Big Bang Fic: Rat and Sword Go To War, Chapter 3 part 2
Title: Rat and Sword Go To War
Author: rthstewart
Rating: T, for a soldier's salty language
Pairings/characters: Peter Pevensie, Susan Pevensie
Disclaimer: This work of historical fiction is offered respectfully and with deep admiration for the men and women herein depicted as well as C.S. Lewis and the other content owners of the Chronicles of Narnia and its related properties. Any original content in this derivative fiction is in the public domain and may be used freely and without notice to me or attribution.
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: All of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Summary: The High King and the Gentle Queen go to war, again.
Chapter 3, part 2
***
He had been sleeping fitfully. Being so close to the base was loud and he was nervous. He and Mademoiselle Lambert had gone into town and picked up dinner at a pub. They had not talked. She was slipping deeper into her role and only spoke in French.
Tebbitt jerked upright in bed when he heard the door handle turn and then saw the door to his room crack open. Mademoiselle quickly slipped in, and shut the door behind her. “Bonsoir. Pardon, excusez-moi.”
“It’s fine,” he replied. It was very dark in the room. He could just make out her shape, a slim woman in an old white dressing gown.
She asked something, all in French, whispering.
“I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, but I don’t understand you.”
She stepped closer, stood next to the bed and said something else. He heard joindre.
“You want to join me?”
“Oui.”
He took her hand and let her sit on the edge of the bed. She smelled of army-issue soap. “Are you nervous?”
She shrugged and said something he thought meant “a little.”
Of course she was. She had signed a last will and testament. She had a cyanide pill in a cork in her luggage. He ran his hand over hers, raised it to his lips, and kissed her palm. “It will go well. I believe in you.”
He wanted to tell her more. That there was no invasion at Pas-de-Calais. It was all a ruse and Colonel Walker-Smythe had lied to her about it. There was no FUSAG, First U.S. Army group commanded by General Patton in Dover. Walker-Smythe had lied about that, too. The tanks and planes the Nazis had spotted in southeast England were fake, plywood and canvas. If she was captured, she would be able to repeat the lie under torture to her interrogators.
There was only one invasion coming and it was Normandy.
In June, over one hundred and fifty thousand Allied troops would land on over fifty miles of beach at dawn. Thousands of planes would fly overhead. Tens of thousands of men would assault the shore but a few miles from where she would be. She would wake up one night and hear the sounds of paratroopers landing all around and gliders would crash into the bridges. She would be in the middle of the biggest movement of troops the world had ever seen. If she was not rounded up by the Gestapo in a sweep of the Caen networks, she could be caught in crossfire when the landing happened, or be killed by a bomb dropped by her own countrymen.
He could not even tell her when this would happen so that she might protect herself. There would be messages personnels and that was all the warning she and everyone else in the Resistance would get. And the intelligence heads had decided to give many of those messages too early, to cry wolf too many times, so that when the real invasion came, the Germans would not believe it.
He wanted to tell her that failure to take and hold the Caen bridges intact would be disastrous to the Allied landings.
But if she knew those things, if she was taken, and tortured, she might disclose those plans to the Gestapo and imperil the whole of their latter day Norman Conquest.
He had loved her for so long but duty was stronger. “You are brilliant,” he assured her.
In the dark he felt but did not see her smile. Her fingers delicately traced his face. She had deliberately chewed her nails short as part of her cover and they were rough and ragged.
“Susan…”
“Susan? Qui est Susan? Je m'appelle Jeanne.”
He realised now what she wanted, what she needed.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
These were not Susan Caspian’s hands that wandered about him, deliberate and knowing. It was not even Mrs. Ellis of Leeds who edged closer, teased apart the buttons on his nightshirt, who shrugged out of her dressing gown to expose bare, white shoulders. This was the final test for Jeanne-Louise Lambert, codenamed Rat, the reserved and shabby French woman. It was she who gently pushed him back into the small bed and slid on top of him and pressed her hungry, trembling body against his.
“Susan, we agreed. We weren’t going to…”
“S'il vous plait?”
Please, she whispered against his mouth, again and again. Please.
To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
ooOOoo
The Gentle Queen of Narnia was accustomed to all manner of uncomfortable transport - horses with bouncing gaits, swaying donkeys and mules, galleons, boats and dugouts, Gryphons, Giants, carts, and chariots. Crossing the Channel by the light of the moon in a gutted Lysander ranked among the very worse. Tebbitt had warned her and so she had stuffed softened wax in her ears but it was so very loud. Surely the gliders Peter had been training in would be better than this insufferable roar.
She was sitting on top of her little suitcase in the rear cockpit, her weapons were strapped and belted all over her body, and her knees were under her chin. How people did this with one man piloting the Lizzie and two passengers she could not imagine. She felt them descend, lower. Pressing her nose up against the cockpit canopy glass she could make out the silver strip of the beaches of the Normandy coast. The pilot would bring them in low, navigating by only map, compass, and moonlight.
She took a deep breath and let it out and the country of France began to pass beneath them. Aslan, your daughter is ready. Your will, not mine.
