Unable to call out, Bruno stamped his feet in frustration. The splash of his hooves on the soggy ground, and the jingle of his stirrups, sent her stomach shooting into her throat. The concrete abomination that was the Atlantic Wall with its pillboxes full of machine guns and soldiers was not that far away. It would be foolish to trust their lives to the muffling effect of the fog.
She gave a sharp tug on Bruno’s bridle and growled “Stop, you” into his ear.
Her heart knocked so loudly now that she could hear its beat against her eardrums. Still she stood fast, holding the grizzled pony that was the sole survivor of Rocheford’s once proud stable, the pony that, long ago, in happier times, had been a gift to her daughter on her birthday.
The sixteenth of May.
Tomorrow.
“For me?” She could still hear the incredulous delight in her five-year-old’s voice, still see her slight figure in the blue party dress as she let go of her hand to fly down Rocheford’s front steps toward a much younger but still placid Bruno, who’d just been brought round by a smiling Paul.
“Papa, he’s beautiful!”
The voice, like the memory, was forever preserved in her heart.
Lillian’s chest tightened. Every cell in her body quivered with the sudden onslaught of fierce sorrow.
Her fiery little daughter, lost to her these many years.
Ça suffit. Put it out of your mind.
“Any problems?” Paul’s lowered voice reached her through the mist. He was talking to Andre.
“No, none,” he replied.
The two men were close now, sloshing toward her through calf-deep water.
Besides Paul, and Jean-Claude Faure, a bookkeeper from the town who had accompanied him to the rendezvous point, the boat carried two other men, who were helping to propel it by use of long poles. They were strangers to her, as far as she knew. As they were members of a different cell she had no need, or desire, to know their identities, just as they had no need to know hers. In this new world where no one could be trusted and collaborators were everywhere, anonymity was the key to safety.
Lying awkwardly in the bottom of the boat was the reason they were all taking such a risk: an injured British pilot. His plane had been shot down over the harbor two nights previously. He and his crew had managed to parachute out. What had happened to the others she didn’t know. This man was a particular problem because he was injured to the point where he was unable to walk. He had been rescued and hidden at great risk. Even now the Germans were conducting an all-out search for him and his crew. Getting him out by sea was judged impossible: the harbor and shoreline were closely patrolled. Moving him overland by vehicle was determined to be equally impossible, as every road out of the valley was blocked, every train stopped and searched.
Since the tide of the war had started to turn against them, the Germans had become increasingly vicious and volatile, like angry wasps defending their nest. The rumors of an imminent Allied invasion somewhere along the coast seemed to have whipped these local ones into a frenzy. They were going house to house, business to business, farm to farm, ransacking homes, boats, shops, even the schools and churches, in search of the downed airmen. To be caught aiding any of them meant summary execution. Even to be suspected meant torture and imprisonment. Many had already been taken in for questioning. As a result, fear lay over the surrounding countryside like the heavy fog.
A solution to the difficulty had been found. Tonight they would walk the pilot out, strapped to Bruno’s back, through the swamp paths that had once been used by smugglers. She knew those paths like she knew the many rooms in her house. Since she had married Paul at the age of eighteen and come to Rocheford to live, she had haunted the estuary, fascinated by the birds, the wildlife, the plants. The mushrooms she had gathered in the marsh and cultivated in the far reaches of the château’s cave-like cellars supplemented the household’s meager diet now that the tightly rationed food supply had all but run out and mass starvation had become a grim reality.
Paul had teased her about her mushrooms once. He did not laugh at them now.
Her knowledge of the paths was why, despite the owl, she had insisted on coming. The danger to the men would be far greater without her to guide them. Paul had wanted to leave her behind.
“The trip will be too hard,” he’d told her. “Too long, and too dangerous.”
Yes, but one wrong step off the ribs of solid ground that snaked across the marsh, invisibly weaving a walkway through the swaying grass and tangles of trees and scrub and fingerlet waterways, and all would be lost. The ground was deceptive. It looked firm where it was not. In many places water beneath the tall grass was more than two meters deep, and the mud below that was silt, oozing and liquid. Unwary animals got trapped in it and died all the time. The same could, and did, befall unwary humans.
“I am coming,” she’d said. His eyes were the color of coffee, while hers were a clear, pale, aquamarine blue. They met, a clash of the dark and the light.
She rarely argued with him. After all these years, they were attuned in most things. But he also knew her well enough to know when she meant what she said. He looked into her eyes, saw that this was one of those times and gave up the fight as lost before it began. A smart man, her Paul.
“Bring her in,” he said to the men in the boat. “Hurry.”
The bow pushed through the last of the reeds to bump dry land. Lillian led Bruno as close to the water’s edge as she dared. Andre held the small craft in place while Paul and the others lifted the pilot out.
The man groaned, a low, pained sound.
“Take care. His leg is broken.” The caution came from one of the men she did not know. “And perhaps some ribs, as well.”
“Sergeant Pilot Ronald Nash,” the pilot said clearly in English as the men heaved his tall, lanky form into the saddle. Even as Lillian felt a thrill of fear at how loud his voice was, she realized that he was rotely identifying himself. He slumped forward over the pommel. “Three Squadron—”
“Merde.”
“The drug’s worn off.”
“Here.” Amid the jumble of alarmed voices and hurried movements, one of the new arrivals pressed a cloth to the pilot’s face. When he took it away after a minute or so, the pilot had fallen the rest of the way forward so that his head rested on Bruno’s neck.
“Drug?” Lillian asked. She did her best to hold Bruno still as the men tied the pilot’s now limp body in place. His flight suit had been replaced with ill-fitting civilian clothes. His splinted leg stretched stiffly toward the ground.
As the men finished, a blanket was tossed over him. Its purpose was both to shield him from the elements and to hide him from view.
Although if, say, a German patrol should chance to see them, she didn’t think a blanket over the airman would be enough to get them waved on their way.