The Paris Agent, page 27
The man fell silent for a moment, and I collapsed back against the wall of the carriage, deeply regretful that I could not help him. I was thirsty too—but I’d only been on the train for a few hours, and I’d had ready access to water at the prison. This man was suffering in a whole other way.
“There’s nothing we can do,” I said, more to myself than to anyone else. “We are trapped, just as he is.”
Near me, an older woman cleared her throat.
“Well, maybe not,” she said hesitantly. “Our door is unlocked.”
“It is?” I said, startled. “But...”
“I’ve been on this train for three days,” she told me. “Didn’t you notice how they were rushing when they brought you in? The Germans are in a panic and often forget to lock the doors.”
“Sir!” I called out, sitting up. “Some of the guards have run away from the bombing. Perhaps all of them! If your door is unlocked, you could try to jump off the train. Perhaps there’s water nearby?”
“Miss, we’re all shackled to the floor in here.” I looked around my carriage. The women around me were all shackled in pairs, but none of us were secured to the floor. The man continued wearily, “A few men in here are loose but they are in no state to escape.”
“Romilly,” I whispered. “Let’s try to help them.”
“But we will be shot!” she exclaimed. “No!”
“We can at least go to the door and see if it really is unlocked. And if it is, I can try to get an idea of where we are.” She didn’t move, so I leaned my head close to hers and whispered, “Listen—there are still planes around, the guards won’t return until they go.” She avoided my gaze, and I nudged her. “I can’t do this without you.”
She sighed impatiently and carefully, awkwardly, we scrambled to our feet and made our way through the throng of women to the sliding door of our carriage. I pushed it open a crack, and although the older woman had warned me, I was shocked to find it was indeed unlocked. This was the boost to my morale I sorely needed. After all, if the Germans were so lax with carriage security as we traveled, perhaps I really did have a chance of escape once we reached our destination.
Outside, the morning sun was rising, casting a romantic glow over the fields that extended as far as I could see to the east and the tiny village in the distance on the north. I couldn’t see any guards—I assumed they’d run to hide among the civilian houses. Behind us, all of the women were shifting to get closer to the open door.
“There,” Romilly whispered, pointing with her free hand. She’d spotted a cattle trough just a few dozen feet from the train line.
“But how do we bring it back for them?”
“Take this,” one of the women in the carriage muttered reluctantly, and the women worked together to pass her empty canteen to Romilly and me at the door. “Take some water to the men then refill it and bring it back. I will share it with you as we travel.”
“If we get shot doing this...” Romilly muttered uneasily, as we began the exceedingly awkward process of climbing down from the carriage, still shacked at the ankles and wrists.
“Then we will die knowing we were doing our best,” I said flatly. I heard the sigh she tried to swallow, but soon we were scrambling toward the trough, our footsteps in sync so the shackle didn’t slow us down any more than it had to. We quickly drank a few handfuls of water ourselves, then filled the canteen and made our way back up the slope to the other carriage. The women from our carriage were pouring out now, making their way down to the water.
“Please go as quickly as you can,” I called to them anxiously. They ignored me, continuing down to the trough, and I was relieved by the sound of more planes overhead. The Allies were unlikely to shoot at innocent civilians, and the soldiers were unlikely to return while the air raid was still active. Would this be my chance to escape? Perhaps. But first, I had to help those men.
“Sir?” I called, as we approached the other carriage. “I have water—”
The door slid open, and I couldn’t hide my shock at what was inside. There were only eight of them, but these were airmen—American and British by the looks of their tattered, bloodstained uniforms. The men were filthy. Their faces were marked with dirt, their eyes sunken and hollow...their lips cracked and bleeding. Two men were unconscious or worse, and the other six were shackled to the ground. They leaned toward us anyway, as if so desperately thirsty that they just wanted to be as close to the water as they could get.
“Here,” I said urgently, passing the canteen to the man at the front. “Just a few sips, then pass it on. When it runs out, we’ll refill it and bring it back. As long as we have the time, you’ll get a second turn.”
But by the time the canteen was empty, other women from the carriage had their fill of water. Romilly and I stood beside the open door of the men’s carriage to talk to Captain Jock Mendleson, the man who’d called for help, while other women went down to refill the canteen for the men a second time.
“We’re done for,” he said heavily, staring at the floor of the carriage. “This isn’t how you treat a prisoner of war. This is how you treat someone you’re going to execute.”
“You can’t know that, Captain,” I scolded him. “If they were going to execute you, you’d most likely be dead already. Hasn’t the war brought twists and turns to your life already? Perhaps the next twist will bring the end of it. Perhaps you’ll be home with your loved ones before you know it.”
Now that the men had been able to have a few sips from the canteen, the urgency was gone when the woman from my carriage returned with it a second time. The men savored the water now, sipping it slowly, sighing with contentment as the moisture drained over their parched throats. Jock took his second pass at the canteen, then handed it to one of his companions as he looked to me again.
“What did you do to get yourselves captured?”
