Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  They had fifteen floors left to go up. He stayed silent for five of them. Then he said, ‘I was shot down, over France, and captured. Put into a prison camp. I managed to escape, though, in the end. It all came out all right.’

  The grey eyes held hers, levelly, a moment. Then they slid away, the contact finished.

  Georgie turned away more slowly, not quite certain what the purpose of his speech had been. She might have asked him, but his silence was the private kind, not welcoming intrusions. And besides, they’d reached their floor.

  She had expected he’d step off with her, but when she turned, the elevator door had closed, and he had gone. She couldn’t see him anywhere.

  The afternoon was fading, and the sunlight slanting through my Grandma’s kitchen window held a tinge of red. Her glass was empty now. She laced her fingers round it, very carefully, and studied them.

  ‘The telegram,’ she said, ‘came two days after that, to tell me your grandfather’s plane had gone missing, shot down over France.’ The pain she’d felt that day must have been easy to revive because I felt her sadness touch me in the pause that followed. She looked up. ‘He knew, you see. Sir William knew. I don’t know how…but I know he was trying, then, to give me comfort, give me hope. I never did forget that. Never will.’

  A week after the telegram, her supervisor sent her upstairs again. No letter this time; just herself, with orders to report to one of the secretaries.

  Georgie couldn’t think why anybody was wanting to see her. She hadn’t done anything wrong, that she knew of. She’d been like a robot the past several days, but it hadn’t affected her work. If anything, bad news increased her level of efficiency, because her mind sought solace in routine, and found distraction in the constant rhythmic clatter of the teletype machines. That had been how she had coped, last summer, with the news her brother Mike had died while storming the Sicilian beachfront, and it was how she was coping now. Not that the two situations were really identical – with Mike they had known from the start he was dead, but this time, with her Kenneth, the message had said he was missing, which meant there was still that uncertainty, still room for hope. How much of that she owed to those few minutes with William Stephenson, when he’d planted in her mind the notion someone could survive the crash, the capture, and could make it out alive, she didn’t know. She only knew that this time, she felt different; not as shattered as she’d felt when Mike was killed.

  She wasn’t perfect, though. The tears still swelled behind her eyes and clogged her throat a little when the secretary upstairs said she’d heard about Ken’s plane, and she was sorry. With a sympathetic smile the secretary led Georgie into a small, empty office, and left her to wait.

  When the door opened ten minutes later, the man who came through was the same British Major who had given Georgie the Official Secrets Act to sign, on her first day at work, and who had frightened her to death with all his warnings about secrecy.

  ‘Miss Clarke.’ He nodded shortly, looking at the file he was holding. There was no preamble. Straight away, he said to her, ‘We’re sending you to Canada…’

  Her heart sank. She didn’t want to leave; to be sent home in disgrace. Determinedly, she blinked back any trace of tears and told him, ‘But I’m fine. I’m really fine.’

  His upward glance was brief, one eyebrow raised. ‘We know that. We wouldn’t be sending you otherwise.’ Lowering his gaze, he carried on, ‘You’ll leave by train, tonight.’

  And then came the instructions.

  She was to go immediately back to her apartment, and pack a single suitcase. To her room-mates, she should say that she was going home for several days, to be with family. Nobody would question that, considering the circumstances. At ten o’clock, a taxi would be sent to pick her up. The taxi driver would pass over certain papers; she would put those papers in her suitcase, and she’d keep that suitcase with her on the train, at all times…

  She actually became a little paranoid about that suitcase. Even though they’d given her a private berth on the overnight train to Toronto – high luxury, compared to the way that she’d travelled the first time she’d gone home to visit, renting a pillow to sleep sitting up in a regular seat – still, she couldn’t stop worrying someone would come try to steal what it was she was carrying. She would never have made a good spy, Georgie thought. She was nervous enough as a courier. God only knew why they’d picked her to do the job.

  Despite the comfortable berth, she got almost no sleep, and was glad when the morning came.

  She had to change trains at Toronto, and carry on east a short distance, to Oshawa. There, she’d been told, she’d be met at the station.

  The platform was nearly deserted at midday, and cold from the damp wintry wind blowing in off the wide, white-capped shore of the lake – Lake Ontario – just out of sight to the south. Georgie wanted nothing more than to set down her suitcase. Her arm ached. But caution and a crushing sense of responsibility for whatever it was she was carrying kept her standing there, the suitcase held in front of her with both hands, while she waited. As the train pulled out behind her she heard footsteps, and a woman – young, like her, but wearing military uniform – approached with cheerful confidence.

  ‘Miss Clarke? I thought so. If you’d like to come with me, I have a car around the front.’

  An army station wagon, big and draughty. As she settled herself in the front passenger seat, Georgie wedged her suitcase in the space between the dashboard and her knees, glad that she soon would be rid of its worrisome contents. This was, she knew, the last leg of her journey. According to the briefing in New York, the woman corporal at the wheel would now drive Georgie to her final destination.

  She was curious to know where it might be, but she knew better than to ask. Instead, she watched the scenery pass: a country road, with blowing grass that scurried south to meet a line of trees that parted, now and then, to show the choppy frigid blue of Lake Ontario.

