The Milliner's Secret (2 page)

‘Remember what curiosity did to the cat.’ Una delicately stubbed out her cigarette. ‘There is above-top-secret information on that card that would oblige me to kill you should you become acquainted with it.’

Coralie shot her an appalled look.

‘Secret?’ Martel echoed.

‘Uh-huh.’ Una paused so long, Coralie was tempted to push her off her chair. ‘It will reveal our friend’s date of birth and thus her age, which she’s lied about for ten years solid. We would be forced, one way or another, to silence you.’

‘Have me arrested?’ Martel’s gaze travelled to the black-uniformed men three tables away. Just as Coralie was sure she’d forgotten how to breathe, he gave a belt of laughter. ‘We’re playing charades, but you win, Madame.
Voilà!
’ He tossed the card on to the table and it fell open against the candlestick. They all saw an unsmiling snapshot of Ottilia with side-parted hair, curls clustering over her ears.

Line by line, the card revealed her. ‘Ottilia Johanna von Silberstrom. Born Berlin, 19 December 1909. Auburn hair, light brown eyes. Profession, none.’ In the upper right corner, blood red in the flare of the candle, was stamped –

‘
Juif
,’ Martel said softly. ‘Or
juive
, I should say.’

Ottilia began to cry. Una pulled out a fresh cigarette. She was shaking.

‘You’ve brought a Jewess into my club, Mademoiselle de Lirac? You are putting my licence, my reputation,
my life
at risk.’

Coralie heard real anger and another ingredient. She couldn’t identify it until Martel began goose-stepping his fingers towards the card. He was imitating German boots. Even in his rage, he couldn’t resist a joke. She pressed her palm down on the identity card, wishing she could melt it with her body heat.

‘Ladies? May we intrude?’

Her startled gaze met a trio of jet-black uniforms. Una’s ‘conquering heroes’ had made their move.

‘Ladies?’ the German officer seemed puzzled by their silence. He was the senior, to judge from his collar insignia of three diamonds. ‘Earlier you seemed very friendly.’

‘You’re mistaken.’ Coralie’s voice was a fingernail rasp. ‘If we gave that impression—’

‘You wish to join us? How delicious!’ Una sprang back to life, though she sounded as if she’d run upstairs fast. ‘Serge, dear, drag up more chairs. Don’t keep the gentlemen standing.’

Martel conceded an ironic bow. A minute later, the men were seated, delivering strained gallantries. All through it, the senior officer stared at Coralie’s hand.

‘What do you hide there, Fräulein?’ As Coralie stared back mutely, he snapped something in German. A junior officer responded by holding out his hand in silent command.

But Serge Martel got there first, snatching the card up only to drop it into the neck of Coralie’s gown. ‘Gentlemen, I was reprimanding this young lady for letting her
carte d’identité
fall from her bag. “Is not your identity your most precious possession?” I asked her.’ He spread his arms rhetorically and only Coralie caught his complicit wink. Still playing his games. ‘In these oh-so-difficult times, you risk others misapprehending not only what you are –’ a glance here for Ottilia ‘– but also exactly
what you were
. Is that not so, Mademoiselle de Lirac?’

Coralie swallowed. ‘As you say.’

The senior officer shrugged. The danger had passed.

Reassuming his professional persona, Martel promised to send up the best champagne. ‘A magnum – and,
meine Herren
, oysters from the west coast –’ he kissed his fingers ‘– on ice, with a mignonette sauce that is famed throughout Paris. You will honour me by enjoying a platter with these beautiful ladies?’

They would, it seemed. Pre-war, oysters would never have been served in July, Coralie thought scornfully. But, then, the occupiers were greedy for Parisian luxury, without understanding its subtleties. People like Martel provided it and pocketed the profit. Martel sauntered off, and the officers named themselves and gave their ranks. After which Una did too, adding, ‘As you already know, to my right is Mademoiselle de Lirac—’

Coralie forced a smile.

‘And Mademoiselle Dupont.’

Had Ottilia heard? Dupont was her new surname. Coralie nudged her. Honey-coloured eyes opened wide. Comprehension stole in. ‘Good evening,’ Ottilia said. In German.

Una covered the moment. ‘Shall we give our ranks too? We’re all chiefs. See? We have feathers in our hats.’ She gave her doll-hat a flirtatious flick, which made the men laugh. They seemed intrigued to meet a real live American. The United States remained neutral, making Una as safe in Paris as she’d ever been.