They followed a glimmering line of moonlit water, the River Dives she thought. There might have been gunfire or tracers but she couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the Lizzie. The pilot banked into a long, arcing circle and Susan saw lights below in the shape of an “L” created by torches of members of the Resistance. It denoted the strip of field on which the pilot would land. There were flashes from a signal light and she carefully watched the dots and dashes. She panicked for a moment that the signal was wrong, that it was a trap, then realised they were signaling in English, not French, for the pilot. It was all clear.
Her pilot shouted something and gave her a thumbs up.
She braced herself and the little plane swooped down. Susan could feel the bottom of the plane brush treetops and then they cleared the wood, dropped like a stone, and bounced onto the field.
Susan jerked open the canopy even as they were still bumping along. Ten minutes at most on the ground and then the pilot needed to be airborne. The longer they stayed here, the greater the chance of ambush by Nazi patrol. They rolled to a stop.
“Good luck, Miss!” the pilot said.
“Merci!”
She slung a Sten over her shoulder and clambered down the port ladder as two shapes jogged toward them across the field. Her feet hit French soil. She held the gun at her hip, keeping it on the two coming toward them.
“Looks to be the regulars, Miss, nothing to worry about,” the pilot shouted over the Lizzie’s whirring propeller. It was probably the last English she would hear for a long time. Regardless, she would be the judge of who approached. The two slowed.
“It’s a cold night to be in the woods.” She stated the pass phrase, calling it out in French.
“At least we can see by the light of the second moon,” one of them, male, responded. Susan lowered the Sten and the men - she could see now they were men - ran forward.
“Good evening!” the shorter man said. He handed her a stack of papers tied together with string.
These were the intelligence reports to go back to England. Susan scrambled back up the ladder and set them inside the Lizzie’s cabin. She pulled her small suitcase out and tossed it onto the grass clear of the plane.
The men were busy removing the guns from the drop tank in the Lizzie’s undercarriage. They hauled the crate out and, ducking under the wing, ran back across the field in the direction they had come with the crate between them.
Teetering on the ladder, Susan shut the canopy and jumped back down. The pilot saluted her from the cockpit. She grabbed her suitcase and ran after the men. The plane was already moving, turning about and in the light of the torches on the ground that had marked the “L” landing strip, Susan could see shadowy figures darting around, turning the torches off and disappearing into the darkness. Behind her, she heard the rumble of the plane bouncing back across the field, accelerating. She turned to look. Surely he would never clear the obscuring trees?
He did. The little plane whizzed up and she could see the trees swaying as the plane’s belly grazed their tops. Then, he was gone, taking her tie to England with him.
“Come!” she heard a man say from the cover of the dark wood.
By the time she reached the truck, there was only one man, the short one who had spoken and given her the papers for the pilot to return to London. He had the back of the truck open and the crate of machine guns already opened. She understood they were intended for the Maquis around Saint Claire, south of Caen.
She set down her suitcase.
“I am Albert Lebourgeois, the driver at the hospital.”
Which she now inferred since he was cramming British-made Stens into the back of an ambulance. “Jeanne-Louise Lambert,” Susan said. “Why don’t I hand the guns to you since you know where to hide them?”
“Thank you.” One by one, she handed him machine guns and they disappeared into nooks and crannies of the dilapidated ambulance. He fitted most of the Stens under the stretcher, in the stretcher, and in the mattress of the stretcher and in the cushions of the driver’s seat. He was obviously very accustomed to this and the whole operation was accomplished very quickly and in the dark.
She had been prepared to order loitering Resistance members away, as she’d understood that sometimes they took the arrival of an agent as an opportunity for a leisurely dinner, fete, and to raid an English agent’s luggage for cigarettes and gum. Here, she found no fault with the security protocols and was impressed with the efficiency. The other members of the Resistance who had lit the plane’s makeshift runway had already disappeared.
Lebourgeois buried the 9 mm rounds for the Stens in a fake bottom of the ambulance, under piles of bandages. He pushed everything back in place with a grunt and suddenly directed his torch on her, up and down. “You’ll need to change clothes,” he said and handed her a drab pile of cloth wadded up in the back of the ambulance. Susan had thought it was for storing the guns.
“Why? Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?” She had spent significant effort to ensure her wardrobe was appropriate so his criticism disturbed her. Everything she was wearing and had brought was French and dated, faded and patched.
“Madame Vion will decide. For now, the baby will not fit.”
The baby? Of course. A brilliant subterfuge.
Susan scooped up the dress and held it against her. Predictably, it was many sizes too large - a maternity dress.
She went around to the side of the car and quickly slipped out of the dark top and trousers she had been wearing, put the gown on and folded up her own clothes and crammed them away in the suitcase. She didn’t trust Monsieur Lebourgeois to not use any spare piece of cloth to hide the precious Stens.
“Put the baby on,” Monsieur Lebourgeois said, handing her a pillow and belt contraption. “You will ride in the back, on top of the guns and if we get stopped, you need to pretend you are in labour.”
Susan climbed in and settled on the bed of machine guns. Lying on your back, on top of 9 mm Stens, with a fake baby strapped to your belly was almost as uncomfortable as sitting on a suitcase in a Lizzie crossing the English Channel. Lebourgeois drove them out of the wood and they began inching along the road to the Bénouville Maternity Hospital with the lights doused. The pace was maddeningly slow but she knew they would have to conserve fuel and given curfews, should not be out at all.
