Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

The mournful wail of air-raid sirens was the first thing Lillian became aware of as she surfaced from the darkness she’d been lost in. They sounded close, far closer than they should have. Usually they were distant bleats borne on the wind from Cherbourg. But this—this nerve-racking screech seemed to originate directly overhead. Surely Paul had not had a warning system installed on their own roof?

Then she remembered: this was not Rocheford. And Paul was dead.

Everything came back to her in a rush. The grief, the horror. Jean-Claude. Andre. She had tried to swallow bleach but had been knocked to the ground before she could ingest more than a mouthful. Her head had smacked into the stone floor. The last thing she remembered was seeing stars—and the crushing pain of a German boot stomping her hands until she relinquished her desperate grip on the container of bleach. Mercifully, after that the world had gone black—until now.

She was alive.

Oh, God, why did you let me live?

As awareness returned, pain descended like a thunderclap. The physical was bad, but the psychic was worse. Her very soul bled.

She forced her eyes to open. They didn’t work properly. The lids felt puffy, swollen, and she could only part them a crack. Her head swam as she tried to look around, her vision blurry. Every cell in her body cried out in protest as she moved, so she stopped. It didn’t help.

The worst of the physical pain came from her mouth. Her lips, her tongue, the inside of her throat were all sheer burning agony. Her lips—she could just see them as she cast her gaze down—puffed out like inner tubes. Her tongue felt big as a cucumber. Misshapen and dry, its tip protruded grotesquely between her teeth. Her throat felt swollen and raw. The air she dragged in through her nostrils seared the inflamed tissue as her greedy lungs sucked it down.

Racked with thirst, she instinctively tried to swallow. She couldn’t—she had no saliva. Simply making the attempt sent fiery needles shooting through her mouth and throat and left her drenched in sweat.

The all clear sounded. The sirens faded. The danger was over.

Her muscles relaxed. Her lids drooped.

Paul, are you here? She reached out for him, through time and space and death, and got no response. If he was out there, she couldn’t find him.

She remembered the day they were married. A small wedding, in the church in Orconte. At eighteen years old, she’d been so in love with him, and so nervous at the idea of becoming his wife, that she’d trembled like a jelly. For the daughter of a village doctor to marry the future Baron de Rocheford was a big step up, socially. Even as she’d exchanged wedding vows with Paul, she’d made her own internal vow that he would never have cause to regret it, that she would be not only the best wife he could possibly ask for but, when the time came, the best baroness he could possibly ask for. After the wedding she’d set herself to mastering all the things she’d never had a reason to know: how to take her place in aristocratic society, how to run a stately home, how to raise her children to occupy a social position far different from the one she’d been born into. As the years passed, she thought she’d made Paul proud as well as happy.

She saw flashes of him with their daughters: his eyes bright with wonder and fear (and an excess of wine), a tender smile on his face as he’d held their silently blinking, blanket-wrapped firstborn, Emmanuelle, a scant hour after her birth; a no less welcoming greeting for their squalling second born, Genevra, feisty from her first breath; in his bathing costume on the Côte d’Azur teaching them to swim: Emmanuelle with her fair hair tucked up under a cap, a frown of concentration on her face as she dutifully strove to follow his instructions to the letter, and Genevra, forgetting her cap, her black curls flying as she leaped into the water without listening to a thing he’d said; his eyes misty as he’d beheld Emmanuelle dressed for her first grown-up dance; his face flushed with pride as, settled into his favorite chair in the green parlor, he’d listened to Genevra play and sing.

Oh, Paul.

A rattle and a creak brought her back to the terrifying present with a start. She tensed, forcing her lids apart again as she sought the source of the sounds.

“You are awake, I see.” A man’s voice, speaking in French with an accent that was unmistakably German, was followed by the sound of a heavy door closing. She sensed rather than saw him, an impression of energy and movement outside the limited range of her vision. But there was no missing the vitality of his presence inside the room.

Unwilling to turn her head more than a few centimeters because of the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm her when she tried, she sought him out by carefully moving only her eyes. In the process she discovered that she was no longer in that hellhole of a cellar. She was, instead, in a tiny windowless room lit by a single small ceiling fixture. Four bare walls of what looked like smooth white plaster were interrupted by the closed door, a substantial-looking panel of dark wood. She lay on her back on a cot along one of the long walls with her left wrist chained to a ring in the wall. A light blanket covered her. What she could see of her manacled arm was hideously bruised, her hand discolored and swollen.

The room was cold, and from the sirens she assumed it was night: the aeroplanes almost always came at night. How long had it been since Paul had died? One day, two? Or more?

The German came toward her. He was large, a high-ranking officer according to his uniform, with short, dark blond hair. He reached the foot of her cot and stopped.

