But Will answered. “Right now we’re constructing a network of safe houses and drop boxes between here and Mantes-la-Jolie. We have a dangerous operation coming up, and the agents who will undertake it need places to hide so that they can flee after. But the locals have grown wary of helping us. In another village, Neuilly-sur-Seine, there were mass reprisals for helping the partisans. Under orders of the chief of the German SD Kriegler, the men were shot and the women and children locked in a church that was set afire.” Marie stifled a gasp. “The whole town was killed.”
“That’s why I’m headed out myself to find new locations,” Vesper explained. “We have the best shot of the locals listening to me.”
“But your French,” Albert said, clucking his tongue. “You can’t possibly go alone.”
“I can go with you,” Marie ventured, instantly regretting it.
Vesper looked as surprised as she at the offer. Then he scowled. “Impossible!” he snapped. “You’ve only just arrived. You have zero actual experience. It’s too dangerous.”
“Her French is brilliant—and yours nonexistent,” Albert added chidingly. Marie wondered how it was possible for the leader of the circuit to operate in France without speaking the language.
Vesper did not answer but stared at her, considering. Did he prefer to travel alone or simply not want her? Either way, he was going to say no, she thought with a mix of disappointment and relief.
“Only as far as Mantes-la-Jolie,” he conceded finally, and she could see the surprise on the faces around her that he agreed at all. “Come.”
As Vesper started through the door, Marie looked back over her shoulder at Josie. They had been reunited for such a short time, and who knew when they would see each other again? She wanted to run to Josie, to say goodbye and see if she had any words of wisdom or advice. But Josie simply raised her hand to say farewell, and Marie knew she had no choice but to go.
She raced down the stairs and out the front door of the villa to catch Vesper, slowing only as she passed the unexploded ordnance in the garden. Vesper did not take the bike they had ridden earlier, but instead set out on foot across the field opposite the house. Neither spoke. His strides were long and she had to nearly run to keep up. Her skin was unpleasantly damp beneath her dress.
They walked on for some time, neither speaking. In the distance, church bells pealed ten. “You’re slow,” he said accusingly a moment later as the field ended at a country road.
“What do you expect?” she spat, all of the anger and fear of the past few days flaring up in her. “You left me in a shed alone and freezing overnight without food or water. I’m exhausted.”
“I haven’t slept a full night in two weeks,” he replied. “It’s the nature of the work, always on the move. But you’ll have rest and food as soon as we have you settled with your wireless. I’m surprised you’d want to come along to help a simple courier,” he added, changing the subject.
Marie flushed. “I had no idea I’d been met by the famous Vesper,” she replied, trying to make light of her earlier gaffe. “What an honor.”
He looked surprised, as if no one had ever joked with him. “You could sound as if you meant it,” he replied stiffly. “I’m also called Julian, by the way.”
“How do you manage without speaking French?” she asked, before hearing Eleanor’s admonishment for asking too many questions.
“As circuit leader, I seldom interact with the locals. It would be too dangerous if I was caught. So I stay low, operate through the other men.”
“And women,” she pointed out. “Or do you think we shouldn’t be here?”
“I think women can be just what the operation needs, if they are good enough—and committed to the task.” This last part sounded pointed—and directed at her. A question seemed to linger under his words, echoing her own doubts.
She decided to ignore it. “You said that we are headed to Mantes-la-Jolie?”
“To a nearby village, actually, Rosny-sur-Seine. Presently we have no safe house in the region, other than the villa, which is too big and visible to hide an agent on the run. We’re trying to establish one, but we can’t simply walk into town and ask who is willing to risk their lives by hiding fleeing agents. So we start smaller and find a local who will act as a drop box for our messages, before asking if they will hide people.”
Before she could reply, there came a rumbling sound from around the corner. A large brown military truck appeared, traveling toward them. Marie tensed and started toward the trees once more. Julian grabbed her arm, and this time she was too terrified to protest. “Easy,” he said in a low voice. “We are just a French couple, out for a morning walk.” She forced herself to continue walking normally, eyes down. A moment later, when the truck had disappeared around the corner, he dropped her arm roughly. “You do know that your cover is that of a Frenchwoman?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then act like one.”
