The House at Mermaid's Cove(54)
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It can’t be much fun for you, down here all alone.”
“Oh, no, I’m fine, honestly,” I said. “I like it—really I do.”
“Hmm.” He rubbed his knuckles against his chin. I noticed how smooth his skin was, not bristling with stubble as it had been when I’d last seen him. After a moment he said, “I suppose you’ve heard about the dance the Americans are putting on?”
I nodded. “The Land Girls can’t stop talking about it.”
“Would you like to go?”
“Me?”
“Why not? They’ve sent an invitation—to ‘His Highness, Viscount Trewella.’ Nice of the US Army to elevate me to royal status.” He smiled. “And it would be natural to take my cousin along. ‘The Honorable Alice McBride’—how does that sound?”
“It’s very kind of you, but—”
“Oh, Alice,” he cut in. “You always think people act from the best motives. Kindness has nothing to do with it. The truth is I’d rather not go, but if I don’t, it’ll look as if I’m snubbing our allies, which I certainly don’t want to do.” He shrugged. “It might be just about bearable with you on my arm.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Was he afraid of being mobbed by the likes of Edith and Rita? Did he think that going with me would help him keep them at bay? I fingered a wisp of hair that protruded from my scarf, wondering how on earth I could make myself look presentable. What I wanted to say was that I couldn’t possibly go to a dance. Not looking like this. But that would sound terribly vain.
That night I stayed up late, trying to memorize the alphabet in Morse code. But I found it hard to concentrate. Staring at the rows of dots and dashes, my mind kept drifting to the dance. It was two weeks away. My hair would grow a little longer in that time. I thought about asking Merle for advice about how to style it.
The thought of going to what the Land Girls clearly regarded as the social event of the year filled me with a mixture of excitement and terror. It had been so long since I’d been dancing. I wasn’t sure if I’d remember how to do it. And the dances were bound to have changed since my brief foray into the ballrooms of Dublin. I was seriously worried about making a fool of myself.
I wondered if Jack knew what he was letting himself in for, asking someone like me as his guest. But I was coming to realize that he never did anything without first weighing the consequences. For him, there always seemed to be an ulterior motive. It wasn’t as if he pretended otherwise. He’d warned me more than once not to mistake his apparent generosity for kindness. And he’d made it clear that I’d only been invited to the dance to make things less socially awkward for him.
But those words he’d used—about it being just about bearable with me on his arm—suggested that he did at least enjoy my company. And on the boat, coming back from France, he’d said that he was glad I was no longer a nun. What was I supposed to make of comments like that? Did he feel more for me than he wanted to admit?
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. A line from the book of Proverbs elbowed its way through the muddle of thoughts in my head. Chapter 3, verse 5 had been drummed into me as a novice, along with the next verse: In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. That was the trouble. I’d stopped submitting to God in all my ways when I’d made the decision not to go back to the convent. Was this bewildering longing for Jack beckoning me down the right path or the wrong one?
I recalled the moment in the boathouse when I’d suddenly realized that I could cast off my old identity if I chose to. I hadn’t given up the religious life to get something for myself. I’d done it to break free from the burden my vocation had become, in the hope of leading a more honest life.
Sister Clare’s face appeared in my head—her eyes clouded with suspicion. I could imagine her questions, if I’d had to justify it to her: Would I have made the same decision if someone other than Jack had rescued me? Had I, even then, been subconsciously drawn to him? And if the answer was yes, how could I possibly claim that leaving the order was what God wanted?
Lean not on your own understanding. I’d never doubted the wisdom of those words. But I wasn’t sure that they could help me now.
Chapter 16
I spent the next two evenings up at the house, shadowing Merle as she sent and received messages. She explained that Penheligan was the radio base for communicating with two of the many Resistance cells now operating in France. One was in northern Brittany and the other in the south area of the region—code-named Team Felix and Team Frederick. The radio operators within both teams each had their own unique “key”—a prefix to any message that came in that immediately identified the sender and made it clear that what followed was genuine and not something the Germans had put out.
On the first evening she went through these identifying codes with me. “If ever you get a message with these letters at the start, you must come and find me.” She pointed to a place at the top of the second page of the cipher book. “It means that the sender has been captured, and anything that follows could be false information.”
After that she gave me old messages, in Morse code, to transcribe for practice. I had to write out the letters, decode them using one of the ciphers, then translate the message from French to English. On the second evening, while I was scribbling away, I heard a noise overhead—what sounded like the scrape of a chair on a wooden floor. Merle saw me glance up.