The Linden Tree Page 16

  Nicolas scowled. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he snapped.

  ‘I most certainly do! What’s the matter with you, Nicolas? A few minutes ago you seemed as full of gratitude to him as I am.’

  ‘Well, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not sure about him any more. You stay here, and wait for me.’

  I was livid. ‘I shall do nothing of the kind. Don’t you dare order me about, after what I’ve been through for you … All right, so you didn’t give me away to the East Germans, I’d have realized that if I’d been able to think straight. But you knew that there was a risk in sending me across the Berlin Wall, and you didn’t worry about that, did you? Kurt said that no man who … he said that he would never send a girl across the Wall, it’s too dangerous. And now you have the nerve to say that you don’t trust him –’

  I knew that my voice was rising in anger, and I didn’t care. For a few minutes I had let myself bask in the knowledge that Nicolas hadn’t betrayed me, and I’d felt all my love for him returning. If he had been gentle and sympathetic, the kind of man Kurt was, I would have been only too glad at that moment to shelter behind him and do as he asked. But I was far too overwrought to accept authority from a man who obviously cared so little for me.

  Nicolas had been putting a finger to his lips, trying to shush me. Now he grabbed at my wrists.

  ‘Let me go!’ I shouted, struggling to free myself. ‘Let me go – you’re hurting –’

  He clapped his hand over my lips again, but too late. My shouts had been heard. His body jerked and his mouth opened in surprise as someone rushed him from the back, wrapping both arms tightly round his throat.

  Nicolas’s reaction was immediate and frightening. He took one step backwards, his hands went up to the arms twisted round his neck, he bent forward and someone, all arms and legs and tumbling curls, came flying over his shoulder to land with a sickening thud on the grass beside me.

  And lay still.

  ‘Scott!’ I sank down on my knees beside the body. ‘Scott …’ I looked up, my eyes half-blind with horror. ‘Oh my God, Nicolas, you’ve killed him!’

  Nicolas was staring in surprise and dismay. ‘No I haven’t,’ he snapped, pushing me aside and kneeling by the boy. ‘He’s winded, that’s all. Is this the American boy you were telling me about? What the devil did he think he was doing, jumping me like that – I might have broken half the bones in his body.’

  Scott’s face was deathly white and his pulse was erratic, but he was indisputably alive. I brushed the hair tenderly out of his eyes.

  ‘I think,’ I said shakily, ‘that he was probably trying to protect me. I told him that I’d seen you in the town, and then he saw me with Kurt and assumed that he was Nicolas. It seemed too complicated to explain, so I didn’t try. Scott must have been coming down the path from the town to the camp, heard us arguing and thought that I was being attacked by a stranger.’

  ‘That was chivalrous of him. He’s got plenty of pluck, I’ll say that. Ah, he seems to be coming round.’

  Scott’s lashes fluttered, then flew open. For a second he stared at me uncomprehendingly, and then recognition returned.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he mumbled thickly.

  ‘It’s all right, Scott dear,’ I said. ‘I’m with Nicolas – this is Nicolas. The other man was … someone else. Are you hurt?’

  In the circumstances it was a stupid question. The boy was too dazed and shaken to be able to assess the state of his health. Nicolas made a more practical approach.

  ‘Sorry about that, friend,’ he said. ‘Look, can you turn your head from side to side? Good. What about trying to move your arms, one at a time … slowly does it … that’s fine. Now your legs.’ He was very gentle with the boy, calm and competent. ‘Does that hurt? Or that? Good, I don’t seem to have damaged you, though you’ll have some painful bruises.’

  ‘He has a nasty cut on the side of his head,’ I pointed out, tenderly investigating some of the matted, darkened curls.

  ‘Hmm – we could see better if we cleaned that up a bit. I think I can hear running water over there. You’d better stay here, Alison, you’re almost as pale as he is. I can look after him – besides I owe him that much. Come on then, bold Sir Lancelot, let’s have you.’

