The Milliner's Secret

by Natalie Meg Evans

  He was just back in his seat when the intercom clicked on.

  It was Phipps. ‘We’re losing height fast and I predict an unscheduled encounter with Mother Earth. Prepare to bail, chaps. Any ideas, Irish?’

  ‘Avoid the forest, a correction starboard.’

  Phipps wished them all good luck. ‘First to the mess bar buys the drinks, the last pays for them.’

  What seemed like three breaths later, Irish was falling through the smoke into pitch black. An ice-cold rush knocked the senses out of him and he experienced intense terror, curtailed by a ripping sound, a violent jerk and the glorious flowering of his parachute. For a while, he felt utterly still, but, as the scattered lights below grew larger, he gained a sense of descent. He offered thanks to Our Lady, adding a plea for the other boys to have got out safely. ‘And the Wingco, of course,’ as Phipps was not a boy and would wrestle with his plane to the last moment.

  The Lancaster’s death spiral lit up the landscape, showing the two rivers and the thin snake of a brook. Seconds later, a massive explosion announced the loss of another British bomber.

  From a second-floor room in Le Cloȋtre sanatorium, a woman watched the distant hillside turn into a raging inferno. The roar of distressed engines had brought her from her bed, and she’d witnessed the impact. She tried to open her window, but it was locked. Pressing her cheek to the glass, she saw figures running across the lawn towards the flames. What did they plan to do? Beat them out with their hands?

  This was her moment, her chance. She found her stockings, shoes and underclothes. They had taken her dress, but a cardigan was folded over the end of her bed. She buttoned that over her nightdress. From the bedside cabinet, she removed one small item. The nurses had wanted to throw it away until she told them that it was a bead from a rosary. Clearly, none of them had ever set eyes on a cyanide death-pill before. She dropped it into a wash bag. Looping the bag’s drawstrings around her wrist, she left her room. If anybody challenged her, she would say she was going to the lavatory.

  A night nurse always sat at a station to mark the comings and goings from the rooms along the corridor. Luck! The station was empty. A cup of tepid coffee and a dish of cherries on stalks suggested the explosion had come as the nurse enjoyed a midnight snack.

  Hiltrud pushed cherries into the pockets of her cardigan. On the ground floor the doors stood open, admitting an eerie orange glow and the odour of burning fuel. One of the nurses had left her cape over a chair, and a shoulder bag, which jingled with coins and keys. Hiltrud hung the bag over her own shoulder and threw the cape over the top. She left Le Cloître like a shadow.

  On still nights, she’d heard trains passing in the distance. If she kept walking, she would sooner or later come to a railway station.

  As dawn broke over the Île de France, Irish woke and attuned himself to the noises around him. He’d had a lucky drop. The chute had caught in the outer branches of a tree, breaking his fall. He’d cut himself loose, dropped five or six feet, then been able to free the parachute and bury it. He dug into his escape pack and found Horlicks tablets, shoved three into his mouth, got up and stretched. A peachy sunrise gave him his bearings and within minutes he found the brook he’d seen from above.

  His compass told him it was flowing north-east. Chances were, it would meet the Seine, or one of its tributaries. The silk maps in his escape kit said the next town of size was indeed Fontaine¬bleau, on the river Aube.

  Using the sheath knife he always carried with him, he cut the warrant officer’s stripes and the wing from his battledress and the sheepskin tops off his flying boots. When the boots had been issued, he’d complained they were half a size too small, but that had probably stopped them falling off during his drop. He wouldn’t have fancied his chances barefoot.

  With profound sorrow, he threw his jacket and flying helmet into a thicket, but couldn’t bring himself to hurl his Enfield service pistol after them. After all, he might run into a troop of Jerries, looking for crash survivors.

  Hitching his knapsack over his shoulder, he walked out of the fringes of the wood on to a road full of morning sun. He had become an evader.

  He reached the railway station of Fontainebleau-Avon shortly after nine, unchallenged. It was Sunday, little traffic about. But he was proud of himself because he’d walked right past a couple on their way to church, and called out, ‘Bonjour.’

