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*
They meet when they are both nineteen, in 1930, when Satine’s father’s business empire has collapsed and they are reduced to what little their aristocratic name can trade upon. He introduces himself as Ben, a student from Covent Garden due to take up a scholarship at Oxford; she, happy to be talking to someone who won’t know the difference between how she looked when she had a maid to do her hair and pearls to wear, and now, drags him out onto the dance floor at the Berkeley hotel without a second thought.
“You’re very clumsy,” is her conclusion; he blushes, not at all well, and half-stammers, but then something reminds him that he must have a brain underneath that thick hair, and for the next two hours, they go toe-to-toe with such gusto that Satine forgets all about her father waiting at home with the heating turned off, and the deplorable state of her shoes, and devotes all her attention to telling off this strange boy who doesn’t even know what pacifism is, for God’s sake, and desperately needs to be educated on the same.
“Why are you so interested in it, anyway?” he asks over the din of the band’s jazz, when she’s gotten incredibly angry at the fact that he argues the side of conflict as Necessary Evil.
“My father fought in France,” she retorts, and feels the old pang of guilt rise in her again at the fact that she is here, now, determined to make a life of her own, and not at home with him. “Nothing will ever be worth that catastrophe happening again.”
“I agree completely.”
Satine blinks, surprised. “You do?”
“Card-carrying member of War Resisters’ International,” he admits, sheepishly, and only laughs when she hits at his arm.
“You rotter! Why did you – ?”
“I like arguing with you,” he says, quieter, and she finds herself taken aback by his face when it is contemplating something serious, as though there’s a dignity to him she had previously missed. “Can I write to you?”
She says yes. They write to each other for a few months, long, chatty letters in which he describes settling in at Oxford and how much he admires his tutor, the excitement of his studies, his disgust for a local group of students who call themselves fascists; she writes back of what society functions she can still afford to go to, tells herself that she mustn’t write of privation when there are so many suffering worse than her, when, her entire life, she has been told that she is lucky. Six months later, their correspondence has petered out, and she thinks little of it.
In 1936 she joins the PPU, and finds herself whispering its pledge in her sleep, as she wakes and drifts away. ‘I renounce war,’ she thinks, as she cleans her teeth each morning; ‘I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.’ Her father seems to grow weaker month by month; he is shriveling and withering in the winter months, pallid and feeble in summer.
She doesn’t often think of Ben anymore – when she does, it is with the mild sense of curiosity over the fact that he has not come back down to London when his days at Oxford must surely be up. She writes him a letter, once, on a whim, not even sure how to address it; when she receives a reply weeks later, just as anodyne and politely written as hers, she finds out that he is a postgraduate, now, and due to finish any day; his tutor is in the process of admitting him to the professoriate, putting the old boys network to its task. He will not be leaving his sleepy world of church bells and punts just yet.
In 1938, she supports Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in Czechoslovakia with every fiber of her being; and even more so when her father passes barely a week after she watches the newsreel, in her local cinema, of the piece of paper fluttering in the Prime Minister’s hand. There follow busy weeks of heartache and long, very long days sorting through and reorganizing her father’s papers; the lawyers descend, all the condescending men who discover too late her sharp head for business and go home again with their egos bruised and smarting. There is more money in the family – in her hands – than she had ever thought, she realizes. She could do something with it, but she doesn’t have the space, just yet, to decide exactly what.
The news of the invasion of Poland strikes at her like venom, makes her itch and pace and lose her sleep for nights on end. She mails leaflets, she marches, she recites her slogans in her head. None of it seems to do much for her state of mind.
In early 1940, she hears of Ben again – this time in a form most shocking, unbelievably profane. His name is in the papers, and his photograph, too – ONE OXFORD OBJECTOR SPARED, they blare, alongside cramped columns of text. He has gone before a tribunal, to be judged against the requirements of the National Service Act of 1939, alongside his tutor (Satine has never seen him before, and finds his rugged black-and-white face handsome, in a calm-inducing, stern sort of way). As the headlines suggest, only the professor is allowed to be a ‘true’ conscientious objector against the conflict, allowed to return to Oxford with his life, if not his reputation, intact – there are intimations that it is because of his age, because of (with a snide, cutting sort of tone) he is Irish, and they couldn’t have expected courage of him anyway. The young lecturer, however, will go to war.
Satine stares at these stories for a long time. Thinks – she’s not sure she likes the beard Ben has grown. Beyond that, she cannot muster the strength to pity him, for fear that she will never stop.
