The Last Letter from Juliet - Melanie Hudson Page 0,71

Anna and Marie. Anna was airborne but Marie was preparing for a flight to Prestwick in a Tiger Moth.

‘A sonofabitch Tiger Moth!’ she moaned, walking out of the Met Office to get her kit together before departing. ‘And Scotland will be damn cold, too!’

‘In August?’

She ignored me. ‘I bet I get pneumonia. There are polar bears in Scotland, right?’

I laughed.

‘You’ve been spoiled lately, with all the Spitfire deliveries. It will do you good!’

She stopped walking and turned around excitedly.

‘Hey, tell me. How did it go in Cornwall?’

I shrugged and tried to feign coy. I could never feign coy.

‘Cornwall? Oh, you know. Same old same old. But honestly, Marie, flying the Hurricane down there was an absolute peach!’

Marie frowned.

‘Hurricane? What the heck? I’m talking about Lanyon! Did you see Edward?’

I smiled. My smile betrayed me. Marie turned towards the operations room.

‘Walk with me while I prepare, and keep talking.’ She took her pilot’s notes out of her flying bag and skimmed through the start-up checks for the Tiger Moth. ‘I want to know everything!’

Over the planning table I gave an abbreviated account of the last twenty-four hours.

‘Then we had a picnic on his boat – The Mermaid – such a lovely thing. He flirted relentlessly, I batted him off, and then he tried to quote Burns, putting on a Scots accent, you know, but he failed – at both the poetry and the accent. He was so funny!’

Marie couldn’t resist an eye roll, which I ignored.

‘We sailed, we walked, we talked and eventually … well, I headed back up the hill to Lanyon. I promised to make my excuses with Ma and Pa and head back down to the village, to Edward, to spend the evening together. But then Lottie arrived at Lanyon, out of the blue and in tears.’

‘That damn Lottie!’ Marie said, looking up from her map. ‘She’s always in the background, messing things up. Damn woman.’

‘She doesn’t mess things up on purpose. Her husband is dead!’

‘Husband? A real one?’

‘What other kind is there?’

‘Don’t make me laugh, honey. No one even knew she was engaged let alone married. She can’t have known the guy for more than two minutes!’

‘Does that matter? I’ve only known Edward for the briefest of time, but still, I …’

‘So, you are in love with him. I knew it!’

I sighed, defeated.

‘What’s he doing in Cornwall, anyways, this mysterious stranger of yours?’ she asked, pouring over a map.

I dashed around the table to stand next to her.

‘No one seems to know, exactly. It’s all very hush-hush. Foreign Office thing. But get this, his name isn’t Nancarrow at all, it’s Gruber!’

Marie raised her brows.

‘He’s a spy, I’ll bet! Shall I do some digging?’

I narrowed my eyes and nodded.

‘Sounds like a plan, Marie. Sounds like a plan.’

It turned out that the organisation Edward worked for was the SOE – Special Operations Executive, which was part of the Special Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. It was an organisation established to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe. Contrary to Edward’s quip about his job being no more dangerous than mine – it was. Significantly more dangerous. The SOE employed and trained special agents. But what the SOE – also known as Churchill’s Secret Army – were doing in Cornwall, at Lanyon, was not information Marie (or Marie’s contact) was party to, that information I would discover later, and at first hand.

***

The hand of war can deal the most agonising and downright cruel turn of fortune, and none more so than for Lottie Lanyon. When Lottie had holed herself up in Yorkshire after Mabel was born, she declared that she would return home a couple of years later with Mabel in tow as a war widow – albeit a fake one. But poor Lottie had not reckoned on karma, and on the day of her return to Lanyon – the day I had spent with Edward on the river – she finally confessed to her elopement with Canadian officer, Jim Reece, who, ten days later, was killed when his bomber was shot down over Germany.

With a wedding ring on her finger and the pretence that the wedding had occurred quite some time before, however, Mabel could now be passed off as legitimate, but would remain at Lanyon with her grandparents and keep the surname she was given at birth – Lanyon – for ease of inheritance, it was explained. Frankly, it was all a bit of a mess, and Ma Lanyon needed quite a bit of a lie