“I ask a German to work with you. If you provide the necessary papers, he will find me a place on the convoy.”
Her father smiled without humor. “You would compromise my honor and his. You are thorough, I give you that.”
Aurélie grimaced at her father. “Or perhaps no one’s honor need be compromised. He removes a thorn in the flesh of the German command. And I—I get your messages through. And there’s something else,” Aurélie added all in a rush. “There’s something I didn’t tell you. I have the talisman. Here. At Courcelles.”
That, at least, had the benefit of getting her father’s attention. “Here?”
“Here.” She didn’t tell him where. The very stones of the castle had ears these days. “I thought I could do some good with it, that my very being here with the talisman would somehow make the Germans retreat.”
She felt foolish even saying it, but her father didn’t mock her. “I, too, once,” he said, staring out over the bedded remains of last year’s herbs. “I brought it with me into battle and watched my comrades fall around me.”
“You were not the demoiselle,” said Aurélie, and winced, because if it failed to work because he was not the demoiselle, what did it mean, then, that it had not worked for her? Was she less than the true born daughter of her father? No, her eyebrows were his, most definitely. There was no implication that her mother had played her father false until well after Aurélie had been born. No one disputed her birth, only her upbringing. “I had thought, in my hand, it would work.”
Her father’s hand settled on her shoulder. He gave a heavy pat, his one gesture of affection, the same he had given her when she was a girl and skinned her knees climbing the old tower stairs and didn’t cry as Suzanne bandaged them up again. “These things work in ways that pass our understanding. Who knows? Maybe it is working, even now. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe you are right. Maybe we send you back to Paris with the word that you have retrieved the talisman from the hands of the enemy. We spread the message through France that the demoiselle holds the talisman and the enemy must fall.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Daisy
Le Mouton Noir
Paris, France
November 1942
“They must fall,” said Daisy. “They will fall. This can’t be for nothing.”
Beneath her hand, Kit stirred, slurred, mumbled. “Fall? What’s fallen?”
“The Germans. Will fall. They must. The news from Algiers . . .”
“Algiers? Why are we talking about Algiers?”
Daisy lifted her head. “Because it’s the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for! The tide’s turning, I can feel it. And Algiers is our doing, just four hundred of us Resistance overturning the Vichy pigs—”
“My dear. Can’t you ever just bask? For a moment? Even . . . even half . . . half a minute . . .”
Kit’s voice fell away into the pillow. His eyes were still closed, his muscles slack. This was one of the few points of incompatibility between the two of them: Kit fell into a stupor immediately after lovemaking, whereas sex tended to charge Daisy with new life. As Kit rolled away semiconscious, Daisy wanted to cuddle and talk (chatter, Kit called it) and sometimes even to make love all over again, although Kit was generally willing to oblige that impulse, after a certain amount of encouragement. She said it was because they had so little time like this together. Almost always, when they were able to snatch an hour or two together at all, they met in the morning or the early afternoon, while the children were at school, clock ticking away, and Daisy didn’t want to miss a single minute in slumber. Kit said nonsense, she was just that sort of woman. What sort? she asked dangerously, and Kit, without stopping to consider, or perhaps too knackered to think, walked straight into that trap. The sort who finds sex invigorating, he replied, and Daisy had made him pay for that careless observation, never fear.
But that was months ago. Now they’d grown used to each other’s habits, to all the shades of expression and gesture and humor. Kit was so familiar that Daisy, gazing at his face, catching his glance across the bookshop or her grandmother’s suite or some discreet café in the tangled alleys of the Left Bank, knew exactly what he was thinking, anticipated exactly what he would say. Lying here in Kit’s narrow bed, clothes strewn around them, skin glowing furiously, she felt as if they had somehow grafted together, two seedlings grown into one, her postcoital vigor merging into his languor as two parts of the same perfect whole. She was Kit, and Kit was Daisy. As they had just established yet again. She folded her hands beneath her chin and stared at Kit’s lips.
