The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “Unorthodox,” he finished, which told Skye nothing beyond what she already knew. That Margaux didn’t get jealous. That she was happy for her fiancé to take other women out for dinner. That she was the most unknowable person Skye had ever met.

  Nicholas lit two cigarettes. As he passed one to her, their fingers touched. His eyes followed her hand up to her lips.

  Somewhere above them, a gull squawked. The water in the river rustled impatiently. Skye didn’t hear any of it. Nicholas was the only thing in her world right then. On the wall, her other hand sat beside his, a half-inch between them. A sliver of emptiness in which sat the most spectacular and untraversed sky, somewhere she would never return from if she entered it. A place that lived in her own mind and certainly not in that of Nicholas Crawford, who was so very at ease with his unorthodox fiancée.

  She pushed herself away, began to walk, and heard Nicholas clear his throat behind her. She drew on the Gitane and it whispered something to her. French cigarettes. It was impossible to buy French cigarettes in England. And oranges.

  She whipped around to face him. “You’ve been on the ground in France.” Her heart shuddered in her chest, then thumped ferociously, wrathfully hard. “Of all the stupid and dangerous things to be doing. Nobody goes on the ground in France. Everyone stays in the sky. Except you. How can you promise me you won’t die when you’re doing that?”

  His silence said everything. “O’Farrell . . .” he said, then stopped.

  What had he been about to say? O’Farrell is too? “I don’t care about O’Farrell!” she cried.

  She pressed a hand to her forehead. Of course she cared about O’Farrell! “Thank you for dinner,” she said formally. “The inn is that way. Goodnight.”

  Then she left, feet striking against the ground, trying to drown out those terrifying words: How can you promise me you won’t die when you’re doing that?

  Fifteen

  It was two months before Skye was at Tangmere again, delivering a plane. She hadn’t seen O’Farrell since the dance, although he had telephoned her once and she knew he was at Tangmere for a week or so and that she might see him. Which meant she might also see Nicholas. She had a present of sorts for him, to apologize for the way she’d ended the dinner he’d been kind enough to invite her to. She planned to leave it with one of the engineers to pass on to him, and to try to find O’Farrell, a man whom it was permissible to always have in her thoughts.

  She flew over a cottage that was hidden by a screen of hedges from the airfield. She was low enough that she could see three people in the garden: one dark head, one fair, and a woman’s perfect, straight-backed poise. Skye waggled her wings, knowing they probably wouldn’t have any idea who was in the plane, but hoping O’Farrell, if indeed it was him, might come to investigate.

  The circuit was busy. And she soon saw why. A Beaufighter, which should have returned hours ago, was limping in, riddled with holes. Skye saw the blood cart and fire engine waiting and she knew it meant somebody on board had holes in him too. She watched the pilot jump out and shout to the medics, who pulled out not a man but a body.

  Skye’s hands tightened on the stick as her throat tightened around her breath. She turned her plane around, circling, not looking at the scene on the ground, wishing she could keep her understanding of death to abstract noun rather than reality.

  It didn’t take long for the Beaufighter and its awful cargo to be cleared away and she was soon able to land. The roof opened, an engineer’s face appeared and it was one she recognized—her friend Ollie.

  “I need to leave this for Wing Commander Crawford,” she said, indicating the box under her arm.

  “I just saw him,” Ollie said, before hollering across the runway. “Sir!”

  “If you could just give it—” Skye began. Too late. Nicholas was there and Ollie had gone to deal with another plane.

  “I thought it might have been you,” Nicholas said with a smile. “O’Farrell’s coming too, although he said I was nuts to think that just because a plane waggled its wings, it meant you were flying it.”

  Skye thrust the box at him, on which she’d written: Delicate and quite possibly nippy. “To thank you for the oranges,” she said. “And to apologize.”

  “You don’t need to apologize. I remember yelling at you for doing dangerous things. We’re even.” He opened the box and laughed. “Hermit crabs.”

