by Scott, Manda
SAINT-CYBARD, FRANCHE-COMTÉ
Red to green: the light above her head.
Hot brandy tea catches at the back of her throat, sloshes about her heart. The controller’s hand swipes down, hard.
‘Go!’
The square space in the floor is black and beyond is the cold, cold night.
Slip-slide out, into the sharp, clean air. Fall. And, falling, pray that the static line was clipped in, that the parachute was properly packed, that this is not an elaborate murder, planned to send you diving five hundred feet to earth. Kramme is somewhere down there.
The tug wrenches her groin, snaps her shoulders back. The air rips open above her, her head tears a white hole in the black sky, and she is falling less fast, but still too fast, too fast, too fast …
The correct posture to brace for landing keeps the feet parallel to the ground, knees together, flex the hips, roll into the impact.
But this is nothing like the practice. An unploughed field hurls up to assault her. The turf bucks and heaves and she falls on her side, and hits rocks, and rolls down a slope until she is jammed at the foot of it with a stone wall to one side and earth to the other and her pack wedged beneath her and her parachute snagged somewhere over her right shoulder. The landing ground should be flat and free of obstruction. She cannot breathe.
‘You look like a beetle trapped on its back.’
The shadow looming over her speaks in the English of the officer class. From behind him, where she can’t see, men are shouting at each other in French. Even so, it may be a German trap.
Nobody shouts at her. The figure waits. She says, ‘They say the asparagus is best picked under the full moon.’
She speaks French. The shadow answers back in the same tongue. ‘And Churchill’s cigars are green in its honour, but the Boche know that by now, so you want to watch where you say it aloud. London should have told you.’
So this is her new Patron. This, this is the famous François Duval, friend of Laurence Vaughan-Thomas, whose life she must preserve above even her own. Welcome to France, Sophie.
He can be prickly … You will have to prove yourself worthy …
Fuck that.
She spits out a mouthful of dirt. ‘I am not responsible for London’s mistakes.’
His face is visible now; long and lean and tired. He is staring at her, fixedly, so that she can see the white rims of his irises. Their eyes meet and she thinks he may be about to say something kind, but he turns away. His voice slides down to her. ‘Your papers will be out of date, too. We shall replace them in the morning.’
‘Are you going to help me up or did I come here to die on my back in a ditch?’
Sighing, he turns back, reaches down and, one-handed, hauls her up – pack, chute and all. His fingers make dents along her bones.
As soon as you stand, check the wind.
She turns to face into the breeze. It isn’t strong, but enough to lift the chute, and drag her across the meadow. She thumps the catch on her chest, wriggles out of her harness and wrestles in the silk, rolling it up until she can hold it bundled in her arms and look around at this place she has fallen into, this part of her land that she has never seen, and does not know.
At the top of the field is a thick hedge, and beyond that, a road on which stand a pair of two-horse carts and a monstrous truck with a frayed tarpaulin pulled over its frame and a man-sized cylinder welded behind the cab.
In the meadow, men run, shouting, carrying the other dropped cylinders, four to each, with poles stuck through the carry-slots. A man at the head of each team is brandishing a torch, hollering orders back and forth, across the field, into the woods on her right, out onto the road. All about is a noisy, bright-lit Gallic mayhem.
All reception committees are to be conducted in absolute silence.
Christ, if Kramme had half a clue … Why is he not here?
She turns, watching, and stumbles on the uneven earth. The Patron catches her before she hits the ground. He says, ‘We are silent when we need to be. The rest of the time … this is their country. They need to be allowed to remember that. And yes, your landing would have gone better with a flatter landing site, but the two best ones are blown and we thought you’d rather not meet the Boche your first day here. Our local commander is Kramme.’
He is taller than she is. He looks over her, not at her. His hair shimmers under the silver moon. If the night offered any colour, it might be red.
He looks beyond her, signalling to his men. She is of no consequence: of this, she is sure. Bored, he asks, ‘Can you bury that chute on your own, or do you want help?’
She takes a step or two up the slope until her gaze is level with his. ‘Have I angered you?’
