The Lavender Garden (20 page)

“So are you still one of us or not? That’s a simple enough question to answer, isn’t it?”

“Of course I am! Look, something happened on the night I arrived in Paris which led to my . . . current circumstances. You of all people will understand, Venetia, that I mustn’t say anymore. And if the person who saved me that night knew I was here—well, he would feel I was betraying him.”

“Hardly,” muttered Venetia. “Making contact with an old friend who has mutual family connections is betraying no one, I would have thought. Look, Con”—Venetia pulled her across the road, taking the
opportunity to glance left and right as she did so—“the point is, I need your help. I’m sure you know how the Scientist network has crumbled. At present, I’m the only wireless operator left. And I’m having to move from place to place to send messages back to London so the Boche can’t trace my signal. I had a pretty near miss two or three days ago—they came to the apartment where I was staying on a tip-off and I’d left only twenty minutes before. My wireless is currently stashed at another safe house, but it’s not secure. I need to find somewhere to transmit urgent messages to London, and also to other operatives here. There’s something absolutely huge about to happen, planned for tomorrow night, and it’s imperative I get these messages through. Surely, Con, you must know somewhere I could go to do this?”

“Venetia, I’m sorry, but I really don’t. I can’t explain to you now, but I’m trapped where I am. I’ve been ordered not to speak to anyone who could trace my association back to the person in question.”

“Good God, Con!” Venetia cried, suddenly stopping in the street. “What are you saying? You were sent over here as an agent of the British government! I don’t care a damn who this ‘person’ you’re trying to protect is, or how he’s addled your brain. But I and many others involved in tomorrow night know that, if we’re successful, it will mean that thousands of Frenchmen are not rounded up and sent to German factories to work as slave laborers there. We need your help! You must know somewhere I can go,” she said desperately. “I
have
to send these messages tonight and that’s an end to it.”

Venetia somewhat reluctantly replaced her arm through Connie’s and they continued walking in silence.

Connie felt as though she were caught in a spiderweb, the delicately spun silk threads of truths, lies, and deception leading everywhere and nowhere. She was in a moral cul-de-sac, not knowing any longer where her loyalty lay, or whom she should trust. Seeing Venetia was drawing her back into the realities of the task Connie had been sent here to complete. Venetia’s bedraggled presence, her hunger and desperation, only fed Connie’s guilt and confusion.

“You could come to the house on the Rue de Varenne, but it isn’t safe,” Connie stated. “As you know, it has far too many German visitors.”

“I don’t care about that. Often those pigs don’t see what’s right under their nose.”

“Venetia, surely it’s too risky? And I know of nowhere else.”

In one corner of her mind, Connie was privately considering that Édouard was absent tonight, and that a separate door from the garden led down to the cellar. She’d used it in the summer when the air-raid sirens had begun and she’d been sitting outside. But what if there was an air raid tonight? What if Venetia was seen entering or leaving the house? What if one of the von Wehndorf twins made an impromptu visit, just as Venetia was transmitting from the cellar below?

“To be honest, Con, I’m past caring.” Venetia sighed. “Nearly all of the safe houses in Paris are gone, although new ones are currently being established. And besides, simply no one would expect a British agent to be transmitting from the cellar of a house which is known to entertain the enemy.” Venetia turned her eyes to Connie. “Are you absolutely sure you’re not turned?” Venetia laughed suddenly. “Well, if you are, I’m dead anyway, so what does it matter?”

Venetia was asking her to prove herself. Connie sighed as she accepted the inevitable. Her loyalty had to be with her friend and her country, whatever the consequences.

“All right, I’ll help you.”

•  •  •

Connie returned home, then made the excuse to Sarah of having left a book downstairs in the cellar last time there had been an air raid. Connie unlocked the cellar door, which led up the steps to the garden beyond, then returned to the drawing room to sit with Sophia. As Sophia’s delicate fingers passed lightly over a new Braille version of Byron’s poems, a radiant smile on her face, Connie could sit still no longer. She feigned a headache at half past six and said she’d take supper in her room.

