The Night Gate

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Georgette’s first year in her new home fell into a pleasant, if uneventful, routine. And for much of it, the war seemed a million miles away.

She was pleased with her house. An L-shaped stone dwelling that sat above a large cellar. A farmhouse kitchen, a bedroom, a large salon with an enormous cheminée, all on the one level. The attic was, as yet, undeveloped. It sat next to a small park in the middle of the village of Carennac, and a terrace at the side of the house gave directly on to the park itself.

The owner of the house had died intestate, and the estate was in the temporary stewardship of the mairie, and so volunteered as accommodation for Georgette.

She was less pleased with the cycle to and from the Château de Montal. Although the route followed the meandering path of the River Dordogne through the silt flats of the flood plain, it took nearly fifty minutes. In spring and autumn it was an easy and pleasant commute, but in the searing heat of summer she would arrive at either end of her journey dripping with perspiration. And in the winter, temperatures could dip as low as minus ten or fifteen, and the road was often obscured by a freezing fog that followed the path of the river, and therefore the road.

Early on, she had taken the decision to set up a canvas camp bed in the Grande Salle du Rez-de-chaussée, the largest room on the ground floor of the château, where the greatest number of the most important crated works were stacked, including the Mona Lisa. Although René Huygue still insisted on keeping La Joconde in his quarters in the Chambre de Nine on the first floor, Georgette wrested her from his grasp each night to sleep with her in the grande salle, also known as the salle des gardes, among the crates. This vaulted chamber with its flagstone floor, and intricately carved stone cheminée was cool and conducive to sleep in the summer, but like an icebox in the winter, even when a fire had been set in the hearth. And Georgette would often cycle home in the morning with leaden legs to catch some much-needed sleep and garner a little warmth from her bed during the hours of daylight.

Food seemed more plentiful in this part of south-west France, and the curators and all the guards at the château ate well. Duck and goose, lamb and limousin beef, and wonderful salads with cheese and gésiers, liberally sprinkled with walnuts from the trees that grew everywhere here. Neither was there any shortage of fruit. And there were several local red wines, a little unsophisticated but still quaffable.

It was easy to forget that the world was at war, and the outcome as yet far from certain. In all this time they had barely seen a single German soldier, and Georgette made frequent outings on her bike to explore a countryside rich in forest and fruit, tobacco and wheat, cliffs rising sheer from rivers and streams that in eons past had carved their way through a landscape of solid rock. There was a regular market in the nearby town of Saint-Céré. She often went shopping for essential food and clothing in the medieval Place Mercadial, where merchants traded in the shadow of the Tours Saint-Laurent, an ancient fortification on a hilltop that dominated the town and the countryside for miles around.

She was unconcerned that she had neither seen nor heard anything of Lange in all this time. Although she missed him, his absence meant that there was no imminent threat from Karlheinz Wolff. Of Wolff himself, she had seen nothing since that day at Bétaille. Both men had receded into a past that seemed much darker and more distant now, viewed from this privileged vantage point in the southern sun.

But by the spring of 1944, these months of comparative idyll were drawing to a close. Rumours of an imminent Allied invasion of Europe were circulating in the villages and marketplaces. The war was going badly for the Germans following defeat in North Africa the previous year, and there was bloody stalemate on the Eastern Front with Russia. The French Resistance, now collectively known as the Maquis, were more and more active in the area. Acts of sabotage on bridges and railway lines provoked savage reprisals from the Germans, and the mood of everyone at Montal had become febrile and tense.

It was one hot night towards the end of May that year that Georgette found herself in the salle des gardes unable to sleep. She lay awake on the unyielding canvas of her camp bed staring up at the vaulted ceiling. Moonlight flooded in through the windows that she had left unshuttered, laying its shadows among the silent crates. Outside, the screech of cicadas and the croaking of a thousand frogs filled the night air, a deafening cacophony in the sultry still of the small hours.

Finally she got up and slipped on her shoes to pad through the adjoining Salle Robert de Balsac, weaving her way among the stacks of crated paintings to the narrow door that led to the north turret. There they had established a small kitchen to prepare food for the staff. If she couldn’t sleep, then she might as well have a coffee. She placed the kettle on a tiny gas ring and wandered off through the salon to gaze through one of the windows on to the courtyard. Moonlight shimmered on the crushed white castine gravel. The château formed a right-angle on two sides of the square. The north-east side was bordered by a line of trees and a couple of stone benches, beyond which lay the château garden, given over now to growing vegetables. Between the trees on the south-east side, a gate opened on to a drive that turned around the slope of the hill, past outbuildings that provided accommodation for the guards, and down towards a road leading to the village of Saint-Jean-Lespinasse. Georgette could see the silhouette of one of the guards sitting on the wall by the gate, his cigarette glowing red in the dark.

It was only then that she became aware of the voices that seemed to drift in from the stairwell at the far end of the salon. The château’s main staircase was a broad sweep of well-worn stone that climbed through the levels of the building at the angle between the two wings. But here, at the end of the north wing, a narrow flight of wooden servants’ stairs rose all the way up to the attic. The voices were coming from one of the upper levels. Hushed male voices. By the light of the moon that fell in through every window slit, Georgette tiptoed slowly up the stairs, cringing at every creak.

On the next landing the voices were louder, amplified by stone walls and tiled floors. She slipped through shadows cast by artworks stacked ceiling high in the Chambre Régence and the Grand Salon d’honneur, to emerge into the first-floor hallway at the top of the staircase. A door led off into the Chambre Fenaille and the tower at the north-west corner. Flickering candlelight sent long shadows dancing through the open door to meet her. She recognised René Huygue’s voice, and sneaked a peek into the one-time bedroom of what had probably been a lesser family member. A group of half a dozen men were grouped conspiratorially around a candle placed on the floor among the crates. They were being addressed by Huygue, but other voices raised themselves in disagreement, only to be shooshed sharply and told to keep the level down. These were rough-looking countrymen in boots and overalls, paysan jackets and cloth caps, but among them Georgette saw a face she recognised. Jean-Luc Percet, one of the château guards. A man in his forties, with a shock of unruly black hair shot through with wiry silver. A wit about the place. Always smiling, laughing, and cracking jokes.

She drew back into the hallway in case they saw her, and pressing her back against the wall, tried to follow the argument. It seemed they were discussing the blowing up of a railway junction near the town of Gramat, a few kilometres south of Montal. Georgette listened, heart pounding so loudly she was sure they would hear it echoing along the stone passages of the old château. The disagreement concerned the when, as well as the precise location. The Germans were using the line to send troops and munitions north, and the destruction of a junction south of the town would cause considerable disruption to their traffic. But it was well guarded and would be a risky venture.

Finally, agreement appeared to be reached, and Georgette prepared to retrace her footsteps quickly to hide herself among the crates in the Chambre Régence. But no one was leaving. She summoned her courage to satisfy her curiosity and stole another glance into the Chambre Fenaille. The men were all clustered around an open door at the entrance to the north-west turret, a door Georgette knew had always been kept locked. Huygue stood in its lit entrance, handing out rifles and pistols, and rucksacks of what she could only imagine must be explosives.

She caught her breath and wheeled away. Huygue was keeping arms in the château and supplying the Maquis! It was madness. If the Germans chose to make an unannounced visit to inspect the premises, they would all be sent off to the labour camps. And God only knew what would become of the art they had tried so hard to protect from the ravages of war.

It was sunlight now that lay dazzling arcs of light on the stone flags of the Château de Montal, and Georgette’s voice that rose in pitch to echo among its vaults. She strode after Huygue through the Salle Robert de Balsac. ‘You’re an idiot!’ she shouted at him.

He strode on, regardless, past the rows of crates.

‘You’re a member of the Maquis, aren’t you?’

At which he stopped abruptly and turned on her, his voice reduced to a hiss. ‘Do not repeat that, ever! Do you hear me? To anyone.’

