‘I can arrange a flat for you in Paris, if you like. Or a small house on the outskirts.’
‘Would I be of use to you there?’
He smiled. ‘No.’
‘Is there any work at all I might do?’ She knew he’d hear the anguish in her voice. And just perhaps he’d understand. James Lorrimer had been born to duty, to serve his country while she had been born simply to serve. But she had found another world and she could not bear to give it up. A world that mattered and in which she mattered, and yet still served.
‘There is one possibility,’ he said quietly. ‘It might well come to nothing. It might come to nothing and still be dangerous, for you and for your child.’
‘What is it?’
‘There is an organisation being formed in Belgium. They call themselves La Dame Blanche, after the white ghostly woman who is meant to appear at the end of the Kaiser’s family dynasty, not to mention various other ghostly and powerful females. It’s not much yet — scraps of information passed along. The eventual idea is to have women sitting on every occupied railway station, noting German troop movements, as well as gathering whatever other intelligence they can. As I said, it may come to nothing.’
‘What would I do?’
‘Go to a small village in Belgium as a widow, a refugee. We would find a reliable woman who would pretend, say, to be your mother-in-law. You would have your baby there, but, if La Dame Blanche becomes a reality, you would also liaise with British agents who would collate the information and get it to where it’s needed. Meanwhile, keep your ears and eyes open for whatever intelligence you can gather. I’ll arrange a way for you to get information through. There may even be other tasks, if La Dame Blanche really does eventuate. It is impossible to know at this stage what will happen. The whole concept may simply fizzle out.’
‘Do you think it will? Fizzle?’
‘No. Or I would not suggest sending one of my most valued agents.’
She felt her heart unfreeze at the words.
Chapter 4
The house was comfortable, middle class. Madame Larresse, or ‘Ma Mère’, as Elspeth called her, had two daughters, Suzanne, who was eighteen, and Charlotte, sixteen. Elspeth was now ‘Marie’, officially a niece by marriage ‘… but I think of her as a daughter’. The story Madame Larresse told the village gossips was that Marie’s husband and parents had been killed in the first weeks of the invasion.
Madame Larresse knew Elspeth’s name was not Marie, but thought it a third name. That name was not her real one, either. The contact from England who collected the letters Elspeth sent to her supposed sister in Brussels knew Elspeth by yet another name: her fourth. James Lorrimer trusted neither the Belgian villagers nor British intelligence. England’s ties with Germany were strong, and information leaked from both sides.
By the time Elspeth had been in Belgium for three months she believed that when — not if — La Dame Blanche spread across Belgium, as women like Madame Larresse hoped, it would be an organisation of enormous use. Already the sister of Charlotte’s godmother’s aunt was collecting information on German troop trains, their times and estimated number of men on board. Elspeth herself had climbed the embankment with Charlotte to check the information was correct before passing it on, taking a basket and gloves with them and the pretext of collecting nettles for soup. The Boche suspected everyone, but a beautiful girl and a pregnant woman collecting nettles would seem innocuous.
As the months went by, more intelligence was passed to the Larresse household: troop build-ups, train timetables, the names of the German officers . . . it was impossible to know what small part of the jigsaw might be useful.
Elspeth and Charlotte collected firewood, now, on the road to the nearest military camp. Each time a truck passed Elspeth noted the time and estimated the possible contents from its weight on the tyres, disguising her notes as a knitting pattern.
If she were discovered to be an English spy, the ‘knitting pattern’ cover would not hold. She would almost certainly be executed, even more certainly tortured first for information she did not have — her only contacts with the potential resistance organisation so far were the extended Larresse family. Even her contact with England was done via that weekly letter posted to Brussels, and the letters to her in return.
Was the information useful? Probably, but only if used well. Elspeth knew enough of military intelligence to accept that vital information was too often ignored. But this was her job, her duty, and her choice.
It was only as her baby grew, month by month, kicking with the vigour of both parents, that she realised she was risking her child’s life now, as well as her own, with each expedition.
