Violins of Autumn (2 page)

Most girls my age are fresh out of school, working in typing pools and factories. And here I am, seconds from touching down in enemy territory.

There are no brakes to pull. No going back. I brace myself for the hard landing.

It isn’t until my feet collide with the first branches that I realize the expanse of shadow beneath me isn’t a field at all. I’m crash-landing into a forest.

I cover my face, not because I remember that instruction, but because vanity takes charge. I also don’t want to lose an eye. That’s just common sense.

Other instructions come flooding back. I keep my legs together and fall freely into the trees. My parachute catches, bringing me to a bouncy stop. Right away, I move my arms and legs. I wiggle my fingers and toes. Only a small spot on my right side hurts. I breathe deeply in relief.

For a while I hang suspended, listening for the drone of the plane’s engine. The sky is silent. Where is Denise? Where are the Maquis members?

In the distance, a dog barks. My muscles tense. Barking dogs are never a good thing. Where there are dogs, there are people. I don’t have contacts in France yet nor a sense of who to safely trust. People who are nice to your face can easily turn against you behind your back. I learned that at boarding school long before joining the SOE.

I twist in my harness, gauging the distance to shades of gray and black ground. I didn’t come all this way to die or injure myself within the first hour. I swear under my breath, hoping Denise and the men are searching for me.

I look up to the parachute hopelessly entangled in the treetop. What to do? My gloved fingers fumble with the buckle of my harness. It refuses to budge.

I go back to hanging and listening.

The snowcapped mountains of France were visible from the large window in my dormitory room at boarding school. How much time did I fritter away daydreaming about life on the other side of those mountains? More than the headmistress approved of, I know that much. I’m finally in France, where I’ve longed to be. But I’m no tourist.

The SOE offered me the experience of a lifetime, an adventure more daring than most people can ever hope for, and I willingly accepted. Nobody forced me into this. At seventeen, I’m plenty old enough to take charge of my life.

As I hang from the tree, the reality of my adventure starts to sink in. I’m stuck in a strange country, in the dark, without supplies. Agents don’t last long here. I could be killed or find myself in the kind of circumstances my emergency cyanide pill is meant to rescue me from. None of that seems romantic or exciting now.

I press my gloved hands to my face, feeling foolish for getting swept up by the recruiters’ enthusiasm. The coolness of the leather against my warm cheeks helps to clear my head. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I can’t hang around in the forest until dawn. I have to get myself out of this mess.

I grab my knife from a pocket in my overalls. The blade slices through the harness with a freeing
zip
. I fall through the air, hit
the uneven ground hard, and collapse in a clumsy heap. For a good half-minute I lie there with my hand clamped over my mouth, moaning away head-to-toe achiness. I crawl to the base of a thick tree to catch my breath.

To my left, the trees are sparse. I’ve landed near a country road. I wait, my heart thumping like a kick drum. Huddled small and out of sight, no one will ever find me. I listen for signs of life but hear nothing. What if the rest of the group has banded together and left me behind?

Just as I decide to dart for the road to find help, the rhythmic footfalls of a solitary person puncture the cool night air. Arms wheeling, I scramble backward. Gripping my knife, I sneak to the thick undergrowth near the forest’s edge. The approaching footsteps close in on my hiding place. Within the shadows I raise my head, shocked to see Shepherd marching down the country road, arms purposefully swinging at his sides. He’s a civilian volunteer, not a military man, but that’s exactly what he looks like: a British officer on a parade square and nothing like an ordinary Frenchman. Did he completely lose his mind between the plane and the ground?

I don’t know what to do. Dressed in my jumpsuit, I risk capture if I join him on the road or call out to him.

Time to consider my options runs out. Four men leap from the ditch on the other side of the road. Gendarmes—the French police. They’re on Shepherd before he has time to react. He struggles and puts up a good fight, but against four armed men he has no chance. I hold my breath as he gives up and they lead him away down the road.

The police were waiting. They know about our drop, and now they’re looking for us. They’re looking for me.

