All Clear

Dover—April 1944

“KANSAS!” COMMANDER HAROLD BAWLED IN ERNEST’S EAR, hugging him and pounding him on the back. “I can’t believe it’s you!” And for the space of perhaps thirty seconds, Ernest wondered if he could convince him he was mistaken—if his two-day stubble and Cornish accent might create just enough doubt that he could look bewildered and say, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid you’ve confused me with someone else.”

But it was too late. The Commander had already seen the look on his face when he’d realized this was the Lady Jane. And now what the hell was he going to do?

If the Commander told Lady Bracknell …

He suddenly remembered Bracknell saying, “Algernon specifically requested you for this delivery.” Tensing already knows I know the Commander, he thought.

That’s why he sent me. But how had he known that? And what was the Commander—

“What are you doing here, Kansas?” Commander Harold was saying.

“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? I thought the Lady Jane had been sunk at Dunkirk—”

“Sunk?” he bellowed, outraged. “The Lady Jane?”

Jesus, the sailor up on deck will hear him, he thought. “Shouldn’t we—” he cautioned, pointing at the hatch.

“You’re right, lad,” the Commander said, and waded over to the hatch, reached up, and pulled the trapdoor shut. “You should know nothing can sink the Lady Jane, not even a Nazi U-boat.”

“But then what happened? Where’s Jonathan?” he said, almost afraid to ask. “Did he make it back?”

“Make it back?” the Commander bellowed, surprised. “Why, you saw him up there on deck not five minutes ago.” He tipped the hatch open and shouted,

“Jonathan! Get down here!”

“Aye, aye, Captain Doolittle,” a man’s voice said, and the sailor came down the ladder, still carrying the wrench and saying reprovingly, “Grandfather, you’re not supposed to call me Jonathan. My name’s Alfred—” He stopped when he saw Ernest, looking uneasily at him. His hand tightened on the wrench.

This can’t possibly be Jonathan, Ernest thought, staring at the tall, broad-shouldered sailor. He’s a grown man.

“Sorry, Captain Doolittle,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

“Stop that Captain Doolittle nonsense,” the Commander said. “Can’t you see who this is? It’s Mike Davis!”

He may not even remember me, Ernest thought. It’s been four years.

“You know,” the Commander prompted. “Kansas!”

“Oh, my goodness!” Jonathan exclaimed, shifting the wrench to his other fist so he could shake hands. “Mr. Davis!” He was beaming. “This is wonderful!”

“Wonderful” was the word, all right. They were alive. His unfouling the propeller hadn’t got them killed. Especially Jonathan—the Commander had known what he was getting into when he took off for Dunkirk, but Jonathan hadn’t. He’d been just a kid.

Though he wasn’t any longer. “I can’t believe it!” he was saying, pumping Ernest’s hand vigorously. “I’m so glad you’re here. I never thanked you for saving our lives. Without you, we’d be at the bottom of Dunkirk harbor. And you nearly got killed yourself, trying to—” He stopped short and looked down at the water Ernest was standing in. “I mean, your foot and everything. I thought they were going to have to cut it off.”

So did I, he thought.

“We’d never have made it without you,” Jonathan said. “I should have recognized you, but you look so different!”

“I look different? Look at you! You’re all grown up!”

“Having German torpedo boats on your tail ages you rather quickly. But what are you doing here?”

“That’s the same question I’ve been asking your grandfather. I’d heard you didn’t make it back to Dover after your second trip to Dunkirk.”

“We didn’t,” the Commander said. “We were commandeered.”

“They needed us to go to Ostende to take off an intelligence officer they couldn’t afford to let the Germans get hold of,” Jonathan explained. “So they offloaded our passengers onto the Grayhoe, and we went to Belgium instead.”

“And when we got him back to Ramsgate, they asked us if we’d do a few other jobs for Intelligence, like—”

“Grandfather,” Jonathan said warningly. “That’s classified. I’m not certain we’re allowed to—”

“Bah! We can tell him. Can’t we, Kansas?”

