Eleanor
London, 1946
The knock came unexpectedly at the door to Eleanor’s house before dawn. “There’s a car here for you,” her mother called. Eleanor’s mother had said mercifully little about her daughter’s departure more than a year and a half earlier from the government job she’d never thought suitable in the first place. Surprised, Eleanor peered out the window. At the sight of the familiar black Austin, her heartbeat quickened. She was being summoned back to headquarters. But why, after all this time?
Eleanor dressed carefully and quickly, fingers trembling as she buttoned the crisp white blouse that, along with her navy skirt, had served as an almost-uniform during her days at SOE. She approached the black Austin that idled silently at the curb outside her flat. A thin finger of smoke curled from the driver’s-side window, mixing with the low fog. “Dodds,” she said, using his name as greeting. She smiled at the familiar silhouette, black bowler hat drawn low over his white fringe of hair that she had not seen in more than a year and a half. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“The Director,” he said simply, and that was enough for Eleanor. She climbed in the back seat and closed the door. The summons was a refrain of the last time Dodds had come unexpectedly for her. But the women’s unit was gone now, relegated to a footnote in the history of SOE. She could not fathom what the Director might want.
Dodds put the car into gear. As ever, he did not speak, but kept his eyes squarely on the road, turning smartly at the red phone booth on the corner. The car wound silently down the shuttered streets of North London, deserted except for the occasional lorry driver packing his load for the early morning deliveries. Though the blackout had ended months ago, the streetlights were still dimmed, like a habit not easily shaken. It was January 4 and a few Christmas decorations still hung in the windows. The holidays had been a dismal affair—as though no one remembered how to celebrate in peacetime. Hard to feel festive, Eleanor supposed, when basic staples like coffee and sugar were still in such scarce supply—and when so many were observing the holidays without the loved one who had never come home.
It wasn’t until they reached the corner of Baker Street that she saw it: Norgeby House had been destroyed in a fire. The slate roof was peeled back like an open can and the window frames stood hollow, spectacle rims charred with flame. Stone and wood smoldered on the ground, seeming to give off heat even through the closed window of the car.
“What on earth?” she said aloud, wondering when the fire had started, calculated whether the story would make the morning newspapers and decided it would not. Though Eleanor didn’t know exactly what was going on, she had a keen understanding that it had to do with why the Director had summoned her so unexpectedly.
Eleanor desperately wanted to get out and have a closer look, but Dodds did not stop the car. Instead, he drove her down Baker Street to Number 64, the main headquarters building for SOE. He ushered her through the door of the building, which, although only slightly larger than Norgeby House, felt infinitely more austere. Inside the foyer, a cluster of senior army officers brushed by. Though some of their faces were familiar to Eleanor, none of the men acknowledged her.
Dodds led her up three flights of stairs to the anteroom of an office and closed the door behind her without a word, leaving her alone. Eleanor did not hang her coat on the stand in the corner, but folded it over her arm. A furnace hissed menacingly and a cigarette not quite extinguished gave off an acrid smell from an unseen ashtray. Eleanor walked to the window, which overlooked the rear of the building. Over the lip of the rooftop, she could just make out the remains of the burned house, the war room where they had met daily. Tattered bits of their maps and photographs, once closely guarded secrets, now fluttered through the broken window like confetti.
Had it really been a year and a half since she had last been here with her hat in her hand, asking to go find her girls? So much had happened since then, D-Day, victory in Europe and, finally, the end of the war. The last time she had been here, the Director had dismissed her, turned her out callously from the place that had once been hers. Even now, it made her insides ache to remember, the pain as fresh as though it had happened yesterday.
The click of the door jolted Eleanor from her memories. Imogen, the receptionist, eyed her coolly, as though they had never met. “He’ll see you now.”
“Eleanor.” The Director did not stand as she entered. But there was a warmth in his eyes behind the businesslike exterior, acknowledging the bond they had once shared. The distance he had shown the day he’d dismissed her was gone, as if it had never existed. Eleanor relaxed slightly.
The Director gestured for her to sit. Closer now, she could see the toll that the war had taken on him—as it had on herself. His sleeves were rolled up, his collar unbuttoned, and the stubble on his cheeks and chin said that he’d been there since the previous day. He’d always been impeccably groomed, but now he looked unhinged.
He followed her gaze out the window toward the smoldering remains of Norgeby House. “Olympus, it seems, has fallen.” His voice was stiff with disbelief.
It wasn’t her problem, she told herself. She had been cast out months ago. Her world had been destroyed, not in the burning of a dusty building off Baker Street, but somewhere in the darkness of Occupied France when she had failed her girls and lost so many of them for good. But Norgeby House was emblematic of the organization that she had given everything to build. And now it was gone. Her eyes burned.
She perched on the edge of the chair he’d indicated. “What happened?”
“A fire,” he said, stating the obvious.
“It might have been an accident,” she offered. Norgeby House, with its endless piles of papers and operators constantly smoking, had been a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.
“Perhaps,” he said, but she could tell by the tone of his voice that he was skeptical. “There will be an investigation.”
