P R O L O G U E
ELOISE
Germany
October, 1944
Perhaps at first glance, we might have looked like ordinary passengers: four women in civilian clothes, sitting in pairs facing one another, the private carriage of the passenger train illuminated by the golden light of a cloudless late-summer sunrise. Only upon closer inspection would a passerby have seen the handcuffs that secured us, our wrists resting at our sides, between us not because we meant to hide them but because we were exhausted, and they were too heavy to rest on our bony thighs. Only at a second glance would they have noticed the emaciated frames or the clothes that didn’t quite fit, or the scars and healing wounds each of us bore after months of torture and imprisonment.
I was handcuffed to a petite woman I knew first as Chloe, although in recent weeks, we had finally shared our real names with one another. It was entirely possible that she was the best friend I’d ever known—not that there was much competition for that title, given friendship had never come easy to me. Two British women, Mary and Wendy, sat opposite us. They had trained together, as Chloe and I had trained together, and like us, they had been “lucky enough” to recently find themselves imprisoned together too. Mary and Wendy appeared just as shell-shocked as Chloe and I were by the events of that morning.
As our captors had reminded us often since our arrests, we were plainclothes assassins and as such, not even entitled to the basic protections of the Geneva Convention. So why on earth had we been allowed the luxury of a shower that morning, and why had we been given clean civilian clothes to wear after months in the filthy outfits we’d been wearing since our capture? Why were they transporting us by passenger train, and in a luxurious private carriage, no less? This wasn’t my first time transferring between prisons since my capture. I knew from bitter personal experience that the usual travel arrangement was, at best, the crowded, stuffy back end of a covered truck or at worst, a putrid, overcrowded boxcar.
But this carriage was modern and spacious, comfortable and relaxed. The leather seats were soft beneath me and the air was clean and light in a way I’d forgotten air should be after months confined to filthy cells.
“This could be a good sign,” I whispered suddenly. Chloe eyed me warily, but my optimism was picking up steam now, and I turned to face her as I thought aloud. “I bet Baker Street has negotiated better conditions for us! Maybe this transfer is a step toward our release. Maybe that’s why...” I nodded toward our only companions in the carriage, seated on the other side of the aisle. “Maybe that’s why she’s here. Could it be that she’s been told to keep us safe and comfortable?”
Chloe and I had had little to do with the secretary at Karlsruhe Prison, but I had seen her in the hallway outside of our cell many times, always scurrying after the terrifyingly hostile warden. It made little sense for a secretary to accompany us on a transfer, but there she was, dressed in her typical tweed suit, her blond hair constrained in a thick bun at the back of her skull. The secretary sat facing against the direction of travel, opposite the two armed guards who earlier had marched me and Chloe onto the covered truck at the prison, then from the covered truck onto the platform to join the train. The men had not introduced themselves, but like all agents with the British Special Operations Executive, I’d spent weeks memorizing German uniforms and insignias. I knew at a glance that these were low-ranking Sicherheitsdienst officers—members of the SD. The Nazi intelligence agency.
The secretary spoke to the guards, her voice low but her tone playful. She held a suitcase on her lap, and she winked as she tapped it. The men both brightened, surprised smiles transforming their stern expressions, then she theatrically popped the suitcase lid to reveal a shockingly generous bounty of thick slices of sausages and chunks of cheese, a large loaf of sliced rye bread and...was that butter? The scent of the food flooded the carriage as the secretary and the guards used the suitcase as a table for their breakfast.
It was far too much food for three people but I knew they’d never share it with us.
My stomach rumbled violently, but after months surviving on scant prison rations, I was desperate enough that I felt lucky to be in the mere presence of such a feast.
“I heard the announcement as we came onto the carriage—this train goes to Strasbourg, doesn’t it? Do you have any idea what’s waiting for us there? This is all a bit...” Wendy paused, gnawing her lip anxiously. “None of it makes sense. Why are they treating us so well?”
“This is the Strasbourg train,” Chloe confirmed cautiously. There was a subtle undertone to those words—something hesitant, concerned. I frowned, watching her closely, but just then the secretary leaned toward the aisle. She spoke to us in rapid German and pointed to the suitcase in her lap.
Had we done something wrong? More German words—but it may as well have been Latin to me, because I spoke only French and English. Just then, the secretary huffed impatiently and pushed the suitcase onto the empty seat beside her as she stood. She held a plate toward me, and when I stared at it blankly, she waved impatiently toward Chloe and spoke again in German.
