Kat snatched up her phone and googled Elliott Beaufort. She didn’t even have to finish typing his name before Google understood what she wanted. Hundreds of brooding pictures appeared, along with just as many pages of search results. Apparently, the man who’d been sitting opposite her was something of a celebrity. Elliott Beaufort had cut his teeth on writing pop stars’ biographies before turning, over the past decade, to more serious nonfiction—or “popular history for the masses” as one reviewer snidely put it. He took historical events people thought they knew about and retold them from the perspective of someone unexpected or overlooked—hence, Kat thought, him writing about a family of female spies during the world wars.
She read on to discover that his name on a front cover ensured bestseller status, his queues at writers festivals were always the longest, his appearances on various television programs about books or history—thankfully not reality television—had given him more visibility than authors usually attained. He’d studied history and languages at Cambridge, so clearly he wasn’t stupid.
A longer bio piece revealed that he was born in 1972, had recently turned forty—which made him a year older than Kat—had been married and divorced three times, and had a daughter from his second marriage. Three times! Once was bad enough, but to have made the wrong choice three times could only mean that he made incredibly bad decisions and never learned from them. But who was she to judge—her decision to marry Paul had been the wrong one too.
Regardless, Elliott Beaufort wasn’t the kind of person she should be going to parties with. His attention span when it came to women was obviously shorter than 1960s hemlines. Luckily she wasn’t looking for anything from him other than a fun night out—and, she hoped, a chance to prove that her Margaux wasn’t his Margaux. After that, she’d never see him again.
PART FIVE
Skye
The RAF certainly did not welcome us into their entirely male and combatant world. Of course at that time it was never envisaged that we would fly their beloved fighters and bombers but they saw no reason why we should contaminate even their elementary trainers . . .
—Rosemary du Cros (née Rees)
Twelve
ENGLAND, NOVEMBER 1942
When Skye returned from the Bedfordshire air base where she’d rediscovered Nicholas and then shouted at him, she received news so huge it was almost unbelievable. She was to be transferred to RAF Leavesden for four months of training.
“You’ve been selected to learn to fly Class V planes,” Pauline told her.
Of all the ways the women had gained ground, this was the most unbelievable: the one Skye had never thought would happen. She was going to fly the largest planes of all—enormous 65,000-pound Halifaxes and Lancasters—and she’d be the first woman to do so.
Even the less-than-friendly welcome she received from the CO at Leavesden didn’t dampen her spirits; Skye had long since lowered her standards and expected only civility. Besides, Dluga, the Polish pilot who’d taught Skye on previous conversion courses, was to be her instructor again and he was waiting for her with his usual friendly smile.
“Ready to lift a rhinoceros into the air?” he asked.
Skye grinned. “Absolutely. I’ve been training with hippos.”
She spent a glorious afternoon being grilled by Dluga, and at dusk she went back to the office to collect her things, to move into whatever accommodation had been found for her, and then to eat. But when she arrived at the office, her bag wasn’t there.
“I’m not allowed in the mess in my flying suit,” Skye said, gesturing at her overalls. “I need to change.”
A flight captain was eventually located, who told Skye she’d been billeted in a cottage off the base and that her bag was there. She was given a set of directions, which led her to a junkyard containing all the detritus of an operating airfield. She received the message loud and clear.
She returned to the ferry pool and entered the mess.
The flight captain accosted her. “You must change,” he said.
A lightning strike of fury flashed through her. “Certainly. If you’ll find my bag and my accommodation.”
“You must have written the directions down incorrectly,” he said.
“Of course I must have,” she said, sarcasm icing every word.
He gave her more directions, very different to the last set, and Skye made a show of writing them down. “You’re too kind,” she said.
He stepped aside, obviously expecting she would leave, find her billet, change and then come all the way back. Instead she brushed past him and collected a food tray, still in her forbidden flying suit.
“You must change,” the flight captain repeated.
“I must,” she agreed. “But first I must eat.”
She sat at a table, quite alone. The silence was appalling and hostile and told her with painful clarity that she could not make a single mistake for the next four months. The RAF had long put it about that women hadn’t the strength to fly four-engine bombers. She mustn’t prove them right. The burden sat on her shoulders more heavily than a parachute, and she tried not to think about Rose and Joan and how terribly long her time at Leavesden would be without companionship.
After supper, she was ordered to the CO’s office. She went slowly, trying to reignite the fire of half an hour before, to gather the strength to stand her ground in the face of the dressing-down she was about to receive after her stunt in the mess.
But it wasn’t the Leavesden CO who greeted her in the office; it was Air Marshal Wylde, her mother’s friend, the man she’d seen three times since childhood: first at the test flights, then at the lunch where she’d given a speech and lastly in Pauline’s office at Hatfield. She stared mutely at him.
“Captain Penrose,” he said. “I believe you were involved in an incident with an Me 110 three nights ago.”
“I was.”
Skye made herself stand tall, even though her stomach had plummeted to the floor at the realization that her aerobatics had not gone unnoticed. If Wylde added to that her earlier defiance in the mess, at best she’d be booted back to Hamble and no woman would ever fly a four-engine bomber. Skye would have ruined everything, again.