The war itself, too, feels very far away, even through May – May, when flotillas of fishing boats churn their way across the Channel and bring thousands of bleeding soldiers home from Dunkirk, and Satine can only send money to help – even through August, when she, still in London, still so far away from the coast, sees nothing of the unfolding Battle of Britain. She sees no contrails, no dogfights, no tendrils of smoke wending their way upwards from the ground. Her experience of the war shrinks to the rituals of shutting blackout curtains around her bedroom and cocooning herself in darkness; to the grumblings of her housekeeper, not often seen but more and more often heard, as she complains about the difficulty of keeping Her Ladyship in decent table with rationing becoming what it is.
Late in that same August, she goes to the Berkeley with the intention of spending one last proper night out in the city before she tells her staff she will be withdrawing to her father’s favorite house in Kent; the old hotel is as bustling and lively as ever despite the tomb-like effect the blackout has on its once-resplendent windows. And it is there that she sees him – sees him immaculate and handsome, bright-eyed and unbowed, as he looks over the crowd, catches sight of her, and, with a raised eyebrow, sidles gracefully enough towards her that her first thought is that she must ask him who finally taught him to dance.
“Lady Kryze,” Ben says, and takes her hand; the beard is scratchy when he kisses her knuckles, but she finds she likes it better on him in person. “You look as wonderful as ever.”
“I thought you would have been long gone by now.” She is moving automatically, as though years haven’t passed, as though she has been waiting all evening to do this – to put his hand on her waist, to draw them both into the sway of dancers and put her head on his shoulder, their free palms entwined on his chest. “When do you – ”
“Tomorrow,” he says gently, and Satine feels as though her world has collapsed into a measurement of hours, rather than days or months. “I’m glad to have seen you.”
They talk for hours, on that dancefloor and at one of the little candlelit tables, about everything – about Oxford, about her father (his fingers are strong on hers, his concern physically evident), about his tutor and the sarcastic love they clearly share, about the war, about what they would do for peace – and there is something inevitable about it, Satine thinks, when, in the foyer, she sees him collecting his little case and she insists, without thinking twice about it, that he must stay with her rather than in some impersonal boarding house.
“I’m not sure,” he says, frowning slightly, one hand in his pocket. “I don’t plan to take any advantage – ”
Satine steps up to him on the steps of the hotel, looks at what little she can of him in the pitch darkness. “When you come back, do you plan to see me again?”
“Of course,” he says instantly, as though offended she could imply otherwise, and then clears his throat. “If you’ll have me, that is.”
“Then tonight isn’t about anyone taking advantage,” she says simply, and takes his hand to draw him into her car.
Someone has left the radio on in Satine’s study; once Ben has taken off his coat and draped it across a chair, Satine steps out of her shoes, takes his hand again, pulls him in close to her, feels totally at peace with the press between them. His sigh in the side of her neck surprises her, because it doesn’t sound tired or anxious; he seems almost entirely without fear, without worry of what may come or happen to him or to her. His kiss, certainly, when he gets around to it, is sweet and undemanding, gently caressing her in time to their song.
“You will come back, won’t you?” she asks, some time later, when she has him shirtless on her sofa and he’s looking up at her sleepily, his fingers on the zipper of her dress.
“With this as my incentive? I should say so,” he grins, sliding his hands into her hair and lifting himself up to kiss the hollow of her throat. “They’ll have to put a guard on me to stop me from deserting.”
“Would you?” she murmurs, as she shrugs the dress off of her shoulders. “Not for me, but for – ?”
He takes a long moment to answer, pulls her down onto him, wraps his arms around her back. “No,” he says eventually, quietly. “I’ve been assigned my duty, and I intend to do it.”
Satine rolls down into him, swallows up his groan, sighs at the tightening of his grip on her thighs – and acknowledges, sadly, that there is a hard, militant part of her that wants to say that she will not have him back, after all.
Sometime in the night, he whispers that he is going away to join something called the SOE, and expects that he will not live long.
She still finds it disorienting to get up in the dark with the blackout curtains shut, but this time, not being alone, she doesn’t – when she comes awake, still naked under the throw that has been carefully arranged over her, the windows are open, the morning sun is streaming in, and she is alone. By the time she has crept to her bedroom and pulled on a dressing gown, though, she knows where Ben is by his quiet humming, and the sound of running water; when she finds him in her master bathroom, he is back in his clothes from the night before, filling the sink with steaming water, carefully testing the edge of his straight razor against his fingertips.
“Does it have to go?”
“I should think so,” he smiles, accepting her brief kiss. “The Army tends to frown on this sort of bohemian display.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Will you?”