  “You have no idea how long it took me to find two at Hamble,” she said, laughing too. “If we’d been at Porthleven . . .” Everything would have been different. She didn’t say it. “I thought they might be a better distraction than whiskey when there aren’t enough pilots available for football.”

  He laughed again. “They will. Thank you. Do you have time to come to the mess for coffee? I think O’Farrell and Margaux will be there,” he added.

  “Just let me get changed.”

  “Before you go . . .” He put out a hand to stop her. “I saw Liberty,” he said.

  So many questions tried to tumble out of her mouth all at once. “Where? How is she?”

  Nicholas’s face was more guarded than England’s coastal defenses. “She’s the same as I remember.”

  Liberty wasn’t even there but Skye still felt the blow. “You mean she doesn’t want to see me.”

  “That’s what she said. But Skye . . . you know with Liberty it’s never about what she says or does.”

  “No, it’s about how hard she kicks.” Hurt shaped those words. Her next were formed from fear. “Or it’s about what’s making her kick.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s she doing?” Skye asked, remembering lying beside her sister in bed in Paris after their mother had died. “Does she think I’m mad at her? I’m not. I wish she knew that.” The last sentence quivered in the air.

  “If I run into her again, I’ll tell her that.” He stepped closer to her, gathering her eyes in his, just as he’d gathered her into his arms the night they’d danced on the airfield, and Skye saw on his face that same tenderness: a compassion she would gladly fall into, if only she could.

  Then she recalled that he’d said Margaux was waiting for him and she knew she’d taken too much of his time already. “Perhaps I’ll see her somewhere too,” she said, steadying her voice so Nicholas would think she was fine. “Then she’ll have to talk to me.” She picked up her bag. “See you in the mess.”

  * * *

  Skye sat on a bench in the changing room, still in her flight suit. Nicholas had seen Liberty. Which meant she was safe and well. Thank God. Relief hit Skye now and she exhaled loudly, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. In wartime, it should be enough to know that someone you loved was alive. But it wasn’t. And there was nothing Skye could do to make Liberty come and see her, except, of course, to hope that they might bump into one another some day soon.

  She stood up, changed, composed herself and walked over to the officers’ mess. O’Farrell, who was lurking by the entrance and tossing casual smiles at the WAAFs, waved Skye over and led her to a table near the window. Through the glass, Skye saw Nicholas step onto the porch and stop to talk to a white-faced pilot whose hand shook around a cigarette. She wondered if it was the man from the bullet-scarred Beaufighter who’d flown home with a dead body beside him. As Nicholas spoke to him, the pilot’s lips formed into the ghost of a smile and a touch of color returned to his face.

  Margaux smoked impatiently by the door, watching three WAAFs making eyes at her very handsome fiancé, who was oblivious to all but the man he spoke to. Then Nicholas joined her, following her over to where Skye and O’Farrell sat.

  “How do you learn to fly so many planes?” O’Farrell was asking Skye.

  From her pocket Skye produced a rectangle of paper the size of a folded handkerchief. The heading at the top read Lancaster and Lancastrian.

  “With this,” she said. “They’re kind enough to give me notes. So I can look up the stall speed rather than havi
ng to work it out for myself.” She grinned at the look on O’Farrell’s face.

  “Notes?” he said incredulously. “But how the hell does a woman who weighs at best one hundred and ten pounds get a thirty-ton Lancaster into the sky?”

  “Given I’m planning to fly the Lancaster rather than carry it on my back, my weight hardly seems relevant,” she said coolly.

  “O’Farrell, if you want to finish the day with your head still on your shoulders, rather than bitten off, I’d probably start talking about something else,” Nicholas broke in.

  Margaux, watching, looked mordantly amused.

  “Can I come up with you?” O’Farrell asked Skye.

  Before she could say no, Ollie reappeared. “I’ve got something for you.”

  The way he said it made Skye shake her head. “What? A Meteor without an engine? A Typhoon without wings?”

