The Black Swan of Paris

by Karen Robards

  Lying awkwardly in the bottom of the boat was the reason they were all taking such a risk: an injured British pilot. His plane had been shot down over the harbor two nights previously. He and his crew had managed to parachute out. What had happened to the others she didn’t know. This man was a particular problem because he was injured to the point where he was unable to walk. He had been rescued and hidden at great risk. Even now the Germans were conducting an all-out search for him and his crew. Getting him out by sea was judged impossible: the harbor and shoreline were closely patrolled. Moving him overland by vehicle was determined to be equally impossible, as every road out of the valley was blocked, every train stopped and searched.

  Since the tide of the war had started to turn against them, the Germans had become increasingly vicious and volatile, like angry wasps defending their nest. The rumors of an imminent Allied invasion somewhere along the coast seemed to have whipped these local ones into a frenzy. They were going house to house, business to business, farm to farm, ransacking homes, boats, shops, even the schools and churches, in search of the downed airmen. To be caught aiding any of them meant summary execution. Even to be suspected meant torture and imprisonment. Many had already been taken in for questioning. As a result, fear lay over the surrounding countryside like the heavy fog.

  A solution to the difficulty had been found. Tonight they would walk the pilot out, strapped to Bruno’s back, through the swamp paths that had once been used by smugglers. She knew those paths like she knew the many rooms in her house. Since she had married Paul at the age of eighteen and come to Rocheford to live, she had haunted the estuary, fascinated by the birds, the wildlife, the plants. The mushrooms she had gathered in the marsh and cultivated in the far reaches of the château’s cave-like cellars supplemented the household’s meager diet now that the tightly rationed food supply had all but run out and mass starvation had become a grim reality.

  Paul had teased her about her mushrooms once. He did not laugh at them now.

  Her knowledge of the paths was why, despite the owl, she had insisted on coming. The danger to the men would be far greater without her to guide them. Paul had wanted to leave her behind.

  “The trip will be too hard,” he’d told her. “Too long, and too dangerous.”

  Yes, but one wrong step off the ribs of solid ground that snaked across the marsh, invisibly weaving a walkway through the swaying grass and tangles of trees and scrub and fingerlet waterways, and all would be lost. The ground was deceptive. It looked firm where it was not. In many places water beneath the tall grass was more than two meters deep, and the mud below that was silt, oozing and liquid. Unwary animals got trapped in it and died all the time. The same could, and did, befall unwary humans.

  “I am coming,” she’d said. His eyes were the color of coffee, while hers were a clear, pale, aquamarine blue. They met, a clash of the dark and the light.

  She rarely argued with him. After all these years, they were attuned in most things. But he also knew her well enough to know when she meant what she said. He looked into her eyes, saw that this was one of those times and gave up the fight as lost before it began. A smart man, her Paul.

  “Bring her in,” he said to the men in the boat. “Hurry.”

  The bow pushed through the last of the reeds to bump dry land. Lillian led Bruno as close to the water’s edge as she dared. Andre held the small craft in place while Paul and the others lifted the pilot out.

  The man groaned, a low, pained sound.

  “Take care. His leg is broken.” The caution came from one of the men she did not know. “And perhaps some ribs, as well.”

  “Sergeant Pilot Ronald Nash,” the pilot said clearly in English as the men heaved his tall, lanky form into the saddle. Even as Lillian felt a thrill of fear at how loud his voice was, she realized that he was rotely identifying himself. He slumped forward over the pommel. “Three Squadron—”

  “Merde.”

  “The drug’s worn off.”

  “Here.” Amid the jumble of alarmed voices and hurried movements, one of the new arrivals pressed a cloth to the pilot’s face. When he took it away after a minute or so, the pilot had fallen the rest of the way forward so that his head rested on Bruno’s neck.

