The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  Skye felt her mouth fall open. There were many things she’d thought Pauline might say, but the news that four of her pilots were to fly Spitfires was not one of them.

  “We need a statement from you for the press noting that there was a communication error,” Air Marshal Wylde said, his eyes drilling through Skye. “And you will agree to be photographed at a press call with one of the Spitfires.”

  Skye nodded. She would concede to a communication error in order to gain so much more; not just for herself, but for every woman waiting outside. And she would swallow the question filling her mouth—How did you know my mother?—because her personal curiosity—or fear—meant nothing when set beside the momentous victory that had just been handed to the women.

  She gave Pauline a huge grin.

  She, a woman, was going to fly a Spitfire.

  Seven

  Flying a Spitfire was even better than Skye had imagined it would be. It was snug in the cockpit, just the right size for a woman, and every time she slid into her seat she felt like she’d slipped on a silk evening gown. The aircraft moved through the sky like a dolphin through water: playful, powerful, and responding to the lightest of touches. She sometimes wondered if she could move the throttle with just the exhalation of her breath.

  The change in policy allowing women to fly operational jets created many other changes. An all-women’s ferry pool was opened at Hamble, near Southampton, close to the Spitfire factory at Eastleigh. Skye, Rose and Joan were moved to Hamble, where they found a cottage together, near the water.

  Two years of relative bliss passed by—well, as blissful as wartime life could be. For thirteen days straight, Skye would fly planes—mostly Spitfires, but often Hurricanes, Typhoons, Tempests, anything that needed to be moved around the country. Then she had two days off to laze around Hamble, eating lobster dinners at the Bugle Inn, or to go to London, where she danced all night at the Embassy Club on Bond Street with a pilot or two, before catching the early train back to Southampton in time to start work in the morning. She was no longer afraid to smile. The RAF appeared to soften, not mounting overt opposition to the women, and RAF pilots and ground crews became more used to occasionally seeing a woman step down from a plane.

  In all that time, Skye didn’t hear from her sister. She didn’t even have news of Liberty secondhand from her aunt as it was impossible to get letters out of France. Skye had never been taught to pray yet, most nights, she found herself thinking in a prayer-like way about Liberty, even though she suspected her sister’s ongoing silence was meant to communicate the fact that she had not forgiven Skye for leaving France.

  Each morning, Skye walked to Hamble—which was a vast improvement on the muddy hut at Hatfield—and waited with the ATA women in the lounge for the weather to clear, or, if it was already clear, to collect their delivery chits. The ferry pool resembled a compressed world with women of almost every nationality working there: American, Canadian, Chilean, South African, Australian, Polish. The radio was always on, tuned to the BBC, and posters of prim Prudence with whom they were all supposed to fly—no matter that Prudence looked like just the sort to turn to jelly in an airplane—covered the walls.

  Jackie would be upside down practicing headstands; Honor would be waiting to battle Skye in backgammon; Chile, affectionately nicknamed after her homeland, would be writing letters; and Diana would be discussing her latest beau, or saying that she really ought to learn to knit so she had something to do to pass the time. Rose would roll her eyes, knowing that Diana, beautiful, rich Diana, would never learn to knit.

  One morning in late 1942, while waiting for the call over the tannoy that signaled the start of the day’s ferrying, Skye and Rose attacked a jigsaw puzzle that was trying to get the better of them, while Joan took over from the unusually silent Diana and complained about the faithlessness of her latest RAF pilot.

  “They’re all faithless,” Rose said knowledgeably. “Better that way, then you won’t miss them when they die.”

  “You’re so jolly unfeeling,” Joan said, as near to cross as someone who inhaled optimism instead of oxygen could be. “Between you and Skye, you’ll have been taken out by almost every man in the RAF before the war ends.”

  Skye smiled at Joan. “You each want different things. You want a lifetime; Rose wants a diversion.”

