SEPTEMBER 24, 1940, NIMWAY HALL, SOMERSET

“Halt there, miss! Stop your vehicle and present your identification card.”

Not believing her eyes, Josie Stirling leaned her elbow out the driver’s window, nudged her aviator glasses down to the end of her nose and glared at the freshly-minted young soldier who was barring her van from passing through the entrance gate to Nimway Hall. “Who are you?”

The soldier straightened, saluted. “Sapper Mullins, miss, of the Royal Engineers.”

Bloody hell, the invasion and occupation of Nimway Hall by the Royal Engineers had begun nearly a month before the schedule that she had confirmed with the War Office only last week.

“How long have you been standing at this gate, Sapper Mullins?”

“Posted here this morning. Six a.m.”

“By whom?”

“My commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Gideon Fletcher. He ordered me not to let you pass, miss, without you show me your papers. If you please.”

She didn’t please. Wasn’t pleased at all and wouldn’t be pleased until she had it out with the arrogant colonel who seemed to think it was within his charge to forbid her entry to her own home.

“What’s my registration plate, Sapper?”

“Your what?”

She pointed to the front of the van. “Affixed to the bumper. The metal plate with the numbers. What does it say?”

“Ah.” He stepped to the front of the van and bent down to give the plate a good look, placing himself in great peril had she been an enemy agent rather than a friendly, if irritated, one. “YC2346.”

“And the make of the van?”

“Looks to be a Bedford—”

“A 1938 Bedford PC delivery van. Tomato red. Her name is Bess. Easy to recognize. Do you note any other distinguishing markings on the vehicle? Say, scrapes or dings, perhaps bold lettering on the side panels that might identify her as belonging to Nimway Hall?”

Mullins stepped around to the driver’s side of the van, pressing his backside against the bramble hedge in order to read, squinting at the gilded advert on its tomato red field. “Says... Nimway Hall, Balesborough, Somerset, Farms & Orchards, by Royal Warrant to His Majesty King George, since 1673.”

“That’s me, Sapper Mullins. I am Nimway Hall. That’s my house up on the hill. You’re standing in my gateway. Now let me through.” She’d been away four days, and, by the looks of things, all hell had broken loose in her absence.

Mullins shook his head slowly as he sidled around to the front bumper again to block her way. “I still gotta see your papers before I can let you pass. Miss—”

“Miss Jocelyn Regina Stirling, owner, manager and guardian of Nimway Hall, and if you don’t step aside and let me though this minute, I shall run you down, flatten you like a digestive biscuit. I suggest you memorize my face, my van, my registration plate and my ire, so you never again make the mistake of stopping me at the entrance to my own home. Do I make myself clear?”

The sapper’s face bore the pinched look of the soon-to-be-strangled but he held his rifle pike-like and parallel to the ground, clicked his heels together and tipped his chin to the sky. “Miss, by orders of Lt. Colonel Gideon Fletcher, I am standing here to protect you from an invasion force—and from your good self—during these dangerous times on the home front. I will see your identification papers as I have been instructed to do, or I will gladly die in the attempt.”

“The boy seems to be honestly trying his best, Daughter.” Josie’s father had emerged from the back of the van where he’d been napping on his old upholstered chair for the past hour, surrounded by boxes and chests of his most prized possessions. He slipped between the front seats into the passenger seat and tapped her arm with his own identification card. “Be kind.”

Josie ignored the card and her father’s famously charismatic smile and glared out the windscreen, past the stonework gate posts and the old gatehouse, up the long winding drive lined with ancient ash and beech, toward the forecourt of Nimway Hall just visible on the rise. So close and yet so bloody far.

“They weren’t supposed to arrive for another month, Father. I’m not ready to be invaded by anyone.”

“I wasn’t ready to abandon Stirling House to Hitler’s bloody Blitz, either, dear girl, but you convinced me of the folly of staying a day longer, and so here I am, at old Nimway—bless its mystical heart—with all my worldly treasures stuffed into the back of this rattling old van.”

