Enlarging it with two fingers, I handed Mat the phone.
“A couple weeks ago I transferred to a new research team, the Inter Services Research Bureau (ISRB). My work revolves around what we do and how we can do it better. Last week, I sorted countless defective uniforms and proposed new zipper designs. It sounds silly, but it’s a good use of my skills. You would be surprised at how many zippers are needed for military uniforms, and the cost of replacements and repairs, in time and in monies, when they break. So if Churchill’s next radio address speaks of increased productivity and resulting victories, credit me and my zipper research.
“I laugh, but it actually is quite serious. All of it is. And if ever I forget, I glance over to Rose Tremaine who sits next to me. She was shy at first but has grown to trust me. She confided in me this morning that she returned to Paris at the end of last month. She wouldn’t tell me how she did it, and I don’t want to know. I chastised her for her foolishness, but then she burst into tears and I stopped. It breaks her heart what’s happening to her beloved home, and she is so afraid for her family. Every day she arrives early, stays late, and never comes out with us at night. I wonder if she feels she has something to prove. She doesn’t. We like her very much.
“War is a strange and terrible thing, Margo. Even fighting side by side, it can tear us apart.”
Mat returned my phone and as I scrolled through the letter again, something caught my attention. I gestured to his file and slid him mine. “Trade with me?”
Mat had said Caro’s name never came up in the file after this meeting. Not until that final letter to her parents, but . . . I clamped my hand on Mat’s shoulder so hard he flinched.
“We’re so stupid. It’s here and she told us, by telling Margo.” I shifted the file between us. “Who is named Rose Tremaine? In real life? No one. It’s not a person—see here? It’s capitalized on every page.”
Mat furrowed his brow.
“Code names are capitalized.” I tapped my phone, still open to the letter we’d read moments before. “She writes about Rose, but Rose wasn’t a real person who sat beside her. Rose was fiction, a code name.” I returned to the file and turned the page. I pointed to ROSE typed in three different places. “And again.” I turned another page and tapped on ROSE once more.
Mat nodded, catching on. “Caro is never mentioned after this point, and Rose was never mentioned before.” He scanned the page. “Without the letters, that connection is impossible . . . We have to be sure.”
“Rose from Briar Rose, Caro’s favorite fairy tale. Tremaine, the stepsisters’ last name from Cinderella, Margo’s favorite fairy tale. They got the books for their tenth birthdays.” I leaned back, cycling through all I remembered. “And she writes about Rose in Paris at the end of last month—exactly when Nelson reported Caro was there. How likely is it two random women working in the same office were in Paris, without permission, at the same time?”
“Not very . . . So Caro is Rose?”
I nodded. “Rose is Caro.”
“We’ve got to prove it.”
We.
The word had opened a world of longing when I first encountered it in Margo’s diaries. We are ten . . . We are “we.” Even when arguing, the sisters were on the same side. They were united. I missed that with my sister. I had missed it with anyone in my life, if I was completely honest.
It was a powerful word—an elusive, beautiful word of belonging. When Mat first used it on the phone that night, it sparked something deep within me—for me. Then Dad threw it in my face at lunch.
We.
Here it was again. Mat and I had been bandying it about for the last few minutes as if it was common, a given, and understood between us. I checked my enthusiasm, or my vulnerability—they somehow felt one and the same—and reminded myself Mat hadn’t meant anything significant by using the pronoun. To him, it was merely a word, a substitute for a noun, quicker than referring to each of us individually. But I couldn’t deny, within it, within this “we,” I didn’t feel alone and our task didn’t feel so daunting.
We sat studying files as fast as we could for the next four hours, taking pictures of every page on which ROSE appeared, and recording notes as to the file, record number, and any other information we hoped could be useful. I wrote straight through a pen and moved on to another.
My stomach then growled so loud neither of us could ignore it any longer.
Mat laughed and closed his folder. “Let’s head to the café and feed you.”
We sat at a small table to compare notes after purchasing coffees and two plates of lamb vindaloo from the cafeteria.
“Remember the memo about landing at Brest?” I tilted my phone to him.
CONFIDENTIAL
14 November 1940
To: Army Command
Fr: Nelson, Frank
Are you landing at Brest? If so, I have an agent I would like to send with you. Please let me know if you have space.
“That was Margaret and Caro’s twenty-second birthday and I think the agent who needed a ride was Caro/Rose. Margaret wrote in her diary that Caro refused to come home and was unreachable by phone on their birthday and for several days after.”
I searched my notebook for notes on the diary entry but was unable to find them. I kept talking as I leafed through each page. “Then she wrote that she got a call from Caro eight days later, on the twenty-second, claiming she’d been sick and had stayed in the London House’s basement, unable to go to work or to an approved shelter, blah, blah, blah. Margaret wrote it all in her diary that night.”
“I remember that. She thought Caro was lying to her, something she felt Caro had never done before.” Mat picked up his phone. “Google says Brest wasn’t in German hands at that time. The Soviets won it in battle in 1939 and held it until ’41. While they had a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in ’39, Stalin played both sides. Maybe there was a secret place the British could put in?”
I scrolled to the next photo, the picture of a file page I’d taken moments before, and handed my phone to Mat. “There had to have been because she called her sister the night she came back. November twenty-second.”
MOST SECRET CIPHER TELEGRAM
22 November 1940
To: Jepson
Fr: Nelson
ROSE returned from Paris today. Meeting tomorrow 0800.
Twenty-Four
After our quick lunch, we each grabbed another stack of files from our lockers and Mat requested three more for each of us. It felt like a race. Not against each other but for the truth—and against time. The Archives closed at seven o’clock.
Finding little over the next several hours, I felt the energy between us diminish. We slumped in our chairs and turned pages more slowly. Until Mat laughed out loud. All heads in the quiet room turned our direction.