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The Lost Girls Of Paris
Pam Jenoff


From the internationally bestselling author Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris is an emotional and powerful journey through friendship and betrayal during the second world war, inspired by true events.1940s. With the world at war, Eleanor Trigg leads a mysterious ring of female secret agents in London. Twelve of these women are sent to aid the resistance.They never return home.1946. Passing through Grand Central Station, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. The case is filled with a dozen photographs, each of a different woman.Setting out to find the women behind the pictures, Grace is drawn into the mystery of the lost girls of Paris. And as she delves deeper into the secrets of the past, she uncovers a story of fierce friendship, unthinkable bravery – and, ultimately, the worst kind of betrayal.







From the author of the runaway bestseller The Orphan’s Tale comes a remarkable story of friendship and courage centered around three women and a ring of female secret agents during World War II.

1946, Manhattan

One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs—each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station.

Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war. Twelve of these women were sent to Occupied Europe as couriers and radio operators to aid the resistance, but they never returned home, their fates a mystery. Setting out to learn the truth behind the women in the photographs, Grace finds herself drawn to a young mother turned agent named Marie, whose daring mission overseas reveals a remarkable story of friendship, valor and betrayal.

Vividly rendered and inspired by true events, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff shines a light on the incredible heroics of the brave women of the war and weaves a mesmerizing tale of courage, sisterhood and the great strength of women to survive in the hardest of circumstances.


PAM JENOFF is the author of several novels, including the phenomenal international bestseller The Orphan’s Tale, and Kommandant’s Girl, which was also an international bestseller and earned her a Quill Award nomination. Pam lives with her husband and three children near Philadelphia where, in addition to writing, she teaches law school.


Also by Pam Jenoff (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Kommandant’s Girl

The Diplomat’s Wife

The Ambassador’s Daughter

The Winter Guest

The Last Embrace

The Orphan’s Tale


The Lost Girls of Paris

Pam Jenoff







Copyright (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)






An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

Copyright © Pam Jenoff 2019

Pam Jenoff asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9781474083195


Praise for The Lost Girls of Paris (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

‘Based on true events, The Lost Girls of Paris brings us three courageous women who braved constant danger to survive.’

Martha Hall Kelly, author of Lilac Girls

‘Fraught with danger, filled with mystery, and meticulously researched, a fascinating tale of the hidden women who helped to win the war.’

Lisa Wingate, author of Before We Were Yours

‘Eleanor Trigg and her girls are every bit as human as they are brave. I couldn’t put this down.’

Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle

‘Pam Jenoff’s meticulous research and gorgeous historical world-building lift her books to must-buy status.

An intriguing mystery and a captivating heroine make The Lost Girls of Paris a read to savour!’

Kate Quinn, author of The Alice Network


For my family


Contents

Cover (#ubc702a7c-7f91-52e1-ad09-8c4b6adf901c)

Back Cover Text (#uf2562c80-4702-5023-b1d1-daf1d832c67d)

About the Author (#u9e68a99b-e74a-5945-8847-7da90f0d3c23)

Booklist (#u0aec74bc-3558-59a9-a459-4180211dccf3)

Title Page (#uae2ab51b-ea51-5b42-8a3f-e58dc7a1d4af)

Copyright (#u0cf8752a-3277-5777-af8d-db5c15a22a08)

Praise (#uf388afcd-796c-587a-b1ac-4dddf1167284)

Dedication (#u88437c1d-08b9-5218-9756-993caa351643)

Quote (#ua00a26e8-f725-5418-b472-9924a7aab140)

Chapter One (#ufc8d26c5-59f5-506c-8e3c-68cb16724824)

Chapter Two (#ue818151f-6389-5f95-a8de-f29994a60017)

Chapter Three (#uf45c9482-b28f-5903-951b-117e02a4f583)

Chapter Four (#u4777d9c2-8f37-5360-89ff-0e4007459623)

Chapter Five (#uc1b9146d-5a31-5cf8-ba96-8244e0204ef5)

Chapter Six (#u5c494f0f-c8b4-5d82-a4d0-dadd9fddfcfb)

Chapter Seven (#ua897878d-42d5-5aac-8eec-367ae03bca52)

Chapter Eight (#u5d471e8a-63b0-5ee5-aaa1-7c0bf8eea906)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should alwaysbe attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

—Winston Churchill


Chapter One (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Grace

New York, 1946

If not for the second-worst mistake of Grace Healey’s life, she never would have found the suitcase.

At nine twenty on a Tuesday morning, Grace should have been headed south on the first of two buses she took to get downtown, commuting from the rooming house in Hell’s Kitchen to the Lower East Side office where she worked. And she was on her way to work. But she was nowhere near the neighborhood she had come to call home. Instead, she was racing south on Madison Avenue, corralling her corkscrew hair into a low knot. She quickly removed her coat, despite the chill, so she could take off her mint green cardigan. She didn’t want Frankie to notice it was the exact same one she had been wearing at work the previous day and question the unthinkable: whether she had gone home at all.

Grace paused to study herself in the window of a five-and-dime. She wished the store was open so she could buy some powder to hide the marks on her neck and sample a bit of perfume to conceal the stench of day-old brandy mixed with that delicious-but-wrong smell of Mark’s aftershave, which made her dizzy and ashamed with every inhale. A wino sat on the corner, moaning to himself in sleep. Looking at his gray, lifeless pallor, Grace felt a certain solidarity. From the adjacent alley came the banging on a trash can, a sound marching in time with the thudding in her own head. The whole city of New York seemed green and hungover. Or perhaps she was confusing it for herself.

Sharp gusts of February wind cut across Madison, causing the flags that hung from the skyscrapers above to whip furiously. An old crumpled newspaper danced along the gutter. Hearing the bells of Saint Agnes’s toll half past nine, Grace pressed on, her skin growing moist under her collar as she neared a run. Grand Central Terminal loomed hulking ahead. Just a bit farther and she could turn left on Forty-Second Street and catch an express bus downtown on Lexington.

But as she neared the intersection at Forty-Third, the street ahead was blocked. Police cars sat three across, cordoning off Madison and preventing anyone from going farther south. A car accident, Grace suspected at first, noting the black Studebaker, which sat jackknifed across the street, steam billowing from the hood. More cars clogged the Midtown streets than ever these days, jockeying for space with the buses and taxis and trucks making deliveries. There did not appear to be another vehicle involved, though. A lone ambulance sat at the corner. The medics did not rush about urgently, but stood leaning against the vehicle, smoking.

Grace started toward a policeman, whose paunchy face pushed up from the high collar of his uniform, navy with gold buttons. “Excuse me. Will the street be closed for long? I’m late for work.”

He looked out at her disdainfully from under the brim of his hat, as if despite all of the women who had worked dutifully in the factories to take the place of the men who had enlisted and gone overseas during the war, the notion of a woman holding a job was still laughable. “You can’t go this way,” he replied officiously. “And you won’t be able to anytime soon.”

“What happened?” she asked, but the policeman turned away. Grace took a step forward, craning to see.

“A woman was hit by a car and died,” a man in a flat wool cap beside her said.

Taking in the shattered windshield of the Studebaker, Grace suddenly felt sick. “Such a shame,” she managed finally.

“I didn’t see it,” the man replied. “But someone said she was killed instantly. At least she didn’t suffer.”

At least. That was the phrase Grace heard too often after Tom had died. At least she was still young. At least there had not been children—as if that made it somehow easier to bear. (Children, she sometimes thought, would not have been a burden, but a bit of him left behind forever.)

“You just never know where it will all end,” mused the flat-capped man beside her. Grace did not answer. Tom’s death had been unexpected, too, an overturned jeep on the way from the army base to the train station in Georgia, headed to New York to see her before he’d deployed. They called him a casualty of war, but in fact it had been just another accident that might have happened anywhere.

A flashbulb from a reporter’s camera popped, causing her to blink. Grace shielded her eyes then backed away blindly through the crowd that had formed, seeking air amid the cigarette smoke and sweat and perfume.

Away from the police barricade now, Grace looked over her shoulder. Forty-Third Street was blocked to the west as well, preventing her from cutting across. To go back up Madison and around the other side of the station would take at least another half an hour, making her even later for work than she already was. Again, she cursed the night before. If it weren’t for Mark, she wouldn’t be standing here, faced with no other choice than to cut through Grand Central—the one place she had sworn to never go again.

Grace turned to face it. Grand Central loomed before her, its massive shadow darkening the pavement below. Commuters streamed endlessly through its doors. She imagined the inside of the station, the concourse where the light slatted in through the stained glass windows, the big clock where friends and lovers met. It was not the place she couldn’t bear to see, but the people. The girls with their fresh red lipstick, pressing tongues against teeth to make sure the color hadn’t bled through, clutching purses expectantly. Freshly washed children looking just a bit nervous at seeing a father who they could not remember because he had left when they were scarcely toddlers. The soldiers in uniforms rumpled from travel bounding onto the platform with wilted daisies in hand. The reunion that would never be hers.

She should just give up and go home. Grace longed for a nice bath, perhaps a nap. But she had to get to work. Frankie had interviews with a French family at ten and needed her to take dictation. And after that the Rosenbergs were coming, seeking papers for housing. Normally this was what she loved about the work, losing herself in other peoples’ problems. But today the responsibility weighed down heavy upon her.

No, she had to go forward and there was only one choice. Squaring her shoulders, Grace started toward Grand Central.

She walked through the station door. It was the first time she had been here since that afternoon she’d arrived from Connecticut in her best shirred dress, hair perfectly coiffed in victory rolls and topped with her pillbox hat. Tom hadn’t arrived on the three from Philadelphia, where he should have changed trains, as expected and she assumed he had missed his connection. When he didn’t get off the next train either, she became a bit uneasy. She checked the message board beside the information booth at the center of the station, where people pinned notes in case Tom had come early or she had somehow missed him. She had no way to reach him or check and there was nothing to do but wait. She ate a hot dog that smudged her lipstick and turned sour in her mouth, read the newspaper headlines at the kiosk a second, then a third time. Trains came and emptied, spilling onto the platform soldiers who might have been Tom but weren’t. By the time the last train of the night arrived at eight thirty, she was frantic with worry. Tom never would have left her standing like this. What had happened? Finally, an auburn-haired lieutenant she’d recognized from Tom’s induction ceremony came toward her with an expression of dread and she’d known. She could still feel his unfamiliar hands catching her as her knees buckled.

The station looked the same now as it had that night, a businesslike, never-ending stream of commuters and travelers, undisturbed by the role it had played so large in her mind these many months. Just get across, she told herself, the wide exit at the far side of the station calling to her like a beacon. She didn’t have to stop and remember.

Something pulled at her leg strangely, like the tearing of a small child’s fingers. Grace stopped and looked behind her. It was only a run in her nylons. Had Mark’s hands made it? The tear was growing larger with every step now, an almost gash across her calf. She was seized with the need to get them off.

Grace raced for the stairs to the public washroom on the lower level. As she passed a bench, she stumbled, nearly falling. Her foot twisted, causing a wave of pain to shoot through her ankle. She limped to the bench and lifted her foot, assuming that the heel that she had not had fixed properly had come off again. But the shoe was still intact. No, there was something jutting out from beneath the bench she had just passed that had caused her to trip. A brown suitcase, shoved haphazardly beneath. She looked around with annoyance, wondering who could have been so irresponsible as to leave it like that, but there was no one close and the other people passed by without taking notice. Perhaps whoever owned it had gone to the restroom or to buy a newspaper. She pushed it farther underneath the bench so that no one else would trip on it and kept walking.

Outside the door to the ladies’ room, Grace noticed a man sitting on the ground in a tattered uniform. For a fleeting second, she was glad Tom had not lived to fight and return destroyed from what he had seen. She would always have the golden image of him, perfect and strong. He would not come home scarred like so many she saw now, struggling to put a brave face over the brokenness. Grace reached in her pocket for the last of her coins, trying not to think about the coffee she so dearly wanted that she would now have to do without. She pressed the money into the man’s cracked palm. She simply couldn’t look away.

Grace continued into the ladies’ room, locking herself in a stall to remove her nylons. Then she walked to the mirror to smooth her ink-black hair and reapply her Coty lipstick, tasting in its waxiness all that had happened the night before. At the next sink, a woman younger than herself smoothed her coat over her rounded belly. Pregnancies were everywhere now, it seemed, the fruits of so many joyous reunions with the boys who came home from the war. Grace could feel the woman looking at her disheveled appearance. Knowing.

Mindful that she was even later now for work, Grace hurried from the restroom. As she started across the station once more, she noticed the suitcase she had nearly tripped over moments earlier. It was still sitting under the bench. Slowing, she walked to the suitcase, looking around for someone coming to claim it.

When no one did, Grace knelt to examine the suitcase. There was nothing terribly extraordinary about it, rounded like a thousand other valises that travelers carried through the station every day, with a worn mother-of-pearl handle that was nicer than most. Only this one wasn’t passing through; it was sitting under a bench unattended. Abandoned. Had someone lost it? She stopped with a moment’s caution, remembering a story from during the war about a bag that was actually a bomb. But that was all over, the danger of invasion or other attack that had once seemed to lurk around every corner now faded.

Grace studied the case for some sign of ownership. There was a name chalked onto the side. She recalled uneasily some of Frankie’s clients, survivors whom the Germans had forced to write their names on their suitcases in a false promise that they would be reunited with their belongings. This one bore a single word: Trigg.

Grace considered her options: tell a porter, or simply walk away. She was late for work. But curiosity nagged at her. Perhaps there was a tag inside. She toyed with the clasp. It popped open in her fingers seemingly of its own accord. She found herself lifting the lid a few inches. She glanced over her shoulder, feeling as though at any minute she might get caught. Then she looked inside the suitcase. It was neatly packed, with a silver-backed hairbrush and an unwrapped bar of Yardley’s lavender soap tucked in a top corner, women’s clothes folded with perfect creases. There was a pair of baby shoes tucked in the rear of the case, but no other sign of children’s clothing.

Suddenly, being in the suitcase felt like an unforgivable invasion of privacy (which, of course, it was). Grace pulled back her hand quickly. As she did, something sliced into her index finger. “Ouch!” she cried aloud, in spite of herself. A line of blood an inch or more long, already widening with red bubbles, appeared. She put her finger to her mouth, sucking on the wound to stop the bleeding. Then she reached for the case with her good hand, needing to know what had cut her, a razor or knife. Below the clothes was an envelope, maybe a quarter inch thick. The sharp edge of the paper had cut her hand. Leave it, a voice inside her seemed to say. But unable to stop herself, she opened the envelope.

Inside lay a pack of photographs, wrapped carefully in a piece of lace. Grace pulled them out, and as she did a drop of blood seeped from her finger onto the lace, irreparably staining it. There were about a dozen photos in all, each a portrait of a single young woman. They looked too different to be related to one another. Some wore military uniforms, others crisply pressed blouses or blazers. Not one among them could have been older than twenty-five.

