‘Don’t hang around,’ he said.
Rosie tried to pull up Eugene’s shirt to get a look at his wound, but he blocked her with a trembling hand.
‘Get out of here. I’m going to die.’
Eugene was fiddling in a blood-soaked area around his belt. She realised he was going for his L-pill, which packed a fatal dose of cyanide.
‘They might be able to keep me alive for a while,’ he said. ‘Taking this makes sure.’
Rosie straightened up, breathed deep and slumped against the wall in a state of complete exhaustion. The scene was carnage: gore splattered up the wall, boots swilling in blood. Part of Rosie felt blind panic. She had to get her mind back in focus.
Edith shouted weakly from upstairs. ‘Hello?’
Just because it had gone quiet didn’t mean that all the bad guys were dead. The vehicles out front were both destroyed. There were horses to escape on, but it would take time to saddle them up and sort Edith out. Time she might not have…
Rosie looked up the stairs and saw Edith in the bedroom doorway, wearing the dress but no shoes. ‘I’ve got to go check the outside,’ Rosie said urgently.
Everyone in front of the house seemed dead, and although Eugene was dying he was still poised with the machine gun in case something came out of the bushes.
Rosie went to the back of the cottage. She rolled the dead German off Madame Lisle’s corpse and snatched his rifle, knowing it would do better than a pistol or a machine gun if she had to shoot at someone in the bushes.
She reloaded as she peeked out of the back door. The paddock looked idyllic, though the horses in the stable blocks on either side had been disturbed by the noise. There was no sign of the admiral’s horse, though its path was clear from the chunks torn out of a hedge.
There were four dead Germans out back, but the one Rosie shot on the helmet was just knocked out. It seemed wrong to kill a man who was unconscious, but he could come round at any moment and she didn’t have time to mess about tying him up.
After shooting him through the heart with the rifle, Rosie made a complete circuit of the cottage, keeping close to the walls in case one of the Gestapo men was hiding out in the bushes. Besides the admiral and his two companions, Rosie counted eight dead Gestapo.
Back in the hallway, Eugene was losing the fight. He’d gone much paler and tried saying something, but all he could do was shake and make a long croak. But his eyes showed Rosie his problem: his grip was weak and his lethal pill floated in the blood pooled between his legs
‘They can’t take me,’ he finally muttered.
Rosie doubted Eugene would survive more than a few minutes, but despite being in agony he seemed anxious about being captured. She crouched down and picked the rugby-ball-shaped pill out of the blood.
‘Do you want it?’ Rosie asked, as tears smudged her vision.
Eugene parted his lips. His face felt cold as Rosie balanced the pill between his teeth and then pushed up his lower jaw to crush it.
‘I let you down,’ Eugene croaked.
As Rosie took the machine gun and made half a step back, the cyanide paralysed Eugene’s breathing and his body began convulsing from a heart attack.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rosie felt like breaking down. At least fourteen people had died in four crazy minutes and it might have overwhelmed her if she hadn’t had to concentrate on helping Edith.
‘I can’t carry you far,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m not as strong as Eugene.’
Rosie stripped her equipment pack down to essentials: three grenades, pistol, machine gun, her ID, Madame Lisle’s bandages and iodine plus the first aid kit, money, maps, compass, some food and refilled water canteens.
Rosie helped Edith down the stairs, then piggybacked her a dozen paces through the gore in the hallway and left her sitting on the doorstep at the back of the kitchen. There still might be Gestapo in the bushes, so Rosie didn’t hang about as she belted across to the stables, with Eugene’s blood-crusted machine gun slung over her shoulder.
There was a saddle room at one end of the stables, but Rosie had only ridden a few times and had never prepared a horse herself.
Which way round did a saddle go? How tightly? How would she know which horses were good for riding? Should they take one horse or two?
‘I’ve got no clue,’ Rosie confessed, once she’d dashed back to Edith. ‘Do you think you can help?’
