agents were made. Here, the girls learned about the makeup compacts that hid compasses and lipstick containers that were actually cameras—things that each would be issued just prior to deployment.
“Don’t touch!” Professor Digglesby, who oversaw the toyshop, admonished as one of the girls went too near to a table where the explosives were live. Unlike the other instructors, he was not military, but a retired academic from Magdalen College, Oxford, with white hair and thick glasses. “Today we are going to learn about decoys,” he began.
Suddenly a loud shriek cut through the barn. “Aack!” a girl called Annette cried, running for the door. Eleanor stepped back so as not to be seen, then peered through the window to see what had caused the commotion. The girls had scattered, trying to get as far away as possible from one of the tables where a rat perched in the corner, seeming strangely unafraid.
Marie did not run, though. She crept forward carefully, so as not to startle the rat. She grabbed a broom from the corner and raised it above her head, as if to strike a blow. “Wait!” Professor Digglesby said, rushing over. He picked up the rat, but it didn’t move.
Marie reached out her hand. “It’s dead.”
“Not dead,” he corrected, holding it up for the others to see. The girls inched closer. “It’s a decoy.” He passed the fake rat around so the girls could inspect it.
“But it looks so real,” Brya exclaimed.
“That’s exactly what the Germans will think,” Professor Digglesby replied, taking back the decoy and turning it over to reveal a compartment on the underbelly where a small amount of explosives could be placed. “Until they get close.” He led them outside, then walked several meters away into the adjacent field and set down the rat. “Stay back,” he cautioned as he rejoined the group. He pressed a button on a detonator that he held in his hand and the rat exploded. A murmur of surprise rippled through the girls.
Professor Digglesby walked back into the workshop and returned with what appeared to be feces. “We plant detonators in the least likely of places,” he added. The girls squealed with disgust. “Also fake,” he muttered good-naturedly.
“Holy shit!” Josie said. A few of the others giggled. Professor Digglesby looked on disapprovingly, but Eleanor could not help but smile.
Then the instructor’s expression turned grave. “The decoys may seem funny,” he said. “But they are designed to save your life—and to take the enemy’s.”
As Professor Digglesby herded the girls back inside the barn to learn more about hidden explosives, Eleanor made her way to the manor and asked for the records room and a tray for tea. She spent the rest of the day sitting at a narrow desk beside a file cabinet on the third floor of Arisaig House, reviewing records on the girls.
There was a file on each, meticulous notes dating from her recruitment through each day of training. Eleanor read them all, committing the details to memory. “The girls,” they were called, as though they were a collective, though in fact they were so very different. Some had been at Arisaig House for just a few weeks; others were about to graduate on to finishing school at Beaulieu, a manor in Hampshire, which was the last step before deployment. Each had her own reasons for signing up. Brya was the daughter of Russians, driven by a hatred of the Germans for what they had done to her family outside Minsk. Maureen, a working-class girl from Manchester, had left the funeral of her husband and enlisted to take his place.
Josie, though the youngest, was the best of this lot, perhaps the best SOE had ever seen. Her skills came from the need to survive on the street. Her hands, which had surely stolen food, were sure and swift, and she ran and hid with the speed of someone who had fled the police more than once, to avoid arrest, or perhaps being sent to a children’s home. She was whip-smart, too, with a kind of instinct that was bred, not taught. There was a tenacity in how she fought that reminded Eleanor of the dark places in her own past.
Eleanor had been just fifteen at the time of the pogrom in their village outside Pinsk. She had hidden in an outhouse while the Russians savaged their village, raping wives and mothers, and killing children before their parents’ eyes. She kept the knife under her pillow after that, sharpened it in the