‘But you are, and you are putting everything we’ve all worked for here at risk.’

‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘I doubt that very much. You’re letting your heart rule your head. It’s insanity to keep weapons in the château.’

He lowered his head to breathe into her face. ‘Keep your voice down!’ And he glanced left and right, afraid that they might be overheard. ‘Your problem, George, is that you’ve got your priorities all wrong. What exactly is more important to you, eh? Art or freedom?’

‘Both,’ she said emphatically. ‘You can’t sacrifice one for the other and expect either to be worth a damn.’

He gasped his frustration, and marched off into the salle des gardes, heels clicking with irritation on the flagstones.

Three days later, word reached them that the Maquis had blown up the main railway line south of Gramat, and Georgette held her breath for retaliation. To her relief, none came. At least, not in the immediate vicinity. But it was less than a week afterwards that René Huygue came to her in a state, his tone very different from the last time they had spoken.

She had just arrived on her bicycle from Carennac. He took her by the arm and led her upstairs and into the Chambre de Nine, closing the door behind them. It had rained the night before, and the cloud cover was low, blanketing the area in a gloomy crepuscular light. Huygue’s office and living quarters were obscured by shadow, and his face seemed very pale in the poor light. She heard a tremor in his voice which was little more than a whisper. ‘I just got word from Paris. The Germans are sending a detachment of troops to search the château. It’s part of a clampdown on all the depots of the Louvre. Apparently they have permission from the high command to open any crate they want.’

Georgette was horrified. ‘What are they looking for?’

Huygue blanched, and couldn’t quite bring his eyes to meet hers. ‘Weapons. But it’s just any excuse to confiscate the art.’

Georgette closed her eyes, and a thousand abusive epithets flitted through her mind. But she stopped herself from giving voice to them. It would serve no purpose. She forced herself to try to think straight. ‘Are the weapons still in the château?’

He nodded.

‘Then we’ve got to get them out of here. When are the Germans coming?’

‘We think sometime tomorrow morning.’

‘Jesus! Where are we going to put them?’

Huygue braced himself. ‘In the cellar of your house in Carennac.’

The rain of the previous day had cleared, and a blue sky was punctuated by soft white clouds rolling across the hilltops that ringed the river valley. They would soon evaporate in the heat. Sunshine lay in late spring swathes across a landscape in full leaf, blossom shed and fruit forming in the orchards that grew across the flood plain. The air was warm after a fresh start, and heating up towards midday, with the promise of a hot early summer afternoon to come.

But the tranquillity of the morning was soon disturbed by the roar of two Panzer V tanks that stationed themselves at the foot of the hill and left their engines idling. A canvas-covered troop carrier brought a detachment of crack SS soldiers up the road to the château where they jumped down and fanned out to cover the courtyard and the front entrance.

The commanding officer drove his lightweight Kübelwagen through the gate and into the courtyard. It had a round-bladed spade clamped to the wheel arch, and a spare wheel bolted to the slope of the bonnet. The canvas roof was folded down over the rear of the vehicle. SS-Standartenführer Harald Schneider swung himself out and over the door without opening it, and cast a deep shadow in the castine. He wore dusty baggy breeks tucked into brown leather boots, and a short, double-breasted reed-green jacket with a leather holster belted around the waist. His field-grey shirt was open at the neck, and an SS Panzer field cap the same colour as his jacket was pulled down over straw-coloured hair that grew abundantly beneath it. He could not have been much older than Georgette, but he had world-weary eyes which had witnessed too much, and disillusion seemed solidly settled on his square shoulders.

The entire staff of the castle, including the guards, were assembled in the heat of the sun to greet him. Somewhere around twenty people in all. Georgette was nervous, in spite of the fact that she and Huygue and Jean-Luc Percet had loaded a farm vehicle with all the weapons from the north-west tower at two o’clock that morning, and driven them the fourteen kilometres to Carennac to hide them in the cellar beneath her house.

Schneider surveyed them with an indifference that suggested that he would much rather be somewhere else. Half a dozen of his men assembled behind him, rifles held at the ready. ‘Who’s in charge here?’ His French was perfect.

Huygue stepped forward. ‘I am.’

‘Your name.’

‘Huygue. René Huygue.’

‘Well, René Huygue. We are here to take a look at exactly what it is you have in this château.’ He paused. ‘And we have information that one of your guards is a leader of the local Maquis.’ He drew a small, leather-bound notebook from a trouser pocket to consult. ‘A man called Jean-Luc Percet.’

Georgette saw Huygue’s face pale, and her eyes flickered towards Jean-Luc standing at the back of the crowd. Huygue said, ‘He isn’t here.’

‘Well, we’ll find out soon enough when we check everyone’s papers.’ He turned towards the group of guards and curators. ‘In the meantime, you can all lie face down in the courtyard where we can keep an eye on you.’

As Schneider turned away towards his men, Huygue caught his arm to catch his attention, and the German wheeled round, eyes blazing.

‘Don’t touch me!’

Huygue took a step back, but maintained an external calm that Georgette was sure did not reflect how he felt inside. He said, ‘With the greatest of respect, sir, there is a sign out front provided to us by your own Kunstschutz, which forbids army personnel from entering the premises.’

‘Is there?’ Schneider very slowly and deliberately unclipped his holster and drew out his pistol. With a ramrod-straight arm he pointed it directly at Huygue, the muzzle a matter of centimetres from his forehead. ‘Well, this is my authority, and it outranks anything your precious Kunstschutz might have to say on the subject.’ In a movement so fast and unexpected that it took everyone by surprise, he grasped the pistol by its barrel and clubbed Huygue across the head with the butt of it.

Huygue dropped immediately to his knees. His hand flew to his forehead, coming away with blood on the fingers. But he made no sound. Schneider reholstered his weapon and turned to the others.

‘Down!’ He pointed at the ground, and everyone fell to their knees to stretch themselves out on the warm castine. ‘Not you!’ He grabbed Georgette by the arm as she was about to do the same. ‘You’ll take my men round the château. Every room in the place. And you’ll open any crate they ask you to.’

It took almost an hour to pass through every room in the building, stopping frequently to uncrate random works of art for inspection. Georgette was intimidated by the eyes on her. Six war-weary young men with appetites that had been denied them by conflict. There was not a smile among them, nor a single moment of human empathy. She felt their contempt for her at the same time as their animal appraisal. And she was afraid.

When finally they reached the salle des gardes, one of them kicked over her camp bed, tipping its sheets and blankets across the floor. ‘What’s this?’ he said. The only one of them who had any French.

‘It’s where I sleep.’

She saw them exchanging glances. ‘Alone?’

‘There’s not exactly room for two,’ she said.

He lowered his face towards hers. ‘Don’t be so fucking insolent.’ Then he nodded towards the crate with the three red dots. ‘Open it.’

Georgette began to panic. Could there be anyone in the world who would not recognise the face of the Mona Lisa? And who knew what would happen if they did. ‘It’s just a painting,’ she said.

‘Open it!’ He bawled in her face.

But she stood firm. ‘It’s too delicate to be exposed to the sunlight.’ And was unprepared for the rifle butt that clubbed her to the ground. Her head struck the flagstones and light exploded in her skull. Almost immediately she was being yanked back to her feet and dragged out through the entrance hall to the courtyard.

Schneider was sitting on one of the stone benches, in the shade of the trees at the far side of the square. He stood immediately, throwing his cigarette away across the gravel, sending up a shower of sparks, and strode across to the group emerging into the sunlight. One of the troops was carrying the crate that held the Mona Lisa, and the soldier who had struck Georgette held her arm in a vice-like grip. She could barely stand, and felt blood trickling down the side of her face.

A rapid-fire exchange that she didn’t understand passed between the commanding officer and his men before he turned to Georgette. ‘I’m told you obstructed the opening of this crate.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I advised against it because of the fragile nature of the painting inside.’