“I read the incident report,” Wylde said.
“If you read Nicholas’s . . .”
She halted. The “incident” report. It wasn’t an “incident.” Skye had been shot at by the Luftwaffe. If she hadn’t cartwheeled her plane, she might have been killed. She directed her anger into her gaze, which she fixed to Wylde. “If you read Wing Commander Crawford’s report, you’ll know that I can hardly be blamed for anything—except being an unarmed woman. I know the RAF tries to make my gender into an offense, but as far as I’m aware it hasn’t yet succeeded.”
Wylde sat heavily in a chair. “Deference is not part of your makeup, is it?”
“Sorry, I should have appended ‘Air Marshal Wylde’ onto my sentence.” Skye pressed her lips together. She’d gone too far. How was it possible for her to have such impeccable control of herself in the sky and to have none whatsoever on the ground?
Wylde gave her a half smile. “Yes, that would make what you just said more deferential.”
Even though she tried to suppress it, the unexpected joke made her lips curve into a smile. She felt the tension in the room ease a little.
“I’m here to order you not to mention your . . . your adventures in Bedfordshire to anyone,” Wylde went on. “They should have had you sign the Official Secrets Act. I don’t know what they were thinking. It’s unlike Wing Commander Crawford to be so forgetful.”
He produced a piece of paper headed Official Secrets Act and indicated that Skye was to sign it.
“What—” Skye began, then stopped herself. Wylde would never tell her what Nicholas and his squadron were doing. But it must be terribly important if an air marshal, of all people, was here to tell her to keep her mouth shut about that strange and secret air base.
She si
gned the paper, frowning, and passed it to Wylde.
He stood up. “You should get an early night. You’ve a tough couple of months ahead of you.” Then his demeanor changed, as if he’d somehow taken off his air marshal persona and had stepped into the role of some other, slightly less intimidating man. He spoke quietly. “You’re very like your mother. But I would have thought that, knowing what happened to her, you’d be the last person to take on new challenges in the air.”
“It’s my job,” Skye said simply.
Before she could ask any more about his connection to her mother, he turned to leave. At the door he stopped. “You fly well. As did Vanessa. I wish that knowledge had been enough for her, and that it would be enough for you.”
The door closed and Skye dropped into a chair. There was no mistaking the regret in Wylde’s tone. As if he mourned not just the loss of Vanessa, but the manner of losing her. Skye pressed her hands over her eyelids until mini auroras were all she could see, rather than Wylde dancing with her mother. Rather than Nicholas, and the fact that whatever he was doing was classified, which perhaps accounted for his behavior the other night. She shouldn’t have lost her temper at him, especially if—her eyes flew open—all the secrecy meant he was doing something decidedly unsafe.
* * *
The day came when Skye was to fly the Halifax by herself: a simple takeoff, circuit and landing.
She spent the morning as second officer on an unfriendly flight where the pilot completely ignored her and returned to Leavesden at lunchtime, too nervous to eat. Dluga, the instructor, found her in the mess staring at her empty tray. “Skye,” he said somberly.
“What?” she asked.
“It’s been requested that you do ten takeoffs and landings before your conversion course is completed,” he said.
She didn’t say, But the men only have to do seven, because she knew it wasn’t Dluga who required it. She didn’t speak at all. Instead she felt her head nod, as if she agreed it was fine for her to be made to do more circuits, simply because she was a woman. In that action, she knew being at Leavesden was causing Skye Penrose to seep out of her body. She needed to recover herself before her solo flight or else she’d never pass.
“Penrose! Office,” someone called and she jumped like a guilty person.
She dragged herself to the office, mind turning over her morning as second officer. She was certain she’d made no mistakes and couldn’t possibly be in trouble. Perhaps they were going to tell her she had to do twenty circuits now. Or some impossible number she’d never be able to achieve. Would she just nod again? Or would she find the courage to protest once more.
But in the office she came face-to-face with Nicholas.
Her hand reached for the edge of the desk and curled around it.
“I’ve been trying to get across here for the past month,” he said quickly. “I owe you an apology. What I meant to say and what I actually said when I last saw you were two very different things.” His brow furrowed and Skye stood still, listening.
“I wanted to say that I was so happy to see you again,” he continued. “And finally explain why I hadn’t written to you. I was transferred to Special Duties not long after I saw you at Biggin Hill in 1940. To anyone else I could have pretended I’d been transferred to another base. But you’re ATA—you know all the bases. You’d have known I was lying. And obviously I’m not allowed to go around telling everyone I’m in a Special Duties squadron. Which meant not writing to you. But after what happened last month, I can explain that much, at least. And hopefully convince you I’m not one of the chauvinist idiots in the RAF who think women can’t fly planes. I know you can fly better than most men, including me.”
He paused for breath and Skye found herself forgetting Leavesden and how many circuits she had to do and actually laughing.
“Why are you laughing?” he asked, brow furrowing still more.
“Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say so much at once in your life.”