Edith had found a pair of Madame Lisle’s rubber boots by the back door. They were slightly too big, but made walking on her badly scarred feet more bearable. She moved across to the stables with an arm around Rosie’s back, but the sight and smell of horses seemed to rejuvenate her.
Friendly heads poked over the stable door and Edith gave two animals handfuls of fresh grass to keep them calm as she led them out and talked Rosie through fitting the saddles.
‘You’re sure you’re OK to ride?’ Rosie asked. ‘It might get hairy.’
‘If I can cling on to Eugene, I can ride a horse,’ Edith said.
It took nearly ten minutes to get the horses ready. Edith asked for her own pistol and Rosie considered running back to the house to get one, but they heard a car approaching and cars only meant Germans, because civilians in the military zone weren’t allowed petrol.
After giving Edith a lift into the stirrup, Rosie mounted her horse as voices sounded fifty metres away, around the front of the house.
‘We were ambushed,’ a German was saying. ‘At least half-a-dozen guns blazing at us.’
Rosie gave her horse a little kick and said gee-up, but the animal regarded this with contempt.
‘Not like that,’ Edith said. ‘A little higher up, and give it more of a snap.’
Rosie looked back anxiously, half expecting men to come running around the house aiming rifles while her horse stood rigid.
‘Gee-up.’
This time Rosie kicked a little too hard and the horse shot off in an indignant gallop, almost knocking Rosie off backwards.
Edith was alarmed as Rosie’s horse stormed off. ‘Hard on the reins,’ she yelled. ‘Got to show her who’s boss.’
Rosie pulled the reins more in hope than expectation. The horse came to a complete halt, but Edith had galloped up alongside, and the presence of Edith’s horse seemed to act as a calming influence on Rosie’s. After their jerky restart, the two animals began trotting side by side.
As the newly arrived Germans took in the full extent of the carnage inside and around the house, the two teenagers vanished out of sight behind the stable block, then down a slight hill and on to a footpath that ran between the surrounding fields.
‘We’ll put a few kilometres in, then find a spot where we can hide out until dark,’ Rosie said.
‘I know all the tracks around here,’ Edith answered, as Rosie noticed that blood was already seeping into the back of Edith’s clean dress. ‘But we should pick up the pace, are you ready for a gallop?’
*
Rosie never got comfortable in the saddle, but the pair rode for thirty minutes without incident. They skirted around villages to avoid being seen, but it was daylight and they still passed horses, carts, and even a gang of prisoners repairing roads, under the eye of grizzled French guards.
Fortunately there were no telephones out here and the local Gendarmes4 didn’t have radios. So unless they encountered men dispatched specifically to look for them, they’d be long gone by the time anyone realised that they’d seen Lorient’s most wanted ride by.
When they reached the abandoned farms of the buffer zone, they found a stream where the horses could drink and settled down in the grass.
Rosie was shocked by how much Edith was sweating when she helped her down off the horse. Edith drank water and nibbled some pieces of fruit, but she doubled over and vomited within minutes of eating them.
‘Let it all come out,’ Rosie said, as she held Edith’s hair back.
‘I can’t get sick now,’ Edith said, clutching her bony fists with frustration. ‘I
’ve got to fight it.’
Rosie tried to keep cheerful for Edith’s sake, but her weakness was no surprise. Edith had barely eaten in a week and she’d spent days on a filthy cell floor while covered with open wounds. Rosie suspected that the vomiting and sweats were signs of an infection spreading into Edith’s bloodstream.
‘I feel dizzy,’ Edith said. Then she sobbed. ‘I was ready to die. No offence, but you shouldn’t have tried to rescue me.’
Rosie didn’t reply, but largely agreed. Eugene had known that the rescue was a huge risk. Perhaps if she’d stood up to him he’d be alive right now and so would Madame Lisle.
As the afternoon wore on, Rosie wiped Edith down to keep her cool and tried getting her to drink as much as possible. Eventually Edith fell asleep. After pulling Edith into the shade, Rosie pulled off her own boots and socks and spent a long time sitting with her feet in the stream.