“I did it for my father,” she says, and picks up the razor as Ben sits, briefly sniggering, on the edge of her claw-footed tub. His hands shook too much to do it himself, she doesn’t say, as she lathers foam along Ben’s jaw. The gas at Ypres made them tremble and quake.
He looks far too young without it – clean-shaven, all she can think of is how he first looked in London, when they had no cares, when she thought he wasn’t much cop. When he examines himself in the mirror, though, the look in his eyes is far deeper, far more critical, grim lines previously unseen visible at the corners of his mouth. But when he brightens, it is familiar nonetheless; he laughs at himself, pulls his suspenders up over his shirt, gathers her in and kisses her still smelling of cream and aftershave.
Before he leaves, he puts a piece of paper with a name and address in her hand – says something about Professor Quinn intending to come to London, when the bombs start falling, so he can be useful – and that she would love him, too, as Ben did.
And then he tips his hat, and is gone, pausing on the pavement to look back at her and smile as though everything will be alright.
*
When she next sees him she is the reviled poster-child of appeasement, and he is in Colditz.
The news had come relatively quickly; or at least, in hindsight, it feels that way, because Satine spends her months between the Blitz and her tour of Germany in 1943 not doing much at all, besides waiting. She spends weeks of nights waiting underground, feeling the earth tremble and fracture around her as the bombs drop and families huddle, waif-like and stoic, until dawn. She waits for her own home to be blown up, but, by some miracle, it never is. She waits for Ben’s letters, but they stop coming, abruptly, in the winter of 1941, and the ones she sends after that are returned unopened; she has no information on where he might be, or whether it is even worth trying to send them.
She waits for weeks, picking up and putting down her pen hundreds of times, before she is able to tell him that a bomb has taken the life of Professor Quinn, in October of 1940. The Oxford man does come to see her, twice – once with a penetrating, persistent, inquisitorial sort of tone, as though testing whether she is worth his time; and then with a much kinder, supportive look in his bright blue eyes, asking after her health, her correspondence with ‘young Ben,’ with all the solicitousness of a father that she had so missed.
He comes to London to be an air warden, because he may be a pacifist and an Irishman but he’ll be damned if he’ll let either of those things count as marks against him; and when the firestorms start and the buildings fall, it is left to Satine to write to Ben, and he doesn’t reply for a month. When he does – from somewhere in Scotland, Satine thinks – for the first time since the Berkeley, she thinks of him as very far away, and very tired indeed.
But that is months ago, now, and it has also been months since she first heard, through the efforts of the Red Cross, that there are English prisoners of war being held in a castle near Leipzig, and when their lists of names are released to the press Ben’s name is among them. What he could have been doing to end up there, she cannot guess; or, in fact, she can very much guess, but if he is indeed a spy it is a miracle that he has not been executed outright, and it is all she can do to continue waiting, day by day, breathlessly hoping that a letter might come, even a letter quickly and brutally censored by Germans and British alike, opened multiple times over.
London society, in the meantime, goes on. And in the spring of 1943, with the papers buzzing about North Africa and Italy and rationing lines at her local grocer’s growing longer by the week, Satine – for the first time, and it feels dirty, it feels like her skin is crawling – accepts an invitation to an event hosted by the Mitford sisters, their one Mosley husband, and the hovering specter of the British Union of Fascists. She goes with her head held high and her back straight, and allows them to fawn over her; allows them to salivate at the idea that such a high-profile pacifist might also be an adherent of their twisted love for law and order, their insistent, driving claim that all they want is peace.
They are idealists too, of a kind, though their ideal future is, Satine is convinced, only some brightened portrayal of a wasteland ruled by Hitler’s fists. But she can use them to hatch what might be the most ambitious and dangerous thing she will ever do in her life – she can use their money, hitch it to her name, lay plans in place.
Lady Kryze, then, renowned and ancient member of the establishment, carrying the hopes of sensible and god-fearing and peaceable Britons everywhere, will go to Germany. She, in place of all others, will be granted safe passage, for the Reich wants this publicity, wants the implication that England is bending. She, due to her impeccable background and unimpeachable, virtuous life, will remain untouched by the swarm of government men who prod at her for weeks, seeking to find evidence of treason and, frustrated, finding nothing.
She is burned in effigy in east London, where the ruins of the docks are still only half-repaired. The papers excoriate her name. One night, soon before she is due to leave, a stone comes crashing through the barricaded windows of her home, sending shards of glass ripping through curtains and carpets.
