“Maybe someday,” Kasia said. “For now, I am very tired; is there somewhere I can rest?”
“Your bedroom is upstairs,” her friend said. “Come, I’ll show you where, and I have a nightgown you can wear.”
* * *
—
Leila and Ricard fled south, on the old roads, from village to village, from Combres to Retournac to Saint-Hostien. Somewhere beyond the Loire the snow had gone, revealing winter fields. Sometimes they took local trains, three-car trains that rattled along at twenty miles an hour and stopped at tiny stations. Once they took an old bus that belched blue smoke from its exhaust pipe. Sometimes they rode in farmers’ wagons pulled by old horses, sometimes they walked. Sometimes they saw church steeples in the distance, which meant villages with little hotels. The skies were blue in the south, where a weak sun suggested that spring might come, someday in the months ahead. In time they reached a village on the coast, and there found a grizzled old rogue with a milky eye who took them, by felucca, to a village in Spain. The village had an eight-room hotel, and they stayed there for a few days. As they lay in bed one morning, a breeze ruffling the sheer curtains by an open window, they talked about the future, about the end of the war, about, someday, going back to Paris.
For Catherine
BY ALAN FURST
Night Soldiers
Dark Star
The World at Night
Red Gold
Kingdom of Shadows
Blood of Victory
Dark Voyage
The Foreign Correspondent
The Spies of Warsaw
Spies of the Balkans
Midnight in Europe
A Hero of France
Under Occupation
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALAN FURST, widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel, is the author of Midnight in Europe, Mission to Paris, and many other bestsellers. Born in New York, he lived for many years in Paris, and now lives on Long Island.
alanfurst.net
Facebook.com/​AlanFurstBooks
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