“Not even your mother?”
“No. After we brought Colonel Tensing back, they sent us straight out again to lay mines against the invasion, and by the time we got back, they already thought we were dead.”
“Which we might have been at any time,” the Commander said. “And then when we started doing missions for Intelligence, everything had to be hush-hush. And we were as good as dead anyway, with the sort of thing they wanted us to do. It was only a matter of our having been killed a bit later than they thought. And if Jonathan’s mother had known he was alive, she’d never have let him do it.”
Jonathan nodded. “So it seemed better all around to let them go on believing we were dead. I suppose that seems hard to you.”
“No,” Ernest said, thinking of what he’d done to Polly and Eileen. “I know sometimes things like that are necessary.”
The Commander nodded. “If it means the difference between winning or losing this war”—
Or getting Polly and Eileen out or not.
—“then it was worth the sacrifice, wasn’t it?”
Yes, Ernest thought, it was worth the sacrifice. And speaking of which …
“I need to go,” he said.
“Go? In this weather? Are you daft? Listen to that.” He jabbed his pipe up toward the ceiling. “It’s raining cats and dogs. You’ll catch your death, lad. No, you stay. You can sleep in the bunk there.”
It was a tempting offer.
But the last time you did that, you ended up halfway to Dunkirk.
“Sorry. I have another delivery I have to make,” he said, and stood up. He waded over to his duffel, took out the parcel and letter, and gave them to the Commander.
“What’s this then? Explosives?” he asked, but when they opened the parcel, it was long thin strips of silver-colored foil.
Chaff, to fool the radar into thinking there were large numbers of ships in an area.
“It says here,” the Commander said, reading the letter, “that when we hear the message that tells us the invasion’s on, they want us to head for Calais and throw this stuff out behind us.”
Which would be even more dangerous than mapping the beaches. “Good luck,” Ernest said sincerely. He put on his almost-dry coat and shouldered his duffel bag. “Goodbye, Commander.”
“Not Commander—Captain,” he said proudly.
“Grandfather got his commission,” Jonathan explained.
“Congratulations, Captain,” Ernest said, and saluted. The Commander beamed. “Good luck to both of you.”
“We don’t need luck,” he said. “Thanks to you, we’ve got the Lady Jane, and she won’t let us down. We’re going to come out of this all right, you mark my words.”
“I hope you’re right,” Ernest said, shook hands with Jonathan, and went up the ladder onto the deck.
And into a veritable hurricane. He had to force his way, bent double, off the boat and back along the dock, hoping he wouldn’t be blown into the water. When he heard Jonathan behind him, calling, “Seaman Higgins!” he thought, If he’s coming after me to bring me back, I’ll go.
But Jonathan wanted to give him something—a flat packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. “Am I supposed to give this to Tensing?” Ernest shouted, using his real name, since there was no way anyone could possibly overhear them in this gale.
Jonathan shook his head, raindrops flying from his wet hair. “It’s for my mother,” he shouted. “It’s in case we don’t make it back. So she’ll know what happened.”
“For after the invasion?” Ernest yelled.
“No!” he shouted back. “For after the war. All these secrets won’t matter then.”
No, Ernest thought. They won’t.
“I’ll send it,” he promised, and stuck it inside his shirt, thinking, as he watched Jonathan run back along the dock, Maybe I could give one to Cess to send.
But what could it say? “Dear Eileen, I wasn’t really killed that night in Houndsditch. I waited till after Bank Station was bombed and then went to find an incident that the Civil Defence hadn’t arrived at yet and left my papers and scarf for them to find, just like a murderer in one of your Agatha Christie mysteries. I’m sorry to have burned the coat, after all the trouble you went to to get it for me …”
You don’t have time for letter writing, he thought. You need to get to the train station.
He set off through the wind and rain to find it. He knew where it was from when he’d come to Dover that first September, trying to get to his drop, and he could walk/hobble a lot faster now than he could then, but he was so frozen by the time he got there that he had to blow on his numb hands before he had enough feeling in them to be able to get the coins in the telephone’s slot so the operator could put him through to British Army headquarters in Portsmouth.