  Scott was still too shaky to stand unaided and Nicolas heaved him up in a fireman’s lift and carried him through the bushes towards the sound of the water. I sat down thankfully on the grass under the linden tree, and closed my eyes.

  The fright of seeing Scott lying, as I thought, dead, had shaken me more than I realized. I felt emotionally and physically exhausted. I was no longer able to think clearly or take any positive action. I knew that, in all fairness and courtesy, I ought to go up to the town and find Kurt. The fact that Nicolas objected to my going did nothing to deter me, but at the moment I simply felt unable to make the effort.

  From the side of the stream came sounds of spluttering and coughing and a sudden heartening yelp of protest. Scott, it seemed, was recovering rapidly.

  ‘Keep still a moment,’ I heard Nicolas say. ‘Ah, you’ve only grazed your head. You’ll live.’

  ‘Ouch, I ache all over,’ Scott groaned. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You need to learn something about unarmed combat before you go round jumping on strange men,’ Nicolas advised. ‘But it was very brave of you to try to help Alison. I hear you’ve been a good friend to her, Scott.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve enjoyed it – until five minutes ago, that is! I thought that the other guy was Nicolas, you see. That was why I jumped you. It didn’t seem quite right for him to be Nicolas, though. I mean, he was older, more responsible-looking – not the kind to let a girl down.’

  My cheeks began to flame. Dear Scott – chatty to the last, he was obviously about to pour out all my troubles. I jumped to my feet, but the knock on his head must have loosened his tongue to such an extent that his words came tumbling out before I could even begin moving.

  ‘I can understand it all now,’ he was saying. ‘I saw her right after she’d talked to him, and she said that everything was okay, but she was crying. Well, it didn’t make sense for her to be crying over this nice steady grey-haired guy – and now I know that she wasn’t. You’re the one she’s been crying over!’

  His voice became indignant, excitable. ‘She loves you, you know that? She really loves you – even after the way you treated her, bringing her over to East Germany and then leaving her without any papers and all. She was worried sick. But she still went right on loving you, and I reckon that’s a whole lot more than you deserve. I – I’d like to punch you on the nose for the way you’ve been hurting Alison!’

  I sat down abruptly, crimson with embarrassment. If there had been a rabbit hole handy, I swear I’d have tried to dig my way down it.

  ‘Calm down,’ Nicolas was saying in a friendly voice, ‘it’s no use your throwing punches until you’re steadier than that on your feet, now is it? I can understand the way you feel, though. I have treated Alison badly, very badly indeed, and I’m going to apologize to her properly the minute I get the chance.’

  Scott sounded slightly mollified. ‘We-ll … I still don’t see how you could let her wander about in East Germany without you. Not in East Germany of all places.’

  There came what seemed like a long silence. I sat very still, looking out across the rolling wooded hills, hearing the plash and ripple of water and the intoxicated buzzing above me, and breathing the slow-dropping honeyed scent of the linden flowers.

  Then I heard Nicolas speaking again, quietly and thoughtfully: ‘No, I suppose it’s hardly credible that I’d do that to anyone I was fond of. But you see, when I planned this trip to East Germany with Alison, I hardly knew her. How did I know that I was going to fall in love with her?’

  Chapter Twenty

  I watched Nicolas as he walked towards me, but his look was entirely preoccupied. He hadn’t realized that I had overheard, and I was glad of it.

  He stopped a few
feet from me and looked at his watch. ‘Scott will be perfectly all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve told him to stay there quietly for a while, but there’s no need to worry about him. He did remind me though, that I have a lot of apologizing and explaining to do to you.’

  I muttered something noncommittal, but he didn’t listen.

  ‘I still have my mission to finish,’ he said, ‘and I must get back to the town. But first, I think you’ve every right to know what I’ve been doing, and why.’

  ‘That would be a help,’ I said shakily.

  He sat down on the grass beside me, but not too close. He hardly glanced at me as he spoke, which was just as well or I would never have been able to concentrate.

  ‘I’ve come to Marberg,’ he told me, ‘to help Elisabeth’s father escape to the West.’

