Chapter 1
September 1942
Southwestern France
It was a rare act of disobedience, lying in the tall grass less than a hundred meters from the farmhouse. Despite her orders to be far away, Sophia was determined to witness her mother’s murder. Her favorite rifle, the Enfield, a present from her biological father, lay ready at her side. She would honor her mother’s wishes and hold fire until it was over, but none of the murderers would live to see the setting of the sun.
The Vichy police would come to arrest her mother, a thing Maria Beauchamp would not permit. She knew her body, weakened as it was by the hard treatment meted out by the Germans in the last war, could not withstand the brutal interrogation in store for her. She had chosen instead to sacrifice her own life rather than risk the lives of those who worked the escape route saving airmen and others fleeing German brutality.
Sophia studied the scene through Swiss binoculars, panning to the second story window in the rear of the house, her bedroom window. Slate shingles rose to a high ridge. She swung the binoculars to the wraparound porch. Square wood columns supported the sloped roof above. Her mother occupied a rocking chair facing the driveway, a blanket covering her lower body. Dust settled behind a police car as it came to a halt at the wooden fence that was the demarcation between road and garden. The car disgorged four traitors in uniform, their distinctive flat-billed round caps bobbing. Sophia watched the chief approach the porch. She knew he would feign courtesy if given the chance. Her mother threw off the blanket, raised a pistol, and denied him the opportunity. Another fell to the wrath of Maria’s Modele 1935. Her mother fled inside, dodging the fusillade of bullets burping from machine guns.
Sophia dropped the binoculars and took up her rifle. She sighted on the remaining traitors and tracked them as they mounted the porch. She bit her lip, relaxed her trigger finger, and watched the men enter the house. Her mother would not flinch from the plan they had laid out the night before. The cyanide pill would rob them of their arrest. Sophia sensed her passing as a tightening of her heart. A staccato rattle bounced out of the house, bullets wasted on a corpse. She tracked the men exiting the house. When the first foot touched ground, she pulled the trigger. The cap flew in the air and the man collapsed to the ground. She tracked to the second and dispatched him.
Sophia allowed herself a moment of grief for her beloved mother. Her eyes burned. She stood. There was much left to do. A time for proper grieving would come. She hid the binoculars and rifle in the hollow of a large oak. They would be returned to their true hiding place later. In a clearing in the woods, Zèlie stomped a greeting. The Carmague was a childhood gift from her uncle Paul, a Provencal vintner. She rode bareback across recently harvested wheat fields under a brilliant sky at odds with the darkness in her heart. The shed at the edge of a field leaned sharply away from the bordering farm road. She dismounted and wrestled the doors open. Inside was the two-wheeled cart she was supposed to have driven to town earlier. It was loaded with produce, sacks of flour and the last of the peach and apricot harvest, bound for Herr Richter, the German agricultural agent. Missing were the usual two rabbits. Sophia and her mother shared them with the good wine on their last night together.
***
Sophia sat on the back of her cart and watched the bullet riddled body that had once been her mother bounce behind the police car. The uniforms tied the body to a statue in the town square. A staff car with swastika flags flying from each front fender forced its way through the townspeople. They listened in silence to the guttural warning the Sturmbannführer delivered in broken French. The German departed, citizens diving out of the way. Her boots raised a puff of dust when she dropped down. She pulled herself onto the statue’s base and stood even with her mother’s death-gray face. She kissed a sagging cheek, then let herself down. As she studied her mother’s body, a man appeared beside her.
“She was quite a woman, your mother. It is a shame what they have done to her.”
Sophia continued to stare. “It is only her body, uncle. Her spirit is somewhere else now.”
“You mean, in heaven, do you not?”
“Call it what you will, uncle. Her spirit left her body long before these cowards shot their bullets into a corpse.”
“How can you know that, Cherie? You were not there, were you?”
There were things that her Uncle Claudius should not know. He would wonder why her mother had cyanide pills in the first place. Then he would ask other questions.
“Of course not. I was making my delivery to the Germans. Notice there is no blood from her wounds. Her heart must have stopped before the first bullet entered her.” She fished a small folding knife from her pocket.
“I will take her home.”
Marie’s body lay on the downstairs bed. Sophia washed it with loving care and treated the wounds, brushed the steel gray hair, and braided it in the fashion her mother had favored. She dressed the body in her mother’s best long gown. She applied color to the lips and cheeks, clipped pearls to the lobes, and placed a gold chain with a tiny locket around the neck. Having reversed the defilement her mother’s body had endured, Sophia laid her head on her mother’s breast and let the sobbing tears flow. Her body vibrated with righteous anger. Her voice was a whisper.
