Suddenly he called out: “Où êtes-vous? Tante Marie vous attend!” Where are you? Aunt Marie is waiting!
I clutched the pillar as I raised myself up, trembling with relief. “Comment va Tante Marie? J’ai apporté quelque chose pour son mal de tête.” How is Aunt Marie? I’ve brought something for her headache.
He strode toward me, beaming. “Come inside,” he said, still speaking in French. He took my bicycle and wheeled it to the front of the farmhouse, propping it against the whitewashed wall. He held the door open for me. Miranda was sitting at a rustic wooden table, tearing at a hunk of bread as if she hadn’t eaten for weeks. She looked much thinner than when I’d last seen her. Her skin was very pale—almost translucent—and there were dark smudges under her eyes. She paused between bites, coughing. It was a cough I’d heard many times in the mission hospital: the harbinger of tuberculosis.
“What happened to you?” I sank down in the chair opposite hers.
She looked at me, still chewing, her face blank at first. Then her eyes lit up in recognition. She dropped the bread on the table. The chair scraped the floor as she pulled herself up. “My God! Ariel!” She came around the table and hugged me. “Oh, it’s good to see you!”
“We were so worried . . . we thought . . .”
“That I was dead?” She held me at arm’s length, her eyes wide as they traveled over my face. “I almost was—but I got away.” She nodded at the man, who was pouring something from a jug into three glasses. “Josef found me this morning, hiding in the shed where he keeps his flour.”
“She was lucky I got there first.” He spoke in English this time, with a strong accent. “The Germans were on their way to take a sack of it for their camp. We had to lock her in the cellar until they’d gone.” He put a glass down in front of me.
“What’s this?” I lifted it to my mouth.
“Good Breton cider.” He smiled. “It’s very strong. Before you drink too much, I’d better take what you’ve brought for me.”
There was so much I wanted to ask Miranda: so many questions about what had happened and how she’d survived. But I knew Josef was right. The priority was handing over what I’d smuggled past the Germans under my robe. And it would be a huge relief to shed the rolls of explosives chafing my skin.
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.