  ‘Bonjour’ was the limit of his French, and he wouldn’t get to the next stage without help. After standing for some minutes on the station concourse, eyeing up potential assistance, he approached a man leaning against a wall. Dirty, with jet-black hair poking beneath a beret, the dog-end of a cigarette glued to his bottom lip, he cut an unsavoury figure. Getting closer, Irish saw that one of his hands was bound up in a dirty rag. A vagrant? No use. He needed someone capable of buying him a ticket and getting him on to a train. He was about to slink away when he noticed the man’s shoes. They were tan leather with hand-stitched welts, such as professional men wore. Unless they’d been stolen, of course. But by the time he’d thought of that the man had seen him and growled something. Probably, ‘What are you looking at?’

  Warrant Officer Donal Flynn held out his hand and said, ‘I’m a British aviator and I need help.’

  Hiltrud von Elbing spent the journey to Paris removing cherry stones with a fingernail. A fiddly job, made no easier by the lurching of the train. The messy results she ate, but after a few attempts she had successfully replaced one stone with the cyanide capsule.

  A guard shouted something at her. She thrust out her ticket, but he shouted, ‘Identité!’ She produced the card belonging to the nurse whose bag she had taken. The man looked it over, then looked her over. She held her breath.

  He was asking her something when a rumpus broke out in the carriage one along. Rudely throwing the card into her lap, he strode away.

  A moment later, Hiltrud saw a young man jump from the slowing train. Shots were fired, and everyone in her carriage dropped their heads to their knees. She didn’t. It was far more interesting to watch the police leap on to the tracks. Not so much fun being at a standstill for half an hour afterwards. When you have difficult tasks ahead of you, you do not want delays.

  At the barrier, a German policeman looked over her papers and called her ‘Schwester’. She puzzled over it until it struck her that her black, hooded cloak and the hem of the cotton nightdress beneath suggested a nursing nun. Where were the taxis? All she could see were bicycles with funny little cubicles attached behind. Yet people were getting into them.

  She approached a driver and said, ‘La Passerinette.’

  The driver returned a mystified look. She pointed to her head, and shouted in German, ‘Modistin!’

  ‘Modiste?’ he queried, and shouted something down the line of drivers. Somebody seemed to understand and a moment later he was asking her, ‘Boulevard de la Madeleine?’

  She had absolutely no idea, but nodded nevertheless.

  After the bumpiest ride of her life, she found herself in a broad street, as fine as any in Berlin. She dropped coins into the driver’s hand, and watched him count them with his eyes before he pedalled quickly away. Within seconds, she had forgotten about him because there was ‘La Passerinette’ etched on to glass. The shop’s blinds were up but there were no hats on show. Nothing to prove that these were the premises of her husband’s mistress. Considering what she was planning to do, she must be sure.

  The door was ajar, and she stepped inside. A man wearing her father’s stiff kind of collar was talking animatedly to a tall, blonde and very lovely girl in a pink dress. They were surrounded by pink and grey hatboxes and Hiltrud had the impression they were arguing over them.

  ‘Fräulein de Lirac?’

  They broke off and gave Hiltrud a curious stare.

  The girl said something in French through sensual, painted lips. Assuming she was being asked who she was, Hiltrud pulled herself up to a dignified height and said, ‘I am your lover’s wife.�
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  The blonde girl took in a shocked breath and colour swept through her cheeks. So. Condemned by her own shame. Hiltrud held out two red cherries hanging from a single stalk. One had a stone, the other . . . Well, she had no actual proof it was a cyanide capsule.

  ‘Non, merci.’ The girl indicated the door and Hiltrud understood that the shop wasn’t open. But, of course, it was Sunday. She’d heard bells as she came through the barrier at the station. She continued offering the cherries and finally, with an impatient noise, the girl took them.

  Hiltrud left, but went no further than the opposite side of the road. After a short wait, she saw the girl leaving the shop, carrying one of the pink and grey hatboxes. Hiltrud followed her to the end of the street, and saw a great building flanked by columns. The girl did not cross the junction, but turned left into another street. At the kerb, she paused and that was when Hiltrud saw her raise her lips to the cherries and bite off first one fruit, then the other.