  “Drug?” Lillian asked. She did her best to hold Bruno still as the men tied the pilot’s now limp body in place. His flight suit had been replaced with ill-fitting civilian clothes. His splinted leg stretched stiffly toward the ground.

  As the men finished, a blanket was tossed over him. Its purpose was both to shield him from the elements and to hide him from view.

  Although if, say, a German patrol should chance to see them, she didn’t think a blanket over the airman would be enough to get them waved on their way.

  “Chloroform.” Paul came up beside her. At the same time, the boat shoved off and the men with the poles got to work again, heading back the way they had come. “They thought it was best to keep him quiet and to combat the pain.”

  “Much risk for nothing if he dies,” Jean-Claude grumbled. A dour man of near her own age, he lived with his elderly mother and was one of the last Lillian would have expected to chance all for such a cause.

  “We must make certain he does not, then,” Paul replied perfectly pleasantly, but with the ring of a leader. Lillian felt a surge of pride in him. From the time he’d heard the little-known general Charles de Gaulle, in the wake of France’s surrender, speaking over the radio from London to call on all Frenchmen to refuse to accept defeat and continue to fight, that’s what he had done. Living meekly day by day under the iron fist of the occupying Nazis, swallowing the shame of France’s surrender and the collaboration of the Vichy government was not something he could stomach.

  “Did you have to get into the water?” Lillian scolded under her breath as she turned Bruno about and headed inland. Left without his rider now for lo these many years, the pony had grown unaccustomed to the saddle and the weight on his back and moved reluctantly, unhappy with his burden. She tch-tched at him under her breath, pulled harder on the rein, got him going at an acceptable pace. “Is there a reason why Jean-Claude, perhaps, or one of the others couldn’t jump out and pull the boat in?”

  “I’m taller?” Paul grinned at her. For a moment she caught a glimpse of the charming young man she’d first met shortly after she’d turned thirteen, when, as the aristocratic son of a prosperous landowner, he’d come to visit her physician father’s clinic in Orconte to observe the effects of an administration of smallpox vaccine, which had just become obligatory in France. At that young age, they’d both been starry-eyed about the future, with no idea that it could hold such things as poverty or hunger or death or war. “You worry too much, ma choupette.” He leaned down to whisper confidentially, “Besides, I stole a pair of Henri Vartan’s work boots.”

  Formerly their farm manager, forced to find other work once the hard times hit in the thirties, Henri still lived in his cottage at Rocheford but now worked for the railroad, which as it happened served as a valuable cog in the Resistance network. Lillian glanced down, saw that Paul was indeed wearing a pair of unfamiliar rubber boots that reached almost to his knees, and harrumphed her opinion of that.

  “I’m all right, Lil.” His voice gentled. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” Her tone was tart, but the truth was his words soothed her. She knew it was stupid, knew he could no more predict the future than she could, but still his reassurance went a long way toward calming the nervous flutter in her stomach. Usually she was better able to keep the fear at bay. Even the high-risk work they’d been doing in preparation for the major operation that was coming had not unsettled her like this.

  All because you heard an owl.

  Yes, and also because taking photographs of the tall, mine-topped poles, called Rommel’s asparagus, as they were being set in place to bristle up around t
he shoreline, and mapping the antipersonnel mines that had been laid down to repel an amphibious landing, and gathering samples of sand from the beaches to make sure they could support the weight of insurgent tanks, which was what they had been doing for the last few weeks, were all easier to explain away than being caught smuggling a British pilot out through the supposedly impassable marsh in the middle of the night.

  The searchlights swung past, but thankfully they were now beyond the reach of the beams.

  “We must go single file.” Glancing around, she repeated it for the benefit of the others as the spit opened out into a sea of shoulder-high grass that stretched endlessly into the night. With the patrols out, she didn’t dare use a torch. Instead she would navigate by memory, and landmarks, such as the abandoned beaver dam dead ahead. “The path is narrow.”

