Pardonable Lie (21 page)

Madame cast a glance toward Desvignes, then turned to Maisie. “But of course. You will always be welcome at my pension, Mademoiselle Dobbs. A friend will be joining you?”

“Yes, an old friend. I believe she will like Sainte-Marie very much.” Maisie addressed Desvignes. “I did not know it was Madame Clement’s gardener who was killed while trying to save the British aviator.”

“Yes, that is so. Did I not tell you?” Desvignes held out his upturned hands. “Was the detail important to you?”

Maisie shook her head. “Not really. The aviator’s father will be pleased to learn that someone tried to save his son, but very sad to know he died in the attempt.”

“We all made the attempt but were too late.”

“Yes, you were all so brave.” Maisie smiled at both Madame Thierry and Captain Desvignes. “Now I must go. Time to pack for tomorrow.”

Maisie left the kitchen and hurried upstairs. Locking the door behind her, she pulled several sheets of paper from her document case, took the book from her shoulder bag, and placed it on the table. She pushed back her chair, walked over to the ewer and filled the bowl with cold water—which she once again splashed on her face—and dried her skin with another lace-edged towel A glass carafe filled with fresh drinking water was on the side table, and Maisie poured herself a full measure, which she sipped while walking back and forth across the room.

Everything pointed to Peter Evernden being the gardener, Patrice. Of that she had no doubt. The fact that the gardener had perished along with Ralph was new information.
Was it the truth?
Maisie continued to pace back and forth. What if…what if Peter did not die, but his presence at the crash made his position vulnerable?
No, no, go back to the beginning.
Why was he in Sainte-Marie?
Back farther. Peter Evernden was an intelligence agent.
She paced, stopped, paced, and stopped, drawing together the suppositions that had nagged at her for days, along with recent clues. With her heart beating faster, Maisie began to dwell upon a suspicion arrived at, much to her dismay, even before she arrived in Paris.
What if Maurice recruited Peter Evernden based upon my description of his linguistic gifts?
She held her hand to her mouth and put down the glass. Then she paced again, her arms clutched around her, each hand rubbing the top of the opposite upper arm.
Let’s say he was transferred to intelligence work and tried to tell Priscilla in the language of boyhood secrecy shared with his brothers.
The assumed name, Patrice, was taken in honor of Patrick, the brother who had founded their boyhood secret society. The guise
a cripple of war
was to anchor him in the community as a man who had fought alongside his fellow men and boys of the village and returned wounded. He had met Suzanne Clement and fallen in love; their affair had produced Pascale. Had Peter known his lover was with child before he died?
Perhaps.
She remembered Priscilla, explaining family names, her brothers Peter, Patrick, and Philip. “It’s all Ps, you see, a family tradition, plus it makes it easier when ordering name tags for the school uniforms. I think the teachers must have thought,
Oh, no, here comes another P. Evernden!
”

Quickly she allowed the events to come together, giving voice to the way in which Fate had synchronized the paths of two men, each an expert in his wartime field of endeavor. And Fate had brought their bereaved to Maisie in the same way, engineering her discoveries to this point in time, when Truth would have her way. She had avoided drawing conclusions too quickly but now acknowledged the obvious.
Ralph was an expert in stop-start landings. He delivered Peter to his assignment behind enemy lines. They wouldn’t even have known each other. No names would have been exchanged, and they probably didn’t even see each other’s faces.
Now she stood at the window.
So, later, when Ralph’s De Havilland was hit by enemy fire, he knew a landing must be attempted.
And where better than a field already tested, a place where he might, just might, find help if he survived?

Maisie heard a noise downstairs, the muffled sound of Captain Desvignes and Madame Thierry talking and then the front door opening and closing. She left her room and went out onto the landing, moving the lace curtain to one side as she had before. Maisie watched as Desvignes walked across the cobbled street, which appeared gray in the dusky light of late afternoon. Then a man stepped from the side alley, from the same place where she had seen him yesterday. He joined the captain and they walked away, toward the police station.

