Once a Warrior Read online

  Satisfied that they wouldn’t wake their grandfather, she leaned back against the doorframe with a heavy sigh. After scrubbing the office and washing the dinner dishes with the gritty gray soap that was going to be the ruin of her hands, she had dusted and swept the living area and banked the fire for tomorrow. That she had hours to go before she slept only added to her exhaustion.

  Absorbed in her own thoughts, Anne-Marie didn’t realize that Henriette was still waiting for a reply to her earlier statement until she caught the girl’s expectant gaze in the wavering candlelight.

  Straightening, she said the first thing that came to mind. “And if the soldier kisses you back?”

  “Sticks his tongue in my mouth, you mean?” Henriette’s horrified tone said that she hadn’t thought before she spoke.

  “That’s usually how it happens.” Even though Anne-Marie’s own experience with kissing was rather limited, her “advanced” age gave her voice the ring of authority.

  Henriette mulled that over for a moment before declaring indignantly, “If he uses his tongue, I’ll slap his face!”

  “That hardly seems fair.” Anne-Marie realized she was sweating in spite of the cold that permeated her room. Both she and Henriette wore knitted shawls over and ribbed stockings under the voluminous, high-necked nightgowns they’d taken turns donning in the small bathroom next to their grandfather’s office. Unbeknownst to her cousin, however, Anne-Marie had kept on the skirt and blouse and wool sweater she’d worn today. “First to kiss your liberator and then to slap him.”

  Henriette yawned, too tired to argue the point, then scrambled beneath the feather coverlet. She had bicycled the five frigid kilometers from her parents’ farm to the village earlier that evening and was planning to go home tomorrow morning. But not before consuming her share of the eggs she had packed in straw and smuggled in her saddlebags to supplement the Gérards’ usually meager breakfast of bitter ersatz coffee and tough, gray bread.

  Candlelight projected Anne-Marie’s well-padded shadow onto the whitewashed wall as she followed her cousin to bed.

  To look at them lying side by side, one would never guess they were the daughters of siblings—sister and brother, in fact—because they were polar opposites.

  Where Henriette’s dark coloring reflected their Breton heritage, Anne-Marie’s Alsatian roots on her mother’s side had lightened her hair to the shade of wild honey and her eyes to clear amber. Their lack of resemblance didn’t end there. Henriette was short and top-heavy, partly due to nature and partly due to a lifelong diet of cream and butter and cheese, while Anne-Marie had been able to eat from morning till night before the strict wartime rationing set in without gaining an ounce on her taller, more slender frame.

  “I think I’ll offer the American a glass of Papa’s Calvados instead of a kiss,” Henriette said in a sleepy voice.

  “That certainly sounds less troublesome.” Anne-Marie blew out the candle, plunging the room into complete darkness, then crossed herself and clasped her hands together.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Praying.”

  Henriette chuckled drowsily. “For Guy Compain, I presume.”

  Anne-Marie’s blood froze in her veins. “What makes you say that?”

  “Papa told me that he saw you two coming out of the woods near the lake yesterday.”

  “Did he seem to think we were doing something wrong?” she asked in a careful voice that betrayed none of her sudden anxiety.

  “He said you appeared to be arguing.” Henriette took most of the coverlet with her when she turned onto her side, giving Anne-Marie her back. “A lover’s quarrel, perhaps?”

  Anne-Marie repressed a shudder of revulsion at the very idea of sleeping with Guy Compain. He was brave and uncompromising, she would grant him that, but he was also short and pimply and gauche. The fact that he was one of the few men over the age of eighteen still living in the village instead of doing forced labor in Germany made him, she supposed, a logical paramour in Henriette’s innocent eyes.

  “Actually, we were discussing Descartes.” She affected a reflective tone as she rolled onto her opposite side so that she was lying—literally and figuratively—with her face to the wall.

  “Who?” Sixteen-year-old Henriette was more interested in getting her hands on the latest issue of Pour Elle than she was in reading the words of some long-dead philosopher.

  “‘Cogito, ergo sum’,” Anne-Marie prompted.

