“What is it?” General Austin barked.
“Perhaps, sir, you could send me with another driver, or I could go by myself. You know that I often travel about the English countryside alone.”
“A different driver? Are you saying that your objection to going on this mission is that you don’t like Sergeant Clare?”
Again, Edi said nothing.
General Austin got up from his desk, went to the window, then turned back and looked at her as though he couldn’t believe what she’d just said. “Like, Harcourt? All those men out there who run into enemy fire shouting ‘Better than Austin,’ do you think they like me? Hell! My own wife doesn’t like me. I don’t think like and dislike have a place in a war.” By the time he finished, his voice was so loud it was a wonder the glass didn’t break.
“No, sir,” Edi said.
“All right, Harcourt, I want you to pack an overnight bag and take something pretty. You’re a girl going off into the country with her soldier boyfriend, and you’re going to stop to see an old friend of a friend, Dr. Sebastian Jellicoe, and you’re going to give him a magazine. That won’t be the story that’s given out around here, but that’s what you’re going to do. Do you have any questions? Anything you don’t like about this assignment?”
Edi kept her rigid stance, but she wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. “Yes, sir, I do have a question. What is this really about?”
General Austin took a moment to answer. “In normal circumstances I’d not tell you, but Dr. Jellie is a retired professor—Oxford, I think—and he knows more about words than anyone else on this planet. We send him top secret documents that need to be decoded. The problem now is that we think he may have been found out. He’s good at playing the absentminded old man who’s too senile to even know a war’s going on, but someone has found out his lie, and we fear for his life. The magazine carries a coded message, so he’ll know it’s from me, and it tells him to leave with you and Clare. And as soon as you two get him back here, Jellie will be sent to the U.S.
“Does that answer your question? Do you think Delores could handle this?”
“Yes, sir, and Delores would be useless.”
“All right, now go. Clare will pick you up at 0900 tomorrow morning. Be here at 0700 and I’ll brief you more.”
Fifteen minutes later, Edi was in her tiny apartment and packing. Tomorrow she planned to wear a suit so severely cut it made her uniform look casual. The other women talked endlessly about getting out of the stiff uniforms and into pretty dresses, but Edi thought that the men didn’t need any more encouragement, so she stayed covered up.
She had other clothes, some pretty civilian dresses, but she wouldn’t put them on until they—she and the odious Sergeant Clare—were out of sight of the soldiers.
After she put the dresses and her underwear is a small case she was ready to go. If she overlooked the fact that she was going to be with the detestable David Clare for this assignment, Edi would have admitted that she was…well, excited about it. Getting out of that smoky office, away from the general’s never-ending bad temper…To go into the country! To see trees! She almost looked forward to it.
On her rare days off, she wasn’t like the other girls, running to the nearest place where they sold drinks and played loud music. No, Edi hopped a ride with anyone she could and went into the English countryside and spent the day. Or if she was lucky enough to get away from the general, she’d stay for days. She walked, she sat under trees, and she watched the cows graze. To Edi’s mind, she wanted to be reminded why a war was being fought, to see what they were trying to preserve.
Sometimes she’d spend the night at a farmhouse. She’d soon learned to lie and say she was a war widow and that her husband had been English. People were suspicious of a tall, pretty American woman roaming about alone, but a widow who wanted to see the country of her dead husband opened doors and made friends. When Edi returned to General Austin’s office after a weekend away, she’d have a list of names people had given her. They wanted to know the whereabouts of their sons and daughters. Illegally, but without guilt, Edi used General Austin’s contacts and his credentials to find out about the names on her list. Within an hour of her first misuse of her closeness to him, General Austin knew what she was doing. Nothing ever escaped his attention. But he just grunted—his own personal way of approving—then piled even more work on her. But it was a small price to pay for being able to help the people who’d been so kind to her. Twice, when she couldn’t find the sons of people she’d met, she handed the names to the general. Both times he found the answer. One young man had been killed in Italy, but the other was wounded and in a French hospital.
After she was packed, Edi boiled herself an egg and heated some toast on the little electric hot plate in her room and tried to read the documents she’d brought from the office. But her mind kept going back to the assignment. If General Austin wanted a man with her then there was a lot more danger to the job than he was telling her.
“So what did you do to PO Austin so much that he made you wear this thing?” the medic asked David Clare as he tightened the inset screws on the long leg brace.
David was sitting on top of a surgical table, wearing only his shirt and his underwear, and the medic was fastening a hideous-looking steel cage onto his left leg. “You didn’t hear that I’m going with Harcourt?”
The medic paused, and for a moment his mouth was open in awe, but then he closed it. “It won’t work. You’ll never get her. Especially not with this thing on.”
Looking at the steel strips wrapped around his leg, David grimaced. He’d been told Austin was a bastard, but he hadn’t realized how much until early this morning. Last night a lieutenant told him he was to drive Edilean Harcourt into the English countryside to visit the wife of a friend of the general. Her husband had just been killed, and the general wanted to offer his personal condolences to the widow—“personal” meaning that he was sending his secretary.
“Oh, wait,” the lieutenant said. “I was told to give you this.” He held out a white envelope, the kind that held an invitation.
“What is it?” David asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s an invitation to the officers’ ball next month. You come back alive and you get to go. Last year Miss Harcourt wore a dress in an electric blue that…” The man shook his head to clear it. “If I were you, I’d hold on to that. You can’t get in without it.”
“I’ll treasure it,” David said as he slipped it inside his shirt.
David and Edi were to spend the night, then return the next day. David only hoped Heaven would be as good as his vision of those two delicious days.
But this morning a smart-ass lieutenant had told him he was to report to a Captain Gilman, a doctor, on the double. Of course by that time everyone in London and probably half of France knew Sergeant Clare was going to be alone with Miss Harcourt for two whole days.
David should have known there’d be a catch. The doctor told him the general said that an able-bodied soldier traveling around the country would engender too many questions. Why wasn’t he fighting?
“I could be on leave,” David said. “Did he think of that?”