Page 24 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

23

The Most Terrible Year of All

The Dordogne, December 1942

Rivière, Elephant, and half a dozen agents ambush the prison van, as Goubil promised. It’s almost too easy.

Stop, I tell myself. Since when did I become the kind of person who sees only the darkness between the stars?

We travel separately and via different routes to the Dordogne. I’m with Rivière, who’s uncharacteristically silent as we chug past Nazi convoys setting themselves up everywhere, having stopped pretending that part of France is free. We aren’t questioned; I suppose they think fugitives have more sense than to travel when there are so many Germans on the march.

“I need to go via Toulouse,” I tell him.

Rivière’s known me long enough that he just sighs.

Josette, whom I moved to Toulouse HQ months ago, greets me by waving one sharp finger in the air. “If you apologize for Lucien’s arrest, I’ll shoot you like I once promised to shoot the Boche. The ones doing unforgivable things are the Nazis, not you.”

I kiss her cheeks, and in her arms I ask, “Any news of Eagle?”

“Still in Castres.”

I’m too fatigued to hide my distress. “Can you send someone—”

She cuts me off. “Lucien left an hour ago for Castres with two others.”

“But—”

She interrupts again. “An adjutant would never let his commanding officer rot in prison. I hugged my son a half hour ago. Go and hug yours. I’ll keep watch while you do.”

From one mother to another, the only gift that matters.

We walk to the Jesuit school where Christian’s boarding. One of the priests was a member of the Dame Blanche network in the Great War. A man who knows how to evade Germans and protect people—I could think of no one better to keep my son safe.

Ten minutes later, I’m in a room with the boy, whom I haven’t seen for a year.

It breaks my heart that he doesn’t run to me, but treads warily, like someone yoked. “It’s you?” he asks.

“Come here, darling,” I say, and at last he dashes forward and doesn’t let go.

When we finally separate, he talks for one glorious hour about the books he’s read, the histories he’s learned, the science he’s studied. “Everyone thinks lions are the deadliest animals in the world,” he enthuses at one point. “But it’s mosquitoes that kill the most people every year. Teeny, tiny mosquitoes.”

He shakes his head in wonder that something so small and so ordinary could be so dangerous.

“I didn’t know,” I force myself to say. “But tell me what you’ve been learning in math.” And he begins to talk about the angles in a lovely, safe triangle while the deadly mosquito buzzes in the drums of my ear.

—

I leave the school carrying a heart and a head so full of my son that I can hardly climb into the car. But a leader’s pain is like the one I’ve carried in my hip since I was a child—invisible, but almost enough to cripple you, so you brace yourself against the air.

Rivière gives me the gift of five minutes’ silence, then says, “Vichy is furious. Luckily the Germans still haven’t worked out who you are and what Alliance is. But they want everyone rearrested. There’s a price on the head of Claire de Bacqueville—a significant price. Elephant’s made you new identity papers.”

“At least they haven’t connected Claire and Marie-Madeleine.”

“But a description of you has been circulated everywhere. You thought you were in danger before,” Rivière says grimly. “Now you’re treasure for anyone who wants to make a killing. MI6 wants you to take the Lysander to London next week.”

If I went to London, I’d be keeping my promise to my children. I’d be in no danger at all.

But last week, a courier arrived at HQ with photographs that had been smuggled out of a prisoner-of-war camp in Mauthausen, Austria, by a doctor. They showed prisoners so thin we thought someone had dressed skeletons in clothes. The last two images were of the river in Mauthausen, its water colored red with the blood of the dead. That was when I understood that Nazis don’t just kill. They’re the kings of slaughter.

I can’t leave my country to men who’ll let her rivers run red with blood.

So I re-dress myself in the costume of la patronne in time to greet my agents, calm their fears, and reignite their hopes, because what if I’m the mosquito, and the Nazis are the ones who get bitten eventually?

