Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
LUCY
The next morning, Lucy woke early. The storm had cooled down Cordeval and a fresh breeze blew in through her window.
She could’ve had a leisurely breakfast and enjoyed the break in the heat, but she had things to do and not much time to do them before giving Polly her answer.
She was sure there were still secrets left to uncover, and she wanted to know who from the book club had died in the square.
Finding the treasure trove in the cellar had made her wonder if there could be clues down there, as it was where the book club had met.
She threw on her clothes, quickly pulled back her hair and carefully went down the worn, stone steps.
Lucy suspected that Mémé must’ve come down here but hadn’t wanted to touch the time capsule that her mother and her friends had left behind. Perhaps Mémé had even tended to it over the years.
The scent of the sea was still there, although she couldn’t hear the sound of furious waves crashing as she had the evening before. 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 for Glitz magazine.
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 said La C?te Normande on 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.