The Bell and the Blade, page 1
About The Bell and the Blade
In the heart of war, love is the deadliest weapon. A thriller and epic love story from the bestselling author of Tully, The Bronze Horseman and Light at Lavelle.
It’s 1944. The world is at war. Forces of evil hold Europe by the throat.
After a mysterious massacre at sea, a ragtag alliance forms in the heart of occupied Belgium.
A handful of Allied soldiers band together with a fearless group of female freedom fighters led by Charlotte Fontaine to carry out a mission no one else can.
The target: unreachable.
The clock: ticking.
The consequences: apocalyptic.
Charlotte: Resolute, hardened by loss - she’ll stop at nothing to save the one she loves.
Fletcher: Sharp as a blade, he never wanted to lead, but now he’s the only one who can finish it.
Louise: Radiant. Innocent. She dreams of peace, but the war won’t let her go.
Rafael: Rebellious, reckless, romantic-and brought to his knees by love.
With time running out, they’re hunted by a brilliant and relentless German officer hellbent on their destruction. In a world on fire, it’s the unbreakable bonds between the unlikely heroes that make all the difference.
From the master storyteller of The Bronze Horseman comes a thrilling, darkly funny, and heartbreaking epic of love, brotherhood, and sacrifice-when every heartbeat could be your last.
CONTENTS
About The Bell and the Blade
Title Page
Contents
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
PART I – La Jonquille est Morte
1 – La Berceau
2 – A Mandatory Morale Event
3 – King of the Ring
4 – The Belle of Bastogne
5 – Two Conversations Between Three Men
6 – One Day in the Life of Kurt Vogel
7 – Trail of Blood
8 – Marriage
9 – Omloop
10 – Saint Waltrude
11 – Beauty and the Beast
12 – Invasion
13 – Minus Zero
14 – Lost Hope
15 – The Empty Ship
16 – D-Day plus Two
17 – Ashes
18 – Coffee from Kivu
PART II – La Ligne
19 – Gray Ghosts
20 – Contact Points
21 – Photograph
22 – I Can’t Say
23 – The Golden Apples of the Hesperides
24 – The King’s Request
25 – Frobisher’s Twelve Missions
26 – Eureka on the Ground
27 – Rebecca in the Sky
28 – A Kiss on the Hand
29 – Saint Lament
30 – Lillehaven
31 – The Klokkenmaker’s Apprentice
32 – Racial Properties of Belgian Clay
33 – Sequoia
34 – Cyrano
35 – Het Steen Castle
36 – Male Pattern Baldness
37 – Dorian
38 – Second Objective
39 – Charlie and her Lovers
40 – Protected Resource
41 – Zvart Haus
42 – About Louise
43 – Heavy Water
44 – Krieger in Liège
45 – La Fortuna
PART III – Santa Fe
46 – Flies on the Castle Wall
47 – Sixty Barrels
48 – The Crossing
49 – Azali
50 – Vandepole and Blomme
51 – The SS, Wehrmacht, and Firmin
52 – Abbey in the Woods
53 – Silver Hart
54 – Mad Jesuit Monk
55 – Red Line
56 – Tremelo
57 – Behold, the Man
58 – The Road to Louise
59 – Sisyphus
60 – Oars in the Water
61 – Reinforced Steel
62 – The Bells of Flanders
63 – No One Knows But Us
64 – Yellow Flowers
65 – Dossin Floral
66 – Alder Fontaine
67 – All Aboard
68 – Checkmate
69 – Easy Red
70 – The Unhappy Few
71 – Force Multipliers
72 – All of Us, Then
73 – Sancta Maria in Silvis Sacris
PART IV – Après le Déluge, Nous
74 – How Many Men
75 – Scout Sniper Medic Fighter
76 – The Cathedral of Critical Mass
77 – A Day of Rain
78 – Known Unto God
79 – A Box of Unclaimed Things
80 – Hélène Aubel
81 – A Simple Formula for Success
82 – Check Your Bones
83 – A Wedding Feast
84 – Ambassador for Enrichment
85 – Fishing with Maurice
86 – The Conversation
87 – Sham Sacrifice
88 – 234 Steps Plus One
89 – A Matter of Utmost Urgency
90 – Fire in her Hand
91 – With Song and Guns A-Blazing
92 – The Waiting
93 – Yellow Ragwort
94 – Madness
95 – The Delta of Drift Diffusion
96 – Saul
97 – Daisy Lane
98 – The Boy from Wind River
CODA
1 – Mirabel
2 – Hurtgen Forest
3 – Thyboron
Acknowledgements
About Paullina Simons
Copyright
Newsletter
To Kevin
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw
wild hands
toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on
alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Stephen Crane
PART I
LA JONQUILLE EST MORTE
Omnia Sentiunt
All things feel.
Pythagoras
1
LA BERCEAU
IT WAS A NIGHT to forget—or perhaps it was a night to remember.
Charlie gripped the wheel as she drove into Antwerp, heading toward the old docks, her forged papers lying on the seat beside her. She didn’t even know who she was hiding from today.