Then, at eight o’clock, she returned downstairs to tell Sarah there were no guests that evening and she was free to retire. Sophia was already up in her room. Connie paced the floorboards of her own bedroom, her nerves jangling as the clock ticked forward. Venetia was almost certainly down below her in the cellar now.

Plagued with guilt at the thought of innocent Sophia, unaware that the woman her family had taken in and given protection to was betraying
her safety right under her very nose, Connie watched the next hour pass in an agony of tension.

At ten o’clock Connie crept downstairs. She was at the back of the house in the kitchen on her way down to the cellar to check Venetia had gone when she heard a soft tap at the front door.

Her heart missing a beat, Connie opened the kitchen door, which led into the entrance hall, and saw the front door had already been opened by Sophia, who had found her way unchaperoned down the stairs. There on the doorstep stood Frederik, his arms wrapped around Sophia. In an agony of tension, Connie slipped back into the shadows to try to decide what to do. She realized that the two of them must have engineered this tryst. Ten o’clock was hardly an appropriate time for anyone to call, let alone a gentleman to visit an unaccompanied lady. Connie wondered whether she should be more concerned for Sophia’s virtue or the possibility that a British agent was still down in the cellar—with a senior Nazi officer only feet above her.

Connie eventually decided the safest thing was to leave them be. While Frederik was looking into Sophia’s eyes, at least he was preoccupied. Once she’d seen the two of them enter the drawing room, Connie fled upstairs to her bedroom. She sat ramrod straight in a wing chair by her window, wishing with every fiber of her body for this night to be over and dawn to break.

Then she checked herself. How could she be so selfish? Venetia and her other fellow agents were putting themselves through the most terrible danger every single day. One night of mental agony was hardly a lot to contend with.

Eventually, Connie heard footsteps in the corridor below her and the creak of the stairs. An upstairs door clicked shut, and Connie sighed in relief, knowing that Frederik must have left and Sophia had gone to bed. Connie was surprised she hadn’t heard him leave, but perhaps he’d taken pains to exit the house as quietly as possible.

She yawned, suddenly feeling the tension drain away and exhaustion replace it. Climbing into bed, Connie fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. And didn’t hear the front door being quietly closed as the dawn began to break over Paris.

Blackmoor Hall, Yorkshire

1999

T
he snow was falling thickly as Sebastian paid the taxi driver and removed Emilie’s suitcase from the trunk of the car. Emilie turned to survey Blackmoor Hall for the first time and saw a darkly forbidding Gothic mansion in red brick. A stone gargoyle was perched menacingly above the arch over the front door, its grin toothless, having been eaten away by the elements, the top of its head clad in a bonnet of snow.

It was impossible to make any judgment of the surroundings in which the house sat; currently the landscape could have been Siberia as much as an English village set on the North Yorkshire moors. The landscape was white, empty, and desolate for as far as Emilie’s eye could see. She shivered involuntarily, as much from the bleakness as the cold.

“Blimey, only just made it,” said Sebastian, appearing next to her. “Hope that driver makes it home safely,” he commented as the taxi plowed its way back up the drive through the deepening snow. “It may be impassable here by tomorrow.”

“You mean we could be snowed in?” Emilie said as they trudged through the snow, now shin-deep, to the front door.

“Yup, it happens most years around here. Luckily, we have a Land Rover and a neighbor with a tractor at our disposal.”

“When it snows in the French Alps, they always manage to keep the roads clear.”

Sebastian grasped the large enamel doorknob and turned it. “Say hello to England, my French princess, where any form of unexpected weather can bring the country to a standstill.” He smiled. “And now, Emilie, welcome to my humble abode.”

Sebastian pushed open the front door and they stepped into an entrance hall that was in direct contrast to the white brightness of outside. Everything was clad in dark wood: the paneled walls, the inelegant deep-stained staircase—even the huge fireplace forming the centerpiece of the room sported a heavy mahogany surround. Unfortunately, a fire did not burn brightly in its grate and Emilie felt little change in temperature from that of outside.

“Come on,” said Sebastian, dropping Emilie’s suitcase by the bottom of the ugly staircase, “there’ll be a fire burning in the drawing room, I’m sure. I left a message for Mrs. Erskine to say we were coming.”

