“Want to come and sit out in my dad’s beautiful garden?” I suggest. His glasses are askew. There’s a faded stain on the white T-shirt he wears. But he smiles all the way up to those big, kind eyes and I never want him to leave.
“I’d be delighted.”
The afternoon has flown by, and Theo and I are still in the garden chatting when I remember I’ve been meaning to try Harry’s office again. He refreshes our cups of tea while I’m inside sitting at the hall table, listening to the number ring out. I sigh impatiently as I hang up, then we automatically wander back out to the garden and take our seats again.
“No luck?” he surmises as he passes me my tea. I shake my head. “She’ll answer eventually. Keep trying.”
“I will,” I say. He hesitates, then he clears his throat.
“I suppose that must have seemed strange last week with me and Harry.”
“It did.”
“You might have noticed a rather imposing locked door behind his desk.”
“I wondered about that.”
“Harry has access to all manner of classified files. With supervision, his students can assist with recording or transcribing oral histories, but from there, every little record is kept under lock and key—usually at the national archives, although from time to time he brings specific objects to the university for concentrated work. He treats every single object as sacred. I’m certain that’s why he has Mrs. White sat way down the other end of that hallway—it makes no sense given how closely they work together, but she smokes like a chimney and he won’t allow cigarette smoke near historic documents. Every object that he signs out from the archive is taken under lock and key into that secure room.”
“What does that have to do with you?” I ask. Theo stretches out his legs and crosses them at the ankles, then looks up to the blue sky above us.
“Do you remember I asked your father if they took the car that day at Salon-La-Tour because Fleur had injured her ankle?”
“Yes. How did you know to ask that?”
He turns toward me. Our eyes meet and lock, and we’re fully clothed and sitting outside, but there’s something almost intimate about this moment.
“Remember yesterday when I told you that history is personal?” When I nod, he goes on. “It is true that I am most likely an orphan, but I know virtually nothing about my birth parents. I lived in an orphanage until I was seven, and then went to live with the Sinclairs. I adore them, truly. They’re a brilliant couple and they did everything they could to build a family around me. As I grew older, my curiosity about my birth parents started to really burn within me, and that always felt like a betrayal of the Sinclairs. It didn’t help that when I tried to ask them about my other family, they would only tell me that my biological parents both died in the war. That I should be proud of them for fighting for their country, but that I had to leave it at that.”
“They were afraid of losing you.”
“Yes, I think so. And perhaps they were worried I’d be disappointed if I went looking for answers and couldn’t find them. I wanted to respect their wishes, but around the time of my eighteenth birthday, I thought I’d go mad if I didn’t try. I waited until they were out one day and went through the drawer in their bedroom where they kept special paperwork. I found my official adoption documents and the name of the orphanage, along with a transcript detailing some very curious remarks from the judge who officiated over court proceedings about me.”
“Curious how?”
“The words ‘unknown identity’ and ‘undocumented surrender’ featured heavily,” he says, smiling weakly as I gasp. “I couldn’t leave it alone after that, regardless of how much Mum and Dad wanted me to. A few weeks after my birthday, I told Dad I had to drive to the university to clarify course options and he let me borrow his car. Instead, I drove to the orphanage. It was hours away from our house in London, way down in Hampshire in the middle of nowhere.”
“Were your parents angry?”
“They still don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t suppose they would be angry now. At the time, it was probably the worst thing I’d ever done. I was a child who liked to please, you see.”
“I’m sure,” I say wryly. “I’ll have you know, I was an angelic child, too.”
“Yes, even from this angle I can see the faintest trace of your halo,” he says wryly, and I smile in spite of myself. “My memories of the time before the Sinclairs took me in had been foggy but as soon as I arrived, I remembered the place. St. Brigid’s, it’s called—it’s a convent, but they also run a school and an orphanage. Once I introduced myself, the Mother Superior remembered my surrender because it was such an odd situation. Out of the blue, a man arrived with me in tow and begged her to help. He said my mother had been posted overseas and there was no one else to care for me. He assured them she would be back to collect me within a few months.”
“Wasn’t there paperwork? A birth certificate, or some kind of admissions form?”
“No,” Theo says, sighing. “Mother Superior had been told that my situation was fraught and it was best if she knew little about me—for my own protection, supposedly. It seems madness by today’s standards but you have to remember, the world was in chaos. She really thought she was doing the right thing. It was an immense shock to learn that I was surrendered without so much as a surname or a date of birth.”
“Of course it was,” I murmur. “You poor thing. What birthday do you celebrate?”
“What my parents call my birthday is the day I was surrendered. They rounded down by a few years—so it roughly matches my biological age, I suppose.”
“And that was just…it? Your parents never returned for you?”
“Mother Superior said they came back just the once a few weeks after my surrender. The man—my father?—called and asked them to take me to a park some distance away. He specifically insisted that someone not wearing a habit or identifiable clothing be the one to accompany me. Mother Superior agreed because she assumed I was still in grave danger. That was the last time anyone heard from either one of them. The orphanage cared for me for a few years after the end of the war, hoping my parents would return, but they never did. They just disappeared without a trace.”
“How awful,” I say. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be as disconnected from my own history as Theo is from his. I feel my mother’s absence every minute of every day—but at least I know the shape of the space she used to fill. “I’m really sorry about all of this, I really am, but what does this have to do with Professor Read?”
“Ah, this is where it gets complicated,” Theo says. “At eighteen, I was upset by what I’d learned but too anxious about having disobeyed my parents in digging into it, so I kept it all to myself. Time marched forward. I went to university and majored in history and gradually narrowed my study focus to the war. That’s when I discovered that I had been wrong in my estimation about that little convent orphanage in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it is little, and it is a convent orphanage…but it happens to be in Beaulieu. That’s the tiny village right in the epicenter of the cluster of properties used for the SOE’s finishing school.”