—

In the heart of France, where Colonel Kauffmann, the partly deaf pilot with a penchant for capes, leads a sector of Alliance, the forests are silent, the winds fierce, the mountains impenetrable, and the paths twist like secrets. This land will hide us like fairytale children in a mythical forest, I think as Kauffmann— who’s taken the code name Cricket—greets me with a warm handshake, saying, “I’ve found you a new HQ.”

“Where are the animals being caged this time?”

“A castle fit for a queen.”

In keeping with his antediluvian appearance, Kauffmann’s procured the empty Chateau Malfonds near the town of Sarlat, which looks as antique but debonair as him. My HQ staff will work there, separate from his sector, so any attention directed at us won’t compromise them.

Monique and Magpie are already in the ops room, setting things up with an endearing combination of his orderliness and her spirit. She locates chairs and other necessary items from all over the chateau, and Magpie places them in functional working spaces. Goubil and Pierre, whom I’ll put on next week’s Lysander, are there too—they can’t stay in France now that they’ve helped us escape.

“Do I smell truffles?” I ask as I walk into the kitchen and find Bee buzzing around.

Then I hear a cough, and I almost don’t recognize Coustenoble, who’s been helping the duke of Magenta make Paris into a stronghold. His face is pale, eyes glassy.

“Damn Boche,” he says. “I nearly got caught.”

“What happened?” I ask, instead of saying, You’re ill. Come and rest, because I know he doesn’t want me to say that in front of his comrades.

“I ran across the border with bullets flying past my ears,” he complains. “I don’t know why they keep the demarcation line if they’ve occupied the whole country. I thought for sure they’d get me this time.”

“Can everyone give me a minute?” I say, and in thirty seconds there’s no one in the kitchen except Couscous and me.

He embraces me. “Jail, little one,” he says, as if his being shot at is a minor inconvenience.

His handkerchief is streaked with blood.

“I’m ordering you to rest,” I tell him.

“I’ll rest when we’ve won.”

I don’t have a chance to say more, because my arrest and escape have made every sector leader from across the country descend upon us to make sure I really am alive. In they come, exclaiming, smiling, embracing. Bee brings tea, coffee, and whiskey, and soon the kitchen is alive with voices.

I heat a pan of milk for Coustenoble, who tells me how well things are going in the north. He finishes by saying, “Now that Paris is on its feet, we need someone to focus on the forbidden zone.”

It’s the most dangerous job of all. The forbidden zone is off limits to anyone without a pass and is heavily patrolled by Nazis who shoot first and don’t ask questions. My whole body rebels against what I think he’s about to say.

“It has to be me, little one.”

The last free stripe in my tricolor. “But you’re ill,” I protest.

“The whole country is ill,” he says. “But here in this room, everyone is well.”

He looks around at the animals of Alliance as proudly as if he’d take on every forbidden zone in the world.

Every time I think I’ve seen true courage, I realize I’ve witnessed only a little bit of mettle. True courage is a man with bleeding lungs sending himself into hell.

All I can do is pass him the milk and show him the message that just arrived on Magpie’s transmitter.

Blockade an astonishing success. Twenty-eight voyages attempted, fourteen ships destroyed.

It means Baston’s intelligence from Stosskopf, the man playing a double game with the Nazis, has been so good that of the last twenty-eight U-boat voyages attempted, fourteen have been blown out of the water. Because of Alliance.

“That’s half!” Coustenoble cries, and he already looks better, as if warm milk and success can mend just about anything.

It’s Baston himself who arrives next. He lets me hug him, but he firmly refuses to listen to thanks or praise. “I have another strategy I hope you’ll approve,” he tells me.

“Go on.”

“My agent in Brittany, Mandrill, has befriended a seamstress who repairs the Nazi submariners’ life vests,” he says. “When the Germans demand that she repairs their vests quickly, she knows a submarine is due to go out. She’s agreed to tell Mandrill when that happens. Then we can radio the information straight to the British.”

