by Kate Mosse
Next, Sandrine saw a man with a calm expression. A long grey woollen robe, like a monk’s habit.
‘Arinius, the map maker,’ she murmured.
Beside him, with her hair braided over one shoulder, a bright-eyed girl with quick, searching eyes. Lupa, one of the unsung Christian saints, who had died at her husband’s side to protect the people they loved. For a timeless instant, Sandrine met her gaze and saw something of herself reflected in Lupa’s silver eyes.
Finally, in the white centre, her father – François Vidal – with the same gentle, loving smile on his face as he had worn in life. She reached out to him, wishing more than anything that she could feel his hand in hers again, but she knew she couldn’t cross the distance between them.
Sandrine understood it was almost over. Time had run its course. The ghost army had done what it had been summoned to do. It had sent the invaders from the land, driving their enemies to death or to flight. Suzanne, Marianne, Liesl and Lucie had led the people – and, God willing, themselves – to safety. Only she remained to gaze upon the faces of the spirits who had risen to fight for the Midi once more.
Sandrine watched as each turned towards Viscount Trencavel. They seemed to wish him to speak. As he did so, his voice carried on the wind. Metal drew against metal, against leather. An intake of breath, ghosts yet, but the sense of purpose remained.
Per lo Miègjorn.
Words not spoken, but heard. Words beyond words, imprinted in the soul and the spirit of those who had given their lives so others might live. And would again.
Then, when the battle is over, they shall sleep once more.
Chapter 149
BAUDRIGUES
Sandrine opened her eyes. At first she didn’t know where she was. She could remember little, except that she had killed Authié and the act had brought her peace. And then something had happened and . . . She tried to sit up, but pain shot down her leg and she remembered. She put her hand to her abdomen and knew, this time, the bleeding would not stop.
Marianne and Suzanne had got everyone away, hadn’t they? And Liesl and Lucie? Everyone safe. She sighed with relief, then remembered. That wasn’t quite right. Lucie had come back to find her lying unconscious in the Place de la Mairie among rotting corpses.
Together, they had made it halfway down the hill, but then they had run into a Milice patrol. Those soldiers who’d fled before the ghosts looked into their souls had staggerred back to Couiza with stories so wild, so horrifying, their commanders had ordered a four-man patrol back to Coustaussa to investigate.
Lucie had tried to stop the soldiers arresting them. A gun had been fired, but who had fired it, Sandrine wasn’t sure. She remembered Lucie falling to the ground, her kneecap blown and bloodied. Shattered bone and cartilage, screaming with pain.
Then, the rattling wheels of the trucks heading east. For a while, peace, when Sandrine realised they had done it. They had won. They had saved Coustaussa. The Gestapo and Wehrmacht were withdrawing. Every unit and battalion leaving the South.
Sandrine was finding it hard to think now, but she wished she understood why they had been brought here rather than been killed. They had no more need for hostages, did they? She realised they were in the munitions store at the Château of Baudrigues outside Roullens. She knew the place from the outside. They’d tried to attack it, more than once. Suzanne, Marianne and her. They had never succeeded.
Sandrine turned her head and saw that Lucie was there. Of course she was there. Brave, brave Lucie to have come back to rescue her.
She felt a wave of affection wash through her battered body. For that first day when they were all together – Bastille Day, Tuesday 14 July 1942, in the boulevard Barbès. Her, Suzanne and Marianne and Lucie, Max and Liesl. And Raoul.
‘Raoul . . .’
Sandrine’s cracked lips broke into a smile as she remembered the sense of promise that day. The blue sky, the sweet summer air. A perfectly framed memory set in a gilt frame. Their voices raised in song.
‘Vive le Midi,’ she whispered, remembering the hope in their voices. ‘Vive Carcassonne.’
Geneviève and Eloise, brave women who had died for their friends. All the others too, known to her and unknown, she had admired. César Sanchez and Antoine Déjean, Yvette and Robert Bonnet. Gaston, too, in the end.