“Baroness Lillian de Rocheford, wife of the late Baron Paul de Rocheford.” His tone was musing. It wasn’t a question. He said it as if he had no doubt as to her identity. He seemed to expect no acknowledgment from her, which was wise because he got none. She watched him and breathed. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Obergruppenführer Claus von Wagner.” A pause while he studied her. “Do you know what you are facing, madame?”

She didn’t answer, of course. She couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. Her mouth was so injured, so ulcerated and swollen, that she doubted she would ever be able to make normal use of it again. Certainly speech was beyond her. But her heart, her poor broken heart, started to thump.

Yes, I know. Although her mind slithered away from the knowledge.

“You were brought here to be interrogated, and eventually executed, as a traitor to the Reich. As you are no doubt aware, some of our interrogation techniques can be—unpleasant.”

Death she welcomed. But dying, as she had already learned, was hard. Her insides shivered and shook at the prospect of more pain. She thought of the sufferings of Jean-Claude. She could not hold out against such brutality. She was not strong enough. Sooner or later she would scream to the skies every secret bottled up inside her.

Then she remembered her mouth—she couldn’t talk. Her fingers were bent and puffed up to the size of sausages—she couldn’t even write. He might torture her, but the silver lining that came with her injuries was that he would not be able to force her to reveal anything, because they’d already done so much harm to her that, physically, she could not.

The German picked up something from what to her slightly unfocused gaze appeared to be a pile of rags on the seat of a small wooden chair near the cot. He held it up, then turned it inside out, examining it. It was ripped and badly stained, but she recognized the deep green color: her sweater. The brown rag that still lay crumpled on the chair must be, then, her trousers. A quick inventory told her that she was not naked beneath the blanket. She wore a loose garment with sleeves that ended near her elbows and a hem that reached her knees. A dress? No, more likely a nightgown or hospital gown. Her lower legs and feet were bare.

While she was unconscious, someone had undressed her. The knowledge made her skin creep.

“Because you are a woman, and because I do not like to hurt women unless I must, I will tell you how you may escape such a terrible fate.” He put her sweater down, picked up her trousers and proceeded to run the once fine wool between his hands before turning them inside out, searching them as if he suspected something might be sewn inside a hem or concealed in a seam, which, thank God, was not the case. “I have received information that you have knowledge of the Allies’ plans to invade. I am particularly interested in the where and when. If you can tell me that—and do not think to lie to me, that would make me very angry indeed—there will be no need for the disagreeable consequences that your actions have brought upon you.”

He had received information—it struck her that any number of people might be aware of Paul’s habit of confiding in her. But they could not know she knew. She clung to that thought as he put her trousers down and picked up something else—her pendant. The small garnet heart dangled by its chain from his fingers as he held it up to look at it. Her own heart came unmoored, seeming to twirl through space right along with the dark red stone.

The girls had given it to her. A long time ago, for Mother’s Day. Their entwined initials had been inlaid in gold in the stone’s center. On the day they’d given it to her, her oldest watching her open the gift with her big eyes and solemn face, her youngest with her radiant smile, she’d been touched to her core, hugging and kissing them both and promising faithfully to wear it every single day.

She had, until the Nazis had stripped it from her.

Lost. All lost. The girls, Paul, everything.

“I see this means something to you.” He watched her closely. She fought to lock down her memories, her heart. He would use them against her, she knew.

“E and G.” His tone was musing as he examined the stone. Hearing those cherished initials in his foul voice made her want to throw up. If she’d had anything inside her at all, she would have. “Whoever they are, they must be dear to you.”

To close her eyes or look away would reveal too much. She stared back, her face as blank as she could keep it.

“So here is your choice.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket, tucked the pendant inside. “You may tell me what I want to know, and thus avoid being tortured. As a reward, I might even let you live. Or you may be stubborn, which will merely be tedious for me, because it forces me to extract the information I require from you in ways you will, I am afraid, find most distressing. And then, having told all, you will be executed. A sad end, and so unnecessary. I urge you strongly to consider before you commit to such a course.”

He started to turn away, stopped and turned back.

“One more thing. Your husband is dead, I am aware, but you have two daughters, do you not? Yes, my information is quite good. I am guessing—E and G.” He smiled at her, a wide, good-humored smile that brought deep dimples to life in his cheeks. “I have given orders to have Mademoiselles E and G found, and brought here and subjected to the same fate you yourself select. So choose wisely, madame.”

He walked to the door, opened it, then looked over his shoulder at her and said, “Someone will come in soon to take care of you. You must not think we neglect the health of our guests. We will restore yours to the point where you can answer, and then we will talk again, you and I.”

Lillian felt cold to her bones as he left.

I’ve done wrong. Much wrong, and I will be judged for it. But I meant it for the best. All of it. Please, please, watch over the girls and keep them safe.

Closing her eyes, she prayed for death.

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