Chapter Nine

All prospective SOE agents were warned about vivid dreams. In fact, all trainees slept two or more to a room, to discover if anyone talked in her sleep—especially in English, a dead giveaway on a mission.

Maybe it was sleeping in a real bed after so many nights on the Charcots’ hard sofa, but Maggie’s dreams that night were surreal and strange, a vision in which she saw Paige Kelly, the friend whose identity she’d borrowed for this mission.

But the Paige in her dream was her old self, although imprisoned in a long mirror, like Alice in the looking glass. She smiled. And Maggie smiled back, their eyes meeting in the glass. Mirror Paige held up one palm, as if in benediction. Maggie opened her mouth to speak, but nothing would come out. Paige smiled sadly; she understood, but couldn’t help.

Just as Maggie lifted her own hand to reach into the mirror, she woke.

She deliberately kept her eyes closed as she lay in the tangled sheets. She didn’t want to move, desperate to keep the connection she’d felt. But the thumps of doors closing, the faint sound of the elevator bell, then a room service trolley being pushed down the hall were enough to make the dream disappear. She opened her eyes reluctantly, seeing the day dawning red from the windows. She turned over and looked up. In the ceiling’s corner, she could see a small brown spider spinning a web and comforted herself by thinking of math—after all, the French mathematician Descartes’s inspiration for positions of points, coordinates, and the Cartesian plane had been a fly on the ceiling of his bedroom.

Maggie threw off the cover. Shivering in her cotton nightgown, she rose and walked to the windows, pushing aside the lined blackout curtains and then opening them as wide as she could to take a deep breath of fresh air.

It had rained again during the night. Looking down on Rue Cambon, she watched a line of nuns in black pass, their images reflected up from the wet pavement. A man with shoes resoled in wood clattered down the cobblestones, while in the distance a siren wailed.

Memories of the night before flashed before Maggie. While she was heartened by having learned the location of the Hess apartment, seeing a Frenchman murdered in the street, spending that much time around Nazis and collaborators, and hearing of Erica’s death had left a noxious taste in her mouth.

And, if she was honest with herself, she had to admit that, although she was happy for Sarah and Hugh, the news of their baby was still…unsettling. Now she knew that things between her and Hugh were really and truly over. She felt wistful—and also slightly relieved.

After a bath and breakfast of decent coffee and a croissant brought up on a tray, Maggie was ready, dressed in Nina Ricci—a lilac silk suit and matching hat, with a pointy Robin Hood brim and bright blue feather.

But before heading to the Hess flat, she still had a cover story to keep up. She’d booked an appointment for the showing of the new collections at the House of Ricci, one of the few couturieres still doing business in Paris.

She left from the Place Vendôme doors of the Ritz for 20 Rue des Capucines, sidestepping puddles on the street. It was only a short walk, and she was early, but there was already a crowd waiting outside the atelier: elegant women wearing Ricci designs of past seasons in tribute; photographers with heavy black cameras; the French film stars Suzy Delair, Danielle Darrieux, and Micheline Presle; and the inevitable gawkers.

The entrance was cordoned off by a velvet rope, where a stylish man with formidable black eyebrows was checking names off a list. Behind him, plastered to the wall, were posters of delicate paintings by Christian Bérard for a promised new Ricci perfume, Coeur-Joie, interspersed with posters featuring a Nazi flag crossed with the Tricolor and the words L’Europe contre Bolshivisme.

“Paige Kelly,” Maggie told the man with the clipboard when it was her turn.

He looked down the list, and back up at her. Then, to her relief, his frosty expression melted. “Welcome, Mademoiselle Kelly.” He nodded. “Please come in.”

She took a deep breath and entered the salon. A high-ceilinged space with a gray marble floor, the room was already hot and loud, filled with clients, department store buyers, salesgirls, and members of the press. The mirrored walls only added to the fun-house chaos and confusion as a pendulum clock kept time.

Around her, she saw women in smart suits and witty hats, holding crocodile purses. They burst into peals of laughter on seeing one another, embracing and giving double air kisses, careful not to smear their waxy lipstick. With fabric shortages in effect, hats were more important than ever. Maggie admired one in particular: a narrow-brimmed boater with a tiny emerald bird perched on a branch of flowers pinned to netting, seemingly just escaped from a silver birdcage. She inhaled their perfumes: jasmine, rose, civet, and ambergris, along with the scents of smoke, face powder, and, on one woman’s breath, the distinct aroma of brandy.

