‘No.’ The old man gave her another smile, and then continued, ‘I think my boy was lost along the Maginot Line, he’s half-French, you see, and was called up early in the war. We all thought it was phoney for so long, didn’t we? And he was married here, with a child on the way. Then the real war started and we heard nothing. My wife and I…’ he started to cough a bit and Fen knew it was to disguise a lump that had formed in his throat, so she started talking instead.
‘I’m going to try and find my fiancé. I thought we were so lucky as he was stationed back in England for so long. I asked him, of course, what his role was, but he never gave me a proper answer and then he was suddenly under starter’s orders and off right after we’d got engaged.’ Fen paused and looked down at her fingernails, clean at least, but in desperate need of a manicure after the years spent in the fields.
She flexed her fingers and realised it must look odd to this fellow passenger that she wasn’t wearing any sort of ring. ‘Never even got the chance to get one, you see. We thought it would be incredibly fancy to try and go to London and perhaps even take tea at the Ritz as a very special celebration, but he never came home,’ she said, still staring at her hands. The letter he’d proposed with, that clue about unravelling gents… it was the only engagement ring she’d been given. ‘It all seems so unfair,’ Fen continued, ‘because my Arthur is – was, I suppose – such a gentle soul and so much more at home with his pipe and slippers and one of these,’ she pointed to the newspaper in her lap, ‘and I can’t imagine him here fighting. He always said he was meaner than he looked, but really I think old Growler down there has a sterner countenance.
‘And look at these villages that we keep passing. Some don’t look like they’ve been touched at all, as if it was all someone else’s problem, someone else’s fight.’ She looked out of the window and then started up again, more to herself than to her companion. ‘It’s not that he wasn’t young and fit and eminently capable, it just seems a waste to have not had him in Whitehall or somewhere…’
Fen looked back towards the old man and realised that the reason he hadn’t interjected was that he was sound asleep, his gentle snore adding another rhythmic sound to that of the train itself. Fen held in a snort of laughter and shook her head. She picked up the crossword and, with eyes afresh, suddenly saw the answer to her five down…
‘Of course,’ she picked up her pen and wrote in the seven letters. ‘A newspaper man is probably EDITOR, but docked so no R. Mix that up and add US and hey presto. TEDIOUS. A bit like me, eh Growler?’
Unsurprisingly, she got no response from Growler, or his owner. All the same, a somnolent companion was better than many, and Fen pondered over what he’d said before she’d bored him to sleep. The so-called Maginot Line was meant to have been France’s wall of defence, except the Germans had both ripped through it and skirted around it when no one was really watching, leaving thousands dead, hundreds of thousands wounded and almost half a million taken prisoner and that was the end of the ‘phoney’ war, as they’d called it. And Burgundy was so close to where both the Maginot Line and the demarcation zone had been. It must have been a battlefield of sorts, literally and strategically, and Fen wondered, what with Arthur’s working knowledge of French and brains the size of Big Ben if perhaps, just perhaps, he wasn’t a normal infantryman at all?
A few more hours passed and Fen decided that the rocking of the train wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t put pen to paper and write a letter back to Mrs B and her friends. She’d promised to keep them up to date with her mission. Mrs B, who had quite a kind heart once you got past her sometimes gruff exterior, had sent her off with a special bar of Fry’s chocolate she’d been saving. She had made Fen promise to write, if only to give her something jolly to read out to the girls of an evening now the wireless was on the blink. Kitty and Dilys were still lodging with Mrs B, not so much for war work now as to help the older lady out while they decided how best to carry on with their lives.
Somewhere near Dijon, France,
September 1945
Dear Mrs B, Kitty and Dilly,
I promised I’d keep you informed, so here it is, my adventure so far.
Mrs B, thanks for the sandwiches, they went down a treat on the crossing from Dover to Calais. And luckily didn’t come up again even though the Channel got quite choppy halfway across!
