The Secret Houses Read online

  The Secret Houses

  John Gardner

  © John Gardner 2014

  John Gardner has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1988 by Bantam Press

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  The French Houses

  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

  Part Two

  The German Houses

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Part Three

  The American Houses

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Extract from The Liquidator by John Gardner

  To the Memory of

  DENIS RAKE (“JUSTIN”)

  The secret houses

  Which are our souls

  Remain uncharted

  Except by God,

  Who Made the map…

  Anon.

  The secret fear of being denounced,

  The secret terror of a knock on the door.

  Yevtushenko: Fears

  Prologue

  Nothing much ever happened in St Benoît-sur-Loire. The Abbey still stood where it always had, and the town went about its business with almost painful normality, philosophically shrugging off the fact that it had spent four years under the Nazi tyranny. German soldiers were regular customers in the bars. Occasionally the military police came asking questions; sometimes a girl would get pregnant by a German. They would take her away, and people presumed she was cared for.

  They had all heard of the Gestapo man in Orléans – Klaubert. Who had not heard of him? The man was a beast. Le Diable d’Orléans he was called, and not without reason.

  You heard things. If you went into the city you might see things also – as well as the damage.

  They knew of course that there had been acts of sabotage right across France. Certainly there had been mishaps and explosions near St Benoît-sur-Loire, as well as the damage already done to Orléans during the fighting, and in the bombing. But, like everybody, the good citizens of St Benoît-sur-Loire now held on to hope. Five weeks ago the Americans, British, and their own Free Forces had landed in Normandy at long last. France would soon be at liberty again, so there was no need to fear the Nazis. During the previous week there had been talk of American parachutists near this very place. Some claimed to have heard shots fired.

  Then suddenly, in the small hours of dawn, it happened. Some heard it from their beds, others as they rose before sunup: cars and trucks driving into the town at full speed, the knocking on doors, and the sound of heavy boots on the pavement.

  The men who came were mainly Gestapo, with some regular troops for weight. They went to three houses and shots were fired in one of them. Later some people saw two bodies being carried out. Nobody viewed the other people – men and women – being jabbed, punched, and hustled into trucks, just as nobody saw the radio set being taken from the house where there had been shooting.

  A Wehrmacht sergeant, fat, friendly, and without malice, told one of the local barmen that criminals had been arrested and were being held by the Gestapo in Orléans. Nobody believed that. They knew it was a Resistance réseau – a network or circuit – that had been crushed. Nobody fancied the chances of the people who had been taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the Rue de Bourgogne, Orléans.

  They did not know the réseau was called Tarot. Nor had they ever heard of the English family called Railton, or the American family named Farthing. How then, could they know the deep effect the breaking of Tarot had on these two families – bound together by marriages and an affinity for their work?

  For the Railtons and Farthings it had started even before the war. It did not end until long after the conflict was over. For two in particular it began in the summer of 1940.

  Part One

  The French Houses

  Chapter One

  ‘Well?’ Caroline stood at the turn of the stairs, outside the cracked and scarred door to their flat. Through the opening Jo-Jo could glimpse the familiar simple furnishings of the place they had called home for the past two years. She now knew it would be home for only a few more hours.

  ‘It’s come.’ She lifted her hand to wave the postcard pulled from her purse. ‘The boy said he should have brought it yesterday, but they needed him for other things. I didn’t believe him.’

  Caroline turned, walking back into the five-room dingy apartment. Each room was no larger than a small cell. Jo-Jo, four years Caroline’s senior, and the taller of the pair, saw that her cousin was frightened. Caroline stopped, looking down from the square window into the Rue de la Huchette. The whores, and the men who protected them, were there arguing.

  The street was notable for two things – the dowdy, run-down third-rate hotel which had been Oscar Wilde’s home, and the brothel, with its ornate doorway flanked by statues of two black pageboys, that made the area safe for les petites Anglaises as the locals inaccurately called them. The whores were friendly, and men employed to watch the place always made certain the two girls were never bothered by passing trade. Further, the apartment was cheap.

  Not that there was any shortage of money, but Jo-Jo and Caroline were, like so many of their tangled family, stubborn and determined young women. Girls of a new breed, they lived almost ahead of their time with a shining idealism that put rank and power to one side, choosing instead to work and exist among ordinary people and so share lives vastly different from the glittering, privileged ways of their sisters and cousins back in England.

  Barely a month previously, the war, which had seemed until then unreal, had exploded into the horror of battle and rout. Hitler’s legions were unleashed, first on Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, with bombs from the air and storm troopers landed by glider and parachute. The great force massed itself, and within hours General Guderian’s Panzer divisions clattered, rolling into France, the ground ahead blasted by Stuka dive bombers; the Panzers, followed by half-tracks towing guns; and the leapfrogging infantry of the Wehrmacht, with the gallant, brutal, expert soldiers of the Waffen SS. The lightning war – Blitzkrieg – had struck, moving across Europe like a giant warm knife through a mound of butter, beating back the defenders, pushing the British toward the sea, and the French into their graves and panic.