Satine goes, nonetheless, for one reason only – and only after she is assured that, when she visits Leipzig, the Reich will take the opportunity to show her just how humanely their captured officers are treated, to dispel any scurrilous rumor of the ‘death camps’ so hysterically exposed by resistance terrorists.
The plane journey is long, and routed circuitously – first Lisbon, taking special care that her transport does not suffer the same fate as the 1942 incident which took Leslie Howard; then Switzerland, where the neutrality of its citizens is obvious in their very deportment, in their lowered eyes and sideways glares at her as she sits and waits for her next connection. England is vanishing behind her so quickly, every tie that she thought she had to it rapidly unraveling.
She keeps Ben’s letters in one of her valises. They are tied together with blue ribbon, neatly stacked, careworn and ragged around their edges.
When she arrives in Berlin, she is placed into the care not of some higher-up – indicating the regime’s disdain of her, no doubt, which in truth she does not mind in the least – but of one of the most frightening men she has ever met. Colonel Maurer, the commandant of Colditz itself, has sharp cheekbones, a closely-cropped head of bristly hair; when he is angry, which is frequently, and rarely for any apparent cause, a high flush of red streaks across his cheeks and his eyes glitter black. The symbols of the SS on his lapels are polished to a high sheen.
Berlin is busy, the hive of Hitler’s activity and his interminable reach across the globe, even as he fights losing battles on the Eastern front and props up a hapless Mussolini. The industrial heartlands of the Rhine churn with the smoke and production of factories; Satine, with a wide-eyed appreciation plastered carefully to her face, knows that Maurer is watching her closely, watching for any sign that she is memorizing locations, details of train lines or telegraph wires (she wants to, of course, desperately, but knows that the merest hint of it will betray her, and so she doesn’t). Leipzig is still picturesque, hazy with early summer heat, and she is taken to tour Eisenach, home of Bach and a beauty she can tell Maurer will never understand.
It is late afternoon by the time her little fleet of cars finally arrives at Colditz. The town is pretty, and the castle, too, though the way it looms above the landscape is terrifying in the falling light of dusk.
“Your servant, Frau Kryze,” Maurer says, for the umpteenth time, as he helps her out of her Mercedes. “I must insist, of course, that you keep your distance from the men housed here. I trust you will find, however, that their circumstances are not at all unpleasant.”
He keeps talking as he walks her into the courtyard – about the Geneva Conventions, about how the men here receive better rations even than their Wehrmacht wardens, that if they would only stop trying to escape so often their guards would not mind their practical jokes whatsoever. But there is barbed wire, here, and a fence sectioning off one long wing of the rambling complex of genteel castle walls, and when the men behind it, in their nondescript jumpsuits, catch sight of her and begin to lean against it, abandoning their desultory game of rugby in order to stare, she can see the hunger in them – French, Polish, Canadian, British and Belgian all, looking at her with something inscrutable and unimaginable in their thoughts.
There is a sharp intake of breath from the back of them, and there, there he is – unshaven, ragged-looking, but more like his London self than she remembers from when they parted, his hands coming up to clutch at the wire, pricking at his fingers.
“I am pleasantly surprised, Herr Maurer,” she murmurs, tearing her eyes away as they continue to walk past. “But I am concerned that some among them do not look entirely well. I hope you take measures to ensure their health?”
“But of course,” Maurer says, disdain creeping swiftly into his voice. Satine’s heels are echoing on the cobblestones beneath them; behind her, she fancies she can hear the chainlink rattle, the shuffle of bodies as Ben, perhaps, races through the press of his comrades in order to keep his eyes on her. “We must, however, maintain discipline. Those who attempt to escape have violated their parole as officers and gentlemen, and spend a certain amount of time in solitary confinement.”
Satine tells herself not to blink. “And how long does this punishment last?”
“For that one?” Maurer looks back; his eyes harden. “I believe it was six months. A very difficult case, and one not yet resolved to my satisfaction.”
Satine does not have the courage, nor the strength, to protest this. After a tour of the castle’s facilities, which are as disturbingly peaceful as their purpose is malevolent, she is escorted out again into that courtyard, now brightly-lit and ringed by guards; the prisoners’ enclosure is empty, the chainlink fence silent.
By the time she is installed back in her hotel in Leipzig, her panic is settling deep into her bones. Whatever good she thought she could do seems entirely, desperately out of reach. What had she hoped to accomplish? Was this all she expected and hoped for – a mere glimpse, her life torn to shreds for the simple assurance that he is still alive?
No, she thinks to herself miserably as she gets into bed, knowing she will be taken away, back to an airport, come the morning – that is not what she had hoped for at all. She had hoped, dreamed of something daring and wild, something monumentally stupid. Something impossible.
