“Extenuating circumstances,” I explained lightly. Our arrangement was unusual—SOE agents were generally never posted with friends—but there was no alternative this time. Noah and I would just need to be very careful that our existing relationship did not compromise our work. “The agent they wanted to send injured her ankle on her final test jump last night and is out of action. I was ready for deployment and given your ‘wife’ was ‘arriving from Paris this week’…” I shrugged ruefully. “Well. Here I am.”
“I suppose you heard what happened to the first agent they dropped in,” Noah murmured, wincing. I nodded. The previous agent had mistimed her drop from the belly of a bomber and managed to hit the side of the plane as she fell, briefly knocking herself unconscious. Her parachute deployed automatically thanks to the static line attached to the bomber, but she landed as dead weight and shattered the bones in one of her legs in the process. Her emergency medevac was the reason I had the privilege of climbing down from the Lysander onto solid ground instead of dropping down through the hole in the body of a bomber myself.
“I’m Adrien and I’ll be your pianist,” the other agent introduced himself, extending his hand to shake mine. The “pianist”—our casual SOE term for Wireless Telegraphy officer, also known as w/t operator—was the person who operated the telegraphy unit that was our only method of communication back to the SOE’s Baker Street headquarters in London. Adrien took one suitcase, and Noah took the other, and I automatically fell into step beside them as they started to walk. The field still appeared peaceful and quiet, but even so, we couldn’t linger. Once we’d started down a winding dirt road, Adrien asked pleasantly, “How do you know one another, then?”
“We met in Paris in 1941,” I explained. “I occasionally let the escape line hide airmen in my apartment for a night or two. Marcel here just happened to come along right when I needed to leave France myself, so we traveled the line together.”
“I couldn’t have made it without her,” Noah said.
I wanted to point out that he had helped me as much as I helped him on that fraught journey, but Noah’s confidence in me was part of the reason I’d dared to come back to France in the first place, so I forced myself to accept the praise instead of protesting it.
“And now here you are. Happily ‘married,’” Adrien said wryly. I glanced at Noah, and he offered me a cautious smile.
“That’s right,” he said earnestly. “Welcome to France, Mrs. Béatrice Martel.” That was the name on my falsified identity papers. Noah’s papers would say Jean-Baptiste Martel.
I wasn’t at all anxious about living with Noah. We had traveled together under difficult circumstances once upon a time and he’d seen me at my very worst. But despite the emotional intimacy we’d shared, our relationship had always been strictly platonic, so I was surprised by the flutter in my chest when I thought about what lay ahead of us. We had to give a convincing performance of man and wife. Even if we had a second bedroom, which I expected we would not, it would be far too risky for us to maintain separate sleeping quarters in case someone peeked in a window or made a late-night visit.
“Marcel, your French,” I said, clearing my throat. “It’s…”
“Passable at long last, surely?” he teased, and he and Adrien chuckled. Noah’s accent was still there, but it was faint. He was fluent and fluid enough in French now that I’d never have suspected him to be British. “Keep in mind, I’ve been here for almost a year—they deployed me a few weeks after I came to see you in that hospital, actually. And if I hadn’t worked to improve my fluency, I’d have failed the program anyway.”
“You’ve done very well,” I said.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Noah had long shown himself to be a determined and capable man. I’d been hiding airmen in my spare bedrooms periodically for months when we met, reluctantly drawn into resistance work by a friend who was mixed up in it up to her eyeballs. When she was captured and killed, I decided I was going to have to get out of France myself at any cost and by any means.
Just a few weeks later, when escape line operatives brought Noah to my terrace seeking refuge for him, I told them I wouldn’t just host him for the night, I’d accompany him on the whole journey back to the UK. We were together every minute from then until we landed in London three weeks later. When the ticket inspector on our first train tried to strike up a conversation with us, I chatted up a storm so that Noah could answer in monosyllables to hide his then-stilted French. When we reached St. Jean de Luz and the guide assigned to walk us through the Pyrenees told me in no uncertain terms I could not bring the bag of food I’d packed for the journey, Noah offered to carry it for me instead.
And on that long, torturous journey through the Pyrenees, whenever I faltered, he pushed me forward, and when he stumbled, I helped him up. As we were smuggled behind bales of hay in a cart from Oiarzun to the British Embassy in San Sebastian, then hidden beneath a stack of blankets on the back seat of a car from San Sebastian to Madrid, then in the back of a truck filled with hundreds of chickens from Madrid to a safe house on the River Guadalquivir, and then finally, locked in the body of a Norwegian collier all the way to the RAF base in Gibraltar, Noah Ainsworth and I ate, slept, walked, hid and even wept, side by side. It was no wonder we stayed in touch. Since our return to the UK, Noah and I communicated by letter, weekly like clockwork, and even managed a handful of face-to-face catch-ups. At the last of these, when I was stuck in a hospital recovering from surgery, he told me he’d been recruited to a top secret agency and would be out of contact indefinitely.
For well over a year, I had no idea where he was or even what that agency was. And then one day at the secretarial job at Westminster my mother lined up for me, I was called into a meeting with two stern-looking officials who introduced themselves as Miss Elwood and Mr. Turner. Just two weeks later, I started SOE training.
I did wonder if the SOE was the “secret agency” Noah had disappeared into, but those suspicions were only confirmed the night before I landed there in that field near Montbeliard. Miss Elwood was a senior SOE official tasked with completing my final checks at the airport before we departed. She spent thirty seconds explaining that I’d be working with Noah, and thirty very long minutes lecturing me about how unorthodox this situation was and how important it was that our friendship not get in the way of our work.
“It’s vital that you both maintain a professional distance, even if you’re pretending to be spouses, even living in the same house and working on the same circuit,” she told me grimly. A circuit was our term for a local network—often comprised of a team of three SOE agents, a circuit leader like Noah, a courier like myself, a w/t operator like Adrien—plus as many local contacts as we could recruit. “Frankly, Chloe, I’m worried about this situation, but we need to send someone tomorrow and you’re the only agent available who is even close to ready.”
“I won’t let you down,” I promised her, and as we walked along that dirt road, back toward the township, there was no doubt in my mind that I’d keep that promise.