Citadel Read online

  In memory of the two unknown women

  murdered at Baudrigues

  19 August 1944

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Maps

  Principal Characters

  Prologue

  The First Summer

  Codex I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Codex II

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Codex III

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Codex IV

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Codex V

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Shadows in the Mountains

  Codex VI

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Codex VII

  Chapter 54

  Codex VIII

  Chapter 55

  Codex IX

  Chapter 56

  Codex X

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Codex XI

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Codex XII

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Codex XIII

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Codex XIV

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Codex XV

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Codex XVI

  Chapter 96

  Codex XVII

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  The Last Battle

  Codex XVIII

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Codex XIX

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Codex XX

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Codex XXI

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Codex XXII

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Chapter 151

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Also by Kate Mosse

  Copyright

  We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the ones who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

  from Diving into the Wreck ADRIENNE RICH (1973)

  Principal Characters

  THE ‘CITADEL’ NETWORK

  Sandrine Vidal

  Marianne Vidal

  Lucie Ménard

  Liesl Blum

  Suzanne Peyre

  Geneviève Saint-Loup

  Eloise Saint-Loup

  IN CARCASSONNE

  Raoul Pelletier

  Robert Bonnet

  Leo Authié

  Sylvère Laval

  Marieta Barthès

  Jeanne Giraud

  Max Blum

  IN THE HAUTE VALLÉE

  Audric Baillard

  Achille Pujol

  Erik Bauer

  Yves Rousset

  Guillaume Breillac

  PROLOGUE

  August 1944

  COUSTAUSSA

  19 AUGUST 1944

  She sees the bodies first. On the outskirts of the village, a pair of man’s boots and a woman’s bare feet, the toes pointing down to the ground like a dancer. The corpses twist slowly round and around in the fierce August sun. The soles of the woman’s feet are black, from dirt or swollen in the heat, it’s hard to tell at this distance. Around them, flies cluster and swarm, argue, feed.

  The woman known as Sophie swallows hard, but she does not flinch and she does not look away, returning to them a kind of dignity stolen by the manner of their death. She can’t risk going closer – it might be a trap, it looks like a trap – but from her hiding place in the undergrowth that marks the junction with the old road to Cassaignes, Sophie can see the victims’ arms are tied behind their backs with rough farm rope. The man’s hands are balled into fists, as if he died fighting. He has blue canvas trousers – a farmer or a refugee, not a partisan. The skirt of the woman’s dress lifts lightly in the breeze, a repeat pattern of lilac cornflowers on a pale yellow background. Sophie shields her eyes and follows the line of the rope, up through the dark green leaves of the old holm oak, to the branch that serves as the gibbet. Both victims are hooded, coarse brown hessian sacking, jerked tight by the noose and the drop.

  She does not think she knows them, but she says a prayer all the same, to mark the moment of their passing. For the ritual of it, not out of faith. The myth of Christianity means nothing to her. She has witnessed too much to believe in such a God, such beautiful stories.

  Every death remembered.

  Sophie takes a dee
p breath, pushing away the thought that she’s too late, that the killing has already started. Crouched, she half runs, half crawls, hidden by the low, long wall that runs along the track down towards the village. She knows there’s a gap of fifteen feet, maybe twenty, between the end of the wall and the first outbuildings of the old Andrieu farm. No cover, no shade. If they are waiting, watching from the blackened windows of the house beside the abandoned cemetery, this exposed patch of land is where the bullet will find her.

  But there’s no sniper, no one. She reaches the last of the capitelles, the ancient stone shelters that cluster in the hills to the north of Coustaussa, and slips inside. For some time, they used them to store weapons. Empty now.

  From here, Sophie has a clear view of the village below, the magnificent ruins of the castle to the west. She can see that there’s blood on the whitewashed wall of the Andrieu house, a starburst of red, like paint splattered from a brush. Two distinct centres, blurred together at the edges, already turning to rust in the fierce afternoon sun. Sophie stiffens, though part of her hopes this means the man and woman were shot first. Hanging is the cruellest death, a slow way to die, degrading, and she’s seen this double execution before, once in Quillan, once in Mosset. Punishment and warning, the corpses left to the crows as on a medieval gallows.

  Then she notices smudged tracks in the dirt at the base of the wall where bodies were dragged, and tyre marks that head down towards the village, not towards the holm oak, and fears this means two more victims.

