by Jane Thynne
It wasn’t until dusk came and the incandescent glow of fires was still lighting the path of the Thames that she closed her front door behind her, climbed into bed, and cried herself to sleep.
* * *
—
SHE WAS WALKING DOWN the Strand when she ran into Henry Franklin coming out of Simpson’s. She almost didn’t see him because her face was huddled as deep as possible in a rabbit-fur stole. The icy air stung her eyes. It was the coldest January in forty-six years, and everyone’s water had frozen.
“How about a cup of coffee?”
The genial journalist’s smile was still there, but Franklin’s mustard checked suit had been replaced with a sober pinstripe, his hair was as short as a soldier’s, and he carried himself with a businesslike bearing. They picked their way along the sandbagged street to a café, where they endured a watery offering of Camp coffee and Cordelia tried not to remember the rich, nutty, chicory-edged roasts she had drunk in Parisian cafés a lifetime ago.
“What are you doing with yourself now, if that’s not too intrusive? I remember you bridling at your sister’s wedding when I asked you that.”
“I’ve joined the Civil Defence. But I’ll have to think of another occupation soon. You’re still at the newspaper, I suppose?”
“Actually, I’ve left. I’m working on something different. In fact”—he stroked his mustache a moment in contemplation—“I wonder if you might be interested. Your experience in France could be quite helpful to us. And you understand fashion.”
“Thanks to you for commissioning my column.”
“Cordelia Capel’s Fashion Notes.”
“I’m not sure how fashion expertise is going to help anyone though.”
“It’s not just fashion. It’s French everything.”
“You’ll need to explain.”
He scribbled on a piece of paper.
“Meet me tomorrow at this address and I will. I’m thinking you might like to work at our finishing school.”
* * *
—
A BLACK PLAQUE OUTSIDE 64 Baker Street reading INTER SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU was the only sign that Cordelia had come to the correct address, but when she crossed the threshold she entered an atmosphere of frenetic activity. Men in uniform clattered down the marble stairs and sped through the revolving doors. Girls loaded with files dashed through the foyer. There was a hyperactive undercurrent that, had their business not been so serious, one might almost have called excitement.
When she gave her name, a secretary accompanied Cordelia in a rickety lift to the third floor and asked her to wait outside a nondescript wooden door. She had chosen her most conservative charcoal serge jacket and blouse, in case the job required office skills, and she smoothed her hair with an anxious hand. Straining her ears, she caught a low rumble of voices, the sharp bark of a cough, and the scraping of chairs, before the door opened and she was shown into a room.
Two well-dressed men rose to their feet, one in the uniform of the Royal Artillery, the other in a tweed jacket and flannel trousers, and shook hands without announcing their names. A second later Henry Franklin appeared and closed the door behind him. There was a single chair facing the desk, and he gestured her toward it.
The smaller man, a wiry figure with a dapper manner and a toothbrush mustache, cleared his throat. His voice was clipped, and he had a terrier-like aura of coiled energy.
“Can we make it perfectly clear, Miss Capel, that not a word of what we say goes outside this room? No one must know that you are here. Not your family or your friends or your young man.”
“There is no young man.”
The taller man gave a suave smile. He had thick hair, brushed back and brylcreemed, a polka-dot tie, and an approachable manner that suggested a less conventional edge to him—not a banker or a lawyer, but a man of letters, perhaps. An actor, or a car salesman.
“Do you know why you’re here, Miss Capel?”
“Mr. Franklin said it was something about a finishing school.”
He bent his head to light a Craven “A,” pocketed the packet, and extinguished his match with a languid shake of the wrist. “Just our private name.”
“I’ve never worked in a school.”
A touch of impatience flared in the face of the military man. As though she was being willfully dense.
“I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the Prime Minister has commissioned a force of auxiliary agents to work on the continent—a clandestine fighting force that will be infiltrated into enemy-occupied territory. These agents spend six months being put through a rigorous series of tests at a variety of schools—preliminary schools and paramilitary schools—and by the time they arrive at our finishing school, they will have been intensively drilled in all the skills they need…”
“What skills?” she asked, baffled.
“That needn’t concern you, Miss Capel. All that matters is, if they’re going to survive among the occupying forces, they’ll need to pass as natives, so we’re looking for people who can help us to that end. We require people with a knowledge of the fashion, manners, and customs of the requisite country. The Gestapo are experts on detail. The tiniest mistake can cost lives.”
“Forgive me, sir…but I’m not quite sure how I would help?”
The military man gave an infinitesimal lift of an eyebrow, and Henry Franklin stepped forward.
