by Wilbur Smith
Saffron shook her head. “Not at all. I grew up among African tribes . . . Their idea of the world is like those Indians. They see more than we do.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Doherty said. “You ride, you shoot, you understand native people. I’ve got to admit, I didn’t expect that. Most English girls look at me like I’m some kind of dumb cowboy straight out of a movie.”
“Well, this Kenyan girl knows how you feel. And it’s funny, we grew up on different sides of the world, but so much of what you said about your ranch is just as true of our estate. We’re high up, with huge skies and red earth and wild animals . . . though I dare say you don’t have quite so many elephants, or zebras, or giraffes.”
“Oh, we did. But I shot ’em all.”
As Saffron was laughing, Doherty looked at his watch. “Say, is that the time? I got Czechs and Norwegians waiting for me. OK, so Czechoslovakia is east of Germany and, ah, south of Poland. Now, where’s Norway?”
“Half way between here and Russia, long and thin, runs along the North Atlantic from the Baltic to the Arctic.”
“Got it . . . Catch you later!”
Then he was gone. Saffron lay back in bed. All of a sudden she was feeling much better.
•••
Several weeks had gone by since her ordeal and Saffron was fully recovered. Meanwhile, Danny Doherty’s fact-finding mission to Arisaig seemed to be lasting a long time. He swore to Saffron that it was business.
“I got new orders. They don’t want me just to observe the training. They want me to do it, too. Get a real feel for how it works.”
Saffron frequently found herself running across the bleak but lovely hillsides with the tall, rangy American beside her, or shooting with him at tin cans dragged on strings by pulley up and down one of the local hillsides, or plunging into the icy blackness of Loch Morar, the deepest and, she was convinced, eeriest body of inland water in all the British Isles.
His toughness, athleticism and marksmanship came as no surprise to her. What else would one expect from a real, live cowboy? But what impressed her more was the understated but razor-sharp intelligence he kept hidden away behind his “aw-shucks” facade. It wasn’t just that he shone in all their classroom work. He approached any task he was asked to perform, and managed to get others to work with him in the way he wanted, without them even realizing that he was taking charge, which suggested a shrewd, perceptive mind.
One of their instructors was a young Oxford graduate called Gavin Maxwell. His mother was the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, and his father was a baronet, whose family home was on the far southwest coast of Scotland. Maxwell was a fount of knowledge about the country and its wildlife.
“It’s a thousand feet down to the bottom,” he’d told Saffron as they stood on the loch shore one morning, with the water, the massive lowering hills all around and the sky itself looking like a vast black and white photograph, so absolute was the absence of color. “They say there’s a monster at the bottom that makes the one in Loch Ness look like a tiddler by comparison.”
From that moment on Saffron discovered that she could not shake the mental image of a great, prehistoric sea creature lurking in the stygian depths. She was beset by the kind of silly, irrational fear that she had always supposed that other, weaker females might fall prey to, but never her.
Danny, however, had other, more mundane concerns on his mind.
“Does the sun ever shine here?” he asked as they were led out for physical training on another miserable morning, with the rain blowing horizontally into their faces by a freezing wind off the sea. As he wiped away the water dripping from his hair and eyes, he was clearly a man who was missing the heat, sun and clear dry air of Wyoming.
“Very occasionally,” Maxwell had replied. “And when it does, a national holiday is declared.”
•••
Danny was billeted in Arisaig House, while Saffron had gone back to her base at Garramore. The hours of training were long and arduous, so there was little time or energy to spare for socializing, and any carousing that did go on happened in a back room at the Morar Hotel. This modest establishment had the only decent bar for miles around, but it closed at nine on weekday evenings, by which time the Baker Street trainees had barely finished their day’s work, and was not open on Sundays.