  At least four dead.

  She suspects everyone has been taken to the Place de la Mairie while the soldiers search the farms and houses. Brown shirts or black, their methods are the same. Looking for deserters, for maquisards, for weapons.

  For her.

  Sophie scans the ground, looking for the glint of metal. If she can identify the casings, she can identify the gun and it might tell her who fired the shots. Gestapo or Milice, even one of her own. But she’s too far away and it looks as if the killers have been careful to leave no evidence.

  For a moment she allows herself to sit back on her heels in the welcome shade, propped against the capitelle. Her heart is turning over, over in her chest, like the engine of an old car reluctant to start. Her arms are a patchwork of scratches and cuts from the gorse and hawthorn of the woods, dry and spiteful sharp after weeks of no rain, and her shirt is torn, revealing suntanned skin and the distinctive scar on her shoulder. The shape of the Cross of Lorraine, Raoul said. She keeps it covered. That mark alone is enough to identify her.

  Sophie has cut her hair, taken to wearing slacks but, thin as she is, she still looks like a woman. She glances down at the boots on her feet, men’s boots held together with string and stuffed at the heel with newspaper for a less awkward fit, and remembers the cherry-red shoes with the little black heels she wore when she and Raoul danced at Païchérou. She wonders what’s happened to them, if they’re still in the wardrobe in the house in the rue du Palais or if someone has taken them. Not that it matters. She has no use for such luxuries now.

  She doesn’t want to remember, but an image slips into her mind, of her own upturned face on the corner of the rue Mazagran, two years ago, looking up into the eyes of a boy she knew would love her. Then later that same summer, in her father’s study here in Coustaussa, and being told the truth of things.

  ‘And there shall come forth the armies of the air, the spirits of the air.’

  Sophie blinks the memories away. She risks another look, peering out from the cover of the capitelle down to the cluster of houses and then up to the Camp Grand and the garrigue to the north. Having warned the villagers of the imminent attack, Marianne and Lucie have taken up position to the west, while Suzanne and Liesl will launch the main assault from the ruins of the castle. There’s no sign of anyone yet. As for the others promised, she does not know if they will come.

  ‘And the number was ten thousand times ten thousand.’

  The beating silence hangs heavy over the waiting land. The air itself seems to vibrate and shimmer and pulse. The heat, the cicadas, the sway of the wild lavender and shock-yellow genet among the thistles, the whispering wind of the Tramontana in the garrigue.

  For a moment, Sophie imagines herself back in the safe past. Before she was Sophie. She wraps her arms around her knees, acknowledging how appropriate it is that things should end here, back where it all began. That the girl she was, and the woman she has become, should make their final stand here together, shoulder to shoulder. The story has come full circle.

  For it was here, in the narrow streets between the houses and the church and the ruins of the castle, she played trapette with the children of the Spanish refugees. It was here, in a green dusk heady with the scent of thyme and purple rosemary, she first kissed a boy. One of the Rousset brothers, fidgety in case his gran’mère should look out the window and catch him. An awkward meeting of teeth is what Sophie remembers. That, and the sense of doing something dark and illicit and adult. She closes her eyes. Yves Rousset, or was it Pierre? She supposes it doesn’t matter now. But it is Raoul’s face she sees in her mind’s eye, not the blunt features of a boy long dead.

  Everything is so still, so quiet. Today, the swifts do not swoop and mass and spiral in the endless blue sky. The linnets do not sing. They know what is to come, they sense it too, in the same way, this past week, each of the women has felt the tension in the tips of her fingers, crawling over the surface of her skin.

  Eloise was the first to be caught, five days ago, at the Hôtel Moderne et Pigeon in Limoux. Four days later, Geneviève was arrested in Couiza. The details of the boîte aux lettres, the fact that Sous-chef Schiffner was there himself, in person, left Sophie in no doubt the network had been betrayed. From that moment, she knew it was only a matter of hours, days at most. The spider’s web of connections that led south from Carcassonne to these hills, this river valley of the Salz, these ruins.

  She tries not to think about her friends incarcerated in the Caserne Laperrine on the boulevard Barbès, or within the grey walls of the Gestapo headquarters on the route de Toulouse, fearing what they will suffer. She knows how long the nights can be in those dark, confined cells, dreading the pale light of dawn, the rattle of the key in the opening door. She’s drowned in choking, black water, submitted to the violent touch of hands on her throat, between her thighs. She’s heard the seductive whisper of surrender and knows how hard it is to resist.