Which did not, Eleanor reflected, mean that there would be answers. “Why did you call me, sir?”
“A bloody mess,” he muttered, but was he talking about the fire or something more? He poured tea from the tray Imogen had left on the edge of his desk. “They’re shutting us down. The whole of SOE. Orders straight from Whitehall. With the war over, they say they don’t need us anymore. We’ve recalled all of the agents.”
“All of the agents you can find,” she corrected. “Have there been any word of the others? My girls, I mean.”
“Seven of the girls have been accounted for,” he said. For a moment, Eleanor’s hopes rose. But then he shared the list with her and she saw the notations: Auschwitz, 1945, Ravensbrück, 1944. “Places where the girls have been confirmed dead.”
Dead. Eleanor’s grief and sense of responsibility for what had happened rose like a wave, threatening to drown her. “And the remaining five?”
“They’ve been given a disposition. Missing. Presumed dead,” he said bluntly. It was an awful verdict, ominous yet uncertain.
“That isn’t enough to tell the families. They were wives, daughters, mothers, for goodness sake.” It was true that some of the families may have put it to rest, lowered empty coffins into the ground or had a memorial service to remember. But for others, the unanswered questions hit hard. Like Rhoda Hobbs’s mother, who had sat sobbing when Eleanor had called on her with questions just days earlier. “Rhoda was a typist,” her mother protested, when Eleanor had suggested that she might have been lost during the war. “The last time I spoke with her, she said she was just running papers down to Plymouth.” Eleanor saw Rhoda in her mind’s eye, boarding the Lysander that had taken her across the Channel, never to return.
Mothers like Rhoda’s deserved to know of their daughters’ valor—and what had become of them. Rage burned white-hot in her as she saw the girls, who had given everything for a promise, betrayed.
“And there’s no word of them?”
“I’m not supposed to discuss such matters, now that your clearances have been revoked.” Though not news to her, the statement felt like a blow. “But I suppose you deserve to know—there are reports from the camps. No records, of course, but eyewitness accounts. They say that the women were executed immediately.” Eleanor turned away, sickened. “Other than that, there has been no indication that any are alive. I think hoping at this point is foolhardy. We must presume them dead.” If he had sent her months earlier as she had asked, she might have found some of them alive. Now it was too late.
Eleanor tried to steady her hands. She took the cup of Earl Grey he offered and felt the warmth, waiting for him to say more. “We still don’t know how they were caught. That is, how the Germans managed the radio game in the first place.”
The Director cleared his throat. “You have notes, I assume, from your search?”
She shifted abruptly, and tea sloshed over the side of the cup, burning her skin. “Sir?” she asked, as though she did not know what he was referring to. She prepared to deny she still possessed any papers after she had been dismissed and told to leave matters alone. But, of course, Eleanor had not stopped looking. She had kept digging through old newspapers and files from the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens, making inquiries through government contacts. She had not just combed all of the records she could get her hands on; she had spoken to every last person in Britain who had any connection to the girls, including the agents who had come back and the families of those who had not. There were complicated stories of arrests, dozens of rabbit holes, but none of them shed any light about what happened to the missing girls, or the truth of how they had been caught in the first place.
Perhaps word of her inquiries had trickled back to the Director. She was a private citizen now, she thought. What right did they have to forbid her?
But there would be no fooling the Director. Eleanor set down her tea and pulled the file that she always carried with her from her messenger bag and studied it. She handed over the folder containing all the information she was not supposed to have—and that she knew he would want to see.
The Director thumbed through her notes and she could tell from his expression that they did not contain anything he didn’t already know. “Like I’ve always said, it’s a bloody shame about these girls.” The Director handed back her file and Eleanor clutched it tightly, the sharp edge cutting into the scarred pads of her fingertips. “I’m prepared to send you.”
She could not believe her own ears. “Sir?”
“If you’re still keen to go, of course. To find out what became of the missing girls—and how they were all caught in the first place.” He knew that she’d been more than keen to go. Those girls had consumed her, and she was desperate to find out about them.
A dozen questions circled in her mind. “Why now?” Eleanor managed finally. After the months of rejection and pain, she needed to understand.
“I’d been thinking about calling you for some time. For one thing, someone’s been asking questions.”
“Who?”
“Thogden Barnett.” Violet’s father. Eleanor had spoken with Barnett not two weeks earlier and had sensed among all of the parents that he was the angriest, the least likely to let it go. So she had fed him ever so subtly her doubts and questions about what had happened to the girls, let the ideas fester in his brain. An outsider, he could take it to his member of parliament and press the matter in a way that she could not. Apparently the gamble had paid off. “Most of the families have, as you know, tried to put the past behind them,” the Director continued. “But Mr. Barnett has been asking questions about what happened to his daughter and how she died. When no one answered to his satisfaction, he brought the matter to his MP. They’re threatening a parliamentary investigation. I need to be able to tell them how the girls died—or at least all of the ways we tried to find out.”
But questions from a grieving parent would not have been enough reason for the Director to take the drastic step of sending her. “You said ‘for one thing.’ Is there another reason?”
