CHARLOTTE COULDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT, but she dozed off after dawn, falling into an abyss of nightmares. At first, she could see Ruby at the bottom of a dark hole, crying out for help. And then she was on a crowded train car headed east. In the third dream, she saw Ruby delivering a stillborn baby in a dirty jail cell. When Charlotte awoke, sweaty and panting, Lucien was gone and she was alone.
He returned late that afternoon, his expression grim. “I’ve spoken with Monsieur Savatier,” he said. “We cleared out the hidden closet. If the Germans come, they won’t find anything out of the ordinary. Monsieur Savatier will contact me if Ruby returns or if anyone comes looking for her.”
“Thank you.” Charlotte hesitated. “Is there any word about what has happened to her?”
Lucien cleared his throat. “She has been moved to the prison at Fresnes.”
“Fresnes?”
“I’m afraid so.”
They didn’t say anything for a moment, but Charlotte knew that Lucien was thinking the same thing she was. This was a bad sign. The conditions were reportedly horrific; people passing by could hear the screams of tortured prisoners.
“Have you learned anything else?” Charlotte asked.
“Just that a man named Léo Huet disappeared at the same time and hasn’t turned up in any of the prisons, as far as we can tell. He was working on the escape line, and the suspicion is that he betrayed Ruby and a few others. Laure has also been apprehended, as has another man who ran a safe house just outside Paris.”
“And have any of them talked yet?”
“Not as far as I know. But the Nazis have their techniques.”
“Will they torture her?”
“I don’t know.”
But from the way Lucien averted his eyes, Charlotte guessed that the answer was probably yes. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach. “Surely the fact that she is American will help her.”
“Yes. I hope so,” Lucien said. But his tone was flat and unconvincing. “Charlotte, if there’s a way to survive, Ruby will. I know she will.”
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. But she also knew that survival might not be a possibility. There was no reason to say it aloud.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
June 1944
From Dartmouth, Thomas and the other two British pilots who’d made their escape from Plouha in January had been escorted to London by two MPs, who took them first to the movements office and then to the Ministry of Defence. There, Thomas had been grilled for hours by an MI9 man who was evidently trying to confirm that Thomas was who he said he was. “You never know,” the man said at the end, when he was assured that Thomas was telling the truth. “It wouldn’t be the first time the Germans had tried to infiltrate us. Welcome back, son.”
The interrogation was followed by fourteen days of mandatory leave, which Thomas was supposed to use to “get his head straight,” according to the MI9 man. But he didn’t want to straighten out his head. He wanted to return to the skies. He wanted to defend Britain. He wanted to drive those damned Nazis out of France. He wanted to get back to Ruby.
It was clear, however, that none of that was going to happen immediately, so he accepted an invitation to visit Harry’s family for a week, although he left after just four days because Harry’s mother hovered over him, staring as if he were a ghost. He knew she could see shadows of her son in him, in the way he carried himself, the way he spoke, the way he walked, and he realized how difficult his visit was for her. So he made his excuses and spent the rest of his leave alone in a small hotel room in London, dreaming of the day he’d make it back to Ruby. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could see poppies. It was the only time he felt a sense of peace.
Thomas received word on the last day of his leave that instead of returning to Northolt, he was to report to RAF Headquarters for a new posting.
“Won’t I go back to my old squadron?” Thomas asked the movements officer, whose office he was shown into upon arrival.
“No,” said the man, who introduced himself as Roscoe Vincent. “I’m afraid you can no longer take part in ops over Europe.”
“Pardon?” Thomas’s stomach was suddenly in free fall.
“The regulations have changed,” Vincent continued as he studied Thomas’s file, which was open on the desk in front of him. “You see, if you were to be shot down and captured by the Germans, you’d be in a position to give them information about the escape line. We can’t risk that.”
“But I would never do that. I swear it!”
Vincent was unmoved. “Of course you don’t think you would. But no one really knows how they’d hold up under torture, eh? In any case, those are the rules, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Now, shall we talk about where to post you? Perhaps you might like to fly Lysanders in a unit that handles air-to-air firing practices?”
“No.” Thomas resisted the urge to squirm in his chair. “I need to be back in combat.”
“Then Malta.”
“I wouldn’t really be making an impact in the war effort there, now would I?”
Vincent sighed and made a note in Thomas’s file. “The RAF base in Drem, then. You can fly missions in North Africa.”
“With all due respect, sir, I’d like to be as involved in the campaign in Europe as possible.”
Vincent peered at Thomas over the top rim of his glasses. “Why?”
Thomas hesitated. “The people of France saved my life. I vowed to myself that if I got out alive, I would do all I could to protect them.”
Vincent studied him for a long time. “So you met a girl.”
Thomas didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to hurt his cause.
“Europe isn’t an option.” Vincent marked something in Thomas’s file and then flipped it closed with finality. “We’ll start you at Ras El Ma in Morocco. It’s being used as a staging post for now. From there, I suspect, you’ll be heading to”—he checked his notes—“Oujda. Also in Morocco. Rest assured, you’ll be a very important part of the war effort. That will be all.”
He stood and waited until Thomas, the breath knocked out of him, rose and made his way to the door. The poppy fields felt farther away than ever, but he was powerless to change that. If he needed to help win the war from the edge of Africa, that’s what he would do. After all, the base in Morocco wasn’t far from the European coast. And that was something.
IT TURNED OUT THAT INSTEAD of flying combat missions, Thomas’s assignment was to deliver Spitfires to airfields in Corsica through the heat of the summer. The aircrafts would be used in the upcoming liberation of France, so Thomas was able to rationalize to himself that in a way, he was protecting Ruby after all, even if he wasn’t doing so directly. But he longed to fly missions, and as the weeks rolled into months, he began to feel as if he would be stranded in Morocco forever.
On June 6, Thomas was on another continent as more than 160,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy to fight the Nazis head-on. The men storming through northern France were a mere 170 miles from Ruby, and he wasn’t there.
Thomas took a short assignment in midsummer training other RAF pilots to evade capture if they went down behind enemy lines. The tide of the war had changed after D-Day, and it was becoming clear that the Nazis wouldn’t be able to hold on. Still, they seemed to be hunting downed pilots ruthlessly. It was more important than ever for pilots flying over the Continent to know what to do if they had to eject over land.
“There are good people on the ground there,” Thomas said to a group of fresh-faced young men in late June. “People who rise above the danger and risk their own lives to help us. It’s why we will win the war, because the things we stand for are rooted in that sort of goodness.”
“How do you maintain your faith in humanity, sir?” asked a young pilot. “How should we go about believing that we will get home safely when the odds are against us from the moment we hit the ground?”
“You must think of the people you love the most,” Thomas said, “and remember that you’re fighting the war to make the world safe for them. Whatever becomes of you—whether you live or die—you’ll know that you are doing things for the right reasons. That’s how you maintain your faith.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE