Nancy missed the mountains now, all those twisting back roads surrounded by good cover where the Germans were no longer willing to explore thanks to the work of her men. Between Saint-Amand and Châteauroux the Boche were out in force and didn’t look that bloody nervous at all. She managed to duck two checkpoints, seeing them in time to turn off her route without attracting attention, but the third one had set themselves up on a sharp bend on the back road between Maron and Diors. She ran straight into them, and of course, as they were off the main road they were bored, and she, teetering along on her bike after twelve hours in the saddle was a welcome distraction.
“Your papers, Madame! Where are you going?”
She stared up at him, saying nothing, her eyes wide. She could probably kill this one, a blow to the throat just like the one she had used on the guard at the transmitter station, but he had two friends with him, one already with his hand on his revolver. She was unarmed. Take out the corporal with the first guard’s gun, hope the third one panicked and she had time to shoot him too, or rush him and go for his eyes? Perhaps a twenty percent chance.
So she burst into tears.
“Sir, please sir, you have to let me through. I don’t have papers. My mother is looking after my little boy in Châteauroux while I work and I heard he is sick!”
The guard shook his head. He looked old for his rank. Old enough to have children himself and a wife who worried about them.
“Please, sir! He is only five years old, his name is Jacques and he is such a good little boy, but my mother sent to say he is so poorly and asking for his mummy.” Perhaps it was the exhaustion, but Nancy had a clear vision of the sick child, his frightened grandmother, the tiny drafty flat where they were living. She was sobbing, and she meant it. She pointed at the scraggy vegetables in her shopping bag.
“Dear Madame Carrell, my boss’s wife, gave me these to make him soup, and Monsieur, he said, ‘Dearest Paulette, you must go to little Jacques, we can manage without you for a day if we must, but your child might die without his mother’s love!’”
Her voice rose in a wail, and the corporal looked over his shoulder at the other two men. They looked baffled. Nancy called out the name of her fictitious son between sobs a couple of times, watching for her opportunity to crush his Adam’s apple if it didn’t work.
He cleared his throat and patted her on her shoulder.
“Now then, my dear. I’m sure little Jacques will be fine. You go along now.”
Nancy got her feet back on the pedals even as she was pouring out her equally effusive thanks. She’d given herself hiccups.
“I shall pray for you, Monsieur!” she managed, then teetered off.
The town was low and sprawling, the center a snarl of twisting alleyways around an open central square. She had to stop and ask directions twice, and both times saw suspicion and fear on the faces of the people she spoke to. None of the patrols she saw stopped her, but the afternoon was advancing and in a couple of hours the number of people on the streets would shrink and she would become more noticeable.
At Beaulieu they had always told the students that if they noticed a patrol, French or German, apparently watching them the best thing to do was approach them. Ask for a match, the time. It made you immediately less suspicious. But Nancy didn’t dare get that close. In the distance she might still look like just another Frenchwoman, but close to they’d smell the blood and sweat on her, see the exhaustion on her face. The warm afternoon sun cast long shadows between the buildings, so she kept to them as much as she could, making herself small.
She found the street at last, in one of the shabbier corners of town. She wheeled her bike round the back, leaving it at the end of the lane, and approached through the yard, like a friend. She knocked, then stood back a little from the door so anyone twitching the lace curtains aside or peering through the slatted shutters could see her. It was a tiny place. One room on top of another, basically.
She felt someone watching her, she was sure of it, and she could only hope it was this Emmanuel, not some Gestapo thug with a revolver in his hand. The seconds ticked by. Perhaps no one was home. Any decent agent in a town of this size would have two or three safe houses. Perhaps she would just curl up behind the garbage pile and go to sleep, wait to see who got to her first, friend or foe. Sounded good.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.” A familiar voice.
The door opened a couple of inches and Nancy found herself looking at the freckled face of the redhead, Marshall, from Inverness. The last time she’d seen him he’d been tied to the flag pole outside the main barracks building with his trousers round his ankles, gagged with the bandages Nancy had used to bind up her chest on her PT runs.
