Chapter 2
TWO
MARGOT
The cellar beneath Margot’s bookshop was lit with candles, dotted sparingly around the room. Margot and her friends sat close together in a circle, their faces pale against the darkness. Their features trembled in the flickering light.
They were risking their lives by being here.
No one knew they were down here in this chilly cellar under a bookshop, plotting resistance and breaking the curfew imposed on them by the Germans. Above ground, there were Nazi soldiers marching through the streets of their village on the edge of the sea.
Almost all Margot’s friends were there, sipping the warmed cider spiced with the little cinnamon she could spare.
Before the war, Margot loved this time of year.
The leaves on thousands of apple trees across Normandy turned the region golden, and the air became tangy with the fruit.
But it was hard to find joy in the change of the seasons now, when they were ruled by so much fear and anger.
One seat in their circle was empty: Margot’s dearest friend, Esther, hadn’t arrived.
They’d known each other all their lives, sharing laughter in good times and tears in the bad.
When Margot had returned to the village from Rouen as a widow, Esther had been there for her, listening to her when she needed to speak, embracing her as she wept.
Four months earlier, Esther had given birth to her baby, Isabelle, a round-cheeked, happy little soul.
Margot still remembered that day of panic and joy; she’d run to get Brigitte, the local doctor, and had held Esther’s hand through the hours it took for Isabelle to make her grand entrance.
Afterwards, Margot had fussed like a mother hen, ensuring mother and baby were comfortable, getting what supplies she could, and cooking meals for Esther as she nursed her baby.
Now Margot clutched her hands anxiously. What if something had happened to Esther and Isabelle? Her friends had all taken a huge risk to come through the dark streets just before midnight to reach the bookshop.
She could feel the tension in the room. The clock upstairs in the shop struck midnight, a bright sound that seemed out of place with the darkness in the cellar.
‘Well… it’s midnight,’ Margot said, her voice trembling. ‘Thanks for coming. Just one more member of our book club to come.’
Aunt Sandrine was knitting in the candlelight, and looked up from the stitches without dropping a single one.
She was wrapped up warmly in a cardigan she had knitted herself.
The candlelight caught the silver strands in her dark hair, which was pulled back from her gently lined, heart-shaped face.
‘She’ll have got caught up with the baby,’ she said gently.
‘Little ones run to their own timetable.’
‘That’s true, they do,’ Madame Guerin agreed with an indulgent chuckle. She was a widow, and bought a new book almost every week from Margot’s shop. She worked in the café on the village square, and when it was quiet she could be seen surreptitiously reading a book hidden under the counter.
Margot nodded. Yes, the baby. It had to be that.
Sylvie, a sempstress who made beautiful gowns for the wealthy people who visited Clarenville-sur-Mer along the coast, leaned into the candlelight and pressed Margot’s hand. ‘I darted from shadow to shadow to get here. Esther’ll do the same, with her little one. They’ll be all right, Margot.’
‘I’m going to look out for her,’ Margot decided. She couldn’t sit and wait any longer.
She picked up a candle in a brass candlestick, shielding the flame with her hand as she headed out of the cellar and up the stairs.
She took each step as carefully as she could to stop the old wood from creaking.
There was no one else in the building, but the occupation made her paranoid.
Then, once she was on the landing at the back of the bookshop, she slowly pushed open the door that led into the small garden behind.
She could hear laughter and voices floating through the air. The Nazis were drinking and enjoying themselves at the bar across the road.
Margot strained to see in the darkness. The garden was full of shadows.
The old, twisted apple tree looked like it was raising gnarled fingers to the sky.
A wooden gate was set in the wall at the back of the garden, where a path ran behind the shops.
She saw the latch slowly lift, and her heart was in her throat.
She clutched the candlestick tightly. The gate opened a sliver at first, then just enough for a figure to slip through the space. Margot finally released her held breath as she saw Esther step into the garden and close the gate behind her with a barely audible click of the latch.
She held a bundle: little Isabelle, who had brought such light to all their lives. Esther bowed her head to briefly dot a kiss to the head of the sleeping infant who was cuddled so tight to her.
