startled onto the field. They were waving. He saw them even as he was descending. The Dirty Lily stopped short of the nest of buildings at the end of the field.
Then he was in the woods, away from the field.
A girl on her bicycle saw him through the trees and signaled to him. She was small and thin, in a light wool coat and scarf. Maybe twelve years old. Or fifteen. Her shoes were heavy and worn. Her bicycle had a small bell. She warned him, “Monsieur, les Allemands!”
She spoke a little schoolgirl English.
“Your clothing,” she whispered. “You must hide it. Stay here. I will bring you other clothing.” She put her finger to her lips. “Shh.”
If she came back, he would ask her which country this was, Belgium or France. He could hear vehicles approaching. The local residents would not be driving, petrol was so scarce. He retreated into the woods as the sounds came closer. The voices and vehicles clustered around the dying plane. Where was Hadley? Hadn’t they run to the woods together? Webb, he thought, was dead. But they had hauled Webb out. Folded next to him in the cockpit, not responding. Blood in his lap.
“Everybody’s out,” said Hadley, appearing at the edge of the woods. Or maybe he had been there all along.
“Is Stewart out?”
“Accounted for.”
Where was Hootie? Hadn’t he seen Hootie lying pale and lifeless in the field?
Over and over, in hiding, he replayed the crash scene, wondering if the girl on the bicycle ever returned with clothing for him.
“I BROUGHT YOU HERE from my cousin Claude’s,” Pierre was saying now. “Do you remember?”
“Yes, that wild bicycle ride in the dark!”
“We were on the bicycle together,” Pierre said with a laugh. “You pedaled while I sat on the handlebars.”
Marshall outlined for the Alberts his erratic journey from the crash in Belgium to their house in Chauny—the farmer with the threatening scythe, the three nights in a barn while the Resistance checked him out, then several nights in the home of the women in black, where he hid in the upstairs room.
“Then the Résistance took me to Claude’s, but the convoyer who was supposed to meet me there didn’t show up, and they dumped me out in the field! I thought I had been betrayed.”
“No, that was correct. They didn’t want to be seen with you at Claude’s.”
“They pointed to the barn, I remember, and I ran through a field in the dark and fell down a couple of times.”
“And then you were safe in the barn.”
MARSHALL HAD HIDDEN UP to his neck in a pile of scratchy, dried weeds and grasses, his nose dripping from a sneezing fit. The noise of his breath on the hay was raucous in his ears but to other ears perhaps no louder than a wisp of dried grass rustling. A shadow passed over him, and he heard two voices mumbling angrily in French.
“Les Allemands,” said the older one, with a guttural spitting sound of contempt.
“Va-t’en!” the other man said.
A cat jumped up on the hay and landed virtually on Marshall’s face. The tail swiped his face, and then the cat rubbed against Marshall’s head and purred. In the shadows the men did not see the cat’s discovery. The cat, a bushy, ragged, pied thing like a mop head, drooled on Marshall’s hair, then rubbed its face in it. Marshall didn’t dare free his hand to move the cat, who was purring loudly.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, Félix? Tu ronronnes comme un train!”
The lantern whipped toward the corner, and Marshall’s eyes were blinded by the glare. The French voices rose in alarm as he crawled out of the hay, the cat swirling around him. Standing, he held his hands out to the men.
He had been given a password, a phrase that might be innocuous if these men were collaborators, but meaningful if they were expecting him.
Carefully, he said, “Il y aura de l’orage demain.”
“Comment?”
He repeated the phrase he had memorized.
“Oui, oui,” they said. He had passed.
“Je suis américain,” he said haltingly. “Aviateur.”
“Aviateur?”
Their excitement purred like the cat. “Chut!” they said to the cat. Be quiet.
“Je suis un aviateur américain,” Marshall said.
The older man repeated the French words. Marshall always remembered his own poor pronunciation—a hayseed stab at a phrase that was elegant in a Frenchman’s mouth.
The older man was Claude, and the younger one was Pierre. They were cousins, Marshall learned later, and the farm belonged to Claude. They wore rugged work clothing, heavy wide-legged trousers and tight jackets. Their clothing