“Bess isn’t old.”

“Nevertheless, you need to give the nice young sapper our identity cards immediately, and I need to pee.”

Out of habit in these days of rationed petrol, she’d turned off the ignition the moment she’d stopped Bess at the gate. Now she turned the key and the van rumbled to a start. Glaring at her father because she knew he’d make good on his threat to water the hedgerow, she reached into her jacket pocket, stuck her and her father’s ID cards out of the window with a stiff arm and wagged them at Mullins.

“Make no mistake, Sapper, I submit my card to you under protest, and only after your assurance that you will never stop me again.”

“I shall take up the matter with Lt. Colonel Fletcher.”

“You do that, Sapper.” If this Colonel Fletcher yob was like any of the other officers left behind to defend the realm against a Nazi invasion, the man was gray, grizzled and pushing seventy. Fought heroically alongside Baden-Powell in the Boer Wars, was under siege in Mafeking, where he was starved, stabbed, and escaped capture on the strength of his wits alone and hadn’t stopped elaborating on his war stories to anyone within earshot since the Armistice. From buck private thirty years ago, to Lt. Colonel in the Home Defense Forces today, Fletcher was just the sort of old soldier to press his authority beyond the limit of his orders and abilities.

Let him try.

Mullins examined both ID cards closely, flicking his attention from Josie to her father to the cards and back again, as though there was any more information in the documents than their handwritten names and addresses and the pre-printed identification numbers. He raised his eyes, his nervous gaze moving past her to her father.

“Before you ask, Sapper Mullins, this man in the seat beside me is my father. Until this morning he was living in the heart of London where, nightly, the bombs of the Luftwaffe have rained down around him. For his safety, I fetched him home to live with me for the duration. We shall register his change of address with the proper authorities in short order. And if you dare hold us for another moment I will make sure that your time here at Nimway Hall is the stuff of your nightmares. Now stand aside.”

Josie snatched back the cards and gunned the engine. Bess gave a victorious pop and the Bedford leaped through the gates, missing Sapper Mullins only by the swiftness of his reflexes, and throwing her father back against the seat.

* * *

“Who the devil are those hooligans, Josie Bear?” Her father was pointing out the passenger window as she motored up the drive. “They’re plowing up your perfectly good badminton court!”

“It’s September, Father; we’re planting winter wheat. And those young women are members of the Women’s Land Army, hardly hooligans.” Relieved to see the rows of rough furrows being turned up in Nimway’s once expansive front lawn, she paused to exchange a wave with the four young women. Maureen on the tractor, Francie and Trina standing on the cross bar of the harrow, keeping their eyes on the spinning disks just below their boots, churning up the ground, and Patsy directing them toward her from the far end of the field. The rows weren’t as straight or deep as when she herself drove the tractor, but pound for pound, the women were a net benefit to the farm and generally easy to manage.

With any luck, a moderate winter, and a healthy crop of wheat come spring, along with the other one-hundred acres of arable fields now planted on the estate, she might not be forced by the Ministry of Agriculture to clear-cut her beloved Balesboro Wood and plant barley or turnips. Losing Nimway’s legendary wildwoods to an unreasonable wartime requisition was as inconceivable as it would be heartbreaking.

If she’d learned anything in her twenty-three years on this earth, it was that if she wanted something done correctly, completely, with the highest standards, and in a timely manner, she’d best do it herself. Best that this crusty old Lt. Colonel Fletcher understand her mind straight away.

Gravel sprayed as she pulled Bess into the forecourt of the Hall below the wide steps and four columns that held up the portico. She yanked on the brake, set the gear lever into park, killed the engine, threw open the heavy door with her shoulder and stepped out. Winnie came bounding up the hill from the stables, her wavy black ears bouncing, the flag on her tail curled over her topline, wagging like the wind, Josie’s haying gloves flapping in her mouth.

