A Gathering Storm (48 page)

And then the Gestapo officer came again. Two soldiers seized her and back they took her to the torture room. This time the man in the suit took an electric branding iron. He lifted the shirt from her back and pressed the iron to her flesh, and she shrieked at the most exquisite pain. After that she sank into kind oblivion. When she swam back to consciousness, it was only to pass out again with shock, the smell of burning meat filling her nostrils.

And still she would not tell them what she knew.

They took her back to her cell. Now she could only lie on her front and sob as the doctor treated her wounds with something that stung. He murmured soft phrases in German as though she were a child, and she sensed that he was doing his best in the midst of the horror. The whole world was pain and confusion and she did not know who she was any more. She’d wake from visions that she was looking down on herself from above: a slug-like creature on the bed, black and naked. She had no identity, only a single will –
that she would not speak.

Twice more they took her to that room, but the second time was different from all the others. The white-coated man held a syringe and thrust its needle into her thigh. She must have passed out, because the next thing she knew she was again in her bed, the blanket flung across her. After this, they did not come for her any more and she supposed they’d given up. So she came to wonder what the injection had been, and what she might have told them under its influence.

Once the worst of the pain receded, dread poured into its place. It took many days for Beatrice to train herself not to tense at every footstep in the corridor, and as daylight drained from the cell each evening, she threw up a prayer of acknowledgement that she’d survived.

But darkness brought different terrors. Tomorrow, it might be her turn to be seized from her sleep and marched down to the yard below at dawn, tied to a post, blindfolded and shot.

She tried to calm herself by imagining that she was somewhere else; riding Cloud over the cliffs by Carlyon in the wind and the rain, kneeling amongst the rockpools looking for mermaids’ palaces. Tasting salt upon her lips, stroking Jinx’s oily hair and feeling the wet roughness of his tongue. How happy she’d been there, she knew that now. Her spirit roamed every part of St Florian; her feet walked the cobblestones by the quay, her fingers twisted the wiry sea grass. She remembered the chalk and leather smell of Carlyon’s schoolroom, the view of the croquet lawn, Angelina’s bewitching laugh.

She tried to think of them all now, of her son running around, but he would look different, she couldn’t imagine how, and this upset her.

They’d be worried about her. Miss Atkins might have written to her parents. She tried to project her thoughts to let them know she was still alive. This made her feel a little better.

She had no idea if Rafe was alive or dead, in prison or free. She’d done all she could for him, to the utmost of her being, but she dreaded the worst. Since they had Charles’s radio and if, under the influence of some chemical, she’d given out names, then . . . she didn’t dare to think.

And so she’d sink into a restless sleep full of dreams of falling, or trying to run. Sometimes she’d see the face of the young man she’d killed, his face naked with fear before it bloomed red. She often thought of him; tried not to think of his mother, opening the telegram with the news.

And she remembered that snowy Christmas in Sussex, when she’d taken up the silver pistol and pointed it at the mirror. How different she was now from the Beatrice she’d been then.
Thank God the future is shielded from us
, she thought as she lay in the post-nightmare dark. And now, though her memory focused on the crucifix on the wall of the Limousin farmhouse, she could not pray.

August 1943

One morning there were no executions, and she woke late and listened to the far-off clamour of the city and the clanking of the pipes, then sat up and listened more intently. There was a pattern to the clanking. Someone was spelling out letters and words in Morse. ‘
Il y a quelqu’un?
’ was the message she strung together. She waited, listening, wondering if it were a trick, or if the message was for another prisoner, but after half a minute the message tapped out again.

She rolled over, loosened a small key from the chain that helped hold the bed together and quickly tapped on the pipes with it. ‘
Oui
.’

A silence then,
‘Where are you?’
also in French.

‘I think third floor looking west.’

‘Me too but second floor.’

Her downstairs neighbour!

She was ready to tap again, but a message came quick on the heels of the last.
‘Careful, the pigs might be listening.’

