Virginia’s core team is assembled at her place, discussing how they might rescue Roger, when they receive a knock at the door. Edmund admits Auguste Bohny. Auguste’s face conveys the awful news before the words emerge.
“Roger Le Forestier has been sentenced to death.”
Gasps and curses are uttered around Virginia. She keeps hold of her emotions.
“Pastor Trocmé is breaking the news to Danielle. Though I do not wish to convey his message to you, I must. Pastor Trocmé sends a stern reproof to the Maquis who brought firearms on the trip, reminding you that those who live by the sword will die by it.”
The room is silent.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, putting on his hat and leaving them.
She’s afraid to look at Bob, but she doesn’t have to. He exits through the back door.
While the others fold in and console one another, she leaves to follow Bob. It takes her a while to find him, but the smell of his cigarette and the glowing ember at its tip lead her to where he sits on a boulder overlooking the valley. The sky is cloudy and gray, and the grass smells sweet from a rain shower that passed through earlier that day. She climbs the boulder and sits next to him.
“Don’t say it isn’t my fault,” he says.
While he smokes, they stare out to the horizon in silence, gazing upon the stony Pic du Lizieux. She hears him sniffing and thinks he might be crying.
“Tell me what happened to you in the Pyrenees,” he says.
“Why?”
“I need to hear it. We’re so close to liberation, and I’m depleted. I’m sick over Roger.” Bob’s voice catches. “I need some kind of inspiration.”
“How could you be inspired by a coward, running away with her tail between her legs?”
“Stop,” he says, banging his fist onto his knee. “Stop calling yourself a coward.”
Bob’s coming undone, she thinks. His war sins, his guilt. It’s cracking him to pieces. She knows how he feels.
“Why was it so bad?” he continues. “I need to understand.”
“I guess it’s because there’s always something in me that feels bigger and stronger than human beings, but there’s no way to feel more powerful than a mountain.”
“That’s not it, and you know it. Not all of it, anyway. Tell me the truth.”
Here we are, she thinks.
In her last mission, this was the time the dominoes began to fall, and she fled. But she will not flee this time. No matter what happens.
Bob slips his arm through hers and draws her closer to his side. She allows herself to relax against him. She takes a deep breath.
“When we set out,” she starts, “the night sky over the Pyrenees was crystal clear. But all I could see were my friends’ faces. Klaus Barbie had begun capturing and torturing them, trying to break them to get my address, while an MP hunted me. They had been informed by a double agent. A priest.”
Bob curses.
“You see why I didn’t want the priest to drive us?” she says.
“Yes.”
“And do you know that, as we speak, that very MP is in the hospital in Chambon?”
Bob flinches and starts to climb to his feet.
“Later,” she says, holding his arm.
Once he settles, she continues her story.
“HQ had been urging me to return to London, but they finally ordered it. The Allies had crushed the Germans in North Africa. The Nazis were spilling into the unoccupied zone. My doctor friend told me the Gestapo were onto me. He showed me the wanted poster with my face. And in my panic, I fled. I fled France instead of staying. I left all my people to the dogs to save my own skin.”
“You were ordered,” says Bob.
“When have I ever let that sway me?”
He looks away from her because he knows it’s true.
It’s November of 1942. There are three men who also found their way to the Pyrenees guide, two Frenchmen and a Belgian she’s almost sure are fellow agents, but who keep as quiet about their situation as she does. Her last fifty-five thousand francs gets them the guide, rucksacks with canteens of water, meager food supplies, and heavy boots. She agrees to be the interpreter; she’s the only Spanish speaker among the refugees.
Virginia passes out uppers, explaining to the guide that they’ll help them stay awake and suppress their appetites. He waves it away, but the others take them.
Without ceremony, they begin.
The guide tells them the climb will be steepest on the French side. They are at six hundred meters, but they will peak at about three thousand. Though the Spanish side will be a more gradual descent, it will be harder. The air is thinner, and the snowdrifts are waist deep.