She lowered her head. “I’m sorry. If you’d like me to go back to the villa, you can take someone else. Perhaps Josie…”
“It’s too late,” he said, as they neared a village with a tangle of limestone houses and a canal winding along one side. “We’re here.” Marie was surprised that their destination was so close to the villa; they could not have walked more than a few miles. He paused before a stone bridge that ran low over the canal. “This region is one where we haven’t had many local contacts. The village is new to us but we’ve been told that there may be townsfolk sympathetic to the resistance and willing to help. We need to find a house or a café where we can leave messages—and where one of our agents can eventually hide for a night if need be.”
“Not a café,” Marie replied. Her eyes traveled down the main road into the town, a twisting cobblestone thoroughfare ending at a small square. “A bookshop,” she added slowly, the notion forming as she spoke. Messages could be exchanged while perusing the books or perhaps even left in a particular volume. “If they have one.”
“A bookshop,” Julian repeated, turning the idea over in his head. “It’s brilliant!” He was looking at her with approval now. She felt her cheeks flush. “There is one, just off the square. The Germans would never go there because they hate books.” Then his smile faded. “You have to do it—persuade the shopkeeper.”
“Me alone?” Marie asked. She had been on the ground less than twelve hours.
“Yes. A man walking into the shops at midday raises too many questions.”
Marie nodded. People would wonder why he was not off fighting. “But I came with you only to translate. You saw how poorly I did back there acting calmly when the army truck passed us.”
“Are you here to do the job or not?” he snapped.
Her job, Marie wanted to retort, was to operate the radio from somewhere hidden away. Yet somehow in her first twenty-four hours on the ground, she’d become first translator, and now operative. She recalled then how Eleanor said the agents must be well trained in all aspects of the job because they might be called upon to do anything at any time, as well as Josie’s comment that they must do the work that was needed. This was her mission, or part of it, at least.
“I know you’re nervous,” Julian said, his voice softening. “Fear is always the first instinct—and rightly so. It’s what keeps us on our guard—and alive. But you must train it, harness it. Now go. Ask the owner if he has The Odyssey by Homer in the original.”
“How will that signal anything?”
“There’s a well worked-out series of questions we use to test whether someone is sympathetic to the resistance. We might ask a fishmonger if haddock is in season or the flower shop clerk about tulips. It is usually something out of season or hard to get.” He exhaled impatiently. “I really don’t have time to explain further. If he has helped before, he will understand the message.”
Marie started into the village, past an école with children playing in the yard at recess. The bookstore was just north of the square, a quiet storefront beneath a balconied home with a window box of withered poppies between open cornflower blue shutters. Librairie des Marne, read the faded yellow paint on the sign outside. Inside, the tiny shop was quiet, save for a boy browsing a rack of comic books. The air was thick with the smell of old paper.
Marie waited until the boy had paid and gone, then approached the bookseller behind the counter in the rear. He was a wizened man with a ring of white hair and spectacles that seemed to rest directly on his bushy moustache with nothing in between. She noticed then a decoration of the First World War on the wall. The bookseller was a veteran—and perhaps something of a patriot. “Bonjour. I am looking for a book.”
“Oh?” The shopkeeper sounded surprised. “So few people read today. Most just want my books for kindling.”
The bookseller looked so pleased at the prospect of actual business that Marie felt reluctant to disappoint him. “A volume of The Iliad in the original.” He turned toward the shelf behind him and started to rifle though the books. “I mean, The Odyssey,” she corrected hastily.
The bookseller turned back slowly. “You don’t actually want the book, do you?”
“No.”
His eyes widened. Clearly he knew the signal. “You can accept a package?” she asked.
He shook his head vehemently. “Non.” His eyes traveled across the narrow cobblestone street to a café. Seated behind the plate glass window were several SS, eating breakfast. “I have new neighbors. I’m sorry.”
