“Let them through,” the soldier called to someone near the first truck. Now loaded with the unfortunate new prisoners, it was just starting to pull out.
With a wave for the soldier, Otto followed, although far too slowly for Genevieve’s peace of mind. As the car crawled after the truck, she cast a last, quick glance at the garden: she could see nothing, not even soldiers.
Was the girl—Anna’s mother—still there on the ground? Or had she already been taken away?
Was she dead?
Genevieve felt sick to her stomach. But once again, there was nothing to be done.
Acutely aware of the truck’s large side and rear mirrors and what might be able to be seen through them, Genevieve managed to stay upright and keep the baby hidden until the Citroën turned a corner and went its own way.
Then, feeling as though her bones had turned to jelly, she slumped against the door.
Anna gave up on the finger and started to cry, shrill, distressed wails that filled the car. With what felt like the last bit of her strength, Genevieve pushed the scarf away and gathered her up and rocked and patted and crooned to her. Just like she had long ago done with—
Do not think about it.
“Shh, Anna. Shh.”
“That was almost a disaster.” Otto’s voice, tight with reaction, was nonetheless soft for fear of disturbing the quieting child. “What do we do now? You can’t take a baby back to the hotel. Think questions won’t be asked? What do you bet that soldier won’t talk about having met Genevieve Dumont? All it takes is one person to make the connection between the raid and you showing up with a baby and it will ruin us all. It will ruin everything.”
“I know.” Genevieve was limp. “Find Max. He’ll know what to do.”
Chapter Two
Is it my fate to die tonight? Lillian de Rocheford’s blood ran cold as the question pushed its way into the forefront of her mind. An owl hooting on the roof of a house brought death to the one who heard it—everyone said so. It was silly, pure superstition. She did not for one moment believe it. But last night an owl had landed on the Château de Rocheford’s steep slate roof almost directly above her attic bedroom, waking her with its mournful hoot. Today the summons had come: they were needed. She had wanted to refuse. The circumstances were such that she could not.
Arrangements had been made, a rendezvous point set. And now here they were.
And I’m jumping at everything that moves because of that damned owl.
“They should be here by now.” She didn’t realize she was fretting aloud until Andre Bouchard, who’d moved a few paces ahead to peer out into the fog, looked back at her. His shadow, distorted by the gray diffusion of moonlight filtering through the trees, stretched back toward her like a skeletal hand.
“If there was trouble, we would have heard something. Shouts, gunfire.” He spoke in a whisper, as she had done.
It was true, what Andre said: war was rarely silent. In the last four years, since the Germans had done the unthinkable and broken through the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line to overrun France, the noise, like all the other horrible things the invaders had brought with them, had been unrelenting. First, the desperate evacuation from nearly every port along the Atlantic coast of the French army and the British and Czech soldiers whose combined efforts had failed to keep France safe. Next, the resulting firestorm as the Germans had launched their attack against the retreat that had left thousands upon thousands dead. Then came the surrender, the declaring of the city of Cherbourg open to the Nazis by their own city council, followed by the ominous rumble of trucks bringing in the despised Wehrmacht to live among them. After that, the growl of the British and, later, the American aeroplanes streaking over her beloved Cotentin Peninsula, the whistle and boom of the bombs they dropped, the staccato rat-a-tat of the entrenched Germans’ return fire, had begun. By now all of that had become so much a part of the fabric of an ordinary night that its absence made her skin prickle with dread.
It was because of the fog, the thick swirling fog that glinted silver as the searchlights sliced through it, that the night sounds were muffled and the planes did not come, she knew. But knowing did not make her less afraid.
There was a curfew in place. Merely to be found outside at this hour would result in arrest. Far worse to be caught where they were, in the supposedly impassable marsh that cut off the beaches from the rest of the Cotentin, and was so prized for its defensive value that the Vikings had once called the area Carusburg, or Fortress of the Marsh. It was also a key part of the Germans’ defensive strategy in the event of an attack launched against the Normandy beaches. For them to discover that she knew a way through the marsh would, she had no doubt, result in her instant execution.
Ordinarily she would have simply refused to think about it, but—the owl.
A cold finger slid down her spine. Only a fool would be unafraid.
The damp chill of the fog caressed her cheeks, brushed salt-tinged fingers across her mouth like a passing ghost. The faint smell of decay that was part of the marsh drifted by with it. She clenched her teeth in an effort to stop shivering and tightened her hand in its knit glove over Bruno the pony’s muzzle to keep him quiet. The searchlights were closing in. Mounted in the boats of the Kriegsmarine patrolling the harbor and the adjacent coastline, their sweep was as punctual as sunrise.
With one last anxious glance at the approaching beams, she ducked her face against the warmth of Bruno’s shaggy brown neck to prevent them from catching on her eyes, inhaled the pony’s familiar musky scent and counted down the seconds until it was safe to look up again.
...5...4...3...
“Baroness. There.”
Andre’s relieved whisper brought her head up prematurely, but it was all right, the searchlights had moved on. Useless to remind him that for tonight she was simply Lillian, that using her title even in this place, where with luck only the beavers could hear, was to endanger her. A lifelong tenant farmer on Rocheford, her husband’s once grand estate, wiry, balding Andre was unable to bring himself to address her so familiarly even now, when the world as they had known it was being ground to bits beneath the filthy boots of the boche.
“Be quick.” Some of the tension left her shoulders as the chaland sliding noiselessly toward them through the glinting black water took on shape and form. Andre left the narrow spit of solid land on which they waited to squelch out to meet the small, flat-bottomed boat. The sucking sound of his boots in the mud made her heart knock in her chest.
“The Germans are far away,” she murmured to Bruno, though whether to comfort the pony or herself she couldn’t be sure.
Bruno threw up his head unexpectedly, dislodging her grip, as her husband Paul, Baron de Rocheford, slid out of the boat to help Andre pull it the rest of the way in. Lillian barely managed to clap her hand over the pony’s muzzle again in time to prevent him from whickering a greeting at the man he must be able to recognize by smell alone, because the distance made him no more than a denser shape in the fog. Once tall and elegantly slender, her handsome Paul was gaunt and stoop-shouldered now. He would turn sixty—impossible to believe—this year, but age was not the culprit. It was the brutally harsh conditions under which they were forced to live. At fifty, for the same reason, she herself had become bony and sharp featured, with haunted hollows beneath her eyes and hungry ones beneath her cheekbones. Her once luxuriant black hair was now thin and mostly gray. Her trousers, purchased before the war, had to be belted tightly around her waist to keep them from dropping straight to her ankles. Her once formfitting sweater hung on her like a sack. Like her much-patched black coat and the threadbare black scarf twined round her head, she had seen far better days.