  At length, the car itself turned south, and took a road that ran towards the lake.

  The woman corporal said, by way of an apology, ‘I’m sure you’d like to go to your hotel and freshen up, but the Major wanted to see you first.’

  Georgie’s heart sank a little at the thought of another major. Maybe this one, she thought, would be a little less intimidating than his New York counterpart. At any rate, all she had to do was give the man the papers that she’d brought, and let him give her, in return, whatever it was she’d be carrying back to New York.

  It must be important, for them to have sent her here in person to collect it. And ‘here’ (although she wasn’t really certain where she was) seemed like a place that might house things of great importance. She’d spotted the huge transmitter tower first, far off. And then the sign that warned the area they’d entered was ‘Prohibited’. The station wagon turned again, along a narrow road that on the surface looked quite innocent – a farm road, with an orchard full of twisting, bare-branched trees on the left – but through the window now she saw a scattering of huts and buildings sprouting from the landscape, unexpected in this rolling lakeshore setting.

  ‘Here we are,’ the woman corporal said as they drew level with the guardhouse. ‘Welcome to The Farm.’

  * * *

  ‘The proper name,’ my Grandma Murray said, ‘was STS 103 – STS for “Special Training School”. But people called it other names. The Farm—’

  ‘Camp X?’ I cut her off, incredulous. ‘You’re talking about Camp X?’

  Like many people in this part of the country, I knew the famous spy school had existed, though I’d never been to see the site. There had been books written about it, and television documentaries, detailing how the camp – the first spy-training camp in North America – had been set up by the British to train agents in the arts of sabotage and secret war. It had been built before Pearl Harbor, before the States officially came into the war, and I knew that the maverick head of the American OSS, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, had made use of it
to train his own clandestine corps of agents, who’d evolved into the modern CIA. Ian Fleming, the naval intelligence officer and writer, creator of none other than James Bond, had reportedly been to the camp, and countless secret and dangerous missions in occupied Europe had been planned and orchestrated from that one small bit of farmland near Toronto.

  My grandmother, having already amazed me by the things she’d told me of her time in New York City, now amazed me further by the matter-of-fact way she spoke about the spy school.

  ‘Camp X, that’s right. Sir William was in charge of that, as well. I didn’t work there, but I worked through there, you understand – the radio transmissions, all our messages, were sent through there. So afterwards, I took a special interest in the articles that people wrote…the books. I still save everything. It’s so much more exciting than the work we did. The men who went there,’ Grandma said, ‘were taught to kill. Kill or be killed. Of course, some of them, like the Yugoslavs, had lost their families, so they wanted to get back, but oh, dear, the things that they went through to learn. They were very brave men.’

  The musical chimes of the clock in the next room broke into the silence, the only reminder of time passing on in the present.

  My grandmother said, ‘It’s a shame, in some ways, that the buildings weren’t saved. We don’t value our history enough, I don’t think. In England, you can go to see the war rooms… you know, Churchill’s war rooms, underground. They’ve kept them as they were. But here…’ She shrugged. ‘I know some of the small things are in a museum, and they did build a monument, down where the camp used to be, by the lake. I remember we were all invited to the dedication of that, all of us who worked for BSC, but I didn’t go. Some of the others did, but I’ve never been back. Never even had a look at it. It wouldn’t be the same,’ she said.

  Georgie felt, that day, that she had entered a forbidden place, as when, in childhood, she had strayed beyond the boundaries of her own safe neighbourhood. But here, instead of barking dogs and unfamiliar faces, there were guards with loaded guns held at the ready.

  It was clear she’d been expected. The station wagon she was in was waved through without ceremony, and a few moments later, before she’d had much chance to take a good look at the buildings around her, she found herself – and her suitcase – being politely but insistently ushered into the presence of the camp’s commandant.

  His office wasn’t large – a desk and a couple of chairs, and a filing cabinet, but the rigidity of military protocol still made the space seem formal. The only contact Georgie had ever had with soldiers (apart from her two brothers, before they’d been shipped overseas, and they hardly counted) had been with the young men that one sometimes met in New York, in their uniforms. But she’d met them in civilian settings. This was her first time on the other side of the fence, within the structured world that was the army.

  The importance of rank became immediately obvious – regular soldiers were not on the same plane as officers. The woman army corporal who had brought her from the station became very deferential and received only a brief acknowledgement before she was dismissed.

  Georgie, having no rank at all, wasn’t sure how to behave, but the Major soon let it be known that he was not expecting her to keep to protocol.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  There was only one chair in the room besides his. Georgie took it, and waited.

  He came round and held out his hand for her suitcase. ‘You have something for me, I think.’

  When she gave him the papers, he walked back to his desk and, without looking at them, shut them in a drawer. Resuming his seat, he leant back and began, in a friendly way, asking her questions. How had her trip up been? Had there been anyone interesting for her to talk to, to help the time pass? ‘Deadly things, trains,’ he said, with a smile. ‘So boring. I much prefer flying, myself.’ His tone and easy manner were inviting her to chat, but her BSC training would not be so easily overcome. She found herself responding as she would have if she’d met him on the street – revealing nothing, in politely brief replies. It didn’t seem to put him off. Instead, he talked about New York.