But she would not be doing so for much longer. Soon, she thought, pressing her hand to her aching back as she picked up yet another dead branch, she would be even further removed from suspicion as well as from active intelligence gathering. She would sit in Madame’s rocking chair (‘I used it to feed each of my children’), her own baby in her arms, her only official task to write the weekly letter to her ‘sister’. Her life would be caring for her child . . .
Her child. Huw’s child. The letters from her ‘sister’ transcribed the letters Huw sent to her. He was ‘Cousin Michel’, and the last page of each of her letters — the page where she sent her love — was her weekly letter to him, to be sent on to France with the inscription ‘Dearest Huw’ added in a good copy of her hand, a careful letter describing the weather, or innocuous memories they shared. This meant his letters to her were seen by yet more eyes, as were hers to him, but each would have been seen by at least one censor even if she had been in England, nor could she have told him the heart of her life — their growing child.
Meanwhile, it seemed, across Belgium, the plans for an organised resistance movement were growing.
‘These men! Always they underestimate us. We can do so much more than gather the information,’ announced Madame Larresse one evening as they sat before the fire made with newly gathered wood, expertly knitting a baby’s matinee jacket with wool unravelled from an old jersey of her late husband, killed by the Boche. (Madame Larresse always spat at the mention of the Boche.)
Monsieur Larresse had been in the Belgian army. Their village had not been taken in the first flush of the invasion, so they had avoided the worst of the atrocities: the raping with bayonets, the public tortures of half-naked women that went on for hours. But every family knew of them.
Elspeth sat back on the sofa and tried to get comfortable. She was nine months pregnant now. Dinner had been onion soup — the Boche took almost all the food, except what was in back gardens or foraged in the forest. The soup had been delicious, rich in herbs, but also slightly indigestible. ‘What kinds of things?’
‘The English ask us to watch the train stations. But what if the train cannot run? What if,’ Madame Larresse smiled, a hawk’s smile, ‘the railway bridge, it vanishes? There can be no trains until another bridge is built. With no trains, the troops, they do not move.’
‘How does the bridge vanish?’
‘Henri the butcher has dynamite.’ Madame Larresse spoke as casually as if the butcher had offered to find their family a rabbit for Sunday dinner.
Elspeth blinked. ‘How?’
Madame Larresse shrugged. ‘The English sent it. The dynamite sits at the back of his shop.’
‘But why send it to Henri?’ I am the English agent here, Elspeth thought resentfully. Presumably the males back in England felt something as powerful as dynamite should be sent to a man. But she should at least have been informed.
Madame shrugged again, as if she’d had the same thought. ‘Cutting the throats of sheep does not necessarily give a man the stomach to blow up the Boche.’
‘Does Henri know how to use dynamite?’ asked Elspeth carefully.
‘His brother was in the army. He used these things.’
‘And Henri’s brother will blow up the bridge?’
‘We women will blow up the bridge,’
said Madame Larresse with satisfaction. ‘And not just the bridge. We will wait until there is a train, a train full of Boche. We will kill them all and laugh at them dying in their agony.’
There were times when Elspeth was not comfortable with Madame Larresse. ‘Henri’s brother will teach us to use the explosives?’
‘No. He is dead. But what is there to know? I saw the dynamite today, when I bought the sausage for our own cassoulet tomorrow. There is a fuse, long, like string. We put the dynamite under the bridge, where it meets the railway cutting, just before the train comes at dawn, we light the fuse. And then we walk slowly away, for if we run the Boche might suspect.’
‘But they will see us breaking curfew,’ said Elspeth impatiently. Us, she thought. I am nine months pregnant and Madame Larresse is fifty and looks seventy. Suzanne, the older daughter, taught piano and Charlotte helped keep house. She doubted the girls had even seen dynamite, much less knew how to place it. Elspeth had at least seen it used. She laid her hands on her swollen stomach. The child was quieter these days, with less room to kick.