Holding the photos of these strangers felt too intimate, wrong. Grace wanted to put them away, forget what she had seen. But the eyes of the girl in the top photo were dark and beckoning. Who was she?

Just then there were sirens outside the station and it felt as though they might be meant for her, the police coming to arrest her for opening someone else’s bag. Hurriedly, Grace struggled to rewrap the photos in the lace and put the whole thing back into the suitcase. But the lace bunched and she could not get the packet back into the envelope. The sirens were getting louder now. There was no time. Furtively, she tucked the photos into her own satchel and she pushed the suitcase back under the bench with her foot, well out of sight.

Then she started for the exit, the wound on her finger throbbing. “I should have known,” she muttered to herself, “that no good could ever come from going into the station.”


Chapter Two (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Eleanor

London, 1943

The Director was furious.

He slammed his paw-like hand down on the long conference table so hard the teacups rattled and tea sloshed over the rims all the way at the far end. The normal banter and chatter of the morning meeting went silent. His face reddened.

“Another two agents captured,” he bellowed, not bothering to lower his voice. One of the typists passing in the corridor stopped, taking in the scene with wide eyes before scurrying on. Eleanor stood hurriedly to close the door, swatting at the cloud of cigarette smoke that had formed above them.

“Yes, sir,” Captain Michaels, the Royal Air Force attaché, stammered. “The agents dropped near Marseille were arrested, just hours after arrival. There’s been no word and we’re presuming they’ve been killed.”

“Which ones?” the Director demanded. Gregory Winslow, Director of Special Operations Executive, was a former army colonel, highly decorated in the Great War. Though close to sixty, he remained an imposing figure, known only as “the Director” to everyone at headquarters.

Captain Michaels looked flummoxed by the question. To the men who ran the operation from afar, the agents in the field were nameless chess pieces.

But not to Eleanor, who was seated beside him. “James, Harry. Canadian by birth and a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford. Peterson, Ewan, former Royal Air Force.” She knew the details of every man they’d dropped into the field by heart.

“That makes the second set of arrests this month.” The Director chewed on the end of his pipe without bothering to light it.

“The third,” Eleanor corrected softly, not wanting to enrage him further but unwilling to lie. It had been almost three years since Churchill had authorized the creation of Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and charged it with the order to “set Europe ablaze” through sabotage and subversion. Since then, they had deployed close to three hundred agents into Europe to disrupt munitions factories and rail lines. The majority had gone into France as part of the unit called “F Section” to weaken the infrastructure and arm the French partisans ahead of the long-rumored cross-Channel Allied invasion.

But beyond the walls of its Baker Street headquarters, SOE was hardly regarded as a shining success. MI6 and some of the other traditional government agencies resented SOE’s sabotage, which they saw as amateurish and damaging to their own, more clandestine, operations. The success of SOE efforts were also hard to quantify, either because they were classified or because their effect would not be fully felt until the invasion. And lately things had started to go wrong, their agents arrested in increasing number. Was it the size of the operations that was the problem, making them victims of their own success? Or was it something else entirely?

The Director turned to Eleanor, newfound prey that had suddenly caught the lion’s attention. “What the hell is happening, Trigg? Are they ill prepared? Making mistakes?”

Eleanor was surprised. She had come to SOE as a secretary shortly after the organization was created. Getting hired had been an uphill battle: she was not just a woman, but a Polish national—and a Jew. Few thought she belonged here. Oftentimes she wondered herself how she’d come from her small village near Pinsk to the halls of power in London. But she’d persuaded the Director to give her a chance, and through her skill and knowledge, meticulous attention to detail and encyclopedic memory, she had gained his trust. Even though her title and pay had remained the same, she was now much more of an advisor. The Director insisted that she sit not with the other secretaries along the periphery, but at the conference table immediately to his right. (He did this in part, she suspected, to compensate for his deafness in his ear on that side, which he admitted to no one else. She always debriefed him in private just after the meeting to make certain he had not missed anything.)

This was the first time, though, that the Director had asked for her opinion in front of the others. “Respectfully, sir, it isn’t the training, or the execution.” Eleanor was suddenly aware of every eye on her. She prided herself on lying low in the agency, drawing as little attention as possible. But now her cover, so to speak, had been blown, and the men were watching her with an unmasked skepticism.

“Then what is it?” the Director asked, his usual lack of patience worn even thinner.

“It’s that they are men.” Eleanor chose her words carefully, not letting him rush her, wanting to make him understand in a way that would not cause offense. “Most of the young Frenchmen are gone from the cities or towns. Conscripted to the LVF, off fighting for the Vichy collaborationist militia or imprisoned for refusing to do so. It’s impossible for our agents to fit in now.”

“So what then? Should we send them all to ground?”

Eleanor shook her head. The agents could not go into hiding. They needed to be able to interact with the locals in order to get information. It was the waitress in Lautrec overhearing the officers chatter after too much wine, the farmer’s wife noticing changes in the trains that passed by the fields, the observations of everyday citizens that yielded the real information. And the agents needed to be making contacts with the reseau, the local networks of resistance, in order to fortify their efforts to subvert the Germans. No, the agents of the F Section could not operate by hiding in the cellars and caves.

“Then what?” the Director pressed.

“There’s another option...” She faltered and he looked at her impatiently. Eleanor was not one to be at a loss for words, but what she was about to say was so audacious she hardly dared. She took a deep breath. “Send women.”

“Women? I don’t understand.”

The idea had come to her weeks earlier as she watched one of the girls in the radio room decode a message that had come through from a field agent in France with a swift and sure hand. Her talents were wasted, Eleanor thought. The girl should be transmitting from the field. The idea had been so foreign that it had taken time to crystalize in Eleanor’s own mind. She had not meant to bring it up now, or maybe ever, but it had come out nonetheless, a half-formed thing.

“Yes.” Eleanor had heard stories of women agents, rogue operatives working on their own in the east, carrying messages and helping POWs to escape. Such things had happened in the First World War as well, probably to a greater extent than most people imagined. But to create a formal program to actually train and deploy women was something altogether different.

“But what would they do?” the Director asked.

“The same work as the men,” Eleanor replied, suddenly annoyed at having to explain what should have been obvious. “Courier messages. Transmit by radio. Arm the partisans, blow up bridges.” Women had risen up to take on all sorts of roles on the home front, not just nursing and local guard. They manned antiaircraft guns and flew planes. Why was the notion that they could do this, too, so hard to understand?

“A women’s sector?” Michaels interjected, barely containing his skepticism.

Ignoring him, Eleanor turned to face the Director squarely. “Think about it, sir,” she said, gaining steam as the idea firmed in her mind. “Young men are scarce in France, but women are everywhere. They blend in on the street and in the shops and cafés.”

“As for the other women who work here already...” She hesitated, considering the wireless radio operators who labored tirelessly for SOE. On some level they were perfect: skilled, knowledgeable, wholly committed to the cause. But the same assets that made them ideal also rendered them useless for the field. They were simply too entrenched to train as operatives, and they had seen and knew too much to be deployed. “They won’t do either. The women would need to be freshly recruited.”

“But where would we find them?” the Director asked, seeming to warm to the idea.

“The same places we do the men.” It was true they didn’t have the corps of officers from which to recruit. “From the WACs or the FANYs, the universities and trade schools, or in the factories or on the street.” There was not a single résumé that made an ideal agent, no special degree. It was more of a sense that one could do the work. “The same types of people—smart, adaptable, proficient in French,” she added.

“They would have to be trained,” Michaels pointed out, making it sound like an insurmountable obstacle.

“Just like the men,” Eleanor countered. “No one is born knowing how to do this.”

“And then?” the Director asked.

“And then we deploy them.”

“Sir,” Michaels interjected. “The Geneva Convention expressly prohibits women combatants.” The men around the table nodded their heads, seeming to seize on the point.

“The convention prohibits a lot of things,” Eleanor shot back. She knew all of the dark corners of SOE, the ways in which the agency and others cut corners and skirted the law in the desperation of war. “We can make them part of the FANY as a cover.”

“We’d be risking the lives of wives, daughters and mothers,” Michaels pointed out.

“I don’t like it,” said one of the other uniformed men from the far end of the table. Nervousness tugged at Eleanor’s stomach. The Director was not the most strong-willed of leaders. If the others all lined up behind Michaels, he might back away from the idea.

“Do you like losing a half-dozen men every fortnight to the Germans?” Eleanor shot back, scarcely believing her own nerve.

“We’ll try it,” the Director said with unusual decisiveness, foreclosing any further debate. He turned to Eleanor. “Set up an office down the street at Norgeby House and let me know what you need.”

“Me?” she asked, surprised.

“You thought of it, Trigg. And you’re going to run the bloody thing.” Recalling the casualties they had discussed just minutes earlier, Eleanor cringed at the Director’s choice of words.

“Sir,” Michaels interjected. “I hardly think that Miss Trigg is qualified. Meaning no offense,” he added, tilting his head in her direction. The men looked at her dubiously.

“None taken.” Eleanor had long ago hardened herself to the dismissiveness of the men around her.

“Sir,” the army officer at the far end of the table interjected. “I, too, find Miss Trigg a most unlikely choice. With her background...” Heads nodded around the table, their skeptical looks accompanied by a few murmurs. Eleanor could feel them studying her, wondering about her loyalties. Not one of us, the men’s expressions seemed to say, and not to be trusted. For all that she did for SOE, they still regarded her as an enemy. Alien, foreign. It was not for lack of trying. She had worked to fit in, to mute all traces of her accent. And she had applied for British citizenship. Her naturalization application had been denied once, on grounds that even the Director, for all of his power and clearances, had not been able to ascertain. She had resubmitted it a second time a few months earlier with a note of recommendation from him, hoping this might make the difference. Thus far, she had not received a response.

Eleanor cleared her throat, prepared to withdraw from consideration. But the Director spoke first. “Eleanor, set up your office,” he ordered. “Begin recruiting and training the girls with all due haste.” He raised his hand, foreclosing further discussion.

“Yes, sir.” She kept her head up, unwilling to look away from the eyes now trained upon her.

After the meeting, Eleanor waited until the others had left before approaching the Director. “Sir, I hardly think...”

“Nonsense, Trigg. We all know you are the man for the job, if you’ll pardon the expression. Even the military chaps, though they may not want to admit it or quite understand why.”

“But, sir, even if that is true, I’m an outsider. I don’t have the clout.”

“You’re an outsider, and that is just one of the things that makes you perfect for the position.” He lowered his voice. “I’m tired of it all getting mired by politics. You won’t let personal loyalties or other concerns affect your judgment.” She nodded, knowing that was true. She had no husband or children, no outside distractions. The mission was the only thing that mattered—and always had been.

“Are you sure I can’t go?” she asked, already knowing the answer. Though flattered that he wanted her to run the women’s operation, it would still be a distant second-best to actually deploying as one of the agents in the field.

“Without the paperwork, you couldn’t possibly.” He was right, of course. In London, she might be able to hide her background. But to get papers to send her over, especially now, while her citizenship application was pending, was another matter entirely. “Anyway, this is much more important. You’re the head of a department now. We need you to recruit the girls. Train them. It has to be someone they trust.”

“Me?” Eleanor knew the other women who worked at SOE saw her as cold and distant, not the type they would invite to lunch or tea, much less confide in.

“Eleanor,” the Director continued, his voice low and stern, eyes piercing. “Few of us are finding ourselves where we expected at the start of the war.”

That, she reflected, was more true than he possibly could have known. She thought about what he was asking. A chance to take the helm, to try to fix all of the mistakes that she’d been forced to watch from the sidelines these many months, powerless to do anything. Though one step short of actual deployment, this would be an opportunity to do so much more.

“We need you to figure out where the girls belong and get them there,” the Director continued on, as though it had all been settled and she’d said yes. Inwardly, Eleanor felt conflicted. The prospect of taking this on was appealing. At the same time, she saw the enormity of the task splayed before her on the table like a deck of cards. The men already faced so much, and while in her heart she knew that the women were the answer, getting them ready would be Herculean. It was too much, the kind of involvement—and exposure—that she could hardly afford.

Then she looked up at the photos on the wall of fallen SOE agents, young men who had given everything for the war. She imagined the German security intelligence, the Sicherheitsdienst, at their French headquarters on the Avenue Foch in Paris. The SD was headed by the infamous Sturmbannführer Hans Kriegler, a former concentration camp commandant who Eleanor knew from the files to be as cunning as he was cruel. There were reports of his using the children of locals to coerce confessions, of hanging prisoners alive from meat hooks to withdraw information before leaving them there to die. He was undoubtedly planning the downfall of more agents even as they spoke.

Eleanor knew then that she had no choice but to take on the task. “Fine. I’ll need complete control,” she added. It was always important to go first when setting the terms.

“You shall have it.”

“And I report only to you.” Special sectors would, in other circumstances, report through one of the Director’s deputies. Eleanor peered out of the corner of her eye at Michaels, who lingered in the hallway. He and the other men would not be happy about her having the Director’s ear, even more so than she already had. “To you,” she repeated for emphasis, letting her words sink in.

“No bureaucratic meddling,” the Director promised. “You report only to me.” She could hear then the desperation in his voice, how very much he needed her to make this work.


Chapter Three (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Marie

London, 1944

The last place Marie would have expected to be recruited as a secret agent (if indeed she could have anticipated it at all) was in the loo.

An hour earlier, Marie sat at a table by the window in the Town House, a quiet café on York Street she had come to frequent, savoring a few minutes of quiet after a day of endless clacking at the dingy War Office annex where she had taken a position as a typist. She thought of the coming weekend, just two days off, and smiled, imagining five-year-old Tess and the crooked tooth that surely would have come in a bit more by now. That was the thing about only seeing her daughter on the weekend—Marie seemed to miss years in the days in between. She wanted to be out in the country with Tess, playing by the brook and digging for stones. But someone had to stay here and make a few pounds in order to keep their aging row home in Maida Vale from falling into foreclosure or disrepair, assuming the bombs didn’t take it all first.

There was a booming noise in the distance, causing the dishes on the table to rattle. Marie started, reaching instinctively for the gas mask that no one carried anymore since the Blitz had ended. She lifted her gaze to the plate glass window of the café. Outside the rain-soaked street, a boy of no more than eight or nine was trying to scrape up bits of coal from the pavement. Her stomach ached. Where was his mother?

She remembered the day more than two years ago that she’d decided to send Tess away. At first, the notion of being separated from her daughter was almost unthinkable. Then a bomb had hit the flats across the street, killing seven children. But for the grace of God, that might have been Tess. The next morning, Marie began making arrangements.