The boats are loaded with soldiers, however, and I was lucky to squeeze onto one that the Red Cross had requisitioned to ship in supplies to the wounded who can’t yet leave France. It’s all frightfully sobering and covering this distance in a relatively short time (27 hours and counting from Haslemere!) makes one realise how close we all were to it, even in the fields of West Sussex.
I boarded the evening train to Paris along with a dishevelled bunch of travellers, and I must say I was glad to see the City of Lights appear out the window, not only because I adore the place, but because it meant I could nudge the snoring salesman off my shoulder, who hadn’t paused for a silent breath since Lille.
I arrived terribly late at Madame Coillard’s (good idea, Dil, to look up my old art teacher!) and then left early the next day. No time to take in the sights or seek out my old haunts – maybe next visit – as I had to dash from her apartment to the Gare de Lyon to catch the train to Dijon. I have to tell you a bit of what I saw, not because I want to shock or upset you, but I feel I’ve seen history in front of my very eyes and perhaps at its darkest point.
In Paris, at the stations, there are soldiers just lying there on stretchers on the platforms, covered in dirty sheets with rust-red stains on them. I can’t bear to think of those poor men who made it off the battlefield, only to be left on a station platform… And the walking wounded fare no better really. They look so gaunt, so pale, except for stained bandages smeared with the blood and mud of the battlefield.
I’m sure this isn’t the cheery adventure you wanted to hear about, so instead I’ll tell you of the latest fashions I saw… Yes, fashions! Can you believe that the women here still have the most exquisite clothes, I think they might have magicked them up, or at the very least be much more deft than me with a needle! And get those hair rollers heating up – fashions here are for big curls on top and longer hair at the back – très chic!
I wonder how Edith is doing in Canada and if Duke’s parents have warmed to her? Will write again soonest.
With fondness, Fen
PS Kitty, you asked me to teach you how to solve crosswords… well, I’ll do what I can from afar! Let’s start with a simple anagram, shall we? Remember how the answer is always one word from the clue – and one word will tell you it’s an anagram, something like ‘twitches’ or ‘confused’, look for that marker! So, here we go… ‘The City of Lights in mixed-up pairs (5)’ – it’s an easy one!
Writing the letter and coming up with even a simple clue for Kitty occupied Fen until she disembarked at the nearest station to Morey-Fontaine. She hadn’t wanted to burden her friends with some of the other sights she’d seen as she’d crossed Paris, such as the young woman, who had looked a lot like Kitty, being mobbed by men and women alike, her shaven head daubed with a large black swastika. The woman next to Fen on the bus had spat out the word ‘tondue’ – meaning shaven one – as they’d driven on and Fen had gleaned from her that there were lingering recriminations for those deemed to have collaborated with the Germans. French women accused of selling Nazis their bodies or exchanging a private few hours with them for basic essentials such as food and clean clothing were shaved and dragged through the streets.
The thought of that shaven-headed woman had stayed with her as she’d arrived at the Gare de Lyon and boarded the train to Dijon. The train journey itself had been long: the constant delays as they were held at sidings while engines pulling carriages of exhausted troops, refugees or supplies took priority on the tracks. But, finally, she disembarked at the somewhat isolated station and though she allowed herself a small shudder at the loneliness of the place, she at least felt a
little bit closer to finding out what had happened to her Arthur.
Like many small, rural stations this one was not much more than a house next to a platform and there was nothing in the way of maps, information or notices – all things that must have been taken away a few years ago to impede the occupation. Still, the familiar yellow of the boîte aux lettres gave Fen some hope and she happily slipped the letter she’d finished writing on the train into it, hoping it might get back to England before she did.
Fen was pleased to have a copy of Mr B’s old map of France with her. She and Kitty had painstakingly traced the roads and landmarks from the original, aware that something as precious as Mr B’s regulation map shouldn’t leave the farmhouse and Mrs B’s protective care.