“I will avenge you. I swear it.”
The sun was a faint remembrance in the western sky. Sophia stood by the two-meter-deep hole dug by two of her almost dozen resident workers, fugitives with false documents. In the waning light, she studied the gravestone that marked the final resting place of her mother’s husband. Sophia grew up believing he had been her father, though she never knew him. When her period arrived, her mother gifted her the truth. Sophia kneeled on the chilly ground, her legs weak from the remembrance.
“Maman, I know how babies are made.”
Marie’s eyes sought a distant past. “Maman?”
“I don’t know if I loved him. Perhaps I did. But in truth, I was lonely. I wanted another child.”
Sophia knew the story of her only brother, forever eight, with a German bullet in his head.
Marie held her daughter’s hands.
“You must not have relations with Etienne’s son my love, for he is your half-brother.”
Tears cooled Sophia's face in the early autumn night air. The funeral would be at sunset, her mother’s favorite time of the day. She took a shovel and climbed down the rickety ladder into the hole.
***
Sophia sat on the end of her cart and waited. The location she specified on the coded note was a remote clearing. A shadow slipped out of the trees. It stopped, then moved toward the cart.
“Sophia?”
“Fool. You know better than to use my real name.”
“Sorry Amalie. Why are you here?”
“I have a message to deliver. Come close. The woods have ears.”
The shadow stepped with care and arrived at the rear of the cart. A half-moon lit his face. Fog from his breath rose before him. Sophia leaned close, put her hands on the man’s shoulders and whispered.
“You’re a dead man.”
She turned him and wrapped a garotte around his throat. She leaned back and put all her weight into it. The man fought like a demon, but Sophia had planned well. With his back bent over the edge of the cart, he had little leverage. The struggle ceased. Sophia shivered and breath eluded her. A vision of her mother calmed her. She climbed off the cart, snatched some rope, tied the man’s hands behind him, and bound his feet. She took her mother’s scarf off her neck and gagged the unconscious mouth. Two fingers to his carotid artery told her he was alive.
The horse whinnied as the cart stopped by the newly dug grave, now a half-meter deeper. Sophia climbed down and patted Zélie’s muzzle.
“Shhh darlin’.”
She used two hands on the inert body’s foot, leaned into it, and pulled. Slowly it moved forward until it tumbled into the hole. Sophia shoveled dirt until it was fully covered. She climbed down and raked off the face. She removed her mother’s scarf and leaned close.
“You could have been a collaborator. Served the Huns and been comfortable. I could live with that. We all have to find a way to survive, and I won’t judge. But you chose to infiltrate the resistance. You chose to condemn my mother to death.”
The shaking face said, “You are mistaken. It was not I”
“The mistake was yours. You said something, a casual remark that proved you already knew my mother was being arrested. You caused my mother’s death a surely as if you had pulled the trigger yourself.”
“Please. I have a wife and children.”
Sophia shook her head. “Your children will grow up fatherless, and better for it.” She reached behind her and pulled out a German bayonet. She raised it two-handed above her head, and drove it into the traitor’s neck.
***
A fire blazed by the pond. Her wet clothes hung from a tree, free now of blood and vomit. She would have burned them had fabric not been so precious. The flames reflected golden off her bare skin and sparkled in her tears. She hugged her knees and mourned her mother. At long last she pulled on the spare set of clothes, doused the fire, and trudged up to the house.
Chapter 2
September 1942
Southwestern France
Sophia woke early and fired up the wood stove in the kitchen. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and washed quickly. Her body shivered from more than the cold. A note had come that the German officer would visit this morning. Her dress came from a trunk that preserved things more comfortably worn in her mother’s affluent days. The reflection Sophia saw in the mirror was that of her mother as a young lady. Age, suffering, and hard work had changed her mother’s body, but she must have been as tall and slender as Sophia to have worn this dress in her youth. Rarely used lipstick and her mother’s pearls completed the image. As if speaking through the mirror, her mother’s words came to her.
You are the lady of the house now, mon ami. Always present yourself so to the Germans. They will treat you more respectfully.
The knock on the door startled Sophia. She was pleased her hands were steady and grateful for the long dress to conceal her less cooperative knees. She opened the front door and smiled.
“Herr Richter. What a pleasant surprise.”
The German agricultural agent stood aside. “I present Sturmbannführer Becker.”