“My Winnie dog, how I missed you!” She dropped to her knees and retrieved the gloves. “Thank you, girl! Come along with me.” She gave the dog a skritch on her chest and a kiss between her deep brown eyes. She fetched her leather satchel and gas mask box from behind the driver’s seat then slammed the door. “As for you, Father, your room is ready; first floor, the old nursery in the east wing, as you requested. The library is also yours, for as long as the Ministry of Mayhem allows us to keep the books on their shelves and not have to use them to heat the hall. Now, you’ll have to forgive me, you need to pee and I need to find the colonel.”

She was the current guardian of Nimway Hall and he was little more than a squatter. The sooner he realized that, the better they would get along.

“Go easy on the frail old fellow, Josie. Wouldn’t want to shock him into heart failure.”

“I think I’ll risk it, Father.” She lifted Bess’s bonnet, used her handkerchief to yank out the engine’s rotor arm, wrapped it and jammed the wad into the pocket of her dungarees, then ran up the wide limestone stairs, Winnie loping happily at her heels.

Despite everything, she was happy to be home at last. She thumbed the brass latch, applied her usual shoulder to open the thick oaken door and—

It didn’t budge. The latch hadn’t clicked either.

The front door of Nimway Hall locked? Never in her life! She tried again, harder this time, met the same resistance, regrouped with a muttered curse then pounded the door with her fist.

“Hallo, in there! Mrs. Patten? Mrs. Lamb? Someone’s locked the bloody door! Let me in!” Winnie braced her paws against the door, whined and barked in agreement.

Three more resounding thumps before the door gaped open just wide enough to reveal the face of another young soldier who stepped into the slight opening. “Your business, madam?”

“Correct, soldier, Nimway Hall is my business. My house. My front door. You’re standing in the foyer of my great hall. Now step aside.”

“Can’t ma’am, until I see your—”

“Where’s this colonel of yours?”

The young man blinked. “In his headquarters, last I saw, madam. State your name, and if you wait here quietly, I’ll tell him—”

“Thanks awfully, but I’ll tell the colonel myself.” Josie took a step back then rammed the door open, tucked her identity card into the startled soldier’s breast pocket and brushed past him into the vestibule, with Winnie at her side. “Come along, girl, we’ll find this colonel and—”

“Ma’am you can’t just—”

“Bloody hell—” Josie hadn’t taken but a few steps when she was stopped in her tracks by the most shocking and shameful sight imaginable. What had once been her family’s crown jewel, the great hall of Nimway, had been reduced to an enormous storage closet, the magnificent floor piled with crates and sheeted furniture, ages old palms and exotic ferns abandoned in their urns.

Even the grand staircase was stepped with boxes and crates, the landing stacked with ladderback chairs, the bannister overhung with blankets.

“Begging your pardon, Miss Stirling, here’s your ID. Welcome. I’m Sapper Lewis.” He haltingly offered the folded brown card as though certain she would command Winnie to bite off his hand. “You see, I wasn’t told to expect… I didn’t know... shall I show you to Colonel Fletcher?”

“No need, Sapper Lewis.” Judging by her mother’s displaced piano in the far corner under the stairs, the sheeted shapes of gilded upholstered chairs and two matching sofas pressed against the wall, the ormolu mirrors and her grandmother’s collection of marble busts teetering on inlaid tabletops, the tinpot colonel was holed up in Nimway’s celebrated conservatory. “I know just where to find him.”

Josie snatched the identity card from the sapper and followed Winnie along the path of sheeted obstacles—Mrs. Patten must have had kittens when the solders started manhandling the Chippendale!

As she approached the double sliding doors leading to the dining room, she wondered if Fletcher had cleared out the enormous table that could seat forty when fully extended, and replaced it with a tank.

Well, good. At least the table remained in place, its length reduced shortly after the war began to accommodate half its original number. The evacuees from the Blitz, Land Girls and various other itinerant lodgers who called wartime Nimway Hall home.

