The House at Mermaid's Cove(36)

I wondered if Jack had wanted to marry Morwenna, whether he and his father had fallen out about it. A match between a viscount’s son and a maid would almost certainly be frowned upon. Perhaps we had something in common, then, Jack and I: both of us denied the choices we might have made.

Leo had said that Morwenna had gone away. Perhaps, if Jack had told her there was no future for them, she’d decided she couldn’t bear to go on living in Cornwall. Or had she slipped over the border into Devon so that they could carry on the relationship without the risk of being seen together? But if he hadn’t married her, where had the rumor of the secret wife come from?

I suppose I could have tried to raise the subject. I could have said I’d been looking at the tide tables and come across a name scribbled in the back. But I suspected he would see right through me, realize that people in the village had been gossiping about his private life, the same way the Land Girls did. Curious as I was, I couldn’t bear the thought of embarrassing him. He’d done so much for me. Gone out of his way to help me. I told myself that if he had secrets, they were no business of mine.

“It’s so peaceful.” Jack’s voice came out of the darkness. “It’s hard to imagine the horrors going on out there.”

“How far is it to the French coast?” I asked.

“About a hundred miles, as the crow flies.”

“Is that where the German planes came from? The ones that bombed Falmouth?”

“Yes—but they won’t come tonight.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s a waning moon,” he replied. “It won’t rise until the early hours of the morning—too late to give a clear view of any target.”

“Dr. Williams told me I should go and work at the hospital in Falmouth.” I had to say it, however much it pained me. “He thinks I’d be of more use there than on the farm.”

“That’s probably true.” He paused, still looking out across the estuary, not at me. “Yes,” he went on. “That’s what you should tell the others in the milking shed: that you’ll be doing shifts at the hospital every so often.” Something in the tone of his voice had changed, as if he was thinking aloud, working out the solution to something that had been puzzling him.

“You want me to go? To Falmouth?”

“No, I don’t.” He turned his face toward me. I caught the glint in his eyes. “I have something else in mind for you, Alice—something that requires a different kind of bravery from nursing but could save many more lives in the long run.”

I’d been about to take a sip of wine, but I stopped, the glass suspended in front of my mouth. “What?”

“I want you to work for us.”

“Us?”

“Churchill’s secret army—otherwise known as the Special Operations Executive.” He reached for his glass and drained it. “Do you know about the French Resistance?”

I stared at him, uncomprehending. “Only what I read in newspapers on the ship.”

“We run undercover missions between Cornwall and France. Ferrying secret agents to help the Resistance and picking up downed Allied airmen to bring them back to England.”

Suddenly I grasped why nothing seemed to make sense up at the house, why I’d only ever seen one of the many people who came and went each week. No wonder Jack had seemed to have an air of mystery about him.

“It’s dangerous work,” he went on. “We need people like you, Alice.”

“But . . . what could I do?”

“You speak fluent French, which gives you the ability to blend in. Last month we lost four men. They were rowing out to the pick-up boat from a beach on the coast of Brittany. A German patrol vessel came by, wanting to know what they were doing. None of them had more than a few words of French. They were shot dead on the spot.”

Somewhere in the trees behind us I could hear an owl hooting. Now I saw why Jack had gone to such trouble for me, why he had fed me, clothed me, and let me hide away from the world I’d left behind. From the moment he’d found me, when I’d muttered words in French while hovering between life and death, he must have realized that I could be of value. What the sea had washed up was bounty, to be taken and used.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” My voice sounded very loud in the stillness. “Why did you pretend to be a farmer?”

“I didn’t pretend.” There was a note of indignation in his voice. “Farming takes up as much of my time as the other work. Don’t you see? We had to check you out. Gauge what sort of person you are, whether you’re cut out for the sort of thing we have in mind.”

“We?”

“Merle Durand is part of the operation. She’d go to France herself if it wasn’t for the children. I asked her to keep an eye on you—get a sense of how good you’d be at sticking to the story I’d invented for you.”

A hollow sensation seeped from my stomach to my chest. How convincingly Merle had acted her part—even down to the tone of awe in her voice at that first meeting on the beach. And those whispered confidences about her marriage in the church. Was any of it true? Or was it something she’d concocted to make me believe that she liked me, trusted me, wanted me for a friend?

“She told you she did the cooking for the people in the house,” Jack went on. “That’s partly true—but her main role is translating radio messages from the Resistance.”