  Paris had been chaos for the last two weeks – noisy, the streets clogged with those who wished to flee, the air rife with rumour, the eyes of its pe
ople wary with fear. Slowly they heard the approaching thunder of war, until the Panzers were poised only a few miles east of the city, with others working to the north and south. Then, today – Thursday, the 13th of June – Paris sighed and lay back silently like a woman bracing herself for rape. The streets emptied; houses closed their shutters; traffic disappeared; there were stories of looting; others said the Métro had come to a halt. Only occasional, and sometimes desperate, people were seen on the great thoroughfares. Jo-Jo had been one of them.

  Now she could see the nerves and muscles of Caroline’s small body go taut with tension. Jo-Jo knew the girl’s feelings and emotions by the look in her eyes or the way she moved. When Caroline was born, Jo-Jo had only recently arrived at the great house which was their true home in England. The other children seemed alien to the little girl, and she fussed around the new baby like a tiny second mother. When Caroline had started to toddle, Jo-Jo was always at hand, and, as they grew, the pair became inseparable.

  Caroline glanced into the street again. ‘What does the postcard say?’ Her long fingers grasped at the pasteboard – a familiar black and white view of the marketplace with the statue standing proud in its centre, and Caspar’s neat hand on the back, in green ink – Things much the same here. We think of you. Remember the tempest will not last forever. Her eyes seemed calmer now as she looked at her cousin.

  ‘It means we have to get out now. Come home, or do as we agreed,’ Caroline said in almost a whisper. Her nostrils flared briefly. Since childhood this had been a habit, a sign of anger about to burst. But this time she held back the fury. ‘He didn’t mean us to get out, back to England, did he?’

  Jo-Jo shook her head, a hand tight on the other girl’s shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t think so. Would you, if you had been Caspar?’

  There was a pause, the sounds of the squabbling whores sucked in through the half-window. ‘Come on, Caro. We’ve known for a week there was no way out.’ She gave a little laugh, like the twitter of some bird. ‘We did agree to do it.’

  Caroline dropped her head, the tousled dark hair falling almost to hide her face, then she swept it back with one hand. ‘We agreed, but nobody thought it would happen.’

  ‘Caspar did. Two months ago Uncle Caspar did.’

  Was it really two months? Caroline thought. More than sixty days since Caspar had sat in this room with bread, ham, and a cheap red wine, laughing and eating with them. Jo-Jo also thought of him: how he had sat opposite her across the table and taken her long hands in his, and how she felt the metal of his false left hand through the glove he always wore.

  When Caspar had lost his arm and leg in 1914, he had worn the makeshift artificial limbs of the time, but now things were more sophisticated and, unless you knew he was a cripple, it was difficult to detect his disablement at all, except for the gloved hand.

  ‘I have no right to ask this,’ he had said, smiling as though preparing them for some household chore.

  ‘But you’re going to ask it just the same, Uncle Caspar.’ Jo- Jo laughed. He was one of the first men of the family she could remember from childhood. Now Caspar Railton was in his late forties, but Jo-Jo recalled the jolly limping figure who had met them after the strange journey which now seemed like a dream, sometimes returning to haunt her – especially after she had been told the truth, on her sixteenth birthday.

  Jo-Jo Grenot had been brought, at the age of four, to the big, exciting, and beautiful Berkshire house called Redhill Manor. The manor seemed to belong to Uncle Richard and Aunt Sara. It was always full of people, and there were a lot of children. Quickly, as she grew, Jo-Jo became aware of the complexities of her family – how Uncle Richard Farthing was an American who had married Sara Railton, a member of the powerful Railtons only through her previous marriage, yet accepted by the family as truly one of them.

  Maman was a Railton who had married a Frenchman. That was why she was called Grenot. The Railtons, and the large American family of Farthings, had become inextricably entwined because of Sara and Richard. Later Maman’s other daughter, Denise, had married a Farthing. The two families were like great trees, planted close to one another, so that underground their roots had entwined, just as their trunks had become covered in ivy which prevented one from seeing the true texture of the bark.

  On the evening of Jo-Jo’s sixteenth birthday Maman had taken her to the rose garden and told her the truth: how she was really a Railton; how her father, who had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, had been a member of part of the Secret Service during the Great War (as they then called it); how he had helped catch a woman German agent and made her work for the British. They had become lovers, and the woman had been murdered by the Germans, but not before she gave birth to Jo-Jo. Maman was not really her mother, but Jo-Jo was still a true Railton and could, if she wanted, take her proper name when she was twenty-one. She refused immediately, telling Marie Grenot that she would always regard her as mother, and wanted no new name.