“What...”
“She wants you to take it,” Chloe translated for me, and I took the plate with my one free hand, bewildered. Chloe passed it to Wendy, and so on, until we all held plates in our hands. The secretary then passed us fat slices of sausage and cheese and several slices of bread each. Soon, our plates were filled with the food, each of us holding a meal likely more plentiful than we’d experienced since our arrival in France.
“She’s toying with us,” Mary whispered urgently. “She’ll take it back. She won’t let us eat it so don’t get your hopes up.”
I nodded subtly—I’d assumed the same. And so, I tried to ignore the treasure sitting right beneath my nose. I tried not to notice how garlicky and rich that sausage smelled, how creamy the cheese looked, or how the butter was so thick on the bread that it might also have been cheese. I told myself the increasing pangs in my stomach were just part of the torture and the smartest thing I could do was to ignore them altogether, but the longer I held the plate, the harder it was to refocus my mind on anything but the pain in my stomach and the feast in my hands that would bring instant and lasting relief.
When all the remaining food had been divided between us prisoners, the secretary waved impatiently toward the plates on our laps, then motioned toward her mouth.
“Eat!” she said, in impatient but heavily accented English.
Chloe and I exchanged shocked glances. Conditions in Karlsruhe Prison were not the worst we’d seen since our respective captures, but even so, we’d been hungry for so long. The starvation was worse for Chloe than me. She had a particularly sensitive constitution and ate a narrow range of foods in order to avoid gastric distress. Since our reunion at the prison, we’d developed a system of sharing our rations so she could avoid the foods which made her ill but even so, she remained so thin I had sometimes worried I’d wake up one morning to find she’d died in her sleep.
“What can you eat?"
I asked her urgently.
She looked at our plates then blurted, “Sausage. I’ll eat the sausage.”
For the next ten minutes we prisoners fell into silence except for the occasional, muffled moan of pleasure and relief as we devoured the food. I was trying to find the perfect compromise between shoving it all into my mouth as fast as I could in case the secretary changed her mind and savoring every bite with the respect a meal like that commanded. By the time my plate was empty and my surroundings came back to me, the guards and the secretary were having a lovely time, laughing amongst themselves and chatting as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
For a long while, we prisoners traveled in silence, holding our plates on our laps at first, then after Wendy set the precedent, lifting them to our mouths to lick them clean. Still, the guards chatted and laughed and if I judged their tones correctly, even flirted with the secretary? It gradually dawned on me that they were paying us very little attention.
“How far is Strasbourg? Does anyone know?” I asked. Wendy and Mary shook their heads as they shrugged, but Chloe informed me it was hundreds of miles. Her shoulders had slumped again despite the gift of the food, and I nudged her gently and offered a soft smile. “We have a long journey ahead. Good. That means we have time for a pleasant chat while our bellies are full.”
By unspoken agreement, we didn’t discuss our work with the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It was obvious to me that each of the other women had been badly beaten at some point—Wendy was missing a front tooth, Mary held her left hand at an odd angle as if a fractured wrist had healed badly, and Chloe... God, even if she hadn’t explained to me already, I’d have known just looking at her that Chloe had been to hell and back. It seemed safe to assume we had all been interrogated literally almost to death at some point, but there was still too much at stake to risk giving away anything the Germans had not gleaned from us already. So instead of talking about our work or our peculiar circumstances on that train, we talked as though we weren’t wearing handcuffs. As though we weren’t on our way to, at the very best, some slightly less horrific form of imprisonment.
We acted as though we were two sets of friends on a casual jaunt through the countryside. We talked about interesting features outside our window—the lush green trees in the tall forests, the cultivated patches of farmland, the charming facades of cottages and apartments on the streets outside. Mary cooed over a group of adorable children walking to school, and Wendy talked about little shops we passed in the picturesque villages. Chloe shared longing descriptions of the foods she missed the most—fresh fruit and crisp vegetables, eggs cooked all manner of ways, herbs and spices and salt. I lamented my various aches and pains and soon everyone joined in and we talked as if we were elderly people reflecting on the cruelty of aging, not four twenty-somethings who had been viciously, repeatedly beaten by hateful men.
