The deer stopped. Suddenly, they froze all motion. In an instant, they were gone, bounding effortlessly through the orchard and into the nearby woods.
I watched. I held my breath, and out into the moonlight came a man. He paused among the trees to survey the house, but the cold drove him on. He was dog-tired, had come a long way on foot, and when he reached my courtyard, he passed into shadow only to find me looking through the glass at him. He was startled-stunned to find me there. ‘Go away, damn you,’ I told him.
‘Lily, let me in. The police are looking for me.’
He rattled the flimsy lock. I weakened. ‘The police …? What is this, please?’
I opened the door, and he shoved past me to drag off his shoes and things.
‘Why did you do that to me?’ I asked.
‘Because I had to. Because it was stolen, and your husband had no right to have it.’
‘You could have told me the truth.’
He asked for some light so that we can see each other better. I refused. He opened the door of the firebox, and I moved away to stand behind the table, then to back up against the wall, which became the sleigh, so that I gripped my head and dug my fingers into my scalp and wanted to scream!
The children would hear me. The children …
‘Lily, what happened?’
How often was I to see men stand like that? Broken, stricken, cursing God and the enemy and themselves. A father with his son still bound to the execution post, a husband huddled over a bloodstained figure that lay sprawled in the street.
‘Lily, what did they do to you?’
My face was crushed into the snow. Their hands were on me. One pinned my arms and had a knee against my head. Others held my legs. I tried to move, tried to crawl forward, to scream, to get away, but they were laughing at me, and my trousers were down around my ankles, my seat was up. I had told them the little I really knew, yet they still did that to me, and their laughter broke in waves that drowned as another of them rutted at me to the hoots of the others.
Again, Tommy asked what happened, but my head was bowed, and I couldn’t find the words to tell him that most of all there was rage against him and rage against them.
That to tell is to fear. That I mustn’t say a thing because I’d been warned not to.
Putting his fingers under my chin, he gently lifted it, gasped, drew in a breath, and held it, then stepped aside to let the light shine better on me.
Flickering shadows couldn’t hide the angry scabs of a scraped cheek where the ice and snow had torn the skin, nor the blackened eye whose purplish bruise had turned to yellow.
My lips were still split and painful.
‘Ah, bon, monsieur, now you see what my husband had them do to me. Are you pleased? That tiara we took to England was never a fake. You knew it was the real one, Tommy, but you let me think otherwise because my husband had told me it was. I should have guessed. I should have had more sense. I was just too stupid.’
‘Only an expert could have seen the difference.’
‘Vuitton was such a one.’
‘We didn’t know how closely your husband was involved. We had to find out.’
‘So, having recovered the real one from me, you substituted the fake, and let me hang out the bait for the wolves.’
‘Can you ever forgive me?’
‘How could I after what we’ve shared?’
‘I still love you.’
‘Ah, no, monsieur, you love only your job. You’re a hunter, just like Marie has said.’
He left me then. As I watched, Tommy put on his shoes and coat, closed the firebox door, and turned to face me one last time. ‘We honestly didn’t think your husband would hurt you like that, Lily, but then I found that his friends tried to kill me in Paris. Two nights ago, I came back to my hotel room, and they were waiting. I don’t carry a gun. That’s not my sort of thing. I ran down the corridor and made it to the stairs and the street, heard three or four shots well behind me, but now the Sûreté are claiming I shot and killed a man. It may have been an accident; it might have been intentional. I’ve never trusted some of the Sûreté’s rank and file. But they’ve got a body-some poor bastard who was staying two rooms down from mine. The newspapers are full of it. My mug’s been plastered all over the place, and that can only mean they don’t want me finding out who stole Nicki’s things and where they ended up.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘Antwerp, if I can, and over to London as quickly as possible. If not, Lyons, Marseille, North Africa, and London. I don’t relish spending time in a French jail where they can get at me. Not with the connections those friends of that husband of yours must have.’
The Action française. ‘The frontiers will be watched. The Nazis will help them find you-the one called Schiller, the lieutenant who’s in the SS. Jules had them to the house while we were in England. Marcel thinks they must have slipped into France from Switzerland after first having been in Poland.’
He was in the orchard when I called out, ‘Tommy, wait! I’m sorry I had to tell them your last name and who you worked for and what you did. I tried not to, but they …’
The bricks of the courtyard were like ice against my bare feet. ‘Please come back. Let me hide you for a little, and we’ll work something out. I’ll drive you south. I don’t know but …’
I fed him as I was to feed so many in the years to come. Full of soup, bread, and cheese, he sat there with his feet ankle deep in a basin of hot water, he to tell me that two of Nicki’s paintings had turned up at an auction house in Brussels, me to tell him what I knew of the Vuittons, the things from the Louvre, and the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire. ‘Their “Action” gangs. They’ll destroy the Third Republic if they can.’
The Royalists and the Action française didn’t agree on everything, but Tommy knew France had a fairly strong fifth column that was just itching for the Germans to invade, the old order being replaced by the new, which was really somewhat older: kings and queens and all that rubbish, or dictators who could tell everyone what to do.
Reaching out to me, he said, ‘Somehow we’ve got to get you and the children out of France. The States would be best, Lily, a visit that’s at least long enough for the worst here to have happened. No one would send you back, not then. You’d like Montana. Jean-Guy and Marie certainly would. Promise me you’ll come if I can find a way.’
For me, the healing had begun, but it was much more than this-though I wasn’t to have known it at the time-it was a change in our relationship from that of lovers to comrades-in-arms.
* * *
‘Madame de St-Germain, je m’appelle l’Inspecteur Gaétan Dupuis, Paris Sûreté. Vous permettez?’
May I. ‘What?’ I asked as if I didn’t already know.
‘Come in.’
Wet snowflakes had settled on the olive brown fedora and shabby overcoat whose top button had come undone and was hanging by a thread.
‘Please, madame, much valuable heat is being lost through this open door of your husband’s.’ Digging a hand into a pocket, he hunched his shoulders forward as if to butt me out of the way. ‘My card and badge will confirm what I’ve stated. One can, of course, appreciate your nervousness, since the house it is quite isolated.’
Patently ignoring the obvious threat, I stood my ground. ‘A policeman … but why?’
His was the shrug of a flic. ‘Merely a few questions. You have a friend, an American.’
There was a black Citroën parked out front, but he had chosen to come to the kitchen door, hoping perhaps that I had not seen that he hadn’t come alone. Short, rotund, seemingly looking diffident but far from it, the warm brown eyes flicked over everything, noted the children still behind me, grinned and ducked his head, the happy father figure in an instant.