Messages, ancient symbols, a young woman the people of war-torn France had called Jehanne. It was all very entertaining, but it didn't explain what Cate was after, or the reason she was dead.
James found her in at the back of the of the museum sitting in front of a computer screen.
Reckless! Stubborn!
She shouldn't have left the inn. Didn't anything that had happened mean anything to her? The attack in London, at the abbey, the day before?
“Kris...”
“I found the woman in the photograph that Cate sent.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
“Her name was Micheleine Robillard. She was fifteen when the Germans invaded France. She lost her father and two brothers during the war. She joined the Resistance, carrying messages across enemy lines, once inside a fake cast on her arm. She guided people out of France who were on watch lists, sabotaged communications, and was rumored to have killed a high-ranking German officer.”
“Go on,” he told her. They needed to talk, but it was clear certain things were off limits. For now.
“They put a price on her head,” Kris continued. “That didn't stop her.”
Like someone he knew.
“She went behind enemy lines, disguising herself, and managed to smuggle weapons into a hotel where several Resistance fighters who were to be executed the following morning were being held.”
She'd tried to imagine the courage it had taken. But there were always stories of people who did incredible things in horrible times.
“She was caught by the Germans in the last months of the war, sometime after that picture was taken, as they retreated towards Belgium.
The Battle of the Bulge. He had studied it—that last bloody battle where the Germans had almost turned the Allies back. Almost. But fate, divine intervention, sheer blind luck, whatever you wanted to call it, they had succeeded. Strategists, military scholars, and historians still analyzed the series of battles that eventually led to the liberation of France and the end of the war.
He could guess how it had ended for a young French girl who joined the Resistance. An army making a last stand didn't have time or manpower to guard prisoners. Every soldier was needed for that last offensive, prisoners were expendable.
Kris’s voice softened. “She was tortured and then shot, her body burned in the forest as the Germans retreated. According to another resistance fighter who escaped and survived the war, she never gave them the information they wanted. A letter was found after the war in a cellar where she and others hid from the Germans. It was probably the last letter she wrote to her mother.”
She skipped over the personal part of the letter, and read the last part.
“Too much has been lost. It must not fall into enemy hands. Tomorrow we will go the hospital.”
“You think she was referring to the tapestry?”
She heard the doubt in his voice, the skepticism that a young girl referred to a lost artifact that had been hidden from the Germans to keep it safe.
“She knew where the tapestry was at the time of the Allied invasion—the photograph Paul Bennett took at the abbey proves that,” Kris pointed out. “After everything that had happened during the war, it makes sense she didn't want it to fall into the hands of the Germans.”
According to everything they'd learned about it, the tapestry was considered an important piece of art, even if it wasn't as well known as the Bayeaux tapestry. And it was no secret that the Germans had looted thousands of pieces of art and other valuables during the war—paintings, sculptures, gold, jewelry.
“And she left this letter, hoping someone would find it.”
“What hospital?” James replied. “Where?”
She folded the papers and put them in her bag. She didn't know, but she had found something else—where Micheleine lived before the war.
The next step. She'd just found it.
“Her family had a farm near Arras before the war,” she explained as they left the museum. “It's possible someone still lives there.”
He knew where she was going with this. He pulled the phone out of his jacket pocket.