And she caught snippets of conversations: “You look ravishing, darling!” “How lovely to see you again!” “We’ll talk after the show…” “I hear she went to New York.” “Well, I heard—”

There were men in attendance, too. Those in suits were buyers for department stores in Italy, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and South America, Maggie guessed, or possibly journalists, but there were also uniformed Wehrmacht officers. Nazis looking for gowns for their wives back home or their Parisian mistresses? Perhaps both? Although Maggie had known in theory what the situation was in occupied Paris, seeing the reality continued to be shocking—the French mixing with Germans at a public event without shame, even with a certain friendliness. She straightened her spine, knowing the Brits would never be caught doing any such thing. Or would they?

The atelier boasted a sweeping marble staircase, its iron balustrade and railing made of twisting vines, with leaves and even the occasional thorn. The stairs’ plush steel-gray carpeting extended into a runway, lined by delicate silvery chairs arranged in rows. Maggie found her way to her seat, which had her name written in calligraphy on a tag tied with ribbon to the spindle-leg chair’s back.

“Welcome, mademoiselle.” A pretty salesgirl, dressed in a fitted black skirt and white blouse, handed her a small notebook and pencil. “Use this to check off the items you’re interested in.”

She accepted it in her gloved hand. “Thank you.” For the purposes of her mission, Maggie—who’d been aware of fashion but never as attuned to its specifics as Paige—had studied it during her downtime in Paris, exactly as she had once studied mathematics. It was far more fascinating than she’d anticipated, with relationships to news, history, and the arts she’d never realized before. The war had affected fashion, too—because of the fabric scarcities, hemlines were now shorter in both evening and day wear. In fact, no more than thirteen feet of cloth was permitted to be used for a coat and only a little over a yard for a blouse; no belt could be more than one and a half inches wide.

Is fashion in France an act of collaboration or an act of defiance? Maggie wondered. As with the ballet, the last thing the French wanted was for fashion to be moved to Berlin, to be run under German rules and regulations. And French women had vowed to remain chic and elegant, considering it a matter of national pride to maintain their looks, to show the Nazis that they couldn’t take away their beauty, confidence, and self-possession.

Maggie overheard the woman next to her, a patrician blonde, whisper to her neighbor, “I saw Reichsmarshal Goering on the Rue de la Paix this morning. He was coming out of his car with his baton. I hear it’s made of ivory and all the insignia are real diamonds and rubies!”

Hearing Goering’s name again, Maggie caught her breath.

The neighbor, the mirror image of the first, but brunette, replied, “I heard he bought his wife an eight-million-franc necklace.”

“Well, I was told he wants his wife to wear French couture, rather than German styles, in spite of all the propaganda about ‘degenerate Paris.’ My friend at Poiret told me he picks out the most lavish silk pajamas and lace gowns there.”

“I have a friend at Laroche who says the same—but swears they had them made in such a large size that it’s possible Goering’s keeping them for himself!”

As the women put their hats together and giggled, the clock ticked, and the crowd grew increasingly restless, even as flutes of Champagne were passed from silver trays. Finally, a woman with a glossy platinum-blond chignon and a triple strand of pearls as the only ornament to her severe black frock walked down the stairs, pausing on the next to last step. Instantly, the room hushed.

The woman smiled to her audience, then spoke in Italian-inflected French. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the House of Ricci.”

All applauded as the woman beamed, her arms opening. “I am Madame Ricci and today we’re presenting designs that we hope you will love as much as we do. They’ll show that, despite the times, French beauty and Parisian haute couture still thrive.”

Madame Ricci raised one plump arm toward the top of the staircase, and someone put a needle to a phonograph record. A Lucienne Boyer song began to play, and the first model descended. An elegant, long-legged young woman with an unseeing gaze, she glided down, her pelvis thrust forward and her chin high. She was wearing a flame-colored wool suit trimmed in black fur and a tiny black top hat, and held a large white card with the number 1. The audience watched intently as she promenaded down the aisle, then twirled, and posed. There were clicks and explosions of light as flashbulbs popped.

One by one, more young women holding numbered cards made their way down the staircase in dresses and suits of rich browns, blacks, and crimsons, all trimmed in furs—Persian lamb, mink, sable. The upcoming fall season’s silhouette was elongated and narrow, and, as a nod to utility, topped by last year’s hats. As more models walked down the stairs, there were oohs and aahs of appreciation, as well as furious scribbling in the little notebooks.

One model appeared in an evening gown of midnight velvet and bugle beads, with a froth of red, white, and blue chiffon peeping out from beneath the skirt. It was a poem of elegance—of specifically French elegance. Resistance! Maggie thought, with a jolt of delight.

Around her, the audience responded, crying out, “La, la!” and “Voyez c’est formidable!” One fat gentleman thumped his cane against the floor, while the German officers in attendance looked on impassively.

“Ah, this one should be on the cover of Vogue,” the woman next to Maggie whispered of the dress, her pencil scratching against the paper.

“Alas, French Vogue’s folded,” replied her neighbor.