He pulled her along a labyrinth of corridors, the walls covered in deep-green wallpaper and adorned with oil paintings of horses out to hunt. Pushing open a door, Sebastian walked into a large drawing room, its walls sporting a dark maroon William Morris wallpaper and accommodating further paintings crammed haphazardly upon them.

“Bugger!” he swore as he looked at the empty grate, filled only with the graying ashes of a past fire. “This isn’t like her. Don’t tell me she’s handed in her resignation again.” Sebastian sighed. “No panic, sweetheart, I’ll have this going in a trice.”

Emilie sat on the fender shivering as Sebastian expertly and swiftly built a fire. Her teeth were chattering by the time he’d coaxed the flames into life, and she warmed her hands gratefully.

“Right,” he said, “you sit there and defrost, and I’ll go and make some tea and find out what the hell has been going on since I left.”

“Sebastian—” Emilie called as he left the drawing room, wanting to know in which direction was the nearest bathroom, but the heavy door swung shut behind him. Hoping he wouldn’t be long, Emilie sat and thawed out in front of the fire, watching the snow flurries thicken to a blizzard and settle on the windowsills outside.

Her knowledge of England was limited—she’d traveled with her mother on a few occasions to stay with friends in London—but her vision of cozy English cottages adorned with thatched roofs and nestling in chocolate-box villages could not be further removed from this austere, freezing monolith of a house and its surroundings.

Twenty minutes later, Sebastian had still not returned, and Emilie was getting desperate. She stood up and ventured outside the drawing
room into the corridor, opening doors to further dark rooms in search of a bathroom. She found one at last, whose vast wooden toilet seat reminded her of a throne. Emerging, Emilie heard raised voices from somewhere in the house. One of them was unknown, but the other was most definitely Sebastian’s. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he was obviously extremely angry.

She now wished she’d asked for more details of Sebastian’s world here in Yorkshire before she’d stepped on a plane with him to come to England. But the two weeks since he’d asked her to marry him had been a whirlwind of activity. Their talk had been more of their fascinating shared past than their future.

Emilie had told him all that Jacques had told her when she’d returned to Paris from the château.

“What a story.” Sebastian had sighed. “And it sounds like that’s only the start. When will Jacques be able to tell you more?”

“He promised he would when I return to put the library into storage. I think it drained him emotionally.”

“I’m sure.” Sebastian had hugged her to him. “But there’s a nice synergy in the way our families have been reunited.”

Emilie’s fingers reached to her neck to touch the creamy white pearls—her mother’s pearls—remembering when Sebastian had presented her with them on the morning of their wedding.

“I bought them back for you at the auction, sweetheart,” he’d said as he’d fastened them around her throat. Then he’d kissed her. “Are you sure you don’t mind the ceremony being so small? I mean, it’s hardly how the last surviving member of the de la Martinières should get married. I’m sure half of Paris attended your parents’ wedding.” He’d smiled down at her.

“Yes, and that’s why I’m very happy to get married quietly,” Emilie had answered truthfully, the thought of being the center of attention horrifying her. The low-key nuptials had suited her perfectly.

After the marriage ceremony, at which Gerard and a Parisian art-dealer friend of Sebastian’s had been witnesses, Gerard had insisted on taking the four of them to the Ritz for lunch. “It’s the least your parents would have wanted for you, Emilie,” he’d added. Gerard had raised a glass to their health and happiness, then asked of their plans. Emilie had told him she was off to stay with Sebastian in England
while the château was renovated. Gerard had caught her as they were leaving the Ritz and urged her to keep in touch with him.

“Anything I can do to help, Emilie, you know that I’m always here for you.”

“Thank you, Gerard, you’ve been very kind.”

“And, Emilie, please try and remember that even though you’re now married, it’s you who owns the château, the proceeds from the sale of the Paris house,
and
the de la Martinières name. I would like to speak to you about the details of the estate and the finances in the future, as well as to your husband.”

“Sebastian tells me everything that I need to know. He’s been wonderful, Gerard, and I couldn’t have got through this without him.”

“I agree, he has, but it’s still a good thing in a marriage to keep your independence. Especially financially,” Gerard had added, before kissing Emilie’s hand and leaving.