Never Leave Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

locks to be fitted on the double doors leading to the grand dining-room, requisitioning yet another room that overlooked the Channel, curtly civil, always menacing.
    She closed her bedroom door behind her, moving across to the window and staring out over the windswept headland to the sea. Paul was still working on the repairs to the defences at Vierville. No doubt doing so on Major Meyer’s orders. The aides had come to Valmy as she had known they would. The cobbled courtyard at the rear of the chateau was rarely empty of staff cars and motorcycles and the old servants’quarters around the courtyard now housed a score of soldiers.
    She leaned her face against the coolness of the window pane. Rommel’s sweeping visit to Valmy had confirmed her suspicions that Major Meyer’s task was to oversee the coastal defences. Which meant that the German high command was increasingly suspicious that if and when an attack by the Allies was launched, it would be directed against Normandy. She drummed her fingernails against the glass frustratedly. It was surely the kind of news that London would be interested in, yet without Paul she had no way of passing the information along. For her own safety and the safety of others, she did not know who Paul’s contact was. It was the way the Resistance survived and flourished: secrecy was its life blood. Even the leaders rarely knew one another except by code names and never did one group know what another was doing. If betrayal came, it could not spread. She turned away from the window restlessly. An invasion was only rumour but it was one the Germans believed. If it were true, it would be vital that they had no knowledge of where and when the attack was to take place. Prior knowledge would doom it to disaster. And in Valmy, on the grand dining-room table, were probably maps and papers that would tell the Allies exactly how much information the Germans had about their plans.
    Her eyes sparked with impatience. Her father had promised that he would garner what information he could, but the rooms occupied by Major Meyer were locked and a sentry stood on duty outside the double doors of the dining-room. No easy opportunities for spying were going to present themselves. Opportunities would have to be made. She opened the bedroom door, walking quickly and quietly along the corridor and down the stairs to the library.
    â€˜We must talk, Papa,’ she said, not sitting down. ‘In the gardens, not in the house.’
    Henri de Valmy nodded. Field Marshal Rommel’s visit to Valmy had shaken him. Whatever Meyer’s task it was obviously an important one and he could feel the precarious safety of their lives rapidly slipping away.
    The sentry on duty outside the dining-room eyed them with hostility as they crossed the hall. It was as if they were the usurpers. A flare of white rage surged through Lisette and she had to clench her jaw in order to remain calm. They were everywhere: tramping up and down the winding stairs that led to Major Meyer’s study; grinding their cigarette stubs beneath their heels as they paced the terraces; littering the drive with their presence. Her father took her arm gently as they walked through the kitchens and out into the courtyard beyond.
    â€˜They must be endured,’ he said quietly, yet again. ‘It is the only way that we will survive them, Lisette.’
    â€˜I hate them,’ she said fiercely as they crossed the cobbles, the February sun chill. ‘They’ve permeated Valmy with their presence. I don’t think that we’ll ever be free of them.’
    â€˜We will,’ her father assured her, his austere features grim. ‘And until we are, we must be grateful for the Major’s civility.’
    Beyond the courtyard a long lawn sloped away towards a terrace and the sunken rose gardens. As they began to walk towards them something tight caught in Lisette’s throat. She hated Major Meyer most of all. It