“Not Kansas,” he said. “These days it’s Ernest Worthing.”

“What’d I tell you, Jonathan? And I’ll wager he’s got even more secrets than we do, haven’t you, Kansas?”

“Yes,” he said. Most of which I can’t tell even you.

“All right, we told you what we’ve been up to since Dunkirk,” the Commander said. “Now you tell us what you’ve been doing these last four years.”

I’ve been trying to get two of my fellow historians out of this century and back home, he thought. I’ve been writing letters to the editor and personal ads and funeral notices with coded messages in them to people who haven’t been born yet. And I’ve been trying to find Denys Atherton, who is somewhere in the staging area for the invasion, so he can tell Oxford where Polly and Eileen are and pull them out before Polly’s deadline, which passed four months ago.

“I’ve been delivering parcels,” he said, and when the Commander frowned, he smiled and said, “I’m Seaman Higgins. Captain Pickering said as how you were hiring on a crew.”

“I knew it,” the Commander said jubilantly. “I told Jonathan that Tensing’d put you to work.”

“You’re not supposed to call Colonel Tensing that,” Jonathan said. “You’re supposed to call him Algernon.”

“That’s only when there might be German spies about.” The Commander turned to Ernest. “All these made-up names—Captain Doolittle, First Mate Alfred—a lot of nonsense. Wanted me to be Capitaine Myriel,” he said, pronouncing it “Cap-ee-tayne Meeryell.” “And what the hell good will that do? If the jerries catch us, they’ll know in two minutes we’re not Frenchies. Instead of worrying over names, I told ’em, you should be seeing to it we don’t get caught.” He turned to Jonathan. “And Kansas here knows his name’s Tensing. He was in hospital with him. Weren’t you, Kansas?”

“Yes,” he said, trying to make sense of all this. He’d assumed they’d met Tensing in connection with the assignments they’d done for British Intelligence and that they’d mentioned him to Tensing, but if they’d known him while he was in hospital …

“How did you meet him?” he asked.

“He was the officer we had to fetch at Ostende,” the Commander said.

“He was badly injured,” Jonathan said. “He’d been shot in the spine.”

“And you told him about me when you were bringing him back?”

“He wasn’t in any shape to be told anything,” the Commander said. “Unconscious the whole way.”

“We didn’t think he was going to make it,” Jonathan said.

“And then eight months later up he pops, nearly as good as new and looking for you. Said he’d been in hospital with you and somebody’d told him we’d brought you back from Dunkirk. Said he’d seen you in some town near Oxford and then lost you again and did we know where you were and what could we tell him about you. Mainly, could you be trusted?”

“And what did you tell him?”

“We told him we didn’t know where you were,” Jonathan said, “but that he should ask in Saltram-on-Sea.”

He knew the rest of it, how Tensing and Ferguson had gone there and given Daphne the address he’d thought was the retrieval team’s. He’d wondered how they’d traced him to Daphne, but he’d always assumed one of the nurses at the hospital had mentioned she’d come to see him.

“It looks like he found you,” Jonathan said.

“Yes, he found me.” Or rather, I found him, I went to the address in Edgebourne Daphine gave me, expecting to find the retrieval team, and there he was. Scared the bejesus out of me. I thought he was going to arrest me as a spy, but he didn’t. He offered me a job. Which I turned down till I found out that Polly’s deadline was two months before Denys Atherton got here.

“What else did you tell Tensing?” he asked.

“What do you think we told him?” the Commander said. “That you were as brave as they come, that you’d saved our lives and the life of every soldier on the Lady Jane when you unfouled that propeller. And I told him he’d be a blasted fool not to recruit you, in spite of you being a Yank.”

That day in Edgebourne, Tensing had said, “You come highly recommended,” and he’d assumed Tensing had talked to Hardy, but it had been the Commander and Jonathan.