“It’s been two minutes, at least,” she said, “and I don’t see how you can fall asleep at a time like this.”
“I don’t see how you can remain awake at a time like this.”
Daisy traced the curve of his chin with her fingertip. “But don’t you see? Every victory, each little advance, it’s not just a victory for France. It’s a victory for us.”
“How’s that, darling?” Kit mumbled.
“Because once the Germans are defeated, we’re free, you and me. I can leave Pierre, and we can get married.”
That made his eyes fly open. “Madame Villon. Are you proposing to me?”
“Of course I am. And you had better say yes.”
“Oh? Do you have some notion of punishing me?”
She reached downward. “I have many ways of punishing you, rosbif.”
“Ah! Yes! So you do. Then I expect . . . I expect . . . my God . . .” His words fell away into a groan; his eyes closed once more.
“Yes? You expect?”
“I expect . . . I expect I had better say Oui, mon ange, whatever you wish, I am yours to command.”
“That’s better.”
“Ah, don’t stop. Please. Go on punishing me . . . all you like . . . yes, even more . . . I deserve it . . . but tell me . . . what was I thinking? . . . tell me . . .”
“Yes?”
“What has brought this . . . God save me . . . what has brought this charming idea into your head, all of a sudden?”
“What idea?”
“Marriage.” He turned another gasp into a sigh. “And don’t say it’s Algiers.”
“No reason,” Daisy said. “Only that I love you madly and want this stupid war to end, so we can live with the children in some sweet little cottage and make more babies together.”
Kit’s eyes flew open again. “What did you say?”
Daisy drew her hand away and sprang from the bed. “Nothing. We must get to work.”
“You said more babies.”
Daisy found her brassiere and fastened it swiftly. “Mon Dieu, mon amour, we will have time for babies later. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“But you said—”
“There is a war to win, after all.” She yanked on her shirt, fastened the buttons, and turned to Kit, who still lay in the bed, propped on his elbow, a scrap of blanket to protect his considerable modesty, tousled and beautiful, long naked limbs everywhere, arms that had held her close a moment ago, had made love to her, of all women, the luckiest Daisy in the world. She bent to kiss him. He took her hand.
“Daisy,” he said, “if you wish me to marry you this very instant, you know I’d do it.”
“But I have a husband, mon amour. It’s very inconvenient.”
“I could kill him, if you like.”
Daisy thought he was joking, but she couldn’t be sure. He certainly looked grave, as if he meant it, but then the English sense of humor was often incomprehensible. Kill Pierre for her. Would he do that? Did she want him to? Her lover, to kill the father of her children? She thought of God, she thought of Madeleine and Olivier. No! A thousand times non. Which was why she could not tell Kit this secret of hers, even though the knowledge—while frightening her to the bone—also doused her with floods of love, as she held his hand and felt his pulse connecting to hers.
No, not yet.
But pl
ease God, let those armies triumph, now in North Africa and then all over Europe. Let the enemy fall. The sooner the better.
When Daisy and Kit had begun their affair four months ago, it was July, and the air inside Kit’s cramped sleeping quarters was hot and oppressive, leaving them panting and sweating and almost outside their own skins when they made love. Now it was dank November and a very different story, but it was not just the weather that had changed.
True, they had not been able to create false papers for everybody on the list in Pierre’s safe. They had not been able to find many of them, for one thing, or to forge enough identity cards, even though Kit worked day and night, even though Daisy ran her feet off carrying messages and delivering the finished papers. But because of their efforts, fifty-two Jewish families had safely left Paris before the terrible dawn of July 16, when the French police started banging on doors and dragging people from their homes, over thirteen thousand in total; nearly eight thousand of those Jews were packed into the Vélodrome d’Hiver and left to swelter in the heat for days, before they were loaded onto trains and sent into Germany, where they disappeared into night and fog.
Thank God, her grandmother was not among them.
