men fighting and dying, and he should be among them.”
“One might argue that you can do more good by stopping spies here in England than you could dying in the desert.”
He said nothing to that, and we drove along in silence for a while longer. The city was behind us now, and we were driving through the countryside. It was beautiful in the summer afternoon sunlight, everything so green. Flowers bloomed, sheep grazed in the distant fields, and birds darted to and fro about the hedgerows. Everything was just as it should be, it seemed.
It was sometimes hard to remember that we were fighting a war. Sometimes, in quiet moments like these, I could forget that the world as we knew it was at risk, and my heart would flutter happily upward like one of those birds.
But then, when the heaviness of that realization came settling back on my shoulders, it made me even more resolute in my determination to do all I could to protect this place I loved so much.
The major’s voice called my attention back to the present. “You got to ask me a question,” he said. “Now let me ask you one.”
“All right,” I said. There was something in his tone that made me wary.
“Why do you steal?”
The question was not what I had expected. “What do you mean?”
“Your life of crime. Why did you choose it?” he asked.
I didn’t answer for a moment. I supposed it was fair enough. I had asked him about the issue that was most sensitive to him, and so he was pushing back with searching questions of his own. But I didn’t know quite how to answer.
“In theory, I suppose it’s for the money,” he went on when I didn’t reply. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You might say because of the way you were raised, with your uncle, but you might have chosen to do something else. You followed him into the lifestyle instead. Why?”
“I enjoy it,” I said brusquely.
“That isn’t the reason. You’re being flippant.”
People didn’t often call me out on that, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. I could feel my temper beginning to rise, but I knew that it was defensiveness. I was used to hiding that part of me, of keeping it deeply buried, and he was doing his best to bring it to light.
“You’ve got a file on me,” I said at last. “Why don’t you tell me?”
The words came out sounding less sharp than I had intended them to. I suddenly felt tired, like I had been running for a very long time. In a way, I supposed I had.
“You have a resentment for the law. Is it because of your background? Because you were born in prison?”
I flinched a little, clenched my teeth against a welling up of feelings I always worked so hard to suppress.
“Or is it because of the circumstances…?”
He was doing it. He was pushing me to the edge, and there was no choice but to go over. Well, why hide it? If he wanted to know why, then I would tell him.
“No,” I said, my voice thick with bitterness. “It’s because my mother didn’t kill my father and she was sentenced to hang for it anyway.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
And there it was. The darkest of my secrets.
My father was murdered in December of 1915, stabbed in the heart with a butcher knife in his own home. It was Uncle Mick, his brother, who found him dead after returning from a locksmithing job. Two months later my mother, despite protesting her innocence, was convicted and sentenced to death.
But they’d discovered by then that she was pregnant with me, and she was granted a stay of execution. I was born in Holloway prison, six months after my father’s murder, and Uncle Mick took me to raise. Aunt Mary was dead by then, and he had hired Nacy, a distant relation, to look after me and the boys.
Then Spanish flu had ravaged its way across the world, and my mother had been spared the indignity of walking to the gallows. She had died, still protesting her innocence, and was buried in the prison cemetery. I had never seen her grave.
It wasn’t a secret within the family. Uncle Mick was never one for keeping things quiet, and he had never tried to hide the truth. But it wasn’t a topic we dwelt on. It was just a fact: my father murdered, my mother convicted. Simple mathematics.
I knew my father’s