The Queen's Accomplice (Maggie Hope Mystery #6)(5)
“Bloody hell.” Profanity, even in front of ladies, was as common in the office as French. “Poor thing.”
Maggie turned away and bit her lip: She didn’t want Brody to see the shocked expression on her face. When the tea was prepared, she put the Denby stoneware pot, mugs, and chipped plate piled high with biscuits on a tray, and carried it into a windowless conference room. Present were Gaskell and two other high-ranking SOE men in uniform, Colonel Bernard Higgs—with a neatly trimmed iron-gray mustache, and Colonel Rupert Shaw—with brilliantined, bushy hair that stuck straight up, like porcupine quills.
The walls were thin and Maggie’s and Brody’s voices had been overheard. “One of our girls murdered, you say?” Gaskell asked as Maggie walked in carrying the tea things, Brody on his crutches behind her. The Colonel shook his head in dismay. “I may be old-fashioned, but in my opinion, these girls should stay at home and listen to their mothers—war or no war, what ho? Certainly not gallivanting around London at all hours of the night, going to bars and dance clubs, listening to jazz…”
Maggie set the tray down on the trestle table covered in green baize as Brody took a seat, leaning his crutches against the wall. “That’s a good girl,” Gaskell muttered absently as he watched her pour. “Jolly good. Not too much tannin in the tea this way.”
“What took you so long, my dear?” Colonel Higgs asked. “Powdering your nose in the ladies’ loo?”
“You could use a little powder—and a little lipstick, too,” Colonel Shaw added. “?‘Beauty for Duty’—am I right, gentlemen?”
Maggie bit her tongue and passed out the agenda for the meeting, the title of which was “The Woman Problem”—about the alleged knotty conundrum of female SOE agents—then perched on a rickety wooden chair.
When SOE had been created by Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on July 22, 1940, Colonel Colin McVean Gubbins had first secured authority, albeit unofficially, to send women behind enemy lines. Colonel Gubbins saw no reason why women couldn’t do the job of secret agent as well as the men. Gubbins had met fierce opposition, but was ultimately supported by Prime Minister Churchill, who’d approved the deployment of women as SOE agents.
Colonel Gaskell, Gubbins’s successor at SOE, was far less enthusiastic about the “women situation.” Although SOE employed scores of women—as typists, drivers, and clerks—all were officially barred from armed combat, and there was no legal authority for servicewomen to carry out the kind of guerrilla work SOE desperately wanted them to perform. The 1929 Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, the main legal instruments offering protection to prisoners of war, made no provision for women—as they were never considered, in anyone’s wildest imagination, to be combatants.
And so, although all SOE agents, both male and female, were performing undercover missions, because of the Geneva Convention, women agents were at a higher risk. Men would be treated as prisoners of war. Women, on the other hand, had far less legal protection. They could be tortured for information and then executed as spies.
“We’re already using women in the field to great advantage,” Brody reminded Gaskell. “Nowadays, more and more Frenchmen are being sent to Russia and the East—and any able-bodied man left behind is looked on with suspicion. Whereas women can still travel freely—generally underestimated by the Nazis, you know.”
Gaskell looked to Maggie. “Would you be mother, my dear?”
Maggie poured the scalding, fragrant tea, passing out mugs to the men.
Gaskell blew noisily on the steaming liquid. “I’m still not in favor of sending our ladies abroad. And of course, if our use of girls as guerrillas leaks out, the policy will have to be denied.”
“Sorry I’m late—” came a woman’s high-pitched, warbling voice in a tone suggesting she was anything but sorry. Diana Lynd was the last to arrive for any meeting. Maggie was never sure if it was because she was legitimately busy or because she enjoyed making a grand entrance in a cloud of smoke and Jicky perfume. Miss Diana Lynd was a statuesque woman in her late thirties, with a quintessentially English sense of style—always dressed in impeccably tailored tweed suits in shades of brown and caramel and soft suede court shoes, her tawny hair rolled up at the nape of her neck. She had a distinctive accent—Benenden and Kensington, Maggie guessed, spoken in tones of cream and honey.
She’d informally been assigned not only responsibility for overseeing the women recruits but also the task of intelligence officer, which largely meant sifting through all information about life on the ground in France.
Gaskell stood, as did the other men. “Until we can shut down sending women agents to France, we can’t have this policy of using females get out,” Gaskell said, taking his seat once again. “If the Germans ever learn we’re using women to fight, we’d be an international disgrace.” He gave a nervous chortle.
“I believe,” Maggie said, raising one eyebrow, “that the welfare and safety of our women in the field—as well as their well-being after they return—should be our highest concern. Not what the Germans may or may not think.”
Brody cleared his throat. “I agree with you in principle, Maggie, but we cannot, under any circumstances, let the use of women as combatants become public knowledge—Goebbels would use it for the most horrific propaganda. If anything ever were to come to light, the policy of dropping women behind enemy lines would have to be denied.”