“Resistance work,” Romilly said.
“I’m a spy,” I told him, and his eyes widened in surprise. “France is riddled with British spies—men, women—all ages, all backgrounds. The war is far from over, and you are far from doomed.” And then I told him about the success at D-day, and the circumstances of my own capture at Salon-La-Tour...my regret at the decision to travel by car.
“But it is what it is,” I said, shrugging, as I tried to keep the conversation positive. “And now we just have to get through each day until we can escape or the Allies liberate us.”
“The guards are coming back!” one of the women shouted. I looked around—wondering if it was too late for Romilly and me to make a run for it, but she was standing beside me staring at the ground. If I were on my own, perhaps I could have run. My ankle still ached sometimes but was healing.
But I could never escape shackled to another woman if she weren’t in the right frame of mind to accept the risk, and I didn’t need to ask Romilly to know that she wasn’t.
I gave the American men one last determined look and a whisper of good luck, before they slid the door closed. Slow as we were, Romilly and I were still the fastest on our feet, so we rushed back to refill the canteen one last time. When I handed the full canteen back to its rightful owner, an older woman who seemed far too frail to have run down the hill herself, she caught my hand.
“My mother used to say that even in the worst of times, we must look for ways to do good,” she said quietly. “I think I had forgotten until just now. So thank you.”
I felt Giles with me in that moment. This was the spirit with which he’d lived his entire life, and it was how I too could find meaning, whatever came next, even with all of my fear for my son and my uncertainty about my own future.
C H A P T E R 23
* * *
JOSIE
Pforzheim Prison, Germany
September, 1944
I tried not to mark the passing of time, but that window meant that I had no way to ignore it. I had seen the end of spring from that cell and had watched summer pass.
One day, a guard came to my door. They usually changed over my waste bucket in the morning so I pushed myself off the bed and picked it up to hand it to him, following the same routine I’d had for months. This time, the guard shook his head in and motioned for me to follow him. Stunned, I took a wobbly step out the door.
“What is the date?” I blurted.
“13 September,” he said curtly.
I had been in that cell for close to five months. Had the war ended in that time? If so, and the Allies lost, it was entirely possible that nothing in the German prison would have changed. I was already struggling to walk on wasted muscles, but my knees gave out at the thought that I was leaving that cell to enter a world where Hitler had won. The guard grabbed me by the arm to drag me into an office after I collapsed. He dropped me unceremoniously into a chair, then sat opposite me to complete paperwork. I sat bewildered as he flicked from page to page, every single slip of paper marked with the words Nacht und Nebel.
Was this sudden change in my circumstances a good thing, or a bad thing? I had no idea, and I was so worn down—so overwhelmed—that I could not even bring myself to ask. Eventually, the guard slipped the paperwork into a folder, propped it beneath his arm, and motioned for me to follow him back out into the hallway. I pushed myself to my feet and collapsed again. He huffed impatiently and once again was dragging me by the arm as I stumbled after him—but then—we walked through a door and I was outside. I looked up at that vibrant blue sky and I sucked in a sharp breath, greedy for fresh air.
All too soon, he pushed me into the back of a van and zipped the canvas door closed behind me. Was this an opportunity to escape? But no. I was still handcuffed, still weak. I had no way to cut the canvas open anyway. I sat alone in that van for an hour or more as it drove, thrown mercilessly from one side to the other with every corner. When it finally stopped, I was once again manhandled from the back and found myself standing outside of another prison.
“Karlsruhe,” the guard said abruptly. “You’ve been transferred.”
There was an all-female wing at Karlsruhe—even the guards were women. A brusque guard named Hertha oversaw my paperwork, and the pitying glances she kept flicking at me as I waited told me I looked every bit as rough as I felt. When she handed me my prison uniform, I thanked her in German, and she was visibly relieved.
“Where am I?” I asked her.
“Karlsruhe is a civilian prison.”
“But...why am I at a civilian prison?”
“You aren’t the only prisoner of war they’ve sent us in the past few days but we have no idea why you’re being sent here. And your N&N designation means we are not supposed to let you associate with the rest of the prisoners. We’re supposed to keep you in solitary confinement permanently...” She paused, glanced at the door, as if checking that we were alone, then dropped her voice. “But we don’t have enough cells for that, so you’ll be bunking in with another N&N prisoner.”
“Nacht und Nebel,” I whispered. “I know it’s ‘night and fog.’ What does that mean?” It was well and truly obvious to me by that point that being an “N&N” prisoner was no positive thing, but I was still curious about the term.
“It’s just a designation of political prisoner,” she said. “Come.”
She led me patiently through the long corridors of the prison, stopping automatically when I slumped against a wall because my muscles were too weak to hold me up. I was exhausted from the effort of carrying myself upright for the first time in months even though I was grateful that Hertha did not manhandle me like the male guard did.