  Some three hours later, they walked out of the marsh into a wood, then paused just inside a line of trees to cautiously survey what lay on its other side: the narrow paved road that led into Valognes.

  A blackout was in effect, so no lights marked the town’s location. Farmhouses dotted the surrounding land, Lillian knew, but they were as good as invisible in the dark.

  Stepping into the road, they started toward the town.

  “How are you doing?” Paul asked, coming up beside her.

  Lillian managed a smile for him. “Fine.” It was almost true. Except for the fact that she was so hungry the sides of her stomach were practically stuck together, and her arm ached from dragging Bruno along, and her feet in their sturdy brogues were freezing. The layers of newspaper with which she’d lined her coat were failing miserably in their task of keeping out the cold, so the rest of her was freezing, too. Even the small garnet heart she wore on a chain around her neck—all her other jewelry had been sold or traded long since, but this particular piece had been too precious to give up—felt cold against her skin. Worse, her nerves were on edge in a way that was both unpleasant and unfamiliar. But there was no point in regaling Paul with any of that: he would only worry. With a hint of humor she added, “You couldn’t have had them meet us at the edge of the swamp?”

  He took the rein from her, and she relinquished it gladly.

  “Better that they don’t know we came through it.” His voice was pitched so that it reached her ears only, and he looked ahead as he spoke. She thought he was searching for landmarks to guide them just as she had done. “The Germans think the marsh is impossible to cross, and we don’t want anyone to tell them differently.”

  “You’re right, of course.” This reminder of what, when the invasion came, she would be called upon to do made her pulse quicken.

  His expression changed, and she followed his gaze to find that he was looking at a small pile of stones beside a corner fence post. It was clearly the sign he’d been watching for.

  “We’re close now.” He glanced around, raised his voice so the others could hear, pointed. “Up this way.”

  On the other side of the road, what looked like a cart track led uphill between parallel fence rows. They turned onto it, trudged over the rocky, uneven ground. At the top of the rise was the dark outline of a barn. Their destination, Paul told them; then he gave a soft, three-noted whistle.

  The barn door slid open with a rusty rumbling sound. Peering through the floating wisps of fog into the impenetrable black maw of the barn’s interior, Lillian felt a quiver of unease.

  A man walked out of the barn, beckoned to them urgently. A gray shape against the darkness behind him, he was impossible to identify.

  Paul’s step slowed. He said, “They should have whistled back.” At his tone she experienced a sensation that felt very much like a spider crawling across the nape of her neck—or a goose walking over her grave. To her alone, he added under his breath, “Turn and walk down the hill. Now. If something happens, run.”

  Sucking in her breath, Lillian glanced at him. At what she saw in his face her heart stampeded.

  Before she could answer, before she could even begin to comply, the night exploded into chaos.

  The sound of charging footsteps accompanied a blinding explosion of light from the barn as a trio of powerful searchlights switched on, catching them full in their beams.

  “Halt!” Soldiers pointing rifles burst through the open doorway.

  Frightened, Bruno whinnied and reared, jerking the rein from Paul’s hold as he bolted with a thunder of hooves. The blanket dislodged, revealing the slipping body of the pilot. Andre and Jean-Claude yelled and jumped aside to get out of the way.

  Paul’s hands slammed into her shoulder, shoving her violently to the ground.

  The soldiers opened fire.

  “Ah!”

  For Lillian, that one cry pierced the tumult like an arrow lodging in her heart. The voice was Paul’s. She saw him fall. He landed on his side on the muddy track, rolled onto his back. Bathed in the garish brightness of the searchlights, he writhed, ashen faced.

  “No!” On hands and knees, she scrambled toward him. Blood stained his coat, spurted from a wound in his chest. “No!”

  She reached him, saw at a glance that it was worse than bad. Snatching off her scarf, she tried to stanch the blood.

  He looked at her, sucked in a shuddering breath. Already his lips were taking on a bluish tinge. She could feel the warm wetness soaking through her scarf and gloves.

