The Milliner's Secret (57 page)

He believed it when she slashed his face, tearing a line from cheekbone to chin. He believed it when she made another thrust into his leg above the knee, then deep into his arm. Knowing he was fighting for his life, he managed to wrench her arm into the air, twisting until the knife fell. He got her out of the flat, slipping in his own blood, then half pushed her, half fell with her, down one flight of stairs.

Out on the street, he shouted for help and sentries came rushing towards him, guns levelled.

He came round in hospital and learned that it was now 11 March, and he had received two blood transfusions. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

His doctor assumed he meant his wife. ‘Transferred to a clinic outside Paris, Generalmajor. Le Cloȋtre. The doctors specialise in brain injuries and –’ the man gave an awkward cough ‘– other mental disorders. She will receive the most compassionate care. Poor lady, it seems her mind was overturned by the death of your son. Sons are irreplaceable to mothers, are they not? I believe the lad was killed in the bombing of your home town?’

Dietrich grunted. Let them think that. The agony in his face and shoulder, radiating into his back, was good evidence that he was still alive. He wished he wasn’t. The shock of Hiltrud’s blade was nothing compared to the shock of Coralie’s betrayal.

PART SIX

CHAPTER 35

A note from Fritzi Kleber informed Coralie that Dietrich had been murdered by his wife. Gräfin von Elbing had arrived unexpectedly in Paris, Fritzi wrote, and for reasons unknown had attacked Dietrich.

It was lucky, Coralie thought later, that she’d forgotten about the cyanide pill hanging from her neck because she’d have bitten it then. Instead, she threw herself on her bed, beyond tears, until roused by persistent knocking. It was Kurt Kleber, bringing her the news that Dietrich was alive, and had been transferred to a hospital in Germany. ‘Perhaps it is a good thing that all our plans are so much in the air, no?’

She was too busy picturing Dietrich in hospital, thinking hateful thoughts of his wife, to listen properly. She nearly said, ‘Yes,’ but caution stepped in. ‘What plans?’

Kurt smiled. ‘Good girl.’

As summer and autumn of 1943 dragged past, she longed to get the truth to Dietrich. I only left you because I feared I might betray what you are and for ever bear the guilt. But Kurt refused to send letters on her behalf.

‘Let him be, Coralie, for his sake and your own. And no,’ he added, in response to her persistent questioning, ‘I don’t know what flared between Dietrich and his wife, or even why Hiltrud was in Paris.’

‘Might he have asked her for a divorce?’

Kurt sighed. ‘Men of honour do not pitch their infirm wives into the gutter to please another woman. Will you excuse me?’ Coralie had once again interrupted him at work at the Hȏtel Marigny. She should thank him and leave, she knew, but she needed more. Grudgingly, Kurt obliged.

‘To dismiss a man like Dietrich von Elbing with a crude note is wantonly to open a Pandora’s box. Do not be surprised at what flies out. Why in heaven’s name did you do it?’

She couldn’t tell him and went home. Looking back over her life, she saw how her impulses had caused disaster after disaster. Stealing Sheila Flynn’s clothes. Taking on her dad one time too many. Singing ‘The Lambeth Walk’ in a French nightclub in her true cockney voice. Filling Henriette’s salon window with red, white and blue. Turfing Lorienne Royer out of La Passerinette. Even backing Manna at the 1925 Derby – that had lost her the mother she’d loved. ‘People desert me. No wonder,’ she told herself.

December 1943 brought freezing pipes and snow, which, because of the stove smuts in the air, turned instantly to dirty slush. Just as cold and long as previous winters. And then, shortly after New Year, a letter:

9 January 1944

To Madame C.

Ma chère femme,

It is perishing in these hills, but I live well enough with a group of fine men (and women!) and our friend with the violin. We are forming a fighting unit and cannot wait to be tested against the enemy and the bastard Milice, whom we hate even more than the Germans. Meanwhile, we amuse ourselves picking off the odd convoy and shooting informants. My old skills are coming in useful. All those years spent calculating tunnel depths and the span of arches have not been not wasted. Do you travel often by rail? I hope you and the child are well, I think of you often.

My love, as always,

R.

Written on onion-skin paper, it had been inserted behind the label of a wine bottle.

The forger Bonnet brought it to her. ‘Pardon, Madame, I drank the wine – I believe I was meant to – and it was a good Côtes-d’Auvergne. Read it, burn it. What a man, our Ramon, eh?’

What a man, but a suspicion of what he might be engaged in made Coralie even more fearful of reaching out to anybody. Her fellow agent, Moineau, had not been near her for months. One morning in mid-January, when she called at rue Mouffetard to collect intelligence dockets for avenue Foch, the butcher shook his head.