  Soon after this, Jo-Jo was sent to the Sorbonne, in Paris. Her grades were exceptional, so she was asked to stay on as a junior lecturer in English. In due time Caroline came to Paris as a student.

  It was through Jo-Jo’s influence that Caroline pleaded with her parents and was allowed to stay in Paris, taking a junior post, with Jo-Jo, at the Sorbonne. Richard and Sara Farthing did not really want Caroline living away from home, or in this manner. They had made her promise to return if things got too difficult. When war was declared in September 1939, Richard had even come over to see his daughter, but left feeling proud of her, and certain she would return to England if Hitler’s armies started a shooting war.

  Now, like Jo-Jo, she thought of Caspar, and the conversation a month previously. ‘I work for a government department,’ he had said, and the girls knew immediately what he meant. It was not talked about among the family, but they all knew some of their kinfolk were involved in secret matters. Caspar had been Chief-of-Staff to the first head of the modern Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Mansfield Cumming: ‘C’ as he – and all his successors – was known.

  ‘People said you’d retired,’ Jo-Jo said.

  Caspar had laughed. ‘I did. The business became very boring, and a bit unprofessional. They persuaded me back in ’38, though. Gearing things up for this show.’ He spoke of the present war, which everyone had expected in 1938. ‘Now, I feel damned awkward about asking this – and you can refuse.’ He talked to them for almost two hours, and they agreed to examine the situation if it should ever arise. He gave them simple codes: the sending of postcards which would warn them to make up their minds – Come home, or do as we agreed. The alternative was simply Come home. When he left, Caspar looked shamefaced, saying they should not discuss this with their respective parents. There was little likelihood of Caroline doing this, as Richard and Sara were in America. But Marie Grenot still lived in Berkshire.

  Now, standing beside the window, Jo-Jo said it all seemed inevitable once Hitler had made his unstoppable move. ‘Damn! Everything’s been for nothing.’ There were bright-red spots of frustration high on Caroline’s cheeks. ‘What has?’

  ‘Living like peasants. Sharing our beds with fleas and our bread with beggars.’

  ‘How can we tell? We chose to do that, Caro.’ Jo-Jo had a way of suggesting a truth, then leaving it to hang in the air, waiting for the other person to speak.

  At last Caroline said, ‘I suppose we go, then.’

  Jo-Jo gave a sigh. ‘Right then. We burn the passports and papers. Use the ones he gave us and head west. It’s less than one hundred fifty kilometres.’

  ‘Jules Fenice.’ Caroline said the name as though she had known the man since birth, and wondered what he would be like – this man trained by Uncle Caspar and waiting for them in a village on the Loire, near Orléans.

  First they had the job with the weapons and ammunition. Then they were to link up with Jules Fenice, whose code name would be Felix in the years to come.

  They stayed in the little apartment
until it was dark, burning the papers and anything that linked them to England. Then, with a few belongings packed in their cheap cardboard suitcases, they set out from the Rue de la Huchette, Paris, to the village of St Benoît-sur-Loire, within spitting distance of Orléans.

  They dodged German soldiers who entered Paris in the morning, and then the French police – for France gave itself over to Hitler’s Reich during their journey, with Marshal Pétain setting up his puppet government in Vichy. They used their French papers, which turned them at a stroke from Caroline Railton Farthing and Josephine Grenot into Catherine and Anne Routon. Sisters.

  They were to be known, later and to others, as Maxine and Dédé – part of a network called Tarot, which became famous, and infamous.

  For the two girls the journey from Paris was a trip into fame which ended in oblivion, mystery, and intrigue.

  Chapter Two

  Four years later, when the secret underground network known as Tarot broke down – five weeks after the Allied armies landed in Normany on D-Day, June 6, 1944 – Caspar Railton did not know how to break the news to Richard and Sara, nor to Jo-Jo’s ‘foster mother,’ his own Aunt Marie.

  He was due to spend the weekend of July 15 at Redhill Manor, set above the small market town of Haversage. There would be no chance to avoid questions about Caroline from Richard and Sara.

  Sara had continued to live in the splendid house – which dated back to the reign of Henry VIII – managing the large estate and farm since the death of her first husband in 1914.

  When Richard Farthing married her, later in the First War, the family had been all too pleased to allow the couple to remain in what was strictly Railton property. During the passing years, this one act had drawn the families closer, and between the wars almost all the senior Railtons visited the Farthings’ magnificent homes in Washington and New England; while the Farthings, in turn, crossed the Atlantic to spend time at Redhill.