Daisy had sobbed without control when the magnitude of the roundup became clear. She still remembered how Kit had held her, how they had clung to each other in the stifling air of the workroom. She had tried to think only of the names and faces of those they had saved, those for whom their efforts meant everything, meant life itself, but her mind kept returning to images of the horror in the stadium, the individual terror each person must have felt, multiplied thirteen thousand times. It was evening, and Pierre was in the office or out celebrating his success or something, and Justine was minding the children as they slept. Daisy had mumbled something about going to see her grandmother and just left. Now Kit and Daisy sat and cried together. Then they got drunk and made love, over and over, because what else could you do in the midst of such darkness? You couldn’t just sit there facing this horror; you needed oblivion, you had to cling to something, some scrap of hope.
Anyway, the next day Daisy’s eyes were dry and her body exhausted, but her soul had turned to steel. I want to do more, she said to Grandmère and to Kit, and they had brought her into contact with a network of French agents, whom she knew only by their code names, which were all various kinds of animals. She had begun as a courier, but as existing agents were captured or killed, and Daisy’s own reputation for daring and resourcefulness began to spread, she started gathering intelligence herself. She encouraged Pierre to give more dinner parties, she learned how to open his safe and raid his papers. She kept her ears open and her face carefully innocent; she was just some pretty, brainless Paris housewife to whom it was a pleasure for a self-important Nazi officer to brag indiscreetly. Every crumb of information that came her way, she passed along in reports that became legendary among both the British and American intelligence services. She continued to courier forged identity papers to downed airmen and to agents and saboteurs dropped in from Britain, to recruit safe houses and escort fugitives.
You are like a new woman, Kit said to her. Or rather like the real Daisy had finally stepped out of the old skin.
Daisy, drunk with risk and passionately in love for the first time in her life, could not have agreed more. Yes, the situation in Paris was bleak, the occupation more brutal by the day, agents picked off one by one, radio sets going ominously quiet, but Daisy had never felt more purpose, had never taken so much immediate, visceral pleasure in food and drink and sex and fresh air. She was alive, she told Kit, she was finally alive.
Only take care to remain so, he would reply, drawing her into bed, as the days turned cooler and the children returned to school. Remember I would die to lose you.
And I would die to lose you, rosbif, she whispered back, kissing his warm skin, curling her body around his, so if we must fall, let us fall together.
That was October. Now the trees were all bare, and the air had turned dark and cold. The Germans, enraged by the success of the Allied invasion into North Africa earlier that month, had seized back control of the Vichy free zone and cracked down ruthlessly on Resistance networks everywhere, but especially in Paris. And now Daisy was beginning to worry about Pierre.
Of course she could not have banished her husband from her bed, just because she’d taken a lover. She refused Pierre as often as she dared, but sometimes she allowed him his carnal rights, in order to keep his suspicions at bay, and also in order to chip little pieces of information from him. She treated these episodes like chores, like cooking dinner or polishing the silver, unpleasant but necessary. After all, you could think about something else while the unpleasantness was going on down below; you could simply imagine yourself elsewhere, in bed with someone else, or else occupy your brain by working out the logistics of a message drop.
Now, Daisy and Kit didn’t speak of any of this, hardly spoke of Pierre at all, in the way a prostitute doesn’t discuss her clients with her lover. But since October, Pierre hadn’t even attempted to have intercourse with her. He’d slept on his side, his back to Daisy, and moreover he spent most of his time at the office, anyway. Was he simply committed to his work? Or had he begun to entertain some inkling of what his wife was up to in her spare time? She tried to ask, but Pierre always answered her with some noncommittal remark, some evasive change of the subject.