‘I told you to open any crate they asked you to.’

She pulled her arm free of the soldier who held it and straightened up defiantly. ‘And there are some things just too precious to be exposed to the elements. But then, I wouldn’t expect a man like you to understand that.’

She had half expected it, but the open palm that he took across the side of her face still knocked her over and left her sprawling in the gravel. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he shouted.

She glared up at him with hatred in her eyes. ‘I think you just answered your own question.’

He turned away and barked a command at the nearest soldier, who immediately drew a long-bladed knife from his belt and began prising open the wooden crate. The sound of nails freeing themselves from the grain of the wood echoed back at them off the carved stonework of the château, and the soldier pulled away the protective leatherette and fireproof paper to expose the Mona Lisa to the gaze of every man and woman in the courtyard. A face that stared back at them across four centuries.

‘Mein Gott,’ she heard Schneider whisper.

‘What the hell is going on here?’ A familiar voice rang out through the still, warm air.

Schneider spun around to see a figure in field-grey army uniform and peaked cap striding across the courtyard towards them. He looked at the rank on the newcomer’s epaulettes and curled his lip in a sneer. ‘How dare you, Hauptmann! You are outranked here, and this is none of your business.’

Paul Lange reached into an inside pocket and drew out a folded sheet of paper which he shook open and held in front of the Standartenführer’s face. ‘I don’t think you outrank the Führer,’ he said. ‘And I am here on his business.’

Schneider cast eyes across the sheet of paper that Lange held before him, and Georgette saw the skin tighten across his face. Lange gave him time to read, then carefully folded it away, and slipped it back into his jacket. He turned towards Georgette, holding out a hand to help her back to her feet, and looked with concern at the blood trickling from her hair. Red welts were raising themselves across her face where Schneider had struck her.

He wheeled around to smash a clenched fist squarely into the face of the SS officer, knocking him into the dust of the courtyard. And every rifle was suddenly trained upon him. He ignored them and glared at Schneider with contempt. ‘What kind of barbarian are you?’ He had raised his voice only a little. ‘A German officer does not strike an unarmed woman.’ He turned towards the open crate. ‘This is the world’s most famous painting, exposed to full sunlight in a dusty courtyard. It needs to be repacked immediately and taken indoors.’ A flick of his head raised several curators to their feet, and they collected the crate and the packing to carry them quickly back into the château.

Schneider was on his feet again, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand. He picked up his SS Panzer field cap and his humiliation was almost painful. But regardless of Lange’s apparent rank, the man carried a piece of paper that superseded pips and stripes, and Schneider knew better than to question it. He did his best to recover his dignity, reaching into an inside pocket to produce a folded sheaf of documents which he held out towards Lange. ‘I have papers, too. Orders to search the château and arrest a guard here called Jean-Luc Percet.’

Lange ignored his papers. ‘Well, you’ve searched the château. Check the documents of the guards, and if you find your man, arrest him and be gone.’

Fear for Jean-Luc rose again in Georgette’s breast, and she quickly searched the faces of everyone in the courtyard only to realise that Jean-Luc was gone. Somehow, in all the distraction, he had seized his opportunity to slip away. Through the château, no doubt, out into the kitchen garden on the blind side and away across the fields to the safety of the woods.

Nonetheless, everybody stood tense in the midday heat, as soldiers examined the papers of every person in the courtyard. When they failed to turn up the suspected Maquis leader, Schneider spat in the castine and threw a dangerous glance at Lange with icy blue eyes. ‘If we ever meet again, Hauptmann, there will be a reckoning.’

He jumped back into his Kübelwagen, and with spinning wheels throwing dust and chippings up into the fibrillating air, he accelerated out through the gate. His men ran at the double to their waiting troop carrier and scrambled on board. Within minutes the roar of its diesel engine, and the growl of the tanks that awaited it at the foot of the hill, became a distant echo.

There was an almost audible sigh of collective relief, but still nobody spoke. Most eyes turned towards Huygue, who gently touched the wound on his head. The blood had dried, coagulating quickly in the sun, but a swelling like an egg had raised itself on his temple, and the bruising all around it was already starting to show. He glanced at Lange. ‘Thank you, Hauptmann,’ he said.

But Lange ignored him. He turned, concerned, to Georgette, and took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the blood from her face. ‘Do you live in the château?’

She shook her head.

‘Then you should go home and get that wound dressed. Is it far?’

She shrugged. ‘Thirteen, fourteen kilometres.’

He seemed surprised. ‘You have a car?’

She smiled at his naivety. ‘A bicycle.’

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘You can’t cycle fourteen kilometres in this state. I’ll give you a lift.’

Georgette flushed self-consciously and glanced towards Huygue. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I insist. You could be concussed.’

Now she felt Huygue’s eyes on her and couldn’t meet them. All the weapons they had removed from the château the night before were neatly stacked beneath a tarpaulin in her cellar.

Lange’s car was parked at the foot of the hill. A brightly coloured green, open-topped sports car with extravagant front wheel arches that ran the length of its extended bonnet to running boards that stepped up to a two-seater bench seat behind the wheel. It was dusty from the drive down from Paris, its windscreen smeared with dead flies. Still, it was the kind of car Georgette had not seen since before the war.

‘Where did you steal this?’ she asked.

‘I bought it. In Paris.’

‘Do ERR have car showrooms now, as well as department stores?’

He chuckled. ‘You never change, do you? I have no idea who owned it before. But it’s British. An MG T-type. Drives like a dream.’

As Lange strapped her bike to the leather roof folded back above the boot, Georgette glanced up the hill towards the château. Turrets and chimneys rising from steeply pitched slated roofs above honey-yellow stone. And she knew that in the Chambre de Nine Huygue would be washing his wounds and panicking about what Lange might find when he got Georgette back to Carennac.

They drove along the tree-lined main road to where it veered off southward towards Gramat, and a huge old farm building sat up on the rocks, with views out across the valley. Lange took the turn-off to Carennac, and followed the tiny River Bave to where it would debouch eventually into the slow-moving westbound waters of the Dordogne. He glanced across at Georgette in the passenger seat and saw her hair blown back from her forehead in undulating waves like water. ‘How’s the head?’

‘A bit sore. But I’ll live.’

He grinned. ‘I never doubted it.’ Then hesitated. ‘Feel up to taking a little diversion? It’s a beautiful day. We shouldn’t let the Germans spoil it.’

She looked at him curiously, but he kept his eyes trained straight ahead of him. ‘Present company excepted, presumably.’

He smiled without looking at her. ‘Like everything else,’ he said, ‘there are good ones and bad.’

They turned off little more than a kilometre later, and wound up into the hills on a road so narrow that they would have been forced to back into a field had they met anything coming the other way. The climb grew steeper, and Georgette could hear the MG’s engine straining. The road doubled back on itself through a copse of trees and over a tiny bridge, before emerging again into the early afternoon sunshine, and the whole valley of the Dordogne opened up below them.

This was not somewhere Georgette had ever come with her bike, and the view was breathtaking. Sunlight shimmered across the patchwork valley, ripening crops glowing gold in fields of wheat and barley, the river itself like shining loops of silver ribbon serpentining randomly between the cliffs that rose distantly on either side. In the shimmering heat, the red stone of the château of Castelnau glowed pink on the far bank, and from where Lange drew his MG into the opening to a hayfield, they had a view east beyond the turrets of Montal, to the towers that clustered around the hilltop above Saint-Céré.

A stone bench stood set into the hillside just below the road, and Lange helped Georgette climb down to join him, sitting on the warm stone to gaze out at the view. Nothing disturbed the silence of the land, except for the singing of the birds, the hum of myriad insects, and the far-off clang of cowbells ringing out across the hillside.

For a long time they sat, reluctant to spoil the moment. She felt the warmth of his body at her side, almost burning where they touched. Eventually she said, ‘Do you think, if we had met under different circumstances, things would have been different between us?’

