she didn’t know. He began to pedal over the uneven ground down a narrow path.
They reached the edge of the clearing and the path gave way to a country road, flanked on either side by a low wall of crumbling stones. A valley unfurled below them, the quilt of lush green and neatly tilled fields, dotted with red-roofed cottages and the occasional château. The rich scent of damp chevrefeuille wafted upward. They were in the Île-de-France region, she guessed from the gently rolling hills and the route the Lysander had taken the previous evening, somewhere northwest of Paris and deep in the heart of Nazi-occupied territory.
They passed a farmhouse, where a young woman was hanging clothes in the yard to dry. Marie seized with fear. Until this point, she had been shrouded in darkness. Now they were out in plain sight. Surely something would give her away. But the woman simply smiled, taking them for a couple out for a morning bike ride.
A few minutes later the man turned the bike off the main road so abruptly that Marie nearly fell. She grabbed for the handlebars as he pulled up in front of a château. “What are we doing here?” she ventured to ask.
“One of our safe houses,” he explained. Looking up at the stately home with its steeply pitched roof and dormer windows, Marie was surprised; she had expected caves and woods, or at most a shed like the one where she’d spent the night. “The house is abandoned. And the Germans would have taken it except for this.” He gestured toward something lodged between two of the paving stones in front of her. Ordnance, she recognized from training. A bomb that had been dropped by the Germans ahead of the occupation, but had not detonated. “There are another half dozen in the garden.”
Inside, the mansion appeared untouched, fine linens and china intact, furniture not covered. In the dining room to the left, Marie could see a table set, as though company was expected anytime. Whoever had lived here had gone without notice, she thought, recalling l’exode, the flight of millions of citizens of northern France four years earlier ahead of the advancing German army. A thin coat of dust on everything was the only sign that the house was vacant.
There came a scratching from above, the faint titter of laughter. The man took the wide stairs two at a time without waiting for her and she hurried to follow. He opened a door to reveal what had once been a study. A handful of men, all about her own age, were gathered around a broad oak desk that had been pressed into service as a dining table. The heavy curtains were drawn and several candles flickered on the table. Overflowing bookshelves climbed to the ceiling.
In an armchair by the window sat Will, the pilot who had flown her here the previous night. Marie was surprised to see him and wondered what had kept him from flying out of France after the Lysander had taken off from the field. He was the only familiar face in the room and she started toward him. But closer she could see that he was dozing, eyes closed.
Marie stood uncertainly on the edge of the room. The group had presumably assembled on the upper floor of the abandoned villa to stay out of sight. Yet they laughed and joked as easily as though they were in a Paris café. The air was warm with the delicious smells of coffee and eggs. Remembering the cold, dark shed where she had spent the past several hours, Marie was suddenly angry. She glared in the direction of the courier, who was now standing across the room by the window. He might have brought her here the night before. But he had not. Perhaps it had been some sort of a test.
One of the men seemed to notice her then. “Come, come,” he said with an accent she recognized as Welsh. He had a wide moustache, ill-suited to fitting in among the French. “Don’t wait for an invitation. Have some bacon before it’s all gone.” Marie was certain that she heard him wrong. There hadn’t been bacon back home since before the war. But here it was, thick and crispy on a nearly empty plate, calling to her. The man held out the plate. “Go on. We don’t eat like this every day. One of the lads was able to buy a rasher off the black market