  ‘Dr Lorenz? But I thought he was ill?’

  ‘He had a breakdown about a year ago, but he recovered completely. He’s as normal now as any of us – though God knows how long that will last if they keep him locked up in Marberg Castle.’

  ‘In Marberg … in the castle up there?’

  ‘Yes. Officially it’s classed as a mental hospital, but prison might be a better word for it. You must have heard of the infamous practice in the Soviet Union of putting political prisoners in mental hospitals in order to destroy their resistance? This is what the East Germans are trying to do to Dr Lorenz.’

  I remembered my sense of foreboding as I passed under the grim walls of the castle, and the glimpse I had had, across the courtyard, of white faces pressed against windows.

  ‘But that’s terrible,’ I protested. ‘Why, Nicolas? Why is Dr Lorenz a political prisoner at all?’

  He shrugged coldly. ‘For the usual reason in any police state. He objected to living under a regime that denied him freedom of conscience, and he said so. As it happens, he has an international reputation in his particular field of medical research, and he has English friends in high places, so his criticisms of the East German regime carried weight. He was invited to an important medical congress in Stockholm last year, when he was going to give details of his research, but the government was afraid to let him go because of the bad publicity they knew he would give them. It was after his visa was refused – which meant that the details of his research would never become freely available to the whole world – that he had his breakdown. This was used as an excuse to put him in an institution and he’s been there ever since, rotting away.’

  I felt sickened. ‘That’s abominable … But does Elisabeth know what you’re doing? You said that she didn’t want to leave East Germany.’

  ‘That’s true. She herself was perfectly happy – she’d never known what life was like anywhere other than in a Communist State, and she quarrelled bitterly with her father. But when his visa was refused and he became ill, she obviously had second thoughts. And when she visited him at the castle and discovered the true situation, she decided to try to help get him out.’

  ‘And that was why you wanted to see her in West Berlin?’

  ‘Yes. One of her father’s friends is a contact of mine and he helped to make the arrangements for the escape. But it’s impossible for anyone except close relatives to visit the castle, and then only infrequently, and we couldn’t plan the operation until we knew its layout.’

  And now I understood. ‘So you used her visit to her grandmother to ask her about the details of the castle!’

  ‘Exactly. But to expect Elisabeth to spend the precious few minutes of her official visit talking to me, when she wanted to be with her grandmother, was inhuman. Then I saw you at the theatre, realized the resemblance, and devised the switch so that Elisabeth could stay longer in the West. The switch was the only part of the operation Braun knew about, and he assured me that there would be no trouble in East Berlin. We’ve worked in co-operation often enough, so of course I believed him – otherwise I’d never have let you come across.’

  I frowned absently at a blade of grass I had pulled. ‘But now you think that he isn’t reliable?’

  ‘I’m sure of it, after what you told me. You and I are not both here at the same time by coincidence, Alison. Braun brought you here for a very good reason.’

  I tossed the grass away. ‘What, for goodness’ sake?’ I demanded.

  He hesitated before answering. ‘I’m not known by sight to the intelligence people over here in the East,’ he said. ‘Normally I work either in West Berlin or in London. I was put on this particular mission because I once met Dr Lorenz and so he knows and trusts me – and that’s important if I’m to get him out of the castle safely. I think that Braun guessed that I would be coming here, and when, and that he wants to take advantage of it.’

  ‘You mean – he’s changed sides? He wants to stop your mission?’

  ‘Yes, I think he may have turned. He certainly wouldn’t be the first agent – on either side – to do so. But if the East Germans wanted to stop the mission, they’d have much simpler ways of doing it than sending Braun all the way from Berlin. No –’ he gave me a small, crooked grin, ‘– at the risk of seeming bumptious, I rather think that he may be interested in me personally. And from what you said, I’m sure that he set you up to help him.’

  My throat tightened. ‘You mean,’ I whispered, ‘that Kurt has been using me? But that’s impossible! He’s been the one who has helped me!’

