Never Leave Me (14 page)

‘He can't suspect you! If he suspected you, he would have had you arrested and shot you as he shot Paul and André!'

‘He suspects,' Elise repeated, shocked by Lisette's grief-ravaged face. She remembered the rumours she had heard concerning Lisette's relationship with Paul Gilles and for the first time wondered if they were true. ‘He won't allow anyone else into Valmy. Not unless it is purposely to trap them. Goodbye, Lisette. I've no more time. I have to go.'

Lisette stepped swiftly towards her. ‘Where is the camera,' she asked urgently.

Elise looked gaunt. ‘In my bag!'

Lisette's finely etched nostrils flared. ‘You'll be searched,' she said tightly. ‘Give it to me. Let me hide it.'

‘It's too dangerous,' Elise protested, but there was indecision in her eyes.

‘Give it to me!' Lisette insisted with passion. Her cool facade was gone. She was a creature of fire and steel and implacable will and Elise bent down to her travelling bag unhesitatingly. ‘It's inside there,' she said, pulling out a tin of dried milk.

‘Is it loaded with film?'

Elise's eyes widened. ‘Yes, but…'

‘Who do I pass it on to?'

‘You can't do it, Lisette,' Elise said aghast. ‘You won't be able to get into the room. It's an impossible task.'

‘I can try,' Lisette said fiercely. ‘And if I succeed, I need to know who to give the film to.'

There came the sound of booted feet tramping into the hall and querying voices. Elise backed away towards the door. ‘I must go. They're looking for me.'

‘
Who do I give the film to?'

Elise paused for a fraction of a second and then said in a rush, ‘Jean-Jacques, the Bar Candide, Bayeaux. Goodbye, Lisette, and good luck.'

She ran from the room, hurrying along the corridor and down the stairs. A few seconds later there was a slam of a door and then silence.

Lisette sat down on the bed and opened the tin, pressing her fingers down amongst the soft granules until they came up against something hard and solid. Her eyes burned. She would do what Elise could no longer do. She would ensure that the Allies knew exactly what Dieter Meyer's plans for them were. And she would render them worthless. Paul and André's deaths would not go unavenged. Not even if it cost her her own life.

Five days later the body of André Caldron was buried in the churchyard of Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts. Dieter had abruptly informed the Comte that no one from Valmy would be allowed to attend the service. It wasn't Lisette or her father that flagrantly disobeyed him, but the Comtesse.

‘But you hardly knew Caldron,' Henri protested, anxiety lining his face.

‘It's a matter of principle,' Heloise de Valmy said quietly, setting a small black pillbox hat on the smooth upsweep of her chignon. ‘He died at Valmy. I have a duty to attend his funeral and no one, certainly not Major Meyer, is going to prevent me.'

‘My dear, I know how you feel, believe me, I do. But Meyer is not a man it is wise to cross.'

Heloise de Valmy adjusted the wisp of veiling across her eyes. She looked as though she were about to dine at the Ritz, not attend the funeral of Sainte-Marie's café proprietor. Her long, slim legs were encased in black silk stockings. She had hidden the stockings away three years ago, intending to wear them on the day of liberation. André Caldron and Paul Gilles'death, in the grounds of her home, demanded that they be worn now. Her black suit was by Balmain, bought on her last shopping trip to Paris before the outbreak of war.

‘He'll stop you,' her husband warned. ‘He won't allow you to flout his orders.'

Heloise de Valmy said nothing. She picked up her prayer-book, the fine, aristocratic bone structure of her face ageless. He regarded her with aching tenderness. She never ceased to amaze him. She hated turmoil and discord and retreated from it whenever possible, yet now, because her own code of conduct demanded it, she was going to deliberately arouse and face Meyer's wrath.

‘I haven't told you that I love you for a long time,' he said, walking across to her and kissing her gently on her temple. ‘But I do, my dear. With all my heart.'

A slight flush touched her cheekbones. ‘Thank you, Henri,' she said and then, as he stepped with her towards the door, ‘No, Henri, don't come with me. This is something I wish to do alone.'

She paused at the head of the stairs, suppressing a slight tremble, and then descended, her outward composure flawless.