I will not risk you with this, she told her baby silently. Gathering intelligence was dangerous enough. Sabotage — successful or not — would bring retaliation, even to the innocent.
‘You will not be there,’ said Madame, echoing her thought. ‘The Boche,’ she spat, ‘would wonder at a woman in your state being out gathering mushrooms. And that is what we say if they do see us,’ Madame Larresse’s smile might be an eagle’s, now, ready to tear her prey apart. ‘We are just poor women. We cry, we say, oh, I am so scared. Suzanne is so beautiful. I am old woman. Who suspects an old woman? I sob on their shoulders and they do not arrest me. They take us for coffee perhaps — even a cognac to soothe my poor old nerves. They say the new commander even has a heart, not like the old one,’ she spat again, ‘who has gone to France now.’
‘And we can kill Boches,’ said Suzanne softly, coming in carrying a tray holding four cups of tisane from the herbs in the garden. Two of Suzanne’s best friends had died, slowly, in the first week of the invasion, when Germany’s admitted policy was to cause so many atrocities that British public opinion would force their government to enter the war.
Elspeth tried to think. Her brain had become like porridge lately. And she didn’t share these women’s casual wish to cause the enemy death and pain. She was a patriot, had worked long for her country and its allies. But not by handing out death and agony, though both were now inescapable in this new world of war. Now, especially, she longed to think of life, not killing.
‘It might work,’ she admitted. She could teach Madame at least a little more about dynamite, and where to place it. ‘You could only do it once. A woman may be found sobbing by one exploded railway bridge. But if she is found at two the Germans would suspect.’
‘The Boche? They are fools. But no, one does not give even fools a chance to work it out.’ Madame Larresse nodded, as if coming to a decision. ‘That is how we will work it. Each party of women will do sabotage once and once only. Each group has one person who will know only one person in the next group. That way, if we are questioned, we know only those we work with or close friends or family.’
Elspeth nodded. That made sense. She had been sent to organise the villagers. But these women were more than capable of organising themselves. Yet there was still so much they did not know.
‘The Germans will retaliate, kill innocents perhaps if they cannot find those responsible,’ she warned them.
‘Then we will kill more, to avenge our dead,’ said Madame calmly.
What had Madame been like in peace time? wondered Elspeth. Had the horrors of the invasion turned her so merciless?
But this was war. Soldiers killed and were killed in war. Why should she, of all people, be so surprised that village women too would accept death to free their country?
‘I will ask in the next letter if someone who has worked with dynamite can visit,’ she offered quietly. ‘It is a little more complicated than lighting a fuse.’
‘That would be good.’ Madame Larresse smiled at Elspeth. ‘Perhaps the English could send us someone to teach us other ways to kill the Boche, as well as what you have taught us.’ Which was little: basic cryptography, self-defence using a stocking noose or a ruthless hatpin. ‘Poison, perhaps,’ continued Madame Larresse, ‘in an apple cake?’ She patted Elspeth’s hand. ‘You are our family now, ma chérie, you who have come to Belgium like an angel to help us kill the enemy.’
‘I do not think angels —’ began Elspeth, then stopped.
Her stockings were wet.
‘Your waters have broken,’ said Madame Larresse calmly. ‘That is good. Suzanne, put water on to boil, and fetch the cloths.’ She smiled. ‘The sooner the bébé is born, the sooner you can help us kill Boche, eh?’
And Huw wanted me safe, thought, Elspeth, reaching for the ring that hung on her heart as the first pain began.
Chapter 5
She had been expecting pain. Pain came, swifter and worse than she had ever known. She had expected hours or, worse, days of screaming. She had, in fact, expected death or invalidism for weeks.
In fact it was all over in three hours, Madame Larresse and Suzanne and Madame Gunier, the midwife, clucking and smiling over the angel in her arms.
She was beautiful. ‘Angélique,’ whispered Elspeth. What other name did this miracle deserve?