Colonel Fletcher and his men added another ten mouths to feed, according to the requisition from the War Office. The only possible saving grace was that if she fed the soldiers from the kitchen of Nimway Hall, then by law, Fletcher must turn over his unit’s ration books to her. Which would then allow Mrs. Lamb to pool the rations and stretch the portions of protein and fat into a more extensive menu.

Winnie skirted the table and led Josie past the fireplace facade with its two life-sized, scantily-clad marble figures of her many-times-great grandmother Charlotte, which had been scandalously live-sculpted by her as many-times-great grandfather, Marco.

Josie turned as she hurried past. “Wish me luck with the colonel, Great-Granny. Though, he’s the one who’ll need it, once I get through with him!”

The door from the dining room to the butler’s pantry stood wide open into the connecting corridor, the perfect sound tunnel to amplify the rumble of male conversation coming from the conservatory beyond.

Near shaking with anger at the colonel’s presumption, Josie stalked down the corridor, intending to launch into a blistering tirade, but reached the doorway to the conservatory only to be stopped again, struck in the heart by the wartime alterations inflicted upon the elegant salon that still smelled of soft candlelight, sweet pipe tobacco and Shalimar.

Winnie nuzzled her damp nose into the palm of her hand and Josie gave the soft muzzle a fond caress, clearing her head of the mist of memories and directing her focus where it belonged: on the enemy.

On the four men at the center of the room—officers of various ranks, by the pips on their tabs—heads and elbows bent over the middle of the rare 17th century rectory table, which they had obviously abducted from her library.

The gilded chairs that had once lined the room when it was filled with music had been replaced by a half-dozen tall metal filing cabinets fitted between the two north-facing Palladian windows, their shutters and blackout curtains shoved open to fill the room with afternoon light.

Smaller tables had been stolen from other parts of the Hall, and were now loaded down with typewriters, telephones and in-baskets, pencils and inkstands. Two drafting tables sat beneath the southern windows. Three large clocks had been fastened to the wall above a bank of equipment with dials and gauges and long runs of wires strung every which way, making grandmother’s conservatory resemble Churchill’s warren-like headquarters under the Treasury building at Whitehall.

And in the far corner of what remained of the conservatory, near the wall of French doors that had once spilled open to the cool evening air, freeing music and laughter out onto the stone terrace, to roam the lawns and down to the lake, was her great-grandfather’s massive oak desk, now decamped from its home in the east parlor.

Doubtless now claimed by the venerable Lt. Colonel Fletcher. Whose ancient reflexes were so finely-tuned that he hadn’t noticed she’d been standing in the doorway for the past minute.

“This field, to the north—”

“Water table too high—”

These soldiers, supposedly trained in stealth and defense, were still bent over their large document as she approached, so involved in the heat of their discussion that she was able to wedge herself between two of the men and ask, “Which of you is Lt. Colonel Fletcher?”

She looked pointedly from man to man, surprised that they were younger than she’d expected. Handsome, crisp, welcoming. Until she found herself looking into the iron blue gaze of the man standing directly across from her. A gaze fierce and feral, that lit fires deep inside her, leaving her breathless, wordless.

The man straightened, squared his broad shoulders until he seemed as tall as a tree. “Miss Stirling, I assume.”

His statement was curt, polite, and sliced through her reverie like Excalibur through stone, a thunderous splitting of her world, between ‘before this day’ and ‘all the days afterward.’

“Yes,” was all she could manage.

“Lt. Colonel Gideon Fletcher,” the man said with an aristocratic nod. “Delighted to meet you... at last.”

Dear God, this colonel was no grizzled veteran of the Boer Wars! He was thirty at most, though threads of gray ticked through the coal dark hair at this temples. A canted, serious brow dipped above those piercing blue eyes, jaw squared off in a strong, clean-shaven chin, lightly limned in the deep blue-black shadow of a beard. He was taller than the other men, lit from the side by the westering sun streaming through the windows, striking his broad-shoulders and glinting off his hair.