  The girl was halfway across the road when she gave an unearthly cry and doubled over. The hatbox rolled like a drum. Baying like a hound, the girl gripped her throat and fell to her knees. A second later, a black car bearing the flag of the German Reich on its radiator grille ploughed into her.

  Hiltrud walked on, ignoring the cries of horror, the running feet. One task complete. She crossed a great square that she recognised. She’d sat here on her first day in Paris, watching eddies of snow falling from a gunmetal sky. She kept walking, remembering the car journey to Dietrich’s flat. They had crossed a river and the driver had said, ‘The Seine, gnädige Dame. A fine river.’

  A good enough river, anyway. Shortly after midday, Hiltrud von Elbing stepped off the wharf into cold brown water, completing her second task of the day.

  CHAPTER 37

  Coralie knew she’d overslept even before she opened the curtains. Georges and Lorienne could have stripped La Passerinette to the floorboards by now, but if they had, they had. She wasn’t going to scramble over to boulevard de la Madeleine in yesterday’s clothes.

  It was after midday and Dietrich was still asleep. She’d nip home to rue de Seine, she decided, change, then return and massage his back until he woke. The way to a man’s heart.

  In her own flat she washed, put her hair up in a bun and changed her pewter-grey choker for one of pale pink. While the kettle boiled, she opened her wardrobe and surveyed her dresses. Was it mischief that made her reach for the pink dress printed with twin cherries in navy-blue?

  The last time she’d worn this . . . Well, she’d see if Dietrich remembered. She put on the tasselled pillbox hat that went so well with it, and reluctantly tied a dark headscarf over it because she intended to cycle to La Passerinette. It was such a gorgeous day.

  She cycled as far as the river, then wheeled her bicycle across the pont des Arts and again across place de la Concorde. At the top of rue Royale, she was held up by a police block. People were gathered in the road, watching an ambulance slowly drawing up. She heard somebody say that a young woman had been knocked down and killed by a German driver.

  Coralie averted her eyes.

  Turning right in front of the imposing Madeleine, she wheeled her bicycle into boulevard de la Madeleine, straining her eyes for the first sight of La Passerinette. The salon door was open! ‘No!’ she raged. ‘No!’

  When she stormed in, Georges Blanchard, surrounded by hatboxes, looked momentarily relieved. Then, as he recognised Coralie, his fists went up.

  Little did he know how many times she’d seen a big man in that stance. ‘Put them down, Georges. You don’t frighten me. Just know this. If I catch you anywhere near this place again, I will go to the head of the Paris police, the head of the Abwehr, the head of the army and the head of the Gestapo, one after the other, until one of them kicks your backside into jail, and kicks Lorienne’s in after it. Look at my face.’ She tapped a cheek. ‘This is the anger of a betrayed woman. Why did you do it?’

  ‘She promised to make me her premier if I brought you down. She was meant to come straight back, with a vélo taxi.’

  ‘Better go and find her then, hadn’t you? How many of my hats are missing?’

  ‘None.’ Georges hesitated, then admitted, ‘Lorienne took one with her.’

  ‘I suggest you ask her to drop it back. Now get out.’

  Coralie watched him till he’d gone round the corner. Sighing, she closed the door, then opened it again because the shop suddenly felt constrictive. After returning the hatboxes to the workroom, she unpinned her closing-down notice and tore it up.

  Seeing her shop threatened again, she’d remembered how passionately she loved her work. Dietrich had advised her well.

  Lunch. Why not telephone Dietrich and invite him to meet her here? She was just reaching for the handset when a man’s cough from the salon told her that Dietrich had anticipated her.

  Walking through, she began a laughing comment that ended in a gasp. It wasn’t Dietrich. Two rough-looking men filled the doorway.

  Had she fainted? Because she was on the floor, looking up at the octopus-arms of her ceiling light. Fingers were tapping her cheek. A man muttered, ‘Wake up.’

  She thought, They’re looters. They think there’s money here. One of them was breathing harshly.

  Fingers tapped her again. ‘Come on, sweetheart, wake up.’

  Sweetheart? English? Not possible. The faces staring down at her simply could not exist together, not on the mortal plane.

