“I’ve had that hat since before the Blitz,” Ian complained, but he was smiling too. They were speeding out of this unsavory little hamlet into the darkness; the hand he’d punched with was killing him; he could feel blood trickle down the side of his face—and he couldn’t stop grinning. He glanced at his wife. “Are you hurt?”
“I think maybe he breaks my nose?” She sounded unconcerned.
“Bloody hell.” His smile disappeared. “I’m pulling over.”
“Is not the first time. Papa broke my nose when I was eleven. I spilled a jug of vodka.”
“Yes, you’re hard as rock, you were raised by wolves, just let me look at it.”
The side of the road was dark as pitch, sliced through by the Ford’s headlights and then the light of the torch Ian pulled from the boot. Nina’s feet crunched on pebbles as she slid out and let him examine her battle wounds beside the car. Her small nose was swelling rapidly and trickling blood, but despite her cursing as Ian pinched the nasal bones, nothing moved that shouldn’t have. “Not broken. Next time perhaps don’t taunt the drunks when they’re squaring for a fight.”
“What is fun in that?” She wiped the blood away with the side of her hand. “So, where does proper English stick like you learn gutter fighting?” She mimed the elbow he’d dropped on his second opponent.
“Every public school boy learns how to box. The elbow strikes and kidney shots I picked up from some guerrillas in Spain.” Ian’s blood was still pumping at twice its normal pace, the rush of excitement starting to drain. “I don’t pick fights, but if anybody picks one with me, I’ll be damned if I fight fair.”
“I like this in you, luchik.” Nina approved, blue eyes glinting in the dark. Ian envisioned the flash of her blond hair outside the restaurant as the man backhanded her. He pulled her suddenly into a rough, hard embrace. He wanted to go back and beat the bastard’s head in.
“Nu, ladno—” Nina squirmed free, looking impatient. “Is fine, no one is hurt, we drive.”
That’s it, Ian thought, fighting back all his inner turmoil as he slid into the car. I’m not letting you go. I don’t know what I have to do to persuade you to stay, Nina Markova, but I’m going to find out.
Chapter 44
Nina
September 1944
Outside Poznań
Nina folded her arms. “It’s been two weeks. It healed clean.”
Sebastian winced as he put his weight on his wounded leg. “It hurts to walk.”
“You’re faking,” she stated.
The English boy sighed. He was just five years younger, twenty-one to Nina’s twenty-six, but she couldn’t help but think of him as a boy. There was something open and trusting about him; even his years in captivity hadn’t dimmed it. “Can we sit down? Please.”
Nina sat, glowering. Their camp looked considerably more lived in now that they’d been ensconced for a fortnight waiting for Seb to mend: stream-rinsed laundry hanging to dry, fire pit now lined with stones and rigged with a crude spit. Nina couldn’t wait to leave it. “You know I want to head west.”
“That’s mad, Nina.” He said it with embarrassment, hating to contradict her. “No destination, no plan—”
“I want out of Poland.”
“You think Germany will be better? We have no papers, no clothes.” Gesturing down at his dirty battle dress. “Odds are we’d get nabbed and then you’d be a kriegie right alongside me. Only you’d be the only woman in a camp full of men, and trust me, they aren’t all gentlemen.”
“We make our way west through the woods, then.”
“You’re going to take backwoods trails all the way across Germany, with no maps? What about when it gets cold?”
Nina laughed. “I’m from Siberia, malysh. It won’t get cold enough to kill me.”
“Don’t call me little boy. All I want is not to get caught, and for you not to get caught.” His long-lashed eyes held hers. “I owe you my life, Nina. If you hadn’t come along, that German would have shot me, or if I’d got away from him, I’d have stumbled around in these trees till I died of thirst or some other Kraut scooped me. I owe you, and if we both get pinched, I can’t ever pay you back.”
Nina opened her mouth. The little English snail is right about one thing, her father remarked. Your plan is mad.
“We hide here,” Seb persisted. “In the woods, something better than a camp clearing. Near enough to Posen to forage, keep our ear to the ground for news. Why move on? We won’t find anywhere better to wait out the war.”