Dieter had known very well what she would try to do. In her own way she was as spirited and as wilful as her daughter. As she crossed the hall he opened the door of the grand dining-room, his shadow falling across her. ‘Where are you going?' he asked quietly.

‘To André Caldron's funeral.' Her flute-clear voice was icily chill. There had been a time when she had warmed towards him. Invited him to dine with them. Imagined that here at last was a German who was different. A German who was not a Nazi. She had been wrong.

Dieter regarded her with a mixture of admiration and irritation. She had an amazing figure for a woman of fifty. Looking at her he knew very well the kind of woman Lisette would become. At the thought of Lisette pain flared behind his eyes. He said brusquely, ‘I gave orders that no one from Valmy was to attend.'

She had been standing looking straight ahead, not deigning to glance in his direction. Now she turned and her blue-grey eyes held his steadily. ‘I am aware of your orders, Major Meyer.'

‘And you refuse to obey them?'

‘If you wish to prevent me from attending the funeral of the man you shot dead, then you will have to do so physically.'

Dieter sighed. He wondered what she would say if he told her that the man whose funeral she wished to attend had cravenly named her daughter as a member of the Resistance. ‘Very well,' he said tightly, ‘I'll see to it that a car is brought round for you.'

The skin tightened across the high perfection of her cheekbones. ‘You can't imagine that I would arrive at the funeral of one of your victims in a German staff car, Major Meyer. I would rather crawl there on my hands and knees!' and she walked quickly away from him, her exquisitely coutured back rigid, her high heels tapping on the stone flags.

He returned to the report he was trying to finish but his concentration had deserted him. He could think only of Lisette. With nerves stretched to breaking point, he slammed out of the chateau, striding around to the stables where his Horch was garaged, ordering his chauffeur to drive him to Vierville.

The defences were still not satisfactory. They needed more concrete; more steel; more swivelling cupolas for the bunkers and blockhouses in order that the arc of fire from their guns would not be restricted.

Lisette's face rose up before him and he groaned, wondering how long it would be before his terrible need of her abated. He needed another woman. He needed lots of women. He had a weekend leave due to him. As the Horch sped through the deep-hedged lanes he determined to go to Paris. The prospect did not elate him. He didn't want the sophisticated, experienced women who had made previous leaves so relaxing. He wanted Lisette.

Her face burned at the back of his mind. He remembered the way her heart throbbed beneath his moving hand. The low laugh that caught in her throat. The soft sensuality of her mouth. Then he remembered the passion of her hate and deep, simmering rage for its cause consumed him. The Englishman had been nothing to either of them. She, herself, had been responsible for Paul Gilles' death. If she had not so foolishly involved herself with the Resistance there would have been no need for him to have been silenced.

He had yet to tell her that he knew of her Resistance activities. It was a confrontation that he dreaded. He had seen her only once since the shooting. It was she who had asked to see him and he had thought at first that she had come to him to be reconciled. She hadn't. She had come to tell him that Paul Gilles was to be buried at Valmy.

‘Shouldn't that be a request?' he had snapped when his first flare of shock had subsided. She had remained frigidly silent, her eyes darkly ringed, her face deathly pale. He wondered if she had lost as much sleep as he, and hoped savagely that she had.

‘Why the devil should Gilles be buried at Valmy?'

‘He had no family of his own. He died at Valmy. It is fitting that he should be buried at Valmy.' Every line of her body had been taut with tension, her voice as tight as a coiled spring.

She had been wearing a dress he had never seen before: a narrow sheaf of black wool crepe with long sleeves and a high neck, its stark simplicity unadorned. Her hair had been drawn back away from her face, tied in the nape of her neck with a velvet ribbon. She had looked incredibly beautiful. The breath had caught in his throat and for a second he had not trusted himself to speak, then he had said tersely, ‘Is there consecrated ground at Valmy?'

‘Yes, there used to be a small chapel near the gatehouse. De Valmy's have always been buried on de Valmy land.'

‘And now Paul Gilles is to join them?'

She had flinched at the savagery in his voice and then had said steadily, ‘Yes.'

He had been unable to bear her nearness any longer. ‘Then bury him at Valmy!' he had said explosively, marching from the room, rage and frustration and jealousy warring deep within him.