Coralie touched Ottilia’s wrist. ‘The Ladies. Follow me,’ she whispered. The ID card lodging uncomfortably between her breasts needed to be torn up and flushed away. She needed, too, to put Ottilia in front of the mirror and make her repeat her new name fifty times. But she also wanted to dissect Martel’s words.
Exactly what you were
. ‘Were’ not ‘are’. How much did he know about her own secret?

She was not Coralie de Lirac. She was not well-born, or French. Or even the Belgian émigrée her own identity papers declared her to be. Her origins were buried layers deep, known only to herself and one other. Or so she’d thought.

One thing was sure: the men preparing to toast them in Martel’s over-priced champagne would have a simple enough term for her.

Enemy.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THREE YEARS EARLIER, SOUTH LONDON

It was a well-aimed fist and it spun its victim into the gutter.

‘That’s for hiding money from me.’ Jac Masson laboured for breath as sweat ran into a moustache the same grey-gold as his hair. To his daughter, staring dazedly up into a smoke-tainted sky, he resembled a lion anticipating the taste of blood. Violence always came easy to Jac, but something had pushed him over a line today, borne out by the explosion of pain in her eye.

‘On your feet, lazy
pute
, and go back to earning a living.’ Jac raised a foot, but before he could deliver a kick, he was hit broadside by a young man pounding towards him in a blur of shirtsleeves. They both went down but the younger man recovered first. He stood over Masson, fists bunched.

‘You want a fight, you rotten Frog? Then take me on and leave Cora alone.’

‘Frog?’ Masson lumbered to his feet. All six feet two inches of him cast a menacing shadow. ‘I’m Belgian, not French. If you don’t know the difference, shut your mouth.’ He sneered at the fists raised against him. ‘Put those away, you scrawny Irish beanpole. I do what I want with my own.’

‘His own’, meanwhile, was trying to crawl out of the gutter, using Masson’s waistcoat as a handhold. Masson caught the hand and twisted it. ‘Girl, I want your full wage packet at the end of the week, and I’ll count every sixpence in front of you. Get back to work.’

He stalked away down Shand Street towards Tooley Street, which was clogged with slow-moving traffic and pedestrians, pausing briefly to toss an object into the road.

The young man, Donal Flynn, ran to pick it up. It was a leather purse, which he shook into his palm. Clucking in disappointment, he walked back to the gutter and hauled Cora to her feet. ‘Are you all right?’

‘My face . . . I must look like Joe Louis on a bad day.’

‘Even if you had two black eyes, you’d never look like a ¬heavyweight boxer.’

She managed a pained grin. ‘Flyweight?’

‘Just about. Lucky I was around, though. I’d just delivered a crate to the infants’ school.’ Donal poked a thumb at nearby Magdalen Street. It was noon and shrill playground noises reached over the factory roofs. ‘I heard him bellowing your name, so I knew you were in trouble.’

‘That’s one way of putting it. I went down like a plank, the air knocked out of me.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘Let’s go, case he comes back.’

‘He won’t – not if he’s going where he usually goes at this time. How much was in the purse?’

‘Five pounds. He chased me round half Bermondsey and only caught me when I tripped. When I wouldn’t hand it over, he started in on me.’

‘He’s got no right.’

‘He’s got the right, Donal. He’s got the hardest punch round here and that’s all the permission he needs.’

Cora Masson made use of Donal’s shoulder while her lungs recovered. Blood dripped from a cut above her eye, mixing with the grit on her cheek. Fanning out the skirts of her summer dress, she groaned. The printed rayon was smeared down one side with grime, and since they were outside a leather-curing works, she knew what that grime might contain. ‘None of the factory hands came out to help. If you heard me, they must have done.’

‘They’re scared. People say your dad once pulled apart a man with his hands.’

‘He did. He tells me about it sometimes.’ She brushed the horrible image away. ‘I’m supposed to be on my way to the Derby.’

Donal laughed, incredulous. ‘You didn’t think he’d let you have a day at the races? You’d be thinking miracles happen.’ He shot a glance down Shand Street. No sign of Jac Masson. The Spotted Cow on Tooley Street had reeled him in, it seemed.

‘I never told him I was going and I’d love to know who did.’ Cora took Donal’s arm. ‘Walk with me to Bermondsey Street, then I’ll be all right.’

‘Back to work?’ Donal sounded relieved.

‘Back to the factory. The buses might still be there. They might!’ she insisted, as Donal shook his head. ‘They’ll make a roll-call and it’ll be pretty obvious I’m not on board because I’m the one who always leads the singing.’ She burst into a music hall number; ‘“He used to be all chuckles, now he’d rather use his knuckles. I’m the girl who gets a shiner from the old man every night.”’