She had become an expert at subtraction. Strip the color. Muffle the light. Remove the name. She reduced herself to mass and motion—steady, silent—a tensile body of a woman who never stopped moving. Her cap was pulled low, her short hair tucked, her coat loose enough to disguise shape and shift. Her pale lips faded into shadow. Her deep brown eyes were lit with watchful fire. But she always felt a fraction misaligned, like a body conducting no heat, or a particle in hiding.
Seamen spilled from the smoke-choked taverns, the clatter of boots and bottles echoing off wet stone. Past the yellowing lights along the harbor, the Scheldt River lay black as oil, slapping the hulls of a thousand ships tethered till morning. It was early June but raining like it was late December. Drunken tempers flaring, men breaking into laughter, falling, calling for their commander. Someone shouted “Rendez-vous! Surrender!”
The rain slicked everything but didn’t cool the fever. Sailors stumbled against one another, singing, sobbing. One of them grabbed a German Polizei by the lapels and shook him. The gendarme shoved him off and kicked him down the cobblestones, almost good-naturedly. Get out of here, you drunken hoot, the shiny German boot seemed to say.
Charlie drove her father’s flower truck carefully, threading through the clamor, avoiding the roar of wild men who had nowhere to be, as if tomorrow didn’t matter.
Or as if tomorrow were all that mattered.
It wasn’t normal, this cacophony in the night.
But on Jordaensstraat, by the castle ruins on the edge of the Old City, it was quiet as always. Here, the docks were smaller, older, mostly deserted. The quay was crumbling, and there were no cranes to help with heavy loads. Everything had to be done by hand.
She parked in her usual spot behind an abandoned warehouse by the river. La Berceau was the smallest and oldest of her father’s trucks, narrow in the frame and wheezy going uphill, but it had one thing none of the others had—a secret compartment underneath a false floor. That’s why she had named the truck the Cradle. She and her two brothers had installed it with a sliding panel and a hidden latch, using two planks and a prayer.
The wind and the misting rain carried the salty sea into her nose and throat and made her feel as if she were sick or weeping. But she was neither. She was fretful and impatient. Popping the clasp, she released the scrawny boy from the truck’s hold.
His name was Zeus.
It had taken her a long time to find him. She’d driven all the way down to Charleroi to retrieve him and his brother from a Carmelite hostel. But Zeus was alone. They didn’t speak of it. He just went with her. The child’s face was wide and his hair cropped and curly, the kind of hair someone who loved him might want to ruffle. When they first met, he said he wasn’t sure if she was a girl or a boy. When she said she was a girl, he puckered his mouth as if he didn’t believe her. A precocious child.
“What if they spot your truck here?” Zeus asked. “Won’t they get suspicio
“They don’t come back here on Friday nights. Don’t worry. We always do it like this.”
“Maybe you should park where other trucks are parked,” the boy said.
“But then we’d have farther to walk to get to the ship. More chance of getting stopped by roving patrols.”
He began to ask another question, but Charlie stopped him. “You’re not my first boy, Zeus. And you won’t be my last. Trust me. This is the safest way. Now be quiet and come.”
“If we’re so safe, why do I have to be quiet?”
She observed him warily. Someone should’ve told her he’d be like this.
A year ago she’d picked the lock on a back door to the warehouse, installed her own, and tonight they entered the vast space easily. They walked to the front, which faced the quay where the old Portuguese ship, the Serra Nova, bobbed in the glimmering water.
“Should we open the window?” the boy asked. “So we can climb out quick when the time comes?”
“No, Zeus. I told you—the patrol shines lights in these windows as they walk past. If a window is open, they’ll see.”
Charlie could tell the boy wanted to take her hand. She wanted to pat him, tell him not to worry, that everything would be okay. But how okay had everything turned out so far? She didn’t want to lie. She said nothing.
“When do they come?”
“I told you, at ten.”
“I’m ten.”
“I can’t believe you’re ten already, Zeus.”
“What time is it now?”
“Fifteen more minutes.” She took a breath. “I don’t like waiting either,” she admitted. What an understatement. “It won’t be long.”
Charlie knew the captain, Andres Ferrer. They’d been conducting business for two years. Ferrer brought Portuguese olives and cork into Belgium and exported Belgian textiles and beer to Lisbon. Textiles, beer—and small Jewish children. For this, Ferrer got paid, and Charlie got paid. The money funded her resistance work and left her beholden to no one—exactly how Charlie wanted it. To be beholden to no one.
It all flowed easy as olive oil. It was a well-practiced silent pantomime. She had explained it to Zeus, but he was an exceptionally questioning child. She had to tell him over and over. This was why Charlie preferred to transport the children in pairs. You were never as afraid when you had someone with you. “It’ll be fine, Zeus,” she said. “But be quiet.”
“Why do I have to be quiet if it will be fine?”
“Because I need to focus, and I can’t when you’re asking me a million questions. If I miss the signal, it will not all be fine.”