She felt the car slow down and turned about on the stretcher to look out the front window. Lights illuminated shapes on the road ahead.
“Patrol?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said tersely. “Hans Schmidt is the commander of the garrison in Bénouville so use his name, clearly and loudly, so they hear it.”
Susan drew a soiled sheet over her body, making sure that her fake baby was both well covered and prominent. The cries of birthing mothers she had heard in Narnia were easy to recall. She began babbling and crying and counting out the time between contractions.
The ambulance slowed and she heard harsh words that she assumed meant “Stop!” in German.
Monsieur Lebourgeois tried to say something to respond to the German soldiers at the checkpoint but Susan screamed right over him. “The baby!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. “My baby is coming! Don’t stop!”
A light shined into the window and landed on her face. “Take me to him! Our baby!” she cried. “Name him Hans after his father!”
She threw one hand over her face, clutched her stomach in the other and writhed on top of the Stens, gasping and groaning.
“Why aren’t you with me, Hans! You’re with that little whore! You said you would take me to Berlin!”
A torrent of French cursing she had learned at Beaulieu followed and having silently counted down from 120, Susan let out a scream. “Take me to the Garrison! Take me to him!”
“I need to get her to the hospital,” she heard Monsieur Lebourgeois say to the guard shining the light inside the ambulance. “Unless you want to deliver a Commander’s baby here on the road?”
He was speaking in French, but someone seemed to understand him because Susan heard what sounded like another barked order and the ambulance lurched forward.
She twisted around on top of the guns and saw something in the road ahead of them in the dimmed lights of the ambulance.
“We have an escort to the hospital,” Monsieur Lebourgeois said. “So you will need to continue your labour.”
“How far is it?” Susan asked, shifting as a gun muzzle stabbed her in the back.
“At this speed, about 30 minutes.”
When they finally pulled into the drive of the Château de Bénouville, Susan was hoarse, crying and gasping again, and calling out desperately for Hans in between contractions she counted out at less than two minutes apart.
Monsieur Lebourgeois jumped out of the ambulance and she heard doors opening and closing and voices.
She kept shrieking. This wasn’t how she’d intended to meet her Resistance contacts, but Susan was confident of her ability to imitate a birthing female. She had presided at births of Talking Beasts, layings and hatchings by Talking Birds, and births of Gryphons, Red Dwarfs (never Black), and the occasional actual human.
She clutched the rail of the stretcher, let out a piercing scream at two minutes, more or less, and cried, “He’s coming! I can feel it! Hans, you bastard!”
The door of the ambulance opened. “Bring her inside,” a woman’s crisp voice said. “Poor thing. Take her straight to the birth suite.”
“Yes! Please! Hurry! Hurry!”
Susan hoped none of the Stens would fall out as strong hands unloaded her and the stretcher. Lebourgeois was there and another man. She felt badly for neither man was young - of course if they had been young, they would not have been here at all. They would have been impressed into a work crew or conscripted into a regiment on the Russian front.
As they carried her into the front door of the hospital, she saw the German soldier next to a motorbike, looking things over with interest in the light of his torch and trying to peer into the ambulance and into the hospital’s foyer.
“Thank you, soldier,” the woman said, speaking very well and clearly and shutting the back of the ambulance. “Now leave us please so that I can see to our patient and another German baby that is coming very soon.”
To emphasize the point, Susan let out another cry. “No! Take me with you! His father is there! Hans!” She concluded with a gut wrenching, writhing groan.
Obviously wishing to avoid awkward domestic scenes, the soldier hurriedly climbed back on his motorbike and, with a quick kickstart, roared off.
The front door closed with a slam. The woman, surely it was Madame Vion, stood at the window, listening and peeping through the blackout shade.
The sounds of the motorbike faded.
Her handlers set the stretcher down on the black and white tiled floor and a collective sigh echoed in the chilly marbled foyer.
Susan stayed where she was, taking her cue from the woman at the window.
“We are clear,” she said quietly, turning away. She gave Susan a critical once over. “Well played, Mademoiselle. You are Jeanne Lambert?”
Susan threw off the soiled sheet and slid off the stretcher. “Madame Vion?”
With the fake baby and ill fitting dress, it was not a graceful few steps forward to shake Madame’s hand.
“I am she.” Her handshake was cool and regal, very much like the woman herself.
The other man, taller, older, and heavier than Lebourgeois offered his hand. “Welcome to Château de Bénouville, Mademoiselle Lambert. I am Claudius Desvignes.”
“Charmed,” Susan replied. She knew from her reading that Lebourgeois was Madame Vion’s ambulance driver and that Monsieur Desvignes was her accountant and office manager.
“I will bring the ambulance into the garage,” Lebourgeois said.
Susan shimmied out of the fake baby belt and it fell to the floor and tangled a little in her baggy gown. She stepped out of the contraption. It might be immodest but she had already stripped in a wood behind an ambulance door. “Thank you, Monsieur,” she said and handed him the belt. “Madame Vion, should I help you store what is here on the stretcher or unload the ambulance?”
She waved her hand. “My men know what needs to be done so that we may get them to our contacts.” Desvignes was already wheeling the stretcher away down a dark corridor. “Do you have a bag?”
“Here,” Lebourgeois said from the doorway, setting Susan’s battered suitcase in the foyer.