‘Save your breath,’ Donal interrupted. ‘I’ll help you walk, but you’re too much to carry. And the buses won’t have waited.’

He was right. The kerb outside Cora’s workplace was littered with cigarette butts and sweet papers, and a single rose torn off somebody’s Sunday best boater. The mess told of a crowd surging across the yard and cramming on to the buses. The hat factory was still going full-blast, its ducts belching out fully formed clouds, which turned yellow-brown as they met the smog that always hung above Bermondsey. Its unique smell, with keynotes of resin and wet dog, was less pungent than usual, thanks to a stiff breeze. It depressed Cora to think of the banks of machinery behind those brick walls, still turning, blowing, stamping, as if the only thing that mattered to the world was more blessed hats.

Donal helped Cora to a section of low wall, taking her weight more easily than his earlier comment had suggested. He carried no spare flesh, but he was fit from pushing laundry crates around the streets six days a week. And while Cora was tall – her height and fair colouring proclaimed whose daughter she was – she was lightly built. ‘Underfed’ was how schoolteachers had described her during her childhood. Having made sure Cora could sit unaided, Donal went to retrieve the barrow he’d abandoned earlier.

When he returned she asked for her purse.

He handed it to her. ‘Empty as a kipper’s socks.’

‘Not quite.’ She extracted a white ticket. Number 22, which happened also to be her birthdate and her age. ‘My lucky number. I knew I was going to get chosen in the raffle this year.’

Donal nodded. ‘My sisters were dead jealous.’

‘Well, they don’t have to be now. See, that’s how luck works. Fate delivers a parcel, all shiny, and it turns out to be horse sh—’

‘Don’t swear, Cora.’

Today, 2 June, was Derby Day, the pinnacle of the English flat-racing season and a high point in the Londoner’s calendar. Since early morning, buses, trains and private vehicles had been pouring out of London, heading for Epsom Downs. Pettrew & Lofthouse, Hat Makers of Distinction, where Cora worked, had a Methodist board of directors who disapproved of horse-racing and, indeed, any form of mixed-sex gallivanting. But even they were forced to concede an annual tradition that allowed a lucky group of workers to join the outflow. This year – 1937, Coronation Year and, by definition, exceptional – they’d agreed that a hundred workers should be chosen to go, rather than the usual fifty. Last Friday afternoon, ticket number 22, with Cora’s name on it, had been pulled out of Old Mr Pettrew’s big top hat.

‘Wouldn’t have killed one of those buses to wait.’ Cora gave the ticket to the breeze. ‘I nipped home to change and my dad ambushed me.’

‘Where’d you get that five pounds from?’

‘Where d’you think?’ Since Christmas, she’d worked evening shifts at the laundry owned by Donal’s grandmother. Finishing at Pettrew’s at six, she’d make her way to the Flynn’s building on the corner of Tooley and Barnham Street to put in a ¬further two hours’ work before going home to prepare tea for her dad. ‘Ten hours a week scorching my knuckles for a few bob and that bloody man thinks I’m going to drop it in his pocket?’ She hurled the purse into Pettrew’s yard. ‘D’you ever wonder if life’s worth living?’

‘Here.’ Donal offered his cap. ‘Wipe your face. I don’t mind if you get blood on it.’

‘Haven’t you got a hanky?’

‘It’s at home.’

‘So what’s this?’ Cora flourished a square of linen.

Donal shoved his hands into his jacket and groaned because he always fell for it when she pickpocketed him. ‘If you’d been alive fifty years ago, they’d have hanged you, Cora.’

‘No. I’d have got away and they’d have hanged
you
.’

Strangers often took Donal for Cora’s younger brother, though he was actually three years older. While she was fair, he had the black hair of Galway but, for all that, they’d grown up to look a bit alike. ‘Injured innocence,’ as Cora explained it, ‘and soupy blue eyes.’ Donal had got into the Troc-Ette Cinema on Decima Street at child’s rates until he turned seventeen.

Watching her dab her cheek, he said, ‘I taught you how to throw a punch back at a bully.’

‘Wouldn’t dare.’

‘My dad never hits my sisters, only us boys.’

‘
My
dad is a gentleman – breeding is all in the fists, don’t you know.’

Donal chewed over this ambiguous statement, before adding, ‘Dad never laid a finger on my sister Sheila, not even before she became WPC Flynn, because she’s halfway to being a saint. He threatens to wallop Marion and Doreen all the time, when they stay out late with their young men. Never does, though.’