“No!”

“It’s true—the editors refused to collaborate, and then the Nazis shut them down.”

The last outfit of the collection was a wedding dress, a white confection of lace and organza. As the model passed, a German officer in the front row reached out to touch the fabric, as if the young woman were a mere walking mannequin, not a living being.

Maggie studied it, impressed by the beauty of the image and by the technique and hours of stitching it must have taken to construct. But did she want it? Could she see herself, someday, wearing a bridal gown, walking down an aisle—or going to a courthouse in a simple suit? Marriage was, after all, most young women’s life goal. And yet, the image left Maggie cold. That’s because you need to be in love first, dummy.

When the parade was over, Maggie wrote a few scribbles in her notebook, for appearances’ sake, then, out of habit, stuck the pencil through her bun.

The shopgirl reappeared. “May we help you with anything, mademoiselle? Did you see anything you like?”

“The wedding dress was lovely,” Maggie replied, voice wistful. Don’t be a fool, Hope. “But, alas, not for me,” she added as she made her way out. Maybe someday…She tried to picture who might be waiting for her at the end of the aisle. Durgin? John? Someone she had yet to meet?

First, though, I need to find Elise. And she shook her head, as if to clear it of such unprofessional longings.

And the best place to start is the Hess family’s apartment.

Sarah had left the Hotel Crillon the night before with a feeling of dread and dismay. The evening had been a disaster.

As soon as the driver dropped her off at the flat she shared with Hugh near the Palais Garnier, she decided she was too easy a target there. She made her way instead to the Opéra House. In the pale moonlight and blue-painted streetlights of the blackout, she let herself in by the stage door. She had the heavy black bag slung over one shoulder.

In the women’s locker room, she had changed quickly out of her evening clothes and back into her dress of the day before, along with raincoat and scarf, rubbing at the red welts the bag had left on her shoulder. She gave the middle finger to the portrait of Pétain, then lay down on one of the low benches. But she couldn’t sleep. Horrific images of Hugh with Fortner haunted her.

In the morning, before any of the staff or dancers arrived, she’d made her way swiftly to the Hôtel Ritz. She avoided the main, German-guarded Place Vendôme entrance, arriving instead via the French-only Rue Cambon doors.

“I’d like to speak to Mademoiselle Paige Claire Kelly,” she told the tiny elderly man at the desk. He was nearly hidden behind an urn of orchids. “My name is Madame Sabine Severin.”

“Of course, madame.” The little man picked up the telephone receiver and dialed the room; after the seventh ring, he hung up and shook his head. “I’m afraid Mademoiselle Kelly is not here now.”

“Merci.” Sarah gritted her teeth. “Do you happen to know when Mademoiselle will return?”

The clerk shook his head, looking truly regretful. “No, I’m sorry, madame.”

“May I leave this for her?” The dancer slipped the weighty bag from her shoulder, placing it on the marble countertop while keeping one hand on it possessively.

“Of course, madame.” He wrote out a label—Pour Mademoiselle P. Kelly—then affixed it with a ribbon. “Would you like to leave a note to go with it?”

“No,” Sarah replied. “No, thank you—she’ll know what it is.”

“Should I add your name to the label, madame? So she’ll know who it’s from?”

Sarah didn’t want to leave anything incriminating with the bag. It was far too dangerous. “No, thank you. She’ll know.” She swayed, feeling a wave of nausea pass over her.

“Is something wrong, madame? You look distressed.”

“I’m fine.” Sarah straightened her spine, pressed her shoulders down, and lifted her chin, as if onstage. “Please make sure she receives it.”

“Yes, madame—I’ll keep an eye out for Mademoiselle Kelly.” The man lifted the bag. “It’s heavy,” he remarked, smiling. “What do you have in there? Diamond tiaras? Ruby necklaces? Gold bars, perhaps?”

“Something like that.”

High on an exposed hilltop stood the ancient stone convent of the Filles de la Charité, an order of nuns devoted to caring for the mentally retarded, epileptic, and incurably ill. Besides the sixteen sisters, there were forty female patients in an adjoining infirmary.

The convent was outside Paris; in fact, the nearest farm was a half-hour walk, the village and the train station another hour’s walk on top of that. It seemed a world away from the Occupation.

The convent was the place Elise Hess had immediately thought of as a place of sanctuary when she’d been brought from Berlin to Paris against her will by SOE. They’d intended to take her back to England. But she’d both outwitted and outrun the British agents, and had ended up, miraculously, on this hilltop with the sisters.

