Never Leave Me Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

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  Contents

  Margaret Pemberton

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Margaret Pemberton

  Never Leave Me

  Margaret Pemberton

  Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.

  She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers’Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.

  Dedication

  For Mike, as always

  Chapter One

  Spring had come early to Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts. The fierce Atlantic winds that whipped the cliff tops with such savagery a mere mile away skimmed the hollow of land in which the village sheltered, and tubs of daffodils and crocus flourished staunchly.

  Lisette de Valmy swung a woollen-stockinged leg to the ground and, using the toe of her shoe, slowed her bicycle to a halt. The mass of colour, vivid against the drab Norman stone of the high, slate-roofed houses, did nothing to cheer her. The sight only emphasised her rage. Flowers represented normality, and normality was a thing of the past. She leaned her bicycle against the wall of the villge café and, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her coat, hurried inside in search of Paul.

  He wasn’t there; nor were any other of the usual occupants. Chairs were tipped inwards against metal-topped tables, and the middle-aged proprietor, André Caldron, was desultorily polishing glasses, a wine-stained towel wrapped around his waist, his shirt sleeves rolled high.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Lisette asked, her hands clenching until the knuckles showed white. Dear God. She had to talk to somebody. Her fury and revulsion had to have some outlet.

  ‘Vierville,’ André replied tersely, putting down the glass he had been polishing and leaning across the bar towards her, his weight on his muscular arms. ‘The Boche rounded them all up at five this morning for work on the coastal defences.’

  The delicate line of Lisette’s jaw hardened. ‘Haven’t they done enough at Vierville?’ she demanded, her eyes sparking as she pulled a red beret from the back of her head, smoke-dark hair falling free. ‘They’ve dug and tunnelled and burrowed until there isn’t a yard of beach that isn’t mined.’

  ‘Now they are destroying the houses,’ André said with a shrug. ‘Nothing fronting the sea is to remain standing.’

  ‘Salauds!’ Lisette said expressively and André grinned. The vocabulary of the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Comte and Comtesse de Valmy had been greatly enriched by the rigours of the Occupation.

  ‘They’ll be gone every day for a week, maybe two. If I were you, I’d stay away from the village until Paul sends you word that he needs you.’

  A small shiver ran down her spine. To be needed was to be asked by the village schoolmaster to take messages inland to Bayeux and Trevieres; to pass through German patrols with information that, if found, would be her death warrant. She didn’t know who else was in the Resistance in Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts. André, by the expression in his voice when he had spoken of Paul ‘needing’her, obviously suspected that she was a courier, but whether or not he was an active member of the village cell, she didn’t know. Nor did she want to know. The more she knew, the more she could tell the Germans if she were caught. It was better this way. Picking up the messages that Paul left for her, leaving them at pre-arranged tables in cafés in Bayeux and Trevieres; not knowing who they were for or who was to collect them.

  ‘There are things happening here, too,’ André said, leaning closer to her, his voice dropping even though they were alone. ‘A large black, chauffeur-driven Horch with outriders swept through the village half an hour ago. My wife thinks it was Field Marshal Rommel on his way to Caen.’

  Lisette’s heart-shaped face tightened. ‘It wasn’t Rommel,’ she said bitterly, ‘and the car wasn’t on its way to Caen.’

  André’s heavy eyebrows rose.

  ‘It was a Major Meyer and he was on his way to Valmy.’ The skin was taut across her cheekbones, and her eyes were overly bright.

  André was very still, filled with sudden apprehension. ‘What did the major want with your father?’

  ‘Hospitality,’ Lisette said, her nails digging into the wool of her beret.

  André whistled through his teeth. Six months ago, Hitler had appointed Field Marshal Rommel Inspector General of Defence in the west. His task, to render over eight hundred miles of coastline safe from invasion by the Allies. He had made La Roche-Guyon his headquarters and the men of Normandy had been rounded up into labour battalions, forced to work erecting a giant steel and cement Atlantic wall, riddling the beaches with jagged triangles of steel, metal tipped stakes, and millions and millions of mines.

  Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts had become accustomed to the presence of Germans; to soldiers requisitioning farm produce; to the Gestapo and SS headquarters at Cherbourg and Caen. Now a high-ranking major had been thrust in their midst, the unwelcome guest of Comte de Valmy. Why? What new plans did the Nazis have for them?

  ‘Have a cognac,’ he said, understanding all too well why she was so pale.

  She shook her head, lights dancing in the dark cloud of her hair as she turned to leave. ‘No thank you André. If you should see Paul, tell him about the major.’

  ‘I will,’ André said, once more picking up a cloth and a glass, his eyes beneath their beetling brows thoughtful. Whatever Major Meyer’s reasons for taking up residence at Valmy, Lisette would be in an ideal position to discover them. And pass the information on.