A rigid man, imposing in his grey uniform stood before her. His black collar bore the jagged double S insignia and the four silver pips of his rank. An iron cross hung at his neck and a swastika decorated his shoulder. Sophia smoothed her dress and smiled.
“Good morning Sturmbannführer. Please come in.”
The officer turned to face his escort. “You will wait outside.”
Richter heil-saluted and left the porch.
Sophia seated the German lieutenant colonel at a sturdy kitchen table.
“Forgive me Monsieur, but I am only able to heat the kitchen. Would you care for some tea? I am afraid our small store of coffee was confiscated in the search.”
“Tea will be fine, Mademoiselle.” The man’s cultured voice contrasted with his reputation for cruelty.
Sophia’s visitor spoke to her back as she worked at the kitchen counter.
“Herr Richter informs me your farm delivers excellent provisions.”
“We do our best under difficult circumstances.” The teacup chattered, and her hand shook as she poured.
“Are you nervous, Mademoiselle?”
Sophia sat opposite her guest, her back straight, eyes meeting his. “How could I not be? Your reputation precedes you, Mein Herr.”
“You need only be nervous if you have something to hide.”
She smiled. “Then I shall not be nervous.”
“Excellent tea.” He set his cup down. “You are quite a problem, fraulein.”
“I do not understand, Mein Herr. Our farm is the highest producing in the area. I personally assist Herr Richter in translating his instructions to the other farmers. The region under his administration compares favorably in wheat and rye production. We are improving in oil seeds and soy, although I will admit they are new to us.”
“Precisely. It has not escaped us that you are an important factor in the region’s success. Were that not the case, by now my men would have lined up your workers and shot them. You would be in our interrogation facility. I assure you the questioning would not be pleasant.”
“And yet we are here, having a polite chat over tea.”
“Indeed. Our planners recognize that tanks are useless without food for the troops. They will not be pleased to lose the production from this farm. They require proof. In fact, they are asking right now for evidence in regard to your mother’s death.”
Sophia sipped her tea. “The Vichy police conducted a quite thorough search of the house and barn. It will require days of work to set the place right again. Yet I am certain they found nothing, for there is nothing to be found. Do you deny it?”
“No, Mademoiselle, I do not. It is a shame we were not able to interrogate your mother.”
“And why was that?” Sophia knew the answer. “Were the Vichy perhaps a little overzealous?”
“Perhaps. The incompetent French police allowed her to kill four of their numbers. Had they been Germans arresting her, I daresay things would have been different.”
Sophia smiled. “I doubt that very much, Monsieur Colonel. Your predecessors treated her most cruelly, and I believe forgiveness would scarcely have found its way into her heart.” She stood. “I, on the other hand, care nothing for the silly games you men play.” The German made to speak, but Sophia continued her practiced words. “You fight these wars, and you play these resistance games. Your side wins. The other side wins. It makes no difference to me. I care only for this farm and the people who work it. I feed people. Your people, my people, I do not care.”
“A pretty speech, young lady. I wonder if your story would remain the same under our interrogation.”
“It would, I assure you. However, perhaps there is another way to convince you of my sincerity.”
“And what would that be, Mademoiselle?”
Sophia leaned forward. Her forearms rested on the table. Her eyes were clear. “It will be my pleasure to receive you. I will show you our farm, and how we labor to serve your needs. You may inspect us at any time.”
“You do not hate us, Mademoiselle?”
“How could I not, Mein Herr? You invade my country, make our lives exceedingly difficult. On a personal level, my mother would be alive, were it not for you Germans. To expect otherwise would be shortsighted. Yet my mother educated me to be a realist. You are here. I wish to survive. And thus it is in my current best interests to accommodate you however I can.”
The man leaned back. “How old are you?”
Sophia smiled. “Old enough to take care of myself.”
The SS Officer stared at her for a long time. “Very well, then. I will visit you upon my return. We will see then what you have to offer.”
“I only ask that you come alone. I would not have the world know I am entertaining a German officer.”
Becker took his leave. Sophia barely made it to the back garden before she fell to her knees and vomited violently.
***
Her flaming red hair floated above the ribbons and flowers decorating the cart and casket. A long train of people from town and country walked slowly behind. The local priest said some things that did not register with her. She placed a bunch of flowers bound with her mother’s scarf on the casket and threw her body over it. Through her tears she whispered.
“Rest for both of us, Maman.” She stood back. Etienne took her hand.
Six of the farm crew lowered the casket into the ground.