‘Not yet.’ He nods into the dark. ‘The Gazo is up on the road. When you’re ready, I’d be grateful if you’d wait in it until we’ve finished collecting the drop. How many cylinders came with you?’
‘Twelve.’ One and a half sticks of the big six-compartment cylinders with their bounty of weapons, ammunition, food, money and medical supplies for this man who claims to have been a doctor.
She didn’t pack them, or decide what they contained, but they are here because she is here. Available aircraft are rare and even more so are pilots capable of navigating by rivers and roads under a no-longer-full moon. There is an invasion on its way. Everyone knows this. It follows, therefore, that in the overall list of London’s priorities, sending food, fuel and munitions to the middle of the French border with Switzerland does not rate highly. She didn’t expect gratitude … well, no, actually, she did.
She tilts her head up, makes him meet her gaze. ‘How many men have you killed?’
‘What?’
She asks in English and he replies in kind and she thinks his accent is similar to that of the local men at Arisaig. For certain, he is not French.
She says, ‘Not at a distance, but by your own hand, knife to the neck, hot blood on your hands, in your mouth, up your nose. How many?’
He blinks, twice, hard, opens his mouth to answer, thinks better of it and turns away. ‘Deal with your own debris, then count the canister chutes and make sure they’re all buried, too. If someone takes home a bundle of silk, I’ll hold you personally responsible.’
He is gone into the dark, striding.
Her training was good. Every fibre of her being yearns to unbuckle the spade from her leg and dig a hole. But first, there is a promise she made to herself last year, when she left French soil.
She fumbles a crushed packet of Gitanes from her inside pocket and, turning away from the wind, lights up.
‘Got a spare?’
He could be anywhere between sixteen and twenty-five, the one who stands at the top of the small rise, his body arced against the wind. He’s big, not in the way of the Boche officers, who waddle their fat up the streets of Paris, but in the way of farmhands, who are born with bones like mammoths and sometimes brains to match.
He grins at her, and she thinks he might be brighter than average. He’s good looking, in a roguish kind of a way, with the beginning or end of a moustache on his upper lip. His hair is sandy-pale, wind-scattered, in need of a cut. His smile is a flash of teeth in the dark, seen and then gone. At least he doesn’t hate her. She flips him a cigarette and brushes another match to life.
‘Sophie.’ As if it’s been so all her life. ‘Sophie Destivelle.’
‘Jean-Jacques Crotteau. They call me JJ.’ His accent is from somewhere north of the Seine, but not by much. They shake hands. His grip is hard, his skin like dried cement; he may have a city voice, but he works in the fields, this one. In the flare of the match she sees other things.
She says, ‘You’ve got a parachute.’ He is cradling it to his breast. ‘We’re supposed to bury them.’
He lifts a brow, inviting. ‘You haven’t buried yours.’
‘I’m about to.’ She brandishes the shovel. ‘Where can we put them so the Boche won’t see?’
He shrugs
, grinning, and she wonders if this is a test, and if so, whether she has passed. Her skin crawls with the uncertainty of it. In Paris, nobody doubted her.
JJ Crotteau grins at her, and death takes a step away. ‘The ditch will be fine.’ He hands her his cigarette, grasps the shovel and jumps down. ‘They don’t have time to search every field in France.’
She smokes for two while he digs, then they swap places.
The ditch is a swamp of thick, treacly mud. JJ and Sophie dig down to real earth, and then stone. When they can dig no more, they inter the parachutes.
Together, they shovel-kick the earth back into the ditch and pat it down, standing back to admire the vanishing trick they have achieved. JJ takes a last drag on his cigarette and spins it away into the dark. ‘Welcome to France.’
At last, someone has said it. She laughs, loosely. ‘The Patron—’ she shakes her hand, as if shaking off water. ‘Is he always like this?’
JJ regards her thoughtfully for longer than is comfortable. ‘Hélène was a mouse; she could tap out Morse well enough, but nothing special. Still, the Boche killed her and it does not sit well with a man like the Patron when a woman dies in pain on his account, even one not so beautiful as you. In every message to the English, he has asked for a Frenchman to replace her as his courier and an army man to replace Albert as his deputy. London promised him both.’ He claps her arm with one big, muddy hand. ‘At least you are French.’ He walks away from her, up the hill. ‘We should help to bury the rest of the chutes.’