If it hadn’t been for them, Tensing wouldn’t have found him after losing him at Bletchley. He wouldn’t have offered him a job and the possibility of finding Atherton and of telling him where Polly and Eileen were. He wouldn’t be working on Fortitude South. And if they hadn’t rescued Tensing, would there even have been a Fortitude South? And they couldn’t have rescued Tensing if he hadn’t unfouled the propeller.

“Tensing recruited you?” Jonathan was asking, as excited as when he’d been fourteen, and Ernest was suddenly reminded of Colin Templer. “You’re a spy?”

“Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid,” Ernest said. “When I’m not delivering parcels I spend most of my time at a desk. And speaking of parcels, I’d better deliver the one I brought and get going.”

He reached for his duffel bag, but the Commander stopped him. “You can’t go yet, not without telling us what all’s happened to you since we saw you last.”

I faked amnesia, nearly killed Alan Turing, got knocked unconscious by a collapsing wall, faked my own death, and met the Queen.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“We got plenty of time.” The Commander pulled out a chair for him. “Sit down. You can’t go out in that gale. You want some coffee? Some stew?”

He remembered the Commander’s stew. “Coffee, thanks.” He sat down. There were things he needed to find out, too.

The Commander sloshed over to the coffeepot. “Jonathan, see if you can find that brandy we were saving for V-Day,” he said. He fished a mug out of the litter of opened cans and charts on the table, poured coffee into it, and handed it to Ernest.

The mug didn’t look like it had been washed since the last time he’d been on the Lady Jane. Ernest sipped cautiously at it. I should have had the stew, he thought.

“Here it is,” Jonathan said, bringing the brandy over.

“Are you sure you want to open that?” Ernest asked. “Won’t it be bad luck to drink it before the war’s over?”

“It’s as good as won already,” the Commander said, “or it will be a month from now, isn’t that right, Kansas?”

And here was the perfect place for his propaganda, the perfect chance to say the invasion couldn’t happen till July twentieth at the earliest and mention FUSAG and Patton and Calais. Better than perfect. If they got captured by the Germans and were interrogated, they could help corroborate Intelligence’s deception efforts.

But they’d saved his life as much as he’d saved theirs. He owed them the truth, and since he couldn’t tell them who he really was, he could at least tell the truth about this. “That’s right,” he said. “Only we need the Germans to think it’s mid-July.”

The Commander nodded. “So Rommel won’t bring his tanks up. And you need him to think it’s Calais for the same reason.” And at Ernest’s look of surprise, “The last two weeks we’ve been minesweeping in Calais harbor to convince them that’s where the invasion’s coming. You think it’ll fool them, Kansas?”

“If it doesn’t, we won’t win this war.”

“Then we’d better see to it that it does. Hold out your mug.” He added a dollop of brandy to Ernest’s coffee and to Jonathan’s and then poured himself a mugful and sat down. “Now, then,” he said. “Tell us what you’ve been up to.”

“You first,” Ernest said, and leaned back, sipping his coffee—which even the brandy couldn’t improve—as they told him about their adventures. They’d spirited Jewish refugees and pilots who’d been shot down across the Channel to England and delivered supplies and coded messages to the French Resistance.

And he knew he should be worried that what they’d done—what he’d done when he unfouled that propeller and kept them from getting hit by that Stuka—had altered events. He’d been afraid of that ever since Private Hardy. But oddly, he wasn’t worried.

He’d thought he’d got the Commander and Jonathan killed, and he hadn’t. Which meant maybe other things he’d feared weren’t true either. Maybe it wasn’t true that he’d been unable to find Denys Atherton and get Polly and Eileen out before Polly’s deadline. Maybe it wasn’t true that something he’d done that night in that he’d been unable to find Denys Atherton and get Polly and Eileen out before Polly’s deadline. Maybe it wasn’t true that something he’d done that night in Dunkirk—saving Hardy’s life or hauling that dog up over the side—had lost the war. If the Commander and Jonathan were alive, then anything was possible.