Jimmy Young, realizing that his people needed to let off steam, had persuaded the hotel’s proprietress, Mary Macdonald, to make special arrangements for Baker Street staff and trainees, and keep that room supplied with as much whisky and beer as was required to restore life to tired minds and aching limbs. The local police agreed to turn a blind eye to the goings-on at the hotel, which were mild compared to the constant shooting, fighting and exploding taking place during daylight hours. The Morar Hotel became the place where the future secret agents went to let down their hair.
One evening in late May, Danny borrowed a car from the Arisaig House garage and drove to Garramore, where he asked for Saffron.
She appeared at the door with a smile that suggested she was surprised to see him, but in a nice way. “Why, if it isn’t Lieutenant Doherty of the United States Navy!” she said. “Have you come to inspect us?”
He gave a rueful half-smile. “I just got my marching orders. They want me back in London, writing up my report.”
The joy was wiped from Saffron’s face. “When will you be leaving?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Oh . . .” Saffron was alarmed by the sudden jolt that had hit her, like a physical blow to her stomach: a feeling of shock, disappointment and, she realized, loss. “I’ll miss you,” she said, seeing no reason to pretend otherwise.
“Yeah, me too . . .” Danny looked downcast, but then he bucked himself up. “Anyway, seeing as this is my last night, I was wondering if you would consent to join me in a farewell drink, down at the hotel.”
She smiled. “That would be lovely. But . . .” she looked down at her muddy khaki blouson and trousers, “I’m still in battledress and army boots. Maybe I should get changed.”
“No, you’re fine as you are. And I know how long you girls take to get dressed in the evening. Let’s go.”
They passed through the gates of the Garramore House grounds and onto the narrow lane that would take them onto the Morar road. A shaft of dazzling sunshine suddenly sliced through the car and it made Danny brake hard.
He shaded his face with his hand. “Well, will you look at that,” he murmured. “I’ll be damned if it ain’t blue sky.”
“There might be a nice sunset this evening, though we won’t see it from the road,” Saffron said. “We need to be down by the shore. Camusdarach’s only a couple of minutes away. Let’s stop off there on the way to Morar. It won’t take a minute to look at the sky. And you know what the hotel’s like. People stay there half the night, so we’re not going to miss them.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Danny turned toward the tiny seaside village of Camusdarach, which was half a mile away. They were familiar with the beach because it was one of the places where their instructors liked to take them for the regular long-distance, open-water swims that were one of the most arduous aspects of their training. To Baker Street trainees, the words Camusdarach Beach conjured up a sensation of convulsive shivering, heaving lungs, guts full of saltwater and exhausted limbs, blue with cold.
It wasn’t a happy place, but it was the best that Danny and Saffron could manage. He parked the car by the side of the road that ran through the village and they began the walk across the seashore landscape, so typical of the region: lonely, wind-blasted trees dotted about a heath of sandy soil held in place by clumps of grass and heather and broom, with thickets of gorse here and there, and streams running down to the sea. Up ahead a line of tall dunes blocked off the way to the beach and prevented them seeing the setting sun.
They strolled in companionable silence and then Danny said, “Wait a second, I want to show you something . . .”
He was wearing a brown leather flying jacket. He snapped open the chest pocket, fished out his wallet and extracted a photograph. “This is Meg. She’s my girl, I guess . . .”
Saffron frowned, uncertain why he had chosen this, of all moments, to reveal that he had a sweetheart. “I guess?” she asked.
“Well, we’re not engaged, she’s thousands of miles away in Washington, DC, and there’s a war on. Anything could happen, right?”
Is he making a pass at me? she wondered. Or maybe he was using his girlfriend as a way of brushing her off. She forced herself not to jump to conclusions.
“Where did you two meet?” she asked as they started walking again.
“In the Russell Senate Office Building, a stone’s throw from the Capitol. I was working at the Pentagon. She was the secretary for a senator who served on the Senate Committee for Naval Affairs. I walked into his office one day, running an errand for my boss, and there she was. I took one look at her and thought, ‘I have got to find some way to get that girl on a date.’”
