Telegram For Mrs. Mooney

by Cate M. Ruane

  If a day came when a letter didn’t arrive to East Hempstead, my ma would know I’d been killed in action. Ma knew the Germans were dropping bombs on Southampton, England, near where the Sopwiths lived. There was no hiding the fact—she’d seen it in a newsreel. The Supermarine Aviation Works had factories around Southampton making Spitfires. A Spitfire can go 400 miles an hour and push 600 in a nosedive. That’s so fast it will make the pilot black out. When a Luftwaffe pilot sees a Spitfire coming he starts praying. Living at Warfield Hall, it being so close to the Supermarine factory, meant my life was in grave peril. Ma was lighting so many candles for me, she said Saint Brendan’s Catholic Church looked like the Consolidated Edison power plant.

  Duncan, the chauffeur, slid open the glass divider and said, “Whitehall, your lordship.” Lord Sopwith pressed a bowler hat to his head, put on a pair of kidskin gloves and waited for Duncan to open the back door.

  “Toodle-oo, sir,” I said as he exited the Rolls.

  The door slammed behind him. He knocked on the glass to get my attention, motioning for me to crank down the window. I figured he’d forgot his attaché case containing top-secrets but then I seen he had it in his hand.

  “Promise me you’ll stay out of mischief, Tommy,” he said. “Remember, you’re my responsibility. And I must answer the American ambassador for your conduct. So be a good chap and no tomfoolery. Consider this an order from Ambassador Winant himself. On second thought, make that F.D.R.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry, sir. My brother will keep a tight reign on me.” I yanked an invisible leash wrapped around my neck, choking with my tongue hanging out.

  Lord Sopwith took off his glasses, rubbing at his temples. Him and Lady Sopwith were against me visiting my brother for the weekend. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince them to let me go. Last time I left their house unattended, their Chris-Craft powerboat ended up over in German-occupied Belgium where it was still sitting. Docked next to a German submarine base.

  Lord Sopwith hesitated before entering the Air Ministry building. He turned around and looked at the Rolls, troubled-like. I knocked on the glass divider.

  “Step on it!” I said. As Duncan pulled away from the curb, I added, “Sir.” I was the low man on the totem pole at the Sopwith residence, and boy, did I know it.

  “Yes, me lord,” said Duncan. When I looked into the rear-view mirror he winked.

  We were stuck in traffic, which was making me fidgety. I was looking forward to this weekend with my brother. Jack was so busy fight Nazis I hardly got to see him. We had big plans: After lunch at the Eagle Club, he was taking me to see the Crowned Jewels, which they kept in the Tower of London. St. Edward’s crown alone contained 444 precious stones and had emeralds the size of Milk Duds. They also had the 105-karat Koh-i-Noor diamond, which had come from India. It was the size of a marshmallow Easter egg, the kind with sugar stuck to it. The Koh-i-Noor diamond came with a curse, which worked only on men—every fella who ever owned it met with disaster. Queen Victoria, on the other hand, was able to wear the rock and go on to become the longest reigning queen since Cleopatra—make that the Queen of Sheba. The curse now applied to King George VI, whose older brother would’ve been king if he hadn’t ditched the throne to marry a twice divorced Yank. The curse: maybe that explained the war. If someone didn’t take that diamond off King George’s hands, the next monarch would be King Adolf. My fingers started twitching.

  Finally, the Rolls pulled up in front of the Eagle Club on Charring Cross Road and I let myself out, tipping my tweed cap to Duncan. I looked around for Jack and didn’t see him, so I started toward the front door where a pack of American airmen were smoking cigarettes and boasting to each other. One bragged: “I was flying so close to his tail, could smell the sauerkraut on his breath—“

  “Excuse me,” I said interrupting them, because I knew this sort of one-upping could go on until Miami froze over. “Have you seen my brother, Jack Mooney?”

  “Eagle Squadron, right?” said a gunner. “Heard their leaves got cancelled. Heard it from Reade Tilley’s girl, who was just here looking for him.”

  “You mean that woman you just tried to make a date with?” asked an airman, “Ain’t right, nosing in on another feller’s gal.”

  “Mind your own business, Bill, if you know what’s good for you,” said the gunner.

  You could tell they were itching for a fistfight. They had that look that tough guys get right before they throw a punch—shifting their weight from one foot to the other, clinching their jaws and widening their eyes so the white showed around the eyeballs. I was scared just being in the vicinity. Innocent bystanders end up with black-eyes exactly this way.