She wished she knew for sure that Liesl and Marianne and Suzanne were all right. Yves Rousset. God willing, Max. Little Jean-Jacques and Marieta.
‘Raoul,’ she murmured again.
Where was he? Why hadn’t he come?
Sandrine thought of Audric Baillard, of his wise face. If France was free again, it would be in part thanks to him. She didn’t understand what had happened, or why he had not been there with them. Only that he was a guardian of the land, the conscience of the Midi. That he linked what had been, and what was, and what was to come.
Sandrine shifted position, the cord seeming to cut deeper into her wrists. She knew she was dying. The internal injuries inflicted by Authié were too severe to allow her to survive. She thought how disappointed Raoul would be.
The minutes slipped by. The air was so still and so hot. Sandrine drifted in and out of consciousness, or sleep, she wasn’t sure. Elsewhere, outside in the park, noises filtered into the dirty room in which they were being held. She knew there were other prisoners here too – Jean Bringer, Aimé Ramond, Maurice Sevajols – she could hear voices from surrounding rooms.
The sound of footsteps, rough orders given in German and in French, the sound of the heavy doors of a Feldgendarmerie truck being slammed shut.
A scream of pain, a single shout splitting the air, then nothing.
The minutes ticked on, ticked on. The sun climbed higher in the sky and the shadows came round. Sandrine felt something on her leg. She opened her eyes and saw that a black spider was crawling across her ankle, the lightest of touches. She thought she should move, shake it off, but she lacked the strength even to do that now. The hours of sitting still, hands behind her back, legs bound, had robbed her of strength.
‘It’s supposed to be good luck, kid,’ murmured Lucie. ‘Maybe you’re going to come into money.’
Sandrine turned her head, pleased to hear the sound of Lucie’s voice.
‘I think it depends on what kind of spider it is,’ she replied.
‘A black widow?’
Sandrine gave a half-laugh. ‘Could be.’
‘I like your socks,’ Lucie said softly. ‘Unusual.’
‘My father brought them back from Scotland.’ She said the familiar words. ‘A gift.’
‘Ah . . . I remember, yes. They’re really something. Thought that the first time we met.’
The silence of the hot afternoon lapped over them again. Sandrine dozed, slipping in and out of consciousness. Strange to be so weightless, so cut adrift from sensation. Everything was blurred now, body and mind and emotion, all run together.
When she next came to her senses, Lucie was talking again.
‘We got everyone else away. We did that much.’
‘Yes,’ she murmured.
‘What happened to them?’ Lucie asked quietly. ‘The soldiers. Their bodies were black, Sandrine. Blood in their eyes . . .’
‘Yes.’
‘What did they see that terrified them so much? That could do that? Like they’d been burnt, all black and scorched.’
Sandrine thought of Alaïs and Léonie and Lupa, Dame Carcas and Viscount Trencavel.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not really.’
Lucie fell silent. Sandrine couldn’t make sense of it either.
‘Just us, kid.’
Sandrine felt a lump in her throat. ‘Just us.’
Outside, the grunt of a lorry being started. More shouting, a sense of panic and fear, perhaps. Nothing ordered about the withdrawal.
‘The last ones are leaving,’ Lucie said, trying to prop herself up.
Sandrine bit back tears as she saw Lucie struggle, her disobedient and broken lim
bs no longer doing what she commanded.
‘How about that? We sent them packing after all.’
Sandrine looked at the ceiling. The patches of damp in the corner and the stains on the wall where a pipe had burst and water had seeped through. The smears of blood, brown and ridged in the gaps between the tiles. They were not the first prisoners to be held in this room.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Lucie said. ‘Next year, you’ll be twenty-one. We should have a grand party. Invite everyone, everyone we know. What do you say? May the eighth 1945. Make it a red-letter day. We’ll have cake for Jean-Jacques, and beer for Raoul.’
‘And Suzanne. She never really did much like wine either.’
‘We should invite everyone we know,’ Lucie continued. ‘Coming of age, and all that.’
‘Raoul will find us,’ Sandrine said, wanting to give Lucie something to cling on to.
