He stepped back. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have--”
“No,” she cut him off. “Don’t apologize.”
She picked her bag up before he could, shouldered it.
“Before we go, I need to tell you something. If we get separated, or if something happens to me, you have to get the diary and this message back to Standish.”
She told him of the overheard conversation, gave him the name, and the key for deciphering the notes in the diary.
“If I’m killed, or recaptured, you mustn’t try to get to me. Get to the coast, get to England. My father and the others must know that someone close to the King is a Nazi sympathizer. That, and the notes in the diary, are far more important than my life.”
Looking up at him, she saw the argument in his eyes, in the set of his mouth. “No. It’s the truth and you know it. We can’t lose the monarch, not with everything else. George must continue to be seen as a strong, capable ruler.”
“I’ll come for you.”
The words, so simply stated, cracked something in Grace’s heart. She wanted to weep, to crow, to dance. But it wasn’t to be. She was promised to another now, and from everything she’d read in the diary, that promise couldn’t be undone. Whoever he was, he would find her and drag her into the snowy night. Then, Grace Corvedale would be gone.
“No,” she said, going to the mouth of the tunnel. “My life for the King’s life. It’s a fair deal to save England.”
Dix followed, and rested his hands on her shoulders. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Grace.”
Tears sprang into her eyes, will you, nill you.
Shaking her head, she fought for control. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” he said, and to forestall any other comment, he led her out of the tunnel and into the night.
It took them two hours to reach the truck. The snow, deep in some places, a mere dusting in others, hindered their progress, caked their clothes and chilled them to the bone.
The truck itself was dilapidated, rusted and looked as if it had been left on the goat track to rust into oblivion.
“Don’t let appearances fool you,” Dix said, his long strides carrying him to the truck more quickly. He pulled a key from his pocket and opened the door for her.
The civilized gesture in the middle of the woods fanned the flames of her appreciation for Dix. They stomped and brushed the snow off as quickly as possible, then started the truck. Grace didn’t know cars, though she’d driven a good many of them. The heavy, satisfied purr of the engine when it turned over told her this was a well-kept auto despite its outer shell.
“I told you,” Dix said, with that lightning smile. “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
She held up her hands in mock-surrender. “I stand corrected.”
With great care, Dix put the car in gear and they rolled over the crisp snow, following the downward path of the mountain.
“What’s the plan, husband?” she said. “From now on, you must call me wife, or Greta, ja?” she added.
“Greta Liebenstraummer, my wife. No children.”
“Ja, zer gut.”
“Do you speak much German?” he asked as they bounced down the rutted track.
“Enough, but when I do speak it, I still sound English,” she said, watching him as he drove. His face was in shadow, but the bulk of him, his sheer size, was a reassuring presence in the drafty vehicle. The heater worked, but it was hard pressed to compete with the gaps in the doors and the cracks in the glass. “Where did you come up with that horrific accent you used as Franz?”
“Our gardener, at home, is German. He can speak English,” he looked at her briefly, smiling, “American English. But he mutters to himself, and to my mother’s roses, in German. I listened.”
Astonished, she stared. “You learned to speak German by listening to the gardener?”
“I learned how to care for roses too.”
“What other languages do you speak?”
“French,” he said, grunting as he downshifted to take a rougher part of the road more slowly. “And Cherokee. Brakes on this are terrible. I tuned the engines, but didn’t get to replace the brakes.”
“You tuned...” she said, trailing off. “Well. How did you learn French?”
“My mother’s French, from Verzey, not far from Reims.”
“Champagne region. I’ve visited there often,” she said, wincing as they hit a rut and she nearly flew into the air. The car tilted, sliding her over the seat to bump his shoulder. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Do you drive?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure I could manage this road.”
“This isn’t a road, it’s a nightmare. We’ll hit a farm road in a few minutes. We’ll stop there and look at the map.”
“Good. I have no idea where I am.”
“The lodge is at Zweiburg. Hitler came in from the Saarland, according to his chauffer, Herr Kempka. They were taking you to Ludwigshafen today, to fly to Berlin.”
“I figured I was twenty miles from the French border, where they took me across.”
“Closer to thirty, but yes. Problem is we can’t go that way. They’ll be watching it. It’s fortified along the old Siegfried Line on the German side, with new bunkers and constant construction. And you already know that on the French side, Le Ligne Maginot is full of bored soldiers waiting for Germans they can shoot.”
“My contacts might be able to get us through.”
“If we could get to them, yes. But I think your capture is a sure sign those might be compromised. It doesn’t really matter. Our German friends expect us to go that way. So we won’t.”
“We can’t go up through Poland,” she said, working her way around the map in her mind.
“Nor can we go through Saarland, now that they’ve re-allied themselves with the Reich. But we’ll head that direction.”
He took the turns with competent skill, keeping the rattling old truck on the track, despite the rocks and stumps she saw looming up in the headlamps.
“We’ll go up along the river to Kusel, then to Birkenfelt and on to Konz, south of Triers. My contact there will get us a plane. As soon as we can, we’ll fly from there to the Netherlands to refuel, and then cross the channel. The Netherlands are still standing neutral,” she heard the sneer in his voice for that.