Madame Vion looked it over critically and nodded curtly. “It will do. Come. Follow me.”
Madame’s attractive heels clicked on the tiled floors; Susan’s own boots made only a soft squeak sound. It was all very dim, lit only by a torch that Madame carried, but Susan could see the proportions of the Château were huge. The corridor was wide, the ceiling was high. It had been too dark in the foyer so she had not been able to see much of the famous staircase or any of the beautiful cupola. “The office is there,” Madame Vion said, and pointed down a branching corridor. “You know the history of the Château?”
“Yes, Madame,” Susan replied politely. “It was built between 1770 and 1780 by Ledoux for the marquis of Livry and is a testament to neoclassical architecture.” It was also huge. “The council of Calvados acquired it in 1927 and you have been the administrator of the hospital here since 1935.”
“I hope you are as well prepared in other areas, Mademoiselle.” Madame Vion pushed open a door. This will be your apartment. “Please change to something appropriate and join me in my office.”
As the quick clip of Madame’s heels faded, Susan quickly donned a plain dark dress (Schiaparelli!) that was very similar to what the administrator was wearing herself. Her room had a wash basin and commode, a narrow hospital bed and a little desk. While it was not a Paris apartment, neither was it a rough Maquis camp. For what was to be done, it was perfect. It was the middle of the night, she was edgy and hungry, but Susan took a moment to put on lipstick. Madame Vion was wearing a light coat and so Susan put one on as well. If Madame was expecting Mademoiselle Lambert to take dictation at 3 in the morning, Susan would probably not be able to manage it.
It would not do to keep Madame waiting and so she hurried down the hall back to the office suite using her own torch and glad she had paid attention to the directions. The briefing papers had referred to Madame as la comtesse and though she had thought it fanciful at the time, she did not now. The Countess Vion ruled her domain and Susan recognized a Queen of the realm when she saw one. This was not to be, as the saying went, Susan’s own show.
The Château was enormous though she understood that only a small part of it was given over to maternity. The rest of the vast, drafty palace hid weapons and supplies, downed Allied fliers, and French men avoiding conscription into German slave labour, the Todt Organization, or the army.
Upon entering Madame’s practical but spacious office, it did not appear there would be any secretarial work that evening. Madame had poured two glasses of wine and set out a depressingly German plate of sausage and cheese. Susan sat next to her on the divan in the office. A single lamp burned that did not illuminate much beyond the table at which they sat.
“I thought you might be hungry,” Madame said. “We do not have bread.”
Susan sat and began weaving the cover story. “We do not have bread in Le Mans either, Aunt.”
“And how is my brother’s wife?”
“Recovering well from her cold, Aunt. She manages in the shop. Life is hard, but no more hard than anywhere else.”
Madame Vion nodded and smiled, a little. Her shrewd eyes slid over the dress Susan wore. It was old, a little frayed, and too big. “You are wearing a Schiaparelli, Jeanne?”
“Better than a Chanel, no?”
Rumours were that the famous designer had taken up with a high-ranking German officer. Susan had not deemed it advisable to include anything from Coco Chanel in her luggage.
The smile was a little wider. “Your first impression is a favourable one.”
“Thank you, Aunt,” Susan replied. “And thank you for having me. I shall do whatever you ask to ease your work.”
“Eat, please. You have had a difficult journey.” Susan dutifully took a small piece of cheese and tasted it, conscious that this was a test of how she ate it and her reaction to it. To a Narnian palate, it was fine. To English tastes, it was milky, soft, and foreign tasting. She wondered if this was the sort of food that the French had made and then hidden from the Nazis, or fobbed it off on their occupiers as not worthy of consumption. She did not know how the French would value what she ate now.
Madame Vion let out a little sigh. “I will need to watch you carefully, Jeanne, to ensure you do not betray yourself or us. The Germans I think you can fool. The Milice are another matter though they are not so active this far north. We must keep you from them.”
“Should I have appreciated the cheese or spit it out?” Susan asked. She wished these were errors that she could avoid.
“It is Pont-l'Évêque, a famous cheese of Normandy and a great rarity in these times.”
Susan deliberately took another bite, registering the taste. “Thank you for giving me my first taste of Pont-l'Évêque!” Susan exclaimed. “It was always too fine for our humble meals! I will take only another small piece. We must save it for a special occasion!”
Madame Vion nodded. “Better. You look younger than you are and that will work to our advantage. A woman wishes to be sophisticated and look older than she is until the day she wishes she appeared young again. I would prefer your presence was unnecessary altogether. Having you here is a great risk.”
“You already take great risks, Aunt, but I understand your concern and share it. Information about the bridges is important to the liberation of France. Which means we must not be caught for we might reveal to our enemy some part of a larger plan.”
Léa Vion had been successful in the Resistance for four years with a garrison less than two kilometres away. Dozens of fliers and other people had been smuggled out of the Château de Bénouville and Susan knew the odds - usually one person died for every Allied soldier saved. Whole networks had been rolled up, hundreds of agents dead and disappeared, but Léa Vion was still here.
Madame raised her glass of wine and Susan brought up hers as well. “Santé, Jeanne.”
The French toast translated as health.
“Santé, Aunt.”