Suzanne brought her a tisane, sweet and comforting. Elspeth sipped and watched her baby suckle. This extraordinarily intelligent baby who knew what to do with no fretting or coaxing, latching on with cherubic lips even though the milk was yet to come.
She felt tired and extremely sore. She also felt exultant.
And something more. She loved this child with a deep, unexpected passion. She would defend her like a tiger if she had to.
And Angélique’s father? Somehow she would find him and let him know he had what he had longed for. She had been practising codes for months, training the women there. Not that she and Huw had a code that they could share. But in the next letter to her ‘sister’ she could speak of . . . the unexpected Christmas present he had left for her. Yes, that would work. And how she had only just found it now. And then talk about a child who had come into her life . . . her sister Brigette’s child, that was it, for Huw knew there was no Brigette. She could tell Huw how wonderful she was: the fuzz of hair, her very baldness beautiful, the soft skin, the tiny perfect hands. The scent of her . . .
Huw was a father once again. Somehow she must let him know it.
And, if he could get leave, she must meet him. Surely he must get some leave. For now they must be married, to give this child an English birth certificate and a name. She could not even let Angélique be baptised here, for that would complicate her citizenship.
They had given her a phrase to use, if she needed to leave: ‘the cabbages have been especially fine this year’. (If the cabbages had slugs, it would have meant an urgent extraction). She placed the phrase in the next letter to her ‘sister’. A week later the reply arrived. ‘I envy you the cabbages! If I arrive on your doorstep in the next month, will you make me cabbage soup to Mother’s recipe?’
She did not tell the family she intended to leave. Partly it was policy — any information was to be shared with as few as possible. But she also felt shame, abandoning women who believed she would stay with them till the Germans had been swept from their land. Possibly — even probably — Madame, Charlotte and Suzanne would respect her desire to keep her daughter safe. But nonetheless it felt like a betrayal.
Yet weeks passed, with no further instructions, either on the use of dynamite or how she might leave Belgium. She would need to get to the sea, somehow, to a fishing boat like the one that had brought her here, to take her to England. But without word from England, she could only wait.
Madame, thankfully, seemed to have postponed plans for immediate sabotage. She confined herself to gathering information, apart from the one afternoon she came ho
me, smiling with deep satisfaction. The Boche who had tried to rape a village girl would rape no more. She had disposed of him most excellently and discreetly. A year ago Elspeth might have enjoyed the details. Somehow her daily world felt narrowed to her daughter. Angélique grew, chubby and laughing, passed from Madame Larresse to Suzanne and Charlotte. Madame Larresse it seemed, loved babies even more than killing Boches.
Her baby was a miracle. The small hands, already able to grasp her finger. The deep blue eyes, the scent of her . . . despite the danger, despite her constant fear for Huw, even with the knowledge that she must leave this village she had never felt such joy.
Other women visited, bringing booties and jackets, soft hand-knitted rugs, napkins washed so many times they were soft and thin. They brought cakes made from hazelnuts or chestnuts instead of flour, and even coffee that was meant to only be for the Boche.
Elspeth realised she had made friends — even with the occupying forces, this life was absurdly like the village back at home. For despite her travels, her experiences, that was who she had once been — a villager. And now, with her baby in her arms, being a villager was strangely satisfying again. Talking about the best wheat stems for thatching with Madame and the thatcher’s widow; comparing how the hens were laying; watching Marie and Odette the cobbler’s daughters telling the rudest jokes, and with gestures too, while their mother, who was deaf, thought they spoke of arranging flowers at the church.
Yet these were the women who would join La Dame Blanche, if it took shape. And, despite the laughter, the knitting, the gentle rivalry over whose apple cake was the moistest without being soggy in the centre, Elspeth suspected the villagers would be good at it.
They were close, these women, and strong too. They helped each other now to cope with the loss of men to war, whether in death or prison camp or labourers with the Germans far away; they coped with food shortages and a lack of firewood, sharing clothes for the children or soups with those who needed them. These women could be ruthless to protect their own.
Christmas Lilies Page 2