It had been three months since she’d arrived at the convent, and Elise was fitting in as the novice Mademoiselle Eleanor—a young woman contemplating taking the vows of a nun. She dressed simply, not in a habit, as the sisters and the Mother Superior did, but in a plain dark blue dress with an apron. She wore the same thick-soled black shoes and baggy cotton stockings as the nuns, and a white linen veil covered her head, disguising her short hair, which had been shaved at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Before the war, Elise had aspired to become a nun. She’d never taken the actual vows, though: she’d liked men too much. She’d been a pediatric nurse at Charité Hospital in Mitte, Berlin, working with St. Hedwig’s Father Licht in the fight against the Reich’s murder of the sick, and the physically and mentally disabled.

But that seemed centuries ago, although the women she and the sisters cared for so lovingly had the same diseases and issues that would have them exterminated in Nazi Germany. Here, the women were treated with love and respect. At least for now; with the Occupation, Elise had a feeling that it was only a matter of time before the “undesirables” here were rounded up and taken away to be gassed, just as they had been in Berlin.

Before she went into the convent’s dining hall for lunch, Elise perched on the low stone wall of the courtyard, swinging her feet and enjoying a few minutes of privacy and silence after a long shift at the infirmary. As the warm sun peeked from behind a heavy cloud and a goldfinch’s song pierced the sweet-smelling air, she prayed, thanking God for allowing her to be useful in such a peaceful place.

One by one, the sisters arrived, walking past the walls of the courtyard. They were women from eighteen to eighty-nine, all dressed in bluish gray habits with white wimples. “Mademoiselle Eleanor!” she heard Sister St. Felix call. “We missed you at Mass this morning!”

“I know, I know!” Elise hopped down from the wall and brushed off her skirt, falling into step with her friend. Sister St. Felix was only a few years older than Elise, twenty-five and plump, with daffodil-yellow hair that occasionally sprang free in tendrils from underneath her veil.

“Wish I could skip early morning Mass some days,” grumbled Sister Marthe, behind them. Just past forty, Marthe was lanky and gaunt, with large eyes, large nose, and a pronounced jaw that some might call handsome.

“Hush,” Sister St. Felix warned. “Mother Superior said, ‘Let her rest as much as possible, after everything she’s been through.’ ”

Marthe had seniority at the convent and wasn’t pleased to be told what to do. “And what exactly has she been through?” She narrowed her eyes at Elise. “No one will say!” When Sister St. Felix glared, she grumpily amended, “Ah, never mind, I know—don’t ask.”

Sister St. Felix pulled open the heavy, creaky door. Inside was a large room with a cool stone floor and whitewashed walls hung with paintings of saints and wooden crucifixes.

In the dining room, the women all sat at a long, low wooden table, as the Mother Superior, Mère St. Antoine, pressed her palms together and recited the prayer, her rosy eighty-something countenance and deep brown eyes framed by her veil. When she finished and they had bowed their heads and crossed themselves, Sister de l’Annonciation and Sister Marie-Bernard began to serve lunch.

Fresh food was far more plentiful in the countryside than in Paris, so lunch consisted of slices of thick brown bread with sweet butter and fresh cheese, and steaming bowls of ersatz coffee made from chicory. After weeks on such fare, Elise was looking much healthier, and feeling stronger. Her angles were smoothing out, her collarbones not as sharp, and her face more pink than pale.

When Elise had first arrived at the convent, Mère St. Antoine had welcomed her and listened to her story with tears in her eyes. Then she showed the younger woman to what would be her new home: a whitewashed room with a crucifix and a palm frond tucked behind it, and a narrow bed covered with lavender-scented linens. For the first time in what seemed like forever, Elise began to feel like a human, not a hunted animal. While she was still not out of danger, here she had miraculously found a reprieve.

The next day, Mère St. Antoine had presented, without comment, false papers, giving her a French identity—Eleanor Blanc, twenty-four, from Paris. Elise received them, also without comment, knowing whoever had provided them did so at terrible personal risk. “In my past life, I really did want to become a nun,” she’d told the Mother Superior.

“This is a great blessing, my child,” the older woman had replied. “To see what life as a sister is really like. And now, especially since you have medical training, I would like you to meet our enfants.”

The infirmary was adjacent to the convent. In actuality, the afflicted weren’t necessarily children but rather females from five to ninety-three, brought to the convent by Assistance Publique, and all called enfants by the nuns with affection. And Elise went to work, thankful for the opportunity to be useful.

One of her favorite patients grew to be Thérèse, a woman in her seventies with high cheekbones and a brusque manner, who’d once been a telephone operator. Her days were spent in animated conversation on an imaginary telephone, with imaginary friends. When Elise came into her room with her pills and a glass of water, she would say into the pretend receiver, “Excuse me, I must ring off now.”

Today, Thérèse eyed Elise warily. “Yes, but Mademoiselle Eleanor is here now,” she whispered into her hand. “And what we’re talking about does not concern her. I shall ring you back when I can.”

