And further still beyond that, I had a few very important reasons to make it home alive.
I stepped closer to the guard, awaiting my turn now. It wasn’t fear that left my palms sweating. It was pure, unadulterated fury. I could not afford to hand over identity papers smudged with sweat.
I had to calm myself down.
During my training, I roomed with a diminutive young woman given the code name Chloe. I thought about her and her quiet wisdom as the guard sent the family on their way. I thought about the times I’d seen the odds stacked against her in training, but she approached each challenge with a cool head and a quiet determination that never failed her. She was likely in the field on a mission too—elsewhere in France, fighting in her own way. Whatever she was doing, wherever she was, I knew what she’d tell me if she saw me on that bridge: the second they make you angry, they’ve won.
“Papers?” the guard said.
My hand was steady as I offered them and I did not flinch as he snatched them away. I refused to so much as glance at the gun slung over his shoulder—to focus on it would be to return to my fury, and then he’d see it in my eyes.
“Visiting from Le Havre?” the soldier asked. I met his gaze calmly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Reason for visit?”
“Family, sir.”
Just as I’d been taught in SOE training, I kept my answer as close to the truth as possible—in this case, maybe a truer word had never been spoken. I was there for my husband, for the long and happy life he deserved to live—the life that had been taken from him at El Alamein. I was there in Rouen to achieve the justice my Giles deserved.
It had been hard to leave Hughie, but it would have been harder to stay, to take walks in the park and to make him eggs for breakfast and launder his clothes and to pretend the world had not changed forever.
The guard handed me my papers and I stepped away from him.
For Giles, I told myself, and for Hughie. I had to keep my head for my boys.
As I continued on my way, I brought to mind the key data points from my briefing at Baker Street with Mrs. Elwood, Mr. Turner and Basile. We spent days at the Baker Street offices poring over maps and aerial photographs of the region, matching up every detail we could glean from those sources with what Basile knew from recent activity on the ground. If my mission was a success, the first thing I would do when I returned to Baker Street would be a similar extended debrief so I could add my observations to the bank of data the SOE had on Rouen and the Normandy region. I was in the city to confirm the integrity of the circuit, but I was also there to gather intelligence for Colonel Maxwell so he could accurately advise Churchill and guide planning for a D-Day invasion. That was a responsibility I did not take lightly.
Already, I’d strolled past the Frontsammelstelle, the meeting point for newly arrived German recruits, and had been startled by the strangeness of the soldier’s ages—almost all of the men milling about were wildly youthful, most no more than fifteen or sixteen, the few adults in the crowd well past middle age. Did this indicate the Germans had exhausted their population of men in their prime? Such an observation might one day underpin a decision which could turn the tide of the war.
I continued on foot toward the first address Basile had me memorize, the home of a Madame Delphine Laurent. She was famous for her wild flair for fashion and rumored to have a secret collection of expensive artwork. Madame Laurent had played hostess to Jérémie many times after the SOE dropped him into France in 1943. He was almost young enough to be her great-grandson, but the two had become good friends, and Basile instructed me to seek her out if Jérémie did not arrive to check the drop box.
“In some ways, Delphine is the worst possible kind of local contact for an agent to make. She attracts attention everywhere she goes—you’ll understand when you meet her. But she loathes the Nazis with a passion, has dirt on just about every French official in Rouen, and lives alone in a massive apartment right near the Seine. She was determined to help, but too frail—too visible—to be involved in active resistance. When she offered the circuit the use of her spare bedroom, it was impossible for me to refuse,” Basile told me.
The area around Madame Laurent’s home had been bombed into oblivion even in the two months since Basile was evacuated. Most of her street had been reduced to rubble, and my eyes watered at the choking dust and the fading smoke that remained heavy in the street. People picked through the ruins of homes, dragging salvageable items down to the sidewalk to be recovered later. A body lay wrapped in a sheet at the curb, awaiting collection. A man sat beside it, covered in dust and blood, his head in his hands. It would be no comfort at all to him that the Allies were pummeling the area to try to destabilize the German stronghold there.
The chances of finding Madame Laurent seemed to grow dimmer with every destroyed home I passed, but right at the end of her street, I found a single apartment block that, other than some blown-out windows and a crack all along the façade, had escaped largely unscathed. God or fate or luck had spared Madame Laurent’s building. I made my way immediately to the doorman’s office and asked after her.
“Who shall I tell her has come to call?”
“My name is Felice Leroy, but she won’t know me by that. I’m the granddaughter of an old school friend of hers, you see. Grand-mère has sent me here to discuss some private business.”
“Private business,” the concierge repeated, holding the telephone receiver in the air as he stared at me suspiciously.
I leaned toward him and dropped my voice as I said pointedly, “My grandmother is an artist, you see…she tells me Madame Laurent might be interested in her collection?”
Two minutes later, I was on my way up four flights of stairs to Madame Laurent’s apartment at the top of the building. She met me at her front door, poking her head out into the hallway as she looked me up and down. Over springy silver curls, she wore a silk scarf in a chaotic swirl of autumnal reds and oranges and yellows, paired with a shade of red-orange lipstick I could only dream to pull off.
“Who is your grandmother?” she asked me without preamble.
“Her name is Viviane Paquet,” I said carefully. Whenever Basile sent someone to her doorway, he would give them the code word “Paquet” to indicate she should take them in. Madame Laurent’s drawn-on eyebrows lifted sharply, and she stepped back, pulling the door wide open.
“I remember her fondly. Do come in.”
Madame Laurent’s apartment was expansive but cluttered, full of shelves stacked with dusty books and knickknacks and tables and bureaus buried beneath paint-stained rags and paintbrushes soaking in jars. She took me through to her kitchen and made me coffee—real coffee—and I carried the tray as I followed her through to her sunroom at the front of the building. We sat beside one another in cane chairs, facing large windows overlooking the Seine and the blocks of rubble all around it. Several windows were cracked, and small panes of glass were altogether missing here and there. She caught me staring at the open spaces.
“I won’t board my windows up, not even if there’s no glassmaker left alive in Rouen to replace them by the time winter comes,” she told me flatly. “They’ve taken my city, but they will not take my view. How long will you be staying with me?”