‘In some ways, yes.’

She turned her head to look at him. ‘What ways?’

He smiled. ‘I’d have had to work much harder to get you to come to my apartment for dinner.’ The smile turned sad. ‘And you wouldn’t have hated me just because I was German.’

‘I never hated you because you were German.’

He turned amused eyes towards her. ‘Oh? So why was it you hated me?’

‘Do we have time? We could be here all afternoon.’

Now he laughed. ‘That’s what I love about you, George. You never take me too seriously.’

She felt a slight constriction of her throat, and an increase in her heart rate, and she wondered if there was anything else about her that he loved. She said, ‘I take your friend Karlheinz Wolff very seriously.’

‘He’s not my friend.’

‘But I take it that’s why you’re here. Because he is.’

He nodded.

‘Where?’

‘He’s staying in a hotel at Gramat.’

She turned to look out once again across the valley. The birdsong seemed discordant now, the cowbells, like John Donne’s bells, tolled for her. No longer did she see sunlight spinning gold across the land. Only the shadows it cast. Somehow, suddenly, it felt as if the endgame was very near. And fear chilled her in spite of the heat.

He said, ‘I’ve been back in Germany again. She’s finally agreed to a divorce.’

She was surprised. ‘Lost her faith?’

He shook his head. ‘It was never about faith. Just a way to get at me. But now he wants her to marry him, so being a good Catholic doesn’t matter any more.’

He took her hand in his, and both fear and pleasure suffused her, nearly drowning all other senses. She felt an arm around her shoulder and half turned towards him to find his lips on hers. Warm, moist, tender, and she opened her mouth to his as his tongue sought hers. And she lost herself in a kiss that seemed to last for hours. Like drowning in him. Before they both broke apart to come up for air.

He looked at her with such searching tenderness, his fingertips on her face. ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered, and she was uncertain whether she should be disappointed or excited. They stood up and still he held her hand as he led her back up to the road.

For the remainder of the drive to Carennac neither of them spoke, each lost in their own private thoughts. She was full of both trepidation and anticipation about their arrival at the house. About the decisions she would face. To commit or not. To give or withhold herself. It had been so long in coming, she had lost any sense of objectivity in how she should respond.

He parked his car at the foot of the steps, and followed her up to the little terrace at the front door. As they stepped into the house she wondered why she had ever worried about him uncovering the stash of weapons in the cellar. It was the last place they would be going.

And now it was she who held his hand as she took him through the kitchen and into the tiny bedroom at the back of the house. A decision that she seemed to have had no conscious part in making. They undressed quickly, silently, dropping their clothes where they stood. Sunlight angled across the bed through half-closed shutters as they fell together among the sheets and pillows. The hardness of his body pressed against the softness of hers. Somehow it all felt just so right. Why on earth had it taken them so long?

Afterwards they lay for a very long time in a tangle of sheets. The house was cool behind its thick stone walls, but the sunlight where it fell across the bed burned their skin. Georgette’s headache still lingered distantly, but banished from consciousness by pleasure, and now fear of a future that seemed impossible. She turned to lay her head on his shoulder, and idle fingers played with the tangle of hair on his chest.

‘When will it end, Paul?’

‘What?’

‘The war.’

She felt the cloud of his uncertainty shadow the moment. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’

‘Do you think we’ll survive it together? You and I?’

‘God, I hope so.’ She felt his fingers running through her hair, and they lay in silence for even longer now, neither of them wanting to bring this to an end.

Eventually, she said, ‘I saw Wolff.’

He sat up immediately, staring at her. ‘When?’

‘A long time ago. The day we arrived, and delivered all the large rolled-up canvasses to a place across the valley there. A little village called Bétaille. He was parked up just along the street, smoking a cigarette and watching us unload our cargo.’

‘What canvasses?’

‘Oh, The Wedding Feast at Cana and others. Nothing that would interest Wolff.’

‘So why was he there?’

She felt his eyes on her, but kept hers fixed on the ceiling, wondering whether she should tell him or not. She shrugged, as if that might somehow put off the moment.

‘George?’

He wasn’t going to let it go. She sighed. ‘The rolled canvasses are accompanied by several other, smaller pieces. One of them is catalogued as Sketch for the Feast. Its crate is uniquely colour-coded with three yellow dots.’

‘Why would Wolff be interested in that?’

And finally she let it go. ‘Because that crate contains a duplicate of the Mona Lisa. A forgery so good, that you and I couldn’t tell the difference. Painted on poplar, just like the original, by the best forger in a century.’

He was silent for so long that she was finally forced to drag her eyes away from the ceiling to look at him.

‘What is it?’

‘He could only have been there because he knows that.’

‘That’s what I thought. Though, I’ve no idea how. There are only a handful of people alive who know about it.’ She hesitated. It was the last shred of her secret. ‘I’ve been instructed to swap it for the original, if I think the real one is in danger of being seized.’

His blue eyes seemed to look right through her for some moments before refocusing. He touched her lips with a finger that he then ran down over her chin and breast, to graze a nipple and cause her to inhale sharply. ‘You should do it now,’ he said. ‘Before he thinks you will. Then when he makes his move he’ll have no idea you’ve beaten him to it. And if the forgery’s as good as you say it is, he won’t know that he doesn’t have the real thing.’

And all Georgette could think of was that if Wolff ever managed to get his hands on the Mona Lisa, even if it was just the copy, he’d have had to come through her to get it.

Lange was still staring at her. And as if he could read her thoughts he said, ‘I told you, George. Wherever Wolff is, I’ll be there, too. So don’t worry.’

He’d been gone for hours now, promising that she would see him again in the next days. And she had remained naked and tangled among the bed sheets, fretting about the future, both short- and long-term. Although the latter, she knew, would not be an issue if the former turned out badly.

Long before the sun vanished, she had drifted off into a shallow, dreamless sleep, waking only as night fell, and sitting up with a start. Her head was pounding, and though the blood had long ago dried, the head wound inflicted by the rifle butt still hurt.

She climbed out of bed and padded into the bathroom to wash. Then spent the next few minutes in front of the mirror examining the wound on her forehead. She dabbed it carefully with boiled water but still it started to bleed again. She staunched the blood with an application of petroleum jelly that she found in a jar in the cupboard.

Now she switched focus to look at herself. The upper right side of her face was badly bruised, and her left cheek still bore the evidence of the slap delivered by the German officer. Her hair was a mess. Cut short before the war, it had started to grow itself out in uneven tufts. And in the absence of a functioning hairdresser, she had spent the last four years cutting it herself. What in God’s name did Lange see in her?

The thought made her smile. But it was a smile that quickly faded as the decision that confronted her displaced everything else. To switch the paintings or not. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, before opening them again to find herself staring at doubt.

She went back to the bedroom to dress, then into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and sit cradling it alone at the long table. The painting was not big. Just seventy-seven centimetres by fifty-three. She knew, too, that the poplar board was not heavy. At the other side of the kitchen, she saw her leather-bound art folder propped against the wall. It would comfortably accommodate the size of the painting and some soft felt to protect it.

She took a sip of her tea, cooled enough now not to burn her lips, and made her decision.

It was a little after daybreak when Georgette cycled across the flood plain the next morning, her art folder strapped across her back. Wisps of mist rose from the river like smoke in the first heat of the sun. A long straight road cut across the valley, and she could see the red-brick of the church on the hill above Bétaille glowing in the early light.

It took about fifteen minutes, and the guard on night shift at the double garage was finishing a final cigarette as he waited for his colleague to arrive and free him to head off to his billet and a well-earned sleep during the hours of daylight. She dismounted and leaned her bike against the gate and showed him her ID. ‘You’re not the usual girl,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘We all have different skill sets. I’m here to check on the big canvasses today.’ All the works were inspected on a regular basis by assistant curators checking for signs of heat damage, or dampness, or mould, or invasions of insects.