“Yes, this business with the fire.”
“I don’t understand the connection.”
“And maybe there isn’t one. You remember how you were asked to leave the files?” he asked. Eleanor nodded. The orders had been clear: touch nothing. “They’d said the files would be packed up and taken. Well, for months, the files sat. No one came for them. It was almost as though they had been forgotten. Then a few days ago, I received a message that the files would be picked up this morning for the parliamentary investigation. And then this happened.” He gestured in the direction of Norgeby House.
“You think someone set the fire deliberately to destroy the files?”
He grunted in tacit agreement. “The police say it was too many old papers in a tight space. But our inspectors found this.” He held up a charred piece of metal. She recognized it as one of the timed incendiary devices they trained the field agents how to use.
“It wasn’t just an ordinary fire,” the Director continued. “It was planned. I want to know who did it and why.” She understood then his sudden interest in having her go abroad. He thought that the fire, which went up just before her records were to be taken, might have something to do with the agents who had disappeared. Particularly the girls. Sending her to find answers about that might bring him answers as well.
“You think it has something to do with my girls?”
“I don’t know. The fire happened right before we were to turn the files over to Parliament. I’ve got people investigating that here.”
But the only way to find that out, Eleanor concluded silently, was in France, where the network had collapsed and the girls were arrested. “We need to know how they were caught, where they were taken, what happened to them,” he said, rattling off the same questions she had been asking all along. But the biggest one was why.
“You were done with me,” she said, unable to keep the recrimination from her voice.
“We had no reason to follow up,” he replied, then gestured toward the smoldering remains of Norgeby House with his head. “Now we do.”
The lives of twelve girls, Eleanor thought, should have been reason enough. “So you want to send me to find out what happened?”
“I can’t.” Her stomach sank. He was going to say no again. Was this some kind of a cruel joke? “At least not in any official capacity,” he added hurriedly. “So if I send you, it’s off the books. What do you say, Trigg?”
She faltered. These last lonely months of searching on her own, she had just about given up hope, accepted that she would never know the truth. Now he was dangling it in front of her. It was what she had wanted, had lobbied for. And now that she had it, she was terrified.
“All right,” Eleanor said at last. “I’ll go.”
“I want answers. Find them,” he said, “at any cost.” His eyes were blazing, the gloves off. Now that they were being cast out, he simply had nothing left to lose. He scribbled something on a piece of paper. “I’ve managed to have you commissioned as a WAAF officer. I can get you a stipend and the necessary paperwork to travel. We’ve got two weeks until they shut us down. After that I won’t be able to pay you—or give you the support you need,” he added quickly, knowing that the money meant almost nothing to her.
She nodded. “I’ll go tonight, if arrangements can be made.”
He held out the British passport. “It’s yours. You’ll need this.” She hesitated. British citizenship, which she had once wanted so badly, was little more than a reminder of all she had lost. But she would need it now. Pushing sentimentality aside, she took the passport from him.
“Where will you start?”
“Paris.” She might have gone to Germany and started at the camps. But the girls had all been deployed to networks in or around the French capital. It was where they had operated, and it had all gone so horribly wrong. “And if I need to reach you, how should I wire?”
He shook his head. “Don’t.” The implication in his tone was clear. The lines were not to be trusted as secure. He stood. “Goodbye, Trigg.” He shook her hand firmly. “And good luck.”
Eleanor left his office and made her way down the stairs and out the front door of headquarters. At the corner, Dodds waited for her by the car. Turning swiftly in the other direction, she ducked between the row houses so he would not see her. She crept through the alley toward the remains of Norgeby House. The fire had gutted the upper floors. She walked through the remains of the ground floor where their meeting room had once stood, rubble still warm around her ankles. She reached the spot where the door to the basement had once been. The stairway that led down to her cellar office and the radio room was thankfully still intact.
She started tentatively down the stairs. Dirt fell from above, as though the whole thing might cave at any second. Eleanor was suddenly gripped with terror. It wasn’t that she feared death, but rather she didn’t want to lose it all now before she might get the answers she had been looking for.
Hurriedly, she stopped before what had been the closet in her office. She went to the file cabinet. The files were all gone. She pulled the drawer all the way out to reach the very back, where whoever had cleaned out her office hadn’t thought to look. There was a steel box where she had left it, untouched by the fire. It was here the girls placed the things most dear to them before deploying. She should have taken the box with her that last day, but she had been ordered to pack and leave so abruptly that there hadn’t been time. She picked up the box. The lid fell off and a tiny baby shoe fell out. Eleanor retrieved it, stifling a cry.
A voice came from above. “Is someone down there?” A flashlight licked the dark walls. Eleanor did not answer, but continued gathering what she had come for. Then she climbed the stairs once more.
A young policeman stood at the top, looking surprised to have actually found someone in the rubble. “Ma’am, you can’t take that,” he said, gesturing toward the box in her arms. “It’s evidence for the fire investigation.”
“So arrest me,” she said, then walked away defiantly, her arms full.
It was the least she owed the girls after what she had done.