“You’re worried about something,” I say, studying his face.

The old general nods. “The seamstress is just seventeen. A child. How can she know what she’s getting herself into?”

I understand why he’s come. He doesn’t, not really—just knows that his guts are filled with discomfort when they should be replete with viands and vittles. So I take the responsibility from him for this young girl’s life. “Her code name can be Scallop.”

Baston studies my face now. I hold my gaze steady and indicate Monique, Bee, think of Josette and all the other women in Alliance’s ranks as I say in my leader’s voice, a dagger I use to slice through doubt, “These women will set the world ablaze. And from their courage, a better one will rise. We have to let them.”

Navarre, MI6, Léon—none of these men would ignore such a powerful weapon against the Nazis because of mere youth. But as I turn away, I think, I hope to God she has a large enough shell to hide in.

—

A note arrives from Josette to tell us that Léon is out of prison already and on his way here with Lucien. I allow myself to smile only as much as you should if your chief of staff is rescued, rather than your lover—the man I’ll hardly have a chance to speak to because he’ll be leaving on the Lysander tomorrow. If MI6 wants me in London, I’ll have to placate them by sending Léon again and hope they aren’t furious with me.

That night, in a bed with the softest eiderdown and a roaring fire beside it, I dream of Léon. Then I hear his voice so near that I sit up, toss a sweater on over the shirt and trousers I’ve slept in, and go down to the kitchen where, yes: Léon is alive and safe with a crowd of people gathered around him.

“Lucien smuggled me a handsaw via a sympathetic guard, and I cut through the bar on the lavatory window a little every time I visited the facilities,” he’s saying with a mischievous grin. “They thought the prison food disagreed with me, hence my frequent need to use the facilities. The night Lucien’s team was ready for me, I picked the lock on my cell, crept past the gendarmes, who were snoring away”—he does an exaggerated impression of a sleeping policeman and I laugh like the others.

Léon hears and looks over at me. When he smiles, everyone turns their heads to see why his face is so transformed and I worry we might have given ourselves away.

He keeps talking, making them focus on him. “I climbed out the bathroom window and slid down eighty feet of rope. As you can see”—he holds up his hands, which are raw—“the rope got the better of me.”

Bee, bless her, gets out salves and bandages.

While Léon’s being ministered to, I approach Lucien. He’s become a man, I see, in this past month. And it’s to the man that I say, “Thank you.”

He beams and blushes and is suddenly a child again for just a second until I say, “Tell them your side of the story,” and he takes his seat at the table and describes how he got the rope and handsaw to Léon with the kind of swashbuckling exaggeration Navarre once reveled in.

I slip in next to Léon.

“I hear you have another price on your pretty head,” he says, words teasing, tone serious. “You know your head is priceless.”

“You’ve gotten out of prison twice. Me only once. I have some catching up to do.”

Before Léon can argue with that shaky logic, another visitor arrives.

“Hérisson!” the duke of Magenta shouts, picking me up and twirling me around. “The north is operating like a countrywoman’s sewing machine. You’re sending people out to safety on airplanes; we’re taking them to London on fishing boats.”

I laugh. The spirit of competition among my animals is fierce. No sooner has someone perfected one tactic than another finds a way to trump it.

“I came to deliver these.” He hands over the last week’s worth of intelligence that’s accrued while I’ve been breaking out of prison.

I open the folder, remembering there’s something I have to tell Léon.

“Look,” I say, showing him tiny photographs gathered by our agents of the system of bunkers, guns, and artillery that are being built along the French coastline. “Take these with you when you go to London. Tonight,” I add, as casually as I can manage.

“Tonight?” Léon repeats. Then, “They want you there, don’t they?”

Before he can tell me I should be the one to go, I pick up another report. “The Nazis are moving so many troops toward Russia. It might make invading France easier for the Allies. That news should make them happy, so I expect twice as much money, whiskey, and cigarettes from London.”