  “The Beaufighter that just came in. It’s NEA.”

  The plane a man had died in just hours ago. His blood would still be inside it. And it was NEA—Not Essentially Airworthy—damaged so badly the RAF didn’t want to risk any of their pilots in it. It would be flown only one more time, by her, to a maintenance unit to be broken up.

  Skye stood. “Are you still coming up?” she asked O’Farrell.

  “I think I’ll let you take this one on your own,” O’Farrell said sheepishly.

  She couldn’t help it. She started to laugh at the look on O’Farrell’s face—the tough American pilot who didn’t want to take a chance on a beaten-up plane flown by a woman. But she sobered up when she saw Nicholas frown, heard him mutter, “Jesus, Skye,” and realized Margaux was looking at him as if she’d apprehended something that made her a little unhappy.

  * * *

  Nicholas sat on a chair in the garden of the cottage opposite the main gates of RAF Tangmere. Six pilots were there for the full-moon period, housed in relative luxury compared to the Nissen huts on an air base, although Nicholas still had to share a room with O’Farrell. They had their own flight sergeants, who acted as mother hens cum cooks cum security, and who attended to the pilots’ every need: plying them with eggs and bacon at breakfast—an extravagance in ration times—and making sure only those with clearance entered the cottage. It was like being back in boarding school, Nicholas sometimes thought. Impossible to be alone.

  He lit what was possibly his hundredth cigarette for the afternoon and knew he would wake up tomorrow with a throat as raw as if it had been used as a runway. He should be getting his maps ready. He should look over the briefing folder. He should at least check the latest weather report. But he couldn’t concentrate on a damn thing besides Skye walking off, laughing, to fly a plane that could very well collapse into pieces eight hundred feet above the ground.

  The back door of the cottage opened and Margaux came out, hands occupied as always with a cigarette. She passed him a coffee and sat down in the chair beside him, letting the silence linger, giving him the chance to say something. But he had no idea what to say.

  Margaux did. “You can’t fly tonight with your head full of whatever is occupying it. If you don’t want to tell me, then tell someone else. But if you’re going to say what I think you will, then I expect I’m the best person.”

  “I’ll be fine by tonight. In fact,” he stood up, “I was about to get ready.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  Margaux never let him get away with avoiding the issue. It was why she was so good at her job: her ability to see inside people and not let them know it at the time, but to have them understand later that whatever they’d thought they’d hidden, they had not, and she was about to use it.

  He sat down abruptly.

  “Is it because she’s letting O’Farrell pay court to her, or because she’s up there in a plane that’s all but broken?” Margaux queried.

  Of course she didn’t make the vastly less pointed inquiry—Is it about Skye?—thus giving him the opportunity to deflect. She went straight in for the kill, knowing it was about Skye and only trying to determine if it was jealousy or fear that had made him so uptight.

  “The latter,” he said shortly.

  “You know she’s been taking up planes like that for the past couple of years and you didn’t know anything about it. Which means you worrying about her isn’t what’s keeping her alive. The only thing you have even a little control over is tonight’s mission.”

  “The moral of your story is to pay more attention to my job and less to hers.”

  Margaux gave him one of her uncommon and charming smiles. “You know I don’t do morals. But if I did, the moral of my story would be to work out exactly why you’re so bothered about her flying into danger when we do it every full-moon night and you don’t worry about anyone in Flight A in quite the same way as you’re worrying about her.”

  “I do worry about my squadron. And the agents. And you.” He met her eyes at last.

  “I know you do. But as I said, not in quite the same way. I’ll call Hamble and find out if she’s back. Get your maps organized. I’ll see you in the lounge.”

  * * *

  Nicholas stood in the cottage’s ops room—a former chapel. The walls around him still bore penciled numbers of the stations of the cross, although one was now papered with a huge map of France and the table in the center of the room was littered with even more—maps being a more reliable survival tool than prayer. Beside him on the mantelpiece, empty champagne bottles stood in their dozens; every reception committee in France sent Nicholas and his fellow pilots back to England with more champagne than even they could drink.