At least Tess was with Aunt Hazel. The woman was more of a cousin and a bit dour to be sure, but was nevertheless fond of the little girl. And Tess loved the old vicarage in East Anglia, with its endless cupboards and musty crawl spaces. She could run wild across the fens when the weather permitted, and help Hazel with her work at the post office when it did not. Marie couldn’t imagine putting her girl on a train to be sent off to the countryside to a cold convent or God-knows-where-else, into the arms of strangers. She had seen it at King’s Cross almost every Friday last year as she made her way north to visit Tess—mothers battling back tears as they adjusted coats and scarves on the little ones, younger siblings clinging to older, children with too-large suitcases crying openly, trying to escape through the carriage windows. It made the two-hour journey until she could reach Tess and wrap her arms around her almost unbearable. She stayed each Sunday until Hazel reminded her that she had best take the last train or miss curfew. Her daughter was safe and well and with family. But that didn’t make the fact that it was only Wednesday any more bearable.

Should she have brought Tess back already? That was the question that had dogged Marie these past few months as she had seen the trickle of children coming back to the city. The Blitz was long over and there was a kind of normalcy that had resumed now that they weren’t sleeping in the Tube stations at night. But the war was far from won, and Marie sensed that something far worse was yet to come.

Pushing her doubts aside, Marie pulled a book from her bag. It was poetry by Baudelaire, which she loved because his elegant verse took her back to happier times as a child summering on the coast in Brittany with her mother.

“Excuse me,” a man said a moment later. She looked up, annoyed by the interruption. He was fortyish, thin and unremarkable in a tweedy sport coat and glasses. A scone sat untouched on the plate at the table next to her from which he had risen. “I was curious about what you are reading.” She wondered if he were trying to make advances. The intrusions were everywhere now with all of the American GIs in the city, spilling from the pubs at midday and walking three abreast in the streets, their jarring laughter breaking the stillness.

But the man’s accent was British and his mild expression contained no hint of impropriety. Marie held up the book so that he could see. “Would you mind reading me a bit?” he asked. “I’m afraid I don’t speak French.”

“Really, I don’t think...” she began to demur, surprised by the odd request.

“Please,” he said, cutting her off, his tone almost imploring. “You’d be doing me a kindness.” She wondered why it meant so much to him. Perhaps he had lost someone French or was a veteran who had fought over there.

“All right,” she relented. A few lines couldn’t hurt. She began to read from the poem, “N’importe où hors du monde (Anywhere Out of the World).” Her voice was self-conscious at first, but she felt herself slowly gain confidence.

After a few sentences, Marie stopped. “How was that?” She expected him to ask her to read further.

He did not. “You’ve studied French?”

She shook her head. “No, but I speak it. My mother was French and we spent summers there when I was a child.” In truth, the summers had been an escape from her father, an angry drunk unable to find work or hold down a job, resentful of her mother’s breeding and family money and disappointed that Marie wasn’t a boy. That was the reason Marie and her mother summered far away in France. And it was the reason Marie had run away from the Herefordshire manor where she’d been raised to London when she was eighteen, and then took her mother’s surname. She knew if she stayed in the house she had dreaded all her childhood with her father’s worsening temper, she wouldn’t make it out alive.

“Your accent is extraordinary,” the man said. “Nearly perfect.” How could he know that if he didn’t speak French? she wondered. “Are you working?” he asked.

“Yes,” she blurted. The transition in subject was abrupt, the question too personal. She stood hurriedly, fumbling in her purse for coins. “I’m sorry, but I really must go.”

The man reached up and when she looked back she saw he was holding a business card. “I didn’t mean to be rude. But I was wondering if you would like a job.” She took the card. Number 64 Baker Street, was all it said. No person or office named. “Ask for Eleanor Trigg.”

“Why should I?” she asked, perplexed. “I have a job.”

He shook his head slightly. “This is different. It’s important work and you’d be well suited—and well compensated. I’m afraid I can’t say any more.”

“When should I go there?” she asked, though certain that she never would.

“Now.” She’d expected an appointment. “So you’ll go?”

Marie left a few coins on the table and left the café without answering, eager to be away from the man and his intrusiveness. Outside, she opened her umbrella and adjusted her burgundy print scarf to protect against the chill. She rounded the corner, then stopped, peering over her shoulder to make sure he had not followed her. She looked down at the card, simple black and white. Official.

She could have told the man no, Marie realized. Even now, she could throw out the card and walk away. But she was curious; what kind of work, and for whom? Perhaps it was something more interesting than endless typing. The man had said it paid well, too, something she dearly needed.

Ten minutes later, Marie found herself standing at the end of Baker Street. She paused by a red post box at the corner. The storied home of Sherlock Holmes was meant to be on Baker Street, she recalled. She had always imagined it as mysterious, shrouded in fog. But the block was like any other, drab office buildings with ground floor shops. Farther down the row there were brick town houses that had been converted for business use. She walked to Number 64, then hesitated. Inter-Services Research Bureau, the sign by the door read. What on earth was this all about?

Before she could knock the door flew open and a hand that did not seem attached to anybody pointed left. “Orchard Court, Portman Square. Around the corner and down the street.”

“Excuse me,” Marie said, holding up the card though there seemed to be no one to see it. “My name is Marie Roux. I was told to come here and ask for Eleanor Trigg.” The door closed.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” she muttered, thinking of Tess’s favorite book, the illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland Marie read aloud to her when she visited. Around the corner there were more row houses. She continued down the street to Portman Square and found the building marked “Orchard Court.” Marie knocked. There was no answer. The whole thing was starting to feel like a very odd prank. She turned, ready to go home and forget this folly.

Behind her, the door opened with a creak. She spun back to face a white-haired butler. “Yes?” He stared at her coldly, like she was a door-to-door salesman peddling something unwanted. Too nervous to speak, she held out the card.

He waved her inside. “Come.” His tone was impatient now, as though she was expected and late. He led her through a foyer, its high ceiling and chandelier giving the impression that it had once been the entranceway to a grand home. He opened a door on his right, then closed it again quickly. “Wait here,” he instructed.

Marie stood awkwardly in the foyer, feeling entirely as though she did not belong. She heard footsteps on the floor above and turned to see a handsome young man with a shock of blond hair descending a curved staircase. Noticing her, he stopped. “So, you’re part of the Racket?” he asked.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He smiled. “Just wandered in then?” He did not wait for an answer. “The Racket—that’s what we call all of this.” He gestured around the foyer.

The butler reappeared, clearing his throat. His stern expression gave Marie the undeniable sense that they were not supposed to be speaking with one another. Without another word, the blond man disappeared around the corner into another of what seemed to be an endless number of doors.

The butler led her down the hallway and opened the door to an onyx-and-white-tiled bathroom. She turned back, puzzled; she hadn’t asked for the loo. “Wait in here.”

Before Marie could protest, the butler closed the door, leaving her alone. She stood awkwardly, inhaling the smell of mildew lingering beneath cleaners. Asked to wait in a toilet! She needed to leave but was not quite sure how to manage it. She perched on the edge of a claw-footed bathtub, ankles neatly crossed. Five minutes passed, then ten.

At last the door opened with a click and a woman walked in. She was older than Marie by at least a decade, maybe two. Her face was grave. At first her dark hair appeared to be short, but closer Marie saw that it was pulled tightly in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and her starched white shirt was perfectly pressed, almost military.

“I’m Eleanor Trigg, Chief Recruitment Officer. I’m sorry for the accommodations,” she said, her voice clipped. “We are short on space.” The explanation seemed odd, given the size of the house, the number of doors Marie had seen. But then she remembered the man whom the butler seemed to chastise for speaking with her. Perhaps the people who came here weren’t meant to see one another at all.

Eleanor appraised Marie as one might a vase or piece of jewelry, her gaze steely and unrelenting. “So you’ve decided then?” she said, making it sound as if they were at the end of a long conversation and had not met thirty seconds earlier.

“Decided?” Marie repeated, puzzled.

“Yes. You have to decide if you want to risk your life, and I have to decide if I can let you.”

Marie’s mind whirled. “I’m sorry... I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“You don’t know who we are, do you?” Marie shook her head. “Then what are you doing here?”

“A man in a café gave me a card and...” Marie faltered, hearing the ridiculousness of the situation in her own voice. She had not even learned his name. “I should just go.” She stood.

The woman pressed a firm hand on her shoulder. “Not necessarily. Just because you don’t know why you’ve come, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here. We often find purpose where we least expect it—or not.” Her style was brusque, unfeminine and unquestionably stern. “Don’t blame the man who sent you. He wasn’t authorized to say more. Our work is highly classified. Many who work at the most senior levels of Whitehall itself have no idea what it is that we do.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Marie ventured to ask.

“We’re a branch of Special Operations Executive.”

“Oh,” Marie said, though the answer really didn’t clarify matters for her.

“Covert operations.”

“Like the codebreakers at Bletchley?” She’d known a girl who had left the typing pool to do that once.

“Something like that. Our work is a bit more physical, though. On the ground.”

“In Europe?” Eleanor nodded. Marie understood then: they meant to send her over, into the war. “You want me to be a spy?”

“We don’t ask questions here,” Eleanor snapped. Then it was not, Marie reflected, the place for her. She had always been curious, too curious, her mother would say, with never-ending questions that only made her father’s temper worsen as Marie progressed through her teen years. “We aren’t spies,” Eleanor added, as though the suggestion was offensive. “Espionage is the business of MI6. Rather, here at SOE, our mission is sabotage, or destroying things like railroad tracks, telegraph lines, factory equipment and such, in order to hinder the Germans. We also help the local partisans arm and resist.”

“I’ve never heard of such things.”

“Exactly.” Eleanor sounded almost pleased.

“But what makes you think I could have any part in something like this? I’m hardly qualified.”

“Nonsense. You’re smart, capable.” How could this woman, who had only just met her, possibly know that? It was perhaps the first time in her life that anyone had described her that way. Her father made sure she felt the very opposite. And Richard, her now-gone husband, had treated her as if she was special for a fleeting moment, and look where all that had led. Marie had never thought of herself as any of those things, but now she found herself sitting a bit taller. “You speak the language. You’re exactly who we’re looking for. Have you ever played a musical instrument?” Eleanor asked.

Though it seemed nothing should surprise her anymore, Marie found the question strange. “Piano when I was very young. Harp in school.”

“That could be useful. Open your mouth,” Eleanor ordered, her voice suddenly terse. Marie was certain that she had misheard. But Eleanor’s face was serious. “Your mouth” came the command again, insistent and impatient. Reluctantly, Marie complied. Eleanor stared into her mouth like a dentist. Marie bristled, resenting the intrusion by a woman she had only just met. “That back filling will have to go,” Eleanor said decisively, stepping back.

“Go?” Marie’s voice rose with alarm. “But that’s a perfectly good filling—just a year old and was quite expensive.”

“Exactly. Too expensive. It will mark you as English right away. We’ll have it replaced with porcelain—that’s what the French use.”

It all came together in Marie’s mind then: the man’s interest in her language skills, Eleanor’s concern over whether a tooth filling was too English. “You want me to impersonate a Frenchwoman.”

“Among other things, yes. You’ll receive training in operations skills before you are deployed—if you make it through training.” Eleanor spoke as though Marie had already agreed to go. “That’s all I can say about it for now. Secrecy is of the utmost importance to our operations.”

Deployed. Operations. Marie’s head swam. It seemed surreal that in this elegant town house just steps from the shops and bustle of Oxford Street, covert war against Germany was planned and waged.

“The car will be here for you in one hour to take you to training school,” Eleanor said, as though it were all settled.

“Now? But that’s so soon! I would have to sort out my affairs and pack.”

“It is always the way,” Eleanor replied. Perhaps, Marie reflected, they didn’t want to give people a chance to go home and have second thoughts. “We’ll provide everything you need and give notice to the War Office for you.” Marie stared at Eleanor with surprise. She hadn’t said where she worked. She realized then that these people, whoever they were, knew too much about her. The meeting in the café had not been by chance.

“How long would I have to be gone?” Marie asked.

“That depends on the mission and a variety of other circumstances. You can resign at any time.”

Leave, a voice not her own seemed to say. Marie was into something much bigger and deeper than she had imagined. But her feet remained planted, curiosity piqued. “I have a daughter up near Ely with my aunt. She’s five.”

“And your husband?”

“Killed in action,” she lied. In fact, Tess’s father, Richard, had been an unemployed actor who had gotten by on parts as extras in West End shows and disappeared shortly after Tess was born. Marie had come to London when she was eighteen, fleeing her father’s home, and had promptly fallen for the first bad apple that dropped at her feet. “He went missing at Dunkirk.” The explanation, a morbid lie, was preferable to the likely truth: that he was in Buenos Aires, spending what was left of her mother’s inheritance, which Marie had naively moved to a joint account to cover their household expenses when they had first married.

“Your daughter is well cared for?” Marie nodded. “Good. You would not be able to concentrate on training if you were worried about that.”

She would never stop worrying about Tess, Marie thought. She knew in that instant that Eleanor did not have children.

Marie thought about Tess up in the countryside, the weekend visits that wouldn’t happen if she accepted Eleanor’s proposal. What kind of mother would do such a thing? The responsible choice would be to stay here in London, to thank Eleanor and go back to whatever ordinary life was left during the war. She was the only parent Tess had. If she failed to come back, Tess would have no one but aging Aunt Hazel, who surely couldn’t look after her much longer.

“The work pays ten pounds per week,” Eleanor added.

That was five times what Marie made typing. She’d found the best work she could in London, but it hadn’t been enough. Even combined with a second job, the kind that would have kept her from getting up to see Tess at the weekends, she would not have made what Eleanor was offering. She did the calculations. She would have enough to keep up the house even after sending money to Hazel each week to cover Tess’s care and expenses, something that simply was not possible now. She imagined a new dress for her daughter, perhaps even a few toys at Christmas. Tess was unspoiled and never complained, but Marie often wished to give her more of the things she had taken for granted in her own childhood. It wasn’t like she could be with Tess now while she was stuck working in London anyway. And, in truth, Marie was curious about the mysterious adventure Eleanor was dangling in front of her. She felt so useless sitting here in London, typing endlessly. Might as well do some good, make a real difference in the war effort—if, as Eleanor had said, she in fact had what it took.

“All right then. I’m ready. But I have to phone and let my daughter’s caretaker know that I won’t be coming up.”

Eleanor shook her head firmly. “Impossible. No one can know where you are going—or even that you are going. We’ll send a telegram informing your family that you’ve been called away for work.”

“I can’t simply leave without saying anything.”

“That is exactly what you must do.” Eleanor stared at her evenly. Though her expression did not change, Marie saw a flicker of doubt behind her eyes. “If you aren’t prepared to do this, you can just leave.”

“I have to speak to my daughter. I won’t go unless I can hear her voice.”

“Fine,” Eleanor relented finally. “But you cannot tell her that you are going. There’s a phone in the next room you can use. Keep it brief. No more than five minutes.” Eleanor spoke as though she was in charge of Marie now, owned her. Marie wondered if accepting had been a mistake. “Say nothing of your departure,” Eleanor reiterated. Marie sensed it was some sort of test—perhaps the first of many.