“I’m not surprised, she’s pretty. Do you think you’ll marry her?”
“Good question. If the Japs hadn’t bombed Pearl, and if we were still at peace, and if I’d stayed in D.C. . . .”
Saffron gave a dismissive sigh. “Forget the ifs, why didn’t you ask anyway?”
“No time. After Pearl Harbor, the nation had to be put on a war footing pretty much overnight. I was working round the clock, so was Meg, so was everyone. Next thing I knew, I’d been seconded to an outfit called the Office of the Coordinator of Information . . .”
“Ha!”
Danny looked at Saffron quizzically.
“Don’t the names they give to units like ours make you laugh? We started life as the Inter-Services Research Bureau.”
“Well, we’re getting another name soon, a whole new set-up. That’s one of the reasons I’m here. My boss, Bill Donovan, is real impressed by you guys. He came over last year, just to take a look-see. Now we’re in this for real, he wants to learn everything he can about the way you do things.”
“So you’ll go back to Washington to report. Then you and Meg can get married.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they’ll tell me, ‘Just send a written report and stay there in England.’ Or maybe I’ll get an order telling me to get my ass to Long Beach, California, because I’ve been posted to a battleship that’s sailing for the Pacific. Look, the truth is, none of us know what the heck is going to happen to any of us. I could be blown up by a bomb in London. Meg could fall in love with another guy. I bet there’s a line around Capitol Hill right now, guys waiting to try their luck.”
“She’ll wait for you,” Saffron said, without thinking, surprising herself with the speed and conviction of her response.
“Really? Do you think?”
“Yes.”
Danny was about to ask her why she thought that, but he stopped himself. There was no need; Saffron had already answered the question in the way she’d spoken.
“Why did you tell me about Meg?” she asked.
“Hell, I don’t know.” Danny looked away, avoiding eye contact while he tried to formulate his thoughts. “I guess I was hoping to learn a little more about you and I thought, maybe if I was honest about myself first, that might . . .”
“Encourage me?”
“I guess.” Now he looked at her again. “I wasn’t being too smart, huh? You’re the girl that held out against the Gestapo for three days. Why would you crack for me?”
She looked at him. “You can always ask.”
“Hmm . . . where do I start? OK, you don’t wear a ring on your wedding finger. Is that a Baker Street thing? I mean, if you were a regular civilian . . .”
“If, if, if . . . Not that again!” she said, smiling to let him know she was teasing.
“Yeah, yeah . . . but you know what I mean.”
“No, I’m not married. I’m not engaged.”
“Wow! She talks!”
“Oh, come on, that makes me sound horrible.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.”
They had almost reached the line of dunes, close enough to have passed into the shadows they cast. Now it was Saffron’s turn to stop walking. She wanted Danny’s full attention and waited until he was standing still, facing her before she said, “Forget about Baker Street. Forget all that secret agent nonsense. Think of me as a girl, going for a walk on the beach with a man she . . . a man who’s a dear friend. I’ve been taught how to do all sorts of things that most girls would never think about in a million years. But I’m no different to them. I like to wear pretty clothes and dance the night away. And love matters more to me than anything else.”
“Have you ever been in love . . . I mean, really in love?” Danny asked.
Her answer was instant. “Yes.”
“I don’t know if I have.”
“Not even with Meg?”
“I don’t know. I mean, she’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. And I know for sure she’d be the best wife any man could ever ask for. And I really like her, don’t get me wrong. But am I in love? How can you be certain about that?”
“Because you don’t have to think about it. Love fills your heart and your soul and every atom of your body. You know you would do anything, anything at all for just one more minute together.”
Danny sighed. “Wow . . . I envy the guy who makes you feel like that. When you were talking about it, you lit up. You were a different person. Who is he?”
What do I tell him? Simple. Stick to Baker Street rules. Keep your cover story as close to the truth as possible.
“He’s a fighter pilot,” Saffron said.
“Impressive. One of The Few, huh?”