Marie’s heartbeat quickened. Surely the Germans had seen her walk into the bookshop.
Pushing down her fear, she tried again. “Monsieur, it would be low profile. Just a letter box in one of the books. You wouldn’t even notice.” She did not mention the prospect of agents needing to hide in his shop, knowing it would be too much.
“Mademoiselle, my daughter lives upstairs with her son, who is not yet one year old. For myself and even my wife, I would not care at all. But I have to think of my grandchild.”
Marie thought of Tess back home in East Anglia. Leaving a child behind was one thing, but to have her right in the middle of the danger would be unbearable. She had no right to ask this of the poor man. She started for the door. Then she saw Vesper in her mind, waiting on the edge of the town expectantly. She could not fail.
“Monsieur, your assistance is dearly needed.” A note of desperation crept into her voice.
The bookseller shook his head, then walked from behind the counter to the front of the store and turned the sign in the window to Closed. “Adieu, mademoiselle.” He disappeared through a door at the back of the shop.
Marie paused, debating whether she should go after him. But she would not convince him, and drawing attention to herself might make things worse. She started out on the street, dejected. She had failed.
Marie walked from the shop, retracing her steps out of the village and across the low bridge. When she reached the place where she had left Julian, she did not see him. Had he abandoned her? For a moment, she was almost relieved; she would not have to tell him about her failure. But without him, she would have nowhere to go.
She spied Julian then, half-hidden among the trees. She made her way up the embankment to him. “How did it go?”
Marie shook her head. “He wouldn’t agree.”
She waited for Vesper to berate her. “I’m not surprised,” he replied instead. “There have been many reprisals in the region. Everyone is scared to help now.”
“Perhaps another shop in the town,” she suggested.
“We can’t afford to ask anyone else today. We’ve already stirred up matters with the bookseller and if we ask too many questions around town, people will start to talk.”
“What now?”
“I’ll take you to the place where you’ll be staying. I would have had another agent bring you to the flat, but since we are here I’ll take you myself. We can regroup and come up with a new plan.” Marie felt a tug of disappointment. She had hoped that they might go back to the safe house and see Josie again. “Come.”
Marie had expected him to start back into the forest. She watched with surprise as he instead started toward the town from which she’d just come. “I thought you said you couldn’t be seen here,” she said, not following him.
He turned back. “Do you always ask so many questions?” The frustration in his voice was unmistakable. “I said I shouldn’t be seen here. And if you follow me quietly, I won’t be.” He led her into the village once more, taking one back street and then another, just skirting the square. “The flat from which you’ll transmit is in this village as well,” he whispered. “In staying here, you should be able to get a sense as to who else we might be able to approach about a safe house.”
“And the flat itself can’t be used as a safe house?”
Julian shook his head. “Too visible. It wouldn’t be safe to hide agents on the run there.” Then how, Marie wondered, could it possibly be safe enough for her? “There are different types of safe houses for different purposes,” he explained. “Messages, radio operators, agents on the run. Each designated for a specific purpose and separate than the rest.”
He led her through an alley and stopped before the rear of one of the houses. “Here.” He produced a skeleton key and unlocked a door, then started up a set of steep stairs.
When they could not climb any farther, he opened a door so low he had to duck to get through it. The room was a garret, with a sloping roof. There was a bed and a washstand and not much else. Still, it was much better than the shed where she’d spent the previous night.
“I suppose that’s yours.” He tilted his head toward the corner, where a familiar case sat.
“My radio!” Marie crossed the room eagerly. She reached for the radio case and opened it, running her hands over the machine. She was relieved to see that it had not been badly damaged in the landing. The coil of the antennae was a bit bent, but she was able to straighten it with her finger. And the telegraph key was loose. It had not been quite right since Eleanor had dismantled the machine, and it seemed to have worsened in transit. She could fix that, though. “Do you have any glue?” she asked.
“No, but I’ll have some sent over.” Marie made a note in her head to find some pine sap or tar if the glue didn’t arrive. She understood then that Eleanor’s tearing apart the radio at Arisaig House had prepared her exactly for a moment like this.