  He opened a folder and studied a photograph that showed an almost perfect landing field—treeless and wide, not cut through with cart tracks or bogged with mud. The river alongside it was the ideal marker for his plane to follow, under cover of night and without anything more than the light of the moon and a folded map to guide him, to the pinpoint.

  Then he read the Air Transport form. It was typed in black, which meant it came from SOE—the Special Operations Executive: the organization nobody knew about, whose mission was to coordinate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines, and which Prime Minister Churchill had charged with setting Europe ablaze.

  Tonight’s mission was named Operation Peaceful; some wag at HQ obviously had a sense of humor. The operation was a double: he and O’Farrell would each fly a Lysander carrying one SOE agent and six hundred pounds of cargo—Sten guns, money, radios, pamphlets—to a tiny field in France, and land on a flare path just one hundred and fifty yards long and lit by only four pocket flashlights. They’d bring back four passengers, who could be SOE agents—civilians who could pass as authentically French and who worked with the local Resistance cells—or members of de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, or Allied pilots who’d evaded capture. Tonight, the reception committee waiting for Nicholas at the field would flash the Morse letter “S” to indicate it was safe to land; “S” for Skye. Nicholas hoped it was auspicious.

  He took out a 1:500,000-scale map of France and cut strips from it, making sure the route he needed to fly along, with approximately fifty miles extra on either side to allow for error, was squarely in the middle of each strip. He mounted them on cardboard, and folded everything down until what he had was about the same size as the notes Skye had produced earlier, able to be held in one hand, with two strips viewable, while he flew the Lizzie with the other hand. As there was barely enough room in the cockpit to stretch, a large map was out of the question.

  O’Farrell worked beside him, both of them silent. A double pickup, which they’d done before, required even closer attention to detail than a lone mission.

  When Nicholas had finished, he committed the route to memory, testing himself until he could scan the map in his mind as easily as his times tables. Everything told him that tonight’s mission should be easy. Although easy wasn’t quite the right word to describe flying a plane into German-occupied territory in the dead of night to deliver a spy and ammunition to the Frenc
h Resistance. Since the British retreat at Dunkirk three years ago, only the pilots in his squadron, and one other similar squadron, ever landed in France. Almost nobody knew they did anything of the sort, or that it was even possible.

  “I think we’ll be on,” Nicholas said to O’Farrell before picking up the scrambler telephone and calling the station commander at Tempsford, their home base. They used Tangmere, which was closer to France, as their forward base for two weeks every month—the full-moon period—when there was a better chance that they might actually be able to see where they were going.

  The station commander agreed with Nicholas that even though there was a chance of fog in low-lying areas, the mission should go ahead.

  Nicholas nodded at O’Farrell and both men went upstairs to change.

  Nicholas put on a navy-blue roll-neck sweater whose labels had been cut off. Over that went black flight overalls. Into his pockets went a specially designed miniature saw, a compass, maps for use on the ground should they have the bad luck to be stuck there, a fountain pen that released tear gas, and a beret. He pulled on his RAF escape boots, which looked from the outside like the usual fleece-lined boots all pilots wore but which had detachable uppers and transformed into a pair of civilian shoes. Last to go on his body was his gun: the single piece of defensive equipment, besides fists and feet, that he and O’Farrell would carry.

  The purr of engines told him that the staff cars from London had arrived with more agents, or Joes as they were called. Some were already at Tangmere, having been set to go the previous evening when all ops had been canceled due to bad weather and poor visibility. It was time to go downstairs for the last supper.

  Margaux came over to him immediately. “She’s at Hamble. The starboard engine failed as she was coming in to land and the plane tried to dump her onto the ground, but she got it down in one piece and with only a scratched underside. It seems a shame she didn’t at least dent le connard given it tried to do her in.”