I return to my ensnared parachute. I’m supposed to hide it, along with my overalls, except I can hardly see it, much less retrieve it. The parachute will have to stay where it is, sure to be found in the morning. But I guess Shepherd’s capture has done more to give us away than my abandoned parachute will.

Under my jump overalls I’m wearing a dull-as-dishwater blouse and skirt that will help me hide in plain sight behind enemy lines. But if I’m captured in the civilian clothes rather than a military uniform that would protect me under international law, the Germans can legally execute me as a spy.

My suitcase of belongings is inside a one-foot-by-six-foot metal cylinder that was dropped from the plane before I jumped. Each piece of clothing made specifically for us by the SOE has no labels, no wrappers or tickets in the pockets—no markings or signs that the clothes actually come from Britain. Without proper clothing, I won’t fit in. And not fitting in is one of many things that can blow my cover.

I tug my helmet off. My sweaty cap of hair breathes again. I bend over and comb my hands through, separating the loose dark-brown waves. My hair is the one thing I truly love about myself. Girls at boarding school got permanents to have wavy hair like mine. Not that they would have been caught dead admitting it; that gossip came to me through the grapevine, when a group of bullying seniors ended up looking like badly groomed poodles. Perfect punishment, I thought, for making my first year so miserable. My best friend, Sylvie, and I practically wet ourselves laughing.

As I stuff the helmet into my overalls, a beam of moonlight glints across the silver knife blade in my other hand. Without realizing it, I’d been flashing out my position all along. I sheepishly return the knife to its proper pocket.

Heel to toe my feet silently roll forward, avoiding fallen leaves and branches. I stick to the shadows, like an owl on a nightly hunt for mice. But the longer I walk, the noisier I seem to get. I can’t help but focus on insignificant sounds. My body betrays me by pumping blood too loudly, forcing each breath to travel a bumpy road—whistling wind through a voice-box cave and nose-hair trees. I swallow. I blink. I can’t help any of it.

“Adele.”

Frozen in place, I stare at the spot where the voice came from, unable to see any telltale human outlines.

“Adele.”

There’s no mistaking that springy British whisper. I haven’t been left alone, after all.

“It’s me,” I say, so quietly I doubt Denise heard. “Come out.”

Seconds later, from behind a bush not five feet away, she appears, still in her jumpsuit. I jerk back, surprised to see how close she really is.

I point to the bush. “How did you get there?”

“Quietly,” she says.

Denise closes the distance between us in three soundless steps.

“Where’d you land?” I ask.

“Not in the proper place, apparently. I saw your chute on its way down. I had a rough idea where to find you. So, you landed in the trees. How’s that for a welcome?”

“I’m okay. No broken bones. My parachute is stuck in the trees, though.”

“Mine’s tucked in a hollow log, near the field I came down in. And I found a couple of our containers.”

“Where are they?”

“Near the road.” Her outstretched arm shows me the way.

Near the road. They may as well have landed on the steps of a gendarmerie. Sunrise is a few short hours away and curfew ends at five o’clock. The gendarmes know about our jump, and if they find our personal items inside the containers there will be no doubt that female agents were dropped into the area. As spies go, ordinary girls like Denise and me are unexpected. We need to use that to our advantage.

“We need to move the containers, Denise. I think we might have fallen into a trap. Shepherd’s been taken. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Bloody hell.” She sighs. “I had a feeling something wasn’t right. What happened?”

“Four gendarmes came at him from a roadside ditch. We could be next.”

Denise pauses while taking this in.

“We won’t be next.” She pulls out her pistol. “Follow me.”

We slink through the woods. Each time the full moon goes into hiding Denise all but disappears from sight, only to reappear out of the darkness in front of me like a ghost taking form in the eerie moonlight. After a clumsy close call with an exposed tree root, I somehow recover my balance quietly. I speed up to shorten the space between us, trying not to crash through the forest like a rampaging bear.

Through a break in the trees I see the field Denise must have landed in. She signals a message to me with her hands. We were taught not to use the same trail twice, to avoid a possible ambush. At the next fork in the path, she heads down the left branch.

