She smiled softly. “You can almost hear their voices, the pain, the loss, the determination, yes?”
Like the woman who stood beside her? That defiance reaching down through the decades into another generation, with determination that those names and faces would not be forgotten.
“They come here for many reasons, the tourists,” Sophie Martin continued. “The younger ones have no understanding of what this was all about, except what they have read.” She made a sweeping gesture of the museum.
“But there are a few, descendants of one of those,” she gestured to the wall. “Historians, someone writing a book. There are others who would like to forget. This is our way of keepingtheir memory alive, perhaps more important in the times we live in when things are too easily cast aside and forgotten, but the world is still a very dangerous place.”
A very dangerous place.
Kris nodded. It reminded her of something Cate wrote in the front of one of her books, a quote borrowed from Winston Churchill—“Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.”
There were some—Cate—who would argue that they were repeating the past now—in political battles around the globe, the financial collapse of third world countries, wars in the Middle East, terrorists in the streets of New York, London, Paris.
“Are you perhaps writing a book?” Sophie Martin asked. “There are many stories here.”
The next book. Was that what Cate was chasing when she sent that photograph?
Kris had never met Paul Bennett. He died several years before Cate's first book was published. But she felt as if she knew him through the stories Cate had shared, and his photographs.
She had read somewhere that looking through the lens of a camera was like looking into someone's soul. Paul Bennett had that gift, the ability to wait for that moment and then capture it in some of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century, including a photograph of a seven-hundred-year-old tapestry.
She had hoped Marcus might be able to fill in the blank spaces, answer some of the questions. They had spoken about it before she went to meet with him. She rubbed her wrist and the raw bruise there, another reminder of the world they lived in.
“I'm looking for information about a young woman who was with the Resistance during the war.”
She took out that photograph that Paul Bennett had taken at the abbey in those days, just after the Normandy invasion, that included a small group of Resistance fighters and a beautifulyoung woman with a defiant expression. She showed it to Sophie Martin.
“Ah,” she said softly. “The one they called Jehanne.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
AUGUST, 1944, AMIENS, FRANCE
The press vehicle, a military truck that had been requisitioned for their use, lurched, bottomed out in the rutted road, then lumbered forward at the head of a long line of military transports that wound through the French countryside.
They'd been on the move for days, passing villages, small towns, the burned-out hulks of vehicles, transports, and tanks, following the enemy.
Each morning there were the briefing meetings with the members of the press, overseen by an officer who was the official liaison between the military and the journalists and photographers traveling with the combined Allied forces.
Refugees displaced when their homes were ravaged, old men, women, children carried belongings they could take with them or packed on the back of a horse or mule, young boys, too young to fight with the Free French, armed with pitchforks and knives, a priest whose church had burned—they all became the story of the war.
Bob Dunnett scribbled in his notebook, and Paul took photographs.
They told the story that others would see in the London newspapers, the toll of humanity caught in the midst of a brutal war, the resilience of the human spirit, the defiance of those who refused defeat.
By night, he held a flashlight between his teeth, hastily scribbling off a letter to his mother and sister, another one to his editor at the newspaper with descriptions to go along with the rolls of film that he was sending back, and a letter to Micheleine, with no place to send it, no idea where she was, or if...
“I think of that small room often, a place apart from all of this, and wonder where you are. I am taking my photographs, the ones that I'm required to take for the newspaper, then there are the others that I take for myself, of this place, the people, your country, with no idea if anyone will ever see them.
“You said, the pictures will tell the story. I remember the look on your face, the expression in your eyes. It is your story. I can only hope that I have told it the way you would want.
“I met an old man who told me a story of a young woman, who left her family and joined the Resistance. He did not know her real name. She is called Jehanne, the people's Joan of Arc, their hero, their hope...you are their hope.
“I have no idea where you might be. I can only hope that I will see you again.”
Other men wrote letters to wives, sweethearts, families, then posted them with the next dispatch. They had been told that all correspondence was put on a flight back to London—if the flight made it out and wasn't lost somewhere over the channel. There were almost daily reports of those that didn't make it back.