Having sensed I’m not to be budged, he jokes, “You’re trading me for Woodbines?”

“The Woodbines would give me less trouble.”

He whispers in my ear, “But not as much satisfaction, I hope.”

My face turns a shade of pink I can’t blame on the fire.

But the jokes fade when Magpie comes in from the ops room with a transmission from Paris. I take it, still smiling, not knowing what the decryption will reveal until the scratchings of my pen become the first desolate notes of a requiem. Everyone in Fresnes has been shot. Hugon. Vallet. And seven more.

“A courier came, too.” Magpie nods to the young woman hovering behind him.

I stretch out my hand and take from her what turns out to be Vallet’s last letter.

I think I have done my duty to my country and my comrades, you will never need to blush on my account. Be courageous, all of you. Farewell…

“Monique,” I say hoarsely, forgetting in this terrible moment to use her code name in front of the others.

She reads it and gives one sharp nod, too stubborn to cry in front of everyone. Then she passes the letter around the table, so everyone can read that Vallet was a man who thought of his country and of what was right more than his own pain and his own life.

—

Mahout, our gypsy pilot in charge of the landing field, is next to arrive. Not knowing what’s happened, he says, “We need to get moving.”

Maurice starts to say that we can’t be thinking of flights to London now, but Monique gives me another, sharper nod. So I force myself to ignore the new hole in my heart beside the one Schaerrer left and say, “Vallet didn’t die so we’d cancel our missions.”

We go out into the storm. I’m not supposed to be present for Lysander flights because they’re the riskiest thing we do. But Léon is leaving, like Bellerophon riding his winged horse across the sky, even though he’s only just gotten out of prison and I haven’t embraced him, let alone lain my head on his shoulder and wept for Vallet and eight others.

Wind and rain lash at us. Clouds dress the sky. The night is an E-minor scale, fathomless; rain the only thing that glitters. I stand under Eagle’s wing in the hailstorm for hours, but the plane doesn’t arrive.

We eventually leave, freezing and exhausted, and Magpie greets us at the chateau with the words, “Transmission just came in. The weather’s set to last all week. They won’t be coming this moon. Merry Christmas.”

Yes, it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow. But none of us looks especially merry.

As everyone unpeels their coats, I remember that we started the year with one hundred men. Now, in Alliance, there are almost one thousand.

That is no small thing.

“Christmas dinner tomorrow,” I announce. “For Vallet. And for hope.”

—

We sit around the chateau table and eat like kings. Kauffmann’s brought food from his farm: a ham, real butter and bread, and dozens of eggs that Bee makes into tiny soufflés. There are English chocolates, vegetables that taste like roasted French earth, chestnuts, and a dozen bottles of burgundy, smoky sweet with a palate of wood fires and cherries.

We eat and laugh, and I try to enjoy what I have and not think about my mother and Yvonne, of Christian and Béatrice eating b?che de No?l without me. Next year, I plead with the Fates, spin out a future that puts me at home with my family for Christmas 1943 .

With North Africa having been invaded by the Allies, surely France is next. By summer. August 1943 at the latest.

Yes.

But tonight is for my agents, not my fears. I dress my face in a smile and reminisce with Maurice about Morocco, listen for Coustenoble’s cough and convince myself it sounds better, watch Magpie talking to Monique with such a compassionate look in his eyes that I hope her heart might be healed by time and tenderness. I ask Kauffmann about his wartime exploits with Léon, who’s at the opposite end of the table. Every time my eyes catch his, I can hear his thoughts murmuring against my ear, saying very private things.

Then the duke of Magenta stands. “To the queen of the animals,” he says, raising his glass. “Bless you for what you are doing. You alone make it possible for old soldiers like me to serve my country. May your prickles never be dulled and your smile continue to make grown men blush.”