  Just then Daphne—Jack’s British fiancée, my future sister-in-law—ran up, out of breath. Her cheeks were pink from the exertion, her hair wild and wind-tossed. Like the cover of an Action Comic. Gee, was she a knockout. “Thank goodness,” she said to me. “I was afraid I’d missed you. Jack’s leave has been cancelled, worse luck.”

  I looked down at my sneakers and kicked the ground, “We were going to see the Crowned Jewels in the Tower of London.”

  “Well, you would have been disappointed in any event, because the jewels were moved to a hidden location in ‘39. Can’t let Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun, get her hands on them.”

  “But—we could’ve at least seen where Henry VIII’s wife, Anne Boleyn, had her head chopped off. They’ve got the actual block with her dried blood on it. And I know you won’t take me, because you faint at the sight of blood.”

  “Hey, doll,” said the gunner, interrupting and making googly eyes at Daphne. “How’s about you and me go for a hot-toddy?”

  Daphne sneered like a Doberman. Bill grabbed the gunner by the shoulder, spun him around and socked him in the nose. “That’s Jack Mooney’s fiancée,” he said. The gunner was flat out on the pavement, blood gushing from his left nostril.

  “Thanks William, but you needn’t have,” said Daphne, pulling me back. “I’m capable of defending myself.”

  When, really—she was about to faint.

  “My pleasure, miss,” said Bill, clutching his aching knuckles.

  Daphne wrapped her arm around mine, so’s she wouldn’t fall down. “See here,” she said, “let’s go back to my place. I’ve already rung Lady Sopwith and you have her permission to stay the week’s end with me. And you don’t have to look like such a sourpuss. If the Luftwaffe takes a break, Jack might be able squeeze in lunch tomorrow—a sandwich on the airfield with one eye on his Spitfire. We’ll take the train and cross our fingers the whole way. Mum’s got a nice wicker picnic basket and then there’s the tartan blanket we can sit on.” She stopped short, took a little notebook from her coat pocket and added to a list she’d already started. “Do you like vegetable pasties? Mine you, they’ll have to be eaten cold,” she said. “But we shouldn’t get our hopes up, because he might be flying.” Her face fell, like she’d just said the saddest thing imaginable.

  The airmen were now on top of each other, landing fists left and right and yelling out nasty names. Daphne put her hands over my ears. Even so, I was pretty sure I’d heard a jaw crack.

  “My goodness,” she said, “why do we need the Germans, anyway?”

  I heard a whistle blow and saw a cop—the kind wearing one of them foot-tall hats—rush up swinging a night-stick. I wanted to stick around, but Daphne grabbed my hand and pulled me in the direction of a subway station.

  “Boys will be boys,” she said, shaking her head.

  End of Sample

  Pre-order now for July, 2018 release.

  COMING SOON IN THE SERIES

  Message For Hitler

  By Cate M. Ruane

  When visiting RAF Rochford, Tommy begins to suspect that a Nazi spy is working mischief at the base: airmen are mysteriously wounded; Spitfires are sabotaged; someone has been poisoning the food. No one escapes Tommy’s radar, especially after Daphne falls ill and is hospitalized. That night the base
is attacked, setting off a chain of events that will either prove Tommy to be a fool or a hero.

  Letter Via Paris

  By Cate M. Ruane

  Daphne receives a letter from Paris, written in invisible ink. The letter is from Juliette, begging Tommy and Daphne to return to Paris and help find her sister, Sophie, who has gone missing. There is no way that Daphne is returning to German-occupied Europe—unless, that is, Tommy can find a way to drag her there. A mystery involving a stolen masterpiece, communist Resistance members, and a foolhardy attempt on the life of Hermann Göring, leader of the Luftwaffe.

  MORE BONUS MATERIALS!

  Visit www.catemruane.com for even more fun stuff.

  By joining our mailing list, you’ll begin to receive bonus chapters, rare photographs of the true-life characters, historical backstories, advance notice of new books in the series, and more. We’ll begin with a peek into Daphne’s mind, as she dreams about her fiancé, Jack, and reads a letter she’s just opened from his little brother, Tommy Mooney.

  We hope you enjoy!

  AUTHOR'S NOTES

  TELEGRAM FOR MRS. MOONEY is a work of fiction, but some of the characters are loosely based on real people who lived and died during World War II.

  Tommy is based on my own da, Thomas Robert Mooney, who was a child when his oldest brother, Flight Lieutenant John “Jack” Mooney, flew with the RAF Eagle Squadron.

