Jackdaws

Jackdaws Chapter 1

The First Day

Sunday, May 28,1944

One minute before the explosion, the square at Sainte-Cécile was at peace. The evening was warm, and a layer of still air cover the town like a blanket. The church bell tolled a lazy beat, calling worshipers to the service with little enthusiasm.To Felicity Claire it sounded like a countdown.

The square was dominated by the seventeenth-century château. A small version of Versailles, it had a grand projecting front entrance, and wings on both sides that turned right angles and tailed off rearwards. There was a basement and two main floors topped by a tall roof with arched former windows.

Felicity, who was always called Flick, loved France. She enjoyed its graceful building, its mild weather, its leisurely lunches, its cultured people. She liked French paintings, French literature, and stylish French clothes. Visitors often found French people unfriendly, but Flick had been speaking the language since she was six years old, and no one could tell she was a foreigner.

It angered her that France she loved no linger existed. There was not enough food for leisurely lunches, the paintings had been stolen by the Nazis, and the whores had pretty clothes. Like most women, Flick was wearing a shapeless dress whose colors had long ago been washed to dullness. Her heart's desire was that the real France would come back .It might return soon , if she and people like her did what they were supposed to.

She might not live to see it-indeed, she might not survive the next few minutes. She was no fatalist; she wanted to live. There were a hundred things she planned to do after the war: finish her doctorate, have a baby, see New York, own a sports car, drink champagne on the beach at Cannes. But if she was about to die, she was glad to be spending her last few moments in a sunlit square, looking at a beautiful old house, with the lilting sounds of the French language soft in her ears.

The château had been built as a home for the local aristocracy, but the last Contest design Sainte-Cécile haf lost his head on the guillotine in 1793. The ornamental gardens had long ago been turned into vineyards, for thi s was wine country, the heart of the Champagne district. The building the government minister responsible had been born in Sainte-Cécile.

When the Germans came the enlarged the exchange to provide connections between the French system and the new cable route to Germany. They also sited a Gestapo regional headquarters in the building, with offices on the upper floors and cells in the basement.

Four weeks ago the château had been bombed by the Allies. Such precision bombing was new.The heavy four-engined Lancasters and Flying Fortresses that roared high over Europe every night were inaccurate-they sometimes missed an entire city but the latest generation of fighter-bombers, the Lightning and Thunderbolt, could sneak in by day and hit a small target, a bridge or a railway station. Much of the west wing of the château was now a heap of irregular seventeenth-century red bricks and square white stones.

But the air raid had failed. Repairs were made quickly, and the phone service had been disrupted only as long as it took the Germans to install replacement switchboards. All the automatic telephone equipment and the vital amplifiers for the long-distance lines were in the basement, which had escaped serious damage.

That was why Flick was here.

The château was on the north side of the square, surrounded by a high wall of stone pillars and iron railings, guarded by uniformed sentries. To the east was a small medieval church, its ancient wooden doors wide open to the summer air and the arriving congregation.