Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes Read Free Book Online Page B

lost that glued-up feeling which came with exhaustion. His mind, too, seemed to be wide open. He felt warm and clean and comfortable. Clean? He looked at his hands in amazement. Yes, he had been scrubbed clean. And he was no longer lying on top of a dust sheet. He was between coarse linen sheets, with a broad pillow propping up his shoulders. A quilted mat, its blue pattern bleached with many washings, covered him. He was wearing a loose white shirt, and the filthy rags which had been his clothes had disappeared. He raised himself quickly on one elbow, but the contents of his pockets had been laid neatly on the small writing-table near the window. Papers, clasp-knife, gun. Yes, they were there all right. He relaxed back on hispillow and looked at his clean hands. Albertine had certainly been busy. He found himself grinning in embarrassment. Well, what of it? She had been midwife to Madame Corlay. It wasn’t the first time she had washed young Bertrand. But it was lucky about that birthmark. He had thought Matthews was being just a touch too realistic there, when he got that chemist fellow to imitate the red blotch on Corlay’s back. Strange that it should have been the first of his faked credentials to stand a real test.
    It was warm in the room. Albertine had closed the windows again. He sat up in bed, swinging his legs on to the chest. He rubbed the back of his head, stretching himself, and gave a long satisfied yawn. And then he smothered a laugh. Not one of his better moments, he decided, looking at the dangling legs under the short shirt. He crossed to a mirror, framed in carved wood, which hung against the white wall. The view there pleased him just as little. The tired lines under his eyes had faded but not departed, and he had never admired Corlay’s haircut anyway. Still, he did look less like himself and more like the Frenchman. He gave a wide grin to himself and saw the gap at the side of his teeth. Another of Matthews’ bright ideas. “If,” he had said, “if you were to smile broadly or to laugh, the gap would be seen. You must have a gap.” So he now had a gap. He felt the still tender gum with his tongue. Yes, he had a gap all right. But what Matthews expected him to laugh at on this trip was beyond him.
    He opened the window. Now the fields and trees were bathed in the amber light of early evening. All the smells of grass and leaves and hay and clover and ripening wheat, distilled by the day’s warmth into one sweetness, hung in the air around him. Time seemed suspended in the silence of these fields. “Whyshould they stay here?” Albertine had asked in answer to his question about any visiting Germans. Living here, one could become as simple as that: one could believe the delusion that peace was self-perpetuating.
    There were footsteps in the room below. They were climbing the staircase, slowly and heavily. He closed the window quickly, and moved silently back to the bed. He was seemingly asleep when the door opened and Albertine entered. There were footsteps following her: heavy, decided footsteps. Hearne stiffened.
    “He has been like that since yesterday morning,” Albertine was saying. Not this morning, then; yesterday morning.
    The man grunted in reply, and Hearne heard something being set down heavily on the wooden chest beside him. For a moment he felt danger. Albertine had seen through the deception. He was caught not only helpless in bed, but ludicrously in a nightshirt. If he could get the man off-guard, if he could reach the gun on the table...and then four cold fingers were laid gently on his wrist and stopped the wild plans. Albertine had only brought a doctor. He wondered where she had found him, for there was no doctor in Saint-Déodat. Doctors practised by districts, not by villages, in this part of the world. It would be just as well to stop feigning sleep. Doctors were doctors. He groaned slightly and twisted his body as his eyes opened. The doctor was shaking his white head and