I felt the warmth of the sunshine on my face through the window of the carriage and closed my eyes, reveling in the simple pleasures of fresh air and warm skin and the company of the best friend I’d ever known. I even let myself think about the secretary and that picnic, and feel the relief that I was, for the first time in months, in the company of a stranger who had shown kindness toward me. I’d almost forgotten that was something people did for one another.
I’d never been an especially cheerful sort of woman and I’d never been an optimist, but those past months had forced me to stare long and hard at the worst aspects of the human condition and I’d come to accept a certain hopelessness even when it came to my own future. But on that train, bathed in early morning sunlight and basking in a full stomach and pleasant company, my spirits lifted until they soared toward something like hope.
For the first time in months, I even let myself dream that I’d survive to embrace my son Hughie again. Maybe, even after all I’d seen and done, the world could still be good. Maybe, even after everything, I could find reason to have faith.
C H A P T E R 1
CHARLOTTE
Liverpool
May, 1970
Dad and I sit side by side on a picnic blanket on Formby Beach, gazing across the blue-gold gradient of the sunset reflecting off the Irish Sea. A red thermos full of hot tea is propped into the sand in front of my legs, and between me and Dad, our golden retriever Wrigley lies flat on the checkered rug, staring longingly at the newspaper on Dad’s lap. There’s only a handful of chips left, but the scent of salt and fat and vinegar seems to be driving poor Wrigley mad.
If Dad wasn’t here, I’d let Wrigley tear into that newspaper. I always did find it hard to say no to that dog, but since my mother’s death, I don’t even try.
Today should have been Mum’s fifty-fourth birthday. Christmas was miserable, but this, the first of her birthdays since her death, is somehow an equally confronting milestone. Mum always liked to make a fuss of birthdays, and we always did the same for her. This should have been her day, so now that she’s gone, it’s a day when her absence is all I can think about. Even Wrigley seemed miserable this morning, sulking around the house as if he knew the date as well as we did. That’s when I decided we had to get out of the house this evening. Yes, this feels stiff and awkward, but this pathetic, depressing picnic is at least some attempt to mark the day.
Geraldine Ainsworth would never have tolerated sulking.
“I’ve been worried about you, Lottie,” Dad says suddenly. His words are slow and careful, ever-so-slightly slurred as they always are—the unusual pattern of his speech the lasting result of a traumatic brain injury from a car accident when he was young. But I have no trouble understanding him, and I turn to look at him in disbelief. He’s worried about me? That’s rich, coming from him. Even the new notches he’s punched into his belt aren’t enough to keep his trousers from sagging off his hips these days. He’s a shriveled version of his old self but even as my defensiveness rises, I note the deep concern in his eyes. That gives me pause. Dad clears his throat and says hesitantly, “You don’t seem yourself since—” He breaks off, obviously searching for words, then settles on a muttered “Well. Since your mum left us.”
“She didn’t leave us, Dad,” I snap. “She was taken from us.”
I wince, immediately regretting my sharp tone, but Dad doesn’t react. He stares right into my eyes and waits, almost as if he’d wanted to generate a reaction in me.
Well, he got one. And now I feel awful for it.
If it had been a friend or colleague who died, I’d have gone to Dad for support. I’d have cried all over him and blubbered about the injustice of it all. I’ve always known Noah Ainsworth as a man who could do a passable impersonation of an extrovert when the situation commands it, but who’s truly most comfortable listening one-on-one. And given I have always been someone who loves to talk, this suited me just fine right up until my mother died. I’ve had so many words I wanted to say since then. I still have no idea if my father will ever be ready to hear them.
The problem is this: I lost my mother, but Dad lost the love of his life. He’s been my emotional rock since I was a child, but I can’t burden him with my pain when his is even greater.
It hits me suddenly now that Dad has seemed every bit as broken and furious about her death as I have, until the last week or so. Flashes of memory cycle through my mind—things I noticed but didn’t pause to be curious about at the time, lost in my own fog of sadness. Dad up early last Saturday, making himself eggs for breakfast. Dad ironing his clothes for the week on Sunday night, just as he always used to. Dad smiling as he walked out the door to go to work on Monday.
And the most telling of all—how did I miss it? Every night this week, Dad waiting for me in the evening with robust, hearty meals—rich beef stews and pastas and baked chicken. He’s eating well again! He’s been quiet, but it’s the old kind of quiet—the kind that allows space for me to talk, not the kind of tense, miserable silence that told me he was too bereaved to listen. And now, after months of introspection, he’s prompting me to share.