‘Yes,’
she replied, eager. What should she say?
‘What shall I call you?’
Real names could be dangerous. On the other hand, if she gave a name recognizable to the Resistance, she might learn of others she knew.

‘Michelle,’
said the pipe.

‘Paulette,’
she replied.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A fortnight, maybe. And you?’
She was getting faster doing this now, more confident.

‘Three weeks, I think. What have they done to you?’

She didn’t reply for a moment, then tapped,
‘It’s better now.’

‘Me, too,’
came the reply, then the rapid tap,
‘Go now.’
Someone had come.

Beatrice felt strangely elated after this conversation. She had a friend. Someone who had suffered as she was suffering.

In the weeks ahead she had many conversations with Michelle and gradually learned nuggets of information about the progress of the war: the Allies had bombed Hamburg and Rome. Mussolini had been ousted by his own monarch. There was information, too, about others in the gaol. Her own pipe, it seemed, was at some cul de sac of the plumbing system, because she was never able to ‘talk’ to anyone else. Michelle however had contact with the cell next door, and through the woman there to a wider network, including some of the men. There were mostly French here, although she had heard of an Englishman known as Alain who had some sort of spyhole in the wall of his cell from which he had a view of the main staircase and, through which he somehow managed to pass notes. The name Paulette seemed to mean something to Alain, though Beatrice had never heard of him, and occasionally there would come up to her via Michelle news of someone familiar to her from the agent training school, or from that social time in London. Through the metallic grapevine she asked for news of Rafe and of Charles. Charles, she was told, had been seen in the Gestapo lock-up in Limoges, but not after that. There was never anything about Rafe.

One very awful morning she was woken by the sounds of activity in the yard below her window, followed by the cracks of gunfire. She at once tapped a message on the pipe for Michelle but there was no answer. She tried several more times that day, but there was nothing. She never heard from Michelle again. In her honour, she wrote on her wall with the little scrap of grit:
In memoriam Michelle,
my friend from the cell downstairs. Never to be forgotten. Vive la France.
And the date,
2 September 1943
.

Two days later, it was her turn to be taken from her cell. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked the guards in panic, but as usual they ignored her. She didn’t know whether or not to be relieved when they escorted her out of the front door of the prison and to where a bus full of prisoners stood waiting. They were being taken to Fresnes, the word eventually got round. They were driven out of Paris, back down the avenue of trees to the great prison. The same cell with the broken window, the same rough wardress, the door was slammed shut . . . and Beatrice was alone with her despair.

She started a new calendar on her wall with a stub of pencil she picked up in a corridor. Months passed. September, October. There were no books for Beatrice to read, no paper to write on, nothing to do but play games in her head. The only contact with others were the sporadic Morse code messages, the occasional outbreak of community singing, usually brutally cut short by the guards, and the longed-for daily exercise in the yard, where the prisoners were not permitted to speak, but sometimes managed to.

None of this was enough. Her wounds had gradually healed, but in November she became ill with depression. She could survive the bad food, the harshness of her captors, got used to the winter nights shivering under a coarse blanket, having stuffed the broken window with cardboard. It was the fear and the loneliness that gradually undid her. In the depths of the night, voices started up in her head, mocking her. No one who valued her knew where she was. She’d been dumped in this prison because the Nazis didn’t know what else to do with her. The Gestapo officer had been right. She’d been forgotten. It was the ultimate betrayal.

Christmas came and went and the prisoners stubbornly sang carols to the chagrin of the guards. She pencilled in the new year, 1944, with a feeling of desperation. At the end of February she sensed the nights becoming milder.

One day in March she was lying on her bed thinking of nothing, lacking the will to move, when a bee began to fly around the room. She raised her head, wondering where it could have come from, and realized the card on the broken window had slipped. The insect circled about a few times then came to rest in a patch of light on the wall above her bed.