He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest England, trying to locate Denys Atherton, and he was still only halfway through the list. And God help him if Atherton had had an L-and-A implant and was here as an American GI because there were more than 800,000 American soldiers in England right now.
The operator put him through to Southampton, and he spent what was left of the afternoon and evening being transferred from office to office, officer to officer, to find out there was no Denys Atherton stationed in Southampton or Exeter or Plymouth, and to worm the telephone number of the paymaster at Weymouth out of a reluctant Wren by using his old-standby American accent. His implant had long since worn off, but he’d done it so long, it was permanently a part of him.
By the time he got off the phone with the Wren, he was coughing. He couldn’t spend the night in the station. It was too cold, and the ticket agent was beginning to eye him suspiciously. He couldn’t hope to catch a ride in this weather either, and at night, and he couldn’t go to an inn anywhere near the docks and risk running into the Commander and Jonathan in the pub room. And he was going to need something hot—and alcoholic—to ward off the chills he was already having.
You can’t get sick, he told himself. You only have a month and a half to find Atherton. And you still haven’t done your invasion-propaganda spreading, to which end he limped out to the edge of town to a pub which catered to the locals, ordered a hot toddy, and prepared to tell all comers that he’d overheard two officers saying the big show was starting on July eighteenth and it was definitely going to be Calais.
But there were no comers, in spite of the pub actually having ale and whiskey—a rarity at this point in the war. The weather was apparently too much even for hardy seafarers. Ernest spent the evening drinking one hot toddy after another and composing imaginary letters:
“Dear Eileen, I know I said we shouldn’t split up, but Denys Atherton didn’t come through till after Polly’s deadline, and it was the only way I could think of to get a message through to him. Remember my telling you about how Shackleton had to leave his crew behind and go off to get help because if he didn’t, no one would have had any way of knowing where they were and they’d all have died? And how he made it to the island and found help and came back to rescue them? Well, I didn’t tell you the whole story. When Shackleton got to the island, he was on the wrong side and had to walk over the mountains to get where he needed to be, and the same thing happened to me …”
And after two more drinks:
“Dear Polly, I lied to you when I came back from Manchester. The person who came to Saltram-on-Sea asking about me wasn’t Fordham. It was Tensing. He’d been tracking me down since Bletchley Park, but you were wrong. He didn’t want to hire me for Ultra. He wanted to recruit me for a Special Means unit, and I thought it would mean I’d be able to get to Denys Atherton, but as it turned out …”
But he couldn’t write Polly because her deadline had passed, and she was already dead. She’d been dead since December.
He’d got drunk that night, too, and tried to call her in Dulwich to warn her, and then r
emembered she wasn’t there until after D-Day and hung up. And when Cess had asked him what he was doing, he’d said, “She’s not here yet. She’s dead.”
And if he had any more toddies tonight, he might blurt out the whole story to the barman, or worse, write it all down, and there was no point. A letter wouldn’t reach Polly in Dulwich because it hadn’t reached her. And if Eileen was here to send it to, then his plan hadn’t worked—he hadn’t found Atherton or got a message through, and Polly had died—and if that was the case, then Eileen was better off not knowing that he was alive, that he’d gone off and left them for nothing. It wasn’t like Jonathan, whose mother would at least have the comfort that he and his great-grandfather had died heroes.
He stood up unsteadily, set down his mug, which was much cleaner than the one the Commander had given him, and prepared to stagger off to bed, but before he made it to the stairs, a pig farmer came in, shaking water everywhere, announced it was “a fit night out for nowt”—a sentiment Ernest agreed with wholeheartedly—and demanded a pint.
“And make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got to take a load of shoats all t’way down to Hawkhurst.”
Ernest promptly begged a ride, crawled into his truck, and was rewarded by the farmer’s asking where he thought the invasion would be and then, without waiting for an answer, saying, “Mark my words, it’s going to be Calais,” and regaling him for the remainder of the trip with how he’d come to that conclusion.
