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Booted footsteps slowly make their way towards my seat. My loud and rapid heartbeats almost drown out their sound.
The footsteps halt at the middle of each row, pausing long enough for the two German soldiers to check the passengers’carte d’identités. Only a few more moments before I find out if my forged papers pass these officers’ inspection.
One of the soldiers stops in front of me. I hand him my papers. The slight tremor in my fingers isn’t enough to betray me, and I train my gaze on his insignia, and not on his face. I’ve already memorised his appearance. Young. Twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Oval face. Long thin nose. Straight blond hair. Narrow shoulders. Tall.
Tension vibrates through the air, squeezing my throat with its fist, freezing my lungs with cold fear. He gives my forgedcarte d’identitéa cursory glance and hands it back to me.
And I stifle the urge to release the air in my lungs in a relieved sigh. That will only draw suspicion.
He moves on, but it’s not until the two soldiers depart our train car that we can all breathe again. I close my eyes for a heartbeat, then shift my gaze to the countryside sliding past the window.
At Vitry-le-François, I disembark and transfer to a train travelling south. The next leg of the journey is less eventful. No German soldiers, Gestapo, or Milice board the train at any point.
The train pulls into my stop. I gather my handbag and step onto the small platform. Monsieur Beaulieu is the only other person to depart the train.
He nods and gives me a small smile, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Bonjour, Madame D’Aboville. Did you have a pleasant trip?”
I return the smile. “Very much, thank you.”
“My son is with the wagon. We can give you a lift home if you’d like.”
“Thank you. That would be wonderful.”
Normally, I cycle when I need to go anywhere, but this time, I didn’t want to risk leaving the bicycle where a German soldier might claim it for his own. As the French have learned, the Nazis and Wehrmacht soldiers have no respect for that which does not belong to them.
The one-horse wagon is waiting for Monsieur Beaulieu at the front of the station. The horse’s ribs show slightly through her black-and-white dapple coat, but I know she eats better than the family.
Pierre sits on the driver’s seat, a slow smile spreading across his face at seeing his father.
Pierre is a year or two younger than my twenty-eight years. By day, he farms alongside his father. At night, he’s a member of the local resistance circuit. Like Allaire, he has a limp that precluded him from fighting in the war, but unlike Allaire’s limp, Pierre’s is not faked. But even with the limp, he’s strong from working in the fields. I’ve witnessed that strength during the parachute drops, when he has helped carry the heavy crates of guns England sends us.
He nods at me, but there’s more than just a greeting in those knowing blue eyes. It’s the acknowledgment we have a job to do tonight. It’s the full moon, and the weather is favourable for the scheduled parachute drop.
Monsieur Beaulieu assists me onto the wagon, and I settle myself between the two men. Pierre clicks his tongue and flicks the reins. The horse starts walking.
Neither man asks about my trip to Paris. They don’t know I’m an English agent, but Pierre does know I’m part of the local resistance group. I was the one who recruited him after I moved to the village.
The trip to the safe house I’m staying at is short. Pierre drops me off at the end of the driveway of the farmhouse, and I hurry up the dirt path to the front door. The place looks the same as it did when I left, with no tyre marks from unwanted German visitors. So far, the unassuming village has been lucky. The Germans have pretty much ignored it. For now.
I open the front door and step into the house.“Papa,” I call out, keeping to my cover that I’m his daughter. His widowed daughter.
“We have a problem,” myPapa’sweary voice says in French behind me.
I pivot on my heels and take in the austere expression of the man who is a decade older than my real father would be if he were alive. “What kind of problem?”
Jacques doesn’t elaborate. He walks out of the house and heads to the large red barn several yards away. The barn that contains straw and hay for the horses, a wagon, some equipment he uses in the vineyard, and what little is left of the produce he stored over the winter.
After the Germans took their share like a swarm of locusts and moved on.
I follow him.
A tortoiseshell cat plods alongside the barn wall, heading in the opposite direction and ignoring us. Mars, one of the two barn cats living on the vineyard.
Jacques opens the small door to the barn, scans the surrounding area, and steps inside. I join him.
He closes the door behind me and walks to the several bales of straw sitting in the middle of the building. He pushes them aside, revealing the trapdoor few people know exists, and says, “Le Hobbit.” The code word to let whoever is in the hiding space know it is a friend not foe about to open the door.
He pulls open the door that hides the small space with a camp bed and a kerosene lamp on a crate. A man wearing a uniform similar to an RAF uniform is lying on the bed, a revolver next to him on the worn blanket.