Rosie kept vigilant for search parties as she washed the outside of her boots and wiped the blood off the machine gun. Then she took the map of their escape plan from her backpack and felt miserable as she studied markings and notes made in Eugene’s handwriting.
They’d planned to take photographs and make up a false identity for Edith while at Madame Lisle’s house, then set off as soon as it started getting dark. They would then have ridden fifteen kilometres across country to a single-track railway which supplied coal to a power station at Moelan sur Mer.
War played havoc with train schedules, but Eugene had somehow confirmed that the power station was still operational and fed by a nightly delivery of coal. The train didn’t stop, but was easily boarded when it slowed to a crawl on a hilly section of track near the village of Lisloch.
Eugene’s plan had involved riding the coal train fifty or sixty kilometres to wherever it got to at daybreak. Then they’d have used their wits to make their way to Paris, but they’d hoped to find themselves in a lightly-policed rural area with immaculate documentation and all their major headaches behind them.
Rosie had no idea if she’d be able to get Edith aboard the slow-moving train on her own, she had no way of making up false documents and with a fever setting in, Edith urgently needed to see a doctor.
*
Rosie felt too edgy to eat, but she forced herself to nibble fruit and cheese as it grew dark.
‘Time to wake up,’ she said gently, as she crouched over Edith.
The skinny body had its head resting on Rosie’s backpack. She nudged Edith several times, but nothing happened. Rosie was wary of inflicting pain and there was hardly any part of Edith that wasn’t injured, but after a third nudge Rosie grabbed Edith’s shoulder and rolled her on to her back.
‘We have to leave or we’ll miss the train.’
As Edith’s body moved, Rosie felt an extraordinary blast of heat. Edith was like a little furnace. Her dress was soaking, and while Rosie didn’t have a medical thermometer it didn’t take one to see that Edith was burning up. She put her thumb against Edith’s eyebrow and slowly raised the lid. The pupil reacted to the sudden change in light but she didn’t wake up.
Rosie found the pulse in Edith’s neck and counted fourteen beats in six seconds. You’d expect a hundred and forty beats per minute if you’d jogged a couple of kilometres, but Edith’s heart rate should have been under half that after four hours’ sleep.
Rosie felt overwhelmed by the responsibility that had fallen on her. The trickling stream was deafening and trees seemed to loom over her like ghosts.
Notes
4 Gendarmes – French civilian police officers.
CHAPTER NINE
The railway line bisected the landscape, making it easy for Rosie to find in the dark. She’d taken a single horse and ridden slowly. She was lucky not to sight trouble, because it would have been impossible to go faster with Edith slumped unconscious over the saddle behind her.
Just after midnight a fully-laden coal train began shaking the ground Rosie sat on. It wound down the hillside at more than twenty kilometres an hour, curving around a large S, designed to ease the gradient when it climbed back up.
Rosie squatted as close to the track as she dared. She’d imagined square-sided trucks like the wagons on her brother’s clockwork train set, but much to her relief, these wagons carried coal in V-shaped pivot-mounted skips, enabling them to be emptied rapidly by tipping. At one end each wagon had a metal platform used to access and maintain the mechanism.
‘I’m so thirsty,’ Edith said weakly.
Rosie almost missed her voice over the clattering train, but dived into the trackside bushes where she was lying and allowed her to drink greedily from a canteen.
‘You’re doing great,’ Rosie lied, stroking Edith’s hair as she raised her head to stop her choking.
‘I’m seeing funny shapes,’ Edith said.
‘It’s the fever. You’re delirious.’
The train seemed endless and by the time fifty coal wagons passed Edith had drifted back into unconsciousness.
Rosie had no idea how long it would take for the train to offload and steam back, but Eugene had expected it well before sunrise. She sat beside Edith, cradling her head and envying the carefree horse munching grass a few metres away.
It was near 3 a.m. when Rosie heard the first rumblings of the train heading back. Edith couldn’t hold on, so Rosie aimed her bag on to the platform of a passing wagon, then grabbed Edith off the grass and needed all the muscle she’d built up in training to sling her over her shoulder.