“You’re doing a little better,” I blurt. He tilts his head a little, thoughtful.
“I will miss your mother every minute until I join her on the other side, Lottie,” he says quietly. “But she wouldn’t want me to spend the rest of my life bitter.” He paused, then added with a wry chuckle, “She wouldn’t have allowed it, actually, and I know that for a fact.”
There are unspoken words at the end of that sentence. About me. About my bitterness and the ferocious anger that still burns so fiercely in me, every bit as destructive as it was when I found out she was gone. And that’s too bad, because I’m still not ready to let any of that go. I’m curious about the change in Dad though, because now that I’ve acknowledged it to myself, I start to wonder.
He isn’t just calmer, he’s focused. Steady. So much more his old self.
As for me, I haven’t missed a day at work, but I haven’t been fully present in that classroom since I returned from my bereavement leave. I’m with those five-year-olds all day long and I spend every second of my work hours pretending I’m the woman I used to be. My heart isn’t in it anymore. The loss of my mother has changed me in a way I’m not sure I can come back from.
“What’s the secret, Dad?” I whisper, throat tight. “How do I stop feeling like this?” Some days, the students in my class do something I know is funny or adorable but I have to force myself to smile. Last week, little Aoife Byrne finally mastered the letters of her name. It’s a feat that’s taken a year of concentrated effort because of her developmental challenges, but I felt no spark of pride or relief. Instead, I am numb or sad or angry all the time, no longer capable of the joy I once took for granted in my life and my job.
“I lived such a wonderful life with your mother, you know,” Dad says. “Truly, we shared so many wonderful years—”
“But she was only fifty-three,” I interrupt him sharply. “You were meant to have more time. Don’t you feel cheated?”
“Cheated?” He considers the word, then gives me a soft look. “There would never have been enough years, love. I’d never have had my fill of that woman! And think of all we shared. You...your brother...a beautiful granddaughter. We built a marvelous home, and we supported one another in our careers and we spent all of those lovely Saturdays in the garden and honestly, when I look back, it feels like a glorious dream.” When Dad becomes emotional, his speech slows even more, the slur becoming more and more pronounced. He pauses now, collecting himself, then adds roughly, “I’ve felt stuck since she died.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“A few weeks ago, I was looking at our old photo albums and I found one of us standing together outside of her family home in 1941. Just a few weeks before that day, I’d learned that my family was gone and the look on my face... I was still in shock when that photo was taken.” He pauses, overcome with emotion again, and my heart aches at the pain in his voice. He was the eldest of five children, but his parents and siblings were killed during the Liverpool Blitz when their home was destroyed in an air raid. “I could barely drag myself
out of bed but your mother told me I needed to find a way to move forward. She had much the same advice for me in the dying days of the war when I was confronted by a whole other kind of grief. She used to tell me ‘Noah, you will not bring any one of your loved ones back for even a moment by refusing to live your own life.’” I look out to the water, my eyes stinging with tears. I hear those words as if she’s whispering them to me herself, but I still don’t have a clue how to apply them. “Twice already she brought me back to life by pointing me to look beyond the immediacy of my loss. This time it was the mere memory of that advice that woke me up. I need something to focus on so I’ve decided to take on a new project.”
“At work?”
Mum was a schoolteacher, just as I am, but Dad owns a small chain of auto mechanic shops—his pride and joy, second only to those of us lucky enough to be his family. He reaches down into the newspaper to withdraw a fat but likely cold chip. Wrigley watches hopefully as Dad raises the chip to his mouth, then slumps again when Dad chews the whole thing in one bite.
“The idea came to me when I looked at that photo, actually,” he says. “It got me thinking about those days again. You know I served.”
He rarely talks about the war, but I’ve seen photos of him as a young man in uniform, and in one, I recall he was holding a spanner.
“You worked as an army mechanic, right?”
“Well, no,” he says carefully. I glance at him in surprise. “I left school at sixteen to enlist.”
“Sixteen,” I breathe, shaking my head. “Dad, that’s so young.”
“Yes, I was young enough that they’d only take me with my parents’ permission, but my mum and dad were thrilled to give it. I’d never been good at school, but I was good with my hands, so it made sense for me to enlist and learn a trade. They were so proud when I qualified...” Dad trails off, draws in a deep breath, then finishes slowly, “...as a flight mechanic.”