Returning to her room and locking the door behind her again, Maisie wiped the sweat from her brow and inadvertently scraped her hand across the almost-healed cut. It began to bleed profusely.

“Blast!” She grabbed the damp towel and held it to her forehead.

She would have to be doubly watchful, even more on guard to protect her findings and ensure that the integrity of her work was beyond question. Above all, she had to be very, very careful.
Am I being watched by the secret service? The war was over twelve years ago; surely there is nothing to protect.

She opened Peter’s leather-bound book, sat down, and took up her pen. When she first worked with Maurice he would give her an assignment each Friday, to be completed by Monday, as a teacher might present a homework problem. The assignments were written in code, and Maisie’s first task was to break that code, be it based on numbers, language, or a combination of the two. “The mind must be trained as an athlete trains the body, the muscles stretched until they are tired and then strained again. If we are to leave no stone unturned in our work, the mind must be lithe, must be agile. These assignments will ensure your mental acuity.”

She began working on Peter’s coded entries.

TWENTY

Maisie lifted her head from the table. Six o’clock in the morning. When had she fallen asleep? She had stopped only to take a late supper of yet another bowl of Madame Thierry’s delicious soup, packed her suitcase for her departure the following day, and continued her task.

The code used in the leather-bound journal had lacked the complexity she expected and was based on assigning a number to each letter of the alphabet. The problem was that the number was different for each page and even each word, depending on the nature of what was being recorded. Sometimes a page was inscribed on the basis of a five-four-three-two-one code, so that the word
DOBBS
might be spelled
ISEDT
, with
I
being five letters away from
D
and so on. If the first letter in a word was
z
, then the code began at the beginning of the alphabet. But then the code would change again, and another combination would be used. Though each code might essentially be simple to break, complete interpretation of the pages was a time-consuming task.
And the book was not supposed to be found in the first place.
In discovering the hiding place, Pascale had proved that the curiosity of a child will often prevail over the training of an adult. In fact, Maisie wondered if the journal should have been written at all; it had revealed to her the place where she would find the definitive proof of Peter’s identity and affiliation.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and stretched. The dreams had come again. Were they dreams or nightmares? She remembered one in which her mother was walking ahead, turning back to admonish her: “Come along, Maisie, hurry up; you don’t want to be left behind, now, do you?” But try as she might, she could not keep up; her legs were like lead. She was running but not moving, and when she looked down it was into a river of blood-soaked mud that sucked at her feet and legs. “Come along, Maisie, come along.” She struggled to wrench herself free of the mud and reached out to her mother, who instead held out her hands to two young girls, two Maisies, but they weren’t her, and her own mother was walking away, holding
their
hands. Then all three turned to her and beckoned, the girls smiling as they revealed themselves. One was Avril Jarvis and the other Pascale Clement.
Come along, Maisie. Come along or you’ll be left behind.

She shivered and looked at her watch. It was over. It was a dream and it was over. In her exhaustion she had allowed the dragon free rein, and she knew the dreams would come again the moment she succumbed to sleep. She must keep a clear head. The driver would not arrive to transport her back to Reims until half-past eight. There was just enough time to run to the woods and find the place indicated in Peter’s journal. She had to keep her promise to Pascale, that the book would remain their secret, but now she knew where to find solid proof that Peter Evernden had been here during the war.

She dressed in her woolen trousers, a blouse, cardigan, stout shoes, jacket, scarf and beret and once again left the house by the back door. Philippe snuffled and moved as she walked past him but continued his old-dog snoring without waking or looking up at her. She slipped through the gate, making her way toward the trees beyond the place where the De Havilland had crashed. A ground-mist was lifting as the grainy light became slowly brighter, sending muted shadows across the fields. The dawn chorus had already commenced, and though she could hear farmworkers in the distance she felt alone.