“Not exactly. He’s—” she searched for the right, non-committal word, “—overseas. We haven’t been together since the War began . . .” Saffron gave a rueful smile. “Well, he flew over me once, about a year ago, and we waved at each other, but . . . I’ve . . . well, it’s easier to tell myself that we won’t be together until this whole beastly war is over. No point in getting one’s hopes up.”
“What’s his name?”
“Gerry . . . with a G.” That’s close enough to Gerhard.
“Well, that’s a relief. Jerry with a J would be a whole other deal. Say, do you have a picture of this guy? Since I showed you my gal and all . . .”
Saffron considered the request for a moment and then decided it would be odd to refuse. She reached inside the canvas satchel that had been her companion all through the War, found her purse and extracted her only memento of Gerhard von Meerbach: the picture of the two of them by the Eiffel Tower.
“There you are. That was Paris, April thirty-nine.”
“Handsome devil, isn’t he?”
“Don’t worry, that’s what Meg’s girlfriends all say when she shows them pictures of you,” Saffron said, and though she meant it light-heartedly, she couldn’t disguise the fact she meant what she said. She could see Danny heard it too.
“Well, I bet the other guys in Gerry’s squadron keep asking him for pictures of his movie-star girlfriend,” he replied, and though his smile said he was kidding, his eyes were looking into hers.
“Not that nonsense again . . .”
“Say, do they paint pictures of beautiful dames on their planes in the R.A.F.? Maybe Gerry has you draped across his engine cowling with ‘Hot Saffy’ written underneath.”
He put one hand on his hip and another behind his head and leaned back, like a pin-up.
“I’ll get you for that!” She took a step toward him, but Danny darted away up the dune, laughing. She raced after him, but he was faster and she couldn’t catch him before he had gone over the top and disappeared down the other side. As fit as she was, the slope was near vertical and the sand was soft and slippery under her feet, so her heart was pounding as she reached the top. She looked around, expecting to see Danny looking back at her, daring her to go after him again. But when she spotted hi
m, he was quite still, with his back to her, staring out to sea. She gathered her breath, pushed her hair away from her face and looked in the same direction. And then she saw why he had lost his interest in their silly game.
The sun was low in the sky, shining between the islands of Rum and Skye, turning them into soft silhouettes of purple and gray. The waters between the shore and the islands were like a black satin, sprinkled with myriad gilt and silver sequins where the sunlight sparkled. The sand on the beach, so gloriously white at midday, was now a pale coral, with every rivulet and undulation marked out in rippling lines of deep gray shadow.
But the most wondrous sight of all was the sky. Saffron could not imagine how any painter or photographer could do justice to the way that the dazzling heart of the sun seemed to burn through the high cloud and turn it into a churning fireball of white gold. To either side, the sunset flamed in vivid pinks, magenta, violet, heliotrope and a deep, imperial purple that faded away into the gray-blue color of the clouds themselves.
She stood, hardly daring to breathe, trying to imprint this majestic vision on her mind’s eye forever. And then she smelled the tang of the sea breeze against her face and listened to the gentle rustle of the calm sea lapping against the beach and the occasional cawing of a gull in the distance.
When she looked down at Danny again, he had turned and was staring up at her. This was not a casual glance, it was a gaze so intense she could feel it and her body responded to it, like a flower opening to the sun. He gave a little nod of the head, inviting her to join him. She walked to the far side of the dune, not racing and tumbling and giggling, as she might have done a short while earlier, but slowly, deliberately, scarcely taking her eyes off his.
She came to him, he opened his arms and she moved between them until her body was touching his. Then he closed his arms tight around her.
It had been so long since she had felt the strong, safe embrace of a man. Her body softened as the tension and resistance went out of it. Her face was leaning against the top of his chest and she caught the faint scent of the sweat from his run up and down the dune. His chest was rising and falling, as if he were still running, though they were both still. She could feel his arousal pressing against her and the melting heat with which her body answered it.