  “You know I failed my Latin examination.”

  “‘I think, therefore I am.’”

  “Oh.”

  Enjoying herself at Henriette’s expense was cruel, but Anne-Marie continued, embroidering a tale that rivaled the Bayeux Tapestry for complexity. If nothing else, she decided she would bore her cousin to sleep. “And then, of course, there’s the whole question of mind over matter.”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe the world exists, or is it only an illusion of our senses?”

  “I didn’t realize Guy was so serious,” Henriette admitted after a moment’s pause.

  He wasn’t. At least not about things like philosophy. In fact, he’d hated school and often bragged that he’d been expelled for writing BBC messages from the exiled Général de Gaulle on the blackboard during lunch break. Far be it from Anne-Marie, though, to correct Henriette’s erroneous impression.

  Besides, her real concern was her uncle. She didn’t trust him. And with good reason. Not only did Henriette’s father drink too much, but when the Calvados—the potent apple-pulp brandy he brewed from the trees on his farm—had finished dulling his senses, he talked too much.

  “Did you father say anything else about Guy and me?” she inquired casually.

  “Only that your maman and papa would roll over in their graves at such a liaison,” Henriette mumbled into her pillow.

  Tears stung Anne-Marie’s eyes at the mention of her parents, who’d been killed during the June 1940 invasion. One day while she was shopping with a girlfriend near Rouen’s Place du Vieux Marché, the square where Jeanne d’Arc had bravely died at the stake, a German bomb had hit their home and it had burned to the ground. Cringing in a doorway across town as the sirens wailed and the Stukas swept down, she hadn’t known that it was already too late for her mother and father and a younger brother who’d been confined to bed with a touch of flu. Her dear, sweet Papa had come home from his law office for lunch and to check on him.

  By nightfall, she’d been both an orphan and a refugee in a world turned upside down. Her immediate family was dead, the old Norman house of her birth had been flattened, and longtime neighbors were preparing to live without any sanitary facilities in cellars and in hovels made from blackened beams and planks. The next day she’d fled the rubble of Rouen with only the clothes on her back, joining the long line of defeated people plodding south, bypassing numerous other burned-out villages and praying that her father’s younger sister would take her in.

  But her aunt was a farmer’s wife with four sons and a daughter of her own to feed. And her uncle, who had just received notice that the Germans were requisitioning his wheat harvest, had emphatically said “No more!” Her grief–stricken grandfather, however, had gladly welcomed his son’s only surviving child into his home. Anne-Marie had lived with him ever since, earning her certificate from the local lycée and her keep by helping around the house and assisting him in his office.

  It was the perfect “cover” for her Résistance work.

  Resisting the Germans was, in fact, a family tradition. When the Prussians invaded Alsace in 1870, her maternal grandparents, who were determined to remain French, had moved to Caen, where her mother was born. And when the “war to end all wars” broke out in 1914 and France found herself crossing swords with Germany yet again, her father, a law clerk in Rouen, had sallied forth.

  Now it was her generation’s turn to answer the bugles of patriotism resounding across the land, and Anne-Marie was proud to be one of the partisans who’d ralli
ed to the call.

  She’d been careful to keep her grandfather in the dark about her activities with the local Résistance. What he didn’t know, after all, wouldn’t hurt him. But by agreeing to serve just this once as a passeur—one of the people who moved downed Allied pilots and Jewish refugees across occupied territories to safety—she had put him in jeopardy as well.

  Still, she had decided it was a risk worth taking. Because if she’d known then what she knew now, she might have been able to help Miriam Blum.

  Anne-Marie crossed herself again and said a silent “Amen.” Outside, that bright bomber’s moon shone down upon a village where all but one slept under a patchwork quilt of snow. Inside, Henriette’s soft, steady snores and their grandfather’s louder ones echoing from across the hall told her that her prayers had been answered.