As Thérèse swallowed her pills obediently, Mère St. Antoine found Elise. “When you’re finished, I’d like to speak with you, child. I’ll wait in the hall.”

“Yes, Mère.”

When Elise was finished and Thérèse had resumed her “telephone call,” Elise went to find the older woman, who stood waiting with a serious face in the stone passage. “Walk with me, child,” the Mother Superior said, leading the way out to the herb garden.

They trod the well-worn dirt paths between the sage and rosemary, passing a lichen-covered statue of Mary, her graceful palms extended in supplication. The sun had climbed higher and shone hotter, although the clouds were still heavy and the air thickly humid.

“You have been with us a few months now.”

“Yes, Mère.”

“We have kept your confidences and provided you with a new life.”

“Yes, Mère.” Elise felt fear at her throat. Was she in danger of being discovered? Would the nuns give her up to the authorities? Would she need to be on the run again?

But the Mother Superior continued, “You have proven yourself. We know your secrets. Now it’s time you knew some of ours.”

Elise was confused. “Mère St. Antoine?”

“We need your help.”

The clock in the church tower rang the hour. Not only had it not been reset to German time but its time didn’t actually correspond to standard measure. Instead, the white-faced clock moved its hands in ancient and mysterious ways—sometimes slower, sometimes faster—obeying its own abiding rhythm rather than the regulations of Berlin and Paris.

“Of course, anything I can do.”

They reached the small chapel at the edge of the convent’s land; next to it stood the morgue.

At the door, the Mother Superior knocked in a complicated pattern, then took a heavy iron ring from her pocket, chose a large key, and pushed it into the lock. She turned it, and the rusty hinges groaned. “Follow me.”

They went down a cool and damp stone corridor to another room with a lock. This time, the nun used a different key, a smaller one, and opened the door.

Inside was a narrow bed and, on it, a sleeping man. It had been so long since Elise had seen a man other than Father Allard, who gave them communion every Sunday, she gasped.

The man was young, in his twenties, with badly cut hair. A coarse, dark beard covered his face. He woke and scrambled to sit up. Terror flared in his eyes as they darted from the older woman to the younger.

“Shhh,” the Mother Superior soothed. “It is only I—and this young woman is Mademoiselle Eleanor. She can be trusted. She’s a trained nurse and I wish her to look at your wound.

“This is Royal Air Force Captain Augustine Preston,” Mère St. Antoine told Elise. “The captain was shot down not far from here by the Luftwaffe. A few townspeople, at great risk, brought him to us, and we’ve done our best to treat the injuries he sustained from the crash. But he’s not responding as we would like. It’s impossible for us to call a doctor—we don’t trust the one who attends the enfants, and so we implore you to do your best.”

The captain’s breathing calmed and he managed in English-accented French, “Thank you, Mère St. Antoine. How do you do, Mam’zelle Eleanor?”

Elise nodded, approaching the bed. “What is your affliction, Captain Preston?”

“Gus, please. Captain Preston is my father.” The Englishman pulled off the sheet, then rolled up his pajama trouser leg.

Gently, Elise removed the bandages around his calf and examined the wound underneath. She didn’t like what she saw. “It’s infected.” She put her hand to his forehead. He was hot with fever.

“We need medicine,” she told the Mother Superior. “Morphine for the pain.”

“Medication is in short supply these days, my child—morphine is impossible to find.”

“I—I can perhaps use some herbs from the garden. But, compared to real medicine…”

“I will leave him in your care.”

Elise looked to the Englishman and gave her most reassuring smile. “I’ll do my best.” This wasn’t the first time she had cared for a downed RAF pilot in hiding behind enemy lines; she had hidden and nursed one back to health in Berlin.

She walked out with the Mother Superior. When they were through the two doors and back on the path, the older woman looked to Elise. “Will he die?” she asked bluntly.

Elise chose her words carefully. She knew Mère St. Antoine had done her best. “Infection has set in his wound, and it isn’t easy to treat at this stage. He needs a specialist.”

“And that is impossible.”

“All I can tell you is what I told him—I will do my best.”

“Thank you.” Mère St. Antoine placed one wrinkled hand to her heart. “And I will pray.”

When people asked Diana Lynd what she was doing for the war effort, she invariably answered, “A boring little job on Baker Street.” Lynd was a statuesque woman with a quintessentially English sense of style. She was always dressed in impeccably tailored suits in shades of caramel, toffee, and cream, with a different brooch each day; today’s was a golden bird in a pearl-and-ruby cage. She wore soft suede court shoes, and her honey-colored hair was rolled up at the nape of her neck. She gave off the distinctive fragrance of Jicky perfume and cigarette smoke, and her accent was clipped, with cut-glass consonants.

