she felt it now too. The knowledge that death was around every corner; that anyone might betray you; that you would shoot and kill someone if you had to. Liberty had always had difficulty expressing even the most ordinary of emotions. How else could she have handled the constant peril of living life as another person in Nazi-occupied France?

  And now Liberty was pregnant. A baby would only magnify everything: the danger, the threat, the sense that one must do whatever one could to survive.

  Skye heard Margaux whisper in her ear. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about Liberty.”

  Then a sound. A terrible roar from above, loud and brutal, as if someone had taken the sky in their hands, ripped it open, and let hell fall out. O’Farrell’s plane, a ball of fire, screaming to earth, shot down by a flak battery nobody had known about.

  “No!” Skye wept now. “No!”

  O’Farrell, hair as blond and shiny as hope, a man who’d come to England to fly planes at a time when he could have turned his back on the war, a man who’d rivaled the moonbeams when he’d told Skye about his baby—he was gone. Another soul to carry inside her. How many could she bear?

  She cried, and so did Margaux, on each other’s shoulders. Liberty’s child, if it even survived, was fatherless now.

  * * *

  But they couldn’t stand and mourn for long. That was war: a too-short explosion of grief, which then had to be buried inside, covered over with determination. There were two people and an unborn child to be found. That night in her bed, Skye pressed a new spray of jasmine flowers to her face and hoped harder than she ever had before.

  But there was no longer a Resistance circuit operating in Orléans; everyone had been captured and tortured and killed. Despite that setback, Margaux and Skye didn’t stop any of the work they’d been sent to France to do, but they added to it the task of finding Nicholas and Liberty.

  They got so close. They heard a tale about a man and a woman hiding in a cellar. A priest had seen them.

  Then on the sixth of July, one month after D-day when the Allied troops were still far from Paris, as Skye, Margaux and Catherine walked along a street, three men in Gestapo-gray approached. None of the three friends faltered. But the men did not pass by. They pounced, and Skye knew immediately that somebody must have betrayed the women. Perhaps Margaux’s Nazi had become suspicious. Perhaps Catherine had been seen transmitting messages. Perhaps one of the men Skye had recruited hadn’t been as loyal as she’d thought.

  Margaux managed to bite one of the Gestpao agents, Skye to scratch another’s cheek and Catherine to land a well-placed kick. Skye didn’t even consider the cyanide she wore in the locket around her neck. She had to stay alive.

  But the building on the Rue de la Pompe where she was taken was not a place devoted to life.

  There, a redheaded French girl sat on the edge of a bathtub transcribing everything Skye said into a notebook while a German man injured every part of Skye’s body in ways she had never imagined. The bathtub, full of water, was the means by which Skye thought she might die as her head was pushed into it time and time again.

  Nicholas. She thought of Nicholas. And her sister. She prayed that no Nazi had done any of these things to her sister.

  She was so grateful when she finally passed out.

  When she woke, she was not in a better place but lying in a cell in Fresnes prison. Another place known for torture. Her head spasmed with so much pain she was sick. But at least she was alive.

  That night, she heard tapping on the wall. Morse code. Prisoners were talking to each other in the only way they could. Skye wept when she heard the taps that spelled out Caro’s name. And Margaux’s. She crawled to the wall and tapped out her own name: Odette Legrand. She wept still more when Margaux and Caro replied.

  Days passed. So many days, each of them the same. Her head in water. Her body disfigured. Her throat raw from vomiting. And then the nights and the blessed relief as she discovered that Catherine and Margaux had each survived another day too.

  Throughout Skye held firm to her story of being a French girl caught up in the thrill of danger. And the Germans appeared to believe she was Odette Legrand, and that she had been working for the Resistance—which was bad enough, but not as bad as being discovered to be a British spy. She prayed they believed the same of Margaux.

  Finally she was moved again. To a train station: Gare de Pantin. There was no possible way to stop the tears when she saw Margaux and Caro on the platform too. Skye did not look at their bruises. She looked only at their eyes, which were the loveliest things she had seen since the sixth of July, full of tenderness. She had almost forgotten that humans could love, and be kind.

  “They don’t know?” Margaux whispered. That you’re British? she didn’t add, but Skye understood.

  Skye shook her head. “No.”

  “Thank God.”

  So they were three French girls who’d foolishly been caught up with the Resistance, not one French girl and two spies working for the British government.

  The signs of imminent Allied victory were everywhere that day, lessening the ache of Skye’s injuries somewhat. The Gare de l’Est had been destroyed by an Allied bomb, said Margaux, whose specialty had always been information. And there was no longer any electricity in Paris.

  The Allies were at Rambouillet, the Red Cross workers at the train station told them, not quite forty miles from Paris. That distance coul
d be broached in a day!

  “You’ll be free before they can take you to Germany,” the Red Cross volunteer called as she was pushed away by a Nazi.

  Skye squeezed Caro’s hand, and Margaux’s. They would make it. They just had to be patient.

  But they were pushed into cattle wagons on a train that left Paris with 2,200 prisoners on board. The brutal August heat poured down upon the wagons and breathing became almost impossible. The train moved slowly, no faster than a person walking, stopping constantly to let through the German troop trains that had priority.

  The women’s spirits rose when the Resistance tried to stop the train at Dormans. But they were fought off by the Germans. Dead men lay like railway sleepers all around.

  “Dormans is hardly more than sixty miles from Paris,” Caro told Skye. Her voice was the barest whisper through her parched mouth. “It’s taken two days to travel such a short distance.”

  “The slower we go, the better chance we have of the Allies catching up to us,” Skye said, and Margaux nodded.

  They must think like that. They had to, despite the fact that the latrine buckets were so full they slopped filth onto the floor, the sweat of fear emanating from the crammed-in bodies was choking and the women around them had begun to die from the diabolical heat.

  “Not us,” Caro said, gathering Skye’s and Margaux’s hands in hers.

  But Skye saw that her eyes had wilted, that Margaux’s ordinarily composed face was set hard over a clenched jaw. And Skye’s hands were twisting at her neck, seeking out a cerulean scarf that she’d had to leave behind in England.

  Then Caro sniffed the noxious air. “I can smell jasmine,” she said, pulling a dead bloom from her pocket.

  She passed it to Skye to press her nose against, and then to Margaux. Skye’s hands settled, as did Margaux’s jaw, and Caro’s eyes bloomed once more with hope.