She almost turned round and walked away. This man would never help her, not after she’d humiliated him twice. Perhaps there was a God after all and this was His last little joke, throwing this man and their history in her path at the moment her hope, her strength was at its lowest ebb.
But she didn’t even have the strength to move.
One. Two. Three. She had nothing to say, nowhere to go.
After an age, he opened the door fully and stepped back. She followed him automatically, into the low grubby kitchen and closed it behind her.
“Marshall,” she said quietly. “I need a radio for my Maquis in Cantal. We just got hit hard and need resupply now. I was told you had a spare set.”
He sat down heavily on a wooden chair by the kitchen table and stared up at her. She could feel his rage, his hatred in the air like the static charge before a storm.
“You evil little bitch. You think you can just turn up here after what you did and make demands? I’ll turn you into the Gestapo myself.”
She sat down opposite him. She couldn’t trust her legs to hold her up any longer anyway. “Do what you want. Get a message to London for my men though. Drop site code name Magenta should be operational still. If they can drop supplies there, there’s a chance my men will get to them before the Germans.”
She put her head in her hands and waited. He didn’t move, didn’t leave, didn’t speak. She thought of Tardivat, of Fournier, of Jean-Clair and Franc. They were worth one last effort. Surely. Come on, Nancy.
“This isn’t about you and me, Marshall, this is about the war. Your problem with me can wait until after the Nazis are over and done with.”
If ever you needed proof there was no God, here it was. After what she had done, after what she had cost her men following her own very bloody personal vendetta against Böhm, any functioning deity would have smote her on the spot for the hypocrisy of that little speech. Wait for it… and… No. No thunderbolt. No shattering light or demons dragging her to hell. Just Marshall, staring at her.
“You set me back a month with that little stunt. I only made it back to France the week before D-Day.”
How was it possible for a human being to be as tired as she was now, and still be talking, moving?
“Oh, cry me a river! After the crap you put me through, you got off easy. I should have shoved that rose up your arse, not tucked it behind your ear.” So much for diplomacy. Count your breaths, Nancy. “Do you need me to apologize, Marshall? Fine. I’m sorry. Even if we do both know you deserved it. Now help me.”
She shifted in the chair, trying to find a more comfortable position and failed. A bolt of pain tore through her legs. She could feel the raw skin tearing on her inner thighs, and her back spasmed. She closed her eyes until it passed, and when she opened them again, Marshall was watching her.
“Where did you come from?”
“We regrouped near Aurillac, I came over the mountain to get to Saint-Amand. My contact there couldn’t help me, and sent me on to you.”
“You got a truck along those roads without being shot?” He raised his eyebrows.
“We lost all our motor transport in the attack. I came on my bike.”
He stood up suddenly and Nancy thought he might be about to strike her, but he didn’t. Instead he opened the door of a ratty dresser and took out a bottle and a couple of dusty glasses. Red wine. The cure of every ill known to man or woman. He filled the glasses and they drank them off. The rough alcohol hit her stomach as a soft explosion of warmth in her belly.
“The set is here and you can have it,” he said at last. “And I’m transmitting tonight, so I can send your message to Baker Street. What pass phrase do you want them to use?”
She thought. Denden would find an ordinary radio somewhere so they could listen to Ici Londres, even if without a transmitter he was unable to talk back.
“Tell them to say, ‘Hélène has had tea with friends.’” Denden would recognize her code name and if they heard that it would put them on the lookout for a drop at least.
He grunted, refilled their glasses, then looked at his watch. “It’s safer to travel by night round here, even with the curfew. There’s a bed upstairs. You can rest for a couple of hours.”
A truce then. Good.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded and pointed upstairs. She finished her glass, and began the slow painful climb up the short flight to the second floor. She hadn’t felt this beaten up since her first day of parachute training. Marshall had pushed her off the platform into the lake that day, made her look like a bloody idiot.
