Violins of Autumn (3 page)

The exposed wooden beams framing the slanted ceilings far above my head make the room seem grander than I would have expected. After introductions, the woman, Claire LaRoche, leads the way to a cozier adjacent parlor.

“Take a load off your feet, ladies,” Bishop says to Denise and me, gesturing to two matching side chairs.

Denise jumps to take up the offer. “Don’t mind if I do.”

I don’t want to take a seat simply because I’m a girl, but I’m as sore and tired as anybody else now that the aftereffects of my jump and hard landing are catching up with me. That padded chair looks mighty comfortable.

From a walnut curio cabinet, Madame LaRoche removes a seemingly endless stream of family photographs. She sets a photo
of a wiry little boy with tousled brown hair in my hands. Even in the grainy photo, the mischievous gleam in his eyes is obvious. It’s that look boys get when they’re about to do something they probably shouldn’t.

The front door swings open, and Madame LaRoche says, “Here is my handsome boy, Pierre, now.”

Expecting to find a child in the doorway, I first notice Pierre’s battered military boots and denim trousers. My gaze moves higher and higher, past his gray woolen sweater and rugged shoulders. I stare directly into the face of the most handsome man I’ve ever seen outside of a movie.

In the photograph, Pierre’s eyes hint that he’s ready for trouble. Now they make him appear dark and brooding. Maybe even dangerous.

The door slams.

“They sent us more girls? Girls. Again. My God.” Pierre’s pointed French words burst my bubble like tiny arrows. “How do they expect us to get our country back when all they do is send us these flimsy little girls?”

“Pierre, you don’t mean what you say. These beautiful girls are guests in our home.”

He clomps across the wooden kitchen floor, yanks a chair out from the table, and flings himself into it. Maybe he isn’t so far off from the child in the photo after all.

After we’re seated, Madame LaRoche serves dinner. We eat our cold potato-and-leek soup in awkward silence. I reach the bottom of my water glass. The urge to get some much-needed sleep has snuck up and wrapped me in a woozy cocoon. Head heavy, eyelids heavier, I struggle to stay upright and alert as Madame LaRoche begins to explain how life in France has changed.

Between the two world wars, France took drastic precautions to ensure that Germany could not attack again. Along the shared border, a massive fortification was built—large fortresses nine miles apart that housed one thousand soldiers each, and smaller forts in between that housed a few hundred men. This Maginot Line was vast, impressive, and impenetrable. Or so it was believed.

Rather than attack through France’s stronghold, Germany went around the line, successfully invading Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, and Belgium along the way. In early May 1940, armies invaded France through the unprotected—though thought to be impassable—Ardennes Forest. That France surrendered so easily came as a major shock and a blow to the pride of the people. They were assured that the Maginot Line would protect them and their country.

“Premier Reynaud resigned, refusing to surrender to Germany!” Madame LaRoche exclaims. “And the new government dances for the Germans like wooden-headed puppets as they Nazify our country. They are imprisoning and killing our people. It makes me ill to think of it!”

She downs several mouthfuls of wine.

“One day they announced that Jews must sew a yellow star on their clothing. ‘Don’t do it, Hannah,’ I told my dearest friend. ‘They are making you stand out.’ She was such a good woman. She only wanted to do what was right. She thought that if she obeyed their rules, they would leave her alone. Then one day she went away. They took her.” Openly weeping, Madame LaRoche says, “What if I never see her again?”

Pierre covers her trembling hands with his to steady them on the table.

“And your poor papa, sent to his death. For what? Daring to
speak out? It is a crime now, to tell the truth? They intend to comb all of France until they have done away with everyone who looks, acts, and thinks differently than they do? It is insanity!”

I shrink down on my chair, as if that might help me disappear. As I pick at a loop of thread in the seam of my skirt, I notice the brief shake of Pierre’s head to his mother.

“I apologize for my outburst,” she says.

Bishop tears his bread into halves. “Please don’t apologize, Claire. In your shoes, none of us would accept what the people of France have been asked to accept.”