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Part 1 Part 2
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6 Part 1 Part 2
Author: rthstewart
Rating: T, for a soldier's salty language
Pairings/characters: Peter Pevensie, Susan Pevensie
Disclaimer: This work of historical fiction is offered respectfully and with deep admiration for the men and women herein depicted as well as C.S. Lewis and the other content owners of the Chronicles of Narnia and its related properties. Any original content in this derivative fiction is in the public domain and may be used freely and without notice to me or attribution.
Possible Spoilers/Warnings: All of The Chronicles of Narnia.
Summary: The High King and the Gentle Queen go to war, again.
Chapter 3, part 2
***
He had been sleeping fitfully. Being so close to the base was loud and he was nervous. He and Mademoiselle Lambert had gone into town and picked up dinner at a pub. They had not talked. She was slipping deeper into her role and only spoke in French.
Tebbitt jerked upright in bed when he heard the door handle turn and then saw the door to his room crack open. Mademoiselle quickly slipped in, and shut the door behind her. “Bonsoir. Pardon, excusez-moi.”
“It’s fine,” he replied. It was very dark in the room. He could just make out her shape, a slim woman in an old white dressing gown.
She asked something, all in French, whispering.
“I’m sorry, Mademoiselle, but I don’t understand you.”
She stepped closer, stood next to the bed and said something else. He heard joindre.
“You want to join me?”
“Oui.”
He took her hand and let her sit on the edge of the bed. She smelled of army-issue soap. “Are you nervous?”
She shrugged and said something he thought meant “a little.”
Of course she was. She had signed a last will and testament. She had a cyanide pill in a cork in her luggage. He ran his hand over hers, raised it to his lips, and kissed her palm. “It will go well. I believe in you.”
He wanted to tell her more. That there was no invasion at Pas-de-Calais. It was all a ruse and Colonel Walker-Smythe had lied to her about it. There was no FUSAG, First U.S. Army group commanded by General Patton in Dover. Walker-Smythe had lied about that, too. The tanks and planes the Nazis had spotted in southeast England were fake, plywood and canvas. If she was captured, she would be able to repeat the lie under torture to her interrogators.
There was only one invasion coming and it was Normandy.
In June, over one hundred and fifty thousand Allied troops would land on over fifty miles of beach at dawn. Thousands of planes would fly overhead. Tens of thousands of men would assault the shore but a few miles from where she would be. She would wake up one night and hear the sounds of paratroopers landing all around and gliders would crash into the bridges. She would be in the middle of the biggest movement of troops the world had ever seen. If she was not rounded up by the Gestapo in a sweep of the Caen networks, she could be caught in crossfire when the landing happened, or be killed by a bomb dropped by her own countrymen.
He could not even tell her when this would happen so that she might protect herself. There would be messages personnels and that was all the warning she and everyone else in the Resistance would get. And the intelligence heads had decided to give many of those messages too early, to cry wolf too many times, so that when the real invasion came, the Germans would not believe it.
He wanted to tell her that failure to take and hold the Caen bridges intact would be disastrous to the Allied landings.
But if she knew those things, if she was taken, and tortured, she might disclose those plans to the Gestapo and imperil the whole of their latter day Norman Conquest.
He had loved her for so long but duty was stronger. “You are brilliant,” he assured her.
In the dark he felt but did not see her smile. Her fingers delicately traced his face. She had deliberately chewed her nails short as part of her cover and they were rough and ragged.
“Susan…”
“Susan? Qui est Susan? Je m'appelle Jeanne.”
He realised now what she wanted, what she needed.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
These were not Susan Caspian’s hands that wandered about him, deliberate and knowing. It was not even Mrs. Ellis of Leeds who edged closer, teased apart the buttons on his nightshirt, who shrugged out of her dressing gown to expose bare, white shoulders. This was the final test for Jeanne-Louise Lambert, codenamed Rat, the reserved and shabby French woman. It was she who gently pushed him back into the small bed and slid on top of him and pressed her hungry, trembling body against his.
“Susan, we agreed. We weren’t going to…”
“S'il vous plait?”
Please, she whispered against his mouth, again and again. Please.
To teach thee, I am naked first ; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?
ooOOoo
The Gentle Queen of Narnia was accustomed to all manner of uncomfortable transport - horses with bouncing gaits, swaying donkeys and mules, galleons, boats and dugouts, Gryphons, Giants, carts, and chariots. Crossing the Channel by the light of the moon in a gutted Lysander ranked among the very worse. Tebbitt had warned her and so she had stuffed softened wax in her ears but it was so very loud. Surely the gliders Peter had been training in would be better than this insufferable roar.
She was sitting on top of her little suitcase in the rear cockpit, her weapons were strapped and belted all over her body, and her knees were under her chin. How people did this with one man piloting the Lizzie and two passengers she could not imagine. She felt them descend, lower. Pressing her nose up against the cockpit canopy glass she could make out the silver strip of the beaches of the Normandy coast. The pilot would bring them in low, navigating by only map, compass, and moonlight.
She took a deep breath and let it out and the country of France began to pass beneath them. Aslan, your daughter is ready. Your will, not mine.