She is lying awake at two in the morning when there is a tapping at the door to her suite. “Zimmerservice,” says the quiet voice on the other side; when Satine, blinking stubborn drowsiness from her eyes, cracks open the door there is a maid standing there with a tray and a pot of tea. She is small and skinny, all elbows and bright eyes, her dark hair pulled severely back.
“Good,” she says suddenly, in English, though accented in French. “Let me in, s’il vous plait, and we shall talk.”
Her name is Anouk. She is eighteen, and has been fighting with La Resistance for three years. She knows Americans, she knows Swiss provocateurs and German dissenters living right in the heart of Berlin; she knows Spanish guerilla fighters and has fought and half-died along with them all.
Most importantly, she knows the SOE, and she knows Ben, and she has been living in Leipzig on-and-off for nearly a year for the express purpose of breaking him out. The first attempt was a failure; the second even more so, and Satine needs to stop her avid listening, needs to get up and put her hands over her mouth and look steadily into the mirror at her dressing table for a long while when she hears of the wounds that can be inflicted by barbed wire and falls from a great height and the teeth of searching dogs, that needed the six months of solitude Maurer forced upon him just in order to heal.
They have been planning a third attempt for weeks, Anouk says, her eyes growing bright and flinty. “And then you arrived,” she says, accusingly, glaring at Satine over their cups, “and the entire place is full of extra guards, and you had better have a plan to help or you will have done far more harm than good.”
“What makes you think you can trust me at all?” Satine says, wanting to laugh with exhaustion.
The girl’s face softens; she looks quickly off to one side, as though acknowledging her youth. “He used to talk about you,” she says, with a shrug. “I had imagined someone – different.”
Anouk has the connections that Satine needs, that she should have bothered to make before she left English soil. She has the false documents, the friends in high and low places, the access to weapons and the experience of using them; Satine has her name and face, and, more importantly, a car. They are on their way by five, as the sun starts to rise; Satine rides by herself in the front seat, taking whispered instructions from Anouk and another girl in the backseat, when they are not huddled down inside the seat itself, having relieved it of its stuffing with the help of quick, methodical knifework. Bernadette is quite like Anouk, though quieter; she is a killer, Satine thinks, with the haunted, distant look of someone who knows she is damned.
The car is stopped twice at checkpoints; each time, Satine’s insistence that she wishes to meet with Colonel Maurer is treated with suspicion, but not enough that the threat of his name does not eventually get her waved on after only the most cursory of searches.
When she drives into the floodlit courtyard, she is met by a rumpled guard who looks very much like he wants to be back in bed, and who yawns as she follows him towards Maurer’s office, leaving the car with its door open, quietly waiting for her return. She is still waiting outside Maurer’s quarters when, behind her, something goes dark, and there is the sound of running feet.
“Frau Kryze,” Maurer says, tearing her startled attention back to him as he comes out to greet her, spick-and-span and furious with it. “To what do I owe this – unsanctioned visit?”
The lights are out in the courtyard. There is a call in German somewhere, sounding bored, and, further away, Satine fancies that she hears the fence rattle.
“I only wished to give you my thanks in person, Colonel, before I left,” she says; it is one of the proudest things she has done, she realizes as she speaks, that she can do this – that she can stare down this man and speak to him without fear. And she does, for minutes and minutes about the potential for peace between their two great nations and her gratitude at being allowed to be its messenger, until the brief spark of interest, slimy and insidious, disappears from his eyes and is replaced by utter boredom.
Behind her, light suddenly floods again around her feet, casting her shadow back onto the wall. It is her cue; the scenes of the play are changing, and so, with a final, quick grasp of Maurer’s wiry hand, she turns on her heel and walks, upright and very, very awake, back into the courtyard. The door of her car hangs open just as she left it; she gets into the driver’s seat and, praying, hoping beyond hope that what she thinks happened has happened and that she is not leaving three lives, rather than just her own, in mortal danger, she starts the engine, turns the car in a circle, and drives off down the castle’s ramp.
Five minutes later, once the forested road has turned black and quiet – relief. “Move,” comes a hiss, and when Satine pulls over she is shoved unceremoniously from behind the wheel and Bernadette takes her place; Anouk slips in beside her, and by the time Satine has bundled herself into the backseat and they are roaring off again with the headlights turned firmly off, Ben has also extracted himself from the ragged compartment of what is left of the Mercedes’s upholstery and is sitting crumpled and wedged into a corner, looking at her crookedly, fresh blood on his face.