The priest had come from Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts and Paul Gilles had been buried in the de Valmy family churchyard.

The day after the funeral he had told his chauffeur to stop at the gatehouse and, driven by a devil he couldn't name, had walked over to the grave. Flowers had been freshly planted. Blue grape hyacinths and mauve honesty and sharply yellow forsythia. The tumbledown walls of the chapel were covered in wisteria and clematis and wild rose bushes, and he knew that in summer the air in the little churchyard would be heavy with fragrance. It was so quiet that he had heard the distant roar of the sea and the birds calling to one another in the nearby beech woods. This was where, one day, Lisette would lie. Lisette and her children, and her children's children. He had turned abruptly on his heel, striding back to his car. He had to stop thinking about her. Whatever had happened in the last few days was over. Finished. He had suffered from temporary insanity and now he was well again.

The Horch slid to a halt on the clifftops of Vierville. He stepped from the car on to damp grass and stared out over the sea. The English Channel. The moat that had protected England for over nine hundred years. The wind blew in from the west, bitingly cold, hurling the waves over the shingle. He tried to think of the task in hand: the coastal defences; the Atlantic Wall; but he could only fume at his inability to banish her from his thoughts as he had so many other women before her. At thirty-two, hardened and sophisticated, he had experienced the
coup de foudre
, the thunderclap of unreasoning, instant infatuation, and he could not free himself from it. His eyes narrowed. He didn't tolerate weakness in others and he would be damned if he would tolerate it in himself. From now on she would cease to exist.

Lisette put the tin of powdered milk at the far back of the store cupboard in the pantry, behind tins of other dried foods. It looked less conspicuous there than hidden in the drawers of her dressing table. She knew that with Elise's departure her father had assumed that all attempts to infiltrate the grand dining-room had been abandoned and she did not disillusion him. Whatever needed doing, she would do alone.

Her leg had begun to heal and Dr Auge no longer came to the chateau. She mended her bicycle herself, hammering out the mangled frame, soldering new spokes to the wheels. It was March now and tulips and freesias bloomed in sheltered corners of the garden. She had pruned the roses, cutting out diseased and frost-damaged wood, working until dusk. It was easier not to think when she was tired, and to think was to open herself to such terrible emotions that it was as if she were being rent apart.

She rarely saw him and when she did, she saw also Paul and André, their hands bound behind their backs, lying in crumpled, blood-stained heaps. He went to Paris on leave; to Rommel's headquarters at La Roche-Guyon; on inspection trips. But whenever he was away the security remained as tight as ever. Sentries were now at Valmy's gates. No one could enter or leave without running their gauntlet. It was like living in a prison.

She cycled twice to Bayeux, and both times knew that she had been followed. She did not go to the Bar Candide. She lingered over an anisette at a street café before cycling the long, weary way home. Elise had been right. Dieter had been suspicious and still was. He was waiting for her to expose other members of the Maquis. André and Paul's deaths had not been enough. She felt ill with the need for revenge. It was as if her very soul needed purging.

By the time she had reached Sainte-Marie her leg hurt so much that she had to fight back tears of pain. It had been a wasted journey. She toiled up the hill through the beech woods wondering when she could again attempt it. She had to let Elise's contact at the Bar Candide know what it was that she intended to do. She was too exhausted to brave the snide looks and glances of loitering soldiers by wheeling her bicycle round to its accustomed place in the stables. She leaned it against the outside wall of the kitchen and hauled herself through Valmy's deserted lower rooms and to her bedroom.

It was five o'clock in the afternoon. Her mother would be resting; her father taking his usual walk; Marie had said that she was going to visit Madame Chamot who had been ill with bronchitis. Weary with defeat, she crawled into bed fully dressed, and closed her eyes. She would not try to make the trip again. Not until she had completed her self-appointed mission and the camera was full of vital film waiting for development. Sleep tugged at her conscious mind. She was hazy and floating, forgetting the hate that she clung to for survival every waking moment of every day. His face swam into her mind, strong and caring. She felt again the curious rapport; the feeling of being completely at one with another human being. ‘I love you,' he had said. ‘Love you … love you …' She could see him, taste him, smell him.