She sat up and studied it closely as it cleaned its wings. It was a honey bee, its pouches heavy with nectar, and she wondered where it had come from and so early in the year. On the bus journey to the prison in September they’d passed orchards dotted with late-summer flowers, and the bee brought back the memory. She thought too of the faithful Wincanton heraldic bee, and Mrs Wincanton’s attempts to bind her to the family. Beatrice believed she’d done her best by Angelina. Yes, she’d been that faithful bee. She’d been faithful to others, or tried to be, as far as she could. To Rafe, and when she thought Rafe was lost, to Guy. She thought of her son, of how she’d kept him, not given him away. There might be some who thought she’d betrayed him by leaving him to do war work. ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’ That’s what everyone had said, the government posters, the women in the queues for rations, the men who went away to fight . . . Only her son might not understand that. He might just feel betrayed.

She hadn’t often wept here, fearing they’d see her tears as a weakness, but now the little bee was blurred by them. Suppose she never saw him again, or Rafe, or her family? After that first meeting with the Gestapo interrogator he’d never mentioned her grandmother or her cousin, and she wondered whether he had lied; whether they were still living safely on the Normandy farm.

The bee took off again, looking for a way out. She pushed her chair beneath the window and pulled the card off. After a while the bee found the hole and flew away.

She went over to the wall and drew another line on the calendar. Eight months she’d been in captivity. Yet she knew that the tide of war was inexorably turning. Last September, the news in the exercise yard had been that Italy had declared war on Germany. In November it was rumoured that the Soviets had won Kiev, then, after Christmas, that they’d liberated Leningrad. There was a growing sense of excitement and hope.

Everybody believed that an Allied invasion of Europe was only a matter of time. And in April 1944, the Occupying forces in France started to move imprisoned British agents east into Germany.

There was no warning. After breakfast one morning in April, the wardress gave Beatrice time only to put on her shoes, and a guard waiting outside escorted her down the metal staircase, through the underground passage and into the reception lobby, where several other women had gathered, all of them dazed and anxious.

‘What’s happening?’ one asked her. She recognized her from the exercise yard, a dark-eyed, gentle-faced woman known to her as Madeleine.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered back, and the guard pushed them apart with a shout:

‘No speaking!’

Outside, they were herded into a battered bus and driven for miles across the countryside. ‘Well, we’re still alive,’ she managed to murmur to Madeleine. ‘Maybe they’re moving us to another prison.’

‘Maybe,’ came the reply. ‘Perhaps they’re nervous. The invasion will come soon.’

The bus came to a stop outside a rail station in a small town. There was another bus just pulling away and on the platform a group of male prisoners, some wounded, all as shabby and emaciated as themselves, were being corralled onto a waiting train by armed police.

As she watched, trying to see if she recognized anyone, one of the prisoners suddenly broke away from the group and started to sprint along the platform. The police opened fire; he dodged onto the track behind the train. Three or four policemen set off in pursuit, some of the others redoubling their efforts to load the prisoners onto the train.

Beatrice was standing at the back of the group, and now everyone was looking at the escapee, running down the track, the bullets sending up clouds of dust behind him.

Then she realized. No one was looking at her. For a second, time stopped. She moved quietly like the shadow of a bird, back through the doorway of the station, and waited. Nothing happened. She glanced across to the ticket-seller’s window and met the eye of the young man who sat there. Fear shot through her. But then he signalled to her, and disappeared. A second later the door to his office opened and he ushered her inside. He shut the door, and started moving cardboard boxes from under a desk. She crept into the hole he made and lay down on her stomach while he replaced the boxes. Then, through a little chink, she watched him retake his stool at the window.

Outside, the shooting had stopped but the commotion continued, with shouting and running footsteps. Train doors slammed. A whistle, a whooshing sound and the roll of heavy wheels. The train chugged away. A moment later a bus engine started up, then eventually there was silence. She wondered what had happened to the man who’d run away.