He flicked away his cigarette end. ‘You’re early.’

‘The girls tell me it gets pretty hot up there during the day.’ She nodded towards the apartment above the garage. She grinned. ‘Don’t want to be getting sweaty hands all over the canvasses.’

He took her round the back and up steps to the door, unlocking it to let her in. ‘I’ll probably be away by the time you’re finished. I’ll let my colleague know you’re here.’

When he’d gone, she stepped carefully over the half dozen large rolled canvasses that lay along the length of the hall and the room beyond it. The shutters were all closed, and sunlight lay in narrow strips across the floor where it squeezed in through lateral vents. To her left a small kitchen gave on to a larger room stacked floor to ceiling with other works on the inventory. Elaborately designed pre-war wallpaper had seen better days. With her copy of the inventory in her hand, she made her way down the hall, turning left towards a small toilet, and a room opening to her right where she knew the Sketch for the Feast was stored. Here the wallpaper was peeling from the walls, an old fireplace shuttered off, soot lying thick all around the hearth. The crated paintings were stacked against the wall opposite, and it took Georgette nearly ten minutes, moving each one with great care, to find what she was looking for. The crate with the three yellow dots.

She carried it out into the hall to prop against the wall, before swinging the art folder from her back and opening it out on the floor. From her satchel she took out a small hammer and a chisel and very gently prised open the case. Peeling back the leatherette and the fireproof paper she set eyes for the first time on the reproduction of La Joconde. She pushed open the toilet door to let light from a window high up on the wall above the cistern spill out into the hall, and turned back to the painting.

She knelt down and gazed at it with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. She had seen the Mona Lisa so many times, touched her, bathed in the light of her presence, examined the brush strokes da Vinci had laid down with such tenderness on this poplar panel four hundred years ago. Cast critical eyes over the film of finely cracked paint and varnish that they called craquelure, damage that time had wrought to scar her beauty.

She found that she was holding her breath. It hardly seemed possible that this was not the real thing. She had not understood, until now, how Jaujard could claim to have been unable to tell it apart from the original. In the last two years, no one had been more intimate with the Mona Lisa than she. Like a lover she had slept with for all those months. And yet here, in the sunshine that slanted down across the hallway, she found herself doubting if this was the copy or the original. She touched it with a reverence born of incredulity. If she could not tell them apart, then neither could Wolff.

The sound of male voices drifted up from outside. The changing of the guard broke the spell. Quickly she lifted the painting from its crate and laid it on the soft felt with which she had lined her art folder the night before. She folded in the top and bottom flaps and tied it shut, then quickly reassembled the crate to restore it to its place in the stack against the wall of the front room. When it was safe to do so, she would return with the original and the switch would be complete. Only she and Lange would know it had been done and Wolff, she was sure, would suspect nothing. After all, there was no immediate or apparent threat to La Joconde at the Château de Montal. Why would she have swapped them?

Still, as she cycled away across the river valley, she harboured a niggling doubt about what she had done. Suppose what she had always taken for the original was really the copy. That Jaujard was somehow playing a game of double bluff, and had made her unwittingly complicit in the deception. She shook her mind free of the thought. It was, she knew, just the uncanny quality of the reproduction that had unsettled her. She was doing the right thing.

She felt the weight of it on her back. A load that far outweighed any reading which might be obtained by placing it on the scales. The weight of four hundred years of history. She put her head down and pedalled faster, heading back to the house in Carennac where she would transfer it to the cardboard suitcase which had accompanied her on this whole extended adventure.

It was late morning by the time Georgette arrived at the château, the suitcase strapped to the back of her bike. As she wheeled it across the courtyard one of the guards quipped, ‘Not leaving us for that German, are you, George?’

She forced herself to laugh as naturally as she could. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easy, Fred.’ She patted the suitcase. ‘Just a change of bed sheets for my camp bed after those brutes stamped all over them yesterday.’

She went into the salle des gardes and gathered up her old bed sheets where they still lay strewn across the floor next to her upturned camp bed. She righted the bed and folded the sheets and blanket neatly on top of it, before sliding her suitcase underneath. Then she ran up the vaulted stairwell, sunlight streaming in, top and bottom. The whole château seemed to glow in the light of the reprieve of yesterday’s search by the Germans. At the top of the steps she turned right along the hallway and into the Chambre de Nine, where Huygue sat at a desk pushed in beneath the window. He slept in the apparent luxury of a four-poster bed set against the near wall, among yet more crates of paintings.

He turned as he heard her and quickly stood up. ‘Shut the door behind you.’ The bruising on his forehead was already yellowing around its outer edges, a dressing on the wound inflicted by Schneider’s pistol grip. He lowered his voice. ‘What the hell, George? I’ve been worried sick.’

‘About me, or your precious stash of guns?’

He glared at her, and she crossed to where the crate with the three red dots leaned against the wall beside his desk. She crouched down to examine it. ‘Is she alright?’

‘Yes, thank God.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘What’s going on between you and that German?’

She looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. He knew you.’

She stood up. ‘Yes. He was a regular at the Jeu de Paume when I was in Paris. He’s with the Kunstschutz. You do what these people tell you or you suffer the consequence.’

‘What was he doing here?’

She shrugged. ‘On some kind of unannounced tour of all the depots, apparently. So we can probably expect him back. It’s just as well he chose to show up yesterday.’

She glanced down at Huygue’s desk and saw that he was updating some kind of journal. 31 mai: ouverture de la caisse contenant la Vierge d’Autun. Opening of the case containing the Virgin of Autun. Which Georgette knew to be a painting by Jan van Eyck dating from around 1435, depicting the Virgin Mary presenting baby Jesus to Chancellor Rolin in his church of Notre-Dame-du-Chastel in Autun in Burgundy. A bizarre portrait commissioned by Rolin himself showing him with mother and son in his church. A priceless work, in more ways than one.

She returned her attention to Huygue. ‘You’d better move those weapons out of my cellar in case he comes back. He showed a great deal of interest in the property. It was all I could do to get rid of him.’

That night she stayed over at the château as usual, the Mona Lisa in her crate propped at the head of her camp bed. But Georgette was unable to sleep. She made coffee after coffee and sat in the dark through the early hours of the morning until she was certain that everyone else in the château was asleep.

She could see the guard perched on the wall beyond the gate to the courtyard, smoking as he always did to relieve his boredom through the hours of darkness. Earlier the moon had risen in a startlingly clear sky, to cast its luminance across the landscape and lay a dazzling white sheen on the castine of the courtyard, broken only by the shadows of trees around its perimeter.

She placed the suitcase on her bed, opening it up to unfold the green felt wrapped around the painting she had stowed inside, and was struck all over again by the uncannily familiar image she unveiled. Quickly she opened up the crate that held the real Mona Lisa and for just a moment placed the two side by side against the wall. It seemed almost supernatural. The same smile twice. The same gaze in two pairs of eyes that never left her. Then hurriedly she fitted the doppelgänger into the crate with the red dots, replacing the wrappings, and closed it up. With shaking hands, she lifted La Joconde to take the place of her imposter in the suitcase, carefully swaddling her in green felt.

She slid the suitcase back under the camp bed and lay down to stare up into the vaults, aware that her whole body was trembling, her breath coming in short, rapid bursts, as if she had just run a hundred metres.

The deed was done.

It was just a week later, on June 6, that news reached the château of the Allied invasion of Normandy, and it sent a buzz of fear and expectation through all of the staff stationed there. Already there were reports of German divisions heading up from the south, making their way north to join the battle to repel the invaders. Under constant attack from guerrilla groups of Maquis fighters, the Germans were exacting terrible reprisals on the civilian population as they went.

The following day Huygue took Georgette aside to tell her that several maquisards fighters would be calling by the house in Carennac in the next day or two to recover the weapons from her cellar. ‘The Germans will be here in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours,’ he said.