“Some of us were not content to sit back and watch the Germans take over our country,” Pierre says. He gestures around the table. “Say one day you find strangers have moved into your home. They eat your food while you go hungry, sleep in your bed, hurt your family, steal what is rightfully yours. Would you give up and allow them to stay? And not only that, you find out you must
pay
for them to stay. Pay them to control your life? Bullshit! We risk prison and death to stand up and fight because we have to. Because it is the right thing to do!”

I catch myself staring at Pierre in wonderment and quickly put an end to it. Abrasive and insulting people aren’t supposed to say things I agree with. I’d already made up my mind to dislike Pierre.

While Madame LaRoche tells us about day-to-day life, how to use our ration coupons and identity cards, the gentle singsong of her voice does me no favors for staying alert. I pinch my leg.

“Remain vigilant, always,” she says. “One slip, something as insignificant as ordering black coffee, will give you away. Milk is rationed here in France. No choices are available to you, so there is no need to specify. All
café
is black.”

A burst of nervous tension sends my heart thumping. The potential for slipups extends beyond what I’ve already considered, possibly right down to how I hold my knife and fork. Only so much can be taught in a training school. Our education in nitty-gritty details is about to progress to the field, where we run the risk of learning lessons the hard way.

“I’m sure lovely girls such as yourselves need not worry about this”—Madame LaRoche begins, and I have a hunch we’re about to be cautioned against something we enjoy—“but you must not smoke.”

We’re already aware of this, but Denise groans anyway. The allure of smoking left me about the same time I moved to my aunt and uncle’s home in London. Away from boarding school, the pressure to fit in with other girls my age disappeared, and I felt free to be myself again.

“Cigarettes may not be rationed in England, but they are rationed here.” Madame LaRoche pats Denise’s shoulder. “Most French girls can only dream of being able to afford such a black market luxury. They do not smoke, and therefore neither can you.”

“
Oui, madame
,” Denise says.

Pierre excuses himself from the table, and he leaves the house as quickly as he entered. The two men from the reception committee empty their wineglasses before rushing out the door after him.

A quiet descends over the kitchen. Denise and I share our uncertainty in a quick glance across the table. Neither of us seems to know what to do next.

“Girls, come with me,” Madame LaRoche says with a kind smile. “I will show you to your room.”

She leads us from the kitchen and up a wooden staircase. Through an open bedroom door at the end of the hallway, I spot our suitcases on the floor. Madame LaRoche points to a low dresser below the room’s window. “There is warm water in the jug and basin. And a chamber pot beneath each bed.”

We wish each other a good night, and Denise claims first dibs on the wash basin.

I remove my watch and withdraw my one and only piece of jewelry—a silver charm bracelet—from the pocket of my skirt. I set both on the dresser and practically fall straight into bed. After tonight, who knows where I’ll be sleeping, possibly under the stars or inside barns. I can’t waste a moment in such a comfortable bed as this one.

My unwinding mind wanders to thoughts of Shepherd. Better him than me. I have to watch out for myself. But still, I’m worried about his safety and wonder what this mission might hold for me.

When Denise finally blows out the candles, I close my eyes and curl up in the crisp blankets. The faint scents of fresh country air and flower gardens instantly remind me of my childhood home in Connecticut. I usually fight hard to forget those memories. It hurts too much to think about my life before the accident, a time when my mother and brother were still alive. To my father, their deaths were all that mattered, and not that I survived.

Soon after the accident, he introduced me to a wealthy woman named Delores. Her movie-star beauty and glamorous clothes obviously impressed my father. I hated the way he looked at her. When we met, she coldly shook my hand, as if I were an adult and not a grieving ten-year-old.

Delores had studied at a private boarding school near Geneva,
Switzerland. My father assured me I would love the school as much as she had. I deserved the best education money could buy.

The day he dropped me off at the school was the last time I saw him. I thought he would stay by my side while I settled in or walk me through my strange surroundings so I wouldn’t get lost. I didn’t want to be there. I was frightened to be left on my own.

As I rested on the bed in my new room, still sick and exhausted from travel that seemed never ending, I tearfully watched my father button his coat and put on his hat.

He patted my hand in the same no-nonsense way he did everything else, and said, “Be a good girl, Betty. Write to us often.”

After he left, I began to wonder about his final words.
Write to us
. Much later, I learned he meant the beginnings of his new family. A family that didn’t include me.