But her job was more important than she ever let on. When she was hired in 1940, she’d been recruited as a secretary to Colonel Harold Gaskell in SOE’s F-Section, charged with running operations in France. She had the ideal qualifications for the support staff position: she spoke fluent English, French, and German, and had a keen knowledge of geography. In her late thirties, unmarried, with no dependents, she’d stated on the official paperwork that she had no political views. She had private means. And she was exacting and tireless in her work.

By 1941, she’d become Colonel Gaskell’s “Girl Friday” and an integral part of F-Section. When the opportunity arose for her to play a larger role in SOE, she grabbed it. In France, as the war went on and more Frenchmen were sent to work for the Reich, it was increasingly perilous for young male agents to travel around the country; they were often arrested and searched, making capture more likely. SOE’s controversial solution, approved by Winston Churchill himself, was to send female agents abroad, despite the fact that women were technically barred from combat by the Geneva Convention.

Lynd was a pragmatist; she believed sending women abroad as agents made sense. Women were as capable as any man, as she well knew. And so she put herself forward to be overseer of F-Section’s female spies, and Colonel Gaskell eventually agreed.

She recruited women to be possible agents, oversaw their training, and pored over their evaluations. If she assessed them as up to the job, she would officially enlist them, only then revealing the clandestine and dangerous nature of what they were being asked to do.

If they agreed to take the job, she gave them their undercover identities. She always accompanied them to the airfield in the south of England when they departed and personally made the final inspections of their disguises—no English cigarettes, all clothing labels French, no incriminating cinema tickets or chocolate wrappers in their pockets.

The women, often much younger, saw her as their leader. And she thought of the agents she oversaw as her “girls.”

Lynd had finished lunch at Fortnum & Mason, where she dined every day unless she was meeting friends at Claridge’s. She returned to 64 Baker Street, an anonymous gray limestone building not far from Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address and Regent’s Park, only one of the many unremarkable SOE offices scattered around London’s Marylebone neighborhood. Because of lack of space in Whitehall, Baker Street and its surrounding area had become home for SOE, and several buildings had been fitted with discreet plaques reading INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU. While that was considered off-putting enough for the general public, the staff and those in the know called it the Firm, the Org, or the Racket, and its employees were known as the Baker Street Irregulars, in honor of Sherlock Holmes’s young informants.

The Baker Street offices were shabby and dimly lit, with SOE agents passing through, often swearing poetically in French and smoking stubby Gauloises. The reception room was small, with only one window and a low ceiling. When Lynd arrived, the receptionist, a plain young woman dressed in an ATS uniform, sporting a fat pimple on her chin, said, “This just arrived for you, Miss Lynd. By motorcycle courier from Station 53a.”

Lynd nodded and accepted the large envelope. She made her way down the narrow hall to her tiny office, heels tapping. Inside, she unpinned her hat, then patted her hair into shape in a Venetian mirror she’d brought from home that hung behind the door. The window, with slatted blinds, looked out on a brick wall. The room was shabby but immaculate, with a banged-up metal desk, on which Lynd had a row of flip-flop card indexes, placed next to a silver-framed picture of the King.

Lynd settled herself at her wooden desk chair, opening the envelope and scrutinizing the missives inside. They were decrypts from Station 53a in Grendon Underwood.

Her cool exterior belied the stab of fear she felt. Lynd had the ominous feeling that F-Section’s agent Erica Calvert, known as TRV, was compromised.

When Maggie Hope, who’d worked as a receptionist in the office for a time in January, had alerted her and Colonel Gaskell to the missing security checks, he wasn’t concerned. “Tell Agent Calvert to be more careful next time!” he’d bellowed, putting the spy’s mistake down to stress and exhaustion.

Lynd had done just that. However, as time had gone on and more messages had come to her with the worrying red stamp, she became increasingly concerned about one of her “girls.” Now the latest decrypt read:

CALL SIGN TRV

20 JUNE 1942

AM SAFELY INSTALLED IN PARIS STOP WILL COMMENCE BROADCASTS AS SCHEDULED STOP BAR LORRAINE STILL SECURE OVER

While the message was unexceptional, at the bottom, stamped in red ink, were the words SECURITY CHECK MISSING. Lynd stared.

Again, there was every indication that Agent Calvert had been captured. And now, the message mentioned a specific place, Bar Lorraine. If the Gestapo knew about the café, any and all SOE agents who went there would inevitably be compromised.

She carried the communiqué to Colonel Gaskell’s office.