They crossed the courtyard and passed through the gate to climb steps to the stone walkway above the garden. On the far side of the potager, wrought-iron gates stood open, leading to an avenue of trees and open country beyond. The means, Georgette imagined, by which Jean-Luc had been able to effect his escape from the château.

Huygue lowered his voice, although there was no one else in sight. ‘We’ve received intelligence that the 2nd SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, has sent three regiments north by different routes. It looks like the second regiment is going to come through Saint-Céré. Might even pass our door. There’s something like a hundred and eighty-eight tanks, sixty trucks, light vehicles and a couple of dozen motorbikes. Nearly 4000 men in total.’

‘Good God,’ Georgette whispered. ‘It’s like an invasion all of its own.’

Huygue nodded. ‘And a prime target for Allied bombing.’ He paused a moment to let that sink in.

Georgette was quick to realise the implications. ‘If they start dropping bombs around here, they could easily hit the château.’

‘Exactly. We have to get word to London giving them our precise coordinates and explain exactly why it is an area to be avoided at all costs.’

Georgette looked at him blankly. ‘How can we do that?’

Huygue took her arm and led her down into the garden. ‘We have a radio transmitter in the towers above Saint-Céré. It’s a pretty makeshift affair, but we’ve been able to send and receive messages from London.’ He chuckled. ‘The boys call it Radio Quercy. The trouble is, none of our people have got very good English. Certainly no one nearly as good as you.’ Georgette knew now what was coming next. ‘Would you be prepared to draft a concise message in English to take up to the towers tomorrow? The boys will encrypt it and send it off. The transmitter will be dismantled immediately afterwards and taken away. Because there’s nothing surer than that the Germans are going to come looking for it.’

Georgette closed her eyes and nodded. There was no need even to think about it. Whatever the risks. This was her duty. She felt the same sense of obligation as when de Gaulle had asked her to look after La Joconde. ‘Of course,’ she said.

The Tours Saint-Laurent stood proud on a conical volcanic peak that threw its shadow across the town of Saint-Céré below. There were four towers, two of them taller than the others, and a two-storey dwelling comprising the remains of what had once been a fortified château. It had had an impressive lineage of ownership over the centuries and was then in the stewardship of the Countess Annie de Coheix who, Huygue assured Georgette, had given tacit approval for the installation of radio equipment in the tallest of the towers.

Georgette had only ever seen the towers from the valley that they dominated, often lost in cloud, but was still unprepared for the steepness of the climb she had to make on her bike to reach them. In the heat of the early afternoon, she cycled through the tiny village of Saint-Laurent, past the mairie, and pushed her bike up the final slope to a door set in huge wooden gates built into an arch in the fortifications. She was breathless and perspiring by the time she got there, the folded message tucked into her bra, damp from her exertions. A handle dangled on a chain almost beyond her reach. She had to stand on tiptoes to grasp it and pull hard to set a bell ringing somewhere on the other side of the gate. It seemed inordinately loud in the still of an afternoon whose heat almost vibrated with the hum of a million summer insects.

The door creaked open just a little, and a tanned leathery face peered out at her. The face of a man she recognised from the gathering of resistance fighters the night she stumbled upon Huygue handing out weapons at Montal. He opened the door a little wider, peering out to make sure they were not being observed, before waving her in and slamming it shut behind her. She left her bike inside the gate and followed him up a steep climb between high stone walls, emerging through overhanging trees and shrubs at the entrance to the residential quarters of the old castle. Red and blond sandstone, rust-coloured shutters and doors. Extensive gardens stretched off to the towers at the south side of the hill, oak trees casting dappled shade on long grass. The maquisard took her the other way, past the echoing profundity of a deep dark well, to the highest of the towers. He opened a tall door to usher her in.

‘I don’t need to go inside,’ she said. ‘Just to give you this.’ And she pulled out the folded sheet of paper from beneath her blouse to hold towards him.

He shook his head. ‘No, no. There might be a reply. If you translate, there’ll be no misunderstandings.’

She glanced up at the square tower which soared into the blue sky above them. There were glazed windows set into the wall about six metres up, and unglazed openings cut into the stone at seemingly random intervals above that. She sighed and stepped inside, climbing narrow stone steps in the dark that led up to a floor lit by the window she had seen from the outside. Another, on the facing wall, looked out over the valley and the jumble of red-tiled roofs of Saint-Céré immediately below. She could see the Place de la République at its heart, and the four-storey lycée building on the far side of the River Bave. And away to the right, the turrets of Château de Montal shimmered in the afternoon heat.

A battered, old blue leather suitcase with rusted clasps sat open on a rough wooden table pushed against the wall below the far window. It was tightly packed with black bakelite units of interconnected electrical equipment, sliders and dials, knobs and switches. A tangle of black and red wire spewed out from one side of it to trail away across the floor into darkness. A Morse code transmitter key pivoted on a wooden block screwed to the table. A young man sitting at the table swivelled in his chair as they came up the stairs. He wore a grubby blue and white striped shirt that billowed baggily beneath his braces. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and he wore a dusty cap pulled down over a shock of pure black hair. He smiled when he saw Georgette, revealing a missing tooth at one side of a crooked and discoloured row of them. He stood up immediately and pulled off his cap to grin shyly. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said. ‘I’m Michel. Welcome to Radio Quercy.’ He waved a hand at the suitcase. ‘Best-equipped radio station in all of the Lot.’

Georgette looked at it in amazement. ‘Where do you get stuff like this?’

Michel said proudly, ‘It’s a Type A MkII suitcase radio made in Britain. Brought by an SOE agent parachuted on to the causses a few weeks ago.’

Even just the mention of SOE transported her back, however briefly, to that cold, wet, windy week on the Isle of Lewis.

‘Can we get on with it?’ The man who had let Georgette in at the gate glanced anxiously from the window.

The young radio operator held out a hand towards Georgette. ‘You’ve got the text?’

She handed him her piece of paper and he sat down with it to open a black leather notebook filled with lines of text and numbers, and embark on the process of encoding it. He scribbled the revised text that he would actually send on to the page of an open jotter. The pencil he held in oil-stained fingers was little more than a stub, its lead point blunted by use.

Georgette said, ‘What if they catch you with that notebook on you? Won’t they know your code?’

Without looking up, Michel said, ‘We use a poem I’ve selected. And that’s the key. The poem’s in my head.’ He tapped the notebook. ‘These are just transpositions. Wouldn’t mean anything to the Krauts.’

When he finished his encoding, Michel flicked switches and turned knobs and Georgette saw the needle on the circular dial dance into life. And he began his transmission, two fingers placed delicately on the transmitter key to tap out sequences of long and short beeps.

His companion was becoming agitated. He whispered to Georgette, ‘They know it the minute we start transmitting. And they know we’re somewhere in the area. They’ve been looking for us for days. It’s only a matter of time before they find us. This’ll be our last transmission from here.’

If he heard, Michel did not react. His focus was concentrated entirely on the key beneath his fingers, until finally he sat back, and Georgette saw sweat trickling down his neck from beneath his hair. ‘Done,’ he said.

‘How long do we have to wait?’

Michel looked at the other man. ‘As long as it takes.’

‘We don’t have as long as it takes, Michel. We need to be out of here.’

Michel raised a steadying hand. ‘Just give it a few, Jacques.’

The distant rumble of diesel motors carried to them on warm afternoon air and Jacques pressed his face to the window. ‘Jesus!’ Georgette heard him whisper under his breath. ‘They’re here.’

‘Who’s here?’ She was alarmed.

‘The Das Reich tank regiment.’ His breath condensed like bullet shots on the glass. ‘You can see them coming down the hill from Figeac on the far side of the town.’

Georgette crossed to the window and wiped away the grime to peer through it. And there in the distance, beyond the lycée, she saw a long column of tanks snaking slowly down through the trees on the road from Figeac. Trucks and motorbikes were already assembling beneath the plane trees in the Place de la République. She was startled by the far-off crackle of gunfire and recoiled from the window as if from an electric shock.