“As is the United States.”
“Yeah,” he said, and his smile gleamed in the darkness. “So they say.”
Flying. She hated flying. But if it got her out of Germany, she’d ride a rocket.
“The biggest problem is gas,” she said, walking through the logistical steps.
“Yes. There won’t be many petrol stations along that route,” she said, as she tallied up the potential issues.
“You know it?” He sounded surprised.
“Not well,” she admitted, “but the Nahe River valley produces Rieslings. I’ve been to vineyards in that area. They are fairly remote.”
“I have extra fuel in the back, but,” Dix let that hang for a moment as he navigated a tricky bit of ground. To her surprise, as the wheels caught again, the road smoothed out. “Not enough for the whole trip. And here is our farm road.”
After a quick stop to relieve themselves and a check of the route Dix outlined, they moved on.
“You should get some sleep,” Dix advised, “I’ll need you to navigate later, but I know this part of the road.”
She agreed, sure she wouldn’t sleep, but within minutes, she had dropped off, and into the dreams. They were urgent now, more vivid than before. The menace she felt from the German was palpable. The fear. The sense of utter doom, which hung over her.
She jerked awake. Somehow, as she slept, she’d come to rest her head on Dix’s leg, and she felt his hand slide out of her hair as she struggled to sit up.
“Whoa, whoa,” he soothed. “Only a nightmare.” He put a hand on hers where she had braced it on the rudimentary dashboard. “You’re entitled to a few, af
ter these last few weeks.”
“Yes, I suppose.” She sat in silence, then said, “You’ve been driving for hours. I can drive, if you need me to.”
“I know. But we’re not going much farther. By daybreak, we need to be under cover if we can. Neither of us are convincing enough as Germans, nor do we want to draw attention to ourselves in any way. They will be looking for us. Anything Hitler wants as badly as he wanted you, they will look for.”
“I know.”
“Tell me why. The diary?”
Grace considered it, but given what he’d risked, she couldn’t deny his right to know everything. “Yes and no. I’m a servant of the Crown, as you know.”
“A spy,” he said, but his voice was teasing and light.
“If you like,” she agreed, smiling as well. “That makes it sound far more glamorous than it is. I simply collect and pass on information I find in my visits to various wineries around France and Southern Germany.
“Hmmm. Yes, well, glamorous or not, if it keeps us out of a new Great War, then I’m deeply grateful.”
“And that would be why I did it,” she said, glad he understood. Her father had come back from France a changed man, according to her Grandmother Corvedale. And her uncles, the two she had never met, were buried somewhere near Somme. The land there at Somme, where the war was worst, had still not fully recovered from the blood spilled in such appalling quantity.
“If not for spying, then why were you taken?”
“I thought it was that, and when they took the diary I was sure of it,” Grace said, curling her legs up onto the seat, but this time, she was careful not to encroach on his space. That had been far too lovely, far too comfortable a place for a condemned woman.
“And it wasn’t?”
“No. Are you familiar with the article from the London Times about Hitler’s rise to power? I believe it was reprinted in the New York Times as well.”
“The New Orleans Times-Picayune carried it.” He grimaced slightly. “The mystical is always news in New Orleans,” he said, “And the article’s references to Madame Blavatsky and the Thule Society’s origins were added to the Times-Picayune article.”
“Then you may understand this better than I thought,” she said, relieved. “I didn’t know you were from New Orleans.”
“Yes, I live in Boston now and my business is there, but my family is in New Orleans.”
“What do you do?”
“When I’m not being a soldier, you mean?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling.
“I import tea, coffee and other spices, and sell them across the United States.”
“Goodness, that sounds impressive.”
She saw that flashing smile again. “Somewhat. But you were talking about the article. About Hitler and why he wanted you.”
No better way than to blurt it out, get it over with.
“It’s the brooch, the one I wear as a necklace.”
“The gold and sapphire one.”
“Yes. The diary tells the story of the necklace and its supposed magical power for the women of my family. It’s hundreds of years old, dating before the 1100s and the conquest of Jerusalem, but it came to my family in 1314.”
Dix frowned. “You say that like it was yesterday.”
She laughed. “For the historians in my family, it was. My Aunt Grace, the one who takes to that kind of thing the most, seems to feel these long dead knights have merely stepped away for a quick smoke, or a cup of tea, rather than having been moldering in their tombs for centuries.”
“That’s a difference in our worlds, I guess,” he said, softly. “Not that there aren’t a vast number of those, but my family doesn’t have that prestige.”
“Really? Well, it isn’t that important,” she said, but she saw the look on his face. Evidently it was a sore point with him, so she quickly let it go. “What’s important is that a legend goes with the jewel. It says the eldest daughter of the family is to receive the jewel when she comes of age. When she meets her destined husband, she will begin to dream of him, and must marry him, or terrible fates will fall upon her, and upon the family.” She sighed. “The same is said to apply if one loses either the jewel or the diary, but that’s been proven to be untrue.”
