Page 67 of The Little Island Flower Stall
‘If he did, I never got to hear about it. But I suppose I’d be the last person to hear, under the circumstances.’
‘He? So itwasa boy?’
‘I don’t know. I’m only guessing he because I don’t know what she had. She’d stopped speaking to me long before that, before she even went away. I knew she was expecting, but that was all.’
‘It wasn’t your fault she had to go away.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘It was the father’s if it was anyone’s. He should have stood by her.’
Celestine shook her head. ‘Oh, he couldn’t possibly have done that, even if he’d wanted to. I believe he would have wanted to, but it would have been out of the question.’
‘Because he was a soldier? A German soldier?’
Celestine stared at her. ‘How could you…?’
‘It’s obvious,’ Bella said, flushing. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? Perhaps it was time for her to own up too. With what Celestine was telling her now and what she’d learnedfrom Rory, everything was starting to fall into place. There were pieces missing, and perhaps they’d never have the full picture, but at least it made some kind of sense now. ‘I just thought, who wouldn’t be able to stand by her? And it seemed to me that it had to be a soldier.’
Celestine shot her a look that seemed sceptical, but perhaps Bella’s guilt would have her read too much into it.
‘I suppose you think that’s awful, don’t you? That she could love someone who was the enemy. And she did love him, with all her heart. But it wasn’t like you might think.’
‘I’m not judging. You fall for who you fall for.’
‘She was hiding him, you see.’
‘What for? Was he in trouble?’
‘Terrible trouble.’
‘And you were in on it?’
‘Anais and I were helping her.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘Probably not as scared as I ought to have been. I was fourteen, going on fifteen. I thought I knew everything. We all did. We thought we were so clever.’
‘Violette was older than you?’
‘Yes, she was seventeen. Klaus was eighteen.’
‘Klaus…? That was him? The soldier? So how did you get involved?’
‘Well, there was a breakout at the tunnels. Some of the forced labourers had escaped and were on the run. We were pottering about in the gardens of this big old house. We used to get in through a gap in the fence. Nobody had lived there for years, and we knew it had good blackberry bushes. We heard a noise in one of the outbuildings. We thought it might be one of the escaped workers. Violette said we needed to help them. It took us ages to work up the courage to go and look. In the end, Anais snuck over and peered through a crack in the boards at the window. Shealmost fell over with the fright, and she let out such a squeal he came out with his gun. He said he’d shoot us if we told anyone he was there.’
Some introduction, Bella thought, but she nodded for Celestine to carry on.
‘He would never have done that,’ Celestine said. ‘Even a bunch of silly girls could see he wasn’t the sort. He looked as if he was scared to death and he needed a bath. Violette was always bold. She came straight out with it, asked if he was hungry, and he said he was. So she went to get him some food, and then that was it – we were all friends.’
‘He spoke English then?’
‘A bit, and we’d all learned a bit of German – we had to, you see, so we knew what was going on from day to day. We went over every day to see him.’
‘Weren’t you tempted to hand him over to the British?’
‘We talked about it, but we didn’t even know how to contact them. The island was more or less cut off. And when he told us how he’d come to be there, we decided not to. You could see Violette was already sweet on him, and the rest of us thought it was all terribly exciting.’