  Telling André about the German now living under her father’s roof had done nothing to dissipate Lisette’s fury. Her hands were shaking as she wheeled her bicycle away from the wall and stepped on the pedals. For the past four years they had been lucky. Her father had told her so many times. Nearly every house in the area had been billeted with Germans. The Lechevaliers in Vierville were allowed access only to a small part of their home; in Colleville, the Mercadors lived together in only one room white German staff officers slept in their bedrooms, relaxed
in the drawing rooms, and forbade the Mercador children to play in their own garden. Valmy had been spared – until an hour ago.

  Lisette crammed her beret once more on to the back of her head and began to cycle down the main street and out of the village. Every few yards she had to return a greeting as the women of Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts called out good-day to her, going stoically about their daily chores; shopping, talking, doing their best to ignore the presence of the enemy in their streets.

  Lisette returned their greetings grimly, wondering if the soldiers lounging at the street corners thought them as resigned and subservient as they seemed. If they did, they sadly underrated the tenaciousness of Norman hatred. Once the Allies invaded, everyone, from elderly Madame Pichon who had delivered every child in the village for the last thirty years, to the eleven and twelve-year-olds in Paul’s classroom, would rise up against them.

  Sentries in camouflage cloaks barred the exit from the village and she slowed down, slipping off the saddle and holding the bicycle steady with one hand as she showed her identity card with the other. The soldier flicked it against his thumbnail without looking at it. He knew damn well who she was and was determined to know her better. The village girls were pretty, but there was something special about Lisette de Valmy. Even in her heavy stockings she exuded class and breeding, and he found her hauteur deeply exciting. She was looking at him now, her chin high, her eyes contemptuous, for all the world as if she were royalty and he the scum of the earth.

  ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ he asked, moving forward and standing very close to her, her identity card still in his hand.

  Lisette’s hands tightened fractionally on the handlebars of her bicycle, her only reply the scorching expression in her eyes. They were beautiful eyes, tip-tilted and thick-lashed, the colour of smoked quartz. Heat flared through his groin. She was the kind of French girl men dreamed of. The kind German generals sported on their arm in Paris. Her silk-dark hair fell in a long, smooth wave to her shoulders, pushed away from her face on one side with a tortoiseshell comb, crowned on the other by a provocatively tilted scarlet beret.

  The soldier grinned. ‘Come on,’ he said in his execrable French. ‘Be friendly.’

  Lisette’s voice dripped ice. ‘I would rather be dead,’ she said, her eyes feral, ‘than be friends with a German.’

  Behind him his companion laughed and the sentry’s smile vanished. Who the hell did she think she was, speaking to him as if he were a peasant? Bloody French with their airs and graces. Anyone would think that they were the victors. ‘Weggenhen,’ he snarled viciously, thrusting her card back at her. There would be another day; a day when his staff officer would not be so particular about the treatment meted out to the local landowning family. Then he would see if she meant what she said about preferring to be dead.

  Lisette, dismissing him as below contempt, cycled over one of the low stone bridges that gave the village its name, and then on and up through high-hedged lanes and beech woods to Valmy.

  She had been having breakfast with her father when the scout car had sped up Valmy’s gravel drive, scattering stones and skidding to a halt before the entrance. Marie, their only remaining maid, had nervously opened the doors to the two occupants of the car, and ushered them into the breakfast room. Lisette had risen to her feet behind her father, her table napkin still in her hand, her throat tight as one of the officers removed his peaked combat cap and tucked it beneath his arm, saying coolly, ‘From ten o’clock this morning, Valmy will be at the disposal of Major Meyer. I trust the Major’s presence here will not be an inconvenience, Monsieur le Comte?’

  The tendons in her father’s neck had tightened as he had said, ‘No, lieutenant. Will Major Meyer be accompanied by his own household staff?’

  The lieutenant’s eyes skimmed the silver on the breakfast table, the sixteenth-century tapestries adorning the walls, the faded colours of the Aubusson carpet. The major was going to have a very comfortable billet. ‘You have a cook?’ he asked peremptorily.

  ‘No.’ When the Germans had first invaded Normandy, thousands of men and women from the towns and villages had been herded away as slave labour, and their cook and her husband had been amongst those who had disappeared and had not been heard of again. Lisette saw the tendons in her father’s neck flex once again. ‘My wife does the cooking.’

  ‘Then she can cook for Major Meyer as well.’ The lieutenant’s pale blue eyes registered the exquisite lace tablecloth, the embroidered crest on the Comte’s table napkin. He knew exactly what kind of Frenchwoman the Comtesse would be. Freezingly elegant, possessing the effortless chic that made German women seem so gauche by comparison. ‘And she can do his washing,’ he added, seeing with satisfaction a dull red stain colour the Comte’s face and neck. Verdamt Gott! If he were being posted here she would do far more than his washing!