And his mouth—it was quite perfectly shaped, full and firm, a wry smile tucked away at the corners.

“Miss Stirling?”

Josie blinked at the man, embarrassed to the bone for falling so far into his gaze, nearly swooning like a schoolgirl. “Yes, Colonel. I would have been home when you arrived, but you’re here a month beforehand and I was in London.”

“So I understand.”

“But you made yourself at home in my conservatory, not the accommodations agreed upon in the original contract.”

“You may not understand, Miss Stirling, given your protected vantage point out here in Somerset, but orders change quickly during wartime.”

“Do they, really—” you bloody, arrogant blighter, she wanted to add.

“We have settled in nicely as you can see, with little enough trouble–“

”What a relief,” she said, with a smile, hoping he caught her sarcasm where she’d aimed it.

“Now, Miss Stirling, if I may introduce my staff officers—” he gestured toward the three men exchanging easy glances around the table. They were handsome, physically fit and well-heeled, as though each had graduated in recent years from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. “Second Lieutenants Easton and Crossley, and Lieutenant Durbridge; you’re likely to be seeing them about, along with a few other members of our patrol. We are ten in total.”

Josie gathered back her composure as each man offered a polite greeting before petting Winnie—who seemed quite taken with the lot of them—and stepping off to other parts of the room, until she was finally standing across the table from the colonel, who had stealthily gathered the large document and was rolling it into a tube.

“Yes, I’ve already met a few of your men—Sapper Mullins in particular. He stopped me at my own front gate. Refused to let me drive through with my van unless I showed him my identity card.”

“And did you show Sapper Mullins your card?” Fletcher asked as he slid the document into a large metal cylinder and screwed on the lid, all without taking his eyes from hers.

“I informed the young man that I own Nimway Hall and that I needn’t show him anything in order to enter my own property.”

“And—?” Fletcher frowned, his gaze hardening. “Did Mullins then allow you to pass through the gate without checking your identification?”

“He did not! Even after he planted himself in front of Bess and I threatened to run him over.”

”Who is this Bess?”

“My van.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Didn’t—?” What a dreadfully confounding man!

“Run over Sapper Mullins.”

“Of course, I didn’t!” How dare the arrogant man accuse her of such a... ah, then–that tucked away smile again—he was taunting her. “Because, Colonel, I didn’t want to bloody the front of my van.”

“Good. I shall write up Sapper Mullins this evening.” He slipped a propelling pencil from his breast pocket and made a brief note on a card.

Josie felt a guilty twinge, that she might be over-blowing the incident. “Do you mean to punish the man?”

“On the contrary, Miss Stirling, I shall commend him for his bravery in the face of danger.” He tucked the pencil back into his pocket and the card onto a stack of loose papers in a wire basket at the end of the table. “Now if you’ll excuse us, Miss Stirling, you can’t have known that you interrupted a critical planning meeting, and that we are very busy with the war.”

“You are busy with the war, Colonel?” The insult struck her like a slap to the face. “And I’m not? We’re not? Is that what you’re implying?”

That dark brow of his quirked. “I don’t believe I understand your—”

“You don’t understand? That you and your staff are meeting here in my conservatory, living under my roof, eating my food while the rest of us at Nimway Hall are merely out in the fields plowing, planting, bringing in the harvest, milking the cows, making cheese and jam, knitting socks and scarves, turning my badminton lawn into field crops so that your lot can plot and plan the war—”

“Miss Stirling—” he glanced across the room at his staff, who ducked their heads and begun busying themselves at various, unconvincing tasks, before turning back to her with those cool blue eyes. “Perhaps you and I can discuss the rules of engagement later tonight. In the library?”