“You fool,” Anouk says from the front, reaching back to press a piece of torn shirt to his brow. “You were supposed to find a way down the stairs, not jump out of a window!”
“Circumstances, my dear,” Ben says, low and tired, though he sounds the same, so very the same, as what Satine remembers that it takes her breath away. “Turn around – we need to get to Singen.”
“Singen?”
“The border into Switzerland is chaotic there, especially around Ramsen. We’ve had a few successful escapes use that route.”
“Bien,” Anouk says, and then she reaches back again, and has a pistol in either hand, the barrels firm in her grip. “All we could spare.”
Ben takes one; the other points at Satine accusingly, as though daring her to take it, and all she can do is shake her head. Ben looks at her, really looks, for the first time – his gaze is unfocused, perhaps from his knock to the head, but his distant, deep bemusement is clear. He takes the second gun, too; takes it away from her, quickly turns them both over in his hands, competently, familiarly, before shoving them into his waistband.
“Ben?” Satine asks, as loudly as she dares.
“Give me a moment, Satine,” he says; a smile pulls briefly at his lips, and again, he will not look at her directly. “I can scarcely believe you are even here.”
*
They have been at their farmhouse in Gascony for a week before Ben is well enough, and Satine brave enough, to really speak to each other.
The trip takes longer than any of them expect, of course, and is full of pitfalls that Satine could hardly have imagined. The job of getting more gasoline for the car takes hours of waiting in the woods, alone, while Anouk and Bernadette venture off on foot to steal and possibly do harm if they are discovered; by the time they reach Singen and all carry on without the vehicle they have driven past dozens of newsstands breathlessly reporting on the disappearance of the English duchess in Germany, and the outraged protestations of her home government, suddenly so eager to publicize her fate. A midnight border crossing follows, then a train to Zurich, another to Geneva; Vichy France lies ahead and is comparatively easy to enter, followed by more trains and trucks, by the lightening of Anouk and Bernadette’s expressions as they are, perhaps for the first time in months, able to openly speak their mother tongue.
And in all of this time, all Satine can see is Ben’s face, harried and drawn, etched deeply with the remembrance and suffering of what she doesn’t know, because he will not tell her. And if he has changed, if she is unsatisfied with what he appears to be, now – hard, distant, unfeeling for reasons both his own and forced upon him – she suspects that he does not know what to make of her, either; of a woman he thought he knew, and does no longer. She feels pangs of hunger during these weeks, sudden and unexpected, and does not know whether they are purely physical – the result of their running and hiding and scheming for too long on too little money and resources – or something else entirely.
They are deposited, finally, with a bag containing a few changes of clothes and a handmade radio, in a town in the southwest, not far from the Spanish border, where the foothills of the Pyrenees are dully green and brown with summer’s heat, and wildflowers grow haphazardly around the empty cottage which is, for the moment, to be their home. Bernadette vanishes of her own accord; Anouk stays with them a day longer, making sure they have a little supply of francs for the village farmers’ food and silence, before she, too, at dusk (and after long, whispered conversations between them that Satine thinks she is not meant to overhear, of a concentrated act of memorization clear in her face as he speaks), gives Ben a fierce hug and tells him that she will be back in a month, once the furore over his escape and Satine’s disappearance has died down.
“I’ll bring Al with me,” she says, and something in Ben’s expression brightens, and he lets out the first real laugh Satine has heard from him in years.
“God above. How is he faring?”
“Same as ever. Complains all the time about French food,” Anouk grins. “He misses you.”
“Tell him to take care.”
“I will,” Anouk says, and, with a nod to Satine, turns and, in her ramshackle outfit of coat and cap pulled low down over her eyes, starts to trudge off towards their nearest town.
There is only one bed in the house. Unsure what to think, Satine takes it for herself, and does not know, since she goes to sleep and gets up again alone, where Ben rests. On their first night by themselves, she thinks she wakes, briefly, in the middle of the night to see him sitting by her side, but it is a fleeting impression at most. Anouk has left them several packets of cigarettes; having never seen him smoke before, it is yet another surprise, another change, to watch him pace slowly along the boundaries of the cottage’s little plot and the edges of the fields, rich with ripening crops, flicking the butts of them off into verges, occasionally letting out a wracking, only slowly-lightening cough. His walk is stilted, she thinks, though she knows her memories of him can’t ring true; though there is a groundwater well that they both make liberal use of to wash their clothes and themselves, his edges still seem roughened.