  Skye was unequivocally of the same mind as Rose. It might sound unfeeling, but a long life and being an RAF pilot were not compatible, and everyone, especially the pilots themselves, knew it. It was best to stick to diversions if one wanted to survive the war with only a few scratches to the heart.

  And Rose was right about the faithlessness of pilots: Nicholas had proved himself to be as capricious as the worst of them, never sending Skye that promised letter. She’d written to him at RAF Biggin Hill but had received no response. She’d written again in case her letter had been lost but there was no reply the second time either.

  Their strange encounter now seemed like a dream, as if she’d conjured up his ghost because it was what she’d needed at the time: someone who knew her from before the war, and before the RAF had almost ground her down. What she’d understood in the hangar that day to be the unbroken bond of their remarkable friendship had obviously been, to him, just a brief encounter, quickly forgotten.

  She’d asked Ollie, the engineer, about Nicholas after the months of silence had dragged on, but all Ollie had been able to tell her was that Nicholas had been transferred; he didn’t know where. Short of asking about him at every RAF base she flew into—which she gathered Nicholas didn’t want, otherwise he’d have written to her—she had no idea how to find him. She’d tried to forget about him, but it was as difficult this time as it had been when she was fourteen.

  The call sounded, returning her to the present: “Will all pilots report to the operations room for chits.”

  Immediately everyone crossed to the hatchway, where they were handed slips of paper to tell them what and where they were flying that day. Skye had a routine delivery of Spitfires, three in all if the weather held.

  She took her maps from her locker, collected her compass and her overnight bag in case she was stuck somewhere for the night, then wound her cerulean scarf around her hair. Then she went outside, smiling. It was a perfect day for flying: autumn, light cloud, sun shining.

  Joan was flying the taxi plane that day and she dropped Rose, Skye and Honor at Eastleigh, before taking off again to deliver the remaining pilots to their pickup points. Skye found her Spit and patted it on the flank. Then she climbed onto the wing, placed her parachute on the seat and herself upon it.

  She let the throttle open slowly, gently, letting the Spit know she was in charge. A delicate flick of the wrist had the plane banking smoothly, the perfect dance partner. She squeezed her way through the corridor of barrage balloons and then hit the open skies, checking her map, setting her compass and settling back for an easy flight.

  It was on her last flight for the day, less than an hour away from RAF Stanbridge, where Joan would pick her up in the taxi plane and take her back to Hamble, when she caught a glimpse of something to her right. She thought nothing of it at first; with Luton and other bases nearby, it was feasible that this part of the sky might have a little traffic.

  Then something flashed past her nose. If there’d been room in the Spitfire, she would have jumped. But as the plane fitted over her as tightly as a shell, the only part of her that could move in response was her heart, which gave her a swift kick. She’d just been shot at.

  She waggled her wings, expecting that some overzealous and obviously blind RAF pilot had mistaken her for an enemy plane even though she didn’t have a swastika painted on her tail. But it happened again, and this time her heart didn’t thud against her chest; it stalled. Because the plane was a German Me 110 and it had her in its sights.

  What the hell was she supposed to do? She had heard of this happening, but so rarely that there was no accepted protocol to handle the situation. And how on
earth was she supposed to handle it without guns? She felt her breath coming fast, the joy from earlier evaporating like mist.

  Think, Skye told herself. And quickly.

  The Messerschmitt fired again: one shot grazed her wingtip and the other embedded itself into her flank. Her Spitfire lurched, and so did her stomach.

  Despite the fact that aerobatics were strictly forbidden, she pushed the Spit into full throttle, roaring ahead, not horizontally but vertically, aiming for the base of heaven.

  The German plane hesitated: it had expected her to engage or to race away, not to attack the sky. She was counting on the fact that, given the rate at which the Germans went through pilots, the man on her tail had never performed an aerobatic maneuver in his life.

  She executed the stall turn expertly: the engine speed dropped to zero and the plane stopped. A moment alone in the sky in an airplane that was precisely perpendicular to the ground, without acceleration to hold her there, engines silent. Just Skye Penrose and the beautiful blue nothingness of air.