‘Course he will.’
‘We have to be patient. Hold on for just a little bit longer.’
Lucie was smiling as her eyes flickered shut. ‘Raoul will find you. Like Hercules and his Pyrène, he’ll tear the Aude apart to get to you. Nothing will stand in his way.’
Sandrine smiled. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘He will.’
Chapter 150
CARCASSONNE
Raoul could feel nothing, see nothing. The days were darkness and nights without sleep. He had lost all sense of time since he was arrested in the station master’s office. Had lost all sense of self. Everything was as if it was happening to someone else, as if he was watching. Between the beatings and the pain, the blissful punctuation of black rest, he had separated himself from the reality.
He hadn’t talked. He hadn’t named names.
Raoul hoped the others had halted the train fantôme and rescued the prisoners. Max among them. Imagined how happy Lucie and Liesl would be. How pleased Sandrine would be.
He felt a tear slip from his eye. He couldn’t bear the thought of Sandrine worrying, waiting for him to come back. Her face had haunted him, every second since he’d been captured. All he could think about was how to get a message to her to let her know he loved her. That he was thinking of her.
Raoul didn’t think the alarm bell had rung, yet he knew all the prisoners were awake. Everyone knew when one of their own was about to be executed. The knowledge swept through the prison like wildfire. He thought how odd it was that beyond the prison walls were the river Aude and the sky and the Montagne Noire. The turrets and towers of the Cité, and Païchérou where he had first set eyes on Sandrine. Where he had taken her dancing only weeks ago.
The backdrop to the beginning of his life. Now, it seemed, the backdrop to the ending of it.
They came for him. Raoul felt a rough hand, the butt of a rifle in the small of his back, pushing him out of the cell and into the corridor. He lost his footing and stumbled, was pulled to his feet before he had the chance to fall. The idea of lying face down on the cool stone was appealing. Raoul thought he could lie and lie and sleep for ever, skin against the damp flagstones.
‘Keep moving,’ said the guard, harsh.
Most of the Nazis had gone. Senior officers of the Milice were travelling with the Kommandant in the midst of the German convoy. Those left behind, Raoul knew, would be hunted down and killed. They knew it too. Retaliation would be quick and brutal and summary. No one would protect the collaborators once the Gestapo was gone.
Raoul staggered forward, hearing the murmuring of voices, like the tide coming to shore, growing and getting louder. Cells filled with Spaniards, French and Belgians and Dutch partisans, occasionally a German voice – deserters who had joined the Resistance – once, a Polish voice. The sound gave him the strength to lift his battered head.
The murmur became a chorus, rising loud and strong. The song of the partisans, ‘La Butte Rouge’, hanging in the air, other songs that each prisoner knew, all sung in their own languages. He remembered what Monsieur Baillard had said once about how words were more powerful than anything else, that they did not lose their power or fade or grow weaker over time.
La Butte Rouge, c’est son nom, l’baptême s’fit un matin
Où tous ceux qui grimpèrent, roulèrent dans le ravin
Aujourd’hui y a . . .
Raoul felt his mouth forming itself into a smile. The cut on his lip was infected and most of the teeth in his lower jaw were gone, but his muscles remembered what it was to smile. He wished he could raise a hand to acknowledge the men’s voices, to wave as he walked by, but he could do no more than nod and turn his head from side to side as he passed. He hoped they understood that their voices made the difference.
It was not how one lived, but how one chose to die. One of Sandrine’s headlines in Libertat. Such a long time ago now, such a very long time ago.
The men started to bang on the bars, a drum tattoo walking him to his final judgement. He wished Sandrine could know he was not alone in these last minutes. He imagined her searching for him, searching every prison, every cell, until she’d found him and set him free. Such courage, such refusal to give up.
She would grieve for him, he knew, but he hoped she would build a new life with someone else. Learn to laugh again. When the war was won.
But he would have liked a child, a daughter. A little girl with Sandrine’s black curly hair, her spirit. They could call her Sophie, perhaps, to remind them of how once they had lived.