  His eyes flicked insolently from the Comte to the young girl standing a foot or so behind him. She was eighteen, possibly nineteen, with an air of fragility that begged to be broken. Glossy dark hair fell to her shoulders, dipping provocatively forward towards high, perfect cheekbones. Her mouth was generous, a faint downward curve at the corners giving it a look of vulnerability and sensuality. Her jaw line was pure and there was a tantalising hint of wilfulness about the chin. His eyes moved unhurriedly downwards, noting the full, high breasts, the narrow waist and the arousing curve of her hips beneath the serviceable tweed of her skirt. He felt his sex stir. Major Dieter Meyer would not have far to look for relaxation in his new posting.

  Reluctantly he clicked his heels, replacing his cap. ‘Goodbye, Monsieur le Comte,’ he said smoothly, aware that the girl was looking at him with undisguised loathing and uncaring of the fact. He found it far more arousing than servile submission.

  When the doors had closed behind them Lisette said in a strangled voice, ‘Couldn’t we have refused? Couldn’t you have protested?’

  Her father’s long, thin face was sombre. ‘It would have been useless. Major Meyer will just have to be endured, Lisette. There is no other way.’

  She swung away from him quickly, loving him too much to want him to see the disappointment in her eyes. There were other ways. Paul Gilles’way. Occupation did not have to mean capitulation. But her father thought the risks too great. He had seen what had happened to the innocent when the Germans had discovered members of the Resistance in their midst and he had no desire to see women and children led away and shot because he, Henri de Valmy, had tried to be a hero.

  His family was over six hundred years old. A de Valmy had been in Rheims Cathedral when Charles VII had been crowned. De Valmys had fought in the Hundred Years War; English knights under Henry V had deluged the walls of the early castle with arrows from their longbows. The exuberant, flamboyant chateau that a de Valmy, influenced by the architecture of the Italian renaissance, had built in the fifteen hundreds and withstood onslaught time and time again. The Nazis were only the last in a long line of marauders and they, too, would one day be no more. All that was needed for Valmy’s survival was endurance. And patience.

  Lisette skidded to a halt as the woods petered out and Valmy stood before her, its long, elegant windows catching the sunlight. Her father was wrong. It wasn’t enough to simply sit back and wait. The Germans had to be fought and she would fight them in any way that she could. The driveway, flanked by linden trees, terminated in a gravel sweep before huge oak double doors, and a large, black Horch was parked sleekly in front of them. Bile rose in her throat. He had come. Even now he was sitting in one of Valmy’s exquisitely proportioned rooms, fouling it with his presence.

  Savagely she remounted her bicycle, swinging it away from Valmy and out towards the coast. The clifftop was off limits now, girdled with barbed wire, defiled by pillboxes and monstrous bunkers. She didn’t care. She needed solitude and ever since she had been a child the long beach and the windswept cliffs had afforded it.

  She bumped the bicycle off the path and on to rough ground thick with mar
ram grass. The sea wind tugged at her hair, whipping it across her face, stinging her cheeks. Little over a hundred yards away a pillbox squatted, ugly and gaunt. A group of soldiers huddled outside it, their backs to the wind. If they saw her, she would be forced to halt. The coast had been out of bounds for over two years. Only when the villagers were rounded up to help with the building of the defences were they allowed access. Lisette continued to cycle defiantly. They were French cliffs, goddamn it. French beaches. If she wanted to go on them she would. Her defiance was defeated by the six-foot high coils of barbed wire that stretched away on either side as far as she could see. With an unladylike epithet, she ground to a halt, flinging her bicycle on to the grass and sitting down beside it, hugging her knees.

  Beyond the barbed wire the mined and despoiled land rose undulatingly, culminating in a lip of chalk, the cliffs falling steeply to the sea. Far away to the left were the silver flanks of Pointe du Hoc as it thrust its needle-like rocks out into the grey waters of the Channel and beyond, unseen, the wide estuary of the Vire. To the right the coast curved gently around to Vierville, to St Clair and Ste Honourine. Few people now lived in the hamlets and villages strung out along the coast. The germans had moved them away, ordering them from their homes as they turned the western seaboard of France into a mighty defensive wall.

  Lisette stared ferociously at the barbed wire and the giant steel jaws embedded along the beach and primed with mines. Rommel was wasting his time. If the Allies invaded, they would not do so in Normandy, but across the narrow neck of the Channel between Dover and Calais. Her father had explained it all carefully to her, showing on a map how easy it would then be for them to push through northern France into the heart of the Ruhr.

  Her eyes clouded. He wanted their defeat as passionately as she, yet he would be appalled if he knew of her involvement with the Resistance. A seabird wheeled over her head, screaming raucously. She watched it bleakly. If he knew of her activities, he would forbid her to leave the chateau. As it was, she was free to come and go as she pleased, and the Germans rarely hindered her. She was Lisette de Valmy, daughter of the local landowner and a regular visitor to the sick and needy in Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts and the neighbouring villages. Her bicycle was a regular sight along the high-hedged lanes and it aroused little comment.