“Cordelia, I’ve briefed these gentlemen on your experience as a fashion journalist. You know how French clothes look. The tailoring, the buttonholes, the cut, and so on. More to the point, you’ve lived in France, and are familiar with the customs. That can be critical to an agent’s survival in the field.”
“What sorts of customs?”
“Everything.” The taller man smiled. “How the Métro operates. How sugar rationing works. Looking left rather than right when you cross the road. Going into a bar and asking for a café noir.”
“No one would do that in France.”
“Oh really?” The arch of an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“Milk’s rationed. Anyone would know that. A café noir is the only kind of coffee available.”
“Precisely.”
She had a sense that she had passed some kind of test.
“We won’t take up any more of your time, Miss Capel. If we decide that you can be of use to us, you will be given a time and date on which to report. And you’ll have to think of a tale to tell your family. Most people settle on something extremely tedious. A desk job involving paper clip procurement. You’d be amazed how few questions that line of work provokes. Or simply say you’re in government service.”
She waited until Henry Franklin had ushered her out of the building and they were heading past the dingy Edwardian blocks toward Marylebone before asking who the two men were.
“The tall one was Colin Gubbins—we call him the General.”
“And the other?”
The one with eyes full of amusement and a charm to which she had immediately warmed.
“Ha! The smoothie. That’s Kim Philby. He’s a fantastic chap. A really good egg. Westminster and Trinity, Cambridge, but he’s not one of the stuffed shirts; he loathes office politics. We knew each other from Fleet Street actually—Philby covered the Spanish Civil War for The Times.”
“He’s a journalist then?” That fitted with the approachable manner, the bohemian dash to his clothes, the twinkle that suggested he knew more than he could possibly tell.
“Among other things. Philby has a finger in all sorts of pies. It was him who got me into this as a matter of fact. He’s drawn up the curriculum for the finishing school. It’s called the Special Operations Executive, though they tend to refer to themselves as the Baker Street Irregulars. Philby’s an instructor in political propaganda, which needn’t concern you. You’ll be in the fashion department.”<
br />
“If I pass muster,” she reminded him.
“Oh, you will.” He smiled as they trotted down into the Baker Street underground. “How’s your sister? D’you hear much of her?”
“Nothing at all. She stayed in Berlin. She’s a German now. She’s quite happy.”
Was Irene happy? It was four years since the two of them had communicated, a situation that would once have seemed inconceivable. Yet still, Cordelia thought of her sister every day.
“Extraordinary.”
“It is. But then Irene was always very self-contained. She lives in a world of her own.”
Just saying this made Cordelia’s heart contract painfully. For some reason a conversation came into her head. All that time ago at Irene’s wedding.
I saw you in the drawing room. Watching everyone. Observing them. Perhaps you should be a spy.
I could never be a spy! The moment I discover anything I always want to tell everyone. Starting with you. You should be the spy. You’re so good at secrets. You hide all sorts of things from me.
It seemed that Irene, once again, would be proved right.
* * *
—
THE RINGS WAS A manor house about a mile and a half from the stately home of Beaulieu, set in dense woodland deep in the heart of the New Forest. Other houses were dotted around the estate, each of them requisitioned to house trainee agents destined for specific areas of occupied Europe, and the inhabitants of each establishment were kept strictly separate from the others, not even supposed to know of the others’ existence. Although Cordelia caught occasional glimpses of silent figures in the woods on night exercises, moving shapes behind the trees that disappeared as soon as she saw them, she had only the vaguest idea who they were. Beaulieu was the last stop in the intensive routine that all agents underwent. By the time they arrived they had already learned to live off the land, read maps, poach, stalk, lay mines, and set booby traps. At Beaulieu they were instructed on clandestine life, personal security, maintaining cover, and interrogation technique. Codes, ciphers, secret inks. Making or copying keys. How to get out of handcuffs when your hands are behind your back using a knot of catgut.
How to kill.
* * *
—
THE HOUSE ITSELF WAS a rambling place with thirteen bedrooms, each sparsely furnished with bare floorboards, an iron bed, and a shabby armchair. For the purposes of cover, Cordelia had been joined up to the FANY, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and wore a khaki uniform with flashes at the tops of the sleeves, bronze buttons figured with the Maltese cross, and a Sam Browne belt. In the evenings, however, she and the other staff changed into civvies and relaxed in the dining room, where a Ping-Pong table had been set up, or stood around the piano for a general singsong. Gradually, although direct questions were discouraged, Cordelia learned a little about her fellow employees. Most of them worked as instructors and were a mixed bunch—a journalist, a stockbroker, and a couple of academics. The taciturn bearded figure had been hired for his burglary skills, another had spent time in prison for forgery, and one man, with a broken nose and a scar stretching from cheek to chin, specialized in strangulation.