And here I am in a strange place, in a strange country all over again. This time I’m too exhausted to care. I drift off to sleep with Madame LaRoche’s sun-dried blankets clutched to my face, not wanting to let go.

The morning gets off to an early start. I’m sure I closed my eyes for only a moment, but dusty rays of sunshine are streaming through the room.

“Wake up, girls,” Madame LaRoche says, with a knock on the door.

Denise pulls the blankets over her head. “I guess she’s never heard of beauty sleep.”

I didn’t get much sleep, beauty or otherwise. I don’t really know Denise well enough to tease her, but I say, “At least I didn’t keep you up half the night by snoring.”

“That’s a load of codswallop. I don’t snore.”

I roll out of bed already dressed in my gray outfit. “Well, it said so on your SOE file.”

Denise’s covers fly to the end of her bed. Her legs swing over the side. “You’re lying. I can tell because your face is twitching.”

I’m too good to let anything twitch. “I’m kidding around. I only looked at my file.”

Denise pops open her suitcase. One item at a time, she removes a comb, a brush, some hairpins, and a tube of lipstick, and lines them up on the wooden stand next to her bed.

“Did you really look at yours?” she asks. “Those files were confidential.”

I take my own comb from my suitcase. From the feel of things, my sweat-drenched hair dried in an unflattering mess, as if I dunked my head in glue and stood in a hurricane. Roughly tugging on the comb to free it from a whirl of hair, I say, “I broke into the safe.”

“Really? All that time they spent teaching us to pick locks and burglarize, and it never occurred to me to put those lessons to good use.” Denise uncaps the lipstick. Partway through one lip, her puckered mouth flattens. “Like what you saw in your file?”

I give up and return the comb to the suitcase. “They said I rebel against authority. Among other things.”

The report also said I show great potential as an agent. I figure they must be right, since I successfully broke into a safe to find that out.

After tightening my watch around my wrist, I notice Denise’s curious glance as I return my bracelet to the confines of my pocket, but I pretend I didn’t.

Early morning sunlight illuminates the house’s deterioration. Peeling wallpaper, yellowed with age, frames a cracked bedroom window, a bare bulb hangs from an ornate ceiling fixture, and the wood stairs and floors are stripped and scratched. Still, the house shows signs that it was beautiful once, before the war.

At the end of the hallway, I stop in front of a nine-paned
window that resembles a tic-tac-toe grid. Through the center pane, I watch a barn swallow swoop across the sunlit grass like a tiny bomber plane before soaring away over the wooden rail fence. Thick forests, brilliant green with new leaves, surround the pastures and a small pond. In the yard, a pair of triangular ears pokes up through a patch of weeds next to the water pump. I laugh when a calico kitten springs out, paws ready to pounce.

“I hoped there would be cats here,” Denise says as she squeezes in next to me. “My, what a lovely sight that is.”

When we arrived during the night, the farm was tucked away in the darkness, a shadowy shape in the middle of nowhere, with a single candlelit window showing the path to the door and little else. That dark and gloomy atmosphere was what I expected. After all, we had geared up to face a dangerous and unfamiliar country, where life is so different than what we’re used to. But now, looking at the peaceful scenery outside Madame LaRoche’s home, it seems as if I dreamed last night up.

“I know we need to lie low,” Denise says as we descend the staircase, “but I am positively itching to get going.”

Not me. I’m not in such a hurry to lose the security of the farm house.

We enter the kitchen as Pierre walks in from outside.

“Which one of you is the wireless operator?” he asks without so much as a hello or good morning.

With an offhand wave, Denise says, “I am.”

During the final bit of training, we were assigned specific jobs to perform in the field in addition to whatever side work is thrown at us on the fly. Denise showed a knack for code and transmission, so she received special training to be a wireless radio operator. I taught myself Morse code when I was young, but
I don’t have a technical bone in my body. What I do have going for me are “unassuming looks.” Sadly, that means I’m plain enough to fly under the radar. I also have a sharp memory, good gut instincts, and trustworthiness, which makes me a good fit for the courier job. Apparently when large sums of money are involved, the temptation is too great for some people.