  Jack was a 20-year-old Spitfire pilot, engaged to marry a 17-year-old London girl named Daphne. About all I know of the real woman comes from a newspaper article quoting a letter that she’d written to my grandmother when Jack was missing: “I’ve put away the trousseau for a while but I’ll be taking everything out again soon as I know he’ll be back.” The character of Daphne is built entirely from that one line.

  Much of Jack’s story, up until June 16, 1942, is either true or as near to it as I could get. Some of his flight maneuvers come from his actual flight reports; it’s true that in a dogfight a few days before his fateful crash, he had shot down two German fighter planes within minutes of each other. At the Imperial War Museum in London, you can ask to see a two second film shot from his Spitfire as he fires upon a German mine-sweeper.

  After finishing the book, I learned that he’d actually gone down just over the Belgian border into France—somewhere along the train track near Bray-Dunes—on his way back to England from a rhubarb to Oostende. He’s buried at the Dunkirk Town Cemetery.

  On 29 September 1942, the three Eagle squadrons were officially turned over by the RAF and RCAF to the U.S. Army Air Force. Eagle Squadron pilots are mentioned in the book: Hugh Kennard, Sel Edner, etc. All are listed on a monument in Grosvenor Square in London, near the American Embassy. Seventy-seven American and five British members were killed during their time in the RAF. Several spent time in German prison camps. Sel Edner, Jack’s best friend, was caught in Paris in 1943 and not freed until the Americans liberated the Stalag Luft III camp—made famous by the film The Great Escape.

  Andrée Eugénie Adrienne De Jongh, nicknamed Dédée, was the young Belgian woman who founded the Comet Line. She was betrayed and captured in January 1943, at the last stop on the escape line before the flight over the Pyrenees. She was interrogated by the Gestapo and tortured. She was sent to the notorious Fresnes prison in Paris and then to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen concentration camps. Released by the advancing Allied troops in April 1945, she was later awarded the United States Medal of Freedom. As far as I know, she wasn’t a Communist. (I say that just in case her association with my fictional Paul-Henri might cast her in that light.)

  Her father Frédéric De Jongh was also betrayed to the Gestapo and was executed in 1943.

  The Vel’d’Hiv Roundup was a raid and mass arrest of Jewish families in Paris by the French police, directed by German Nazi authorities, on 16 and 17 July 1942. The roundup was one of several aimed at reducing the Jewish population in occupied France. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 victims were arrested, including more than 4,000 children. Most of those arrested ended up at Auschwitz. Yet, it’s true that the French Resistance was able to rescue several people, arriving just ahead of the French police. It was about this time that a man named Jan Karski, a Pole, was making his way from Poland to the French Resistance in Paris and onward to England with evidence showing that the Germans were conducting mass exterminations of Jewish families. So our fictional characters are placed in Paris at the right time to have heard rumors of death camps.

  Sir Thomas Octave Murdoch Sopwith (who wasn’t actually knighted until 1953) was an English aviation pioneer and yachtsman. His Endeavour challenged the America’s Cup in 1934 and 1937. Warfield Hall is in Berkshire; I have taken the liberty of relocating it to Hampshire.

  My grandmother, Tommy’s ma, did get back to Ireland once before she died. She brought me back a four-leaf clover glued to a card.

  To take a train from Mons to Dunkirk, via Lille, you would have had to return to Brussels and switch trains. For the purposes of the story, the train goes direct Mons-Lille-Dunkirk.

  And lastly: Crayola didn’t come out with Canary Yellow until 1998.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  TO THE MANY PEOPLE who have helped shape this novel, thank you.

  To Caradoc King, Mildred Yuan, and Millie Hoskins at A. P. Watt, United Agents, London, for the many hours and heart you put into reading multiple drafts, making astute suggestions, and for talking the book up all over the place.

  To my early readers: Victoria Fisch, Renee Rushing, Rachel Devenish Ford, Josiah Goodman, Sarah Clatterbuck, and the late Ian Brown. Especially to Chrys Goodman for excellent copy-editing. And to an expert on all things World War Two: my brother, Kevin Mooney.

  My next-door neighbor, Frances “Frank” Simmons, of Asheville, NC, was a navy fighter pilot in the war. Frank answered nit-picking questions about every aspect of flying a fighter plane. He passed at age 92, one of the last of a brave generation.

  And finally, to Kevin and Glenda Mooney—for your faith in me, which seems to know no bounds.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CATE M. RUANE spent years working as a copywriter and art director at advertising agencies in New York City and San Francisco. Born and raised on Long Island, she now lives in Asheville, N.C. This is her first novel.

  www.catemruane.com