Jacques turned to Michel. ‘We need to go now!’

Michel nodded and stood up, shutting down the transmitter, and quickly unscrewing the transmission key from the table. He crossed the room, coiling lengths of wire to stuff hastily into the suitcase and snapped it shut. He stuffed his notebook in his pocket and tore the page with the encoded text from his jotter. Together with Georgette’s original text he crumpled it up and dropped it on to the floor, stooping down with a cigarette lighter in his hand to set them on fire. He stood up and watched as the paper burned, and when the writing on it was no longer legible, he stamped out the flames and grabbed his suitcase. ‘Let’s go.’

They hurried down the dark staircase to emerge blinking into the sunlight, momentarily blinded by it, before running for the gate. Down the narrow passage to the door that opened out through the fortifications on to the hillside beyond.

Georgette grabbed her bike and the three of them stood listening for a moment on the far side of the wall. The roar of the tanks was louder now, rumbling in the afternoon heat like summer thunder.

Michel nodded to Georgette. ‘Merci, mademoiselle.’ And he turned and ran off through the trees, hefting his transmitter.

Jacques said, ‘You’re on your own now.’ And he jumped over the wall to crash off through the undergrowth into the cover of the woods below.

Georgette mounted her bike, frightened and feeling very exposed. Her only way back to Montal was by road. She started off down the steep incline, gathering speed. At the mairie she rounded the bend and set off down the narrow road that wound its way around the hillside and down to the town below.

It was much faster on the way down than the way up. The air felt hot in her face, and she was having difficulty controlling her breathing. A long way off lay the safe haven of Château de Montal, and it seemed impossibly distant. Immediately below, the rooftops of Saint-Céré reflected afternoon sunlight off red Roman tiles.

She came fast around the final bend and on to the long straight stretch that descended to the hospital, and her heart very nearly stopped. The road at the foot of the hill was swarming with SS troopers, a truck and a couple of motorbikes. There was no way she could turn back, and nowhere for her to hide. She braked and drew to an unsteady stop as one of the soldiers stepped out into the road with his hand raised. He grabbed her bike and shouted at her to get off. Another caught her by the arm and marched her into the road. It was only then that she saw two men backed up against the wall at the foot of the hill. Civilians, beaten and bleeding, cowed and fearful. Georgette saw the fear in black eyes that met hers as half a dozen soldiers on a shouted command raised their rifles and shot them where they stood.

Georgette was shocked to her core. How easily the lives of those young men had simply been erased. All their memories, their hopes and expectations. The pain of growing up, falling in love, raising a family. The patriotism that had moved them to fight for the freedom of their country. Extinguished in the blink of an eye. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she understood the true frailty of human existence. That our time on earth is just a split second of eternity. ‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ The words of the Shakespeare play they had studied at school came back to her, and she realised how easily she too could be gone in just a heartbeat. In just the next few moments. And what would any of it have meant?

The blood of the resistance fighters was already coagulating in the dust of the pavement, and she was pushed violently in the back before being made to walk among the soldiers along the road towards the centre of town.

She half turned, protesting. ‘My bike!’

The one who had wrenched it from her said, ‘You won’t be needing that again, mademoiselle.’ And the sense that her own death was imminent struck her with such force that her legs very nearly folded beneath her. Seldom in her life had she felt so utterly powerless.

As they turned into the Rue de la République, she saw yet more soldiers herding a large civilian crowd of mostly women and children into the Boulevard Gambetta. Perhaps forty of them or more. The two groups of soldiers met up and Georgette was shoved into the boulevard to join the other civilians. She saw dark frightened eyes flicker momentarily in her direction. A pall of fear that was almost palpable hung over the group, nervous soldiers prodding them with semi-automatic rifles, tension heightened by the shouted commands of their agitated Sturmbannführer. A man called Christian Tyschen.

An involuntary gasp escaped collectively from the townsfolk as shots rang out from the direction of the Pont Neuf which spanned the river at the Hôtel de la Truite. Tyschen screamed at his troops and rifles were immediately raised towards the crowd. Georgette heard children crying and several of the women called out, pleading with the Germans not to shoot.

Georgette felt sick to her stomach. So much for her brave notion that she could in any way protect the Mona Lisa. She couldn’t even keep herself safe. So this is how it was all going to end. In a hot dusty street in a provincial town in south-west France. In a hail of bullets from a trigger-happy bunch of SS troopers. The confidence of the occupiers had been shaken as they sensed that the war was starting to slip away from them. Their desire for revenge fed by fear.

Incongruously, a woman’s voice speaking German rose above the hubbub, and Georgette pushed herself up on tiptoes to see a small woman in a print dress belted at the waist addressing herself to the German commander. Short, crimped hair was parted at one side above a pretty face with an upturned nose. Tychsen was trying to ignore her, but she followed him as he strode among his troops, gesticulating with expressive hands, voice plaintive and pleading. The conversation was too fast for Georgette to follow, but the woman was persistent and fluent. Someone whispered, ‘That’s Berthe Nasinec. She’s Czech. Married to the hairdresser.’

‘What’s she saying?’ another asked.

‘No idea.’

Whatever it was, it was bothering the German commander. Initially, to Georgette, he had appeared young for a commanding officer, but watching for his reaction he seemed older now than his years. A thin face, badly scarred around the chin and mouth, blond hair greying beneath his peaked hat. As he removed it to wipe the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve, Georgette saw that he had very little of it left. She saw, too, that his sweat-stained uniform was punctuated by badges for bravery. And pinned to his shirt at the neck she recognised a Knight’s Cross with oak leaves. But it didn’t take much courage, she thought, to turn guns on a group of unarmed women and children.

For the first time Tyschen met Berthe’s eye and he shouted at her. Words that no one could understand. But she was unperturbed, and continued following in his wake, pleading, cajoling. Suddenly he turned, taking his pistol from his holster, and pointed it at her head. She stopped, but stood her ground and thrust her chin out in defiance, almost daring him to shoot. Whatever she said then either embarrassed or shamed him, for the Sturmbannführer turned away, re-holstering his weapon, and started shouting fresh orders at his men. They in turn lowered their weapons and headed off at the double along the boulevard. Very quickly the crowd began to disperse, hurrying off through alleyways mired in shadow, along the street in the direction of the factory, or turning the other way towards the fire station, mothers raising children in their arms as they fled.

Georgette felt a hand on her shoulder. She’d barely had time to absorb that they had somehow been reprieved. Only history would reveal just what a narrow escape it had been. For the next day, Tyschen’s soldiers would go on to hang ninety-nine men from an avenue of trees in the nearby town of Tulle.

Her legs were still like jelly and she turned, startled, at the touch on her shoulder. A grim-faced Lange stood behind her. He was in uniform, but seemed much less sure of himself than the last time she had seen him.

‘Come with me, quickly,’ he said. ‘They’re shooting resistance people all over the place. We don’t want to get caught up in this.’

They cut through a narrow passageway to a street of terraced houses shaded by old plane trees in full leaf. At the end of it, they turned down a lane that led towards the rugby stadium and the cemetery, and she saw his green MG parked there in the shade.

‘Wolff’s here,’ he said breathlessly. ‘He’s chosen his moment well. When he has brute force on his side. He can take the painting and kill whoever he needs to in the process, and with all this confusion no one will be any the wiser.’

They climbed into the car and he started the motor, before turning anxiously towards her.

‘Did you make the switch?’

She nodded, still barely able to find her voice.

‘Where’s the original?’

‘Still at the house in Carennac. I’ve hidden it.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Good. We need to go now and get her to safety.’