The boy stopped talking, and the two of them stared through the dirty glass. The boy wiped the dust off with his little hand to see the ship better. She waited for the German sentries to make their hourly patrol down Glaskaai. They marched to the walls of Het Steen Castle, then turned around and slowly walked back. As soon as they were out of sight, Ferrer would flash a light—three short, one long—giving her the all-clear. Charlie and her charges would open the window, climb out, and run to the stern of the ship, where a side cargo door would open. They would rumble up the gangplank and disappear inside.
She would say hello to Andres, and settle the child deep in the lower hold, past the barricade of crates and pallets. She’d give him some food, water, a book, a flashlight, go over the passwords, then lock him inside. She’d pay Ferrer, and before she left, they would have a convivial smoke together—another mission successfully completed.
Charlie thought if their time together had been lengthened and the war shortened, Andres might have expressed another, more romantic, interest in her. But who had time for romance these days?
Friday night was a good time for this exchange, because the rest of Ferrer’s crew was off at the pub getting plastered. From the flashing signal to the cigarette took seven minutes.
But that wasn’t what happened this Friday night.
Because on this Friday night, the men were reckless on the stones and nothing was ordinary and nothing took seven minutes.
Charlie felt the first alarm when ten o’clock came and went, and there was no patrol. She wiped the face of her watch, just in case she’d misread the time, then pried open the window.
“I thought you said not to open the window?” Zeus said.
“Shh, I need to listen.”
The German guards were punctual like pistons. Charlie knew them by form and shape, knew their weapons, their purposeful gait, the smell of their cigarettes, the cadence of their chatter. But tonight they were absent, and the strong wind brought not a whiff of the tobacco smoke that signaled their arrival.
She and the boy continued to wait, but her hands started to shake. Something was wrong. She’d been right to note the drunken cacophony when she first drove in. She should leave, run, take the child to a safehouse, and try again another day. But Zeus needed to get on that ship. This wasn’t for her. It was for him.
From the distant alleys, where the city was still alive, an accordion wheezed a half-forgotten tune, swallowed by night and wind. This part of Antwerp was nothing more than a still painting: the black silhouettes of ships against the maw of the sea, the crumbling stone castle looming over the shoreline, a waxing crescent moon hidden behind silver-black clouds.
The boy whispered, “What is that song?”
She couldn’t remember, though she’d been humming it under her breath for minutes.
Finally, it came to her. “Parlez-moi d’amour.” Talk to me about love. Tell me beautiful things again . . . in my heart I’m never tired of hearing it. I love you, but deep down, I don’t believe you. Yet I still want you, need you, wish for you to tell me the words of love that I love.
Briefly closing her eyes, Charlie gave a pained sigh and checked her watch.
It was 11:30. No! That couldn’t be right!
And still no patrol in sight.
Maybe the Germans had sampled a little homemade beer and confused the hour? Had Andres gone out for a nightcap—or five—and forgotten to return? Charlie might not have thought much of it had the Germans not been patrolling the outer Scheldt docks with the exacting precision of priests ringing the bells of Saint Waltrude, every hour on the hour from dawn to midnight. Other alarming things were happening, which, combined with the lack of Nazis, added to her panic. Andres Ferrer was missing too. Why had he not flashed the sign at the appointed hour? Could two unlikely absences occur simultaneously for unrelated reasons? That strained credulity.
Something must’ve happened. Things were happening everywhere. There was chaos in the square.
“Do I go now?” Zeus whispered.
“Go where? No, Zeus.” Could she have missed the sign? She did close her eyes for a moment when she allowed a breath of nearly forgotten heartbreak to flow into her chest. But Ferrer would’ve flashed again. He knew to signal three times more. It had been over ninety minutes.
Intently, Charlie watched the darkened Serra Nova.
In the stillness, fear was born. Serra Nova was moored in its usual spot on Glaskaai. Normally, the berths next to it were vacant, but tonight, another merchant ship bobbed to its left, heaving against the pilings. It was longer than the Serra Nova, slightly wider, though just as dark, just as locked up, just as abandoned. Squinting, she tried to make out the name in faded white across the prow. La Fortuna. Reading that name, something heavy and foreboding tolled inside Charlie’s chest. She almost trembled.
There was a Belgian flag on her mast, a Portuguese trading flag below it, and below that, a swaying white flag painted over with a narcissus—a daffodil. A bespoke flag of a painted yellow flower seemed odd for a merchant ship, too personal. Almost as if it weren’t a flag, but a sign . . .
“Charlie!” Zeus pointed. In the dark, broken only by a flickering gas lamp, a group of black-clad men appeared out of the shadows. She emitted an audible gasp. Quickly they crossed the quay and hurried down the narrow wooden wharf at the broadside of La Fortuna.
The interlopers fanned out along the ship’s flank, grabbed onto the mooring ropes and expertly wound their way up the rough knotted twine. They looked chillingly professional. On the freeboard of the ship above the waterline, they found ladders and grappling hooks and climbed up the hull like spiders, to the top of the deck, noiselessly vaulting over the railing—Olympic athletes all. The ship’s mass groaned against the pilings, but otherwise there was no sound except for the distant whine of the gut-wrenched accordion.
“Charlie,” Zeus whispered, “are they coming for me?”