‘Your usual’s not available today, Madame.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘The cuts of meat you like are unobtainable now. Try elsewhere.’

It seemed she wasn’t even part of the Resistance any more. Fritzi had not honoured her promise to visit, and Coralie now avoided walking down avenue Marigny. It wasn’t until early February that a visit to parc Monceau shifted her spirits. If golden aconites and the first snowdrops could push their heads up and smile, so could she, she told herself. She would start the new year afresh, if a little late, by appointing an assistant milliner.

There had been truth in Lorienne Royer’s malevolent note: How will you fare without your right hand? Coralie had always relied on good technicians, such as Madame Zénon, the Ginslers and Violaine. She missed having people to advise her and help develop ideas. Often, these days, she hit the limits of her skill. It wouldn’t be long before people whispered, ‘Coralie de Lirac is only as good as her staff.’

On 14 February, she placed a card in La Passerinette’s window and in various shops in the Sentier. Within hours, hopeful young women were knocking at her door, eager to relate their experience, as she had once done. They confided how little they were being paid, and how they needed better commission.

‘My brother is a prisoner of war.’

‘My mother is sick.’

‘I have a child to care for, and my husband is doing service du travail obligatoire in Germany.’

Poor things. Yet she said, ‘No,’ to them all. None of them had looked very much like Violaine or Amélie, but she knew that seeing white hands stitching and moulding cloth, curls falling over furrowed brows, would be too much to bear. She took the notices down and struggled on. Then, towards the end of the month, she received a visitor.

‘I am told, Madame, that you are seeking an experienced milliner.’

‘I was . . . Are you here for your daughter?’

A chuckle. ‘No, Madame, for myself. My name is Georges Blanchard and I have been a milliner all my life. I am retired, but . . . ’ His savings had been depleted by years of exchange-rate banditry. And he was bored and . . . ‘The days are long.’ She invited him in, and met a bear with a limp. He was six feet four, a Great War veteran and had suffered shrapnel injury. Her workbenches would be far too low for him and he’d crack his head on the salon chandelier. But he made her smile. She hired him on the spot.

And then Moineau tinged his bicycle bell at her as she cycled home one evening, her wheels crunching over the last of the snow. ‘Got a light, Cosette?’

‘Hello, stranger.’ She pulled over and they pretended to share a cigarette.

He’d been hiding, he told her. Fortitude had been infiltrated by Gestapo informants in January, twelve members arrested. He’d been tipped off by a friendly French policeman before they nabbed him.

‘Who was caught?’ Not Mademoiselle Deveau, she hoped.

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Will it make you sleep better to know, Cosette? Anyway, I only get code names.’ He dragged on his cigarette, then held it out to her and, as she took a half-hearted puff, said, ‘The fat old bird on the canal? She never used a code name, always Francine. They got her. So, are you ready for a new parcel?’

‘Oh dear – I mean, yes, of course.’

‘Still at the place on rue de Seine? You haven’t gone back to that alley by Saint-Lazare . . . What was it?’

‘Impasse de Cordoba. I have the key to it, for emergencies.’

‘Bien. Get supplies in. Still got that ration book?’

‘Of course.’

She tried not to think of Fortitude’s twelve doomed operatives. Instead she worried about Una, who hadn’t answered any letters since September ’43. She took to wearing her choker again. She wasn’t sure she would actually prefer cyanide to the Gestapo, but she liked having the choice.

On the last day of February, Moineau delivered a twenty-three-year-old forward gunner who had bailed out over occupied Luxembourg after bombing targets in Germany’s industrial Ruhr. Crawford Lesoeur, an officer of the Royal Canadian Air Force flying for the RAF, had broken his leg when his parachute came down in trees. After eight months in hiding, he was only now fit enough to make his way to England.

He was scheduled to stay at rue de Seine for three days, and because he couldn’t climb up into the roof space, Coralie donated her bed, taking the box-room that had been Noëlle’s. Not that she slept much. Every creak, every night sound was a black Citroën pulling up in the street below. It was the slam of a car door, the approach of booted feet. On what was supposed to be Lesoeur’s last day with her, Moineau called to report a problem with the next safe house. She’d have to keep her airman hidden a bit longer, and take him to the next location herself – the usual courier was dead.

Coralie went out and queued for food, eyes skinned for possible danger. She bought small amounts at a time so that nobody would see her enter her flat with provisions for two.

When her guest asked if she was married, she spoke of Ramon, and risked saying, ‘He’s with the Maquis, in central France.’ It made her proud and shone a light on her feelings because, though she missed Dietrich brutally, she was choosing sides again. When Crawford Lesoeur gave his opinion that Germany had to be pummelled to defeat, she nodded agreement. When he said that a well-prepared French Resistance would play its part when the Allies invaded, she took it as the compliment it was meant to be.