  But then she had to right herself, and face the fact that the other plane was still nearby. She readied herself to climb once more.

  Suddenly and appallingly, the sky filled with more planes. She was in the middle of an ambush and she understood for the first time that true fear was not expressed in a racing heart and a sheen of sweat; it manifested itself in a perfect stillness. She didn’t blink, didn’t think, was certain she didn’t even breathe. Her eyes locked like radar on the approaching planes and she wondered if she would die like that: a statue, already lifeless.

  A sudden, urgent inhalation of air made every part of her body start working again, her gasp one of astounding relief now, not horror. The new arrivals didn’t have swastikas on their tails; they were on her side. Thank God.

  She pulled her Spitfire around in time to see the Me 110 screaming off across the sky. The RAF pilots, obviously realizing from the fact that she’d discharged no weapons—and had instead resorted to circus tricks—that there was some kind of difficulty, came up alongside her to escort her into their base.

  She wasn’t allowed to fly at night and it was getting dark so she flew in formation with four Lysanders—the modified and top-secret black Lysanders she’d seen once at RAF Tangmere on the south coast. She’d asked about them and been told they were used by the Special Duties squadrons, but for what purpose she had never discovered. Unlike most other Lysanders, these had ladders fixed to the rear cockpit, metal cylinders attached to the fuselage, the rear guns removed. One of the Lizzies had a mermaid emblem painted on its flank, above which were at least a dozen stars signifying completed missions. Another bore a curvaceous Betty Boop.

  They descended into a fiery orange Belt of Venus that had slung itself above the horizon. Looking down through the dusk, Skye could hardly believe they were at an RAF base.

  She landed on a narrow, boggy runway cut through a derelict farm. Cattle wandered around the perimeter, ducks flapped forlornly beside a swampish puddle in the eastern corner, and thatch-roofed outbuildings sagged in a forlorn huddle along one side. But Skye’s eyes were sharp and she began to make out the Nissen huts designed to look like cowsheds, the hardstandings, the fire and ambulance garage, the outlines of more black Lysanders.

  As she taxied after the follow-me car, safe now, the sensation of the bullet lodging in her Spit’s side played over in her mind. She made herself breathe slowly, suddenly too aware of her vulnerability; a vulnerability that she and the other ATA women chose not to contemplate. Some of them had died over the past year; among them the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson, lost in cloud so dense and vast that she’d only fallen out of it, to her death, when she ran out of fuel. Skye had been lucky so far: no drowning sea, no murderous hillsides, no disastrous mechanical failures like others had experienced. She’d been lucky again tonight. For how long would that luck hold?

  Don’t think about it, she told herself for the hundredth time that year.

  She sat still, waiting for the ground crew, but her fingers worked her scarf this way and that. Even though everyone had the impression that the RAF and the ATA women were getting along, Skye knew it would take only one slip-up for the fragile peace to be broken. It was entirely possible that she would be reported for her forbidden aerobatics. She needed her wits about her. She climbed out of the cockpit and jumped to the ground, pulling off her scarf to reveal her long, dark hair.

  The pilots from the squadron of Lysanders were also out of their planes now, and they all stopped dead in their tracks in a manner decidedly slapstick, as if there were some kind of invisible wall in front of them. And there was, Skye supposed, just not one of bricks and mortar.

  “You’re a woman,” one of the pilots said in a noticeably American accent. “And beautiful.” He grinned.

  “I certainly was a woman when I dressed myself this morning,” Skye replied, glad that her voice was steady and that she had, by now, become expert in these types of conversations. She knew to fire back from the outset or else suffer a barrage of commentary and innuendo. “And you’re obviously an excellent flirt.”

  All the men laughed, the American loudest of all.