The cheering is thunderous and now I am blushing, so I stand before he can say anything more and raise my glass. “To Vallet. To Hugon and all the rest. And to an Alliance that will never be broken.”

More cheering; damp eyes and cheeks. We hide them beneath celebrations that continue until midnight. Coustenoble falls asleep in his chair, others break away to talk in smaller groups. Léon whispers in my ear, breath hot against my skin, “Don’t come upstairs for fifteen minutes. I have a gift for you that I need to get ready.”

Anticipation means it’s only ten minutes later when I push open the door to my room. The fire is blazing and the air is scented with lavender and rose. Léon is standing in the doorway of the bathroom. “For your present, you need to be naked,” he says.

I laugh, the burgundy, the warmth, and the proximity of the man I love almost too much. I slide out of my clothes, watching him watch me, the pulse in his throat beating against his skin. Then I see what my present is: a bathtub full of heavenly hot water, scattered with dried rose petals and lavender.

“It’s the best present I’ve ever had,” I tell him. “But only if you share it with me.”

He grins. “That was definitely my plan.”

We slide into the tub as if we have all the time in the world. I lean my back against Léon’s chest and he wraps his arms around me. My eyes almost close, but I don’t want to miss anything of the scent, the touch, and the taste of Léon Faye; my Eagle, my love.

“How are you?” he murmurs, trailing the washcloth along my arm.

“I should be asking you that,” I say, more lightly than I feel. Always trying to pretend, to never say, I spend every minute thinking you’re going to die and knowing, if that happened, that I would die, too. “Didn’t you just escape prison and leave half your skin behind?”

He laughs. “Serves me right for being cocky. I actually believed my experience in aerial maneuvers would see me down that rope without any consequences.”

I stroke my finger across one damaged palm and feel Léon’s muscles relax, as if we will, for just a few hours, pretend we’re two people who’ve never seen the inside of a prison, whose friends haven’t died, and who don’t have intelligence that the Nazis would kill for hidden in a room downstairs.

“I already miss you,” I say, thinking of London.

“Me too,” he whispers, voice husky, lifting my red, chilblained fingertips to his lips and kissing them as if they were the loveliest hands in the world.

I turn my head, needing to catch his lips against mine, but it isn’t enough, so I shift my body, straddling him, his hands gripping my hips, mine tangled in his hair until the kiss becomes too urgent, too unequal at expressing everything we’re trying to say.

We climb out of the bath inelegantly and hurriedly. Léon tosses me a towel before he steps me back into the bedroom and I’m on my back on the bed, him above me, his hands as undisciplined as the weather outside, and I can’t believe this is all we have—words and mouths and bodies—when this thing between us stretches beyond horizons, fills every ocean, paints dawns red and sunsets gold, gifts the sky its moon and the stars their glittering particles of dust.

—

When I wake, it’s still dark outside. In the firelight, I creep out of bed and search for the present I had London send over on last month’s midnight flight. I stare at it for a moment, wondering and worrying, but also stupidly, ridiculously happy.

I wrap the necktie around my waist like a belt and walk back to the bed.

Léon stirs. When his eyes flicker open and he realizes I’m not lying beside him, terror rouses him fully.

“I’m here,” I whisper. “Safe.”

He shutters the fear instantly, the fear that sometimes becomes too much even for him and soaks the sheets with sweat at three in the morning.

He raises himself to his elbow, looks quizzically at the silk around my waist, moves his lips to my stomach, then along my hipbone to the top of my thigh.

“I have two presents for you,” I murmur, needing him to not have his lips on me, not yet. “You’ll have to unwrap the first to find the second.”

A faint smile lifts the corners of his mouth, and I see something else I love about him—the man who runs at life like it’s all a game he’s certain to win, and his only job is to enjoy it.

He undoes the tie with one tug of his fingers. It unrolls like the perfect…

“Moroccan sky,” he says, and I smile.