Eleanor started for the door, indicating that Marie should follow. “Wait,” Marie said. “There’s one thing.” Eleanor turned back, the start of annoyance creeping onto her face. “I should tell you that my father’s family is German.” Marie watched Eleanor’s face, half hoping the information might cause Eleanor to change her mind about accepting Marie for whatever she was proposing.

But Eleanor simply nodded in confirmation. “I know.”

“But how?”

“You’ve sat in that same café every day, haven’t you?” Marie nodded. “You should stop that, by the way. Terrible habit. Varying one’s routine is key. In any event, you sit there and read books in French and one of our people noticed and thought you might be a good recruit. We followed you back to work, learned who you are. We ran you through the cards, found you qualified, at least for initial consideration.” Marie was stunned; all of this had been going on and she’d had no idea. “We have finders, recruiters looking for girls who might be the right sort all over Britain. But in the end I decide if they are the right sort to go. Every single one of the girls passes through me.” There was a note of protectiveness in her voice.

“And you think I do?”

“You might,” Eleanor said carefully. “You’ve got the proper credentials. But in training you’ll be tested to see if you can actually put them into use. Skills on paper are useless if you don’t have the grit to see it all through. Do you have any political allegiances of your own?”

“None. My mother didn’t believe in...”

“Enough,” Eleanor snapped. “Don’t answer a question with any more than you have to.” Another test. “You must never talk about yourself or your past. You’ll be given a new identity in training.” And until then, Marie thought, it would be as if she simply didn’t exist.

Eleanor held open the door to the toilet. Marie walked through into a study with high bookshelves. A black phone sat on a mahogany desk. “You can call here.” Eleanor remained in the doorway, not even pretending to give her privacy. Marie dialed the operator and asked to be connected to the post office where Hazel worked each day, hoping she had not yet gone home. She asked for Hazel from the woman who answered.

Then a warbling voice came across the line. “Marie! Is something wrong?”

“Everything’s fine,” Marie reassured quickly, so desperately wanting to tell her the truth about why she had called. “Just checking on Tess.”

“I’ll fetch her.” One minute passed then another. Quickly, Marie thought, wondering if Eleanor would snatch the phone from her hand the moment five minutes had passed.

“Allo!” Tess’s voice squeaked, flooding Marie’s heart.

“Darling, how are you?”

“Mummy, I’m helping Aunt Hazel sort the mail.”

Marie smiled, imagining her playing around the pigeonholes. “Good girl.”

“And just two more days until I see you.” Tess, who even as a young child had an acute sense of time, knew her mother always came on Friday. Only now she wouldn’t be. Marie’s heart wrenched.

“Let me speak to your auntie. And, Tess, I love you,” she added.

But Tess was already gone. Hazel came back on the line. “She’s well?” Marie asked.

“She’s brilliant. Counting to a hundred and doing sums. So bright. Why, just the other day, she...” Hazel stopped, seeming to sense that sharing what Marie had missed would only make things worse. Marie couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit jealous. When Richard abandoned her and left her alone with a newborn, Marie had been terrified. But in those long nights of comforting and nursing an infant, she and Tess had become one. Then she’d been forced to send Tess away. She was missing so much of Tess’s childhood as this bloody war dragged on. “You’ll see for yourself at the weekend,” Hazel added kindly.

Marie’s stomach ached as though she had been punched. “I have to go.”

“See you soon,” Hazel replied.

Fearful she would say more, Marie hung up the phone.


Chapter Four (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Grace

New York, 1946

Forty-five minutes after she had started away from Grand Central, Grace stepped off the downtown bus at Delancey Street. The photographs she’d taken from the suitcase seemed to burn hot against her skin through her bag. She’d half expected the police or someone else to follow her and order her to return them.

But now as she made her way through the bustling Lower East Side neighborhood where she’d worked these past several months, the morning seemed almost normal. At the corner, Mortie the hot dog vendor waved as she passed. The window cleaners alternated between shouting to one another about their weekends and catcalling at the women below. The smell of something savory and delicious wafted from Reb Sussel’s delicatessen, tickling her nose.

Grace soon neared the row house turned office on Orchard Street and began the climb that always left her breathless. Bleeker & Sons, a law practice for immigrants, was located in a fourth-floor walk-up above a milliner and two stories of accountants. The name, etched into the glass door at the top of the landing, was a misnomer because it was just Frankie, and always had been as far as she could tell. A line of refugees fifteen deep snaked down the stairs, hollow cheekbones above heavy coats and too many layers of clothing, as though they were afraid to take off their belongings. Their faces were careworn and drawn and they did not make eye contact. Grace noticed the unwashed smell coming from them as she passed, and then was immediately ashamed at herself for doing so.

“Excuse me,” Grace said, stepping delicately around a woman sitting on the ground with a baby sleeping on her lap. She slid into the office. Across the single room, Frankie perched on the edge of his worn desk, phone receiver cradled between his ear and shoulder. He grinned widely and waved her over.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said as soon as he hung up the phone. “There was an accident by Grand Central and I had to go around.”

“I moved the Metz family to eleven,” he said. There was no recrimination in his voice.

Closer she could see the imprint of papers creasing his cheek. “You were here all night again, weren’t you?” she accused. “You’re wearing the same suit, so don’t try to deny it.” She immediately regretted the observation. Hopefully, he would not realize the same about her.

He raised his hands in admission, touching the spot near his temples where his dark hair was flecked with gray. “Guilty. I had to be. The Weissmans needed papers filed for their residency and housing.” Frankie was tireless when helping people, as though his own well-being did not matter at all.

“It’s done now.” She tried not to think about what she had been doing while he had been working all night. “You should get some sleep.”

“Don’t lecture me, miss,” he chided, his Brooklyn accent seeming to deepen.

“You need rest. Go home,” she pressed.

“And tell them what?” He gestured with his head toward the line of people waiting in the hallway.

Grace looked back over her shoulder at the never-ending stream of need that filled the stairwell. Sometimes she was overwhelmed by all of it. Frankie’s practice consisted mainly of helping the European Jews who had come to live with relatives in the already teeming Lower East Side tenements; it sometimes felt more like social work than law. He took all of their cases, trying to find their relatives or their assets or get them citizenship papers, often for little more than a promise of payment. He had never missed her salary, but she sometimes wondered how he kept up the lights and rent.

And his own health. His white shirt was yellowed at the neck and he was covered as always in a fine layer of perspiration that made him seem to glow. A lifelong bachelor (“Who would have me?” he’d joked more than once) approaching fifty, he was a dilapidated sort, five-o’clock shadow even at ten in the morning and hair seldom combed. But there was a warmth to his brown eyes that made it impossible to scold and his quick smile always brought out her own.

“You need to at least eat breakfast,” she said. “I can run and get you a bagel.”

He waved away the suggestion. “Can you just find me the number for social services in Queens?” he asked. “I want to freshen up before our first meeting.”

“You’ll do our clients no good if you make yourself sick,” she scolded.

But Frankie just smiled as he started out the door for the washroom. He ruffled the hair of a young boy who sat on the landing as he passed. “Just a minute, okay, Sammy?” he said.

Grace picked up the ashtray from the corner of his desk and emptied it, then wiped the top of the table to clear away the dust left behind. She and Frankie had, in a sense, found each other. After she had taken the narrow room with a shared bath off Fifty-Fourth Street close to the West River, she’d quickly run through what little money she had and started to look for a job, armed with no more than a high school typing class. When she’d gone to answer an ad for a secretary for one of the accountants in the building, she had walked into his law office by mistake. Frankie said he’d been looking for someone (whether or not that was the case, she would never actually know) and she’d started the next day.

He didn’t really need her to work there, she quickly came to realize. The office was tiny, almost too small for the both of them. Though his papers were seemingly tossed in haphazard piles, he could put his fingers on a single page he needed within seconds. The work was hectic, but he could do it all by himself; in fact, he had been doing it all for years. No, he hadn’t needed her. But he sensed that she needed the job and so he had made a place. She loved him for it.

Frankie walked back into the office. “Are you ready?” he asked. She nodded, though she still wanted to go home for a bath and a nap, or at least find coffee. But Frankie was headed purposefully toward his desk with the young boy from the landing in tow. “Sammy, this is my friend Grace. Grace, I’d like to introduce Sam Altshuler.”

Grace looked behind the boy toward the door for the others. She had been expecting a whole family, or at least an adult, to accompany him. “Mother? Father?” she mouthed silently over the boy’s head so he could not see.

Frankie shook his head gravely. “Sit down, son,” he said gently to the boy, who could not be older than ten. “How can we help?”

Sammy looked up uncertainly through long eyelashes, not sure whether to trust them. Grace noticed then a small notebook in his right hand. “You like to write?” she asked.

“Draw,” Sammy replied with a heavy East European accent. He held up the pad to reveal a small sketch of the queue of people waiting on the stairs.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. The details and expressions on the people’s faces were stunningly good.

“How can we help you?” Frankie asked.

“I need sumvere to live.” He spoke the broken but functional English of a smart kid who had taught himself.

“Do you have any family here in New York?” Frankie asked.

“My cousin, he shares an apartment vith some fellas in the Bronx. But it costs two dollars a veek to stay vith them.”

Grace wondered where Sammy had been living until now. “What about your parents?” she couldn’t help asking.

“I vas separated from my father at Vesterbork.” Westerbork was a transit camp in Holland, Grace recalled from a family they had helped weeks earlier. “My mother hid me vith her for as long as she could in the vomen’s...” He paused, fumbling for a word. “In the barracks, but then she was taken, too. I never saw them again.”

Grace shuddered inwardly, trying to imagine a child trying to survive alone under such circumstances. “It’s possible that they survived,” she offered. Frankie’s eyes flashed above the boy’s head, a silent warning.

Sammy’s expression remained unchanged. “They vere taken east,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. “People don’t come back from there.” What was it like, Grace wondered, to be a child with no hope?

Grace forced herself to focus on the practicalities of the situation. “You know, there are places in New York for children to live.”

“No boys’ home,” Sammy replied, sounding panicked. “No orphanage.”

“Grace, can I speak with you for a moment?” Frankie waved her over to the corner, away from Sammy. “That boy spent two years in Dachau.” Grace’s stomach twisted, imagining the awful things Sammy’s young eyes had seen. Frankie continued, “And then he was in a DP camp for six months before managing to get here by using the papers of another little boy who died. He’s not going to go to another institution where people can hurt him again.”

“But he needs guardians, an education...” she protested.

“What he needs,” Frankie replied gently, “is a safe place to live.” The bare minimum to survive, Grace thought sadly. So much less than the loving family a child should have. If she had a real apartment, she might have taken Sammy home with her.

Frankie started back toward the boy. “Sammy, we’re going to start the process of having your parents declared deceased so that you can receive payments from social security.” Frankie’s voice was matter-of-fact. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, Grace knew. He was helping a client (albeit a young one) get what he needed.

“How long vill that take?” Sammy asked.

Frankie frowned. “It isn’t a quick process.” He reached in his wallet and pulled out fifty dollars. Grace stifled a gasp. It was a large sum in their meager practice and Frankie could hardly afford it. “This should be enough to live with your cousin for a while. Keep it on you and don’t trust anyone with it. Check in with me in two weeks—or sooner if things aren’t good with your cousin, okay?”

Sammy looked at the money dubiously. “I don’t know ven I can repay you,” he said, his voice solemn beyond his years.

“How about that drawing?” Frankie suggested. “That will be payment enough.” The boy tore the paper carefully from the notepad and then took the money.

Watching Sammy’s back as he retreated through the doorway, Grace’s heart tugged. She had read and heard the stories in the news, which came first in a trickle then a deluge, about the killings and other atrocities that had happened in Europe while people here had gone to the cinema and complained about the shortage of nylons. It was not until coming to work for Frankie, though, that she had seen the faces of the suffering and began to truly understand. She tried to keep her distance from the clients. She knew that if she allowed them into her heart even a crack, their pain would break her. But then she met someone like Sammy and just couldn’t help it.

Frankie walked up beside her and put his arm on her shoulder. “It’s hard, I know.”

She turned to him. “How do you do it? Keep going, I mean.” He had been helping people rebuild their lives out of the wreckage for years.

“You just have to lose yourself in the work. Speaking of which, the Beckermans are waiting.”

The next few hours were a rush of interviews. Some were in English, others she translated using all of the high school French she could muster, and still others Frankie conducted in the fluent German he said he had learned from his grandmother. Grace scribbled furiously the notes Frankie dictated about what needed to be done for each client. But in between meetings, Grace’s thoughts returned to the suitcase she had found at the train station that morning. Why would someone simply have abandoned it? She wondered if the woman (Grace assumed it was a woman from the clothing and toiletries inside) had left it inadvertently, or if she knew she wasn’t coming back. Perhaps it was meant for someone else to find.

“Why don’t we break for lunch?” Frankie asked when it was nearly one o’clock. Grace knew he really meant that she should take lunch, while he would keep working, at most eat whatever she brought back for him. But she didn’t argue. She hadn’t eaten either today, she recalled as she started down the stairs.

Ten minutes later, Grace stepped out onto the flat rooftop of the building where she liked to eat when the weather permitted. It had a panoramic view of Midtown Manhattan stretching east to the river. The city was beginning to resemble one big construction site, from the giant cranes building glass-and-steel skyscrapers across Midtown to the block apartments going up on the edge of the East Village. She watched a group of girls on their lunch hour step out of Zarin’s Fabrics, long-legged and fashionable, despite the years of shortages and rationing. A few even smoked now. Grace didn’t want to do that, but she wished she fit in just a bit. They seemed so sure of their place. Whereas she felt like a visitor whose visa was about to expire at any moment.

Grace wiped off a sooty windowsill and perched on it. She thought of the photos in her purse. A few times that morning, she’d wondered if she had imagined them. But when she’d gone into her purse to fish out some coins for lunch, there they sat, neatly wrapped in the lace. She had wanted to bring them with her and have another look over lunch, but the roof tended to be breezy and she didn’t want them to blow away.

Grace unwrapped the hot dog she’d bought from the vendor, missing the egg salad sandwich she usually packed. She liked a certain order to her world, took comfort in its mundaneness. Now the whole apple cart seemed toppled. With last night’s misadventure, she had moved just one piece out of place (admittedly a very big one, but a single piece nonetheless) and now it seemed that everything was in complete disarray.

Turning her gaze uptown, her eyes locked on the vicinity of a certain high rise on the East River. Though she couldn’t see it, the elegant hotel where she had spent the previous night loomed large in her mind. It had all started innocently enough. On her way home from work, Grace had stopped for dinner at Arnold’s, a place on Fifty-Third Street that she had passed dozens of times, because she didn’t have anything in the shared icebox in the boardinghouse kitchen. She had planned to ask for her meal to go, broiled chicken and a potato. But the mahogany bar, with its soft lighting and low music, beckoned. She didn’t want to sit in her cramped room and eat alone again.