Or maybe it was just his relief at not being a murderer. Or the brandy.

“These last four months we’ve been helping map the beaches in Normandy,” the Commander said casually.

Mapping the beaches. Jesus, an incredibly dangerous job. And, if they were caught, one that could undo everything Fortitude South had worked so hard to accomplish the last few months.

“Your turn,” the Commander was saying. “What have you been doing? How long were you in hospital?”

“Nearly four months,” he said. “I tried to get in touch with you. That’s why I thought you were dead. After I wrote you, Daphne—”

“Our Daphne, from the Crown and Anchor?”

“Yes. She came to tell me you hadn’t made it back from Dunkirk. Have you sent them word you’re alive?”

Jonathan shook his head.

“Not even your mother?”

“No. After we brought Colonel Tensing back, they sent us straight out again to lay mines against the invasion, and by the time we got back, they already thought we were dead.”

“Which we might have been at any time,” the Commander said. “And then when we started doing missions for Intelligence, everything had to be hush-hush. And we were as good as dead anyway, with the sort of thing they wanted us to do. It was only a matter of our having been killed a bit later than they thought. And if Jonathan’s mother had known he was alive, she’d never have let him do it.”

Jonathan nodded. “So it seemed better all around to let them go on believing we were dead. I suppose that seems hard to you.”

“No,” Ernest said, thinking of what he’d done to Polly and Eileen. “I know sometimes things like that are necessary.”

The Commander nodded. “If it means the difference between winning or losing this war”—

Or getting Polly and Eileen out or not.

—“then it was worth the sacrifice, wasn’t it?”

Yes, Ernest thought, it was worth the sacrifice. And speaking of which …

“I need to go,” he said.

“Go? In this weather? Are you daft? Listen to that.” He jabbed his pipe up toward the ceiling. “It’s raining cats and dogs. You’ll catch your death, lad. No, you stay.

You can sleep in the bunk there.”

It was a tempting offer.

But the last time you did that, you ended up halfway to Dunkirk.

“Sorry. I have another delivery I have to make,” he said, and stood up. He waded over to his duffel, took out the parcel and letter, and gave them to the Commander.

“What’s this then? Explosives?” he asked, but when they opened the parcel, it was long thin strips of silver-colored foil.

Chaff, to fool the radar into thinking there were large numbers of ships in an area.

“It says here,” the Commander said, reading the letter, “that when we hear the message that tells us the invasion’s on, they want us to head for Calais and throw this stuff out behind us.”

Which would be even more dangerous than mapping the beaches. “Good luck,” Ernest said sincerely. He put on his almost-dry coat and shouldered his duffel bag.

“Goodbye, Commander.”

“Not Commander—Captain,” he said proudly.

“Grandfather got his commission,” Jonathan explained.

“Congratulations, Captain,” Ernest said, and saluted. The Commander beamed. “Good luck to both of you.”

“We don’t need luck,” he said. “Thanks to you, we’ve got the Lady Jane, and she won’t let us down. We’re going to come out of this all right, you mark my words.”

“I hope you’re right,” Ernest said, shook hands with Jonathan, and went up the ladder onto the deck.

And into a veritable hurricane. He had to force his way, bent double, off the boat and back along the dock, hoping he wouldn’t be blown into the water. When he heard Jonathan behind him, calling, “Seaman Higgins!” he thought, If he’s coming after me to bring me back, I’ll go.

But Jonathan wanted to give him something—a flat packet wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. “Am I supposed to give this to Tensing?” Ernest shouted, using his real name, since there was no way anyone could possibly overhear them in this gale.

Jonathan shook his head, raindrops flying from his wet hair. “It’s for my mother,” he shouted. “It’s in case we don’t make it back. So she’ll know what happened.”

“For after the invasion?” Ernest yelled.