“Really?”
“Well, the jewel was lost once, briefly, but recovered, so I guess we’ll never know. And until now, no one was in a situation of peril that the diary and the jewel were endangered.”
“How fascinating. Do you believe it?”
“I didn’t, not really,” she admitted. In the darkness of the car, with their lives in the balance, she was compelled to total honesty. And with him, with Dix, even more so. “And it hasn’t been completely secret, you see. One of my great grandmothers loved to tell the story of how she and my great-grandfather fell in love. She was a flighty creature, unfortunately, and a terrible gossip. The story wasn’t that interesting in face of new scandals, so it died away. But I was careless, I used the story to get information, to build rapport with a mother over the wedding of her daughter.”
Grace looked out into the darkness. Nothing stirred, not even the wind, on the snowy landscape. The stars were hard, winking dots on a field of inky black. It was so cold, so very, very cold.
“Did you get the information you needed?” Dix asked softly.
“I did.”
“Then it was what you needed to do.”
She sighed. “Yes, it was, but that was the tipping of the domino, I’m afraid. Somehow the story got to Hitler. You know of his passion for eugenics?”
“You mean genocide?”
She shuddered. “Yes, might as well be that. He decided that my jewel might help him build his master race.”
“Damnation,” Dix said softly. “Beg pardon,” he apologized, but his indrawn breath said he understood the gravity of the situation.
“No need. His historian read the diary, told him that he couldn’t use it that way, according to the book. Only I could wield it. And until I passed it on to my daughter, should I have one, it would lie dormant.”
Dix saw the flaw in the plan immediately. “And if you died without passing it on?”
“I don’t know.” She shifted restlessly on the seat. “It hasn’t happened, not in all the centuries. Even when it was lost, even the one time where a mother passed the gem to her daughter at a very young age, it’s stayed in the family.”
“Where did this thing come from?”
“We have no idea. Some think it’s from Egypt,” she said. “The lotus flowers, the etchings in the gold are all ancient Egyptian symbols, but that could mean nothing. The Egyptian Empire was, like the British Empire, vast.”
“Yes.” Dix stopped at a crossroads, checking the map. He turned north, and took up the thread of the conversation. “So it shows you your true love?”
“No.”
Her answer was so curt and short, Dix turned to look at her.
“It doesn’t,” she answered defensively. “It shows you who you’re destined to marry.”
“Ah,” he said. “So not all these marriages have been happy ones?”
“I didn’t say that. I said the book doesn’t talk about love. It talks about destiny.”
“These people didn’t love each other?”
“Of course they did, but that wasn’t the guarantee. Only that the gem would show you, in dreams, your destined mate.”
Something in her voice alerted him. “You’ve had dreams.”
She felt the panic and tears well up, sitting like a huge stone on her chest.
“Grace?”
“Yes,” she said, finally. “I dreamed.”
“And?”
“He’s a Nazi.”
Chapter IX
The silence deepened in the car. Dix didn’t know what to say. He believed in magic, or at least in those things you can’t always explain. While his parents attended a protestant church every Sunday, they certainly believed in the more mystic side of things, and so did
he.
How could he not, growing up in New Orleans with a passionately French mother, to whom everything was a sign, and his father’s Cherokee heritage as well?
Dawn was breaking when he saw what he needed.
“There, that’s what we need,” he said, pointing off a ways into a fallow field. “A barn. We can pull the truck around behind it, out of sight.”
“Won’t the farmer wonder, or forbid it?”
“No, not these days. Times have been hard, and as long as we don’t leave a mess, or set it on fire, farmers here won’t begrudge us rest in their barn.”
“All right.”
Dix put the truck in reverse and backed down the road to the edge of the field. He eased the truck into the field at the tree line, so his tracks wouldn’t be as visible as they would running straight to the barn. The road had been clear, and didn’t betray their passage, but the obvious tracks of the truck in the field were something he’d have to see to.
The labor of that, and the time would give him room to think.
“Grace, I don’t know if there’s a solution to what’s going on,” he began, “but if there is, I’ll do my best to help you find it.”
He looked steadily at her, once he turned off the truck’s engine. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he added.
She nodded, not meeting his gaze. “Thank you. I don’t know what it would be. But I can hope.”
“Good. Now, take your bag and I’ll get the blankets from the back of the truck. We won’t be able to have a fire, but I have some bread and cheese, a bottle of wine, some sausage, enough for a cold meal.”
Together, they heaved open the large barn door, slipping into the sweetly hay-scented, and very full, barn. The crop had been bountiful and the bales were stacked to the rafters of the modest building. This farmer’s cows would not go wanting, no matter how bitter the winter.
“We’ll stack the bales like this,” he said, pulling some down to form a square. “That way, we can block the drafts from the doors.”
“This building is so well built, there’s not much of one, even with the door open,” Grace noted, pulling down a bale.
“You’re strong, for a woman,” Dix complimented.
A Jewel In Time; A Sultry Sisters Anthology Page 20