Most of the cells we passed were empty, but I saw hundreds of female prisoners outside in the yard through the windows. When Hertha pushed open a door and I saw long rows of showers inside, I could not help but to weep. I was still wearing the same outfit I’d been in when I was arrested five months earlier and had not bathed since that day. My clothes were so stained with blood and dirt and sweat that most of the fabric was stiff.
Hertha went back to the door and peered through the small window, looking back into the hallway, then she reached into her pocket and handed me a slip of soap.
“Thank—” I started to say, but she cut me off with a low hiss and shook her head. I nodded in understanding—she was obviously concerned she’d get in trouble for helping me—but I was certain my gratitude showed in my eyes.
The water in the showers was icy cold, but I didn’t care one bit. I washed every inch of my body with that soap. To pull on even that stiff prison uniform, after months in the same filthy clothes, was one of the most pleasant sensations I had ever experienced.
Once I was dressed, Hertha took me back through the prison block, all the way to the front office, then down another corridor. Here the doors were much closer together, but unlike the main dormitory, each cell was enclosed. She stopped, unlocked a door and swung it open. I gasped in surprise. This space was much larger than my previous cell, with two chairs and a low table, and a cupboard, and even a bed with a straw mattress on it. A woman lay on the mattress, facing the wall so I could not see her face.
Perhaps other prisoners would not smile at a shared cell with a single bed, topped by a thin, filthy mattress that was already occupied. But there was so much for me to be excited about in that room. Human company! Soft furnishings! A toilet and even a sink!
Oh, even if I could just drink as much water as I wanted, I would be in heaven.
Hertha motioned for me to step into the cell, and the prisoner rolled over on the bed and sat up with a start. As the door slammed closed behind me, I wondered if I’d finally lost my mind.
“Chloe? Is it really you?”
“Fleur?” I croaked. She rose from the bed and rushed to my side as my knees gave way, catching me just in time to help me to the bed. My whole body shook with sobs, but she held me close, and rubbed my back.
“Eloise,” she said firmly. “They know my real name, so it only seems fair that you do too.”
“I’m Jocelyn,” I wept. How had I survived for so long without so much as an embrace? Now that I was hugging a friend again, it seemed as vital to my survival as air or water and food. “My friends call me Josie.”
* * *
“...so, Veronique and I decided that was enough, we’d alert Baker Street. But as we were preparing the transmission, the Gestapo arrived...” I swallowed roughly. “She took an L pill. The last time I saw her, they were dragging her outside to try to force her to vomit. I have no idea if she survived.”
Eloise listened silently as I explained about the circumstances that led to my arrest. I could not bring myself to explain the torture I had endured at Avenue Foch. Even bringing it to mind was enough to make me weep.
I was distracted pushing those memories away for a moment but when I looked at Eloise, I saw that she had wrapped her arms around her chest and was trembling, staring at me with sheer terror in her eyes.
“Turner is the double agent,” she choked.
“Yes,” I said gently. “It’s shocking, I know.”
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I trusted him to arrange care for my son. He’s the only person who knows where Hughie is.”
There was nothing we could do from the prison cell. No way to raise the alarm, no way for her to check on her little boy’s welfare. All I could do for her was to hold her while she rode the wave of panic and frustration. And later, when I tried to talk about the five months I’d spent in solitary confinement but the words just kept sticking in my throat, she held me too.
All we had was that we were together. Regardless of how dire our situation was, I knew we were blessed to have that.
C H A P T E R 24
* * *
CHARLOTTE
Liverpool
July, 1970
A few strange days have passed since my conversation with Aunt Kathleen. I’m trying to find the courage to ask Dad about Josie Miller again. This time, I plan on asking him straight—were you really in love with her? Could you have fathered a child with her? But before the opportunity arises, Theo calls, and he does not sound like his normal self.
“I’m sorry to ask this,” he says, his voice high and a little strained. “Perhaps you could come to my flat? There’s something I need to show you.”
“There’s something I should talk to you about, too,” I say, although I’m still not sure if I should tell him about Aunt Kathleen’s suspicions about Dad’s relationship with Josie. I don’t want to get his hopes up that we might have stumbled upon his mother and his father in one fell swoop. I make the trip over to Manchester right away and find Theo a ball of chaotic energy. He tells me to take a seat at his little dining room table, and he bustles about the kitchen, making cups of coffee and chatting nervously about the cricket game he watched with his friends the previous night.
“Theo,” I interrupt him after a while. “What’s going on?”
“The birth certificate came,” he says, suddenly incredulous. “We found her.”
Jocelyn Nina Miller was born in London in 1920, and at that point at least, was the only child of Tobias Andrew Miller and Drusilla Rose Miller, née Sallow. Drusilla and Andrew had married two years before.
“So...these people might be your grandparents?”
Theo chews his thumbnail anxiously.
“I went to the library and looked in the phone books. I can’t find Tobias or Drusilla Miller anywhere.”
“I’m sorry...”
“Wait—it’s just....” He gnaws at his lip then cracks his knuckles. “Your dad told you Jocelyn’s parents had an especially unhappy divorce, right?”