“I’ll have a menu, please,” Grace said. The maître d’s eyes rose. Grace made her way to the bar trying to ignore the looks of the men, surprised to see a woman dining alone.

Then she noticed him, a man at the edge of the bar in a smart gray suit, facing away from her. He had broad shoulders and close-cut, curly brown hair tacked into place with pomade. A long-forgotten interest stirred in her. He turned and rose, his face lifting with recognition. “Grace?”

“Mark...” It had taken a second for her to place him so far out of context. Mark Dorff had been Tom’s college roommate at Yale.

More than Tom’s roommate, she realized as the memories returned. His best friend. Though two years older than Tom, Mark had been a constant presence among the sea of boys in navy wool blazers at events, and at the homecoming dances. He had even been an attendant in her wedding. But this was the first time they had really spoken, just the two of them.

“I didn’t realize that you were living in New York,” he remarked.

“I’m not. That is, sort of.” She fumbled for the right words. “I’m here for a time. And you?”

“I’m living in Washington. I was here for a few days for work, but I’m headed back first thing tomorrow. It’s good to see you, Gracie.” She had always disliked the nickname her family had given her, that Tom had picked up for his own. It felt diminutive, designed to keep her in her place. But now there was a kind of warmth to hearing it that she realized she had missed during her months alone in the city. “How are you?”

There it was, the question she dreaded most since Tom’s death. People always sounded as though they were trying to get the level of sympathy in their voices just right, to ask in a personal-but-not-too-personal way. Mark looked concerned, though, like he really meant it. “That’s such a stupid thing to ask,” he added when she did not answer. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she said quickly. “I’m managing.” In truth, it had gotten easier. Being in New York and not seeing the places that would remind her of Tom every day allowed her to put it behind her, at least for a time. That numbness, that kind of forgetting, was part of what had driven her to New York. Yet she felt guilty for having found it.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be at the funeral. I was still overseas.” He dipped his chin. His features were not perfect, she noticed then. Hazel eyes a bit too close together, chin sharp. But the way they fit together was handsome.

“It was all a blur,” she confessed. “But those flowers...” They had towered over the others. “It was so kind of you.”

“It was the least I could do. Losing Tom like that, it was just so goddamned wrong.” Grace could see from his face that the loss of his friend had affected him deeply. Mark had been different than the other boys at Yale, she recalled then, and not just because he was Tom’s best friend. A bit quieter, but in a confident rather than shy sort of way. “We’re going to put together a scholarship fund in his name.”

Grace felt a sudden urge to flee as the past seemed to well up all around her. “Well, it was lovely seeing you.”

“Wait,” he said, touching her arm. “Sit a minute. It would be nice to talk to someone who knew Tom.”

Grace didn’t think it would be nice at all. But she sat, allowing the bartender to pour a healthy snifter of brandy. At some point Mark moved his bar stool closer without seeming presumptuous or wrong. From there the rest of the night grew fuzzy around the edges and hours faded. Later she would realize how the restaurant was actually much more of a bar. What had she been thinking, going there? She was a widow of just under a year and had no business talking to strange men.

But Mark was not a stranger. He had known Tom, really known him, and she found herself lost in his stories. “So then I discovered Tom on the roof of the dormitory and he had no recollection of how he’d gotten there. But he was only worried about being late for class,” Mark finished the story, which was meant to be funny.

But instead, Grace’s eyes began to burn. “Oh!” She brought her hand to her mouth as the tears spilled over.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly.

“It’s not your fault. It’s just that you and I are here to laugh about it...”

“And Tom isn’t.” Mark understood, in a way no one else had. He reached over to smooth a smear of lipstick from her cheek. His hand lingered.

Mark switched the subject to something else then, she recalled. Music or politics, or maybe both. Only later would she realize that he had said nothing about himself.

Forcing her gaze from the direction of the hotel, Grace pushed the images from her mind. It was all done now. She had slipped from the elegant hotel room while he slept and hailed a taxi. She would never see him again.

Instead, she let herself think of her husband, the memories she usually kept so steadfastly at bay now a welcome distraction. She’d met Tom one high school summer during a family vacation on Cape Cod. He was just the right boy: fair-haired and charming, the son of a Massachusetts state senator and headed for an Ivy League college, larger than life in that captain-of-the-football-team kind of way. It was hard to believe he wanted her. She was the daughter of an accountant, and the youngest of three girls. Her sisters were both married and living within a square mile of where they had grown up in Westport, Connecticut. Tom’s attention was a welcome draw away from the small-town life that had always felt so stifling, and the future of interminable bridge games and rotary club meetings that seemed inevitable if she stayed.

She and Tom married after her high school graduation and rented a house in New Haven while he was in college, making plans to move to Boston when he finished. They spoke of a belated honeymoon, a cruise to Europe perhaps upon the Queen Elizabeth II or another ocean liner. But then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and Tom had insisted on signing up for officers’ school after he graduated. He’d been training down at Fort Benning and about to deploy.

“I’ve gotten weekend leave,” he said that last night on the phone, arranging things as he always had. “It isn’t long enough for me to come up to Connecticut, but meet me in Manhattan and we’ll have a weekend. You’ll see me off at New York Harbor.”

That was the last she’d heard from him. The jeep carrying him had crashed, going too quickly around a curve on the way to the rail station, a stupid accident that might have been prevented. Grace often looked wistfully at the yellow ribbons, the flowers that the other women wore. Not just the trappings of war widowhood but the pride and the purpose—the sense that all of the loss and pain had been for something.

Grace had gone back to Westport briefly after Tom’s funeral. Marcia, a childhood friend who wanted to help Grace, had kindly offered to host Grace for a visit at her family’s place in the Hamptons. Grace had felt such immense relief at being away from her family’s sympathetic gazes and the too-close town of her youth. She had found the silence of the coast out of season deafening, though, and so she had left for Manhattan. But she had told her family she was going to stay with Marcia and recover for an extended time, knowing they would never agree to her living alone in the city. Marcia had gone along with the scheme, forwarding any letters from her family that came. That was nearly a year ago and Grace still hadn’t gone back.

Grace finished eating and returned to the office. The ragtag queue of clients had dispersed now that morning-intake hours were over. Frankie was nowhere to be found, but he had left her a pile of correspondence to be typed, letters to various city agencies on behalf of their clients. Grace picked up the first one and studied it, then inserted a sheet of paper in the typewriter, losing herself in the repetitive clack-clack sound.

When it was finished, she reached for the next paper, then stopped. She opened her bag and pulled out the envelope containing the photos, splaying them out in front of her in a fan shape. Twelve girls, each young and beautiful. They might have been part of a sorority. But most wore uniforms and beneath the smiles their jaws were set grimly, eyes solemn. The photos had been wrapped lovingly in the lace. They were still worn from handling, though, cupped like the shape of a palm. Putting her fingers beneath, Grace could almost feel the energy radiating from them.

She turned one over and there was a name scrawled on the back. Marie.Madeline, read another, and Jean and Josie. On and on, sounding like attendees at a garden party. Who were they?

She glanced up. Frankie had returned and was on the phone across the room, gesturing animatedly to whomever was on the other end of the line, verging on angry. She could show the photos to him, ask his advice. He might know what to do. But how could she explain having reached in the suitcase and looked, much less taken something that was not hers?

Grace ran her finger lightly over the first photo she had seen, of the young, dark-haired beauty called Josie. Look away, a voice inside her seemed to say. Studying the photographs, Grace was suddenly overcome by an uneasy feeling. Who was she anyway, stealing photos and sleeping with strange men? This wasn’t her business. She needed to return them to the suitcase.

Frankie started across the office toward her and she scooped up the photos hurriedly, tucking them back into her bag. Had he seen? She held her breath, waiting for him to ask about them, but he did not. “I’ve got papers to file at the courthouse,” he said instead.

“I’ll take them,” she replied quickly.

“Are you sure?”

“It will do me good to stretch my legs,” she said. “I’ll do it on my way home.”

“All right, but be sure to leave early to make sure you’re there by four thirty because the fellas in the clerk’s office tend to knock off early.” She nodded; that had been part of the plan. Leaving early would let her get back to Grand Central so that she could rid herself of the photos more quickly.

Nearly two hours later, Grace emerged from the subway at Grand Central, headed for the place she had sworn never to go again for the second time that day. She rode the escalator up to the main concourse level. The station had changed into its late-day colors now, the commuters moving more slowly now, rumpled and ready for home.

She reached into her bag, pulling the envelope out as she started for the bench. Her heart raced. She would slip the photos into the suitcase quickly, then hurry away before anyone could see her and ask questions. Then the whole mess would be over.

She reached the bench and looked over her shoulder to make sure no one in the hurried crowd was watching. She knelt and peered beneath the bench.

The suitcase in which she had found the photos was gone.


Chapter Five (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Marie

Scotland, 1944

Marie was dreaming of a morning when she and Tess were making scones, warm and buttery. She put them in a paper-lined basket for Tess to take so they might have a picnic in the garden. Marie reached for a scone and was ready to pop it in her mouth when a sudden bang caused her hand to freeze, suspended in midair.

Pounding on the door shook Marie from sleep. “What is it?” Before she could stand, the door flew open and she was doused with a bucket of icy water. Her skin screamed as the freezing wetness seeped through her nightgown and bedclothes.

Harsh lights switched on. “En Français!” a female voice scolded.

Marie sat up, trying to get her bearings. Scotland, she remembered. It had been nearly midnight when the taxi from the rail station had left her in front of the fog-shrouded manor. A sentry at the desk had led her to a room with several beds and left her without further instructions.

She swung her feet to the floor. A woman in a gray dress loomed over her, glowering. “You must answer in French, even when asleep. It is not enough to know the language. You must think in French, dream in it. You are to be out front and dressed for the run in five minutes.” She turned and walked through the door, leaving Marie cold and shaking.

As Marie scampered to her feet, she looked at the empty bed next to hers. There were six beds in all, arranged in two dormitory-style rows flush against the bare, beige walls. Except for her own, they were neatly made. There had been other girls. She recalled hearing their breathing in the darkness as she had tried to change into the nightdress she’d been issued without waking them. But the rest of the girls were gone, up and out already, as they were meant to be. Why had no one woken her?

Hurriedly, Marie hung the wet nightdress on the hissing radiator. In the trunk at the foot of the bed, there were two identical sets of clothing, olive cotton trousers and shirts and a pair of black rubber-soled boots. She changed into one and put on the similarly drab coat she’d been issued, then stepped from the dorm room into the musty corridor of Arisaig House, the gray stone manor turned Special Operations Executive training facility. Though it was not yet dawn, the hallway was bustling with agents, mostly men as well as a smattering of women, presumably going to various classes and assignments.

Outside, the predawn February air of the western Scottish Highlands was biting, and despite her dry clothes, Marie shivered from the earlier dampness. She dearly wished for the muffler that had been confiscated upon arrival, deemed by the clerk as “too English.” The fog had lifted and she could see now that the manor was situated on a sloping bluff, nestled among bare, ancient woodlands that had not yet awakened from winter. The back of the estate rolled gently down to dark, still waters, set against a cluster of hills on the far banks. On a pleasant day, it might have felt more like a country resort than a covert training center.

Marie looked about uncertainly, then spied a small group of women who had assembled on the front lawn. None of them spoke as she approached.

The ground rumbled suddenly under Marie’s feet. She flinched and braced for impact, immediately transported back to the bombing raids in London just a few years earlier that sent them all into the subways and shelters at night. But the earth stilled.

“Just a practice drill,” one of the other girls whispered. “Some of the blokes at explosives training.” The explanation, meant to be reassuring, was not. They were training with actual explosives, which made the mission ahead seem all the more real.

The cluster of women started on their run without speaking, following a path along the water’s edge. At the front of the pack, a slight girl who could not be more than twenty seemed to lead the group, setting the pace with her short, spindly legs. If Marie had ever given thought to what an agent might look like, she would not have fit the bill. But she was surprisingly fast, and as the others followed behind her in a formation that seemed silently agreed upon, Marie struggled to keep up.

The run proceeded along a narrow trail up a tall hill, perhaps a mountain; Marie could not see the top and she was already struggling to control her breath as the incline grew steeper. Taking in the path ahead, the doubts she’d had at signing on for this grew; no one had ever considered her particularly strong or worthy of doing meaningful things, not even Marie herself. What made her think she could do this now?

To distract herself from the effort, she studied the assembly of bobbing heads in front of her. There were five women, all dressed in khaki pants and boots like herself. They ran with an ease that suggested they had been doing it for some time and were considerably more fit.

They reached a rocky plateau. “Rest,” the lead girl instructed and they paused, some taking drinks from canteens they’d carried. Marie had seen a metal water bottle alongside the clothing she’d been issued, but in her haste had not thought to bring it along.

“Onward!” the girl at the front cried after less than a minute. The others tucked away their canteens and the pack surged forward, only their footsteps breaking the silence. What seemed like hours later, they reached the summit. The fog had begun to lift and sparrows called morning greetings to one another. Marie took in the pinkening sky above Arisaig House, and the sparkling waters of the loch below. She had never been to the Scottish Highlands before coming here to train. Under other circumstances, it would have been idyllic.

The girls started down the hill without pausing. The run was less physically strenuous, but navigating the twisted, rocky path seemed almost harder in descent. Suddenly, Marie’s foot came down unevenly on a stone and her ankle folded inward. She yelped as pain shot through her lower leg. She stumbled, trying not to fall. Her first training activity and already a failure. Keep going, she thought. Through gritted teeth she willed herself forward. But the throbbing ache grew worse with every step. She began to lag behind the others even more, the distance growing too great not to notice. She simply could not keep up.

The girl at the front of the pack seemed to sense this. She slowed her pace and dropped to the rear. Marie waited for the younger woman to berate her for being slow and weak. Instead, she put her arm around Marie’s shoulder. Though she was not quite as tall as Marie, she somehow lifted her until the toes of her injured foot seemed to scarcely touch the ground.

“Come,” she said. “Pretend we’re dancing at one of those fancy clubs in London.” The notion was so far-fetched and removed from what they were doing that Marie found herself smiling through the pain. With a strength that seemed superhuman, the girls pushed forward, the slight girl nearly carrying Marie as they ran to the front of the pack once more. The uneven terrain jarred her sore ankle harder with each step. Another woman came to Marie’s other side and helped to support her. Marie tried to at least make herself light, so as not to be a burden. They sailed as one down the hill.

When they reached the front lawn of Arisaig House, the lead girl let go of Marie so abruptly that she almost fell. The other woman who had been helping her stepped away, too. “Thank you,” Marie said, reaching for a low stone wall that ran the perimeter of the property to support herself. “I don’t think it’s broken,” she said, testing out if it would bear her weight and grimacing. She sat on the short fence. “But perhaps some ice... Is there an infirmary?”