She moved around the desk that separated them and saw that it wasn’t just seriousness on his face but worry too, as if he’d also lost sleep over their last strained conversation. “Apology accepted,” she said. “It seems that circumstances contrived to make me think you’d turned into a pipe-smoking, mustache-sporting, awfully superior RAF commander.” She grinned.
It was Nicholas’s turn to laugh. “Well, I definitely don’t have a mustache, although,” he touched the dark shadow above his upper lip, “I could probably do with a shave. And I’ve never smoked a pipe—the New Yorker in me rebels at even the thought of it. These are more to my taste.”
He pulled a packet of Gitanes out of his pocket.
“My favorites,” she breathed. “I haven’t seen them since the war started.”
“Then you’d better have them.”
He tossed them to her, and she extracted one and had it lit and inhaled within seconds.
“I’m not sharing,” she said.
“So you’ve become someone who goes around yelling at her old friends and not sharing her cigarettes?”
She was mid-inhale when he spoke and her ill-timed laughter made her start coughing.
“I suppose I deserved that,” she managed at last. But there was something more serious she needed to say and she studied the lit tip of the cigarette as she spoke. “I had a visit from an air marshal to ensure I don’t tell anyone about a mysterious RAF base and its squadron of Lysanders. If you’re doing the kind of special duties flying that requires an air marshal to warn me to keep my mouth shut, then it’s more dangerous than what I’m doing. Does that mean I should give you a ticking-off too?”
He was silent, but from the sudden hardening of the muscles on his face she understood two things: that he couldn’t say any more, and that she was right.
Her hands lifted to her neck and she tugged off her cerulean scarf, holding it out in front of her. “Like I said, or rather shouted at you last month, I have flown through almost every kind of mechanical failure and something is keeping me alive. This is my good luck charm, but you need it more than I do. Not because you aren’t an excellent pilot, but because secret special duties must be risky at best, deadly at worst.”
Nicholas stared at the scarf, and then swept his eyes upward to meet hers, and she saw that they were a wistful, liquid blue.
“I can’t,” he said, one hand touching the scarf then falling away. “If anything happened to you and I had your scarf . . .”
Skye hastily withdrew her offering. Of course he couldn’t accept it; he was engaged to another woman. “Do you at least have your watch?” she asked.
He nodded. “I’m sorry you’ve had air marshals hunting you down. And I really am sorry about what I said to you. I was so dumbstruck at seeing you that my behavior thereafter can only be described as dumb.”
“And I’m sorry I told Margaux I’d seen you in your underwear,” Skye said sheepishly.
He laughed. “Luckily Margaux isn’t . . .” He hesitated. “The jealous type.”
What to say to that? He said his fiancée’s name casually, as if they’d known each other a long time and were completely comfortable together. Yet another reminder that Skye needed to get used to thinking of Nicholas as the person he was now, not the person he’d once been.
Then Nicholas turned to the window, glancing sideways at her. “O’Farrell’s been asking about you. I told him he wouldn’t find a better woman in all of England to spend time with.”
“So he’s worth spending time with?” she asked, squashing her cigarette into the nearest ashtray with a nonchalance that she hoped hid the fact that talking with Nicholas about O’Farrell was, for some reason, bizarre.
“He is. He pretended to be Canadian back in 1940 so he could get over here and fly with the RAF.”
“That was a brave thing to do,” Skye said.
For the United States had passed a Neutrality Act in 1939, which meant any Americans caught trying to get across to England t
o help at that time were liable to be jailed. With America’s entry into the war, that had of course been revoked. But it meant that beneath O’Farrell’s cocky exterior might be a man more intriguing than she’d thought. What if, when she returned to Hamble, rather than limiting her encounters with men to just one dance at the clubhouse or one supper at the Embassy Club in London, she allowed for more?
As she considered what Nicholas said about his friend, she passed the Gitanes back to him. “If you were here in 1940, it wasn’t only O’Farrell who did a brave thing.”
Nicholas’s cheeks colored a little and he took out a cigarette. “O’Farrell and I met at university,” he said. “We were both members of the Harvard Flying Club. It was so damn frustrating sitting in America knowing there weren’t enough pilots over here and having the skills the RAF needed, but being told, for no good reason, that I couldn’t use them. One night I thought, to hell with it. O’Farrell came too. We’d probably both had too much whiskey,” he added, as if trying to minimize their actions.
“I imagine the whiskey had worn off before you got to Canada,” she said quietly.
Nicholas’s cheeks pinked still more and Skye felt an almost unbearable urge to throw her arms around him, to squeeze him as tightly as she’d done in the cave the day he left England, both to thank him properly and to give expression to everything she felt right then: pride in her friend and the overwhelming fierceness of affection she’d always felt for him. Back then she expressed it by giving him her cove, her mother, the Moth, and occasionally the fastest hermit crab to race. Now, she had no idea how to express it.
“I wouldn’t have O’Farrell in my squadron if he wasn’t brave,” Nicholas said, turning away from the window to face her and bringing them back to where the conversation had started. “And I’d definitely have you if I could.”
The Paris Secret Page 13