“Oh, do we still have a library, Colonel? I’ve been gone four days, surely you’ve had time enough to remove the books to the cellar and install a munitions factory.”

He let her protest fall to the tabletop between them. “Shall we say ten o’clock, then?”

The colonel best learn who was in charge of Nimway Hall. “Half-ten.”

Josie threw him a look that she hoped was haughty, turned abruptly to leave, feeling the man’s gaze following her as she and Winnie strode toward the door, completely unaffected by the man, by his rudely imposing size, the conceit in his tone, least of all by the suspicion in his scandalously blue eyes.

* * *

Try as he might, Gideon couldn’t drag his attention away from the woman who was striding so imperiously toward the door, her lithe shoulders erect, head held high, the black dog prancing beside her, eyes raised in homage.

From the day they had driven into the forecourt of Nimway Hall, everyone on the estate had seemed mad about their mistress, dazzle-eyed with deference, near swooning with admiration over their Miss Josie. In spite of the glowing reports, Gideon had expected the lady farmer to look a bit more, well... like a farmer: fingernails cracked with dirt and wear, horse-faced, cheeks parched from too long in the sun, thick shoulders and a sturdy gait.

Miss Jocelyn Regina Stirling was anything but, her skin like peaches, with a spray of golden freckles across her high cheekbones, her limbs lean and athletic, blond hair out of sorts but silken as it escaped its bounds. And as she paused for a moment in the doorway and turned her implacably green gaze back to him, he drew a silent breath and set his jaw against her, accepting her challenge and dismissing his attraction as having been too long without a woman.

Without the right woman.

The very last thing he needed in the midst of this backwater posting was to waste precious time doing battle with the contentious lady of the manor. By all measures, the sort of woman who’d stick her nose into his business at every chance. He couldn’t let that happen, wouldn’t—not if he was to guard the most secret element of his mission, one known only to himself.

“That girl knows how to fill out a set of dungarees, Colonel, if you don’t mind my saying, sir.”

“I do mind, Crossley.” Minded the direction of his own thoughts even more. “And you’re a better man than that. Miss Stirling is the lady of Nimway Hall and will be treated with respect at all times. As will every person on the estate. I didn’t think I had to actually say that to the lot of you.”

To a man, they were younger than himself by at least five years, each graduating from one Oxbridge college or another just in time for war to be declared and their particular specialties seconded into the Royal Engineers. Good lads, fine lads, if a bit rowdy when not attending to the work of the moment. And at the moment their work was to site and build a secret Operational Base somewhere on or near the grounds of Nimway Hall, to then recruit and train members of Churchill’s newly-formed secret army of Auxiliary Units who would occupy the base as a resistance force against an invading German army—all without the locals learning the existence of those units or the location of the base during or after completion.

“Let’s begin where we left off before Miss Stirling arrived, gentlemen,” Gideon said, rolling out the large sketch of a map he’d concealed from the doubtlessly observant Miss Stirling. Her downward glance had been brief, but how could she not have recognized that the map on the table in front of them contained every detail of Nimway Hall and its grounds known in advance by the War Office. Stretching westward from the three farms of the lower fields, eastward up the hillside and through the ancient woods, north beyond the lake to another two farms and south to the boundaries of Balesborough village, with the eccentric Hall, its extensive stables, the old barn and scattered outbuildings at the center of its beating heart.

Surely she noticed, just as she surely must have noticed him staring at her with as much naked interest as Crossley had so crudely described. Just as surely as she was, even now, plotting some offensive against his command of her fiefdom, a battle that would endure for as long as Churchill’s Special Operations Executive required the use of Nimway Hall, whoever was posted here—which looked to be for the duration.

“Easton,” Gideon said, trying to shake off the woman’s influence over his thoughts, “you were reporting on the local topography.”

Easton returned to the table with Durbridge, drafting compasses in hand. “As I was saying, sir, the site that we choose for the Operational Base must be well-drained–this is Somerset, after all—and, because the excavation must be done by hand, quickly and in secret, it must be free of rocky outcroppings and occlusions.”