The girl shook her head. “No time. The run took longer because we had to help you and we’re late for breakfast.” She did not bother to hide the annoyance in her voice. “You don’t want to miss meals because there’s nothing to eat in between. No food allowed in the barracks, so it’s either eat now or go hungry.” Her accent was northern, Marie decided. Manchester, maybe, or Leeds. “I’m Josephine, by the way. They call me Josie.” She had a cap of dark curls that had been cut into a short, crude bob and skin a shade darker than the others, like warm caramel.

“Marie.”

Josie lowered her arm to help her to her feet, then gestured toward Marie’s still-damp hair. “I see you’ve had the Poirot shower.” Marie cocked her head, not understanding. “She doused you for not getting up.” Josie’s dark eyes sparkled with amusement. Marie wondered if the other girls had left her sleeping purposefully so she would get soaked, a kind of hazing. “Madame Poirot, she’s our instructor in all things French. Somewhere between a headmistress and a drill sergeant.”

Marie followed the others into the manor. The dining hall was a massive ballroom that had been converted, with long wooden tables running the length of the room. It had an air of civility that stood in sharp contrast to the dark, cold hike. The tables were set with linen napkins and decent porcelain. Servers poured coffee from silver urns. A smattering of agents, male and female, were already seated. The men sat separately, and Marie wondered if that was by rule or preference.

Marie found an open place at the women’s table next to Josie. She took a too-large sip from her water glass, nearly spilling it in her thirst from the run. Then she reached for a piece of baguette. The food was French, but austere—no extras, as if to acclimate them to what they would find in the field.

“How many of us are there?” Marie asked. It almost felt audacious to include herself in their number when she had just arrived. “The women, I mean.”

“We don’t ask questions,” Josie said, her words a rebuke of Eleanor’s when she recruited Marie. But then she answered. “About forty, including those who already deployed—and those who’ve gone missing.”

Marie’s head snapped around. “Missing?”

“Missing in action, presumed dead.”

“What happened to them?”

“No one knows.”

“But we’re radio operators, for goodness sake. Is it really that dangerous?”

Josie threw back her head and laughed so loudly the men at the next table looked up. “Where do you think you’ll be broadcasting from, BBC Studios? You’re transmitting in Occupied France and the Germans will do anything to stop you.” Then her expression grew serious. “Six weeks.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s the average life expectancy of a radio operator in France. Six weeks.”

A cold chill ran up Marie’s spine. Though she had known on some level that the work she’d accepted was dangerous, she had not grasped how deadly it was. If she’d realized the likelihood that she wouldn’t be returning to Tess, she never would have accepted. She needed to leave, now.

A blonde woman about her age seated across from Marie reached over and patted her arm. “I’m Brya. Don’t let her worry you, dear.”

“In French,” Madame Poirot scolded from the doorway. Even among themselves they were to maintain the fiction they would have to portray once deployed. “Good habits start now.” Josie mimicked this last phrase, mouthing the words silently.

A whistle, shrill and abrupt, caused Marie to jump. She turned to see a burly colonel in the doorway to the dining hall. “Breakfast canceled—all of you back to barracks for inspection!” There was a nervous murmur among the girls as they started from the table.

Marie swallowed a last mouthful of baguette, then followed the others hurriedly down the corridor and up a flight of stairs to their dormitory-style room. She flung the nightdress she’d hung to dry on the radiator beneath her pillow. The colonel burst in without knocking, followed by his aide-de-camp.

Josie was staring at her oddly. It was the necklace, Marie realized. A tiny locket shaped like a butterfly on a simple gold chain, Hazel had given it to her when Tess was born. Marie had hidden it, a flagrant violation of the order that all personal belongings be surrendered at the start of training. This morning, in the scramble to get dry and dressed, she had forgotten to take it off.

Josie reached around Marie’s neck and unclasped the necklace quietly and slipped it into her own pocket. Marie started to protest. If Josie got caught with it, the necklace would be confiscated and she would be in trouble as well.

But the gesture had caught the attention of the colonel. He walked over and flung open the trunk lid and studied Marie’s belongings, seizing on her outside clothes, which she had folded neatly in the bottom. The colonel pulled out her dress and reached for the collar, where Marie had darned a small hole. He tore out the thread. “That isn’t a French stitch. It would give you away in an instant.”

“I wasn’t planning to wear it here,” Marie blurted out before realizing that answering back was a mistake.

“Having it on you if you were caught would be just as bad,” he snapped, seemingly angered by her response. “And these stockings...” The colonel held up the pair she’d worn when she’d arrived the night before.

Marie was puzzled. The stockings were French, with the straight seam up the back. What could possibly be wrong with that? “Those are French!” she cried, unable to restrain herself.

“Were French,” the colonel corrected with disdain. “No one can get this type in France anymore, or nylons at all for that matter. The girls are painting their legs now with iodine.” Anger rose in Marie. She had not been here a day; how could they expect her to know these things?

The aide-de-camp joined in, snatching a pencil from the nightstand beside Marie’s bed, which wasn’t even hers. “This is an English pencil and the Germans know it. Using this would give you away immediately. You would be arrested and likely killed.”

“Where?” Josie burst out suddenly, interrupting. All eyes turned in her direction. “We don’t ask questions,” she had admonished just a few minutes earlier at breakfast. But she seemed to do it deliberately now to draw the focus from Marie. “Where would it get me killed? We still don’t know where we are bloody well going!” Marie admired Josie’s nerve.

The colonel walked over to Josie and stood close, glowering down his nose at her. “You may be a princess, but here you’re no one. Just another girl who can’t do the job.” Josie held his gaze, unwavering. Several seconds passed. “Radio training in five minutes, all of you!” he snapped, before turning on his heel and leaving. The aide followed suit.

“Thank you,” Marie said to Josie when the others girls had left the room for training.

“Here.” Josie handed Marie back her necklace. She went to her own drawer of clothing and rummaged about, then pulled out a pair of woolen tights. “They have this kind in France, so they won’t dock you for it. They’re my last pair, though. Don’t wreck them.”

“He called you a princess,” Marie remarked as they straightened out the belongings that had been set topsy-turvy during the inspection. “Is it true?” She reminded herself that she should not be asking. They were not supposed to talk about their backgrounds.

“My father was the leader of a Sufi tribe.” Marie would not have taken Josie for Indian, but it explained her darker complexion and beautiful, coal-like eyes.

“Then what on earth are you doing fighting for Britain?” Marie asked.

“A lot of our boys are fighting. There’s a whole squadron who are spitfire pilots—Sikhs, Hindus—but you don’t hear about that. I’m not supposed to be here, really,” she confided in a low voice. “But not because of my father. You see, my eighteenth birthday isn’t until next month.” Josie was even younger than she thought.

“What do your parents think?”

“They’re both gone, killed in a fire when I was twelve. It was just me and my twin brother, Arush. We didn’t like the orphanage, so we lived on our own.” Marie shuddered inwardly; it was the nightmare she feared in leaving Tess, a child left parentless. And Tess would not even be left with a sibling. “Arush has been missing in action since Ardennes. Anyway, I was working in a factory when I heard they were looking for girls, so I turned up and persuaded them to take me. I keep hoping that if I get over there, I can find out what happened to him.” Josie’s eyes had a determined look and Marie could tell that the young girl who seemed so tough still hoped against the odds to find her brother alive. “And you? What tiara are you wearing when you aren’t fighting the Germans?”

“None,” Marie replied. “I’ve got a daughter.”

“Married then?”

“Yes...” she began, the lie that she had created after Richard left almost a reflex. Then she stopped. “That is, no. He left me when my daughter was born.”

“Bastard.” They both chuckled.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” Marie said.

“I won’t.” Josie’s expression grew somber. “Also, since we are sharing secrets, my mother was Jewish. Not that it is anyone’s business.”

“The Germans will make it their business if they find out,” Brya chimed in, sticking her head in the doorway and overhearing. “Hurry now, we’re late for radio training.”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Marie confessed when it was just the two of them once more. She had signed up largely for the money. But what good was that if it cost her life?

“None of us do,” Josie replied, though Marie found that hard to believe. Josie seemed so strong and purposeful. “Every one of us is scared and alone. You’ve said it aloud once. Now bury it and never mention it again.

“Anyway, your daughter is your reason for being here,” Josie added as they started for the doorway. “You’re fighting for her and the world she will live in.” Marie understood then. It was not just about the money. To create a fairer world for Tess to grow up in; now, that was something. “In your moments of doubt, imagine your daughter as a grown woman. Think then of what you will tell her about the part you played in the war. Or as my mother said, ‘Create a story of which you will be proud.’”

Josie was right, Marie realized. She had been made all her life, first by her father and then Richard, to feel as though she, as a girl, had no worth. Her mother, though loving, had done little through her own powerlessness to correct that impression. Now Marie had a chance to create a new story for her daughter. If she could do it. Suddenly Tess, the one thing that had held her back, seemed to propel her forward.


Chapter Six (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Eleanor

Scotland, 1944

Eleanor stood at the entrance to the girls’ dormitory, listening to them breathe.

She hadn’t been planning to come north to Arisaig House. The trip from London wasn’t an easy one: two train transfers before the long overnight that reached the Scottish Highlands that morning at dawn. She hoped the sun might break through and clear the clouds. But the mountains remained shrouded in darkness.

Upon arrival, she slipped into Arisaig House unannounced, but for showing her identification to the clerk at the desk. There was a time to be seen and a time to keep hidden from sight. The latter, she’d decided. She needed to see herself how the training was going with this lot, whether or not the girls would be ready.

It was a cool midmorning in March. The girls had finished radio class and were making their way to weapons and combat. Eleanor watched from behind a tree as a young military officer demonstrated a series of grappling moves designed to escape a choke hold. Hand-to-hand combat training had been one of the harder-fought struggles for Eleanor—the others at Norgeby House had not thought it necessary for the women, arguing that they would not possibly find themselves in a situation where it was needed. But Eleanor had been firm, bypassing the others and going straight to the Director to make her case: the women would be in exactly the same position as the men; they should be able to defend themselves.

She watched now as the instructor pointed out the vulnerable spots (throat, groin, solar plexus). The instructor gave an order, which Eleanor could not hear, and the girls faced each other with empty hands. Josie, the scrappy young Sikh girl they’d recruited from the north, reached up and grabbed Marie in a choke hold. Marie struggled, seeming to feel the limits of her own strength. She delivered a weak jab to the solar plexus. It was not just Marie who struggled; almost all of the girls were ill at ease with the physicality of the drill.

The doubts that had brought Eleanor north to check on the girls redoubled. It had been three months since they had dropped the first of the female recruits into Europe. There were more than two dozen deployed now, scattered throughout northern France and Holland. From first, things had not gone smoothly. One had been arrested on arrival. Another girl had her radio dropped into a stream and she had to wait weeks until a second could be sent to begin transmitting. Still others, despite the months of training, were simply unable to fit in and pass as Frenchwomen or maintain the fiction of their cover stories and had to be recalled.

Eleanor had fought for the girls’ unit, put forth the idea and defended it. She had insisted that they receive the very same training, just as rigorous and thorough as the men. Watching them struggle in training now, though, she wondered if perhaps the others had been right. What if they simply didn’t have what it took?

A shuffling behind Eleanor interrupted her thoughts. She turned to find Colonel McGinty, the senior military official at Arisaig House, standing behind her. “Miss Trigg,” he said. They had met once before when the colonel had come to London for a debriefing. “My aide told me you were here.” So much for quiet arrivals. Since taking charge of the women’s unit, Eleanor’s reputation and profile within SOE had grown in ways that made it difficult to operate discreetly.

“I’d prefer the girls not know, at least not yet. And I’d like to review all of their files when I’m done here.”

He nodded. “Of course. I’ll make arrangements.”

“How are they doing?”

The colonel pursed his lips. “Well enough, I suppose, for women.”

Not good enough, Eleanor fought the urge to scream. The women needed to be ready. The work they would be doing, delivering messages and making contact with locals who could provide safe houses for weapons or fleeing agents, was every bit as dangerous as the men’s. She was sending them into Occupied France and several of them into the Paris area, a viper’s nest controlled by Hans Kriegler and his notorious intelligence agency, the SD, whose primary focus was finding and stopping agents exactly like the girls. They would need every ounce of wit, strength and skill to evade capture and survive.

“Colonel,” she said finally. “The Germans will not treat the women any more gently than the men.” She spoke slowly, trying to contain her frustration. “They need to be ready.” They needed this group of girls on the ground as soon as possible. But sending them before they were ready would be a death sentence.

“Agreed, Miss Trigg.”

“Double their training, if necessary.”

“We’re using every spare minute of the day. But as with the men, there are some who simply aren’t suited.”

“Then send them home,” she said sharply.

“Then, ma’am, there would be none.” These last words were a dig, echoing the sentiments of the officers at Norgeby House that the women would never be up to the task. He bowed slightly and walked away.

Was that true? Eleanor wondered, as she followed the girls from the field where they’d practiced grappling to the nearby firing range. Surely they could all not be so unfit for the job.

A new instructor was working with them now, showing them how to reload a Sten gun, the narrow weapon, easily concealed, that some of them might use in the field. The women, as couriers and radio operators, would not be issued guns as a rule. But Eleanor had insisted they know how to use the kinds of weapons they might encounter in the field. Eleanor followed at a distance. Josie’s hands were sure and swift as she loaded ammunition into the gun, then showed Marie how to do it. Though younger, she seemed to have taken Marie under her wing. Marie’s fingers were clumsy with the weapon and she dropped the ammunition twice before managing to get it in place. Eleanor watched the girl, doubts rising.

Several minutes later, a bell rang eleven thirty. The girls moved in a cluster, leaving the weapons field and starting for a barn on the corner of the property. Keep the girls busy, that was the motto during training. No time to worry or think ahead, or to get into trouble.

Eleanor followed them from a distance so they would not notice. The converted barn, which still had bits of hay on the floor and smelled faintly of manure, was an outpost of Churchill’s Toyshop, the facility in London where gadgets designed for the agents were made. Here, the girls learned about the makeup compacts that hid compasses and lipstick containers that were actually cameras—things that each would be issued just prior to deployment.

“Don’t touch!” Professor Digglesby, who oversaw the toyshop, admonished as one of the girls went too near to a table where the explosives were live. Unlike the other instructors, he was not military, but a retired academic from Magdalen College, Oxford, with white hair and thick glasses. “Today we are going to learn about decoys,” he began.

Suddenly a loud shriek cut through the barn. “Aack!” a girl called Annette cried, running for the door. Eleanor stepped back so as not to be seen, then peered through the window to see what had caused the commotion. The girls had scattered, trying to get as far away as possible from one of the tables where a rat perched in the corner, seeming strangely unafraid.

