Nancy’s raiding party returned in time to at least offer a distraction and keep some of the escape routes open down the valley, but as the hours unspooled the scale of the loss became clear. Several of the larger arms stashes gone, their field hospital and its supplies, Nancy’s bus and the storehouse all destroyed. And the men lost.
Nancy’s gear had been in the truck and she’d changed out of her whore’s outfit and back into slacks and boots as soon as they returned and realized the camp was under attack. They were only just clear of it when machine-gun fire hit the tank. She felt the heat of it on her face, like a blush of shame. It became Franc’s funeral pyre and when she and René returned to the spot just before first light, they buried his charred remains by the road and marked the spot with a cross of stones.
As dawn broke, the survivors from the camp were walking in scattered groups through the forests on both sides of the river, avoiding the roads and taking meandering twisting routes to the fallback position near Aurillac. Occasionally, a Henschel would pass overhead, firing random machine-gun bursts into the foliage hoping to hit one or other of the groups. They missed. When Nancy and René reached the fallback, Tardivat and Fournier could hardly look at her. It was different to the aftermath of the attack on Gaspard’s camp. No one was celebrating, telling blossoming stories of their heroism and daring. The air stank with defeat, and the whispers among the men were all about the lost weapons, the likely reprisals on the villages near where they were found, how the civilian population of Montluçon would suffer for the attack on the Gestapo headquarters.
Nancy set herself up in the corner of a half-ruined barn, and Fournier and Tardivat slept there too, exhausted and talking to each other only in low voices while Nancy stared at the wall and said little to anyone. She thought of Henri—what she might do to get him back, to find out if he were really alive or dead. Once Denden made it to the fallback they could radio requests for resupply, and perhaps in a few days she would return to Böhm, offer herself up on a plate. She needed to make this right first though. She had left them to fend for themselves hours after finding a spy in their camp. The dull ache of not knowing what was happening to Henri, which had become a familiar companion since the day of his arrest, had become an ever-present agony since that night in Courçais. It had driven her mad, and that madness had cost her men dearly. And they knew it.
It was two days before she saw Denden again. He was at the back of a ragged group led by Gaspard. When she saw Denden’s face, she was afraid he was wounded, so ashen was he with fatigue and grief.
“The radio’s gone, Nancy.” It was the first thing he said to her when they found her in the barn. “I destroyed it when I thought we were going to be overrun.”
“So now you have nothing,” Gaspard said, sitting down heavily opposite her on the earth floor. “Without your rich men in London, you have nothing. No food, no guns, and no soldiers.”
She looked up and around the group, the last of her senior officers. They looked broken, disappointed.
“You should have been here,” Gaspard said, making sure she knew. “You let that little bitch give away our position then went on your crazy mission, taking our best men from their posts when we needed them the most.”
No one, not Tardivat, not Fournier, not even Denden tried to disagree.
“Fine. I’m nothing. I’m shit,” she said, without heat. “But we still have a job to do. That army group…”
Denden started to pull off his boots, wincing hard as he did. “That job’s canceled, Nancy. We’re back on the usual harry-the-Germans missions, or we would be if we hadn’t just had our men and weapons scattered.”
“One hundred dead, two hundred wounded…” Gaspard continued.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Gaspard,” Denden screamed at him. “She gets the fucking point.”
Gaspard turned toward him and Nancy wondered if they were finally going to kill each other here and now and save Böhm the job. Gaspard attacking Denden, Nancy fighting Gaspard, Fournier fighting her. But though Gaspard opened his mouth to speak, to sling something hateful at Denden, he stopped. Even he was too broken to fight with any spirit today. She’d broken them all.
She put her head in her hands, then felt a touch on her shoulder. She looked up. It was Tardivat; he offered her a water bottle. She took it and thanked him. He didn’t reply. She had to fix this, she had to. It was more important than her own hurt, more important, today, in this moment, than Henri. She wanted to stop, to curl up and die as the realization hit her. She had no easy way out; there was no slipping off and arriving like a martyr in Böhm’s office for her now. This was her job; this was what had to be done.
“Do you still have the code book, Denden?”
He nodded, not looking at her.
“Then I’ll go and get us a radio. You said something about a spare in Saint-Amand? Used to belong to that girl who got picked up in March?”
“You’ll never make it,” Gaspard said, getting to his feet. “I’m going to see to my men.”
Denden waited until Gaspard had marched out of the barn before he replied. “Yes. I stopped for a drink with my motorbike friend there. Bruno from the café in the square where we were said he had a spare set hidden away. But we have no vehicle, Nancy. The trucks are all gone.”