“No!” he shouted back. “For after the war. All these secrets won’t matter then.”

No, Ernest thought. They won’t.

“I’ll send it,” he promised, and stuck it inside his shirt, thinking, as he watched Jonathan run back along the dock, Maybe I could give one to Cess to send.

But what could it say? “Dear Eileen, I wasn’t really killed that night in Houndsditch. I waited till after Bank Station was bombed and then went to find an incident that the Civil Defence hadn’t arrived at yet and left my papers and scarf for them to find, just like a murderer in one of your Agatha Christie mysteries. I’m sorry to have burned the coat, after all the trouble you went to to get it for me …”

You don’t have time for letter writing, he thought. You need to get to the train station.

He set off through the wind and rain to find it. He knew where it was from when he’d come to Dover that first September, trying to get to his drop, and he could walk/hobble a lot faster now than he could then, but he was so frozen by the time he got there that he had to blow on his numb hands before he had enough feeling in them to be able to get the coins in the telephone’s slot so the operator could put him through to British Army headquarters in Portsmouth.

He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest He’d spent over a month making trips to Army headquarters in London and making calls—under various pretenses—to British Army camps all over southwest England, trying to locate Denys Atherton, and he was still only halfway through the list. And God help him if Atherton had had an L-and-A implant and was here as an American GI because there were more than 800,000 American soldiers in England right now.

The operator put him through to Southampton, and he spent what was left of the afternoon and evening being transferred from office to office, officer to officer, to find out there was no Denys Atherton stationed in Southampton or Exeter or Plymouth, and to worm the telephone number of the paymaster at Weymouth out of a reluctant Wren by using his old-standby American accent. His implant had long since worn off, but he’d done it so long, it was permanently a part of him.

By the time he got off the phone with the Wren, he was coughing. He couldn’t spend the night in the station. It was too cold, and the ticket agent was beginning to eye him suspiciously. He couldn’t hope to catch a ride in this weather either, and at night, and he couldn’t go to an inn anywhere near the docks and risk running into the Commander and Jonathan in the pub room. And he was going to need something hot—and alcoholic—to ward off the chills he was already having.

You can’t get sick, he told himself. You only have a month and a half to find Atherton. And you still haven’t done your invasion-propaganda spreading, to which end he limped out to the edge of town to a pub which catered to the locals, ordered a hot toddy, and prepared to tell all comers that he’d overheard two officers saying the big show was starting on July eighteenth and it was definitely going to be Calais.

But there were no comers, in spite of the pub actually having ale and whiskey—a rarity at this point in the war. The weather was apparently too much even for hardy seafarers. Ernest spent the evening drinking one hot toddy after another and composing imaginary letters:

“Dear Eileen, I know I said we shouldn’t split up, but Denys Atherton didn’t come through till after Polly’s deadline, and it was the only way I could think of to get a message through to him. Remember my telling you about how Shackleton had to leave his crew behind and go off to get help because if he didn’t, no one would have had any way of knowing where they were and they’d all have died? And how he made it to the island and found help and came back to rescue them? Well, I didn’t tell you the whole story. When Shackleton got to the island, he was on the wrong side and had to walk over the mountains to get where he needed to be, and the same thing happened to me …”

And after two more drinks:

“Dear Polly, I lied to you when I came back from Manchester. The person who came to Saltram-on-Sea asking about me wasn’t Fordham. It was Tensing. He’d been tracking me down since Bletchley Park, but you were wrong. He didn’t want to hire me for Ultra. He wanted to recruit me for a Special Means unit, and I thought it would mean I’d be able to get to Denys Atherton, but as it turned out …”

But he couldn’t write Polly because her deadline had passed, and she was already dead. She’d been dead since December.

He’d got drunk that night, too, and tried to call her in Dulwich to warn her, and then remembered she wasn’t there until after D-Day and hung up. And when Cess had asked him what he was doing, he’d said, “She’s not here yet. She’s dead.”

