The Secrets of Provence

Prologue

The German sighs, placing both hands flat on the table: such long, elegant fingers, the nails carefully manicured.

Mathilde knows he’s a man of culture and refinement, one of her husband’s best customers.

She’d be happier if Jacques refused to serve Nazis in his bookshop but, as he reminds her, his mother’s medical treatment is expensive and the family has to eat.

So he sells Kriminalassistent Werner Schmidt first editions at knockdown prices, thanks to an exchange rate that favours the Germans, and the two men talk about the relative merits of Racine and Shakespeare without acknowledging the fact they’re on opposing sides, and that Schmidt holds all the power in their relationship, such as it is.

The Boche are terrorising and starving Jacques’ fellow Parisians, while their officers eat in the best restaurants and send furs stolen from Jewish women home to their wives.

Schmidt picks up the leaflet and shows it to her with a sad smile, raising his eyebrows as he places it back on the table. Really? he seems to be asking. Is this the best you can do?

‘Do tell me how you came by this document,’ is what he actually says.

‘Someone must have dropped it into my basket,’ Mathilde replies. ‘As I’ve already told your colleagues, I was jostled by a stranger, but by the time I realised what had happened, he’d gone. Or she.’

‘How convenient.’ Schmidt lights a cigarette and blows out a column of smoke as he gazes into the distance.

Hold your nerve, Mathilde tells herself; they need more to arrest you than a single tract.

When she realised she was being followed, she managed to push most of her papers into a conveniently placed post box without being noticed.

Only this last folded sheet remained, caught at the bottom of her basket.

‘It’s not just one leaflet, though, is it?’ Schmidt remarks, as if he can read her mind. ‘We know what you and your colleagues at the museum are up to, and sooner or later, we’ll catch you in the act.’

‘I have no idea what you mean,’ Mathilde tells him, though her heart is beating faster. Have the Gestapo found the printing press in the basement of another bookshop? Should she warn the others, or is it already too late?

Herr Schmidt leans across the table, fixing her with his cold, clever eyes. ‘The war is over, Madame Duval, and these petty acts of rebellion are pointless. What do you think a call to arms such as this will achieve?’

Mathilde shrugs. ‘I don’t even know what the leaflet says.’

But she has a clear answer to his question: if a single person in the whole of Paris reads their message and realises there are others who won’t accept defeat, who are banding together to fight back, then the risks she’s been running will be worth it.

A spark of resistance is all that’s required, because that spark can be fanned into a flame and fire spreads rapidly when the conditions are right: when people are humiliated, and hungry, and desperate.

These small gestures of defiance – every Nazi poster she’s torn down, every leaflet she’s distributed, even the lost German soldier she sent the wrong way – they must add up to something.

Others will notice, even if they don’t have the nerve to follow her example.

‘I don’t actually need another reason to lock you up,’ Herr Schmidt says, tapping a cylinder of ash on to the floor. ‘There are enough grounds already.’

‘Hearsay and one piece of propaganda?’ Mathilde replies. ‘I doubt it. Besides, what would my husband think?’

Schmidt looks at her sharply and she knows she’s hit a nerve.

The German can’t hide his interest in Jacques; he’s always hanging around the bookshop, reeking of cologne and intention as he engages her husband in awkward conversation.

He’s probably lonely and it can’t be easy for a homosexual in the Gestapo – although Ernst Rohm, the former head of the SA Brownshirts, seemed to get away with it if the rumours were to be believed.

Mathilde’s tried to warn Jacques what Schmidt’s after, but he refuses to believe her.

Dear Jacques: he has no idea how handsome he is, and he’s never been particularly worldly.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you went away,’ Schmidt muses, almost to himself.

He stands and walks to the window, drawing on his cigarette, then grinds the stub beneath his heel and turns to her.

‘Yes, I want you gone. There’s no place in Paris for a troublemaker like you.

Either I throw you in prison – and I can do that in a second, believe me – or you leave the city and in fact the whole occupied zone immediately. Which is it to be?’

Mathilde thinks quickly. Schmidt obviously wants her out of the way so he can cosy up to Jacques, but her husband is a grown man and can look after himself.

Schmidt won’t do him any harm, apart from a certain amount of embarrassment.

Leaving the occupied zone would also solve a problem that’s becoming more urgent by the day: the fact she and Jacques are hiding an English neighbour in their apartment who would otherwise have been interned in a camp for foreigners.

Madame Scott-Jones needs someone to escort her south and Mathilde would be the ideal person.

‘I have a cousin in Avignon,’ she tells Schmidt.

‘And you’d guarantee to stay there?’ he asks.

She nods. Jacques can’t join her immediately because his mother is dying, yet when the inevitable happens, he’ll surely travel south.

He might love his bookshop but he loves Mathilde more, and although they might be parted for a few months, even a year, they’ll be together again eventually.

She can carry on fighting the Nazis from Provence; her cousin Pierre was a fervent Communist before the party was banned, so he’s bound to be active in some kind of resistance.

Schmidt claps his hands against his thighs.

‘That’s settled, then. I’ll give you an Ausweis for the unoccupied zone.

You must leave tomorrow morning, though, before you change your mind.

’ He gives a wolfish, sardonic smile. ‘You and your husband have reason to be grateful to me. I hope you realise how lucky you are.’

Mathilde can’t bring herself to utter the thanks he’s clearly expecting; she merely stares at him, trying to keep the contempt out of her eyes.

When her pass has been arranged and she’s finally discharged from police custody, he drives her back to their apartment and tells Jacques what’s been decided.

She watches from the doorway as the two men talk together.

How can Jacques be so unaware of the hunger in Schmidt’s eyes, and the air thrumming with tension?

She wonders with rising dread whether she’s made the wrong decision.

But what choice did she have? Schmidt was going to get rid of her somehow, and rotting in jail is pointless.

Saying goodbye to Jacques’ mother is hard enough, knowing she’ll never see the old lady again, but parting from her husband is agony.

After a supper that no one has the appetite to eat, the two of them climb the steep hill to Sacré-C?ur and stand with their backs to the ghostly white building, gazing into the dark.

A thousand everyday tragedies are playing out in the city below: lovers quarrelling, children crying, broken hearts mourning their dead.

In an attempt to assert some sort of control, she and Jacques agree that they’ll try to meet in this spot every year on the evening of their wedding anniversary: 3 September.

They were married the day war was declared and the world changed for ever.

‘That’s what we’ll do,’ Mathilde says, clinging on to his hand while she still can. ‘It may be difficult until the war’s over but we’ll keep coming back until we find each other again.’

She’s trying to convince herself as much as him, because a terrifying image has flashed into her head: a young man with dark hair, lying with his head thrown back in a pool of blood on the cobblestones. She gazes into her husband’s beloved face, committing every feature to memory.

‘Don’t be afraid, chéri,’ she says. ‘Death is coming for all of us, sooner or later. It’s how we live that matters.’