“What the devil is it now?” he rumbled from behind his paper-stacked desk when she knocked on his closed door. A short, round man with thinning pale hair, Colonel Harold Gaskell had a fleshy, shining face, red with rosacea. Although he’d served in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps as a doctor at the war’s outbreak, he’d been evacuated from Dunkirk in early June 1940 and posted to London. Despite the fact that he was in charge of F-Section, he had no firsthand knowledge of, or training in, guerrilla warfare.

“Ah, Miss Lynd,” Gaskell amended in a milder tone on seeing her. “What do you have there?”

“Another decrypt from Agent Calvert, Colonel. She’s missed the security check yet again, and one of our girls at 53a caught it. The message says she’s in Paris now and that Bar Lorraine is still operational.”

“Good, good.” Gaskell ran his hands through what was left of his hair.

“Sir, she left off her security check.”

“She’s probably hurrying to use the radio and sign off.”

Lynd spoke carefully as she handed him the decrypt. “But, sir, we’ve already admonished her a number of times—”

Gaskell looked it over, gnawing on his left index finger. “Miss Lynd, do I need to explain yet again the realities of being an agent? It’s nothing like the classroom. Who thinks about a security check when the Nazis are in hot pursuit?”

Lynd bit her tongue. She knew Colonel Gaskell had gotten his job through the old boy network, because he was an Eton alumnus. She felt he was woefully underprepared for the responsibility.

“Don’t think too much, Miss Lynd!” She heard the unspoken words: I still haven’t signed off on those papers you need.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about Calvert’s package?”

“She didn’t mention it, sir.”

“I received word from the top brass that package is more urgent than ever. We must recall her—now. Have Raoul give her word and get her back on the next Lysander. Let’s see, the next full moon, that’s—?”

“In a week, sir.”

“So, let’s get on with it then. Get her and her package back to Blighty posthaste.”

“Sir, if her radio is indeed compromised and if we send them a message about the package, that may alert them to something she might have hidden—”

“Zounds, woman, stop your fussing!” Gaskell pounded a fist on his desk for emphasis. “Get Calvert on that plane! That’s an order!”

Lynd wrote out a message to be sent to Raoul—code name for Jean-George Dubois, Air Movements Officer for SOE, known in France as Jacques Lebeau.

But she did so reluctantly, with a growing feeling of dread. What had happened to Agent Calvert? Not acknowledging even the possibility that an agent could have been compromised and captured was a horrible mistake, heading toward an even more tragic end.

Still, Lynd followed her orders. She had to. She didn’t think Colonel Gaskell was stupid, not exactly. Unburdened by brains was how she thought of him and men of his ilk in the privacy of her own mind. And yet, Gaskell held total power over her.

She had lived a luxurious life in Bucharest. Raised by English nannies, she’d been brought up speaking French, English, and German, in addition to Romanian. But by the 1930s, Fascism had risen to power, and the ultranationalist anti-Semitic movement, the Iron Guard, seized control of the government. In 1937, Miriam Rose Horowitz, age thirty-three, had fled to England—and then, on September 3, 1939, England declared war. By the end of that year, Romania had become an ally of Nazi Germany, and Miriam Horowitz, now known as Diana Lynd, was a citizen of Romania—what Britain now considered a “hostile territory.” To avoid being sent to an internment camp, she hid the country of her birth.

One of the few people who knew Lynd’s true identity was Harold Gaskell. She needed the colonel to keep her secret safe. She needed him for protection. And, as she was in the process of applying for British citizenship, she needed his support of her petition. And so her hands were tied. If Gaskell lost faith in her, she could easily lose the opportunity for British citizenship—and face imprisonment in an enemy internment camp.

And if the situation wasn’t fraught enough, Lynd had even more incentive not to question Colonel Gaskell, for she had, illegally, contacted high-ranking German authorities at the beginning of the war. While she and her mother had escaped to London in ’37, their Jewish cousins, trapped in Romania, were in grave danger. Lynd had intervened on their behalf, making an extraordinary venture to Holland a year later, when she heard they’d been threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. She had traveled alone through Nazi-occupied Holland and into Belgium to bargain for their freedom. A large amount of money had changed hands, and they were saved from the camp.

While she had had absolutely no contact with the Germans afterward, that one incident, if exposed, would have landed her in grave trouble. And Colonel Gaskell knew about her dealings with the Nazis, too. He knew everything. And so she said nothing to challenge his authority. Even against her better judgment.

Looking down at her delicate gold watch for the time, she noticed it had stopped. She took it off and began to wind it, relieved when she could hear its gentle ticking again.

Leaving the Rue Cambon side of the Ritz, Sarah pulled a scarf over her hair and tied it under her chin. She put on sunglasses, then took the Métro—doubling back three times—to the Marché aux Fleurs, a flower market by the Quai de la Corse on the Île de la Cité in the shadow of the twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral. It was the best place she could think of to lose a tail. The market consisted of rows of cast-iron Art Nouveau pavilions, near to bursting with cascades of cut blooms, flowering tree branches, fresh greenery, surrounded by tree-lined walkways. The air was filled with the fresh fragrance.