  * * * *

  “Ssh!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Shivering as much from nerves as from the bitter cold, Anne-Marie turned to the wounded RAF pilot crouching in the ditch beside her. After checking to be sure that both Henriette and her grandfather were sound asleep, she’d sneaked down the stairs and out the door of the house. Her “lodger,” whom she’d alerted when she slipped into the garage while gathering wood for tomorrow’s fire, had been lying in wait in the loft above her grandfather’s coupe.

  “I hear something,” she whispered now in the English she’d learned at school.

  “The German patrol?” he asked on a cloud of breath.

  “They’re not due back for twenty minutes.” She’d managed to glean the timing of their new schedule while the Gestapo agent’s bad tooth was being pulled. While she was at it, she’d filched a small glass of the cognac he’d anesthetized himself with before submitting to the painful extraction. She’d poured some of it into a snifter for her grandfather. The rest she’d used to disinfect the pilot’s nasty leg wound before they’d set out from the village on foot.

  The seconds dragged by as they listened intently. A twig snapped. Ice-crusted leaves rustled. Then an owl flapped out of a tree, showering them with snow.

  Anne-Marie breathed a sigh of relief and then whistled softly in a pre-arranged signal. When a gnomelike figure rose out of the ditch on the other side of the road, she stood on cramped legs and gave the pilot a hand up. “Follow me.”

  The road they needed to cross was coated with a thick, slick layer of ice, making it hard for the limping aviator to keep up with her. Normally the crews of shot-down Allied planes escaped back to their bases through northern France, near the Belgian border. The Gestapo had recently infiltrated the Résistance network that repatriated them, however, so he’d been passed farther south by a friendly railroad man and was being flown back tonight.

  “You’re late,” Guy Compain scolded, raising his wrist to check his cheap steel watch as they approached. He was Anne-Marie’s age but had taken to wearing little boys’ shorts, even in winter, to appear too young for forced conscription. So far, the Germans had been too busy trying to capture the more illustrious Résistance leaders to bother with some village idiot who didn’t have enough sense to wear long pants when it snowed.

  “Sorry, old chap,” the Englishman gasped, “but I’m a bit wobbly on the pins.”

  “The leg wound he received when his plane went down is infected.” Anne-Marie had switched back to French for the explanation. She slid a supportive arm around the pilot’s waist and motioned for Guy to do the same on the other side. “Since my grandfather won’t have any sulfanilamide powder until the Lysander comes, I poured a little cognac on it and gave him some aspirin for his fever.

  “Let’s go,” Guy snapped.

  He hadn’t wanted any part in helping the pilot escape, which was what they’d been arguing about when Henriette’s father had seen them coming out of the woods. Too dangerous, he’d declared, reminding her that they would automatically be given the death penalty instead of a prison sentence if they were caught. It was too late to back out now, she’d countered. The pilot was here and he was hurt.

  Guy had finally relented when Anne-Marie urged him to remember Miriam Blum, on whom she’d always suspected he’d had a crush.

  Moonlight guided the slow-moving trio’s path. A copse of trees lay straight ahead. On the south side was a lake where the villagers swam in summer; on the north, a large field that had been cleared of snow so the small British Lysander could land.

  Silent as ghosts, several other figures came out from behind the trees. Like Anne-Marie and Guy, they were all dressed in dark clothes and knit caps. One carried a Sten gun, which had been delivered in a previous drop while the others created a flare path with their obstacle lights.

  Tonight’s mission was the partisans’ most daring to date. Their supplies were usually dropped with black parachutes on moonless nights. Since this was their first pick-up, though, they’d decided to risk exposure instead of a crash.

  “I hear . . . the plane.” Now that escape was so close at hand, the fevered pilot began to shake.

  “You’ll be home soon.” Anne-Marie kept a tight hold on him, finding that his weakness somehow gave her strength.

  On the ground, everyone watched anxiously as the Lysander approached the makeshift airfield they’d prepared. They’d been warned that timing was of the essence in an operation of this sort. Once the plane landed, they would have three minutes to unload the precious cargo it carried and to get the wounded pilot aboard before it took off. Any longer than that and the German patrol might spot it and sound the alarm.

  “Vite, vite!” Guy reminded them to hurry in a harsh whisper.