Margot smiled with relief. There was a burst of sudden, raucous laughter, which made her heart jump until she realised it was just the noise of German soldiers at the bar carrying on the chill autumn night air. How dare they have fun, while everyone else was forced to creep about in the dark.
Together the two women slipped into the shop and closed the door on the night outside.
As soon as they were safely concealed, Esther whispered, ‘I’m sorry to be late.
I came across the beach because it seemed safer than the coast road, but the Professor was down by the pier.
If not for being on his blind side, he would’ve seen us. ’
Theo Lauterborn, the man everyone in the village called the Professor.
Margot had known him for years, but didn’t trust him.
Not any more. He was a little older than her, she supposed, his hair dark blond with only a hint of grey, his moustache neatly trimmed.
He sometimes came to the shop to buy stationery and sheet music, which Margot ordered in for him.
He lived in an old fisherman’s cottage on the edge of the village and kept himself to himself.
All she knew was that he was a musician, and that he had lost the sight in one eye.
It looked milky, as if it had turned into a sightless marble.
Once, before the war, he’d broken through his solitary shell and shown her kindness, when he’d heard that Margot had lost her husband a couple of years before. They’d talked, and she’d wondered about the quiet man who lived on his own, and what his life had been like before he’d come to Cordeval.
But then the war had come.
He played the piano sometimes in Petit’s bar across the road and the sound would drift up to Margot’s window in the apartment above the shop. But he was a German, and whenever Margot found herself enjoying his music she felt a stab of guilt.
‘Thank goodness he didn’t see you,’ she said, holding out the candle. ‘I don’t trust that man at all.’
‘What business did he have being out so late?’ Esther asked. Then she chuckled and added, ‘But then he might ask, what business do I have being out so late? Better that such questions aren’t ever asked.’
‘We’ve started a secret book club, and Nazis like you aren’t welcome!’ Margot teased.
She led the way into the cellar, where her friends looked up from their whispering.
‘Ahh, there they are!’ Aunt Sandrine cooed. She paused her knitting to wiggle her fingers towards the sleeping baby.
‘She’s such a beauty!’ Colette beamed at Isabelle. She was a florist, and one of the younger club members, with wavy chestnut hair under a hand-knitted beret.
Margot led Esther to her seat, then announced with a grin, ‘I call to order the very first meeting of the Resistance Book Club!’
A ripple of excitement ran around the circle of Margot’s friends. They shouldn’t be here, and they certainly shouldn’t name what they were doing in such a way. But this was their own, small act of defiance against an occupying army.
‘We must resist now more than ever,’ Esther said. ‘Everything we do, no matter how tiny it is, is something.’
‘First of all, we’ll be breaking the curfew each week, just by being here – as you all know,’ Margot said, taking her seat again. She glanced from face to face peering from the darkness, before adding, ‘And we’re breaking their rules again by what we’re going to read.’
In the shadows where the candles didn’t reach, amid the stacks of books that filled Margot’s cellar, there was the sound of a creaking hinge. Then the door to the tunnels, long unused, began to open.
Around Margot the women started with surprise in the second before a small figure darted into the cellar with a whisper of, ‘All right, troops? You wouldn’t believe how many folks don’t bother to lock these smuggler’s doors!’
Young Beatrice closed the door and planted her hands on her hips. ‘What if I’d been Adolf Hitler, eh? I would’ve goosestepped right in here and given the lot of you what-for!’
‘The tunnels!’ Margot smiled at Beatrice. ‘You clever girl. That’s what we’ll do in future, to avoid the Nazis patrolling the streets. Come through the tunnels!’
The tunnels ran like a maze under the town, and most houses with cellars had a door that opened into them.
They’d been carved out by smugglers, so some people said, and others claimed they’d provided an escape route for aristocrats during the revolution.
But they weren’t used much now, and they were damp and smelt of the sea.
Claudine, who was still wearing her oilskins after being out in her father’s fishing boat earlier, nodded eagerly. Her short, bobbed hair poked out from a high collar that kept out the cold and the wet. ‘Of course, the tunnels – why didn’t we think of that before?’
‘I’ll keep that door bolted from now on,’ Margot said, relieved that they’d found a solution to the curfew. ‘But we’ll have a secret knock for the book club.’