They followed a glimmering line of moonlit water, the River Dives she thought. There might have been gunfire or tracers but she couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the Lizzie. The pilot banked into a long, arcing circle and Susan saw lights below in the shape of an “L” created by torches of members of the Resistance. It denoted the strip of field on which the pilot would land. There were flashes from a signal light and she carefully watched the dots and dashes. She panicked for a moment that the signal was wrong, that it was a trap, then realised they were signaling in English, not French, for the pilot. It was all clear.
Her pilot shouted something and gave her a thumbs up.
She braced herself and the little plane swooped down. Susan could feel the bottom of the plane brush treetops and then they cleared the wood, dropped like a stone, and bounced onto the field.
Susan jerked open the canopy even as they were still bumping along. Ten minutes at most on the ground and then the pilot needed to be airborne. The longer they stayed here, the greater the chance of ambush by Nazi patrol. They rolled to a stop.
“Good luck, Miss!” the pilot said.
“Merci!”
She slung a Sten over her shoulder and clambered down the port ladder as two shapes jogged toward them across the field. Her feet hit French soil. She held the gun at her hip, keeping it on the two coming toward them.
“Looks to be the regulars, Miss, nothing to worry about,” the pilot shouted over the Lizzie’s whirring propeller. It was probably the last English she would hear for a long time. Regardless, she would be the judge of who approached. The two slowed.
“It’s a cold night to be in the woods.” She stated the pass phrase, calling it out in French.
“At least we can see by the light of the second moon,” one of them, male, responded. Susan lowered the Sten and the men - she could see now they were men - ran forward.
“Good evening!” the shorter man said. He handed her a stack of papers tied together with string.
These were the intelligence reports to go back to England. Susan scrambled back up the ladder and set them inside the Lizzie’s cabin. She pulled her small suitcase out and tossed it onto the grass clear of the plane.
The men were busy removing the guns from the drop tank in the Lizzie’s undercarriage. They hauled the crate out and, ducking under the wing, ran back across the field in the direction they had come with the crate between them.
Teetering on the ladder, Susan shut the canopy and jumped back down. The pilot saluted her from the cockpit. She grabbed her suitcase and ran after the men. The plane was already moving, turning about and in the light of the torches on the ground that had marked the “L” landing strip, Susan could see shadowy figures darting around, turning the torches off and disappearing into the darkness. Behind her, she heard the rumble of the plane bouncing back across the field, accelerating. She turned to look. Surely he would never clear the obscuring trees?
He did. The little plane whizzed up and she could see the trees swaying as the plane’s belly grazed their tops. Then, he was gone, taking her tie to England with him.
“Come!” she heard a man say from the cover of the dark wood.
By the time she reached the truck, there was only one man, the short one who had spoken and given her the papers for the pilot to return to London. He had the back of the truck open and the crate of machine guns already opened. She understood they were intended for the Maquis around Saint Claire, south of Caen.
She set down her suitcase.
“I am Albert Lebourgeois, the driver at the hospital.”
Which she now inferred since he was cramming British-made Stens into the back of an ambulance. “Jeanne-Louise Lambert,” Susan said. “Why don’t I hand the guns to you since you know where to hide them?”
“Thank you.” One by one, she handed him machine guns and they disappeared into nooks and crannies of the dilapidated ambulance. He fitted most of the Stens under the stretcher, in the stretcher, and in the mattress of the stretcher and in the cushions of the driver’s seat. He was obviously very accustomed to this and the whole operation was accomplished very quickly and in the dark.
She had been prepared to order loitering Resistance members away, as she’d understood that sometimes they took the arrival of an agent as an opportunity for a leisurely dinner, fete, and to raid an English agent’s luggage for cigarettes and gum. Here, she found no fault with the security protocols and was impressed with the efficiency. The other members of the Resistance who had lit the plane’s makeshift runway had already disappeared.
Lebourgeois buried the 9 mm rounds for the Stens in a fake bottom of the ambulance, under piles of bandages. He pushed everything back in place with a grunt and suddenly directed his torch on her, up and down. “You’ll need to change clothes,” he said and handed her a drab pile of cloth wadded up in the back of the ambulance. Susan had thought it was for storing the guns.
“Why? Is there something wrong with what I’m wearing?” She had spent significant effort to ensure her wardrobe was appropriate so his criticism disturbed her. Everything she was wearing and had brought was French and dated, faded and patched.
“Madame Vion will decide. For now, the baby will not fit.”
The baby? Of course. A brilliant subterfuge.
Susan scooped up the dress and held it against her. Predictably, it was many sizes too large - a maternity dress.
She went around to the side of the car and quickly slipped out of the dark top and trousers she had been wearing, put the gown on and folded up her own clothes and crammed them away in the suitcase. She didn’t trust Monsieur Lebourgeois to not use any spare piece of cloth to hide the precious Stens.
“Put the baby on,” Monsieur Lebourgeois said, handing her a pillow and belt contraption. “You will ride in the back, on top of the guns and if we get stopped, you need to pretend you are in labour.”
Susan climbed in and settled on the bed of machine guns. Lying on your back, on top of 9 mm Stens, with a fake baby strapped to your belly was almost as uncomfortable as sitting on a suitcase in a Lizzie crossing the English Channel. Lebourgeois drove them out of the wood and they began inching along the road to the Bénouville Maternity Hospital with the lights doused. The pace was maddeningly slow but she knew they would have to conserve fuel and given curfews, should not be out at all.
