the prison was emptied, those held there were sent to Natzweiler,” he added.
Eleanor shuddered at the name of the concentration camp on French soil where so many of the captured male agents had reportedly perished. But something puzzled her. “Why not Ravensbrück? Natzweiler was only for the men, wasn’t it?”
“Perhaps because they didn’t expect to keep them alive very long. The Germans killed them without records. Nacht und Nebel.”
Night and Fog. Eleanor had heard of the program at headquarters, meant to make prisoners disappear without a trace. She pressed back the tears that burned heavy against her eyelids. “How long?” she asked Henri. “How long before the invasion were they taken from here?”
“Not more than a few weeks.” She gasped. They had come so close to making it.
“You know they weren’t the only ones who died,” Henri said abruptly.
She nodded. “I know. You lost people as well.” It was another reality of what had happened; even as the agents were working to liberate Europe, civilians had become caught in the cross fire. Not just partisans, but ordinary men, women and children. Some had been killed as collateral damage in the acts of sabotage—the factory workers when a bomb was set, or the driver of a train that had been derailed. Still others lost their lives through German reprisals against the resistance. Churchill had said to set Europe ablaze, but the hard truth was that innocents got burned.
Eleanor stood in the middle of the tiny attic space, seeing Marie here beneath the creaky rafters, cold and alone. Or had some of the others been here with her? Eleanor would never know.
How had she been arrested? Something had gone terribly wrong in the field, and no one had survived to tell about it. Eleanor stared hard at the walls, as though willing Marie to speak through time. But the room remained still. Perhaps Marie herself had died not knowing.
Or perhaps she had left some kind of clue. Eleanor scanned the room, looking for some sort of hiding place. She ran her hand along the paneled walls.
“We searched it thoroughly, I assure you,” Henri said. Eleanor ignored him, continuing to feel along the floor, heedless of the dirt that blackened her hands. He didn’t know the girls the way she did, nor understand the way they would have operated to conceal things. Her hands ran over an uneven floorboard and she pried it up to reveal a hollow space. She looked up at Henri, whose face registered surprise in spite of itself. But the compartment was empty.
She ran her hands along the edge of the bed frame, the rough lines where agents and other prisoners had carved things into the metal raised like scars. She knelt to examine it. Some had put tally marks as though counting off days, others their names. Believe, read a single word. She did not see Marie’s name. She moved to the next bed frame where she found a word written in familiar handwriting. “Baudelaire.” The French poet.
Eleanor recalled the report of Marie’s recruitment, reading French poetry in a café. She walked to the bookshelf, scanning the titles that were mostly in French. She pulled out a book of French poetry and scanned the table of contents until she found a Baudelaire poem, “Fleurs du Mal.” Eleanor turned quickly to the page where the poem began. Sure enough, certain letters had been underlined faintly. She followed the pattern they spelled out: L-O-N-D-O-N. Marie had tried to signal something about headquarters, but what? Once it would have seemed a cry for help. But now, hearing the echo of Henri’s words, it seemed something altogether different: an accusation by Marie of those who had betrayed her and the other agents. Was she saying that someone in London was to blame?
Shuddering, she closed the book, then looked up at Henri. “Earlier you said the blood was on my hands.” Henri seemed less angry than when they had first met, and she didn’t want to stir it all up again. But she had to know. “What did you mean?”
“While I was working as a messenger, I often carried messages between here and Gestapo headquarters. The Germans were broadcasting to London so haphazardly. Why did no one notice and stop it? The Germans would not have been able to manage the radios on their own. They needed help, Miss Trigg. It had to be someone on your side. The way they were broadcasting and got the information so easily.” His voice was almost