Marie did not run, though. She crept forward carefully, so as not to startle the rat. She grabbed a broom from the corner and raised it above her head, as if to strike a blow. “Wait!” Professor Digglesby said, rushing over. He picked up the rat, but it didn’t move.

Marie reached out her hand. “It’s dead.”

“Not dead,” he corrected, holding it up for the others to see. The girls inched closer. “It’s a decoy.” He passed the fake rat around so the girls could inspect it.

“But it looks so real,” Brya exclaimed.

“That’s exactly what the Germans will think,” Professor Digglesby replied, taking back the decoy and turning it over to reveal a compartment on the underbelly where a small amount of explosives could be placed. “Until they get close.” He led them outside, then walked several meters away into the adjacent field and set down the rat. “Stay back,” he cautioned as he rejoined the group. He pressed a button on a detonator that he held in his hand and the rat exploded. A murmur of surprise rippled through the girls.

Professor Digglesby walked back into the workshop and returned with what appeared to be feces. “We plant detonators in the least likely of places,” he added. The girls squealed with disgust. “Also fake,” he muttered good-naturedly.

“Holy shit!” Josie said. A few of the others giggled. Professor Digglesby looked on disapprovingly, but Eleanor could not help but smile.

Then the instructor’s expression turned grave. “The decoys may seem funny,” he said. “But they are designed to save your life—and to take the enemy’s.”

As Professor Digglesby herded the girls back inside the barn to learn more about hidden explosives, Eleanor made her way to the manor and asked for the records room and a tray for tea. She spent the rest of the day sitting at a narrow desk beside a file cabinet on the third floor of Arisaig House, reviewing records on the girls.

There was a file on each, meticulous notes dating from her recruitment through each day of training. Eleanor read them all, committing the details to memory. “The girls,” they were called, as though they were a collective, though in fact they were so very different. Some had been at Arisaig House for just a few weeks; others were about to graduate on to finishing school at Beaulieu, a manor in Hampshire, which was the last step before deployment. Each had her own reasons for signing up. Brya was the daughter of Russians, driven by a hatred of the Germans for what they had done to her family outside Minsk. Maureen, a working-class girl from Manchester, had left the funeral of her husband and enlisted to take his place.

Josie, though the youngest, was the best of this lot, perhaps the best SOE had ever seen. Her skills came from the need to survive on the street. Her hands, which had surely stolen food, were sure and swift, and she ran and hid with the speed of someone who had fled the police more than once, to avoid arrest, or perhaps being sent to a children’s home. She was whip-smart, too, with a kind of instinct that was bred, not taught. There was a tenacity in how she fought that reminded Eleanor of the dark places in her own past.

Eleanor had been just fifteen at the time of the pogrom in their village outside Pinsk. She had hidden in an outhouse while the Russians savaged their village, raping wives and mothers, and killing children before their parents’ eyes. She kept the knife under her pillow after that, sharpened it in the darkness when no one was looking. She’d watched helplessly as her mother whored herself to a Russian officer who lingered behind in the village. She’d done so in order to feed Eleanor and her stunning younger sister, Tatiana, who had skin of alabaster and eyes that were robin’s-egg blue. But it wasn’t enough for the bastard. So when Eleanor woke up one night to find him standing over her little sister’s bed, she didn’t hesitate. She had been preparing for that moment and she knew what she had to do.

Later in the village, they would tell the story of the Russian captain who had disappeared. They couldn’t imagine that he lay buried just steps from the house, killed by the young girl who had fled with her mother and sister into the night.

But her effort to save Tatiana had come too late; she died shortly after they arrived in England, weakened by the Russian’s brutal assault. If Eleanor had only known what was happening and been able to stop it sooner, her little sister might still be here today.

Eleanor and her mother never spoke of Tatiana after that. It was just as well; Eleanor suspected that if her mother did let herself think about the daughter she had lost, she would have blamed Eleanor, who hadn’t been half as pretty or as good, for fighting back against the Russian. Everyone handled grief in their own way, Eleanor reflected now. For Eleanor’s mother it was escaping the life she had known in the old country, changing their surname to sound more English and eschewing the Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green for the tonier Hampstead address. For Eleanor, who had felt quite literally on the run since the old country, SOE had given her a place. But it was in the women’s unit that she had found her life’s work.

Eleanor analyzed each file thoroughly now. The records charted progress in each girl, to be sure, a growing sureness in marksmanship, wireless transmissions and the other skills they would need in the field. But would it be enough? In each case, it fell to Eleanor to make sure the girl had what she needed. Headquarters might deploy them too soon in the name of expediency and getting support into the field. But Eleanor would not send a single girl a moment before she was ready. And if that meant blowing the whole operation, then so be it.

Sometime later, an aide appeared at the door. “Ma’am, it’s dinnertime if you’d like to come down.”

“Please have a tray sent up.”

The next file was Marie’s. Her basic skills were competent enough, she noted from the instructor’s comments. But they described her as having a lack of focus and resolve. That was something that could not be taught or punished to overcome. She recalled watching Marie struggle earlier with weapons and grappling. Had recruiting her been a mistake? The girl had looked weak, a society girl not able to last the week in these strange circumstances. But she was a single mother raising her child in London, or at least she had been before the war. That took grit. She would test the girl tomorrow, Eleanor decided, and make the call whether to keep her or send her packing once and for all.

It was nearly eleven o’clock, well after the lights-out bell had sounded in the barracks below, when her vision blurred from too much reading and she was forced to stop. She set down the files and crept from the records room to the barracks below.

She listened to the girls’ breathing in the darkness, almost in unison. She could just make out Marie and Josie in adjacent beds, their heads tilted toward one another conspiratorially in sleep, as though they were still talking. Each girl had come from a different place, united here into kind of a team. But they would be scattered again just as quickly. They could not find their strength from one another because out in the field they would have to rely on themselves. She wondered how they would take the news tomorrow, how one would fare without the other.

The aide who had brought her food earlier came up behind her. “Ma’am, a phone call from London.”

Eleanor walked to the office he indicated and lifted the receiver to her ear. “Trigg here.”

The Director’s voice crackled across the line. “How are the girls?” he asked without preamble. “Are they ready?” It was not like him to be at headquarters so late and there was an unmistakable urgency to his voice.

Eleanor struggled with how to answer the question. This was her program and if anything was out of sorts, she would be held to blame. She could hear the men back at headquarters, saying that they had known it all along. But more important than her reputation or her pride was the girls. Their actual preparedness was all that would save them and the aims they were trying to achieve.

She pushed aside her doubts. “They will be.”

“Good. They must. The bridge mission is a go.” Eleanor’s stomach did a queer flip. SOE had taken on dozens of risky missions, but blowing up the bridge outside Paris would be by far the most dangerous—and most critical. And one of these girls would be at the center of it. “It’s good that you are there to deliver the news in person. You’ll let her know tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Of course, she would not be telling the girl everything, just that she was going. The rest would come later, when she needed to know.

Then remembering the sleeping girls, she was flooded with doubts anew. “I don’t know if she’s ready,” she confessed.

“She has to be.” They couldn’t wait any longer.

There was a click on the other end of the line and then Eleanor set the receiver back into the cradle. She tiptoed back to the girls’ dorm.

Josie was curled into a ball like a child, her thumb close to her mouth in a habit she had surely broken years ago. A wave of protectiveness broke and crested over Eleanor as she remembered the sister she had lost so many years ago. She could protect these girls in a way she hadn’t been able to her own sister. She needed them to do a job that was dangerous, potentially lethal, though, and then she needed them to come home safely. These were the only two things that mattered. Would she be able to manage both?

A faint smile played about Josie’s lips and Eleanor wondered what she was dreaming. Just a young girl with a young girl’s dreams. Eleanor would let her remain that—at least for a few more hours.

She tiptoed from the room, closing the door softly behind her.


Chapter Seven (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Marie

Scotland, 1944

Marie still hated running.

She had been at Arisaig House for almost six weeks and every morning it was the same: five miles up and back, partway around the loch and up a dreaded incline only known among the girls as “The Point.” Her heels were cracked and bleeding and the blisters on her feet from all of the damp hikes seemed on the constant verge of infection. Just thinking about doing it again made her bones ache.

But, she reflected as she made her way to breakfast after splashing some water on her face to freshen up, she no longer ran at the rear of the pack. Over the weeks she had been here, she had built up speed and stamina she hadn’t imagined herself to possess. She liked to keep up with Josie so that they could talk as they ran. Nothing detailed really, just a few words here or there. Josie, who had spent much of her early childhood summers in the mountains of Cumbria, would point out bits of the Scottish landscape or tell stories she’d heard from the war.

Marie had gotten to know Josie well during her weeks at training. Not just through the classes and meals; they spent long sleepless nights talking, Josie sharing stories of her childhood on the streets of Leeds with her brother, fending off scoundrels who wanted to take advantage of defenseless children. Marie shared her own past, too, of how Richard had left her penniless. She felt silly, though, complaining after all Josie had been through at such a young age. Her own childhood, while cruel, had been one of unmistakable privilege, not at all like Josie’s street urchin–like experience. The two would not have known each other in different circumstances. Yet here they had become fast friends.

In the dining hall, they took their usual spots at the women’s table, Josie at the head, Marie and Brya on either side. Marie unfolded her napkin carefully and placed it in her lap and started eating right away, mindful that Madame Poirot was, as ever, watching. Meals were constantly part of the lesson. The French wipe up their gravy with bread, she’d learned soon after arrival. And never ask for butter—they no longer have any. Even at mealtime, it seemed the girls were being scrutinized. The slightest mistake could trip you up.

Marie recalled a night shortly after she had arrived at Arisaig House when they had been served a really good wine at dinner. “Don’t drink it,” Josie had whispered. Marie’s hand froze above her glass. “It’s a trick.” For a second she thought Josie meant the drink had been poisoned. Marie lifted the wineglass and held it beneath her nose, sniffing for the hint of sulfur as she had been trained but finding none. She looked around and noticed them plying girls with a second glass, then a third. The girls’ cheeks were becoming flushed and they were chatting as if they didn’t have a care. Marie understood then that the test was to see if they would become reckless after drinking too much.

“You’re in an awful hurry,” Josie observed as they ate breakfast. “Hot date?”

“Very funny. I have to retake codes.”

Josie nodded, understanding. Marie had already failed the test for the previous unit in radio operator class once. There would not be a third chance. If she couldn’t do it today and prove that she could transmit, she would be sent packing.

What would be so bad about that? Marie mused as she ate. She had not asked for this strange, difficult life, and a not-so-small part of her wanted to fail and go home so she could see Tess.

She’d trained intensively from morning until night since coming to Arisaig House. Most of her time was spent in front of a radio set, studying to be a wireless telegraph operator (W/Ts, they were called). But she’d learned other things, too, things she could not have possibly imagined: how to set up dead and live letter drops and the difference between the two (the former being a pre-agreed location where one agent could leave a message for another; the latter an in-person, clandestine meeting), how to identify a suitable rendezvous spot, one where a woman could plausibly be found for other reasons.

But if running had gotten easier, the rest of the training had not. Despite all she learned, it was never enough. She couldn’t set an explosives charge without her fingers shaking, was hopeless at grappling and shooting. Perhaps most worryingly, she could not lie and maintain a cover story. If she could not do that under mock interrogation, when the means of coercion were limited, how could she ever hope to do it in the field? Her one strength was French, which had been better than everyone else’s before she arrived. On all other fronts, she was failing.

Marie was suddenly homesick. Signing on had been a mistake. She could take off the uniform and turn it in, promise to say nothing and start home to Tess. Such doubts were nothing new; they nagged at her all through the long hours of lecture and at night as she studied and slept. She did not share them again, of course. The other girls didn’t have doubts, or if they did they kept them to themselves. They were resolute, focused and purposeful, and she needed to be, too, if she hoped to remain. She could not afford to show fear.

“Headquarters is here,” Josie announced abruptly. “Something must be going on.”

Marie followed Josie’s gaze upward to a balcony overlooking the dining hall where a tall woman stood, looking down on them. Eleanor. Marie had not seen the woman who had recruited her since that night more than six weeks earlier. She’d thought of Eleanor often, though, during these long, lonely weeks of training. What had made Eleanor think she could do this blasted job, or that she would want to?

Marie stood and waved in Eleanor’s direction, as though seeing an old friend. But Eleanor eyed her coolly, giving no sign of recognition. Did Eleanor remember their meeting in the toilet, or was Marie one of so many faceless girls she had recruited? At first, Marie’s cheeks stung as if slapped. But then Marie understood: she was not to acknowledge her past life or anyone in it. Another test failed. She sat back down.

“You’ve met her?” she asked Josie.

Josie nodded. “When she recruited me. She was up in Leeds, for a conference, she said.”

“She found me, too,” Brya added. “In a typing pool in Essex.” Each, it seemed, had been selected by Eleanor personally.

“Eleanor designed the training for us,” Josie said in a low voice. “And she decides where we will go and what our assignment might be.”

So much power, Marie thought. Remembering how cold and disdainful Eleanor seemed during their initial meeting in London, Marie wondered if this perhaps did not bode well for her.

“I like her,” Marie said. Despite Eleanor’s undeniable coldness, she possessed a strength that Marie admired greatly.

“I don’t,” Brya replied. “She’s so cold and she thinks she’s so much better than us. Why doesn’t she put on a uniform and fly to France herself if she can do better?”

“She tried,” Josie said quietly. “She’s asked to go a dozen times, or so I’ve heard.” Josie had an endless network of connections and sources. She made friends with everyone from the kitchen staff to the instructors and those relationships provided valuable bits of information. “But the answer is always the same. She has to remain at headquarters because her real value is here getting the lot of us ready.”

Watching Eleanor on the balcony, looking out of place and almost ill at ease, Marie wondered if it might be lonely to stand in her place, and whether she sometimes wished she was one of them.

The girls finished their breakfast swiftly. Fifteen minutes later, they slipped into the lecture hall. A dozen desks were lined three by four, a radio set atop each. The instructor had posted the assignment, a complex message to be decoded and sent. Eleanor was in the corner of the room, Marie noticed, watching them intently.

Marie found her seat at the wireless and put on the headset. It was an odd contraption, sort of like a radio on which one might listen to music or the BBC, only laid flat inside a suitcase and with more knobs and dials. There was a small unit at the top of the set for transmitting, another below it for receiving. The socket for the power adapter was to the right side, and there was a spares kit, a pocket with extra parts to the left. The spares pocket also contained four crystals, each of which could be inserted in a slot on the radio to enable transmission on a different frequency.

While the others started working on the message on the board, Marie looked down at the paper the instructor had left for her to take the retest. It was the text of a Shakespeare poem:

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed that they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

The message first had to be coded through a cipher. The ciphers were contained in a small satchel, each printed on an individual square of silk, one inch long by one inch wide. Each silk contained what was called a “worked-out key,” a printed onetime cipher that would change each letter to another (for example, in this key, a became m and o became w) until the whole message made no sense at all to the naked eye. Each cipher was to be used to code the message, then discarded. Marie changed the letters in the message into the code given on the cipher and wrote down the coded message. She lit a match and burned the silk cipher as she’d been taught.

