“Oh!” I say, comprehension dawning. “You think your father was in the SOE?”
“I suspect both parents may have been, actually,” he says. “It’s the only explanation I can think of for the secrecy. I suppose the other thing you need to know is that when I arrived at that orphanage, I didn’t speak a word of English.”
“Were you mute?”
“Oh, no. Mother Superior told me I was quite the chatterbox and I learned English quickly enough, but when I first arrived there I spoke only French.”
“My goodness,” I say, shaking my head. “You are an interesting man, Theo Sinclair.”
“Only in this aspect,” he laughs. “The rest of the time I’m a dreadfully uncool history teacher. My dad is an Oxford man so I’d been studying there, and he just about disowned me when I transferred to Manchester, but when I joined all of the pieces of my own past together, it was clear to me that Professor Read was probably the only person on earth who could figure out who I really was.”
“And did he?”
“Much like you and Noah, I assumed that I would be able to tell him what I knew and that he would fill in the rest of the picture. As you now know, it doesn’t work that way, but Harry is a very kind man. He told me he was very sorry for my situation but that he couldn’t reveal anything that remained classified. I was disappointed at first, but also genuinely fascinated by his work, so I did spend a lot of time lurking in his office in my final year of undergrad studies. After a while, he told me there was one agent who had a child around my age, but that child does not share my name and was never surrendered to an orphanage. So, I had to let it go, and for a long time, I did. I had just about completed my Master’s, and Harry was helping with my PhD application—he was to be my supervisor.” His eyes grow distant for a moment and I know he’s thinking about what might have been, but then Theo shakes himself and continues. “One day, I left his offices. I got all the way to my car before I remembered I left something on my desk I needed that night. My office was in one of those little rooms in the rabbit warren hallway between Mrs. White’s desk and Harry’s office, and he obviously didn’t hear me come back. He’s a mild-mannered sort and it’s rare for him to raise his voice, but he was so excited he was just about shouting into the phone. It was something about a medical record accidentally placed in another agent’s file. All I remember is Harry laughing and saying, ‘You have to admit it was starting to look as though she disappeared into thin air—this is all we’ve ever found.’ Well, obviously that caught my attention—especially when I heard him explaining that this file mentioned a woman’s abdominal surgery in 1942 and speculating about whether this was a euphemism for an ‘illegitimate’ pregnancy.”
“No!” I gasp.
“I couldn’t just barge in and let him know I overheard a call he’d obviously timed for after I left, but I barely slept a wink that night wondering. I hoped he’d fill me in the next day, but he didn’t say a word. We were working together in his office that afternoon, reviewing a transcription I’d made from a recorded interview, when Harry got up to go to the bathroom and I realized he’d left his keys on the desk…” Theo sucks in a breath, then covers his eyes. “Charlotte, you can’t tell anyone this. Promise me. Both Harry and I could get in all kinds of legal trouble.”
“Of course I won’t,” I promise.
“I pulled the fire alarm.”
“Oh! Wow,” I say, jaw dropping. “That’s brave.”
“It was absolutely not brave. It was impulsive and quite stupid.”
“What happened?”
“I assumed Harry evacuated when the alarm rang, but I also knew the campus staff would quickly realize it was a false alarm and I probably had no more than ten minutes before he’d return. I took his keys and opened the secure room. Inside, there was a long, high bench lit by a line of very bright study lamps. And right there on the bench sat a file for an agent code-named Fleur. Hundreds of pages were sorted into neat piles.”
“The woman who saved my dad’s life!” I gasp. “You’ve seen her file?”
“Very briefly, yes,” Theo says. “It was immensely thick, so I knew she wasn’t the agent Harry was excited about. I mean, he just mentioned only ever finding a single page, right? And that was the page I wanted to find so I started searching around the desk. Right on the top of one of the piles of paperwork, I found an incident report about a parachuting accident—Fleur landed badly in training and injured her left ankle. But I was running out of time and as interesting as all of that was, it wasn’t worth risking my career for, so I turned to leave. That’s when I realized that in a darker corner of the room, a corner I’d assumed was just more filing cabinets, was an area Harry has set up specifically for close photography. He has fixed flash light stands and a tripod and the like there, and in the center of all of that was a single page from a medical report for an agent with the operational name ‘Chloe.’”
“Oh my God.”
“The report was very short, so even in ten seconds I just about memorized the whole thing. Chloe was much slimmer than her examiner would have liked, so he was recommending she be provided with extra lard and bread at breakfast and dinner. Her medical history was unremarkable except for ‘abdominal surgery’ in early 1942.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Theo sighs. “That’s all I learned.”
“When were you taken to the orphanage? And how old were you?”
“I wasn’t surrendered until 1944—about six months after that medical examination. And given my size and development at the time, the director thinks I was probably two.”
“It’s a fit!”
“Yes. I wonder if my father was caring for me while she trained, perhaps even when she was deployed, and then he surrendered me when his own work called him away. Without more of her record…without knowing who he was…there’s no way to know for sure. So…imperfect as it is, I still believe this random page is the closest I’ve ever come to identifying an agent who might have been my mother.”
“Did you find out Chloe’s real name?”
He sighs sadly. “If only. That page only listed her operational name. I’m guessing that Chloe’s own file was lost or destroyed, perhaps in that dreadful fire in 1946.”
“That’s such a shame. But I still don’t understand why Read was so angry with you that day we met him.”
“Ah, that’s the simplest part of all of this. Your father mentioned they had to drive because Fleur couldn’t walk. He seemed to be struggling to explain himself, so I tried to prompt him and asked if she’d hurt her ankle. Remember?”
“I do.”
“I completely forgot that I only knew Fleur had a history of ankle issues because I read the incident report in her classified file.”
“Of course.” I wince. “So Harry didn’t catch you that day?”
“He suspected right away, actually,” Theo says, groaning as he covers his face with his hands. “Harry went to the evacuation point after I pulled the fire alarm and there were only a handful of people there so it was obvious I was missing. He confronted me as soon as he came back upstairs. Maybe we could have gotten past it if I’d been honest, but like the bloody idiot I am, I flat-out denied I’d been in the file room and we argued. Eventually he gave me the benefit of the doubt and allowed me to stay on to finish up my Master’s but our relationship was never the same. I changed paths after that. To be honest, I was so ashamed of lying to Harry, I realized I had to make peace with the uncertainty of my origin, and to do that I had to move on from that area of study. I suppose I probably set up the family history group as some kind of penance. I can’t change what I did that day in Harry’s office, but I can help others to find their own stories. I do get a lot of joy out of it. You should have seen Mrs. Underwood a few weeks ago when she managed to find her grandfather’s birth certificate all on her own! It’s so fulfilling seeing those men and women finding their own pasts, even if I can’t find mine. And I do enjoy teaching, even if it’s not what I thought I’d wind up doing.”