The thought of going to what the Land Girls clearly regarded as the social event of the year filled me with a mixture of excitement and terror. It had been so long since I’d been dancing. I wasn’t sure if I’d remember how to do it. And the dances were bound to have changed since my brief foray into the ballrooms of Dublin. I was seriously worried about making a fool of myself.
I wondered if Jack knew what he was letting himself in for, asking someone like me as his guest. But I was coming to realize that he never did anything without first weighing the consequences. For him, there always seemed to be an ulterior motive. It wasn’t as if he pretended otherwise. He’d warned me more than once not to mistake his apparent generosity for kindness. And he’d made it clear that I’d only been invited to the dance to make things less socially awkward for him.
But those words he’d used—about it being just about bearable with me on his arm—suggested that he did at least enjoy my company. And on the boat, coming back from France, he’d said that he was glad I was no longer a nun. What was I supposed to make of comments like that? Did he feel more for me than he wanted to admit?
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. A line from the book of Proverbs elbowed its way through the muddle of thoughts in my head. Chapter 3, verse 5 had been drummed into me as a novice, along with the next verse: In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. That was the trouble. I’d stopped submitting to God in all my ways when I’d made the decision not to go back to the convent. Was this bewildering longing for Jack beckoning me down the right path or the wrong one?
I recalled the moment in the boathouse when I’d suddenly realized that I could cast off my old identity if I chose to. I hadn’t given up the religious life to get something for myself. I’d done it to break free from the burden my vocation had become, in the hope of leading a more honest life.
Sister Clare’s face appeared in my head—her eyes clouded with suspicion. I could imagine her questions, if I’d had to justify it to her: Would I have made the same decision if someone other than Jack had rescued me? Had I, even then, been subconsciously drawn to him? And if the answer was yes, how could I possibly claim that leaving the order was what God wanted?
Lean not on your own understanding. I’d never doubted the wisdom of those words. But I wasn’t sure that they could help me now.
Chapter 16
I spent the next two evenings up at the house, shadowing Merle as she sent and received messages. She explained that Penheligan was the radio base for communicating with two of the many Resistance cells now operating in France. One was in northern Brittany and the other in the south area of the region—code-named Team Felix and Team Frederick. The radio operators within both teams each had their own unique “key”—a prefix to any message that came in that immediately identified the sender and made it clear that what followed was genuine and not something the Germans had put out.
On the first evening she went through these identifying codes with me. “If ever you get a message with these letters at the start, you must come and find me.” She pointed to a place at the top of the second page of the cipher book. “It means that the sender has been captured, and anything that follows could be false information.”
After that she gave me old messages, in Morse code, to transcribe for practice. I had to write out the letters, decode them using one of the ciphers, then translate the message from French to English. On the second evening, while I was scribbling away, I heard a noise overhead—what sounded like the scrape of a chair on a wooden floor. Merle saw me glance up.
“They’re having a meeting in the maids’ sitting room,” she said. “I hope they won’t make too much noise—it’s right underneath the boys’ bedroom.”
I thought of how odd it sounded, this juxtaposition of the old way of things with what went on at Penheligan nowadays. The activity overhead was a reminder of the secret life of the house, of people I rarely encountered, who came and went, slept in the beds for a few nights, and were spirited away before anyone working outside caught a glimpse of them. Some, I knew, were agents in training, destined to be parachuted into France, or to go in by boat with Jack and me.
I wondered if Jack was the only instructor, or whether there were others. Surely, he couldn’t do all that single-handed, as well as running the farm? I stared at the jumble of letters in front of me. There was so much about him that I didn’t know.