Page 45 of The Resistance Book Club

The scent of the sea was still there, although she couldn’t hear the sound of furious waves crashing as she had the eveningbefore. She peered at the radio, not wanting to touch it. It looked like something from a museum, and she wondered if the cellar was the best place for it.

She looked inside a crate and found a shoebox full of photos. Some of them were duplicates of the pictures on the wall in Sébastien’s bar. She’d have to look through them carefully and ask Beatrice to help identify the people from the past who had been captured on film as they’d walked through the village. Maybe the book club members were in the photos?

She turned her attention to a crate of old books, and gently lifted each one out. They had to be more banned books, like the crate of them she’d found in the storeroom. At least these copies had been saved from the flames of the book bonfire, and Lucy shivered at the thought of all those books being reduced to ash. The books were surely rare, valuable editions now, but Lucy couldn’t bear the thought of selling them. Like the radio, they belonged here.

Lucy couldn’t sell the shop to someone without a connection to Cordeval now. She’d have to speak to Sébastien again about buying it. He knew the history; he was part of it.

She carried on looking, trying her best to remember where she’d found things so she could put them back where they had been. This was far away from her usual life, sitting at her desk in London choosing photoshoot images forGlitzmagazine. And it certainly wasn’t what she would’ve been doing if Andrew hadn’t torn their lives apart. Right now, she would’ve been on their honeymoon, drinking champagne in a luxurious hotel. She paused for a moment to push down the sadness and anger that threatened to rise up inside her.

She was utterly engrossed, fascinated by even the most ordinary things she found – even a small ball of string. She recalled the way that Esther’s book had been wrapped, and realised that it might be the string that they’d used to wrap the banned books.As Lucy held it, she felt the gap in time between then and now shrinking.

She started to look through another box and thought she’d found more banned books. But as she lifted the first, which saidLa Côte Normandeon the cover – the Normandy coast – she realised that these weren’t books at all. She’d found a box of maps.

She opened out the map and saw faint pencil crosses marked on it. At first they seemed random, but she quickly realised that they were plotting a route from a farm marked on the map, through the back lanes, and ending with an asterisk on the coast.

Mémé and Beatrice had mentioned maps in the notebook, something about gathering them up. But they hadn’t explained why. Lucy looked again at the path on the map, and realised that, if the resistance were helping people who weren’t familiar with the area to escape, then a map showing a safe route to their pick-up point on the coast was essential. She carefully laid it down. What she had found must’ve been the few that were left over, and she looked through each one in fascination. The routes and the pick-up points kept changing, which made sense, so that they could keep several steps ahead of the Germans.

And right down at the bottom, she found a very old map.

It looked dirty with age, and the route on it didn’t look like any coastal path that she’d ever seen. Even though it was titled ‘Cordeval’, and she could make out the church on the edge of the village, the square and the harbour, it didn’t look recognisably like a plan of the village. She followed the paths, trying to make sense of them, and then she realised what she was looking at.

This, she suddenly realised, was much older than everything else in the room. She was, in fact, holding an antique map showing the network of cellars and tunnels that ran under Cordeval.

She knew exactly who she had to show this extraordinary piece of Cordeval’s history to. She had to find Sébastien right away.

THIRTY

MARGOT

1941

Margot ran out onto the landing, heaving for breath. She wondered if Beatrice had come through the tunnels and taken Isabelle. But no, the girl wouldn’t have gone off with the baby without leaving a note.

There was only one other option. She ran up the stairs to the flat at the top of the house.

As Margot reached the landing, the door to the flat opened and the Professor emerged. He was cradling Isabelle against his chest and the little girl was chuckling merrily. In her hands she held not only her little knitted goose, but a small teddy bear that wore a red tartan bowtie.

Margot rushed forward and snatched Isabelle from him, and held her tight. ‘What are you doing with my baby?’ she demanded.

‘She was crying,’ the Professor said, as though that was all the excuse he needed. ‘I didn’t want my brother to hear. I meant no harm, madame, I’m sorry. But— my brother.’

‘Wait – did you play the piano on purpose?’ Margot asked him. ‘So that your brother wouldn’t hear Isabelle?’

The Professor nodded. ‘But it didn’t soothe her, so I came to collect her. I’m truly sorry I scared you.’ Then he touched the tip of his finger to Isabelle’s nose and the little girl gave a merry gurgle. ‘You may keep Herr Knuddel, young miss; he’ll be a friend to you.’

Margot looked at the little bear in Isabelle’s chubby hand.

‘Last night, just before Esther—’ She paused as she heard the gunshot echo in her memory again. She took the folded piece of paper from her pocket and held it out to the Professor. ‘She wanted me to give this to you.’

The Professor nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he took the page. ‘For what happened to your friend.’ For a moment he closed his eyes, then he unfolded the paper and Margot saw musical notes scattered across printed staves. ‘She was a remarkable woman.’

Margot tried to fight the sob that was rising up inside her. She couldn’t cry in front of the Professor. But she’d lost her friend; she’d been shot right in front of her.

And there had been things about her that Margot hadn’t known. The fact that both she and Daniel were Chevalier. And she had no idea why Esther had wanted her to pass a sheet of music to the Professor.

‘She was the bravest woman,’ Margot said, and sobbed. ‘She turned and said something – in Hebrew I think…Yimakh shemo…I’m not sure. I don’t know what it means.’ Her words caught in her throat as she cried, but she carried on. ‘I’d never heard her say it before, but there was so much anger in her voice…so much defiance. And then…your brother shot her. He just shot her dead.’

The Professor drew in a breath, his face filling with sadness. ‘“Yimakh shemo ve-zikhro”,’ he said. ‘May his name and memory be obliterated. A fitting curse for mymonster of a brother.’ Then he reached into his pocket and held out a pristine, folded white handkerchief. ‘Thank heavens Isabelle is here with you.’