Fen now flattened out the tracing against the white wall of the station house. She wasn’t surprised that there was no stationmaster about to help her, she doubted it had been a job with much longevity during the war, what with the railways being used for everything from troop transport to black-market smuggling, from what she’d heard. So, she took her bearings and found what she decided must be the road that would lead to Morey-Fontaine.
As she started walking, knowing that her destination was now only a few miles away, she felt more optimistic than she had for long a while, or at least since Arthur’s letter had arrived. Perhaps it was the fact that the sky was blue and the road, though dusty and potholed, was flat and quiet, or maybe it was something to do with being back in France. After all, Fen had lived in Paris from when she was a small girl until she was eighteen and sometimes felt more French than English. Perhaps that was why she had planned this hare-brained mission to find Arthur – it wasn’t just him calling her over the channel, but France itself.
Haaaarrrrruuuuuuuaahhhhh. The horn belted out its klaxon-like sound, but too late to warn Fen of the truck’s approach.
‘Blimey!’ she cried as she fell over into the ditch beside the dusty road. She felt like shouting out some of the slightly riper words that she’d picked up from the returning squaddies at Dover, but almost as soon as the truck had forced her from the road, it was gone and out of sight, and certainly out of earshot. A large dust cloud and the settling silence of the empty road was all that was left of the accident.
‘How rude!’ Fen climbed back out of the ditch and found her suitcase where it had been flung out of her hand, a glancing blow from the truck striking it several feet in front of her. Luckily, the sturdy leather and decent catches hadn’t been damaged and her undergarments weren’t shredded all over the road, but still, this wasn’t the welcome to rural France she’d been hoping for.
She dusted herself off and patted down her hair, feeling completely out of sorts, not to mention a bit battered and bruised.
‘Oh dear,’ she said to no one but the birds scavenging in the dust, as she saw how dirty her hand was now. ‘Only one thing for it.’ She squatted down by her suitcase, unclipped the catches and found inside a clean handkerchief and a brightly coloured scarf. Fen cleaned her face as best as she could with the hanky and wrapped the scarf around her head, as she always had done when she was at work in the fields, using it to tame her chestnut curls that escaped from her victory rolls.
Feeling a bit more herself – she did like to look her best where possible, even if it was only a slick of lipstick and a pinch to the cheeks instead of rouge – she clicked her suitcase shut and carried on along the road. She had, in the panic of the moment, kept her wits about her and made a mental note of the colour and make of the vehicle. Needless to say, she spent the rest of the walk into Morey-Fontaine going over in her head exactly what she’d say to the owner if she ever saw that big dirty grey Citroën again.
Finally, as she reached the outskirts of Morey-Fontaine, the vast stone tower of the church came into view. The village was larger than she had anticipated though, and it took her a full twenty minutes or so to navigate the narrow, and occasionally winding, streets until she found herself in what looked like the main square.
‘Place de l’Église…’ she read out loud to herself, seeing the stone plaque with the square’s name high up on the wall of one of the shuttered buildings.
The church, built of greyish-beige stone, did indeed dominate one side of the square, which itself was looking rather down at heel, unsurprising given the fact that the local community had probably been too distracted by the war to get round to tending the marigolds. Large plane trees created welcome shade within the square and Fen walked underneath them to find herself at the grand Romanesque doorway at the front of the church. She looked up at it and studied the solid, reassuring permanence of the ancient stone arches. Her childhood had included many trips out to villages and small towns like this one, and she remembered how her father would read from his Baedeker’s guide, his voice fading out of earshot as Fen would walk away from him, her mother and brother, her fingers trailing over the sun-warmed walls of whichever church they were visiting until she met an obstacle – a buttress, a door, a broken paving stone. She much preferred to soak in the buildings this way; feel them, touch them, notice them, rather than rely on mere facts and dates to tell her about them.
The caw of a raven broke her nostalgic train of thought and she shook her head clear of old remembrances and walked towards the church, her arm stretching out as she got closer, ready to touch the stone, the expectation of its warmth and the familiar grainy surface bringing back her memories. She had barely touched it when her eye was drawn to the parish noticeboard, the legs of the slim, wooden cabinet planted in a stone trough that spilled over with weeds and long grasses. The notices were out of date and sun-faded, but it wasn’t them that caught her eye. It was the name of the church: SS Raphael et Gabriel. The Archangels of Death.