“A bicycle then,” she said firmly.
“But Saint-Amand is more than a hundred kilometers away.”
“A bit less over the hills.” She didn’t need the lost maps to tell her that. She knew the roads and paths round here almost as well as Gaspard. Denden, Fournier and Tardivat exchanged cautious glances.
“I can get you the bicycle,” Fournier said at last.
“But why do you have to go, Nancy?” Denden asked. “Can’t you send one of the boys? You need to find which of our arms depots are still secure, resupply the men from there as best you can.”
“Do you still have my notebook, Denden?”
He reached into his back pocket, showed it to her.
“Then you can handle all that. You and Fournier and Tardivat. But I can get through checkpoints. No one else here can.”
He shoved the notebook back into her pocket, reached for her hands. “Nancy, your face is everywhere.”
“They don’t see my face when I go through checkpoints! They see a housewife. Look, I know I’ve been a goddamn fool. I fucked it up; I have to fix it.”
She plunged her hands into her bag and pulled out the dress she had worn in the Gestapo raid. It was stiff with dried blood. “Tardi, can you make this into something respectable? Dress me as a war widow? God, what I wouldn’t give for the material from that nightdress now.”
Tardivat lit a cigarette. “I still have a parachute in my pack.”
“Can you do it, Tardi?”
He flinched when she said his name.
“Yes. I can do it, mon colonel. It will take me till morning. You should sleep, wash. You look like a witch out of fairy stories, not a housewife.”
He took the bloody rag of a dress from her and walked out of the barn. She watched him go, thinking of that nightdress. He had made it as a gesture of his admiration, of fellowship and friendship, and she had lost it. Lost it and got men killed. She needed it back.
Fournier got up too, touched Denden on the shoulder. “We should begin at once, Denis.”
Denden nodded. “One moment,” he said, then waited until Fournier had slouched out of the barn. “Did you kill Böhm?” he asked. “I know about the offer he made in Courçais now, what Anne said.”
That made it easier somehow. “No. And he said Henri is still alive, but I know I need to fix this now, Denden. I can’t go looking for him until we are done.”
He stood up, touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Nancy.”
“Did Jules survive? I haven’t seen him.”
He looked away from her. “He did, but he daren’t speak to me after Gaspard… Just get some sleep.”
Then he was gone too.
She woke next morning aching from the cold ground and the bruises she had picked up in the raid. The dress was lying next to her. She went to wash in one of the icy tributaries that ran from the mountains and into the river in the valley below. Someone had told her once it took hundreds of years for the rain to work its way through the soil and then emerge again, purified and enriched in these springs. She worked the blood out of her nail beds and scrubbed her skin pink, then put on the dress Tardivat had washed and repaired, made more decent and plain with his harvested parachute silks. It was a little too big for her now, but Tardi had provided a sash, similar to ones she’d seen women wearing in Chaudes-Aigues—a very French attempt to make starvation fashionably acceptable. She smoothed her hair behind her ears and put on her shoes. Not her army boots, not her heels, but the mid-level low and feeble things made out of cardboard she wore when she needed to get through ordinary checkpoints.
The men, scattered around the clearing over their morning cooking fires, glanced at her in surprise. They had grown used to seeing her in slacks and army tunic, and her sudden reappearance as an ordinary Frenchwoman shocked them. Denden and Tardi were waiting by the barn, an iron-frame bike between them.
“Fournier delivered this for you,” Denden said as she approached, trying to sound cheery. But Fournier hadn’t stayed to see her off, Nancy thought. “And I’ve found these.” He handed her a pair of reading glasses. “I picked them up in case mine got smashed, and I’ve been trying to remember the name of the square with the café and Bruno… but I can’t recall it for the life of me.”
He started describing the square, the way the light patterned the walls of the buildings in the afternoon and the qualities of the hospitality he’d enjoyed there, till Nancy just put her hand on his arm and he ground to a halt.
“I’ll find it, Denden.”
He was scared for her, she realized, under all the chatter. Tardi pushed himself off the wall and fished something out of his pocket. A crucifix on a chain. He showed it to her, then without saying anything, fastened it around her neck. For just a second she thought it was burning her skin, but no, the metal was just cold.
“Are you a Christian, Tardi?” she asked.
He didn’t look her in the eye, but his voice didn’t sound angry. “I have tried to be; I have not always succeeded. But if you are to look like a war widow… They would ask God’s help.”