“It was an ad hoc collection of people largely untrained with no system of coordination. The difference between that and the well-oiled machine we have ready to go now is all thanks to you.”
The farmhouse did not have electricity—it was lit only by oil lamp and, at night, the fire in an open stonewalled fireplace, owing to the chill in the air with the clear skies and the full moon. It was a rustic home that spoke to the harsh lives the Masson family lived, and in that regard, it was the least romantic place in the world. But as Noah and I worked together over those months, I’d learned that any room could seem romantic to me if he and I were alone in it.
He was wrong about our circuit—the credit truly did belong to him. But I had slowly come to the realization that Noah had always unlocked the very best in me, and maybe I did the same for him. We had been entirely focused on the factory operation since my arrival and I didn’t dare admit my growing feelings for him even to myself. But in the back of my mind, I knew a reckoning was coming.
We were focused on the most important work of our lives—work that could well impact the lives of countless others throughout Europe—and so the undertone to our relationship remained unacknowledged and unspoken, a distraction we could not afford. But we were not strangers to these feelings—a hint of something deeper had been there between us even in the earliest days of our friendship. Back then, we suppressed our attraction not for the sake of a mission, but because it was the right thing to do. Noah was then committed to someone else back in England, and while that was the case, we would only ever have been friends.
But now, on this second stint together in France, Noah’s relationship with Geraldine was over. As soon as that factory was destroyed, I was determined to finally put words to all that lay between us.
At the sound of the plane, Noah and I both ran outside, the wood-framed screen door slamming behind us. We took our position at the top of Clément’s garden and stared in the direction of the factory. The engine’s drone grew louder but even as I looked this way and that, I couldn’t find the plane.
“It’s got to be the Pathfinder,” I said uncertainly. “But…”
“Yes. The moon is full. We should be able to see it by now…” Noah frowned. He pointed in the distance to a narrow tower. “There. You can see the factory chimneys on the north side. That’s the whole reason I asked Clément if we could watch from here tonight.”
“Yes, but…” I said, but then I paused and turned. We were high on a hill, looking down at the valley where the factory was situated, but on the other side of that hill was a series of small villages. From the air, would they look the same? “Noah—God. Is that sound coming from—”
He took off at a sprint before I could even finish, racing around to the other side of the farmhouse. I followed, but I wasn’t running—I was stumbling forward, sicker and shakier with every step until…there it was. A glint of moonlight, reflecting off the wings of the Pathfinder as it streaked across the sky in entirely the wrong place. I whimpered in shock and fear as the first flares began to fall, but Noah cried, his fists in the air above his head.
“No! No! Stop! Please stop!”
Our only lifeline from Montbeliard was Adrien’s wireless set, and it was no use to us in that moment—the pilots would have no way to listen for the signal, no clue how to decrypt our message. Besides, the set was likely miles away, hidden in a secure spot known only to Adrien.
It did us no good to shout, but Noah and I shouted anyway, screaming until our voices were hoarse and our throats ached. It did us no good to cry, but I wept tears of despair and frustration, and Noah’s cheeks were soon shiny with moisture too.
We were entirely powerless, but even though we had no idea how such a mix-up could have occurred, we did not feel blameless—in fact, I felt the guilt might crush me, and as Noah’s trembling hand finally reached for mine, I knew he was feeling the same.
I wanted so badly to turn away from the carnage, to hide from it, but all I could do was to face it. I clutched Noah’s hand like a lifeline as right before my eyes, dozens of bombers swarmed to carpet-bomb the homes of innocent villagers.
The next few days passed in a furious blur. I spent them rushing messages from Noah to Adrien, who would encode them and transmit them to Baker Street, then ferrying messages back again. Everyone was bewildered by the mix-up. News of the disaster had horrified even the highest levels of operation in the SOE and it seemed all of the senior folk were tripping over one another finding someone to blame. Eventually an announcement came over the transmission: Gerard Turner had been tasked with the job of straightening it all out.
I asked Mégane and Jullien for some time off, ostensibly so I could offer first aid and help search for survivors in the village. There was some truth in that. But Baker Street had a whole other reason to send me to the village. They needed to account for each death and to report on each injury. I was there not just as a nurse, not even just as an agent. I was there, among the wreckage and the blood and the broken bones and the bodies, as Colonel Maxwell’s eyes and ears. I was there to bear witness to our catastrophic mistake.
I could have handled the stress of the nursing, but the guilt weighed on me, even though, as far as I could tell, Noah and I had done everything right. Even so, I dragged myself home each night on curfew to crawl into bed beside Noah to weep.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered thickly one night.
“None of this is our fault,” I whispered back, between sobs. “It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“We’ll make sense of it,” he choked, rubbing soothing circles along my back. “We can’t fix it, but…we’ll figure out what went wrong. I promise.”
A week after the incident, I was exhausted in a way I’d never experienced before—physically drained by my efforts to help the injured, emotionally drained from standing, virtually powerless, among so much suffering. There were funerals every day and when I wasn’t needed at the hospital, I tried to attend as many as I could. None of the mourners would ever know who I really was, but it felt important to me that someone from the SOE attended those funerals. Our agency was ultimately responsible for every lost life, even if we still had no idea why the bombers had targeted the wrong area.
The immediate crisis was finally passing, but there was no time to rest and recuperate because I had to return to my “job” with the Travers family. As tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep the night before my return to child-minding, and beside me, Noah was tossing and turning too. I knew he was still awake—his breathing was shallow, but we’d been lying in silence for hours, and he startled me when he said suddenly, “You know all about my family, so you know why this is so personal for me.”
“Yes,” I whispered, after a stunned pause. Over that difficult week, we had not mentioned it once directly, but I’d been thinking about his parents…his brothers. I’d been thinking about that fraught trip from Paris to London via the escape line in 1941, and the way he kept talking about seeing his family again with such longing in his voice. I remembered the shock of the heartbroken letter he sent me a week after our return.