“You’ll need to hang your wire out the window to transmit,” he said. She looked out the window, where he indicated a poplar tree, its buds just beginning to bloom. Then she noticed something familiar across the street. The bookstore. Her stomach did a queer turn. Her flat was just over the café where she had seen the SS.
“But the SS…” she began. “How can this possibly be safe?”
“Because they would never expect you to be here.”
“And if they find out?”
“They won’t—if you are discreet. Are you hungry?” he asked.
“I am,” she admitted. The bit of breakfast she had enjoyed with Albert and the others was a distant memory. Julian went to the cupboard and pulled out half a loaf of bread and some cheese wrapped in paper. Marie wondered whether he had stocked the larder or someone else had a key.
He brought the food to the table and went back for two glasses of water. His hand trembled as he passed one of them, sloshing the water. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Just exhaustion,” he said, trying to smile. “Sleeping in a different place every night, being alone for weeks on end… It wears on you.”
But hands didn’t tremble just because one was tired. “How long has it been like that?”
His smile faded. “I’ve had it for years, nerve damage from some shrapnel earlier in the war. It’s only been the past few months that it’s worsened. Please don’t say anything. If the others knew…”
“I swear it.”
“Thank you.”
They ate in silence. The air grew chilly. “Is it all right if I make a fire in the grate?” she asked, fearing that she would be expected to stay in the cold and dark as she had been in the shed.
He nodded. “Yes. It’s no secret that the apartment is occupied.” As she tended to the fire, he sat back and stretched his legs out, crossing his black boots. It was the most relaxed she had seen him since they had met.
“So what happens now?” she asked.
“You’ll stay here and you’ll receive messages to transmit. They’ll be brought by couriers or Will, the pilot who flew you in.” Julian didn’t mention that Will was his cousin, and Marie wondered if the omission was intentional or whether, in his focused world, he considered the information irrelevant. “He’s the air movements officer, but he helps coordinate the transmissions as well as the flights. It likely won’t be me,” he added. “My men—and women,” he added, this time correcting himself, “are spread across two hundred miles of northern France. I’m constantly traveling between them to make sure they are doing what is needed.” She saw then the responsibility he carried on his shoulders.
“One other thing—be careful when you are transmitting. The SD have become more aware of what we’re doing and they’re on the lookout for transmissions.” Eleanor had said the same, Marie recalled, right before her departure. “Don’t transmit for too long and keep an eye out for the direction-finding wagons or other signs that anyone is onto you.” Marie nodded. She had heard of the vans that prowled the streets, containing special equipment to detect the source of radio signals. It was hard to imagine the police had such things in this sleepy little town. “You can’t stop transmitting, though,” Julian continued sternly. “You have to get the messages through. The information we send to London is critical. They need to know that we are making everything as hard as possible for the Germans to respond when the invasion comes.”
“When will that be?” It was the ultimate question, and asking it felt audacious even for her.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, frustration creeping into his voice. “But it’s supposed to be that way. Need to know, remember? Safer for everyone. The invasion is coming. That much is certain. And we are here to make sure it is a success.” His tone was not boastful but clear and unwavering, one of ownership. Marie saw then that his intensity came not from being arrogant or mean, but from having the weight of the entire operation on his shoulders. She saw him in a new light then, admired his strength. She wondered again if it was wise to have so much go through one person. “That’s all you—or anyone else—needs to know.”
They were risking their lives, Marie thought. It seemed they had a right to know more.
He rose from his chair. “I have to go. You’re to stay here, act normally and transmit the messages the couriers bring you on schedule.”
Marie stood. “Wait.” She didn’t particularly like Julian; she found him prickly and ill-mannered and too intense. But he was one of the few people she knew here and she was not eager to be left alone in this strange apartment, surrounded by Germans.
There was nothing to be done about it, though; going was his work and staying hers. “Goodbye, Marie,” he said, and walked out the door, leaving her alone again.