The first week passes, and Satine starts to feel sleepy, as though the landscape, rich and heavy-skied as it is, is bearing her down into somnolence. It is only then, while she is dozing, dreamlike, in the shade of an ancient olive tree by the side of the house, that Ben comes to sit by her; reaches out, puts a hand over hers where it rests, slowly tanning, on the bed of dried leaves and pine needles that carpets the ground.
“Lady Kryze,” he quotes, and smiles. “You look as wonderful as ever.”
She wants to hold him, and so she does; she pulls him towards her, puts her face into his hair, wants to cry, and does.
He doesn’t tell her much, still. For what little he does say, she knows he’s worked in France, in Belgium, possibly in Holland. The circumstances of his capture were unbelievably fortunate; trapped while helping downed RAF pilots escape from occupied France he was mistaken as one of them, and therefore treated as an enemy combatant and not a spy. What he has seen, and what he has done, Satine does not ask (and in truth, she doesn’t want to know these answers); she only knows that there is a stillness to him, now, a quickness to his hands which denotes a strength she dares not test for fear it would harm her. He frightens her, and sometimes, she thinks she wants to punish him for it.
“We heard you were coming,” he tells her, once, when they have progressed to sitting inside together at the rough-hewn table in the meager kitchen, holding hands across its splintered wood. “In Colditz. It was in one of the papers they let us read.”
He looks down, brushes a thumb across her palm. “For the briefest of moments, I hated you with a passion.”
Not for himself, he tells her, later – for herself. For the idea that she could have abandoned everything she ever believed in for the sake of one man, no matter what he had meant to her.
“And what do you think of me now?”
“I don’t know,” he says slowly. But he leans into her nonetheless; his kiss is careful, wary, and she knows she will feel the same to him – unfamiliar, vaguely uncomfortable, and not knowing what to do.
Time, she thinks – time must save them from this. And, ever so slowly, it does.
Two weeks, and she wakes to find him lying beside her, faintly snoring, bare-chested against the sweltering heat of the oncoming day and to take full advantage of the cold kept in by the solid stone walls. Two weeks and a day, and they walk into town, quietly, not drawing attention, to buy food which they will prepare together; two weeks and three days and he stops smoking, suddenly, as though leaving behind the nicotine that helped sustain his camaraderie with his fellow prisoners for over a year is easy.
Three weeks, and she rolls over in their now-shared bed and embraces him, slowly, hardly expecting anything; and so it is a shock, but a wanted one, one that makes her giddy, when his touches become quick and urgent, when he lets her lean over him and match him kiss for hard, desperate kiss. He comes apart in her hands, shuddering and moaning, and then takes much longer to bring her to the same state with his fingers and tongue, making her feel that someone, at least, somewhere (here and now, him) worships her.
It’s easier, after that – when she takes him to bed, when she makes sure he sleeps through the night once they have finished with each other, when she wakes in the morning to find herself already in his arms, his hands on her cheek, her breast.
“We were not made for change, you and I,” he murmurs, sighing into her skin. “The world moved on without us.”
But no, she finds herself thinking, at sunset, when she is reminded of red dawns and watches clouds of russet golds; that’s not quite right. They have moved with the world – and regretted it every second.
She is alone, when their month is up, and going out to the well in the early morning wearing nothing but his shirt, when an appreciative whistle floats her way from the road, and she turns to find a young man standing there with a scar over one eye and a cocksure expression which can only mean trouble – whether for her or for others is the only question.
“You must be Satine,” he calls as she quickly tugs the edges of the shirt as far down as she can; his accent is brashly, very obviously American. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Ben calls him Al, and gets lifted into an exuberant hug in those long, gangly arms; Satine doubts that is his real name, and thinks he must be very dangerous indeed. He and Ben, though, are so at ease in each other’s company, and he brings teasing, lilting jokes out of Ben with such charm and speed, that he cannot be all bad – or so she thinks, until it becomes clear that he is here to take Ben to Paris, where he has been based, and where their work will start all over again.
“I think I’m meant to go home, Al,” Ben says, quietly serious, with a glance at Satine. “If I’m rumbled again, there’s no question that I’ll be executed. And my presence will be required to clear Satine’s name of the things that have been said about her in the British press.”
“You think I wouldn’t want you to go home if we didn’t need you? C’mon, friend,” Al says, shaking his head. He pulls a photo from his pocket with a flourish, hands it, grinning, to Satine. “My girl,” he says conspiratorially. “Damn, but I miss her.”
“You were saying,” Ben prompts, shaking his head.