  He’d been down to the office before, evidently. He asked after one of the women who worked on her shift, someone Georgie knew well, but she didn’t admit to it. Remembering what she’d been told when she’d signed the Official Secrets Act, about not discussing her co-workers, she told the Major simply that she didn’t know a lot of other people where she worked.

  ‘Ah, well, maybe she’s in a different department. Big place, is it?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘I’m told you get some quite important visitors,’ he said. ‘Someone said Noel Coward comes to see your chief, from time to time. And Lord Mountbatten.’

  Georgie had heard about Noel Coward, and had actually been fortunate enough to see Lord Mountbatten pass through the offices. Like everyone else, she had thought him quite dashing and handsome, though nobody, really, compared with her Kenneth.

  Still, she didn’t think that discussing the comings and goings of people of influence was such a wise thing to do during wartime. Excusing her ignorance with a smile and a shrug, she said, ‘I wouldn’t know. I only work with passports’.

  Then the Major smiled, too, and stopped his questioning to measure her approvingly with one long glance. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘I thought you might, when I heard you’d been selected by Bill Stephenson himself, but even so, I like to be sure. Now,’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘I expect you’re tired. I’ll have somebody run you up to your hotel. You’ll get a bit of rest, at least. The train to New York won’t be leaving till later tonight.’

  He was standing, dismissing her. Georgie frowned. ‘But…’

  ‘Yes?’

  She nodded at her suitcase. ‘I thought…that is, I was told you had something that I was supposed to bring back.’

  He looked at her in vague surprise. ‘That’s all they told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sat again, reaching for his phone while, in his turn, he gave a nod toward her suitcase. ‘Well, it won’t fit in that, my dear.’ Into the phone, he instructed, ‘That package we’re sending to New York, could you locate it for me? That’s right. In my office, please.’

  They didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes, but to Georgie’s confusion the man who stepped into the office came in empty-handed. He was older than she was, but not by too much – not yet thirty, she guessed – neatly dressed in civilian clothes: white shirt, grey suit. His hair was neither blond nor brown, but something in between, just as the man himself was neither tall nor short, but simply medium in height and build; nice-looking in a quiet way, with nothing unremarkable about him.

  Unless, she thought, one made allowance for his eyes. He had blue eyes, intense and intelligent. They looked at her, then travelled to the Major, with a question.

  But the Major spoke to Georgie, first. ‘Miss Clarke, meet Andrew Deacon. Andrew, this is Miss Amelia Clarke. She’ll be escorting you down to New York.’

  Through the polite exchange of nods, Georgie tried to adjust to the notion that the ‘package’ she’d be taking back was human, while the Major continued, offhand, ‘We might be wise to keep you here another day, and send you back tomorrow. Give Miss Clarke a little time. She didn’t come prepared.’

  She turned her head, and asked, ‘Prepared for what?’

  The Major smiled. ‘For being Andrew’s wife.’

  They didn’t actually have time alone together until they had boarded the train on the following evening. And it wasn’t until they were seated in the dining car for dinner that they had their first real conversation.

  The dining car was very nearly empty. There were only three couples, including themselves, and the others were seated at tables some distance away. They could speak in lowered voices without being overheard.

  ‘This has all been a bit of a shock for you, I expect,’ Deacon said.

 
; She had taken to calling him Deacon because it made everything seem much more businesslike, much less uncomfortable. Not that he’d been anything except a perfect gentleman, but still, the fact remained that she was travelling in intimate close quarters with a stranger.

  ‘It’s been a shock for me, as well,’ he said, in his evenly pitched British voice, with a faint smile that told her that he, too, felt awkward. ‘I didn’t plan on marrying this year.’

  The marriage wasn’t real, of course. Somewhere, she knew, there would be papers stating otherwise, to bolster the charade. And there would also be the photographs the two of them had posed for in the camp commandant’s office earlier today, Deacon in his grey suit and she in a dress borrowed for the occasion from a local shop.

  She could have tried refusing, she supposed. She could have told them that, although there was a chance, a good chance, that her boyfriend might be dead, this whole scenario felt wrong, to her. Disloyal.

  Or she could have tried to argue that she didn’t have the skills for this. She wasn’t trained to masquerade as someone else; she wouldn’t be convincing. Why me? she’d wondered once again, and as before, had found no one to give her any answer. She only knew that this was not what she’d signed on for, when she’d gone to work for BSC.

  Nonetheless, she’d gone along with it. Hers not to reason why, she reminded herself. Besides, she didn’t know what mission they were sending Deacon on – she’d been told simply that he was going overseas – but it was possible that what this man was being sent to do would be important to the war, and that her role, however small, might make a difference.

  She found it difficult, looking at him across the white-clothed table in the dining car, to judge what kind of job he might be going to. He was not the sort of man who made a definite impression on her at first meeting, but rather he revealed his personality in stages, like an image that was blurry to begin with but came into focus more and more the longer that one looked at it.