“Wait out—!”
“It can’t be long now,” Seb rushed on. “A few months, maybe even before the end of the year, and this country is running over with Allied instead of German sentries—”
“Running over with Soviets, when our forces arrive. I won’t wait for that.”
“We’ll tell everyone you’re Polish instead. You lost your papers. The Red Cross will help, at the very least.”
“What do we do until then? Sit around embroidering?” That brought Yelena painfully to mind, unpicking blue threads from state-issued men’s briefs so she could embroider stars into a scarf.
“I’ve spent four years doing nothing but pass time. If we can stay warm, stay secret, and feed ourselves—”
“We.” Nina glared again. “You mean me.” Two weeks in the woods, and this city boy still couldn’t light a fire without wasting half the kindling.
“Until the war ends, I need you,” Seb acknowledged. “After the war, you’ll need me.”
Nina raised her eyebrows.
“I’m a British subject. Once the Germans are finished, I can get myself shipped back to England. I’ll take you with me.”
Nina blinked. “How?”
He shrugged. “My brother has connections everywhere; he can sponsor you. You could get British citizenship eventually. You just have to know people, and believe me, we Grahams know people. You keep me alive till the war ends,” Sebastian Graham repeated, “and I’ll get you to England and see you settled there. I owe you that.”
Nina hesitated. What did she know about England except that it was full of fog and capitalists?
“England,” Seb wheedled. “As far west as you can go without leaving Europe. Not to mention that we’ve got Piccadilly. The Egypt wing of the British Museum. Fish and chips—you haven’t lived till you’ve had fish and chips, Nina. No Komsomols, no gulags, no collective apartments. A nice king with a stammer who doesn’t go in for mass executions. It’s a big improvement on the Soviet Union, believe me, and you can call it home. All we have to do is hunker down and stick together.”
Nina had no idea what fish and chips was, or Piccadilly. Where her mind lingered was on the words as far west as you can go without leaving Europe.
“Survival now for citizenship later,” Sebastian said. “What do you say?”
IT WAS A STRANGE THING, Nina reflected, to have nothing in the world but a single partner. She had lived so long among hundreds of women, then she had been alone among the trees with no company but hallucinations. Now she had Sebastian Graham, and could any alliance have been stranger?
“I wanted to join the RAF,” Seb said. “Spitfires and glamour. But the recruiting bastard laughed in my face.”
“Flying bombing runs isn’t glamorous.” Nina pushed a leaf across the flat stone between them. Seb was teaching her poker, having patiently marked up a variety of leaves with a charred stick to make a deck of cards. “Are oak leaves hearts or spades?”
“Spades.” He cocked his head, listening. “That’s a nuthatch.”
“What?”
He imitated a birdcall.
“You don’t know anything about the woods, but you know birds?” Nina pushed the oak leaf that was the queen of spades across the rock.
“I like birds.” He linked his hands together, made a curious little gesture imitating flight. “My brother, Ian, gave me my first bird book. The other boys said it was sissy, until I punched them. Ian showed me how to punch the same day he gave me the book. He said I could like whatever I wanted, I’d just best be prepared to hit people if they gave me grief about it.” Seb tilted his head back, listening for the chirrups and twitters coming from the trees. “So many birds here—nuthatches, starlings, bitterns . . . it seemed like at the camp, there were only those tattered hulking crows.”
They were still at the same campsite for now. They’d need better shelter soon, but the weather was still mostly warm. Seb had no skill laying snares or tracking game, but he had a wiry toughness equal to hours of foraging as his leg healed, and his Polish was good enough to make him useful whenever they headed to the outskirts of one of the villages to trade game for bread. Nina managed to snag a pair of breeches and cap and jacket off a village clothesline, rough peasant wear that made Seb into a scruffy traveler rather than an escaped soldier. “We can’t risk it too often,” she warned the day they almost stepped out of the trees into a party of German sentries. “Never the same village twice, and never the bigger towns. They’ll be crawling with Fritzes, not to mention hungry villagers looking to turn in suspicious travelers.”