Raoul sighed. Not Sophie. Something new, for the future. He would leave it to Sandrine, she’d know.
‘This way.’ Again the jab in the back.
Raoul knew he wasn’t the first to be taken out today. He’d heard them, from four in the morning. In the early days of the occupation, at any execution there was a rabbi or a priest. As the years passed and there were too many souls to be shriven, too many in need of absolution, the practice ceased. The rabbis were all dead or deported and the good Christians could not collude with such unchristian acts. A last cigarette, the condemned man’s last supper, that too had gone.
He turned his head from the light as he was pushed into a room, too bright after the darkness of the cell. Disorientated, not certain what was happening, he stood between the two warders. He smiled then, realising that even now, even today, the pretence of fairness and the rule of law was being played out. A court martial, though there was no lawyer and no debate.
For a moment, letting his thoughts drift free, Raoul imagined what Sandrine might say. He heard himself laugh, so missed the pronouncement of the summary sentence, though it was only going to end one way.
Death by firing squad. To be carried out immediately.
The executioners were waiting as Raoul walked out of the courtroom and into the open air. Sand at his feet, the sun too bright. He thought how odd it was that he was to die on so beautiful a day. There was a single wooden stake in the centre of the yard. Even with his eyes narrowed against the light, Raoul saw blood on the stake from the last man who had stood there. Red, not yet brown in the sun.
‘Pelletier, Raoul.’
For a moment, the handcuffs were removed, but only so his hands could be tied around the stake with rope.
‘This?’ one of the guards was saying, waving a black hood in front of his face.
‘No,’ he said.
Raoul was pleased at how clear his voice sounded. Sandrine would be proud of him, he thought. Then the memory of her took the strength from him, and he felt his knees buckle.
‘No,’ he said again.
He looked at the twelve men ranged against him. Then he stood up straight and looked his killers in the eye. His countrymen.
‘Mon còr,’ he said. The only words that mattered any more.
He watched as the rifles were raised. He let his eyes slip, fleetingly, up to the Midi sky. So blue and clear. How strange, he thought again, that there should still be such beauty in the world. And he hoped she was safe beneath it.
‘Sandrine,’ he whispered.
Raoul heard the sound before he
felt the bullets slamming into his chest, his legs, his arms, his head.
Chapter 151
‘Raoul!’ Sandrine cried out, her heart suddenly racing. ‘Raoul?’
For a moment she was neither asleep nor awake, as if some part of her had been left behind in the dream. She was floating, looking down at herself from a great height, like the stone gargoyles, dragons, lions that leered at passers-by from the cathédrale Saint-Michel. A sensation of slipping out of time, falling from one dimension into another through white, endless space.
‘Has he come for us?’ Lucie murmured.
Sandrine smiled at the sound of Lucie’s voice. She had been quiet for so long.
‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘Soon.’
The flies were worse now. The room was airless, the sun ferocious, and the heat and the smell of blood caught in Sandrine’s throat. She turned her head to the right and could see, through the high windows, a patch of sky so blue and clear and endless. It seemed wrong, she thought, that there should be such beauty in the world on a day like this.
She rolled her head to the other side. Lucie was very pale, barely breathing. Sandrine could see her thin chest, beneath her broderie anglaise blouse, rising and falling faintly. Sandrine smiled a little. Lucie had always said she’d get married in that shirt. Smart, she said, but not too much.
A sudden memory of Lucie waltzing around the salon in Coustaussa, holding Jean-Jacques in her arms. Liesl was there, taking photographs as always. Marieta was grumbling the baby would get overexcited and never go down. Marianne was smiling and clapping her hands, Suzanne, with a wry expression, watching Marianne more than the baby. Had Monsieur Baillard been there? Sandrine frowned, she couldn’t remember. Had Raoul?
The gentle past faded once more. The pain was constant now, as if her insides were being turned inside out. She could feel the infection moving under her skin, hot and angry and swollen. As for her hands, she couldn’t feel them at all any longer.
