tired by the sound of her dragging voice, but when the light caught her face I noticed the bags under her eyes and realized she was more tired than I thought.
‘You can help me with the guns in the crypt. Mavis—you’ll remember—she’s very helpful. She found her voice with us in the Résistance and doesn’t squeak like a mouse anymore. The work is different from before—tenuous at best with the sweeps… and the Germans. Mother Superior stays at the convent, doesn’t come out into the open. Or Sister Mary-Francis.’ She handed me a Carte d'identité—a forged set of documents with a grainy photo of a woman who looked like me if you were drunk enough to imagine a resemblance. I also got a new name: Jeanne Calvet. ‘It was the best I could do on such short notice.’ Her eyes sagged when she looked at me.
I nodded. ‘It’s fine—Jeanne.’ I flipped open the book and read the typed print inside. ‘From Lyon.’
‘Adèle, you can’t tell anyone where you are. Not your family and definitely not your lover. They’d unknowingly lead the Milice straight to us if the Gestapo doesn’t make it first.’
‘What if Luc comes looking for me?’
‘He’s a résistant, Adèle. He won’t jeopardize your cover or his. You know that.’
I remembered the last time I saw Luc. The feel of his hands on my skin; the comforting warmth I felt deep inside when I took him into my body, his lovely, syrupy voice when he’d call my name. Catchfly. A name that belonged to the past, its memory as thin as the perspiration my body left behind on the Morris Column.
‘I’m sorry, Adèle,’ she said, carefully. ‘This is the way it has to be.’
I closed my eyes when I felt the tears welling. The sound of Charlotte’s sobs—the painful wounds on my body were nothing compared to the memory of Charlotte’s regretful cry. And Mama and Papa—what would become of them now?
‘Don’t be sorry.’ Tears rolled down my face when I opened my eyes. ‘This was my doing.’
1944
25
The sisters’ crypt smelled of old bones and rotting flesh despite the cologne I rubbed under my nose. ‘To keep the Gestapo away,’ Marguerite said. ‘Germans are afraid of germs so the sisters lay the dead in catacombs, uncovered.’ Dug into the ground under the old convent in the centre of Lyon, the crypt had hundreds of tombs set head to toe, linked like dominoes through winding corridors of dirt and stone.
Marguerite looked on from behind as I wedged my body in between two beams searching for a gun that had been stashed in a hole two days prior, her face very close to the low-burning lantern she held in her hand. ‘Reach all the way back.’
I peered into the crude dirt dug-out set into the wall and then reluctantly stuck my hand in. Spiders, biting ones, and scorpions, I thought, as I felt blindly around, breathing in the putrid, thick air wafting from the tombs. ‘Why did you stick it so far back?’ I reached further into the dark hole, feeling for the barrel of the gun amidst cobwebs and crumbling sod, suffocating me as much as the smell.
‘It wasn’t me. Get the gun, all right?’ Marguerite was irritated; I could tell by the sharpness in her voice and the jerky movements she made with her head, as if her headpiece wasn’t fitting right, which made me glad I didn’t have to wear a habit like she did.
I pulled the gun from the hole like a snake. Long and thin, a German MG 42. ‘There,’ I said, tossing the gun into a crate with some others. ‘The last one.’
Marguerite took inventory of the arms we had smuggled while I dusted dirt from my postulant’s veil. ‘Now we have to wait for the transport truck. The Maquis will collect the arms at the hill cottage.’ As she closed the crate’s oblong lid, I saw its metal handles and instantly felt a pull in my palm from the last time I had carried it—Marguerite’s travel crate, the one I helped her lug to the convent on our first day. We both picked up an end and carried it upstairs into the sewing area of the old convent.
Just as I was locking up the crypt door, Mavis came scampering through the front doors. She had a smile on her face that bordered on panic, waving a note in her hand as she closed the doors behind her. ‘Adèle,’ she said all breathy. ‘It’s for