The trees seemed to cluster together even more, as if to shield the inner sanctum of forest animals from the cold air. Maisie walked to the right, looked carefully at the surrounding fence, and began counting. Here and there it seemed as if a post had been replaced, but essentially, the fence appeared to be much as it was when first constructed at the turn of the century.
Number twenty. Turn right into the wood.
Maisie knelt down and slipped through the fence. She was looking for a particular oak tree, a very old one, possibly the grandfather of the wood. Dry leaves crackled underfoot, and each time she heard a twig snap or leaves rustle, she stopped and listened, her heart beating, her breath steamy in the morning air.

This must be the one.
It was the broadest oak. Maisie walked around the perimeter of the tree, then knelt between two roots in particular, looking for the place close to the ground, where the bark had grown away from the trunk in a shape that resembled a small doorway. When Maisie was at Chelstone, she had heard children in the village call them fairy doors, for they resembled an opening into a storybook world.
This is the place.

Maisie pulled the Victorinox knife from her jacket pocket, selected the largest blade, and brushed back the peaty decomposing fallen leaves; then she struck the ground and began to dig. She would only need to go down about a foot or so. Using both hands to scoop back the earth, she finally felt her fingers touch metal.
It’s here.
Leaning back, Maisie looked around once more and then brushed debris from the tin.
Yes, this is it.
It was almost seven o’clock. She must not tarry, and certainly she should not risk being seen coming from the wood. She was obviously still under surveillance. Placing the tin in her pocket together with the Victorinox knife, she filled the small hole and covered it again with leaves. Another quick look, another missed heartbeat as a rabbit left its warren, and she was gone. Over the fence, one more glance to right and left, along the fence line and across the field, keeping close to a rough stone wall, then up to the houses. Maisie looked back once toward the wood as she came close to Madame Thierry’s garden. She squinted into the now-bright morning sunshine just as a man made his way swiftly across the field and into the woods. It was the Englishman. She looked at her watch and willed the driver to arrive early.

Locking the door of her room behind her, Maisie was breathing deeply as she leaned against the closed door. Her bags were packed. She would wash her face and hands and then wait until Madame Thierry called her to say that her driver had arrived.
No need to go outside again.
She placed the tin on the table, then thought again and put it back in her pocket. She splashed water from the bowl onto her face and dabbed her cheeks with the lacy towel. Then she began washing her hands a second time, scrubbing under her nails with the bristle brush that had been placed with the soap in a china dish. She removed the tin from her pocket and doused it with water to remove the dirt. Maisie considered emptying the bowl of water into the lavatory next to the landing, but thought better of it.

Using a lace towel to dry the tin before opening it, she turned it over to examine the lid. It was a Princess Mary tin, a gift from the nation sent to each and every man serving overseas on Christmas Day 1914. The brass box, bearing an embossed image of Princess Mary surrounded on either side by a laurel wreath, along with the names of the Allied countries at war with Germany, contained a combination of treats, dependent upon whether the man was an officer or soldier. Had Peter Evernden enjoyed a pipe along with his half-ounce of tobacco and card with the picture of the princess? Or was he one of the men who’d received a pencil and a packet of sweets instead? Maisie turned the box over. It was approximately five inches long by three and one-quarter inches wide, with a depth of one and one-quarter inches. A green corrosion had already fused the two parts, but she prevailed and eventually the lid came off to reveal a small cotton pouch with a drawstring. Rust spots dotted the cream fabric but the opening spread apart with ease. And when Maisie tipped up the bag, a chain with two small round coins attached fell into her hand. She smiled. It was just what she wanted, just what she knew would be there: Peter Evernden’s identity tags. Intelligence agents did not wear any identification, though the metal tag was issued. The agent would bury the tag somewhere close within the field of operation, to be found later should he be taken prisoner or killed, though in this case the family had already been notified that he was missing, presumed dead. And as Maisie knew from his coded journals, when Peter Evernden left hurriedly on his next assignment, he had no time to retrieve the discs, though he hoped they would be found.
How strange
, thought Maisie, as she returned the tags to the small bag and then to the tin, which she wrapped inside a blouse at the bottom of her case.
How strange that it was the daughter he had never known who discovered the key he’d left behind.