  Sophie rests her head on her arms. She’s so tired, so sick of it. And though she fears what is to come, more than anything now she wants it to be over.

  ‘Come forth the armies of the air.’

  A burst of machine-gun fire from the hills, and the answering staccato chatter of an automatic weapon closer to hand. Sophie’s thoughts shatter, like fragments of bright glass. Already she’s up on her feet, pulling her Walther P38 from her belt, greasy with goose fat to stop the springs jamming. The weight of it in her hand is reassuring, familiar.

  Breaking cover, she runs, low and fast, until she’s reached the edge of the Sauzède property. Once there were chickens and geese, but the animals are long gone and the door to the enclosure hangs open on a broken hinge.

  Sophie vaults the low wall, landing on the remains of straw and uneven earth, then on to the next garden, zigzagging from one square of land to the next. She enters the village from the east, slipping through the unkempt cemetery, its gravestones like rotten teeth loose in the dry land. Crossing the rue de la Condamine, she darts into the tiny alleyway that runs narrow and steep and sheer along the side of the round tower and down, until she has a clear view of the Place de la Mairie.

  As she’d suspected, the whole village has been brought there, beneath the burning sun. There is a Feldgendarmerie truck at right angles across the rue de la Mairie and a black Citroën Traction Avant, a Gestapo car, blocking the rue de l’Empereur, penning the villagers in. Women and children are lined up on the west side by the war memorial, the old men to the south of
the small square. Sophie allows herself a grim smile. The configuration suggests they expect the attack to come from the hills, which is good. Then she sees a ribbon of red blood and the body of a young man lying on his back on the dusty ground, and her expression hardens. His right hand twitches and jerks, like a marionette on a frayed string, then falls back to his side.

  Five dead.

  Sophie can’t see who’s in charge – the line of grey jackets and black boots, the field greens of the ordinary soldiers, blocks her view – but she hears the order, given in French, that nobody else should move. Equipment is scarce, but these men are well armed, unusually so. Grenades at the waist, bandoliers slung over shoulders, glinting in the sun like chain mail, some with M40 sub-machine guns, the majority with Kar-98 semi-automatic rifles.

  The hostages are caught between courage and common sense. They want to resist, to act, to do something, anything. But they’ve been told not to jeopardise the mission, and besides, they’re paralysed by the reality of the murdered boy on the ground in front of them. Someone – his mother, his sister – is sobbing.

  ‘C’est fini?’

  Sophie can’t breathe. She is seeing everything, hearing everything, but can no longer take it in.

  That voice.

  The one person she’d hoped never to see again. The one voice she’d prayed never to hear again.

  But you knew he would come. It’s what you wanted.

  The rattle of a machine gun fired from the ruins of the castle snaps Sophie back to the present. Taken by surprise, one of the soldiers jerks round and returns random fire. He’s no more than a boy either. A woman screams and pulls her children to her, trying to shield them. Jacques Cassou, a Pétainist, though a good man at heart, breaks away from the group. Sophie can see what’s going to happen, but she’s powerless to stop it. She wills him to wait just a moment more, not to draw attention to himself, but panic has taken hold. He tries to run to the safety of the rue de la Condamine, forcing his tired, swollen legs to carry him away from the horror, but he’s an easy target. Sophie can only watch as the Schmeissers tear into the old man, the force of the assault spinning him round. His daughter Ernestine, a lumpen, bitter woman, runs forward and tries to catch him. But she is too slow, he is too heavy. Jacques staggers, drops to his knees. The soldiers keep firing. This second hail of bullets brings them both down.

  Six dead. Seven.

  The world breaks apart. The signal has not been given, but, hearing the guns, Marianne and Lucie launch the first of the smoke-signal canisters from the Camp Grand. It soars over the houses and lands at the edge of the square by the truck, disgorging a stream of green smoke. Another canister pops, then another and another, releasing plumes of blue and pink and orange and yellow into the stifling air. The soldiers are disorientated, cross-firing into one another’s positions. They, too, are on edge, Sophie realises. Whatever they’ve been told about this operation, they know something doesn’t add up. It is no ordinary raid.