Ernest didn’t have to say a word, which was just as well because the minute he got back to Cardew Castle, Chasuble said, “Oh, excellent, you’re here—good Lord, what’s that smell?”
“Pigs.”
“I thought you were going to sea. Well, never mind. You need to shave and bathe, particularly bathe, and get into this.” He tossed a dinner jacket and Bracknell’s too-small shoes at him, told him he had ten minutes, and hauled him and Cess off to another reception, this one for General Montgomery.
“Only it won’t be Monty,” he said after they were in the staff car.
“What do you mean, it won’t be Monty?” Ernest asked, attempting to tie his tie in the rear-vision mirror.
“It’s a double,” Cess said. “An actor.”
Oh, God, out of the frying pan into the fire. “It’s not Sir Godfrey Kingsman, is it?”
“It can’t be,” Cess said. “He’s dead. He was shot down.”
“No, that’s Leslie Howard you’re thinking of,” Chasuble said.
“It is not. He was on his way to entertain the troops—”
“And that’s Jane Froman,” Chasuble said. “What does Kingsman look like? Whoever this actor is, he’s supposed to be the spitting image of Monty.”
Which ruled out Sir Godfrey. Actors could work wonders with makeup and wigs, but not with height. Montgomery was a good eight inches shorter than Sir Godfrey.
And Cess was right. The general at the reception was a dead ringer for Monty, right down to the high cheekbones, toothbrush mustache, and imperious manner. “Are you certain he’s not Montgomery?” Chasuble whispered after they’d all been introduced to him as assorted officers and aides to General Patton. “He sounds exactly like the old boy.”
“I’m certain,” Cess said. “And it’s your job to see to it that he stays in character. Monty’s a teetotaler, and he’s not, so keep at his elbow and make certain he doesn’t get hold of anything but lemonade. This is a dry run—quite literally—to see if he can pull it off.”
“And if he does?” Ernest said, watching the dapper general chatting with the guests, who all seemed completely taken in.
“They’re sending him off to Gibraltar to convince the Germans the invasion’s going to be in the Mediterranean, or, if they won’t believe that, to convince them it’s not coming till July.”
And I suppose I’ll end up having to accompany him and see to it that he stays sober, Ernest thought, cursing his luck. Why couldn’t Monty’s double have been sent to the invasion’s staging area instead and Monty sent off to Gibraltar?
He was right about being assigned to accompany him, but “Monty” wasn’t scheduled to leave yet, so Ernest spent the next week dragging automobile headlights along a fake runway in the rain while the phonograph played engines-revving-up sounds, by the end of which the cold he’d caught in Dover had blossomed into full-blown influenza, and he realized he’d never really appreciated antivirals. Or paper tissues.
On the other hand, he didn’t have to go to Gibraltar, and the doctor prescribed bed rest for a week, during which time he was able to get nearly caught up on his articles and his own coded messages, writing in bed with a typewriter on his knees:
“For sale, hothouse poinsettias, hibiscus, pearl hyacinth cuttings. Contact E. O. Riley, Harbor House,” with Mrs. Rickett’s address, and “Lost in Notting Hill Gate Underground Station, gold monogrammed compact, inscribed ‘To Polly from Sebastian.’ ” Also, a review of a production of The Tempest put on by the Townsend Players, which listed as cast members Eileen Hill and Mary Knottinge, and commented, “The shipwreck which begins the action was well done, but the ending is rather doubtful, though this reviewer hopes that will improve with time.”
And the day after he was allowed to get up, Lady Bracknell sent him and Chasuble to the Bull and Plough to spread invasion propaganda, and he had a chance to put a call through to the paymaster in Taunton while Chasuble flirted with the barmaid. But there was no Denys Atherton listed on the pay rolls there or at Poole, and time was running out.
Even sooner than he’d thought. A pilot he’d talked to in the pub said, “Whenever it is, it’s soon. Three weeks from now they’re locking down the entire staging area. No one in, no one out, not even the post.”