“The Hutte family have finally agreed to talk terms,” Al says earnestly as Satine looks down at the photo, brushes wrinkles out of a slim, pretty face framed by rich, dark hair. “But only if you’re the one to negotiate. Don’t ask me why, but Jean has a thing for you, or trusts you at least, and if we get access to their black market networks and supplies the impact on the resistance would be huge…”
Satine puts down the photograph, goes outside, wraps her arms around herself and watches the sun reach its zenith, closing her eyes against the glare, surrounded by the hushed sounds of still heat and cicadas. It is close to an hour before Ben comes out to her, and she knows he has already made his decision, standing there as he is with his hands in his pockets and squinting into that same sun.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” he says, quietly. “Will you wait?”
“Yes,” Satine says, and closes her eyes again. “Here?”
“No. Al will get you to Portugal, and from there to London.”
That sends a shiver through her; not at the fact of the ostracization that awaits her, but that she’ll have to endure it alone. “Will you write?”
“Write, radio broadcast, telegram – anything I can, and as often.”
I will tell De Gaulle himself to send your messages back to me, he says. He puts his arms around her from behind, his bearded chin on her shoulder, closes his eyes into the side of her neck, and stays there for some time.
*
He shows up on her doorstep on May 9th, 1945.
Much of 1944 passes in complete quietude. She is hardly recognized upon her return; the house is silent and mothballed, and she finds that, for a few months at least, she doesn’t even want or need anyone there to help her run it. She takes to reading the papers for hours on end, cups of cooling tea by her side; she goes out in dresses simpler than she has ever worn before in London, regretting that her skin once again turns pale. The society pages interest her not a jot.
After a month, she remembers the name so lovingly scrawled on the back of Al’s little photograph, and, after a series of discreet enquiries dispersed through an old family friend at the American consulate, writes her first halting, awkward letter. A mere two weeks later, she receives a telegram from New York that is pages and pages long – it must have cost a fortune – and the process of pouring out their hearts to each other begins in earnest.
It is Padme – Padme who is also independently wealthy, who has bought as many war bonds as she has persuaded others into through her activism – who reminds Satine that there are people who need her help, organizations worthy of her money, her name, her face. A year on, and suddenly confronted with her survival (along with the carefully-placed rumors of her detention and daring escape from her duplicitous Nazi hosts), there are few in the press who care to dwell on what she might have been to them, not with the Mitfords and Mosleys disgraced and the war grinding on with, still, no end in sight.
So it seems so simple, in the end, to support the Red Cross when it dives into Europe in the wake of what everyone is quickly calling D-Day; it is wonderful, when August 25th comes and the wireless abounds with reports of Paris liberated, and, mere hours later, a telegram arrives at her door to say Yes, I am alive, I am still here. It is a long time to wait, still – a long winter, pinched by famine in Holland and horrendous death tolls in the Ardennes, and, in her empty house, Satine writes letters, writes checks, and nearly forgets to make sure she has enough coal and oil to get through the season without freezing. That small inconvenience dealt with, she opens the windows to spring, closes them to the blackout at night – for the V2s have started again in September, dropping with piercing shrieks from the sky without warning, and for a few months it seems that London is slipping into despair again, destined to repeat the agony of the Blitz with an even worse toll.
It stops, finally. It all stops, and then, after taking a breath, it continues on. There is so much work she can do, now, with millions of displaced refugees suddenly making their voices and their desires heard across the continent; when the hideous truth of the camps are revealed, when she hears how many children have lost their parents. I will work for the removal of all causes of war, she remembers, and sets to it; she even briefly considers selling the house to bolster her funds, but decides against it, both because it would hardly help to be homeless herself and because, with so much creative chaos ricocheting around Europe, she doubts very much that Ben would ever be able to find her again if she were to leave.
Two days after V-E Day, then – that is when he arrives, and when the bell rings and she opens the door there are still the remnants of hundreds of flags and posters plastering the street behind him, the trash of victory gradually losing its color in the gutters and underneath people’s feet. He is in uniform, the first time she has ever seen him that way, trim and neat in scratchy khaki wool, citations of she knows not what on his chest and his uniform beret under his arm.
They haven’t made him shave, at least, and it is that which is most familiar to her – how his face creases and his eyes tighten at their corners when he smiles at her.
“Hello there,” he says, and then he steps up to her, and there are passers-by in the street who stop to applaud, still giddy with the fact of their collective victory, when they get to be the witnesses to another precious reunion, another pathetically-relieved, unending kiss.
They don’t even know our names, Satine thinks.
Somehow, this is a change she believes she can accept – now, and perhaps forever.
*
FIN
*