  ‘Ramon?’

  ‘Oui, chérie.’

  ‘Donal?’

  ‘Hello, Cora.’

  ‘I’m Coralie. What the hell?’

  ‘We met at a station.’ Hard breaths made spaces between Ramon’s words. It wasn’t her hazy vision that made his face seem grey. It was grey. He’d painted his cheeks with some kind of dirt, and dragged it through his hair. Disguise, she supposed. After all, the Gestapo were after him.

  Donal finished the story in English, ‘He got me on the train at Fontainebleau and stayed with me till I had to jump. We met up at the Madeleine. Lovely church. Whoever built it must have seen the Brompton Oratory because—’

  Coralie interrupted. ‘Ramon, are you all right?’ To Donal, she said, ‘He’s not well.’

  ‘Caught a bullet in the finger. It smashed bone and it’s infected. He needs a doctor and we both need a safe house. I think Ramon said there were flats above this shop.’

  ‘Too dangerous, but I know somewhere else.’ It would have to be impasse de Cordoba.

  She let Donal haul her up, then led them into the workroom. Donal looked around, at the boxes, at the designs pinned on the walls, the marotte heads sporting unfinished models. ‘Who makes all this?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘They’d fall off their chairs at Pettrew’s. I’m proud of you, Cora.’

  ‘Call me Cora one more time, I’ll punch you. I’m Mademoiselle de Lirac.’

  He grinned. ‘And I’m Air Vice Marshal Flynn.’

  ‘You both need a change of clothes. I have to get you out of here.’ Dietrich might come looking for her at any time. He would see Donal as an enemy captive, to be treated according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. Ramon might as well have a firing-squad target pinned over his heart. She sniffed him. ‘Been sleeping rough?’

  ‘Running, chérie, not sleeping. Help me get back to my comrades. I have no money. My new English friend paid for my ticket.’

  She took Ramon’s filthy beret, replacing it with a trilby that Georges had left behind. It changed his appearance immediately. Ramon’s jacket was stiff with dried blood. That was why he stank. She made him take it off and helped him into a trench coat she’d left there when the weather turned warm. Tight on him, but masculine enough not to draw attention. Coralie wished she’d had the foresight to keep a man’s suit here as well because Donal’s blue-grey trousers, blouson jacket and white sweater screamed ‘British airman’.

  In the end, she had Donal and Ramon exchange jumpers, and discovered
that both men carried pistols in side holsters. She made no comment. For Ramon, she fashioned a cravat from an offcut of cloth while Donal dulled his light brown flying boots with black ink and blue tailor’s chalk. After she’d added a slick of glycerin to his hair, he looked more like a local, particularly as he now had a morning’s growth of beard. Her finest touch was a black eye, conjured out of the makeup in her bag. Solange had left a bottle of red nail varnish behind and Coralie stippled tiny dots under Donal’s eye to resemble burst blood vessels. His face was already hatched with scratches and bumps from his rough landing. ‘We might as well make a virtue of it,’ she said.

  Ramon considered her handiwork. ‘You’ve overdone the yellow.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve seen a few black eyes in my time.’ She said it again in English to Donal, adding, ‘I’ve seen them in the mirror.’

  Donal shook his head, and she supposed there were things he didn’t like to be reminded of. ‘Right,’ she told him, ‘the story is, I’m taking you home because you were beaten by thugs outside a drinking den. If anybody stops us, say nothing and look dazed.’

  It was agreed that Ramon would go ahead and they would meet at the corner of rue de Leningrad and rue du Berne, close to impasse de Cordoba. When it was their turn to leave, Coralie knotted her scarf over her hat and assembled a few useful items, including her left-handed scissors, wads of absorbent cloth, salt and ersatz coffee. Putting them in her bicycle basket, she thought of Dietrich. He would never track her to impasse de Cordoba – it would seem as though she’d abandoned him again.

  Outside, she gruffly reminded Donal, ‘Traffic comes from the left over here. If we’re stopped, I do the talking. Anything goes wrong, run for it and we’ll meet at Gare de Lyon, where you arrived.’