She felt the car slow down and turned about on the stretcher to look out the front window. Lights illuminated shapes on the road ahead.
“Patrol?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said tersely. “Hans Schmidt is the commander of the garrison in Bénouville so use his name, clearly and loudly, so they hear it.”
Susan drew a soiled sheet over her body, making sure that her fake baby was both well covered and prominent. The cries of birthing mothers she had heard in Narnia were easy to recall. She began babbling and crying and counting out the time between contractions.
The ambulance slowed and she heard harsh words that she assumed meant “Stop!” in German.
Monsieur Lebourgeois tried to say something to respond to the German soldiers at the checkpoint but Susan screamed right over him. “The baby!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. “My baby is coming! Don’t stop!”
A light shined into the window and landed on her face. “Take me to him! Our baby!” she cried. “Name him Hans after his father!”
She threw one hand over her face, clutched her stomach in the other and writhed on top of the Stens, gasping and groaning.
“Why aren’t you with me, Hans! You’re with that little whore! You said you would take me to Berlin!”
A torrent of French cursing she had learned at Beaulieu followed and having silently counted down from 120, Susan let out a scream. “Take me to the Garrison! Take me to him!”
“I need to get her to the hospital,” she heard Monsieur Lebourgeois say to the guard shining the light inside the ambulance. “Unless you want to deliver a Commander’s baby here on the road?”
He was speaking in French, but someone seemed to understand him because Susan heard what sounded like another barked order and the ambulance lurched forward.
She twisted around on top of the guns and saw something in the road ahead of them in the dimmed lights of the ambulance.
“We have an escort to the hospital,” Monsieur Lebourgeois said. “So you will need to continue your labour.”
“How far is it?” Susan asked, shifting as a gun muzzle stabbed her in the back.
“At this speed, about 30 minutes.”
When they finally pulled into the drive of the Château de Bénouville, Susan was hoarse, crying and gasping again, and calling out desperately for Hans in between contractions she counted out at less than two minutes apart.
Monsieur Lebourgeois jumped out of the ambulance and she heard doors opening and closing and voices.
She kept shrieking. This wasn’t how she’d intended to meet her Resistance contacts, but Susan was confident of her ability to imitate a birthing female. She had presided at births of Talking Beasts, layings and hatchings by Talking Birds, and births of Gryphons, Red Dwarfs (never Black), and the occasional actual human.
She clutched the rail of the stretcher, let out a piercing scream at two minutes, more or less, and cried, “He’s coming! I can feel it! Hans, you bastard!”
The door of the ambulance opened. “Bring her inside,” a woman’s crisp voice said. “Poor thing. Take her straight to the birth suite.”
“Yes! Please! Hurry! Hurry!”
Susan hoped none of the Stens would fall out as strong hands unloaded her and the stretcher. Lebourgeois was there and another man. She felt badly for neither man was young - of course if they had been young, they would not have been here at all. They would have been impressed into a work crew or conscripted into a regiment on the Russian front.
As they carried her into the front door of the hospital, she saw the German soldier next to a motorbike, looking things over with interest in the light of his torch and trying to peer into the ambulance and into the hospital’s foyer.
“Thank you, soldier,” the woman said, speaking very well and clearly and shutting the back of the ambulance. “Now leave us please so that I can see to our patient and another German baby that is coming very soon.”
To emphasize the point, Susan let out another cry. “No! Take me with you! His father is there! Hans!” She concluded with a gut wrenching, writhing groan.
Obviously wishing to avoid awkward domestic scenes, the soldier hurriedly climbed back on his motorbike and, with a quick kickstart, roared off.
The front door closed with a slam. The woman, surely it was Madame Vion, stood at the window, listening and peeping through the blackout shade.
The sounds of the motorbike faded.
Her handlers set the stretcher down on the black and white tiled floor and a collective sigh echoed in the chilly marbled foyer.
Susan stayed where she was, taking her cue from the woman at the window.
“We are clear,” she said quietly, turning away. She gave Susan a critical once over. “Well played, Mademoiselle. You are Jeanne Lambert?”
Susan threw off the soiled sheet and slid off the stretcher. “Madame Vion?”
With the fake baby and ill fitting dress, it was not a graceful few steps forward to shake Madame’s hand.
“I am she.” Her handshake was cool and regal, very much like the woman herself.
The other man, taller, older, and heavier than Lebourgeois offered his hand. “Welcome to Château de Bénouville, Mademoiselle Lambert. I am Claudius Desvignes.”
“Charmed,” Susan replied. She knew from her reading that Lebourgeois was Madame Vion’s ambulance driver and that Monsieur Desvignes was her accountant and office manager.
“I will bring the ambulance into the garage,” Lebourgeois said.
Susan shimmied out of the fake baby belt and it fell to the floor and tangled a little in her baggy gown. She stepped out of the contraption. It might be immodest but she had already stripped in a wood behind an ambulance door. “Thank you, Monsieur,” she said and handed him the belt. “Madame Vion, should I help you store what is here on the stretcher or unload the ambulance?”
She waved her hand. “My men know what needs to be done so that we may get them to our contacts.” Desvignes was already wheeling the stretcher away down a dark corridor. “Do you have a bag?”
“Here,” Lebourgeois said from the doorway, setting Susan’s battered suitcase in the foyer.