“We could hope for another badger sett like we dug outside of Minehead,” Crossley said, taking up a ruler. “Cut through that hillside of tunnels like a sword through butter.”

“Unfortunately for us, Crossley,” Gideon said, “hoping won’t get the job done.” He hadn’t yet been assigned to the Royal Engineers at the time; he’d joined the group as its leader only a month before and still felt like a fish out of water. He’d supervised the construction of exactly one Operational Base in that time, but as his CO had said when he offered the posting, it was that or nothing. Better than sitting around the war on his backside, warming a desk at Whitehall.

“What about using the ruins of that old tithe barn below the escarpment?” Durbridge asked, pointing to the ruins on the map.

“Too central and an attractive nuisance,” Gideon said, making a note beside the barn. “I watched for a time this morning and saw the evacuee children playing there, chasing rabbits.”

“Also true about both cattle sheds, sir,” Easton said, “abandoned, according to the groundskeeper, until after the war, but a playground for the children.”

“That,” Durbridge added, “and we can’t have a dozen men disappearing inside a cattle shed every night and not reappearing until the next morning. Someone would notice.”

“Miss Stirling would notice,” Gideon said. And he must do everything in his power to keep the woman out of their business. “The same is true of the stables, busier even than the dairy barn. We might look at the farms and the outbuildings to the west. Though they are doubtless just as busy and exposed. Anything else come to mind?”

"The grist mill,” Crossley said, leaning in close to read the tiny print. “Says here it’s in ruins. Worth a look. You remember, Durbridge—that first base we constructed just outside Exeter. Sited it in the gear room below the floor of an abandoned mill.”

“That was a brilliant find,” Durbridge said. “Removed the shaft and the workings, added plumbing, electricity, field phones, built an escape tunnel, supplied it, disguised the entrance with that trapdoor, trained the Aux Unit and Bob’s your uncle.”

Gideon caught an anomaly that had been hiding in plain sight, tapped the map with the point of his finger. “What about this rectangle here? Looks to be in the woods on a slight rise east of the Hall. Whatever it is, it’s been unused long enough not to warrant a note.”

“An old saw mill?” Durbridge removed his spectacles and bent down to inspect the rectangle. “Would make sense. Plenty of wind on this side of the hill to turn a blade. We may be in luck. May not have to sap like moles this time round.”

“Good then,” Gideon said as he rolled up the map. “I’ll check out the mysterious rectangle tomorrow afternoon while you survey the farms again and walk the perimeter. Decide who does what.”

“Durbridge and I will check out the farms,” Crossley said, heading back to his drafting table with a bit of a strut.

“And the farmers’ daughters, if I know you two,” Easton said with a laugh. “Sir, if anyone asks, do we tell them we’re on a walk-about?”

“Since we’re headquartered here in Somerset, gentlemen,” Gideon said, “our official cover should work for anyone asking. That we’re part of the Defense Chain Operations Task Force, surveying and siting the Taunton Stop Line.”

Crossley snorted. “Well, if that mouthful doesn’t choke the locals, nothing will.”

“Divide and distract, Mr. Crossley,” Gideon said, “one of the pillars of tradecraft. Learn that lesson and you’ll soon be able to hide in plain sight while you carry out the most critical of missions in broad daylight.” Just as he was doing.

“Truth is, sir, I thought by now I’d be using my Master’s in Civil Engineering to build bridges and cities, not hidey-holes for the SOE.”

“This war has altered everyone’s plans, Crossley.” He’d orchestrated his own post-graduate studies for just that purpose—as a career military officer, specializing in gathering intelligence. But the best-laid plans....

“Sir, what if we meet up with Miss Stirling in our progress?” Crossley asked, his judgment of the woman on point. “She’s bound to object—what then? What do we tell her?”