I’d sent the most detailed and possibly ridiculous instructions to London and they excelled. The tie is the same breathtaking hue that’s painted over Rabat when the red sands of the desert reflect the light back up into the sky.

I almost can’t say the next thing because I know it will knock the smile off Léon’s face.

I pick up his hand. “When I first met you in Vichy in 1940, I told you there were two things I was fighting for. Now…” I pause and the seconds march past, so many of them that Léon tries to catch my tear-filled eyes in his worried ones, but the only thing I can look at is the floor.

“Now there are four,” I whisper.

“Four?”

“Béatrice, Christian, you. And…” I touch my stomach, already in love despite the fact that it’s too dangerous and I can’t be la patronne of the largest Resistance network in France, a woman on the run with a price on her head, and be pregnant, too.

“And our son,” I finish. I know it’s a boy. And that he’ll be a warrior like his father.

“Our son?” Léon repeats, two words that aren’t meant for a world tearing itself apart, and he covers his face with his hands, jaw working furiously as he tries to control his emotions.

I gently peel his hands away. “It’s okay,” I say softly. “It’s okay.”

He gathers me to him like I’m the very air he needs to fly. “I should have noticed,” he says, voice hoarse. “Rations and running have made you so thin that it doesn’t make sense that your stomach is a tiny bit curved.”

“What will they say?” I blurt. Because it will soon be obvious to those who work closely with me—Monique, Magpie, Lucien, Bee—that I’m pregnant.

He hesitates and I brace myself for him to say, I’ll have to take over. You need to go back to your children.

All those things are true.

All those things are impossible.

But he smiles. “Minerva, do you ever feel like our lives have been divided into two halves? The half when I didn’t know you, and the half where I do?”

Of everything, that’s what makes me cry. That he didn’t say, The half where I was an air force commandant, and the half where my role was recognized by only a scraggly band of people and the shadows of British Intelligence . That he considers his whole life as orbiting, like a moon to its earth, around me.

His fingertips trace over the child we’ve made, the child we love—the child that might make us behave with more or less courage than we need to. “I’m trying to say that, in 1938, could you ever have imagined a future when there’d be hundreds of men in France who’d unquestioningly do whatever you asked?”

“Well, I do have that kind of face,” I joke.

Léon doesn’t laugh. He holds my face in his hands and says fiercely, “What’s happened in Alliance is extraordinary. I don’t know if ever again in history there’ll be another woman like you, Marie-Madeleine. One who commands legions with grace and courage and humility and flair.”

“Léon,” I whisper. Suddenly I can feel, and I think he can too, that same sense of disaster that follows me everywhere—that what we have won’t survive the war.

But is it because he’ll be captured, or I will? Or both of us?

As one of my arms stretches over my head, his hand caught in mine, I shut my eyes against every second but this one. Now is all that exists in wartime. The future is just a mirage made of hope, or a chasm carved away by tears.

—

I wake so late there’s sunlight in the room. Refreshed and ready for 1943, I go downstairs, listening for the sound of Tiger’s cough. I don’t hear it, and I think, Ah, he’s better.

But when I enter the kitchen, there are fewer faces than the night before.

“Where is he?” I ask Léon and Magpie, who both look guilty.

“Gone. To the forbidden zone,” Léon says.

“We couldn’t stop him,” Magpie adds quietly. “He wanted to leave like a man. Saying goodbye to you…” He shrugs, as if in just a couple of months he’s gleaned whatever it was that Léon was trying to explain last night. My leadership. This strange quality that makes men do the bravest things they’ve ever done, but also run from taking leave lest it make them cry.

I remember Coustenoble’s face two nights ago, the way he looked around at his friends, and now I see it for what it was: a prince farewelling his most trusted lords.

I will never see Couscous again.

I stumble outside, let the mistral claw at me. Winter is angry, its teeth keen.

And premonition presses like the cold barrel of a gun against my neck, whispering, 1943 will be the most terrible year of all.