The trail meanders along a narrow riverbed. I kneel to roll a pebble over the edge. It bounces a short distance through the deepening black of the gully and skitters to a stop.

“No splash,” I whisper.

I climb to the bottom, checking the softness of the bank with my knife as I go, a trick I picked up playing cops and robbers with my brother, Tom, and his friends. I always played the part of beautiful bank robber Bonnie Parker, and my brother’s friend Nick was Clyde Barrow. The two of us got so good at being on the lam that sometimes Tom and the other boys couldn’t find us for hours. But after Bonnie and Clyde really were gunned down by police, the game didn’t seem as fun anymore.

Denise joins me and we follow the dry riverbed, out of sight, without leaving behind a map of footprints on the bone-dry earth. At an old bridge in the country road, she motions for us to leave the riverbed. We climb to the top, concealed by the bridge.

No matter how hard I squint, no unusual forms stand out among the shadows. The soft moonlight can’t locate our containers. Neither can I.

We skirt the field and come to a shallow ditch alongside the country road. Denise stands next to me, silent, as she scans the darkness. Eventually she puts her mouth to my ear and says the words I don’t want to hear.

“The containers are gone.”

The containers are gone. After everything else that’s gone wrong, I get a terrible sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if it’s another sign of things to come.

I eye up the surrounding forest. Any number of sly German soldiers or French police like the ones who nabbed Shepherd might be hidden there in the pitch black. I shiver at the thought of them slipping out from the cover of those trees like boogeymen.

Maybe someone should have done a better job of talking me out of this.

“What should we do?” Denise asks. “They told us the safe house would be no less than a mile from the drop zone, but we can’t wander aimlessly in the middle of the night. If no one finds us soon, we’ll have to stay put and wait for first light.”

I don’t like the idea of sleeping outside on the cold ground without a fire, but it’s looking like our only option.

“Besides, we were dropped in the wrong place,” I say. “Who knows where the safe house and reception committee might be. I can’t wander around with a million francs stuffed into my jumpsuit.”

“True.” Denise quickly ducks. She points toward the trees to our left. Three men walk onto the field from the forest at the roadside. I crouch, ready to withdraw my knife. “When I make a run for it, stick with me.”

“Denise, wait—it’s Bishop,” I say.

He runs toward us, waving his arms above his head. “Don’t shoot.”

“However did you find us out here?” Denise asks.

“We heard the two of you talking.” Bishop doesn’t sound at all happy about that, and my relief at being found turns to embarrassment. “Voices carry greater distances at night, girls, don’t forget that.”

“Our containers,” Denise whispers. “Where are they?”

“We have them. Your radio is safe, Denise, no need to worry.”

“Shepherd has been captured,” I say.

“Yes, we know,” Bishop says. “It’s unfortunate. We’ll discuss it at the safe house.”

He and the two other men, part of the group that was to have met us on the ground, lead us through the woods. The long walk seems to take even longer because no one speaks. We come out near a stone farmhouse. Comfort is only steps away. How has it been hours, and not days, since we left England? It doesn’t seem possible.

We were forewarned that the people of France are starving. The occupying Germans strictly ration most foods and restrict the diets of every French man, woman, and child to the calorie.

The first thing I see when I enter the farmhouse is a long wooden table set for dinner.

A petite woman rushes around the table to greet us. Her round cheeks remind me of pink lollipops. “
Bienvenue. Bienvenue. Entrez
.”

The woman reaches around Bishop to fish me out. She throws her arms around me as best she can. My arms hang lax at my sides. I’m not sure what to do about this stranger’s eagerness to show me affection. Able to see clear over the top of her upswept graying curls, I count eight place settings at the table and wonder who will take up the extra one.

“I am glad to have you here,” she says before moving on.

Denise endures the woman’s enthusiastic squeeze until her steely British reserve wins out. I almost laugh when she squirms away and redirects the hug toward Bishop.

He diverts the hug by politely extending his hand. “How do you do?”