At the junction with the road south to Gramat, they were forced to stop where soldiers had established a roadblock to allow free passage of an endless convoy of troop trucks and motorcycles and other vehicles heading north. They sat with the engine idling while half a dozen soldiers pointed their rifles into the car and a senior officer checked both sets of papers. He scrutinised them carefully, then examined Georgette with curious eyes which flickered then towards Lange. After the briefest of pauses he saluted, then shouted an order to halt the convoy and let the MG through. Lange accelerated away with relief. He said, ‘A piece of paper from the Führer’s office is useful, but might not always count for much in present circumstances. Nervous soldiers shoot first and ask questions later.’

The drive on the long winding road back to the house seemed endless. Glimpses through the trees of sunlight coruscating on the slow-moving waters of the Dordogne, nothing moving in the flood plain beyond. The turning of the world, it seemed, had been put on pause by the momentous events unfolding elsewhere. Georgette could not stop her hands from trembling.

When they got to Carennac the village was deserted. Shop, café, hotels all shuttered up. People locked away in their houses. No one wanted to attract attention to themselves, and only the spectres of the past walked the streets, silently inviting them to become phantoms of the future.

Lange drew in at the foot of Georgette’s steps, killed the motor and stepped out on to the asphalt. He stood for several long moments, listening intently, eyes scanning the park and the streets that led off into the silent heart of the village. But there was not a sound other than the slow tick-tick of the engine as it cooled, and some somnolent birdsong among the trees in the park.

He nodded towards the door. ‘Let’s go in.’

He followed her up the stone stairway and into the cool of the house, passing through the kitchen and into the grand salon. There she stopped, and he walked briskly past her, casting anxious eyes around the room before turning to face her.

‘Where is it?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s safely hidden. And anyway, Wolff won’t know where to find me if I’m not at the château.’

‘Of course he will!’ Lange snapped. ‘He’s been tracking you all this time. He’ll know everything about you.’ He paused. ‘Where’s the painting?’

She frowned. ‘I told you, it’s perfectly safe.’

Lange drew his pistol and pointed it at her. ‘Tell me!’

Georgette was startled and looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Paul?’

He shook his head. ‘Where is it?’

But for Georgette time had come to a dead stop. Her life, she knew with a greater clarity than she had felt even in the Boulevard Gambetta, was over. Only now, she wanted it to be over. Because how could she ever live with this betrayal. With her own blind stupidity. She felt the first warm tears track their way slowly down her cheeks. In a tiny voice she said, ‘That’s all you ever wanted from me, wasn’t it? The Mona Lisa?’

‘It’s what Hitler asked me to get for him, and it’s what I intend to deliver. Now where is it?’

‘What if I won’t tell you?’

‘Then I’ll kill you and tear the place apart until I find it.’

She stared at him for a long, long moment. In her heart, what she had taken for love morphed into hatred, and for a few fleeting moments she thought he felt it too, and saw discomfort or maybe even guilt in his eyes. ‘You’d better kill me, then,’ she said. ‘Because I’m not going to tell you.’

She closed her eyes. Not wanting to see him as he pulled the trigger to compound his treachery. More tears spilled from between eyelids squeezed tightly shut. She had seen the lives of men extinguished in a split second less than an hour before. And now she saw her own brief life flash before her eyes. Like a film that spooled too quickly, allowing for only a handful of memories to register. The childhood tragedy of a much-loved father taken too soon, the sadness of her mother’s passing. Lange as he made love to her, touching her face with tender fingers. Rose’s words to her that night at the apartment in Paris. If you ever sleep with him, it’ll be the end of you, you know that? She had been right. And now she remembered the day in the blackhouse overlooking the beach at Uig Bay, when Mairi’s grandmother had seen the halo of darkness around her.

In the stillness of the house she could very nearly feel Lange squeezing the trigger, and she flinched at the sound of the gunshot when it came. Something whistled past her and embedded itself in the door. She opened her eyes, startled to see Lange gazing down in astonishment at blood bubbling through a large hole in his chest. He looked up to see Georgette staring at him, and as if shutters had come suddenly down on his life, his eyes turned up towards heaven and he toppled forward to hit the flagstones with the sickening slap of flesh and bone on unyielding stone.

As he fell she saw, standing behind him on the side terrace, the pale figure of Karlheinz Wolff, arm raised, his pistol trembling just a little in his hand as he pointed it through the open door. His leather flying jacket hung open, sweat trickling from the hairline beneath his cap. The faintest of smiles lit a troubled face. He said, ‘You put your trust in the wrong man, Georgette.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘You know what a Mischling is?’

She had no voice to find, every sense and sensation numb with shock. She shook her head.

‘It’s the German word for a half-breed. The Nazis stole it specifically to describe someone of mixed Jewish and Aryan race. It’s what they call me.’ His voice was laden with bitter irony. ‘Some grandmother I never even knew.’ He ran his tongue over dry lips. ‘I was never, ever, going to deliver the Mona Lisa to that condescending, Jew-hating cretin Göring. From the moment he asked me to, I knew that my whole war was going to be dedicated to keeping her safe from him. And from Hitler.’ He cast his gaze down towards the man who had stolen his fiancée, blood pooling slowly around his body on the floor.

He raised his eyes again to meet hers, and his head snapped suddenly to the side as a single shot rang out. His pistol clattered away across the flagstones, an arc of blood spouting from the side of his head as his legs buckled beneath him and he fell on to the terrace just beyond the door.

Georgette heard cautious footsteps approach, and the shadows of three men darkened the doorway as they stopped to check that Wolff was dead before turning into the room. One of them held a pistol in his hand and pulled off his cap with the other. And Georgette saw that it was Jean-Luc Percet, the guard from the château. He grinned when he saw the prone figure of Lange on the floor. ‘Two for the price of one, eh? Good thing René Huygue sent us to get those guns from your cellar this afternoon, or it might have been your blood on those flagstones.’

The three maquisards buried Wolff’s body in a half-dug trench in the park next to the house, where the cantonnier had been preparing to lay a drainage pipe. They bundled Lange’s body into his sports car and drove it off through the still deserted village, not a living soul daring to open a window or unlatch a shutter. The burned-out remains of the MG were found two days later at the foot of cliffs downriver, the remains of its driver burned beyond recognition.

Georgette was left alone in the house, with blood on the floor, and the world’s most famous painting secreted away in her attic where no one, now, would even come looking for it.

It was almost a year later, on May 7, 1945, that the Germans surrendered and the war came to an end. In all those months, the dead place, seared into her soul by the events of that June day the previous year, had prevented Georgette from spilling so much as a single tear.

And just as it had on that fateful day almost a year before, the sun was shining the day the war ended. Instead of cycling to the château, Georgette took her bike and retraced the route Lange had taken her on their drive into the hills. She found the entrance to the hayfield where he had parked, and the stone bench set into the hillside just below the road where he had kissed her.

She climbed down to sit alone on the cool stone and gaze out across the landscape that dropped away into the valley below. The turrets of Château de Montal catching the oblique light of the sun, its honey-coloured stone glowing warm against the spring green and all the fruit trees in blossom. The towers of the Tours Saint-Laurent, from which they had transmitted her message to London in an effort to try to keep the artworks in the château safe from bombers, stood in stark silhouette against a painfully blue sky.

The same hum of insects and the same dull clunk of distant cowbells filled the air, just as it had the day she felt Lange’s lips on hers and knew that they were going to make love. There were so many reasons to remember him, but only one that now brought the tears she had refused to cry in all this time. And she wept. And wept. With unrestrained grief.

A little over a month later, on June 15th, the Mona Lisa, along with many other artworks from Montal, made the return journey to Paris to resume her rightful place in the Louvre. Eight months later, the rolled canvasses which had been stored above the garage in Bétaille, including Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, and Sketch for the Feast, also made the long trip home. When the crate containing Sketch for the Feast was eventually unpacked, it was found to be empty. No copy or reproduction of the Mona Lisa was found. And no one, least of all the authorities at the Louvre, were going to admit that it had ever existed.