“Not look!” she ordered.
Bill lifted his wet hand toward his face. “You drew blood.” He looked down at the circle of teeth marks. “I didn’t know you had such a temper.” He thought, She’s a bloody wildcat. I don’t know her at all. “Aren’t you going to say sorry?” he asked, pressing a dirty rag against the wound.
“I not speak,” she said.
“Well, that’s not very nice,” he said. “I only told you the truth, like you wanted.” He paused. “And anyway, Kath was right, and you did like it. You loved it.”
Izzy wrapped a blanket around her and went to lie on the cold single bed in the alcove, turning her back to him while he returned to the makeshift bed by the fire. He lifted the rag from the wound, and when it had stopped bleeding, he dressed himself slowly.
“It’s warmer to sleep here,” he suggested, but she didn’t move.
He lay, missing her warmth, wondering what other things they would discover about each other, wondering how much time they had left.
When darkness had fallen and it was time to get on the move again, he had trouble waking her. She still seemed determined not to speak, so he kept up a barrage of light chatter. He talked about different kinds of fireplaces and how they burned coal in London, not wood, and didn’t remark on her failure to reply. They packed up their things and set out, both feeling like something was broken between them that could never be mended.
She stumbled on the railway tracks, and he caught hold of her elbow. She shrugged him off.
“Look, Izzy,” he said, almost in a whisper. “We might be captured any minute. We might never see each other again. I’m sorry you weren’t my first. But I can’t change what happened before I met you. You are the love of my life.”
As soon as he started to speak, tears began to roll from her eyes, and she tripped. This time when he steadied her, she let him. Then she stopped walking, as sobs came in great gulps. He took her in his arms, and she howled into his shoulder, tears and snot running down the oilskin cape. He held her, stroking her short curls, until she was cried out; then he pulled a rag from his pocket for her to blow her nose. It was crisp with dried blood from where she’d bitten him.
“Sorry,” she sobbed. “Sorry for bite, for smack, for shout. You can hit me.”
He shook his head. “I’d never hit a woman. Seen too much of that. Never. Never.”
She kissed him on the lips. “You right. We alive. We never fight. And I never do not speak. Too hard.”
• • •
But though they were lovers again, something subtle had changed, and the reality of their situation finally began to dawn on them. Bill knew they were moving too slowly and finally acknowledged the truth—the partisans weren’t out looking for Izzy; they had more important things to do, like blowing up bridges and fighting battles. He and Izzy were tiny and alone in the center of a huge continent teeming with Nazi soldiers, who would crush them like beetles under their boots.
They walked for two more nights, more sober, more realistic, more hungry. They burrowed themselves down in cold barns and outbuildings during the day, and held on to each other with a new desperation.
As they walked, they began to talk about what would happen if they were caught. Bill knew what they’d do to him: send him back to Lamsdorf for thirty days’ solitary confinement in the cooler; but he didn’t know what the punishment might be for Izzy, for helping a prisoner escape. He feared they might shoot her. Impossible though it sounded, it might be safer for her to pretend she was another escaped prisoner of war.
“You wouldn’t be able to speak,” he warned, and Izzy nodded dismally.
“We’d have to come up with a name for you, and you’d have to learn a serial number and how to write them like an English person would.”
He told her that her British next of kin would be informed, and said that would have to be Flora, if only they could think of a way of letting Flora know that this fictitious prisoner was connected with him.
“I know! His name will be Cousins, because me and Flora are cousins.”
Bill tried out various possible first names as they walked through the dark, and eventually decided Cousins’ first name should be Algernon because he and Flora used to play at being Biggles and Algernon.
“Characters from books,” Bill explained. “She’d know right away. We used to play it all the time when we was kids. So you’d be Algernon Cousins. He’d be young to explain the fact that you don’t shave. Maybe he lied about his age and joined up when he was only fifteen or sixteen.”
Izzy nodded. “I am small for a boy.”
“He’d have been bullied at school, for being so small, for having a stupid name like Algernon, but that would have made him tough.”
“And what work he do? Farm boy?”
“No, because he’ll have a London address—Flora’s address. He could be a stable lad who looks after the horses which pull the coal wagon, but who dreams of being a jockey. That’s it—an ostler who looks after the gee-gees. Like Al-gee. That’d be his nickname for sure, Gee-gee Cousins.” He explained to Izzy that young English children called horses “gee-gees,” but he couldn’t tell her why.
When they rested that day, he showed her how to write her new name and address, and she memorized an invented serial number, Harry’s with two numbers changed.
“Will this work?” asked Izzy doubtfully.
Though Bill couldn’t see how it would, he tried to sound confident. “Of course. It has to work.”
As afternoon slipped into evening on the eighth day, they were sleeping in the hayloft of a barn when they were woken by voices from the yard outside. They gripped hold of each other, and Bill raised himself to a sitting position. It sounded like two people.
“Fuck,” whispered Bill as he recognized Captain Meier and Herr Weber. “Quick, hide.”
They scrambled to their feet. Bill grabbed their boots, and Izzy rolled up the blankets. Above their heads the thick beams of rafters crisscrossed, supporting the roof.
“Up there,” Bill ordered, quietly.
Izzy passed Bill the kit bags and blankets, and he stretched on tiptoe to lay them on top of the beam nearest to him.
The great door of the barn swung open below them, and a shaft of evening light streamed in. Bill kicked the straw about where they’d been lying.
The captain and Herr Weber entered the barn beneath them, speaking in German. Bill wished he knew what they were saying. He led Izzy on tiptoe to the darkest corner of the hayloft, and he wrapped his arms around her knees and lifted her so she could reach the beam. With a massive pull, she heaved her body up onto the rafter and lay along it.
“Bombardier King,” Herr Weber called in English, “are you in here? If so, I arrest you. Give yourself up now, and it will not go so badly for you.”
Izzy reached her hand down to help Bill, but he moved silently across the hayloft, as far from her as possible. If they found him first, he’d say they’d quarreled and split up days ago. Anything not to turn her in.
There was another discussion in German below, presumably Captain Meier telling Herr Weber what to say, and he called out in English again.
“Are you here? Is Izabela with you? The SS will shoot her for helping a prisoner escape. Her mother is back on the farm, and she is beside herself with anxiety. You must hand yourself over to us now. This is your last chance.”