Virginia takes in this information and communicates it as soberly to the others as she’s able. She has one sock for her stump and can’t imagine what it will look like after this trip. A sudden, sharp longing to remain in France, to find a new identity and return to her people in Lyon, rushes at her. She has sent countless downed pilots and agents along this circuit, but now that she’s the pawn in the game, she’s shocked to find how unequal she feels to the task.
Aside from the guide, breath already comes hard and fast for them. Their guide is petite and light, sure-footed and fit. She wonders how many times he has done this. Will he be able to get them safely to the other side? Every time a dog howls or a searchlight flashes, they crouch low. There are border patrols they’ll have to avoid on the ascent and descent. Snow they will have to survive at the peaks.
As the fragrance of crushed pine needles under their boots rises, a heavy, wet fog descends. The craggy, mossy rocks cause them to stumble. In spite of the protests of her fellow refugees, she situates herself last in the procession so they won’t notice when her limp worsens. Soon great silver firs surround them on all sides, and they reach the snow. A dusting, two inches, four inches, a foot. In drifts, snow seeps into her boots, making her good foot feel as numb as her prosthetic.
A little voice in her mind jabs her.
You should have listened to Vera and left Lyon before the winter weather. Then you wouldn’t have had this much snow to contend with. Your network wouldn’t be in such danger.
Try as she might, she can’t silence this hateful voice. It accompanies her on the sharp climb, along with the ghosts of her people.
Not ghosts, she tells herself. They might not be dead.
If that’s true, why do they haunt you?
Struggling through many hours, they reach a summit and stop to catch their breath, but she can’t. The air is too thin. It’s like a fist around her throat. The coming winter has made a frozen, terrible beauty of the landscape. She wants to turn back. They are so alone in the wilderness. They drop their rucksacks, massaging their bleeding shoulders. The men struggle to breathe around her. The guide watches, unmoved. It takes every ounce of training she has to steady her heart and suppress her panic.
She’s certain she’ll die out here. Her frozen body will be passed by hundreds of others on their escape. She’ll be stuck and stiff until the thaw, when she’ll rot and slide down a cliff and get buried in the mud.
And she deserves it, for leaving her people.
She pulls the scarf off her neck, desperate for a breath. The man next to her bumps her arm, shoving a flask at her. She takes a greedy drink.
Eau-de-vie. The water of life.
Slowly, the sweet brandy begins to relax her, and soon—though not soon enough—she finds a way to breathe. Shallow gasps slip into her lungs, and her organs adjust, taking what they can from the air. As the wind picks up, the guide grows impatient. He resumes the hike.
Virginia had thought the climb would be the hard part, but the descent in the rushing, icy wind sends them through snowdrifts up to two feet deep. Balancing on the downward hike is excruciating, and because it’s more gradual—because there are as many ascents as there are descents—they remain in the thin, impossible air for hours. As the sun rises, a cabin appears. Virginia thinks she’s seeing things, but the guide motions for them to go in, and they all collapse.
“Sleep,” he says.
As if on a hypnotist’s command, they drop. It feels as if she has only just closed her eyes, when he pokes her awake and tells them to eat. While the men are occupied with the stale bread, she sits on her cot and inspects her stump under the smelly blanket. Her knee is bloody and blistered, and pus makes it stick to the sock. She quickly covers it, removes the blanket, and asks for another drink of brandy. Though she thinks she could stay on that cot in that crude cabin forever, the guide urges them to prepare for the next leg of the journey. Virginia passes out more uppers, and pulls on her rucksack, feeling the sting as its straps settle into the deep grooves on her shoulders. The pain on her stump is searing, but there’s nothing to be done for it. They have so far to go.
As the hours pass, as the second day turns to evening and falls into night, nearly out of her mind with pain, Virginia continues to think she will die. She’s become so numb from the cold, she can’t feel anything about the fact of her death any longer, only that she hopes it comes soon. On and on they hike. Sudden ascents torture them; sharp descents are even worse. She thinks her good foot might have frostbite. She worries that it will have to be cut off, too.