Twelve parachutes. Twelve vast swathes of silk, enough to make a bedspread, half a dozen shirts, two dozen camisoles. There are, therefore, twelve holes to be dug by men who are variously surly, garrulous, exhausted, scared – and every one of them thinks this is a criminal waste of good fabric.
Georges, Léon, Raymond, Vincent … they all glance at her in much the same way the Patron had, with a wary horror. She knows their names from the briefings; now she attaches faces. If I need to, will I give you to Kramme? Or you? Not JJ. Already she thinks she will try not to give JJ to anyone, but she knows that her discretion may not stretch that far.
There are youngsters here, which she didn’t expect, and they are both more respectful and friendlier. The oldest introduces himself as Daniel Fayette. He’s lean, wiry, dark and looks about nineteen, so when he cadges a cigarette from her, she gives it. His younger brothers try the same and pull faces at her when she tells them that ten and eleven are too young to smoke. Their neighbour, René, is thirteen, with reddish, straggling hair that blows across his face so that he looks like a wild pony, caught on a hillside. He doesn’t smoke.
He introduces himself with a gravitas beyond his years. ‘I am René Vivier. My father, Raymond Vivier, is Mayor of Saint-Cybard.’ It sounds as if he has said this all his life, but he reverts swiftly to a child’s gap-toothed, broad-cheeked grin, and joins the other two to dance along beside her, throwing questions in the fast patois of the mountains.
‘Is it true that in England, they have a machine to plant the potatoes and another to harvest the corn?’
‘Is it true that in England, they have engines that pull the ploughs, and that all the horses have been turned into glue to hold the RAF planes together?’
‘Is it true that in England, they make powder that smells nice to spread on the fields instead of dung?’
‘Is it true that the English are going to let Russia win the war for them, that they won’t come across the sea until the Boche are all dead?’
By local standards, René must be almost old enough to hold a gun. The last question is his. She answers it as if he were a man.
‘The armies are growing day by day; they’ll come as soon as they can. And look, to show what they can do, they sent me, and I have chocolate.’ Real, French chocolate, or rather, English chocolate, wrapped to look French. The younger boys clamour, as she expects them to. René is not so easily distracted. When he frowns, his brows almost meet across the bridge of his nose in a way that adds to his age.
‘Did you bring guns for us to learn to shoot? Bren guns? Stens? Automatic pistols from the Americans?’
‘Not Brens, but I brought all the rest. And plastique, and timers, and grenades.’ She remembers something of her instruction an age ago, in Scotland: Don’t let the children eat the PE. ‘The plastique looks like cheese and smells nice, but it will kill you. You must never eat it.’
They know this already, clearly. René’s look would shrivel grapes on the vine. He is not diverted from his track. ‘Can you teach me to use them, the guns? Can you help me kill the Boche?’ When she doesn’t answer, his face hardens. ‘I’m not too young.’
‘You’re the same age I was when I started killing the Boche.’
He is not as impressed with this as she had imagined. ‘Why, then, won’t you teach me?’
‘Because the Patron will be in charge of the guns. He will give the lessons.’
So she is not interesting, really. His attention drifts past her to the men carrying in the last precious cylinder, which was lost in the woods beyond the ditch.
She shoulders her pack and follows them up to the road, where they load it into the back of the truck. Three others are already inside; the rest have gone on the horse-drawn carts, to be stowed in barns in places she neither knows, nor wants to know.
‘Get in.’ The Patron is behind her, speaking to the children, or to her; they are grouped together now. They hand each other up into the back of the truck and sit on benches on either side with the tarpaulin flapping behind and overhead.
Petrol is impossible to get: the Boche have it all. The Gazo, therefore, runs on a mix of charcoal and dried cow dung that burns in the cylinder, giving off a gas that is pumped to the carburettor. The smell is beyond imagining.