Despite the scattered raindrops, men in worn shirts with rolled sleeves, flannel trousers, and suspenders sold a seemingly infinite variety of plants. Beautiful, fragile, ephemeral flowers were the one commodity so perishable that Germans couldn’t ship them home. And so fuchsia azaleas in clay pots were for sale next to tin buckets of crimson and lemon roses. Sarah walked past rows of cut flowers, unseeing.

A man was following her. When she stopped to sniff a poppy, he stopped as well. In her peripheral vision, she noted he was trim and athletic, well dressed in a dark suit and snap-brim hat, with the posture and mannerisms of a German. She wandered the aisles, seemingly idly shopping for flowers, but watching him closely. Wherever she went, he followed.

Sarah knew it was over. She broke and ran, weaving between shoppers, pushing over vases full of flowers to slow him down. Water splashed across the pavement; her sunglasses fell off. The man swore and gave chase, hurdling over the upended buckets.

As merchants yelled and shoppers looked on in horror, her pursuer shouted, “Stop! Gestapo!” and pulled a Luger from inside his suit jacket.

Sarah turned a hard corner and made eye contact with one of the vendors, a swarthy, square man with thick, hairy forearms. He nodded, and she slipped into his stall, crouching behind tiered buckets of flowers.

“Where did she go?” the German demanded of the man and the customers, gun in hand. “Wo ist sie?”

Everyone remained mute.

“Wo ist sie?” the German insisted.

The vendor met his glare with stony silence. The rest looked down and shuffled their feet.

Finally, in frustration, the German kicked over a stand holding cups of lavender in frustration, then ground the wet blooms under his black boots. Muttering profanities, he made one more loop through the marché before stomping off.

The vendor watched him go. When the coast was clear, he nodded to Sarah, crouching behind the bank of flowers.

“Thank you, monsieur,” she said, picking a pink rose petal out of her hair as she rose and turned to go.

His dark face creased in a sad smile. “Give ’em hell, mademoiselle.”

Bar Lorraine, on an anonymous side street, was deserted. The room was shadowy and narrow; the bottles behind the dark wood bar were empty. The cracked tile floor was crowded with small square tables. The owner, Marco Mayeux, was cleaning for the afternoon and evening ahead; the bentwood chairs were up on the marble bistro tables as he mopped the floor. Mayeux was somewhere in his seventies, with tiny, round eyeglasses, a coarse mustache, and a shirt buttoned to the top under a gray hand-knit sweater vest. Suddenly noticing the quiet, he stopped cleaning.

“Delphine?” he called to his wife, who often worked with him. Usually she was chattering away, or singing along to the wireless. But the café remained silent. “Delphine, where are you?” Shoving the mop back into the bucket with a splash of dirty water, he wiped his hands on his smudged apron.

He found her in the kitchen, bound to a chair and gagged. Two SS officers holding Walther pistols towered over her. A long-legged and elegant German in civilian clothes perched on a stool nearby. “Gestapo,” the man said by way of laconic explanation.

Mayeux, stunned, looked from his wife’s terrified eyes to those of the seated man.

“Monsieur Marco Mayeux.” The German lit a cigarette. “You and your lovely wife are peaceful, law-abiding citizens, are you not?”

“Of—of course, sir.” The man’s voice was tight with fear.

“You have no contact with the so-called Resistance?”

The blood left Mayeux’s face. “No.”

“You do not run a letter drop for British terrorists?”

“N-no.”

“You lie.” The German looked thoughtful. “I know for a fact you collaborate with the English terrorists, with one of their Paris networks.” He looked to the men. “Oh, why prolong this? I need to return to the office.” He waved the hand with the cigarette, creating an arc of smoke. “You may proceed.”

One SS officer shot Delphine and then Mayeux in the head.

“You,” the seated man said to the first gunman. “You’re his cousin, from Aix. You’ll be running the café now.”

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer.” The gunman fingered the long, ragged scar on his cheek.

“You,” the officer said to the second. “You’ll stay in the back, with the guns.”

“Yes, sir! But—won’t the British agents expect to find him?” He pointed at Mayeux’s corpse with the snub tip of his Walther.

Von Waltz stood, tossed his cigarette to the floor, then crushed it under his heel. “Not if they’ve never been to Bar Lorraine before. You’re the cousins, called in to take care of everything while they’re away. Everything.”

“When do we start?”

“Why, you already have,” von Waltz answered, brushing ash from his long black leather coat. He gestured to a dirty apron hung from a wooden peg. “No time like the present!”