  The instant the tiny aircraft came to a stop on the four hundred-yard runway, the waiting réseau members got to work. Outgoing “mail” diagramming the location of railway depots and bridges so the Allied bombers could further disrupt the Germans’ supply routes went on, while medical supplies, boxes of ammunition and orders for continuing the clandestine sabotage of Nazi travel came off. Last but not least, the injured aviator was made as comfortable as possible in the cramped interior.

  Then, before the Lysander even lifted off, the partisans vanished into the night as quickly and quietly as they had earlier appeared.

  Anne-Marie stuffed the package meant for her grandfather under her sweater and took off at a run. Snow whitened the ground under the trees, but otherwise it was hard with frost. The ski boots she’d bought on the black market made a ringing sound when their iron supports struck a frozen rut in the road.

  Traveling alone, it hardly took any time to reach the village. Only once, when two bicycles came along with their blackout lights flickering unevenly, did she have to sink into the bushes alongside the road. Like her, the riders were breaking the midnight curfew, and she wondered on an increasingly rare romantic whim if they were secret lovers hurrying home to avoid the German patrol.

  She clenched her chattering teeth, then shoved her bare hands in her pockets and tucked her chin into the curly lamb collar of the old coat she’d found in her grandmother’s armoire and remade for herself, waiting until the bicycles faded around the next curve.

  The rue de Bretagne, the main street in Ste. Genviève, was deserted now. Still, she looked carefully before crossing it because the Nazi nights had a thousand eyes. Even though the patrol car wasn’t due to pass for another few minutes, there was no telling who might have gotten up to use the bathroom and then stopped to peer out the window on the way back to bed.

  Her grandfather’s house was as dark and tightly shuttered as a tomb. She slipped around to the back, took off her boots, and tiptoed in through the door that opened to their cramped kitchen. On stockinged feet then, she started across the living room.

  Skirting the massive mahogany sideboard that stood against the same wall as the door to the vestibule, Anne-Marie permitted herself a small smile at how well things were going. First, she would set the sulfanilamide powder in her grandfather’s medical cabinet. Then she would duck into the tiny downstairs bathroom to strip off h
er clothes and put on her nightgown before sneaking back up—

  A light flared on just as she reached for the doorknob.

  She spun, her heart in her throat, to find her grandfather sitting in the harsh glare of a gas lamp near the draped and shaded window that faced the street. Despite the fact that he was on call for emergencies all night, they suffered the same gas cuts as the rest of the village. Which meant that he’d been waiting for her under cover of darkness.

  The lamp hissed steadily as she studied him in the gloomy silence. He looked as if he’d just awakened from a long nightmare. His white hair was mussed, his face flushed, and the fraying ties of his black silk robe lay limp and wrinkled in his lap. On the small table beside his favorite reading chair with the worn frieze upholstery sat the crystal snifter, empty now, into which she had poured the pilfered cognac.

  “‘Tiger Lily!’” He practically spat out the nom de guerre she’d taken when she’d joined the Résistance movement.

  Anne-Marie sighed in resignation. She couldn’t deny it. He’d caught her in flagrante. Nor could she look him in the eye and lie. He’d see right through her. The only option she had left was to try to contain the damage.

  Toward that end, she spoke softly so as not to wake Henriette. “How long have you known?”

  “I have eyes, I can see. I have ears, I can hear.” His own voice quavered with quiet dignity. “Or do you think I’m too old, too blind and deaf and senile to know what you’ve been up to all these months?”

  “Of course not.” With more aplomb than she felt, Anne-Marie set her ski boots on the floor, unbuttoned her coat, and pulled off her black knit cap. Her hair, gleaming almost gold in the light from the gas lamp, fell past her shoulders. She reached up under her sweater and removed the precious parcel of sulfanilamide powder he needed to treat his patients, many of whom had been beaten by the Germans or badly wounded by Allied bombs.

  “You—” As he took the package she proffered, his dark eyes widened in dismay. “Where did you get this?”

  “That,” she said gently, “you’re better off not knowing.”