And if he had any more toddies tonight, he might blurt out the whole story to the barman, or worse, write it all down, and there was no point. A letter wouldn’t reach Polly in Dulwich because it hadn’t reached her. And if Eileen was here to send it to, then his plan hadn’t worked—he hadn’t found Atherton or got a message through, and Polly had died—and if that was the case, then Eileen was better off not knowing that he was alive, that he’d gone off and left them for nothing. It wasn’t like Jonathan, whose mother would at least have the comfort that he and his great-grandfather had died heroes.

He stood up unsteadily, set down his mug, which was much cleaner than the one the Commander had given him, and prepared to stagger off to bed, but before he made it to the stairs, a pig farmer came in, shaking water everywhere, announced it was “a fit night out for nowt”—a sentiment Ernest agreed with wholeheartedly—

and demanded a pint.

“And make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got to take a load of shoats all t’way down to Hawkhurst.”

Ernest promptly begged a ride, crawled into his truck, and was rewarded by the farmer’s asking where he thought the invasion would be and then, without waiting for an answer, saying, “Mark my words, it’s going to be Calais,” and regaling him for the remainder of the trip with how he’d come to that conclusion.

Ernest didn’t have to say a word, which was just as well because the minute he got back to Cardew Castle, Chasuble said, “Oh, excellent, you’re here—good Lord, what’s that smell?”

“Pigs.”

“I thought you were going to sea. Well, never mind. You need to shave and bathe, particularly bathe, and get into this.” He tossed a dinner jacket and Bracknell’s too-small shoes at him, told him he had ten minutes, and hauled him and Cess off to another reception, this one for General Montgomery.

“Only it won’t be Monty,” he said after they were in the staff car.

“What do you mean, it won’t be Monty?” Ernest asked, attempting to tie his tie in the rear-vision mirror.

“It’s a double,” Cess said. “An actor.”

Oh, God, out of the frying pan into the fire. “It’s not Sir Godfrey Kingsman, is it?”

“It can’t be,” Cess said. “He’s dead. He was shot down.”

“No, that’s Leslie Howard you’re thinking of,” Chasuble said.

“It is not. He was on his way to entertain the troops—”

“And that’s Jane Froman,” Chasuble said. “What does Kingsman look like? Whoever this actor is, he’s supposed to be the spitting image of Monty.”

Which ruled out Sir Godfrey. Actors could work wonders with makeup and wigs, but not with height. Montgomery was a good eight inches shorter than Sir Godfrey.

And Cess was right. The general at the reception was a dead ringer for Monty, right down to the high cheekbones, toothbrush mustache, and imperious manner.

“Are you certain he’s not Montgomery?” Chasuble whispered after they’d all been introduced to him as assorted officers and aides to General Patton. “He sounds exactly like the old boy.”

“I’m certain,” Cess said. “And it’s your job to see to it that he stays in character. Monty’s a teetotaler, and he’s not, so keep at his elbow and make certain he doesn’t get hold of anything but lemonade. This is a dry run—quite literally—to see if he can pull it off.”

“And if he does?” Ernest said, watching the dapper general chatting with the guests, who all seemed completely taken in.

“They’re sending him off to Gibraltar to convince the Germans the invasion’s going to be in the Mediterranean, or, if they won’t believe that, to convince them it’s not coming till July.”

And I suppose I’ll end up having to accompany him and see to it that he stays sober, Ernest thought, cursing his luck. Why couldn’t Monty’s double have been sent to the invasion’s staging area instead and Monty sent off to Gibraltar?

He was right about being assigned to accompany him, but “Monty” wasn’t scheduled to leave yet, so Ernest spent the next week dragging automobile headlights He was right about being assigned to accompany him, but “Monty” wasn’t scheduled to leave yet, so Ernest spent the next week dragging automobile headlights along a fake runway in the rain while the phonograph played engines-revving-up sounds, by the end of which the cold he’d caught in Dover had blossomed into full-blown influenza, and he realized he’d never really appreciated antivirals. Or paper tissues.

