The House at Mermaid's Cove(53)
He glanced up from his plate, a forkful of food suspended on its way to his mouth. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I saw in London. The Germans dropped a bomb on a school. According to the news reports, it was deliberate—not accidental. It cut the building in half. The children were having their lunch when it fell. Thirty-eight of them were killed, and six teachers.”
The piece of bacon in my mouth suddenly felt like cardboard. A school. What kind of wickedness made men drop bombs on children?
“Those men we rescued are pilots,” he went on. “So many have been lost. We need every single one of them if we’re going to win this war.”
I picked up what remained on my plate and offered it to Brock. “What if they get shot down again?”
“Then we’ll do our best to rescue them. If anything, coming so close to being captured makes them even keener to get back out there—they’ve seen firsthand what it’s like to live under German occupation.”
Something flickered in his eyes as he said it. I wondered if he was thinking of what the injured airmen had been through in France, or whether his mind had leapfrogged to another place. Was he thinking about the girl in the photograph? No doubt people on Guernsey were experiencing the same kind of treatment the Germans were meting out to the French. If Morwenna was trapped on the island, Jack would have no way of knowing what had become of her.
I’d heard enough horror stories about the Great War when I was at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Belgium to know that it was not only men who were victimized when soldiers invaded. Some of the older nuns at the convent where I lived in Brussels had harrowing memories of being made to strip naked by German troops who accused them of being spies. Baseless charges, they said: the only purpose was humiliation—but they counted themselves lucky not to have been raped.
No wonder Jack sometimes looked as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. If what I suspected was true—if he’d spirited Morwenna off to Guernsey to avoid a scandal—he must be racked with guilt at having to leave her to the mercy of the Nazis.
Listen to me, Sister Anthony: the tighter you pull those strings, the better you will restrain the imagination.
The voice of Sister Margarita rang through my head, transporting me back to the novices’ robing room in Dublin, where I had first put on the hated skullcap. It was as if, because I no longer wore it, my mind had lost the discipline of rational thinking. I told myself that I had no concrete evidence to support my wild theory of Jack fathering an illegitimate child with the girl Leo Badger had seen him with one summer, years ago. The baby in the photograph could be anyone’s child. I didn’t know for certain that the girl was Morwenna—or that the snapshot had been sent from Guernsey. For all I knew, Jack could simply have used an old envelope to store the photo. And as for Ned being the child, surely that was venturing into the realm of fantasy.
“I suppose you’re thinking about the agents we dropped?” Jack’s question was so far from what had been in my mind that it took me by surprise.
“I . . . yes . . . I was.” I avoided his eyes as the lie came stumbling out. “Have you heard from them?”
“They all got through.” He nodded. “And everything they took out with them has been safely delivered. But that creates a problem for us.”
“Why?”
“They took radio parts as well as ammunition and medical supplies. That means the Brittany Resistance teams now have fourteen working radio sets instead of the half dozen they had before.” He looked at me. There was nothing haunted in his eyes now. What I saw was a determined gleam. “Merle needs help translating the messages. She doesn’t have enough time, with the children to look after. We’re drafting in another woman from the village to relieve her of the cooking. But I’d like your help with the radio work.”
I held his gaze, beyond being surprised by anything he asked me to do. “Well, yes, of course,” I said. “If someone teaches me what to do.”
“It’ll take time to pick it up,” he said. “I’ve brought you a set of the codebooks we use.” He reached into his knapsack. “You’ll need to learn Morse code first. That’s this one.” He passed me the thinner of the two books. “The ciphers are in here.” He held the other one out to me. “There are two ways of interpreting messages: most of the time you’ll be translating straightforward coded phrases—but sometimes you’ll receive sentences that sound like nonsense. You’ll get something like ‘I love Siamese cats,’ or ‘Granny has eaten all the chocolates.’ They convey something quite specific, for the sake of speed, such as a warning about enemy troops in a drop area, or an imminent raid on a safe house.”
I opened the Morse code book. That seemed straightforward enough, patterns of dots and dashes alongside each letter of the alphabet. The cipher book looked more intimidating—it was thicker than the family Bible at the house in Dublin.
“Merle will show you how to use the transmitter.” He stood up. “You’re most likely to be needed in the early evenings, when she’s busy with the children. I hope you won’t mind—I know you’re already putting in long days.”
“It’s not as if I have anything else to do.” I hadn’t meant for it to come out sounding like a complaint. I enjoyed the solitude of the boathouse. I loved walking back there, enveloped in the lush tranquility of the valley, knowing that I could spend the evening ahead reading one of the books I’d borrowed from the house, or just lie outside on a blanket, looking at the stars. It was a freedom that most people took for granted, but for me it was still new and very precious.