A flight mechanic? I turn to Dad, eyebrows high.
“Wait. Are you telling me you trained on planes before cars? Why don’t I know this already?”
“It was always my dream to work on airplanes, right from when I was a little boy,” Dad says wistfully. “And it was incredible work. I loved the problem-solving and the challenge of it—I mean, honestly Lottie, it was just so bloody cool. I spent my whole school years feeling stupid, but I felt like the smartest man in the world once I knew how to make a plane work.”
Dad’s always shown a vague interest in planes, but he’s never seemed especially passionate about aviation. Not like this. Even as he’s speaking, there’s a wondrous glint in his eye.
“But you work on cars,” I say stupidly, as if he might have forgotten. “You always have.” Dad glances at me, and I add weakly, “At least, as long as I’ve been alive.”
“I came out of the war a changed man. I knew I needed to reinvent myself and to be completely frank, my mind wasn’t up to the challenge of resuming aviation work. I mean, cars are still plenty complex. Still challenging. But given my...” He waves toward his head, and my
eyes widen.
“The car accident? I thought you said that happened when you were a kid.”
“Well, I was a kid. I was only in my twenties. And it probably was a car accident but...”
“But what?”
“My memories of that day aren’t perfect, that’s all. Anyway, after the war, it was helpful for me to go back to basics and learn a new trade. So, I went right back to the start of an apprenticeship, this time with cars.”
“You never told me any of this,” I say. Dad and I are close and I thought I knew his life well. It stings a little that this is a part of his past he’s never shared with me.
“There’s a lot I never told you, love,” he says gently.
“Well? What else?”
“When the war started, I had a promotion of sorts, and I ended up working as a flight engineer. It was marvelous fun at first, soaring into the sky with a crew that soon enough felt like brothers to me. But...everything changed in 1940 with the Battle of France. Me and the boys were so proud to be defending our neighbor—we knew England was at risk too and we wanted to do for France what we hoped the world would do for us if the Germans came to our shores. But one day, on a mission over Northern France, my plane took a brutal hit.” I gasp in shock, and Dad nods slowly, still staring out at the water, but his gaze is distant now and his voice drops. “We had no choice but to bail out and it was terrifying. Ian Owens’ chute didn’t open. No chance he could have survived a fall like that. The rest of the crew were captured pretty much right away.”
“And you?” I ask, stunned.
“Ah, I was the lucky one that day,” Dad says softly. “By some miracle a gust of wind caught my chute, and I was blown away from the others, right into the backyard of a sympathetic French farmer. He hid me for months while the area was lousy with Germans. He put me to work with his sons—fixing their cars, working on the fields—hiding in plain sight as it were. Not an uncommon thing for helpful Frenchmen to do for downed airmen at the time. Once that initial phase of the occupation had settled into something calmer—still awful, mind, but not quite as chaotic—the farmer sought out a local resistance group and in time, they took me into their network of safe houses. Your mum and I weren’t married yet, but we were dating, and she had no idea if I was alive or dead for over a year.” He shakes his head as he exhales. “I suspect that just about drove her crazy.”
“But...what?” The slight sting that Dad had been keeping secrets from me is now a soul-deep ache and confusion. “Dad.” He doesn’t react, so I say again, this time more urgently, “That’s how you learned French, isn’t it? You told me you learned at school...”
“Like I said, love,” he says quietly, “I didn’t want to lie to you and your brother, but it was easiest to give you both simpler explanations for these things at first. Then time got away from me. Some things are easier to forget than to confront.”
“Wow,” I breathe, shaking
my head. “Dad! This is incredible.”
“They were wild times. Everyone my age has a story to tell about the war years.”
“But...but you?” I suppose any daughter would be shocked to hear a parent had lived through such an ordeal, but my father is so quiet—at times, bordering on shy. I don’t think of Dad as weak but even so, I just can’t picture him living under such danger.
“And then, after I escaped France—”
“How did you ‘escape France’?”
“There was really only one way out and that was the escape lines operated by resistance volunteers. They made up false papers for me, then smuggled me through a series of safe houses, from Lille to Paris, where they paired me up with a girl...a resistance operative, of sorts. She also needed to get out, so we escaped via the Pyrenees.”
“But—the French-Spanish border is. ...
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