The Undercover Secretary by Ellie Midwood

Author:Ellie Midwood [Midwood, Ellie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781837900442
Published: 2023-01-18T13:00:00+00:00

Along with the first winter frost, a cloud the color of lead had descended upon Paris, robbing it of light and warmth. I rather welcomed the change as my own world had lost all color. The darkness was befitting somehow. I bathed in it, sought out the shadows on purpose and drank the poison of despair and melancholy as if it was ambrosia itself. Together with every trace of my family, the only fear that was left in me had disappeared.

After the Kristallnacht—the infamous Night of Broken Glass during which German Jews all over the Reich had been beaten, killed in cold blood in front of the police, who stood and did nothing, or shipped off to God knew where—even Maxim’s people couldn’t find them or even what had happened to them. And if Soviet spies failed to locate you, you were well and truly gone. Dead, that is, not just arrested; erased from the memory of the country in which you had the misfortune to have been born, as though you had never existed at all.

Death was no longer my enemy but a release—from all the pain in the world that I suddenly could no longer carry.

As days got slashed in half and the grinning skull of the moon crept along the sky for most waking hours, I no longer avoided seedy alleyways, no longer took lengthier but safer routes, no longer flocked to crowds seeking safety in numbers. Instead, I let the sound of my heels echo off the walls next to which pimps and thieves smoked and met their gaze with my own, challenging, almost daring them to harm me in some way—any way they wished, to be frank—just to feel something other than this unbearable numbness. However, whatever they saw in my dead cold eyes made them avert their gazes first and even step out of my way. The creatures of the night, they smelled the aura of some ancient plague around me and scattered like rats before they could catch it. I didn’t blame them one bit. It was a terrible burden to carry.

“I don’t want you going through the park tonight,” Alfred warned me one Tuesday morning as we were getting dressed for work. “The gendarmes issued a warning that there is some madman on the loose. Stakes women out and snatches them when they’re all alone. Slashes their throats with a razor like Jack the Ripper.”

I kissed him tenderly on his lips and promised to take the Metro. But when the night came and my work at Mademoiselle Charlotte’s was over, I went straight to the deserted, snow-shrouded square, dusted the bench with my bare hand, feeling no cold whatsoever as I did so, and sat with my arms spread like wings atop the bench’s back. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, a serene smile creasing my lips for the first time in ages.

I felt the planks of the bench creak lightly under someone else’s weight. In spite of myself, my smile grew wider.

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