  Skye had heard stories about the Special Duties squadrons, of which this must surely be one; there were a few other camouflaged airfields in England but not like this one. Special Duties pilots were the glamour boys of the RAF: the best and bravest of them all, and, apparently, they always had plenty of French perfume and champagne. The American certainly looked the part: so tall that Skye had to tip her head back to meet his gaze, hair the sandy color of a Cornish beach, eyes a warm shade of honey, smile perfectly shaped for making knees go weak.

  “Thank you for frightening off the Me 110,” she said, nodding around the now very close circle of men. She wondered if she could perhaps charm them into supporting her report about the incident. “Women aren’t to be trusted with guns, which leaves me with nothing more than aerobatics to protect myself.”

  “They were some damn good aerobatics,” her American admirer said. “Do you give lessons?”

  And they thought women were the flighty ones. “I’d say you’ve had lessons enough of the kind you’re referring to,” she countered.

  Hoots of laughter followed, and the American—a squadron leader she noted from his insignia, so he couldn’t be half bad at flying—looked a little abashed.

  “Quit it, O’Farrell.” Another voice broke into the jocularity. The men stepped aside to let in their wing commander. “Are you all right?” he asked Skye.

  Skye turned and then stopped, as if she were the one walking into an invisible wall.

  “Skye?” the man said.

  As soon as her legs had recovered from the shock, and despite her disappointment that he hadn’t written, she did what she should have done the last time she’d seen Nicholas. She crossed the space between them in an instant and wrapped her arms around him.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she cried, giving him a tight squeeze in case he vanished again, a squeeze that he returned with equal fierceness.

  When she stepped back, she saw that his mouth had opened in astonishment. It wasn’t quite the perfect circle of surprise she’d been struck by when they’d first met on the pier at Porthleven, but in that expression she saw, unmistakably, her friend. She grinned.

  Nicholas didn’t. A cloud passed over his face. It became suddenly closed, unfamiliar.

  Behind her, Skye heard the murmurings of the men. And she realized what she’d done. In an organization known for discipline and rank, one didn’t throw oneself on a wing commander in front of all his men, even if one had known that wing commander when he was eleven.

  “I mean it’s good to see you, Wing Commander Crawford,” Skye amended. “It’s Captain Penrose now,” she added, realizing that with her sheepskin flight jacket on and rank insignia hidden, he would have no idea what to call her.

  Then Nicholas smiled at last and she lost the very few words she’d been able to gather togeth
er. The force of that smile alone could have sent the Me 110 screaming back to Germany. Not to mention the eyes, blue and startling and looking right at her. She shook her head in bemusement, blushing as she remembered what she’d said to him the last time they’d met: You’re handsome. The same thought crossed her mind now: how had Nicholas Crawford become so handsome?

  “Captain Penrose,” he said teasingly. “It’s been a while.” He turned to the assembled men. “As much as you’d all like to watch Captain Penrose and me catch up on nearly ten years of estrangement, I’m sure you have better things to do. O’Farrell, see if Skye can stay at the Waafery tonight. Jenkins, let the station commander know we have a visitor.”

  As the men set off, Skye heard another voice call out from behind them: “Sir, your fiancée’s here.”

  And Skye saw Nicholas, the “sir” whose attention was required, whip around. Before he did, she caught a look of immense relief on his face, as if this arrival was something he’d been waiting for with a fervor ordinarily reserved for more momentous news, like the end of the war.

  A woman crossed the hardstanding toward them. She wasn’t beautiful but striking, like a light pillar in a night sky—that spectacular clustering of ice crystals into columns of fire. She was immaculate in her Women’s Auxiliary Air Force uniform, her glossy deep brown hair set in a perfect victory roll, her lips painted a dark and stylish red, her face barely animated by a smile. She attracted the combined gazes of everyone there.

  She slipped her arm into Nicholas’s.

  As the pilots dragged themselves away, Skye heard one of them mutter, “Christ, if I hadn’t thought our wing commander had the dishiest piece in the land, now he’s got another one who’s just as much of a doll.”