  ‘If I’m right, all he’s been doing is to win you over to his side by helping you out of dangerous situations that were entirely of his own contriving. Look, Alison –’ Nicolas reached out and took my hand, clasping it strongly in his own as he spoke, ‘– I know that you’ve had a very rough time and that you feel grateful to Braun, but believe me, if the Vopos really had picked you up, you’d never have got away. I think that all the terrifying things you’ve been through were deliberately staged by Braun, or his masters, in order to frighten you and make you indebted to him for what you thought was his help. He sent you here because he could be pretty sure that if I was in Marberg, you’d find me. He also knew that I couldn’t possibly acknowledge you in public, because it would endanger my mission. I think he believed that this would turn you against me so effectively that you would be prepared, in revenge, to point me out to him. And it almost worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t, Nicolas!’ I pulled my hand away and turned my head from him in an attempt to conceal my shame. Because now that I was safe with Nicolas, I could see exactly what Kurt had been doing. He’d tried one of the oldest dramatic devices in the book, one that playwrights have used for centuries – and although I was an actress, I’d been too over-wrought to recognize it.

  Kurt had been cunning. He had known that, once I was alone in Germany, I would be so terrified, so dependent on him that I would believe him implicitly. Kurt, with his kindness and sympathy, had persuaded me to mistrust Nicolas – for a few moments, even to hate him. Almost, to hate him enough to betray him.

  Wasn’t there a couplet in a scene from a Restoration drama that we’d once learned at Drama School, a couplet that expressed the conflict exactly? … ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned –’

  ‘“Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”’

  I hardly knew that I had whispered the last line aloud, but suddenly Nicolas was kneeling in front of me, gently taking my face between his hands. His eyes were serious, his voice remorseful:

  ‘And you thought that you were a woman scorned – that I’d scorned you? Oh, my sweet love … And yet you still didn’t give me away? You’ve been wonderful, Alison – I don’t deserve ever to be forgiven.’

  His lips were so near that there was only one possible form of reply. I was floating, conscious of nothing but ‘Oh my sweet love’ and the taste of his mouth, unable to imagine, in that moment out of time, that there could be anything to forgive.

  Abruptly, breathlessly, he pulled himself away and stood up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alison,’ he said, his voice jerky, ‘but I have to go. I’d like to say:
“To hell with everyone else” and stay with you here under this linden tree until it’s time for us to leave, but I can’t. Not when a man’s life and work – and the lives of all the people he can help through his work – depend on what I do in the next hour. It must seem very unflattering to you and I apologize, but I must finish what I came here to do.’

  I wasn’t interested in flattery. Besides, I’d been through too much to want to see it all go to waste. ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I hoped. Now listen.’ He drew a deep breath, and his voice steadied. ‘I must get back to the town. I’m supposed to be in the market place at the moment, establishing the fact that I’m part of the procession so that I can help with the job of returning the wine cask to the castle. Don’t ask me how I’m going to get Dr Lorenz out, because there’s no need for you to know. It’s all carefully timed and planned, and there’s a getaway car hidden among the trees just off the dirt road at the top of this path. I want you to stay here while I do my job and then go up the path and be waiting out of sight near the car in an hour’s time, at seven-fifteen. Right?’

  I nodded. We checked watches, and then Nicolas picked his hat out of the bushes where he had flung it when he jumped me, and adjusted his short cloak across his shoulder.

  For a few seconds we stood looking at each other. The thundering of my blood was so loud in my ears that it drowned even the sound of the bees, but the linden flowers were sweeter than ever, their scent pervading my senses.

  Nicolas bent his head towards me and I raised my face, but he only smiled, cupping it between his large hands and kissing my forehead. ‘Let’s not risk starting anything,’ he advised, ‘not before I get you back to safety. And please do as I say, and stay hidden beside the car – you’ve run enough risks already.’

  Suddenly, as if remembering what I had been through, he seized me and held me close and for a moment I clung to him, feeling the strong slow hammer of his heart against mine.