“How long is it since you’ve seen him?”
“Almost two years. He came to Cornwall on leave, just before heading out to the Mediterranean.” She ran her finger around the edge of the photograph. “Sometimes I dream that he’s been captured. We’ve had men staying here who’ve escaped from prison camps. I’ve heard such awful things about what happens in those places.”
I thought about the men Jack had told me about—shot dead because they didn’t have enough French to throw the Germans off the scent. Somehow the photo in Merle’s hand made it all seem much more real. That face, smiling into the camera with no notion of the horrors that lay ahead, had a powerful eloquence. My doubts fell away at that moment. I knew what I had to do.
“You won’t say anything about Fred, will you?” Merle went on. “People can be so judgmental. I have to think of the children—I wouldn’t want them hearing hateful things in the school playground.”
“Of course not. And I’m sorry . . . I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about you and Jack.”
She smiled. “It’s human nature, isn’t it? And he’s the kind of man that sets hearts fluttering. I’ve heard the way the Land Girls go on about him.”
“They told me he had a secret wife.” I made myself sound amused, contemptuous, as if it mattered not one iota whether such a thing was true or not.
“Oh dear—and you thought that was me!” Merle laughed as she tucked the snapshot of her lover back inside her bag. “Well, I don’t know where that rumor came from. He’s never mentioned a wife to me. But he keeps things very close. You’ve probably realized that by now.”
My induction to Churchill’s secret army began the following afternoon. Merle took me through the kitchen to the main part of the house, through a locked door that bore the same “No Entry” sign I’d seen at the front entrance.
“What does that symbol mean—the anchor with the initials beside it?” I asked.
“It’s the insignia of the River Forces,” Merle replied. “It’s the branch of the military that deals with operations launched from inland waterways, like the Helford estuary. The sign’s meant to fool anyone nosing around into thinking the house is being used for conventional military activities.” She led me into a lofty room with carved wood paneling on the walls. Jack’s ancestors stared down at me, painted in oils. The largest picture was of a man in Elizabethan costume, whose rather sinister-looking face was encircled by an extravagant lace ruff. It hung beneath an ancient-looking minstrel gallery.
“This is the great hall,” Merle said. “It was used for banquets in the old days. But it’s been turned into an extra bedroom.” She pointed to a pile of mattresses stacked in a corner of the room. “We’re quiet now, but we’re expecting a full house tomorrow. There could be as many as twenty. Most of them will be parachuted into France, but some will be going with you. It’s a new moon next week. That’s when we do the airdrops and the pickups—it’s the only safe time. You’ll be leaving on Sunday morning, before it gets light.”
I hadn’t realized it would be so soon. The thought of boarding a boat and heading out across the sea that had almost taken my life made my stomach flip over.
“The agents you take will be carrying equipment that’s too fragile to parachute in. Once you’ve dropped them in Brittany, you’ll be bringing other people back. We don’t know how many at this stage. Some might be injured. There’ll be first aid equipment on the boat if you need it.”
She opened the door to a room off the great hall. The smell of this room was different to the rest of the house. Musty and slightly stale, as if no one had used it for many years. “This is the library.” Bookshelves covered two walls, and on the others hung oil paintings of hunting scenes. Long windows looked out over what once would have been lawns. Now the vista was the rows of onions, beans, and potatoes I’d been spending my afternoons hoeing.
I followed Merle across the room to a large desk with a briefcase on it. She flipped open the lid of the briefcase and pulled out a headset. “This is how we communicate with the Resistance groups,” she said.
Moving closer, I saw that the headset was connected to an apparatus inside the briefcase.
“It’s a Morse code transmitter,” Merle explained. “Most of what we plan is done via sets like this. The trouble is, the Germans attack any group they get wind of. Equipment is either destroyed or confiscated. So, for backup, we use this as well.” She went over to the window, where a conventional wireless radio, identical to the one we’d had at home in Dublin, sat on an ornate bureau inlaid with ivory. She turned one of the knobs and music came out of the speaker. “It’s tuned to the BBC’s French service,” she said. “Twice a day the announcer in London drops coded messages for the Resistance into the broadcasts. It allows us to let people in Brittany know that a boat is on the way.”