On the other hand, he didn’t have to go to Gibraltar, and the doctor prescribed bed rest for a week, during which time he was able to get nearly caught up on his articles and his own coded messages, writing in bed with a typewriter on his knees:

“For sale, hothouse poinsettias, hibiscus, pearl hyacinth cuttings. Contact E. O. Riley, Harbor House,” with Mrs. Rickett’s address, and “Lost in Notting Hill Gate Underground Station, gold monogrammed compact, inscribed ‘To Polly from Sebastian.’ ” Also, a review of a production of The Tempest put on by the Townsend Players, which listed as cast members Eileen Hill and Mary Knottinge, and commented, “The shipwreck which begins the action was well done, but the ending is rather doubtful, though this reviewer hopes that will improve with time.”

And the day after he was allowed to get up, Lady Bracknell sent him and Chasuble to the Bull and Plough to spread invasion propaganda, and he had a chance to put a call through to the paymaster in Taunton while Chasuble flirted with the barmaid. But there was no Denys Atherton listed on the pay rolls there or at Poole, and time was running out.

Even sooner than he’d thought. A pilot he’d talked to in the pub said, “Whenever it is, it’s soon. Three weeks from now they’re locking down the entire staging area. No one in, no one out, not even the post.”

“That’s to fool the Germans into thinking it’s in June,” Ernest told him. “There’ll be an attack then, but it’s only a feint, to draw the Germans off. The real invasion won’t come till mid-July,” but he was thinking, If I don’t find him by next week, I’m going to have to steal the Austin and take off for Wiltshire to find him.

But he didn’t have to. The next morning Cess leaned in the door and told him Lady Bracknell wanted the two of them to go make a pickup.

“I can’t,” he said. “I need to finish these and get them to the Call by four tomorrow, and I’ve barely started on them.”

“What vital news is it this time?” Cess asked, leaning over his shoulder as he typed, and thank goodness this wasn’t one of his articles. “Another garden party?”

Ernest shook his head. “Friendship Dance.” He read, “The Welcome Club of Bedgebury will host a Friendship Dance for the newly arrived American troops—”

“We’re officers,” Cess said, “and we’ll be driving Bracknell’s Rolls, not walking. There won’t be any mud. Or bulls.”

“No. I told you, I’ve got a deadline. Can’t Chasuble go with you?”

“No, he has a date to take Daphne to dinner.”

“Can’t he do that tomorrow night? Or the night after?”

“It is the night after, but Chasuble’s afraid we won’t be back by then, and he’s already in her bad graces for having had to cancel when we went to the Savoy to meet Monty.”

Tomorrow night? “Where is this pickup we need to make?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Cess said. “Lady Bracknell gave me a map. And he said something about Portsmouth.”

Which was right in the center of the invasion area, where Atherton was. “All right. Are we going as civilians?”

Cess shook his head. “Army officers.” Which meant they’d be picking up whatever it was at an Army camp, and no one would consider it odd if an officer asked where a Denys Atherton was stationed. He could even order an enlisted man to check the records and find him. He’d have to get away from Cess, but over the course of a two-day journey, there should be ample opportunities, and if they weren’t leaving till tomorrow morning, he might be able to drop his articles by the Call on the way. “When do we have to make this pickup?”

“Tomorrow morning at nine. Does that mean you’ll go?”

“Yes,” he said, and as soon as Cess left, he typed, “Music will be provided by the 48th Infantry Division Band,” yanked the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, rolled a new one in, and typed, “Mr. and Mrs. James Townsend of Upper Notting announce the engagement of their daughter Polly to Flight Officer Colin Templer of the 21st Airborne Division, currently stationed in Kent. A late June wedding is planned.”

Cess opened the door and leaned in. He was dressed in his officer’s uniform. “Why aren’t you ready?”