Fen caught her breath. She had been right. Arthur’s clues had led her to the correct village. The anagrams of Morey-Fontaine and Archangel Death made utter sense now – he’d given her the village and, if that was ambiguous, the name of the church in it. She was definitely in the right place. Her pride in her clue-solving capabilities was marred, of course, by the heartache that accompanied it; the reason why he had left her the clues. So that she could find out what had happened to him.
With her resolve all the stronger, she looked around the town square and tried to work out what to do next. Having grown up in France, she knew as much about its culture as its language (and she could speak the lingo as well as the most earthy of Burgundian farmers), so she knew that the place to head would be the town hall. There, the maire, or local mayor, would know exactly what had gone on in this small town during the war, both officially and unofficially.
Fen cast her eyes around the square, looking for a signpost or some hint as to where the mayor’s office might be. She wandered over to the centre of the square and placed her sturdy old suitcase down. Stretching out her hand and swinging her arm around to get some blood flowing back into her fingertips, she paced the square until a noticeboard under one of the trees caught her eye. Feeling like it would be quite safe to leave her suitcase unattended, and pleased not to be lugging it with her at every step, she hotfooted it over to the noticeboard to take a look. It was a large wooden cabinet-style structure, with the notices roughly nailed onto a board behind two glass wooden-framed doors. The cabinet stood on slightly shaky-looking legs that were dug deep into a large stone planter, itself overspilling with unkempt weeds and wild flowers.
Fen scanned the notices, but there was nothing pinned to the board about the local maire or the hours he kept. She caught sight instead of her reflection and noticed that her headscarf was a bit skew-whiff. She adjusted it and patted down her hair, making sure her hairpins were doing what they were meant to do.
As she was checking her appearance, she happened to glance at a faded advertisement: ‘Workers Needed’, it declared. She read on: ‘Domaine Morey-Fontaine seeks labourers for winery and vineyard work. Board and lodging included.’ The small print pointed her in the direction of the local château, so local in fa
ct that it was just the other side of the church.
With the sun starting to fall behind the rooftops of the buildings and a rather unsubtle rumble patrolling through her stomach, Fen walked back to her battered suitcase and picked it up, hoping that the advertisement was still in date and that the château of Morey-Fontaine might be willing to hire her – and, more importantly right now, feed her too.
Four
Château Morey-Fontaine was named after the small town, or perhaps it was the other way around and the town had sprung up, back in the mire of medieval Burgundy, because of the presence and protection of the solid stone house and the sanctity of its church.
Either way, it was impossible to miss the ancient building. All Fen had to do was follow the monumental, sand-coloured stone walls around from the front portico to the east end of the church to find herself in a pleasant little grove of fruit trees. From here, she could see the château itself and in between them she could make out what must have once been formal gardens.
The ground was dusty underfoot as she covered the short distance between the orchard and the house, but Fen could tell that once, maybe only a few years ago, these would have been well-kept lawns. Lichen-covered, dry, stone bowls were all that were left of the ornamental fountains, the cherubs no longer spouting water, their mouths cast in pouts, whistling in the wind.
Unkempt bushes lined the path, and Fen tried to make out the original shapes of the topiary cut they once must have had. The bushes looked sparse and their outer branches were yellowed by the dry summer. The borders, no doubt once ornately planted, had been given over to a vegetable patch and Fen recognised the brownish skins of onions poking up through the soil and a few green beans hanging off a limp plant. A prickly-leaved artichoke sat majestically in the middle of the bed, its heavily laden head, regal purple in flower, nodded at Fen as she walked past and then up the broken stone steps to the château’s main terrace.
A Dangerous Goodbye: An absolutely gripping historical mystery (A Fen Churche Mystery Book 1) Page 3