“Be respectful, obtuse, and then send Miss Stirling to me.” Gideon took a step away from the table and winced. He’d been standing too long, took a sharp breath. “That goes for all of you, gentlemen. Be respectful—”

“What, me too, sir?” Easton asked, “I’m a happily married man. Going to be a father in a few months! I’d never!”

“Of that, I am certain, Easton.” As certain as he was of Crossley working his charm on every woman in his path. He checked the wall clock. “Two hours until dinner. We’ll work the remainder of the day outlining tomorrow’s canvassing and setting up a grid. You need to log your routes in advance, then report the details of your findings when you return tomorrow. Include the names of any locals you might meet, notes on their attitudes, any resistance to your authority or undo curiosity about your presence.”

He purposely left his derby-handled cane hooked over the edge of the table and steeled himself for the walk across the marble floor toward the large old desk in the corner. If only to see how far he could travel without resorting to the limp that had plagued him since he first rose out of his recovery bed. Nearly four months ago, it was. Long past time the blasted thing should have healed and set him free to return to combat.

He managed a strong, regular stride for a dozen feet, and in his progress attempted to avoid a waste bin, mis-stepped around it, then over-compensated. A white-hot pain shot through his knee as he caught himself, straining tendon against bone, tasking his knee beyond its limit to hold him upright without grabbing the back of a chair.

He could feel his staff watching his struggle to steady himself. Even more galling was their pretense that they hadn’t noticed his humiliation; that they weren’t each wondering how the devil a man who couldn’t walk across a marble floor without the aid of a cane was going to manage a trek through the woods tomorrow in search of the mysterious structure on the map.

Same damned thing he was wondering about himself, same reason for welcoming such a challenge to his injured leg. No one would be watching his progress, judging him, assessing his worth to the war effort. A measured walk at his own pace, through a late September woodland in Somerset, that most bucolic of English counties, the jewel of England’s southwest, known for its lazy streams, its apple orchards, its cheese from the caves of Cheddar and scrumpy. A simple stroll compared to the terrain he’d covered in the struggle that had claimed the lives of three of his comrades, nearly cost him his own life and left him with a debilitating wound in his leg that cramped his back and stretched his patience.

Gideon worked his way to his desk and gripped the arms of the chair, positioned his leg straight in front of him and lowered himself onto the seat cushion, holding back the groan of relief because he’d heard himself groan too often.

Had suffered humiliation under his mother’s care while he remained delirious with fever—I love you, Son. You’ll come through this.

His sisters’ unfounded encouragement—You’ll be up and fighting again in no time, Brother, dear.

Watching helplessly while the soldiers being evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk were landed at Ramsgate Harbor.

The surgeons, his doctors—You need to let your body heal on its own, Gideon, or you’ll never return to a normal life.

He couldn’t imagine what kind of life that would be, so he’d worked even harder, vowing to recover in record time. You’re over-doing it, Gideon. You’ll do further damage.

And when he approached his Commanding Officer—Yes, Gideon, I see that you are able to walk across the room with a cane. But you can’t return to lead your unit. You know already that it was disbanded after Norway, the men redeployed to other units, on other missions.

“Besides,” his CO had said, over-kindly, “until you’re at full strength, you would be a danger to fellow agents on any operations behind enemy lines.”

“I’m not begging, sir,” Gideon remembered saying, “but I’ve got to do something for the war effort. I’m a soldier. I should have been helping evacuate Dunkirk. Instead I was sitting with my mother on the lawn like a derelict from a long ago war, no more helpful to my comrades than the bin man. Please, sir, give me a job. Anything.”

Though he realized now that he hadn’t truly meant ‘anything.’

“The map’s all set, Colonel,” Durbridge said, bending over the long table, “ready to mark out the grid.”

And here he was, a month later, mired in the banalities of the home front, living the life of a country squire, nanny to a pack of eager of school boys playing at soldier, the unwelcome guest of a most beguiling woman who needed taming.