“I thought we were leaving tomorrow morning.”

“No,” Cess said. “Lady Bracknell wants us to leave now.” Which made no sense—Portsmouth was only a few hours away, but Ernest didn’t object. The sooner they got there the better, and if they stopped for the night along the way, he’d have even more opportunities to ask about Atherton.

“Give me twenty minutes,” he said.

“Ten. You don’t know where our map got to, do you?”

“I thought you said Bracknell gave one to you.”

“No, a map of this area.”

“Prism had it, I think,” Ernest lied, and as soon as Cess had gone off to look for it, he dug the map out of the pile on his desk, stuck it in his pocket, and bolted down to the mess to hide it in the silverware drawer. Then he ran to throw his razor and soap into a bag, answer Cess’s “Are you certain you didn’t have it after Prism?” and take the bag and his officer’s uniform back to the office. He put it on and began typing madly again.

He managed to finish another message—“Schoolgirl Mary P. Cardle won the war-saving stamp competition at St. Sebastian School last week. Fourteen-year-old Mary, known to her friends as Polly, earned the money to buy the stamps by running errands. Said headmaster Dunworthy Townsend, ‘Let’s hope we can all do as much for the war effort as Mary has.’ ”—before Cess reappeared with the map, saying, “You won’t believe where I found this,” and demanding to know why Ernest still wasn’t ready.

Ernest stuffed the articles into an envelope, sealed it, and hurried out to where Cess had already started up the Rolls. He pulled out onto the road before Ernest even had his door shut. “We need to run these articles by the Call office,” Ernest said, showing the envelope to Cess.

“We’ll have to do it on the way back.”

“But Croydon’s right on the way.”

Cess shook his head. “We have to go up to Gravesend and then back down to Dover and Folkestone first.”

“What?” If Cess had lied about Portsmouth, he’d kill him. “Why?”

“We need to write down the names of all the roads and all the villages we go through,” Cess said.

“Why? Can’t Bracknell get those off the map?”

“Yes, but not the landmarks. And the distances have to be right, in case a member of the German High Command happened to spend a holiday hiking through Kent before the war.”

“The German High …? What exactly are we picking up?”

“A German prisoner of war,” Cess said. “We’re picking him up at his prison camp and driving him to London. He’s ill, and the Red Cross has arranged to have him sent home to Germany. But first we’re driving him to Dover through the staging area in Kent so he can see our invasion preparations firsthand.”

“A few rubber tanks, wooden planes, and a sewer-pipe oil refinery? Those were meant to fool a reconnaissance plane from twenty thousand feet up, not a—”

“No, we’re going to show him the real thing,” Cess said, “ships, aeroplanes, everything. He’s only going to think he’s in Kent. That’s why we have to drive to Gravesend this afternoon. We’ve got to map out a false route so the colonel can accidentally overhear us talking about where we are.”

It was a clever plan. With signposts down all over England, the colonel would only have their word for where they were, and if they could convince him he was in Kent and he went home and told the German High Command, it could help convince them the Allied attack would come at Calais.

But it played hell with his plan to find Atherton. He could hardly ask a soldier where Denys was with the colonel listening. He’d have to get away from him and Cess.

“You said we’ll be gone two days,” he said. “Where are we spending the night? At an Army camp or in Portsmouth?”

“Neither. We’re bringing him straight to London.”

“But I thought you said we wouldn’t be back in time for Chasuble’s date?”

“Chasuble said that. He’s convinced something will go wrong and we’ll blow the gaffe,” Cess said. “No, we’re not to stop for anything, except to go to the loo.

And we’re not to let the colonel out of our sight for a moment. Lady Bracknell wants both of us with him at all times.”

When peace breaks out again (as it will, do you know) and the lights come on again, we shall look back on these days and remember gratefully the things that brought us cheer and gave us heart even in the glummest hours.

—NEWSPAPER ADVERTISEMENT,

1941