  No. No. No.

  “Paul.” It was all she could say. A lump lodged in her throat. Her chest felt like it was caught in a vise. She pressed both hands down hard on his wound, praying that it would be enough to stem the bleeding.

  “Lil.” His eyes closed, then opened again. Heart thudding, she leaned close to catch his words. “Last night—did you hear the owl?”

  Horror turned her blood to ice.

  “I—” There was no time for more. Rough hands closed on her arms. A trio of rifles were thrust in her face. Screaming, crying, fighting like a madwoman to get back to him, she was dragged away.

  Chapter Three

  “All right. You’ve had enough.”

  Max’s low-pitched warning as he came up behind her spurred Genevieve into tossing back the champagne remaining in her delicate crystal flute like it was a shot of neat whisky.

  “It’s never enough.”

  His arm snaked around her waist. He yanked her back against him.

  “Hey! You almost made me drop my glass.” Not bothering to struggle, she glared at him over her shoulder.

  “Pull yourself together.” He spoke into her ear. His voice was harsh. They were alone in the hall, or he never would have grabbed her like that. In public Max always exhibited the deference that was due her as the star around which his life supposedly revolved.

  “Let go of me.”

  “What we’re doing here is too important for you to jeopardize it with your stunts.”

  “Are you calling rescuing that child last night a stunt?” The outrage in her voice was in no way diminished because she had, of necessity, to keep the volume low. After Otto had taken her to Max—at an illicit nightspot in the place des Vosges—and left her in the car while he’d gone in to get him, Max had come out and climbed into the back seat, his grim expression making it clear that Otto had already briefed him about what had occurred. He’d taken one look at her face and obviously picked up on the desperate resolve with which she’d been clutching the baby. Instead of scolding her or launching into a diatribe about her foolishness in getting involved, he had been as soothing and reassuring as only Max at his best could be. And, just as she’d been certain he would, he’d known exactly what to do. He told her all about the Oeuvre de secours aux enfants, also known as the Children’s Aid Society, or OSE, even as Otto had driven them to a house in the Bastille. Assuring her that the clandestine organization had been set up by the Resistance for exactly that purpose and the child would be protected from the Nazis and well cared f
or until she could be restored to her family, he’d persuaded her to hand Anna over to him when they’d stopped in front of it and taken her inside. When he’d returned, alone, he reassured her some more as Otto drove them to the Ritz. Genevieve had spent the hours since not sleeping and not thinking about Anna or the girl or any of the associations the encounter had dredged up. Oh, and drinking.

  “It was a good thing to do. It was also stupid. What if you’d been caught? Do you know what they would have done to you?” His breath tickled her ear. She could almost feel the movement of his lips against the delicate whorls. She could feel the firmness of his body pressed up against her back and the hard strength of his arm around her waist. She fought the urge to close her eyes—until she realized that her arm was wrapped on top of his, holding it as he held her. Instantly her arm fell away, and she stiffened into rigidity.

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “They would have arrested you. Then they would have tortured you. Do you have any concept of what torture is like? They might, for example, have begun by breaking your fingers, one by one. You’d give up Otto and me and the whole bloody network the minute they started in on you, believe me.”

  “It didn’t happen, did it? So why are you worrying?”

  “Because now you’re drunk. And that makes you a liability.”

  “I am not drunk.”

  “You stumbled over the carpet back there. There’s too much at stake here. We can’t afford any cock-ups.”

  “I do my job.”

  “And you need to keep doing it. No more haring off to rescue children. No more getting drunk. Just do what you’re supposed to do.”

  “Since when do you get to dictate my every move?” She shoved at the arm wrapped around her waist. It wouldn’t have worked, but a waiter carrying a tray came around the corner just then—his attention fortunately on the tray’s load of freshly filled champagne flutes rather than the little drama playing out between her and Max farther along the hall—and, seeing him, too, Max released her.