The Patron sits in the front with Georges, an elderly, balding blacksmith who is the driver. In the rear, the men doze and smoke and pass a hip flask of coarse brandy back and forth.
Sophie sits between JJ Crotteau and Daniel Fayette. It may be that only they are prepared to sit with her, that everyone already knows she is a traitor. She is too tired to care.
She dozes, her head on JJ’s shoulder. Time slips through her fingers like parachute silk. At some point the roar of the Gazo becomes a murmuring, and the ground becomes a soft, enfolding warmth. She drinks hot milk, and realizes she has been shivering when she ceases to do so. And she sleeps.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE FAYETTE FARMHOUSE
9 April 1944
CAUTIOUS FOOTSTEPS WAKE her, and the creak of a door, swiftly silenced. She lies still with her eyes almost, but not quite, closed, keeps her breathing even, listens, learns.
It is morning. The day is already warm. Warm and golden, with splashes of cornflower blue, and it smells of warm, soft cattle. Crows call, and doves, the light and the dark of sound playing over the blue and gold world.
She is dressed only in her underwear. She is lying on a soft, well-made bed with sheets that smell of soap and sun and wind. Very faint, somewhere, is the scent of lavender flowers.
All this she absorbs in the time it takes a large man with a long stride to make four paces across a bare wooden floor. He is big, but light on his feet. He is alone.
She rolls a little, so her left arm is underneath her, and her right free of the bedclothes. Straight arm to the throat if she needs to. Elbow in the eye. If he has a gun, then she’s—
‘Get up. It’s late.’
Merde. François Duval is taller than she remembers from the night. In daylight, his eyes are a clear, savage grey. His hair is the colour of new rust. He is thin, and has not had nearly enough sleep.
She swings up to sitting, which at least makes him take a step back. Her underwear is not so substantial as to leave much to the imagination and the Patron is the kind of uptight Englishman who does not relish seeing a woman’s part-clothed body in daylight. He hisses an oath and looks the other way. Idiot. She glances past him to study the surroundings.
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br /> The room is not vast, but bigger, lighter, than those at the Firm’s manors in England. Sun floods in through half-shuttered windows that slice it, so that bands of liquid light pattern the wall.
On a nightstand is a ewer of water in thick, solid-lipped pottery the colour of a June sky, and under her bed is a chamber pot of the same ware, in the bottom of which is a teaspoon of lavender oil. Someone here is kind, then.
She tilts her head at him. What now?
‘Get dressed.’ And he is gone, out of the door, lightly down wooden steps, hailing someone with a leap of joy in his voice; not her.
Her suitcase is by her bed, retrieved from the first of the canisters to drop. She has the clothes made for her in London, and worn for two months, so that they no longer look new. She has washed and rewashed them, put them through the mangle, scrubbed them on the board, until they look as old as did the dress she was wearing when she got onto the boat in Normandy.
Today she chooses one with tiny, dark rosebuds on a pale green background that goes well with her scarf. The cut falls modestly below her knee, flaring out from the belt. Her coat is dusty and has a mended tear on one elbow. Her shoes are leather, not clogs, but they, too, have been distressed to the point of destruction; she will need new ones soon.
Thus she dresses, and, dressing, hears movement beneath her feet. Bending, she puts her eye to a crack in the boards and sees down onto the back of a brown cow. The smell of hot breath, hot flesh, hot milk, is soft and thick as dough. Quite urgently, she needs to relieve herself, and to eat.
She heads outside, not wanting to soil the perfumed pot, and finds that she was right: the farmhouse is a big one, prosperous. From the top of the wooden steps, she can see out over tended fields, hedges, a cherry orchard in bloom. In the home fields a dozen cows queue to get into the dairy and easily as many graze their way across the release field on the other side. A single field near the road is devoted to lavender, an astonishing extravagance when it could be growing food. Beyond, forested mountains rise in a solid wall, blocking the route east. If she is where she is supposed to be – and it seems she is – then Switzerland is fifty kilometres east. She can walk that in a day if she has to, given good weather and better shoes. I could be free of this, free of choices, free of fear. It won’t happen, but she can dream.