Jumping aboard was precarious, but Rosie got a foot on a metal step and steadied herself by grabbing a metal rung used for climbing inside the container. After lying Edith out on the metal platform and tucking her under the angled side of the coal skip to make her invisible, Rosie crawled along the ledge at the side of the wagon to retrieve her backpack from two wagons up.
She had no problem getting there, but the train crested the hilltop as she turned back. Noise and vibration grew as the train picked up speed. The pack made it hard to balance and she had to pull herself in desperately as overhanging branches thrashed the side of the wagon.
When the ordeal was over, her heart was belting. She was black with coal dust, and even more alarmingly the increased vibration had moved Edith’s body several centimetres, leaving her head poking off the metal platform.
‘Quite an adventure,’ someone said.
Rosie jolted with fright as she saw two white eyeballs peeking over the end of the skip in the next wagon.
‘You’re better off using the foot holds,’ a boyish voice explained. ‘Climb through the skip and out at the other end.’
Rosie went for her pistol, making the eyes panic and drop back into the skip. ‘How’d you get here?’ she yelled. ‘What are you after?’
‘How’d you get a gun?’ the voice asked back. ‘Don’t shoot me. I was trying to help.’
Rosie thought before answering. Someone this young was probably no threat, but unlikely to be travelling the middle of the night without company.
‘What are you doing here?’ Rosie asked.
‘Nabbing coal,’ the boy explained, his voice now echoing from deep in the skip.
‘Are you alone?’
The boy considered this question for a few moments before answering. ‘I’m alone. Will you shoot me if I stick my head back up?’
‘Not unless you try something,’ Rosie said.
But she felt vaguely ridiculous saying this, because the coal-black creature that swung its leg over the side of the truck was ten years old at most.
‘I saw you jump on,’ the boy said. ‘Never hang off the sides like that. We’re coming up to some tunnels. They’d have caught your luggage and minced you.’
Rosie nodded as the boy landed on the platform with a clank. He wore tattered trousers and boots held together with twine.
‘I’m Justin,’ the boy said, as he studied Edith. ‘Your friend looks bad.’
‘She’s sick,’ Rosie said. ‘Are you running away, or something??
??
‘I would if I didn’t have a mum and three sisters to feed,’ Justin said. ‘This is my work. I sneak into a loaded wagon on the way out. On the way back I work along all the skips, collecting the lumps of coal. Every wagon has a few bits that don’t get tipped out.’
‘Quite a scheme,’ Rosie said.
‘I can sell you coal if you want it,’ the boy said, as he scratched his matted hair. ‘I do OK, but the dust makes you itch like a bastard.’
Edith laughed, because it was kind of cute hearing this little lad swear. ‘I don’t need coal.’
‘I could swap coal for food if you haven’t got money.’
‘You must come from somewhere,’ Rosie said.
‘Course,’ the boy said. ‘But you didn’t tell me your name when I told you mine, which is being evasive.’
He made evasive sound important. As if it was the new word he’d learned in school the week before.
‘I’m Rosie,’ Rosie said, though she realised she should have lied. ‘Do you ever get caught?’
‘Loadsa times,’ Justin said. ‘The driver and guard let me be, but the railway police bash me up if they catch me.’
‘Sounds rough.’
‘Tunnel,’ Justin said urgently, before taking a quick breath and burying his face inside his jacket.
Rosie didn’t understand why until they plunged into pitch darkness. The blast of steam from the engine billowed around the tunnel, and air currents blew up a storm of coal dust off the wagons. She began coughing, then made things worse by rubbing her eye with a blackened finger.
Justin sounded exhilarated when they came out. ‘You’ve gotta take a deep breath when you see a tunnel. It’s actually fun once you get used to it.’
Rosie didn’t see the appeal as she hunted blindly for her water and blinked the grit out of her eye. Then she remembered Edith and turned anxiously to see what the tunnel had done to her.
‘Did your friend fall off the horse or something?’ Justin asked.
Rosie couldn’t tell whether the dust had affected Edith. But she was starting to realise that Justin might be more than an irritation.