In the moments remaining before she left Sainte-Marie, Maisie began to consider her strategy for the conversation with Priscilla. Her hotheaded friend would no doubt want to rush to Sainte-Marie to see Pascale, which would not please Chantal Clement at all. In fact, Maisie thought that Chantal Clement’s gray eyes revealed the steely determination of a woman who was not scared by much, even the German army in her home. No, she must take care to control Priscilla, to ensure that Chantal was consulted and the situation discussed before Priscilla came within miles of the carriage sweep. But without a doubt, her friend should not be kept from her brother’s child any longer.

Maisie paced the room again, listening for the sound of a motor car door slamming, her name spoken at the front door, and Madame Thierry’s insistent call from the foot of the stair.
What about Ralph Lawton?
Peter’s journal had revealed interesting information about Lawton and the crashed De Havilland. It was the most intriguing part of her assignment thus far. It seemed that, in more ways than one, she was going in the right direction, her intuition at play with the hand of Fate, though at times she felt as if she were being moved through the past like a pawn in a game of chess.

T
HE DRIVER CAME
at the allotted hour and, after bidding farewell to Madame Thierry and a drooling heavy-lidded Philippe, Maisie departed as quickly as possible for Reims. Her ticket purchased, she spent only a few minutes on the waiting platform before a piercing whistle heralded the commencement of the long journey to Biarritz: the arrival of the train that would take her to Paris and her connecting train. She found her compartment and took a seat by the window, the better to keep a keen eye on the platform. As the station guard blew his whistle and waved the flag, Maisie closed her eyes and leaned back. But it was a short-lived relief, for as the train began to move she heard the guard shout, the whistle blow again and a carriage door open and close. A late passenger had taken a chance and jumped aboard the moving train. It was without doubt a man traveling alone; a woman, Maisie thought, would not have taken so unseemly a risk. Two people would not have had the time to clamber aboard, but a solitary traveler determined to board would not have allowed a guard with a whistle to prevent him from taking a chance. Could it have been the Englishman? Or was it simply a young man who had not yet learned a sense of life’s fragility, a boy determined to visit his sweetheart or rushing to another city to find work. Maisie leaned back in her seat again, her hand clasped around the handle of the black leather document case that now held Peter Evernden’s journal. She closed her eyes.
I must not let my fear diminish me.

M
AISIE COULD SMELL
the Atlantic Ocean in the distance even before her first vision of waves strung out in lines, wind-driven whitecaps reflecting both sun and cloud as they forged toward the shoreline of Biarritz. And as the locomotive finally reached the buffers, travel-weary men, women, and children surged forth onto the platform. Doors slammed back against the carriages as porters ran to and fro, back and forth, with trunks, suitcases, hat-boxes, and, in one case, a rather large hairy black dog sitting on top of a suitcase awkwardly balanced on a hand cart. Despite the flurry of activity and the fact that Priscilla anxiously awaited her arrival on the other side of the barrier, Maisie remained in her seat. She waited until there were fewer passengers on the platform and then took her brown leather suitcase down from the rack, gathered up her document case and handbag, and moved out into the corridor and to the door that opened out onto the platform. She looked both ways before alighting and then walked briskly to the place where Priscilla had stipulated that they should meet.

She continued to walk purposefully until she saw Priscilla in the distance. Relieved, she hoped her friend would not overdo her welcome, but Priscilla was her usual ebullient self, rushing toward Maisie, stopping only to drop her cigarette, which she stepped on and twisted into the ground before continuing. Maisie could not help but notice that her friend was as glamorous as ever.

Priscilla’s shoulder-length hair was brushed across her shoulders and topped with a cream beret. Wide ivory woolen trousers were complemented by a navy and cream hip-length cardigan with a just-below-the-waist belt. She wore a navy silk scarf around her neck and navy shoes on her narrow feet. Her slender wrists jangled with bracelets that Maisie could hear as Priscilla approached, taking off her dark glasses as she neared the weary traveler.