All the faces were unfamiliar except one. A lofty young man with thin lips and an inquiring manner who she met on her first day in the workshop. He sported a uniform that looked—and indeed had been—tailored on Savile Row, and she recognized him before he even introduced himself.
“I’m Hardy Amies.”
Amies was a well-known couturier whose Linton tweed suit in sage green with a cerise overcheck she had once seen in Vogue, photographed by Cecil Beaton. Cordelia tried to hide her astonishment, yet he was far too sharp to miss it.
“We share a passion, Miss Capel. I saw your fashion notes in The Courier. I liked the one about the Molyneux spring-summer collection. Terrifically vivid.”
“Thank you.”
He picked an imaginary piece of fluff from the cuff of his jacket. “We have a friend in Molyneux. The general manager in fact.”
Into her head came an image of Torin, and the package that contained a mint green dress. It’s Molyneux. I love it! How did you know? And the enigmatic smile. I met a chap who worked for them and he gave me some advice.
She stowed the fragment at the back of her mind until she knew what to make of it.
“Unfortunately it’s rather more low couture than haute that we’re interested in here,” he continued. “Take a look.”
Amies handed her a jacket. It was a rough, ordinary outfit of navy serge—the type of garment you saw in every French town, every day. It might belong to a postman or a plumber or the man queuing at the station in front of you. It was better than a cloak of invisibility if one wanted to walk along a Parisian street unremarked.
“We’re not only about guns and grenades, you know. All agents going into foreign territory need foolproof cover. Before they leave us, our agents must be correct down to the last point. The cut of a jacket, the way a shirt collar is set, the way the buttons and the fasteners are placed, differs, as you will appreciate, from country to country. If an agent turns up in France wearing British tailored clothes, even if we’ve sewn ‘Galeries Lafayette’ into the lining, it can be enough to give them away. If he or she carries a box of Swan Vestas, or a London bus ticket, they’re risking their life. Every jacket we produce has the correct train tickets in its pockets—we call it ‘pocket litter’—and we even check the dust in the trouser turnups, would you believe.”
“I would now,” said Cordelia, fingering the jacket seams.
“We have British American Tobacco making precise replicas of foreign cigarettes, using genuine French tobacco. They even replicate the matches. French chocolate, too, but they have to make it ersatz because there’s a much lower quality of confectionery now. Then there’s the documents. Any person who travels to work and wants to buy food on the way home needs a pocket full of different documents, and the Nazis are most meticulous.”
He paused. “The final step, of course, is to model the agents themselves. Most of our agents in France carry papers suggesting they are of Belgian or Swiss parentage, to disguise any lapse in their accent. We have an actor chap here who teaches them how to cover up or accentuate their features and blemishes.”
Amies’s narrow lips compressed into a smile.
“The part they hate most is the visit to the dentist. We can’t risk them being found with English fillings. So we excavate the cavities and refill them.”
* * *
—
CORDELIA’S DAYS PASSED IN the minute, meticulous assembly of disguise. She learned how to age a briefcase, softening it with lukewarm water, drying it, rubbing it first with sandpaper then with Vaseline, and packing dust into the cracks. She distressed belt buckles with meths and sulfuric acid. She filed down the heels of shoes and scratched their soles. She unpicked clothes that had been bought on the continent and copied them, stitch by stitch. If she needed to check a detail, she consulted a further rail of clothes that had been removed from foreign refugees for reference. One morning she was adjusting the lining of a suit so that one of Kim Philby’s pocket manuals called The Art of Guerrilla Warfare could be inserted when she caught Amies’s eyes on her.
“How are you getting on with Mr. Philby?”
“Well, I think.”
“The thing about Philby, he’s always trying to get information out of one.”
“What kind of information?”
Amies paused while she inserted the manual into the seam she had created. It was printed on soluble rice paper and could be swallowed in less than a minute with a glass of water. He seemed about to say more, then shrugged.
“Oh, I don’t know. In my case he usually wants to know the name of my tailor.”
* * *
—
ONE SUNDAY, CORDELIA HAD finished a game of table tennis and burie
d her nose in Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit. She was dodging any further company when Philby sought her out.
“Fancy a stroll?”
Cutting across the lawn, they followed a winding path through the woods. It was a glorious spring day and the sun was dappling through the upper branches of the beech trees, but deep in the tangle of rhododendrons, shadow layered on shadow. Philby was smoking. Generally, he was relaxed and unflappable, and though his naturally curly hair was always oiled down, nothing entirely masked his air of rumpled bohemian jollity. Yet that day she sensed a frustration in him, as though he was distracted.
“So what did Henry Franklin tell you about me?” he asked abruptly.
“He said you were a good egg.”