The House at Mermaid's Cove(76)
I undressed upstairs in one of the bedrooms. There was a woman’s nightgown strewn across the patchwork quilt of the double bed. Josef’s wife’s, I assumed. I wondered if she worked alongside him in the bakery, whether she’d helped to hide Miranda when the Germans came for their flour. The very ordinariness of the room—the rumpled bedclothes, the chamber pot under the chair—belied the remarkable bravery of these people. How much easier, and safer, it would be for them to kowtow to the enemy, accept the occupation, and carry on as best they could. But instead they were risking their lives to free the country they loved.
I went downstairs feeling lighter, freer, boosted by knowing that this part of the job was done. Josef was looking out of the kitchen window. He kept going back to glance across the yard as he produced more bread, along with butter and cheese, to go with the cider. Miranda and I shared it as she told me about the prison camp where she’d been held for the past three weeks.
“They didn’t twig that I was an agent, or they would have tortured me.” Her voice was as matter-of-fact as if she’d been commenting on the weather.
“Why did they arrest you?” I took another swallow of the cider. It was very bitter but warming as it went down.
“Because I was out after the curfew. I told them I was a history student from Paris, on a field trip to see the Neolithic standing stones of Brittany.”
“But if they believed that why didn’t they let you go?”
“They . . .” She glanced down at the lump of cheese on her plate. “They found another reason to keep me.”
“Les batardes,” Josef hissed.
Only then did I grasp the chilling reality that she had been raped by her captors, kept prisoner for no other reason than that. There were no words to convey the outrage I felt about what the Germans had done. I got up and went over to her, put my hand on her shoulder. But she shrugged it off.
“I’m all right.” She nodded, and kept nodding, as if she were trying to convince herself. “What matters is what I took from them.” She took something from her pocket and laid it on the table. It was a piece of silk, like the one Merle had given me.
“It’s a map of the Atlantic Wall,” she said, as she unfolded it. “It was passed to me by one of the other prisoners—a woman from the Resistance in Normandy—before she was taken out to be executed.” She ran her finger along the blue line that meandered across the fabric from the top right-hand corner to the bottom left. “The Germans are planning to beef up their sea defenses in northern France. Up to now, only the ports have been fortified. But they’re going to plant land mines and antitank devices on the beaches of Normandy.” She pointed to red crosses dotted along the outline of the coast. “These show where the fortifications will be. Underwater obstacles and naval mines will be placed in waters just offshore. The intention is to destroy the Allied landing craft before they can unload on the beaches.”
“She has to get this back to London.” Josef glanced at me. “It’s too complex to be sent by radio.” He went over to the window again, his face grave. “She needs to be on that boat of yours tonight—but I can’t take her any farther.”
“Why not?”
“The Germans have been watching me. They’d think it very suspicious if they caught me driving to Lannion. They’d want to know why I was taking bread to a town where there are four boulangeries.”
“And they’ll be looking for me,” Miranda said. “The prison camp’s only ten miles from here. They’re going to be searching any vehicle heading for the coast.” She folded the map and put it back in her pocket. “My only chance would be to keep away from the roads: go through the fields and hide in hedges.”
The brave smile couldn’t conceal the paleness of her skin and the hollow look of her eyes. I wondered how she’d find the strength to walk the five miles to Lannion—more like six or seven miles, probably, if she was going through fields.
“There’s another solution, though, isn’t there?” She was looking at me intently. “You could take it.”
I gazed back at her. “Well, yes, I could, but what about you? You can’t go on hiding out here. You . . .” I faltered, not wanting to spell out what was on my mind: that she needed medical attention and somewhere safe to recuperate. “You could be putting other people in danger,” I said instead. “Anyone who hides you would be at risk of being arrested—or worse.” I paused, suddenly seeing another way. “Why don’t you pretend to be me? Take these clothes and my identity card, and the bicycle. The Germans won’t be surprised when they see the nun that passed through the checkpoint coming back a few hours later.” I patted the coif on top of my head. “With this on, they won’t even realize it’s a different woman.”
“But what will you do?”
“What you suggested: walk back through the fields. If I run into any trouble, I’ll show my Irish passport—they can’t detain someone from a neutral country.” I sounded full of confidence. I knew that if I showed the slightest trepidation, she wouldn’t go along with it. “I’ll meet you after dark at the quayside in Lannion,” I went on. “We’ll row out to La Coquille together.”
I could see her mind working, weighing it up. “I don’t know,” she said. She turned to Josef. “What do you think?”