She opened the door at the top of the stairs and sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling the relief and exhaustion sweep over her like soft waves over the shingle of a Mediterranean shore. She stared at her feet. Take your shoes off, Nancy, a voice in her head said firmly. She considered. No, don’t take your shoes off. From the squelch of blood as she moved her toes she could feel that her heels were torn to ribbons, and she did not want to spend all her precious rest time bandaging them up. The shoes stayed on. She did still have a big silk handkerchief, the remains of the parachute, in her pocket though. She pulled it out, then ripped it in two before she pulled her skirt up to her waist and looked at the bloody mess of her upper thighs. She tied one half of her handkerchief around the top of each leg, shifting back and forth on the bed. The material was cool and though it wasn’t much of a bandage, at least it would stop the wounds rubbing up against each other as she slept.
She began to lean back, her eyes already closed, when she heard the back door open and voices, low and urgent, then running footsteps up the stairs. No, No. Go away.
Marshall burst into the room. “Change of plans, Wake.”
“Just kill me,” she said.
“Don’t think I’m not tempted,” he replied. He was pulling an old armoire out of its alcove on the other side of the room. “Get off your arse and help me with this if you want the radio.”
Charming. She got up, staggered over, grabbed the other end and shoved.
“What’s happening, Marshall?”
“One of the friendly gendarmes just popped by. Seems some maniac took out Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon. Our local boys have got the wind up and are squeezing everyone hard before we do the same thing to them. Someone’s going to give them this address eventually.”
He squeezed into the gap behind the armoire and felt along the wall, then pulled a knife from his belt and cut away a section of the wallpaper. Nancy watched it fall back and he reached into the hole between the beams and pulled free the radio. Well, she hoped it was the radio—a brown leather solid case, like an oversized briefcase. “You have to go now.”
“Straps?” she said.
He opened the bottom of the armoire and tossed a couple of rolls of buckled webbing onto the bed. Nancy fastened them onto the loops on the case as he shoved the wardrobe back into position. Outside a horn beeped twice.
“They’re coming,” Marshall said. “You armed?”
“No.”
A sudden popping of small arms outside, then shouts in German.
Nancy went to the front window. “Four Gestapo, three Milice with them. Two more of them taking off after your lookout.”
“Leave, Wake.” He had split open the mattress and was pulling out a belt of grenades like a magician pulling handkerchiefs out of his closed fist.
“No, give me a revolver. You know I can shoot. We can take these men and both get away.” She put out her hand.
He fixed the belt around his waist.
“We wouldn’t have a hope. Go now before the house is surrounded.” He saw her hesitate and leaned forward, resting his forehead on the edge of the mattress. “Nancy, I was scared. In Inverness. When I saw who you were, I thought you’d tell them I’d been a coward coming out of France. But I’m not scared now.” He got up again. “There. Now sod off, will you?”
Fists began to hammer at the front door.
Nancy picked up the set and attached it like a backpack across her shoulders. She almost fell under the weight of it. Marshall lifted the front window, pulled the pin on his grenade and dropped it down into the street.
“Look out!”
Then the thunderous clap of the explosion. The house shook and on the street someone screamed like a rabbit in a snare. Bullets started to pepper the window frame, cracking the wood into splinters.
Marshall staggered backward but didn’t fall.
“Marshall?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Get going.”
Boots on the ground floor. More shouts. Marshall pulling the pin on another grenade.
She felt her hands on the frame of the back window. Hauled it up and climbed through, then twisted round, hung down and let herself drop into the yard. The back door opened as she sprinted toward the rear gate.
“Stop! Stop or I’ll shoot!”
She didn’t stop. The bullet hissed by her ear, and she swung out into the back street. Nobody there yet. Behind her she heard a third grenade, another rippling crackle of gunfire. No point turning back. No point waiting. Marshall was a rat in a trap, and she had to clear the area before the Gestapo or the Milice called in more reinforcements. Her bike was just where she had left it. She climbed on and the pain made her gasp. Then she started to ride.