The Lost Girls of Paris - Pam Jenoff Page 0,46

the mistake of the other night behind her and get back to sorting out her life here. Seeing him again would be a mistake, and meeting him in Washington an even worse one.

Which was exactly why she had to say yes.

Chapter Eleven

Marie

France, 1944

In the predawn stillness there was a scratching sound outside the shed. Marie sat up, terrified and exhausted. She had spent the night half sitting, half lying against a rough wooden wall. Her bones ached from the cold, hard ground, and there was a wet spot on the seat of her dress where the dampness of the earth had soaked through.

The noise came again, like the rustling of deer that poked at the garden each summer she and her mother had spent outside Concarneau when she was a girl. This was not a deer, though; the footsteps were heavier, crushing twigs beneath them. Marie leaped to her feet, imagining a German on the other side of the door. She tried to remember from her training what to do. Her skin prickled.

But then a key turned in the lock and the door opened. It was the tall, angry man who had brought her the previous night. Marie smoothed her skirt, embarrassed at how the shed reeked now from the spot in the corner where she had tried discreetly to use the ground as a toilet. She hadn’t wanted to, but with the door locked and no facilities, there really hadn’t been a choice.

The man did not speak, but gestured for her to follow. She obeyed, working her dishwater-blond hair into a low knot as she stepped from the shed. Her mouth was sour and her stomach gnarled with hunger. Outside the sky was pink at the horizon, the air damp. Since he had brought her to the shed in the middle of the night, she couldn’t have been there for more than a few hours. But the time waiting and worrying about when he would come back and what she would do if he did not had seemed like much longer.

She could see that the shed was sunk in a ravine behind a row of poplar trees. “You managed all right?” the man asked in English as they climbed up the hill, his voice so low she could barely hear it.

“Yes. No thanks to you,” she added, too loudly, her annoyance at how she’d been treated bursting forth.

He turned back. “Quiet!” he commanded in a low, gravelly voice, grabbing her wrist so hard that it hurt.

“Don’t touch me!” Marie tried to pull back, but his iron-like grip held her fast.

His eyes blazed. “I’m not going to get arrested because you can’t keep your mouth shut.” They stared at each other for several seconds, not speaking.

The man started onward once more, leading her through the forest in a direction that seemed different than the way he’d brought her the previous night, though she could not tell for certain. As they walked, she studied him out of the corner of her eye. His hair was close-cropped and his jaw square. Though he wore the trousers and shirt of a French peasant, his too-straight posture and gait suggested he was military, or once had been.

The trees broke to a clearing and on the far side sat a small, unmarked rail station scarcely bigger than the hut where she had been forced to sleep the night before. The man looked in both directions expertly, like one who had spent much time ensuring that he had not been detected or tracked. Then he grasped her arm once more. Marie pulled away. “Don’t touch me again.” The unwanted hands of strange men always transported her back to her childhood, where her father’s painful grip was always followed by a slap or strike.

She waited now for the courier’s rebuke. Instead, he nodded, a slight assent. “Then stay close.” He started across the clearing and walked behind the station, where a lone bike sat. “Get on,” he said, gesturing to the crossbar. She hesitated. The early morning sun was well above the trees now. Riding openly across the French countryside seemed foolish and sure to attract attention. To refuse would mean angering this man further, though, and she knew nothing in this country but him and that miserable shed. He steadied the bike as she climbed on the crossbar and then he mounted the bike, encircling her with his long, broad forearms to reach the handlebars. She shifted, uncomfortable at being so close to a man

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