“The young lady will sit with me,” the colonel said firmly, and I could not miss the disappointment in the eyes of other men. My mind had been clouded by the frustration of the situation I’d stumbled into, but a realization punched through the fog. The colonel wasn’t suspicious of me at all. He was bored already ahead of the long journey and probably lonely, eager for the company of a pretty girl, and maybe the desperation in the eyes of these soldiers meant they were lonely too.
Sometimes I wondered if there was something wrong with me because I very rarely felt fear, not the way other people seemed to. Instead, I tended to default to anger, and a wave of it surged within me as I looked around that train carriage. I wanted to rail at every one of those men. Look what you’ve been a part of! Look what you’ve done to France! To Europe!
But the SOE had invited me to train as an agent months earlier not because of my skill set or my intelligence or even my courage, but simply because I was a pretty young thing who spoke French and knew France and who would likely never attract much suspicion, even if I did attract attention like this. Apparently I was going to test that theory right off the bat.
Releasing my rage this early in the mission was not an option. I drew some deep breaths to try to calm my racing thoughts.
There was some shuffling around the colonel’s seat as the other men made room on the luggage racks above their heads for my bags. One reached to take my leather shoulder bag, and I pretended not to notice as I quickly sat down and tucked it between my shoulder and the window. As the train left the platform, the men in the seats closest to me turned to face me. In painfully stilted French, a young man of only eighteen or nineteen years old asked me shyly, “What is your name?”
My every sense was on high alert as I tried to articulate each sound carefully to hide an accent I hadn’t been aware of even an hour earlier.
“Felice Leroy,” I said politely, giving him my cover name. This was the name on the set of identity papers I was carrying, but I had spare papers buried in the bottom of my bag, and I could adopt a new cover name if my circumstances changed—even if I simply became anxious that I might have been exposed. My operational name, Fleur, was known only to those within the SOE or the resistance and would not change unless my cover was completely blown at some point.
“This is…you to…be visit to Rouen today?” another asked me in broken French, which meant it was time to trot out my cover story for the first time.
“I spent a lovely Easter with my aunt in Paris, and now I will go spend a few days in Rouen before I go home to Le Havre.”
“Are you seeing boyfriend in Rouen, perhaps?”
A fictional boyfriend might end their apparent fascination with me, but would that be a good thing? This polite chitchat was harmless enough. It was probably better to bat my eyelashes and play along.
“No boyfriend,” I said lightly. “I’m stopping in Rouen to see if I can find an uncle who disappeared on a business trip some weeks ago. The British have bombed the city so much that my aunt is convinced he’s been injured or…” I tried to feign some combination of concern and dismay. “…well. Or worse.”
There was sudden movement beside me. The colonel had reached into his jacket and now passed a small white business card toward me.
“What a concerning situation that is for your family, mademoiselle,” he said gravely. “I’m staying at this hotel in Rouen for a week. If you need help, please contact me.”
I murmured my thanks and forced a shy smile as I took the card and slipped it into my shoulder bag, right beside the hidden compartment stuffed with forged currency and identity papers.
I’d expected my mission in France to be wild—exciting, dangerous, meaningful—but this? This was utterly surreal. Over the next few hours, I chatted with the young soldiers as they talked about the brief reprieve from the war they’d enjoyed on leave in Paris. I was careful not to speak too much myself, but did gradually relax as I realized that my slight accent was not likely obvious to these men—the young soldiers’ French was so woeful the conversation was half chit-chat, half French lesson, and the colonel himself spoke fluently but had such a thick German accent that at times, I had to strain to make sense of him.
The younger men seemed to share a strange delight at conversing with me—as if my presence on that carriage extended their leave by a few more precious hours. There was an innocence to the conversation that might almost have blinded me to their uniforms for a moment or two along the way. Most were junior Wehrmacht soldiers—by that point in the war, almost certainly conscripted. Perhaps they were reluctant players in this battle, just as, I supposed, most of us were—drawn into the war if not by conscription, then by circumstance, just as I had been.
During my training I had learned that when it came to a cover story, revealing less was always the best strategy, so I tried to deflect the focus back onto the men as we talked. I asked about their lives back home, and some flashed me faded, well-worn photographs of young wives or tiny children. Others had photos of beloved pets. The colonel carried a well-loved photograph of himself, seated in a leather armchair with an enormous cat in each arm.
But if, for even a second, I had felt a shred of empathy for those men given how polite and respectful they had been toward me, the reminder that some had wives waiting at home was like a slap to the face. I was once a wife sitting at home waiting for the return of my husband away at war, and he had been taken from me, by men likely wearing uniforms not dissimilar to these. It made no difference if the man who shot down my husband’s plane at El Alamein was young or respectful or even conscripted against his will. Giles was still dead. The world would offer no justice for that so I had to eke it out myself.
But I could not afford to become distracted by thoughts like this. I knew when I left Britain I would need to stop my mind from wandering to my grief for Giles, or longing to be with my son Hughie, who was back home in Bexley with my mother. My boys would never be far from my mind, nor could they be front and center. I could not afford to lose focus. Distraction meant carelessness. Carelessness could be catastrophic.
So I maintained my polite facade by reminding myself that I was playing along with the charade so that later, I could wreak havoc upon these men and everything they stood for.
C H A P T E R 4
CHARLOTTE
Liverpool
May, 1970
At first, Dad is so cheerful as he goes about his project to find Remy that I feel certain I’m right to ignore Aunt Kathleen’s warning. I don’t mind that my skirts are soon snug from the endless stream of rich meals he’s cooking for us, I’m just pleased to see he’s filling out in the face a little too. He clams right up when I try to talk to him about the project or ask questions about his war days, but I remind myself that Dad told me about the SOE when he was good and ready, and he’ll tell me more when the right time comes, too.
He was semiretired before Mum died. He still worked five or even six days a week, but they were short days, focused on oversight of his managers at each of his six workshops rather than business specifics. He had reached a point where he was financially secure and didn’t need to continue expanding the company so instead, he delighted in extra time for family, golf and gardening.