“That’s to fool the Germans into thinking it’s in June,” Ernest told him. “There’ll be an attack then, but it’s only a feint, to draw the Germans off. The real invasion won’t come till mid-July,” but he was thinking, If I don’t find him by next week, I’m going to have to steal the Austin and take off for Wiltshire to find him.
But he didn’t have to. The next morning Cess leaned in the door and told him Lady Bracknell wanted the two of them to go make a pickup.
“I can’t,” he said. “I need to finish these and get them to the Call by four tomorrow, and I’ve barely started on them.”
“What vital news is it this time?” Cess asked, leaning over his shoulder as he typed, and thank goodness this wasn’t one of his articles. “Another garden party?”
Ernest shook his head. “Friendship Dance.” He read, “The Welcome Club of Bedgebury will host a Friendship Dance for the newly arrived American troops—”
“We’re officers,” Cess said, “and we’ll be driving Bracknell’s Rolls, not walking. There won’t be any mud. Or bulls.”
“No. I told you, I’ve got a deadline. Can’t Chasuble go with you?”
“No, he has a date to take Daphne to dinner.”
“Can’t he do that tomorrow night? Or the night after?”
“It is the night after, but Chasuble’s afraid we won’t be back by then, and he’s already in her bad graces for having had to cancel when we went to the Savoy to meet Monty.”
Tomorrow night? “Where is this pickup we need to make?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Cess said. “Lady Bracknell gave me a map. And he said something about Portsmouth.”
Which was right in the center of the invasion area, where Atherton was. “All right. Are we going as civilians?”
Cess shook his head. “Army officers.” Which meant they’d be picking up whatever it was at an Army camp, and no one would consider it odd if an officer asked where a Denys Atherton was stationed. He could even order an enlisted man to check the records and find him. He’d have to get away from Cess, but over the course of a two-day journey, there should be ample opportunities, and if they weren’t leaving till tomorrow morning, he might be able to drop his articles by the Call on the way. “When do we have to make this pickup?”
&nbs
p; “Tomorrow morning at nine. Does that mean you’ll go?”
“Yes,” he said, and as soon as Cess left, he typed, “Music will be provided by the 48th Infantry Division Band,” yanked the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, rolled a new one in, and typed, “Mr. and Mrs. James Townsend of Upper Notting announce the engagement of their daughter Polly to Flight Officer Colin Templer of the 21st Airborne Division, currently stationed in Kent. A late June wedding is planned.”
Cess opened the door and leaned in. He was dressed in his officer’s uniform. “Why aren’t you ready?”
“I thought we were leaving tomorrow morning.”
“No,” Cess said. “Lady Bracknell wants us to leave now.” Which made no sense—Portsmouth was only a few hours away, but Ernest didn’t object. The sooner they got there the better, and if they stopped for the night along the way, he’d have even more opportunities to ask about Atherton.
“Give me twenty minutes,” he said.
“Ten. You don’t know where our map got to, do you?”
“I thought you said Bracknell gave one to you.”
“No, a map of this area.”
“Prism had it, I think,” Ernest lied, and as soon as Cess had gone off to look for it, he dug the map out of the pile on his desk, stuck it in his pocket, and bolted down to the mess to hide it in the silverware drawer. Then he ran to throw his razor and soap into a bag, answer Cess’s “Are you certain you didn’t have it after Prism?” and take the bag and his officer’s uniform back to the office. He put it on and began typing madly again.
He managed to finish another message—“Schoolgirl Mary P. Cardle won the war-saving stamp competition at St. Sebastian School last week. Fourteen-year-old Mary, known to her friends as Polly, earned the money to buy the stamps by running errands. Said headmaster Dunworthy Townsend, ‘Let’s hope we can all do as much for the war effort as Mary has.’ ”—before Cess reappeared with the map, saying, “You won’t believe where I found this,” and demanding to know why Ernest still wasn’t ready.
Ernest stuffed the articles into an envelope, sealed it, and hurried out to where Cess had already started up the Rolls. He pulled out onto the road before Ernest even had his door shut. “We need to run these articles by the Call office,” Ernest said, showing the envelope to Cess.
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