Madame Vion looked it over critically and nodded curtly. “It will do. Come. Follow me.”
Madame’s attractive heels clicked on the tiled floors; Susan’s own boots made only a soft squeak sound. It was all very dim, lit only by a torch that Madame carried, but Susan could see the proportions of the Château were huge. The corridor was wide, the ceiling was high. It had been too dark in the foyer so she had not been able to see much of the famous staircase or any of the beautiful cupola. “The office is there,” Madame Vion said, and pointed down a branching corridor. “You know the history of the Château?”
“Yes, Madame,” Susan replied politely. “It was built between 1770 and 1780 by Ledoux for the marquis of Livry and is a testament to neoclassical architecture.” It was also huge. “The council of Calvados acquired it in 1927 and you have been the administrator of the hospital here since 1935.”
“I hope you are as well prepared in other areas, Mademoiselle.” Madame Vion pushed open a door. This will be your apartment. “Please change to something appropriate and join me in my office.”
As the quick clip of Madame’s heels faded, Susan quickly donned a plain dark dress (Schiaparelli!) that was very similar to what the administrator was wearing herself. Her room had a wash basin and commode, a narrow hospital bed and a little desk. While it was not a Paris apartment, neither was it a rough Maquis camp. For what was to be done, it was perfect. It was the middle of the night, she was edgy and hungry, but Susan took a moment to put on lipstick. Madame Vion was wearing a light coat and so Susan put one on as well. If Madame was expecting Mademoiselle Lambert to take dictation at 3 in the morning, Susan would probably not be able to manage it.
It would not do to keep Madame waiting and so she hurried down the hall back to the office suite using her own torch and glad she had paid attention to the directions. The briefing papers had referred to Madame as la comtesse and though she had thought it fanciful at the time, she did not now. The Countess Vion ruled her domain and Susan recognized a Queen of the realm when she saw one. This was not to be, as the saying went, Susan’s own show.
The Château was enormous though she understood that only a small part of it was given over to maternity. The rest of the vast, drafty palace hid weapons and supplies, downed Allied fliers, and French men avoiding conscription into German slave labour, the Todt Organization, or the army.
Upon entering Madame’s practical but spacious office, it did not appear there would be any secretarial work that evening. Madame had poured two glasses of wine and set out a depressingly German plate of sausage and cheese. Susan sat next to her on the divan in the office. A single lamp burned that did not illuminate much beyond the table at which they sat.
“I thought you might be hungry,” Madame said. “We do not have bread.”
Susan sat and began weaving the cover story. “We do not have bread in Le Mans either, Aunt.”
“And how is my brother’s wife?”
“Recovering well from her cold, Aunt. She manages in the shop. Life is hard, but no more hard than anywhere else.”
Madame Vion nodded and smiled, a little. Her shrewd eyes slid over the dress Susan wore. It was old, a little frayed, and too big. “You are wearing a Schiaparelli, Jeanne?”
“Better than a Chanel, no?”
Rumours were that the famous designer had taken up with a high-ranking German officer. Susan had not deemed it advisable to include anything from Coco Chanel in her luggage.
The smile was a little wider. “Your first impression is a favourable one.”
“Thank you, Aunt,” Susan replied. “And thank you for having me. I shall do whatever you ask to ease your work.”
“Eat, please. You have had a difficult journey.” Susan dutifully took a small piece of cheese and tasted it, conscious that this was a test of how she ate it and her reaction to it. To a Narnian palate, it was fine. To English tastes, it was milky, soft, and foreign tasting. She wondered if this was the sort of food that the French had made and then hidden from the Nazis, or fobbed it off on their occupiers as not worthy of consumption. She did not know how the French would value what she ate now.
Madame Vion let out a little sigh. “I will need to watch you carefully, Jeanne, to ensure you do not betray yourself or us. The Germans I think you can fool. The Milice are another matter though they are not so active this far north. We must keep you from them.”
“Should I have appreciated the cheese or spit it out?” Susan asked. She wished these were errors that she could avoid.
“It is Pont-l'Évêque, a famous cheese of Normandy and a great rarity in these times.”
Susan deliberately took another bite, registering the taste. “Thank you for giving me my first taste of Pont-l'Évêque!” Susan exclaimed. “It was always too fine for our humble meals! I will take only another small piece. We must save it for a special occasion!”
Madame Vion nodded. “Better. You look younger than you are and that will work to our advantage. A woman wishes to be sophisticated and look older than she is until the day she wishes she appeared young again. I would prefer your presence was unnecessary altogether. Having you here is a great risk.”
“You already take great risks, Aunt, but I understand your concern and share it. Information about the bridges is important to the liberation of France. Which means we must not be caught for we might reveal to our enemy some part of a larger plan.”
Léa Vion had been successful in the Resistance for four years with a garrison less than two kilometres away. Dozens of fliers and other people had been smuggled out of the Château de Bénouville and Susan knew the odds - usually one person died for every Allied soldier saved. Whole networks had been rolled up, hundreds of agents dead and disappeared, but Léa Vion was still here.
Madame raised her glass of wine and Susan brought up hers as well. “Santé, Jeanne.”
The French toast translated as health.
“Santé, Aunt.”
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3 Part 1 Part 2
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6 Part 1 Part 2