“How’s Carys and Poppy, anyway?” I abruptly change the subject. Mum was livid when Archie came home during his first year at university with a pregnant girlfriend in tow. He was the golden child of the family until that day, the academic whiz who had scholarship offers to Cambridge and Imperial College. For a while, we all thought he’d have to drop out of his economics degree to support his surprise family, but Archie found a way to have his cake and eat it too. For two years, he worked nights to put a roof over their heads while he finished his degree during the day, and it’s all paid off for him with this fancy new World Bank job.
“The terrible twos are no joke, Lottie,” Archie says, but then he spends a few minutes regaling me with stories of his daughter’s stubbornness and wit, and I feel myself relaxing again, the moment of tension gradually fading away. “I better go,” he says, after a while. “I have to get home before Carys goes to bed or there’ll be hell to pay. Tell Dad I said hi. I’ll try to catch him next weekend.”
“Okay, Archie. I love you.”
We were not a family who said those words all that often, but since Mum died, I throw it in at the end of just about every conversation. Archie barely misses a beat before he replies, “You too, Lottie.”
I hang up the phone, only for it to ring again before my hand is even off the receiver,
“Hello?” I say, startled.
“Charlotte.” Theo’s bright tone immediately tells me that he has some good news. “I don’t suppose you and your father feel like taking a drive tomorrow morning? Remy has agreed to a meeting.”
C H A P T E R 9
JOSIE
Montbeliard, France
December, 1943
Even two weeks after the bombing, we were no closer to understanding how the village had been bombed instead of the factory. Noah was adamant he had the right coordinates, but it was becoming clearer that London wasn’t convinced. Questions just kept coming with each wireless transmission and he was increasingly frustrated.
“We did everything right,” he exclaimed one night. “Someone in London is responsible for this!”
“At least Turner has taken over the investigation,” I said hesitantly. He had been one of my favorite instructors, tough but cheerful and positive, a dedicated and passionate Frenchman who, like me, had escaped occupied Paris during the early years of the war. I admired and trusted every member of the SOE’s leadership, but I knew no one would hunt down a mistake that cost French lives like Turner would.
“That is a comfort,” Noah said, scrubbing a hand down his face wearily. “Elwood is skilled and loyal to the SOE, but she’s so busy training female agents now. And Maxwell works day and night but he has a full plate liaising with Churchill and the government. Booth is a genius when it comes to encryption, but unless the error related to messages between us and London, he’d be out of his depth. I fear if anyone but Turner took on the investigation, it might have fallen by the wayside, and this is too important to be forgotten.”
In the meantime, we were stuck in limbo. A ground-based sabotage operation was still out of the question, but we knew a second air raid would never be planned until the error that led to the first catastrophe was identified. For several weeks, we trod water—me busy with the Travers family, Noah continuing a little work with the mechanic, but mostly focused on building the local Maquisards groups. But on a personal level, we were growing closer than we’d ever been. Lying side by side on that bed night after night, we had only two things to discuss—our mission, which had stalled, and our lives before the mission.
I told him more about my upbringing—about growing up there in the 18th Arrondissement, and what it was like to be an only child, homeschooled most of the time because I was usually too sick to go out. It was a comfort just to remember times when my relationship with Maman was simpler, maybe even easier.
“Sickness was my life,” I told him. “Maman was always at work during the day, but if I was scared or upset when she came home, she would come and lay down with me. She used to play talking games to distract me. I think she just wanted to help me escape out of that bed…that room. And my body wasn’t up to that, so she tried to use my imagination to free me. She would stretch out beside me and gently brush her fingers along the skin of my cheeks and forehead…”
Let’s go somewhere lovely together, she would say if I was frustrated at remaining bed-bound, or if I was so sick that it felt exactly like life itself was slipping away from me, and I was terrified of what might come next. I would close my eyes and picture myself—in a library, at a candy store, walking along a beach with Maman holding my hand. What does it smell like there, darling? The familiar, reassuring scent of dust and aged paper, or the sweetness of candy, the salt of the sea. What will we eat there, Jocelyn? We would visit the café afterward for a treat, or gorge ourselves on that candy and never get a stomachache, or devour hot chips and fish. How do you feel in your heart?
Loved. Wanted. Known.
We played that game so often in my early years that by the time I was an adult, Maman no longer needed to say the words to me to relieve my anxiety. Just bringing the memory of that game to mind could ease my fears or distract me from my pain.
“I was her whole world, other than… I guess, Aunt Quinn,” I told him, but I felt a pinch in my chest at the memory of my mother’s friend.
“Her sister?” Noah asked.
“No, not her sister. They became friends at work,” I said. “Westminster couldn’t find enough men to train as doctors during the Great War, so for a brief window, they admitted women to study medicine. After the war, the administration decided that all of those women doctors should be nurses again, but Maman and Aunt Quinn refused to go back to their old jobs and ultimately won. I think they bonded over that and they’ve been best friends ever since. Every year they’d visit with one another, Quinn would come to us in the autumn, Maman and I usually went to London to visit Quinn late in the spring. They never missed a trip in all the years since Maman and I left London when I was a toddler.”
“How did you end up in France?”
“My parents divorced,” I said, throat tight. “It was very bitter. I had just been diagnosed with Coeliac Sprue. Maman found herself on her own with a sickly child and no child support. She said we had to move to France because the cost of living there was lower and the hospitals more supportive of women in medicine so she had some chance of promotion.”
“And is that how you wound up in Paris on your own when the occupation began? Your mother had gone to Britain to see her friend?”
“Yes,” I sighed heavily. “She wanted me to leave my classes at the Sorbonne to join her and I refused. I’d been doing so well with my English course and I didn’t want to drop out just before my final exams. Besides, Parisian newspapers made it seem like an invasion was months away! We quarreled and Maman went without me. The next thing I knew, Germans were on the streets. Maman moved in with Quinn and still lives in her terrace to this day…”
He was silent as I paused, trying to figure out how to explain that last, terrible morning before I was deployed. Miss Elwood had just told me I’d be flying out to France that night, so I took a car from the barracks to Aunt Quinn’s flat.