Then she began to tap out the message using the telegraph key. Marie had spent weeks learning to tap out the letters in Morse code and had spent so much time practicing she had even begun to dream in it. But she still struggled to tap swiftly and smoothly and not make mistakes, as she would need to in the field.

Operating the wireless, though, was more than a matter of simple coding and Morse. During her first week of training, the W/T instructor, a young lieutenant who had been seconded to SOE from Bletchley Park, had pulled her aside. “We have to record your fist print and give you your security checks.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You see, radios are interchangeable—if someone has the coils and the crystals to set the frequency, the transmission will work. Anyone who gets his hands on those can use the radio to transmit. The only thing that lets headquarters know it is really you is your security checks and your fist print.”

The instructor continued, “First, your fist print. Type a message to me about the weather.”

“Uncoded?”

“Yes, just type.” Though it seemed an odd request to Marie, she did it without question, writing a line about how the weather changed quickly here, storms blowing through one moment and giving way to sunshine the next. She looked up. “Keep going. It can be about anything really, except your personal background. The message needs to be several lines long for us to understand your fist print.”

Puzzled, Marie complied. “There,” she said when she had filled the page with nonsense, a story about an unexpected snowstorm the previous spring that had left snow on blooming daffodils.

The transmission printed on the teletype at the front of the room. The instructor retrieved it and held it up. “You see, this is your fist print, heavy on the first part of each word with a long pause between sentences.”

“You can tell that from a single transmission?”

“Yes, although we have your other transmissions from training on file to compare.” Though it made sense, Marie hadn’t considered until that moment that they might have a file on her. “But really, it doesn’t change from session to session. You see, your fist print is like your handwriting or signature, a style that identifies your transmission as uniquely you. How hard you strike the transmission key, the time and spacing between letters. Every radio agent has her own fist print. That’s one of the ways we know it is you.”

“Can I vary my fist print as kind of a signal if something is wrong?”

“No, it is very hard to communicate unlike oneself. Think about it—you don’t choose your handwriting consciously. It just flows. If you wanted to write really differently, you might need to switch to your nondominant hand. Same with your fist print—it’s subconscious and you can’t really change it. Instead, if something is wrong, you must let us know in other ways. That’s what the security checks are for.”

The instructor had gone on to explain that each agent had a security check, a built-in quirk in her typing that the reader would pick up to know that it was her. For Marie, it was always making a “mistake” and typing p as the thirty-fifth letter in the message. There was a second security check, too, substituting k where a c belonged every other time a k appeared in the message. “The first security check is known as the ‘bluff check,’” the instructor explained. “The Germans know we have checks, you see, and they will try to get yours out of you. You can give away the bluff check if questioned.” Imagining it, Marie shuddered inwardly. “But it’s the second check, the true check, that really verifies the message. You must not give it up under any circumstances.”

Marie completed the retest now, making sure to include both her bluff and true checks. She looked behind her. Eleanor was still there and she seemed to be watching her specifically. Pushing down her uneasiness, Marie started on the assignment on the board, picking up speed as she worked through the longer message with a new silk cipher. A few minutes later, Marie finished typing the message. She looked up, feeling pleased.

But Eleanor ripped the transmission off the teletype and strode toward her with a scowl. “No, no!” she said, sounding frustrated. Marie was puzzled. She had typed the message correctly. “It isn’t enough to simply bang at the wireless like a piano. You must communicate through the radio and ‘speak’ naturally so that your fist print comes through.”

Marie wanted to protest that she had done that, or at least ask what Eleanor meant. But before she had the chance, Eleanor reached over and yanked the telegraph key from the wireless. “What on earth!” Marie cried. Eleanor did not answer but picked up a screwdriver and continued dismantling the set, tearing it apart piece by piece with such force that screws and bolts clattered across the floor, disappearing under the tables. The other girls watched in stunned silence. Even the instructor looked taken aback.

“Oh!” Marie cried, scrambling for the pieces. She realized in that moment she felt a kind of connection to the physical machine, the same one she had worked with since her arrival.

“It isn’t enough just to be able to operate the wireless,” Eleanor said disdainfully. “You have to be able to fix it, build it from the ground up. You have ten minutes to put it together again.” Eleanor walked away. Marie’s anger grew. This was more than payback for her earlier outburst; Eleanor wanted her to fail.

Marie stared at the dismantled pieces of the wireless set. She tried to recall the manual she’d studied at the beginning of W/T training, trying to envision the inside of the wireless set in her mind. But it was impossible.

Josie came to her side then. “Start here,” she said, righting a piece of the machine’s base that had fallen on its side and holding it so that Marie could reattach the baseplate. As she worked, the other girls stood and helped to gather the pieces that had scattered, going on hands and knees for the missing bolts. “Here,” Josie said, handing her a knob that screwed into the transmitter. She managed to tighten a screw Marie was struggling with, her tiny fingers quick and deft. Josie pointed to a place where she had not inserted a bolt just right.

At last the machine was reassembled. But would it transmit? Marie tapped the telegraph key, waited. There was a quiet click, a registering of the code she had entered. The radio worked once more.

Marie looked up from her work, wanting to see Eleanor’s reaction. But Eleanor had already left.

“Why does she hate you so much?” Josie whispered as the others returned to their seats.

Marie didn’t answer. Her spine stiffened. Not bothering to ask permission, Marie stormed from the hall, looking into doorways until she found Eleanor in an empty office, reviewing a file. “Why are you so hard on me? Do you hate me?” Marie demanded, repeating Josie’s question. “Did you come here just to finish me off?”

Eleanor looked up. “This isn’t personal. You either have what it takes or you don’t.”

“And you think I don’t.”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. I’ve read your file.” Until that moment, Marie had not considered what it might say about her. “You are defeating yourself.”

“My French is as good as any of the others, even the men.”

“It is simply not enough to be as good as the men. They don’t believe we can do this and so we have to be better.”

Marie persisted, “My typing is getting quicker by the day, and my codes...”

“This isn’t about the technical skills,” Eleanor interjected. “It’s about the spirit. Your radio, for example. It isn’t just a machine, but it is an extension of yourself.”

Eleanor reached down for a bag by her feet that Marie had not noticed before and held it out. Inside were Marie’s possessions that she had arrived with that first night, her street clothes and even the necklace from Tess. Her belongings, the ones that she had stowed in the locker at the foot of her bed, had been taken out and packed. “It’s all there,” Eleanor said. “You can change your clothes. There will be a car out front in one hour, ready to take you back to London.”

“You’re kicking me out?” Marie asked, disbelieving. She felt more disappointed than she might have imagined.

“No, I’m giving you the choice to leave.” She could have left anytime, Marie realized; it wasn’t as if she’d enlisted. But Eleanor was holding the door open, so to speak. Inviting her to go.

Marie wondered whether it was some sort of test. But Eleanor’s face was earnest. She was really giving Marie the chance. Should she take it? She could be back in London tomorrow, be with Tess by the weekend.

But curiosity nagged at her. “May I ask a question?”

Eleanor nodded. “One,” she said begrudgingly.

“If I stay, what would I actually be doing over there?” For all of the training, the actual mission in the field was still very difficult to see.

“The short answer is that you are to operate a radio, to send messages to London for the network about operations on the ground, and to receive messages about airdrops of personnel and supplies.” Marie nodded; she knew that much from training. “You see, we are trying to make things as difficult as possible for the Germans, slow their munitions production and disrupt the rail lines. Anything we can do to make it easier for our troops when the invasion comes. Your transmissions are critically important in keeping communications open between London and the networks in Europe so they can do that work. But you might be called on in dozens of other ways as well. That is why we must prepare you for anything.”

Marie started to reach for the bag, but something stopped her. “I put the radio back together. The other girls helped a good deal, too,” she added quickly.

“That’s quite good.” Eleanor’s face seemed to soften a bit. “Well done, too, with the rat during explosives training.” Marie hadn’t realized Eleanor had been watching. “The others were startled. You weren’t.”

Marie shrugged. “We’ve had plenty in our house in London.”

Eleanor looked at her evenly. “I would have thought your husband dealt with them.”

“He did, that is he does...” Marie faltered. “My husband’s gone. He left when our daughter was born.”

Eleanor didn’t look surprised and Marie wondered if she had learned the truth during the recruitment process and already knew. She didn’t think Josie would have told. “I would say I’m sorry, but if that’s the kind of scoundrel he is, it sounds like you are better off without him.”

The thought had crossed Marie’s mind more than once. There were lonely times, nights racked with self-doubt as to what she had done to make him leave, how she would ever survive. But in the quiet moments of the night as she nursed Tess at her breast, there came a quiet confidence, a certainty in knowing she could only rely on herself. “I suppose I am. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner.”

“Apparently,” Eleanor said drily, “you are capable of maintaining a cover story after all. We all have our secrets,” she added, “but you should never lie to me. Knowing everything is the only way for me to keep you safe. I suppose, it doesn’t matter, though. You’re leaving, remember?” She held out the bag containing Marie’s clothes. “Go change and turn in your supplies before the car arrives.” She turned back to the file she had been reviewing and Marie knew that the conversation was over.

When Marie returned to the barracks, W/T class had ended and the others were on break. Josie was waiting for her, folding clothes on her neatly made bed. “How are you?” she asked with just a hint of sympathy in her voice.

Marie shrugged, not quite sure how to answer. “Eleanor said I can leave if I want.”

“What are you going to do?”

Marie dropped to the edge of the bed, her shoulders slumped. “Go, I suppose. I never had any business being here in the first place.”

“You never had a good reason to be here,” Josie corrected unsentimentally, still folding clothes. Her words, echoes of what Eleanor had said, stung Marie. “There has to be a why. I mean, take me, for instance. I’ve never really had a place to call home. Being here is just fine for me. It’s what they want, you know,” Josie added. “For us to quit. Not Eleanor, of course, but the blokes. They want us to prove that they were right—the women don’t have what it takes after all.”

“Maybe they are right,” Marie answered. Josie did not speak, but pulled a small valise out from under her bed. “What are you doing?” she asked, suddenly alarmed. Surely Josie, the very best of them, had not been asked to leave SOE school. But Josie was placing her neatly folded clothes in the suitcase.

“They need me to go sooner,” Josie said. “No finishing school. I’m headed straight to the field.”

Marie was stunned. “No,” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s true. I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning. It isn’t a bad thing. This is what we came for after all.”

Marie nodded. Others had left to deploy to the field. But Josie had been their bedrock. How would they go on without her?

“It isn’t as if I’m dying, you know,” Josie added with a wry smile.

“It’s just so soon.” Too soon. Though Josie couldn’t say anything about her mission, Marie saw the grave urgency that had brought Eleanor all the way from London to claim her.

Remembering, Marie reached into her footlocker. “Here,” she said to Josie. She pulled out the scone she’d bribed one of the cooks to make. “I had it made for your birthday.” Josie was turning eighteen in just two days’ time. Only now she wouldn’t be here for it. “It’s cinnamon, just like you said your brother used to get you for your birthday.”

Josie didn’t speak for several seconds. Her eyes grew moist and a single tear trickled down her cheek. Marie wondered if the gesture had been a mistake. “I didn’t think after he was gone that anyone would remember my birthday again.” Josie smiled slightly then. “Thank you.” She broke the scone into two pieces and handed one back to Marie.

“So you see, you can’t leave,” Josie said, brushing the crumbs from her mouth. “You’ll need to stay to take care of these youngsters.” She gestured toward the empty beds. Marie did not answer, but there was a note of truth in Josie’s joke. Three of the girls were newer than herself now, having replaced some of the agents who had already deployed.

“There will be a new girl to take my place.” The thought was almost unbearable. But Josie was right; whoever came next would need her help to navigate this difficult place as Josie and the others had done when Marie herself first arrived.

“The girls need you now more than ever. It’s not just about how long you’ve been here,” Josie added. “You’ve grown so much since that day you stumbled in here, unable to make it to The Point on a run or to hide your English contraband.” They both smiled at the memory. “You can do this,” Josie said firmly. “You are stronger than you know. Now, on to detonation. I can’t wait to see what piece of crap Professor Digglesby blows up today.” Josie started from the barracks. She did not wait or ask if Marie was coming. In that moment, it was as if she was already gone.

Marie sat motionless on her bed, staring out at the dark waters of the loch. Behind the windswept hills, the sky was a sea of gray. She imagined if she did not move, nothing would change. Josie would not deploy and she would not have to face her own terrible choice of whether to leave. They had created kind of a separate world here where, despite the training, it was almost possible to forget about the danger and sorrow outside. Only now that world was ending.

She looked down at her belongings in the bag, relics from another era. She could have her life back, as she’d been dreaming for weeks. But she was part of something bigger now, she realized as she looked across the barracks. The days of training and struggling with the other girls had woven them together in a kind of fabric from which she could not tear herself away.

She pulled her hand back. “Not yet,” she whispered. She closed the bag, then went and joined the others.


Chapter Eight (#ud32e4584-82b1-54e6-9cbe-6d0b6a5f37b3)

Grace

New York, 1946

The suitcase was gone.

Grace stood motionless in the concourse of Grand Central, letting the end-of-day crowds swirl around her as she stared at the space beneath the bench where the suitcase had been that morning. For a moment, she thought she might have imagined it. But the photographs she had removed from the suitcase were there, thick in her hand. No, someone had taken or moved it in the hours while she had been at work.

That the suitcase was no longer under the bench should not have been a surprise. It belonged to someone and hours had passed. It was only natural that someone had come to claim it. But now that it was gone, the mystery of the suitcase and the photographs became all the more intriguing. Grace looked down at the photos in her hand, which she felt bad for having taken in the first place.

“Excuse me,” Grace called to a porter as he passed.

He stopped, tipped his red cap in her direction. “Ma’am?”

“I’m looking for a suitcase.”

“If it’s in the stored luggage, I can get it for you.” He held out his hand. “Can I have your ticket?”

“No, you don’t understand. It isn’t my bag. There was one left under a bench earlier this morning. Over there.” She pointed. “I’m trying to find out where it went. Brown, with writing on the side.”

The porter looked perplexed. “But if it isn’t your bag, why are you looking for it?”

Good question, Grace thought. She considered saying something about the photographs, but decided against it. “I’m trying to find its owner,” she said finally.

“I can’t help you without a ticket. You might want to ask at the lost and found,” he replied.

The lost and found was on the lower level of the station in a quiet, musty corner that seemed worlds away from the bustle above. An older man with white sideburns wearing a brimmed visor and a vest sat behind the counter, reading a newspaper. “I’m looking for a suitcase, brown with chalk writing on it.”




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