It takes her some time to realize the wind has left, transporting the clouds, pulling back the curtain on a spectacular night sky. The guide stops them and points. Bewildered, she looks ahead and wonders why the stars are so low. Have they climbed above them?
“Una aldea,” the guide whispers.
A village.
The lights aren’t stars—they’re houses.
“Village!” she says to the others. The guide shushes her.
The refugees reach for her, embracing. They laugh through their tears. The guide leads them, creeping, to a solitary cabin on a ridge. Inside, a beautiful young man and his pretty wife and their noisy, fat baby welcome them. There’s a fire, warm bread, and a bottle of oloroso. Virginia asks for a sock, and the woman produces a pair made of soft, dry wool. But even these socks aren’t as welcome a sight as the suitcase the man fetches, opens, and reveals that holds a wireless transceiver.
“¡Gloria a Dios!” says Virginia.
He strings up the wire and taps the message to HQ that the travelers are safe. The minutes of silence while they wait for the reply stretch on, endless, but then a response comes.
There’s a great cheer all around as headquarters congratulates them. Virginia tells the wireless operator the code names in the group and then has him tap that, while the others are cooperative, Cuthbert has been troublesome. The response comes back quickly; the man reads the words aloud as the Morse code delivers them.
“If Cuthbert is trouble, eliminate him.”
Virginia howls with laugher. Those around her don’t understand, and she doesn’t enlighten them.
The next morning, they arise to the aroma of eggs cooking and tea brewing and the baby fussing and babbling. They leave the beautiful people on the mountain with many thanks and blessings, complete their descent, pay the guide the balance, and head for safe houses to rest until their rendezvous at the train station for the five o’clock to Barcelona. When they reunite, they are strengthened and confident, but anxious for the journey to be over. None of them have papers, so they need to keep moving. She and the men sit on separate benches, watching the clock, willing the long hand to move faster.
It’s here that her grief and guilt settle over her shoulders like a harness, tethering her as if on a rope over the mountain and all the way back to Lyon. Virginia has a physical ache for human comfort, but she knows that if her people are captured and in prisons or camps, they won’t have it. She resolves that she won’t, either. She will return to London to restore her strength and tell Vera everything she knows, and then Virginia will insist on returning to the field.
She closes her eyes, imagining all the ways she might return, but the train whistle stirs her to attention. She sits up fast, but when she opens her eyes, all the hope drains from her.
She stares down the barrel of a gun.
“Since we didn’t have papers, the Spanish police arrested us,” Virginia says. “A prostitute with tuberculosis was my salvation. When she got out of prison, she went to the American consulate to tell them who I was. They got me back to London.”
“Incredible,” Bob whispers.
“And in spite of all that, I don’t feel as if I’ve conquered anything. Those mountains I crossed continue to conquer me. I don’t feel like I’ve ever left them. I think I can’t leave the mountains because I shouldn’t have crossed them. I should never have left France to begin with. I abandoned my people because I was a coward.”
“No,” he says. “There’s nothing cowardly in you.”
“But you didn’t leave when you were caught,” she says. “You never left France. You joined the Maquis.”
“France is my home, not yours. And I did leave Lyon. I left when I couldn’t be of use any longer, and I found where I could be. If you had stayed in Lyon, you’d be dead. If you hadn’t left, you wouldn’t have learned the wireless. You wouldn’t have been sent to us here. We’d have nothing without you.”
She shakes her head no.
“You don’t believe me,” he says. “You think any old agent could help get us boys in shape? Any old agent could make us want to push ourselves to impress him? This from an agent wearing a fake leg called Herbert.”
“Cuthbert.”
“One who has been here since the beginning as a volunteer for a country she wasn’t born in, willing to come back and fight to the death, even when she has a price on her head.”
He jumps down from the boulder and looks up at her.
“Only la Madone could help us like this,” says Bob. “And once we’re liberated, when you stand there looking over the mountain you’ve helped conquer, I want you to take off this scarf at your neck and raise it in the air to me in surrender because I was right.”