So Daisy was feeling wary about Pierre, and the relative safety of the free zone no longer existed, and the Gestapo was tightening its noose, and the network was fast running out of money and resources, utterly dependent on the British and the Americans. Now she was pregnant with Kit’s child, due sometime around the middle of July. (She hadn’t yet seen a doctor, but she was quite sure she knew when she had conceived, a rare moment of carelessness.) That wasn’t all. Last week, she’d had the distinct sensation that she was being followed, and then news had reached them of a major Gestapo raid on one of their most important informants. Even her grandmother had warned her to be careful, that their luck was perhaps beginning to run out. Grandmère, in fact, had already laid down plans, in case Daisy should have to flee at a moment’s notice, with or without the children. (If necessary, Grandmère would take charge of Madeleine and Olivier, and they would all reunite in Spain or Switzerland or someplace.) Until now, Daisy had refused to listen to these plans. She didn’t want to consider that she’d have to give up her work, or Kit, or both.
But now, as Daisy made her way down the stairs to the workroom, nerves still buzzing from lovemaking, and considered just how many more weeks remained until her pregnancy became obvious to both the men in her life, she thought that maybe it was time to pay a visit to Grandmère, just in case.
Kit followed her down the cramped hatchway a moment later, fully dressed, hair combed back damply from his forehead. He dropped a kiss on the nape of her neck, sat down in the chair, and reached for his pipe. “Darling, I’ve been thinking—” he began.
“Shh!”
He looked startled but obeyed. Through the walls of the hidden workroom, they heard voices from the bookshop, muffled and indistinct but masculine in timbre. And as Daisy and Kit both knew, the customers of Le Mouton Noir in these troubled times were mostly female.
They sat in silence, staring at each other, listening to the noises through the walls and bookshelves. Daisy could make out the young soprano of Philippe’s voice, the firm tenor of Monsieur Lapin. But that deep, urgent, staccato baritone that answered him! This was a commanding voice, a voice that did not expect to be disobeyed. Daisy strained to hear the words, but all that wood and plaster—designed, after all, to blanket the sounds of Kit’s own activities in this room—made it impossible.
Kit grabbed her hand. “Go upstairs,” he whispered. “I’ll destroy the papers.”
“But if they search—”
“Go! I’ll close the hatch behind you. They’ll never see it, and even if they do, I swear they’ll have to climb over my dead�
��”
The doorway slid open. Daisy started from the chair. Kit moved even faster, jumping forward to block Daisy from the intruders, so that she caught only a glimpse of Monsieur Lapin’s haggard face and a long arm in a dark suit.
“Monsieur Legrand, I believe?” said a familiar, urbane voice.
Daisy edged out from behind Kit. “Lieutenant colonel!” she exclaimed.
He was not wearing his uniform, but the same suit of navy blue he wore on the rue Cambon side of the Hôtel Ritz to visit Grandmère in her suite and the trilby over his pale hair. He removed it now and begged Daisy’s pardon for intruding. Then he turned to Monsieur Lapin and asked for a moment of privacy.
“Yes, monsieur,” said Monsieur Lapin, and closed the door. They heard the soft thump of the bookshelf sliding into place, Philippe’s high voice asking a question, his grandfather shushing him. Von Sternburg stepped forward and laid a book of plain brown leather on the table. The Scarlet Pimpernel.
“Your grandmother explained that this book is like a password,” he said.
“Grandmère!”
“Who the devil are you?” said Kit.
“Compose yourself, young man. I come here as a well-wisher, nothing more. A certain piece of information has come my way, and I wished to communicate it to you without delay.”
Von Sternburg’s face was solemn and heavy. He put his hand to the scar on his face, as if it had begun to pain him. Daisy thought he looked like he had aged a decade or so since she’d seen him last.
“Lieutenant colonel,” she said softly, “are you well? Can I get you a glass of water? Or brandy?”
Kit looked surprised. Von Sternburg merely shook his head.
“My thanks, but I’m afraid we have little time. Your grandmother has asked me to summon you to her at once.”
“What’s the matter? Is something wrong? She’s not unwell, is she?”
“She’s as well as ever,” said Von Sternburg. “It’s your husband.”
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 34
