“She’d probably be just as happy with a biscuit,” I said. My head hurt and I felt achy all over. I held on to my knapsack. At least I hadn’t lost the notebook.
“Warden Hawk rang, sir,” Deputy Warden Esther told Warden Ita as we came in. “He’s at a fire and wants you to meet him there. The address is on the desk. I’ll take charge of this sweet lad. You look done in, Bertie.”
Warden Esther settled me on the floor in a corner of the meeting room with a blanket over my shoulders. I rested my head against the wall and LR curled up beside me. Warden Esther brought me a cup of hot, sweet tea and a plate of biscuits.
“The constable at the reception desk at Trenchard House says your father won’t be back until ten, but they’ll send him here then.”
“All right. Thank you.”
It was quiet for a while. I thought about Mr. Humphrey. He might not be able to rebuild his shop. But he was determined to be around for the invasion.
“The invasion is coming,” Mr. Humphrey had said. Everyone was saying it.
The whole city of London was breathing it in and out, like the first scented flowers of spring. The invasion was our hope. Our hope for an end to persecution and evil, an end to the war itself.
The invasion is coming. Violette had written that in her notebook too. It had been her very first sentence. In a way, it seemed like the invasion was the key to everything in our future. And then I remembered what Leo Marks had been talking to David about: a mixed-alphabet cipher using a key word or phrase. A key word or phrase.
Reaching into my knapsack, I grabbed the notebook, a pencil, and a piece of paper. Setting everything out on the floor before me, I wrote out the phrase, and then I filled in the rest of the alphabet, trying to remember David’s directions. It took a couple of times, because at first I forgot that each letter of the key phrase could be used only once. Finally I had it:
Next, I turned to the first lines of Violette’s final message:
B would be M. Y remains Y. D becomes N. T is A. I held my breath. Then I wrote faster and faster. It was like wiping off mist from a window. And finally these words emerged:
I took a deep breath. This is it, I realized. It’s the key to her last message. I couldn’t wait to read it all. Maybe I could decode the whole thing tonight. My hands trembled with excitement.
Warden Esther stuck her head in. “Are you all right, Bertie? My goodness, lad, you look awfully pale,” she said, coming toward me. Quickly I moved my knapsack to cover my work. She rested the back of her hand against my forehead in a couple of places. “Forgive me. My hand’s a little cold.” She smiled.
“My mum used to feel our foreheads for fever this way,” I told her.
“And I’m sure she will again, Bertie. You seem to be fine. But there’s a lot of bad influenza going around right now,” she went on. “Mrs. Kathleen Clark, the rector’s housekeeper at St. George’s, was telling me she’s barely left the sickbed of a patient in her care.”
I listened, but all I could think of was decoding the rest of Violette’s message. As she moved toward the door, I lurched to my feet and stuffed everything back into my knapsack. “Warden Esther, you know, I’m feeling much better. I’m just going to walk home and save my dad the trouble. Thank you for everything! I’ll be fine.”
Before she could stop me, I was gone, LR trotting beside me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Some curious facts have been submitted to me within the last twenty-four hours.
—Sherlock Holmes, in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”
THURSDAY
I was still in bed when the door flew open and Eleanor and David burst in. LR hopped up and twirled in circles, making excited, whiny noises in her throat.
My dad appeared in the doorway. “Sorry, Bertie. I offered to make tea and discuss books, but they didn’t want to talk to me.”
“Dad! I can’t believe you’d let a girl in my room.” I scrunched the blankets up close under my chin. I felt fuzzy and confused. “What time…Is it time for school?”
“We’ve already been to school.” Eleanor plopped down on Will’s bed, snatching up LR in her arms. “You, apparently, have been sleeping most of the day. Your hair looks like a bunch of red grass sticking up on top of your head.”
I tried to flatten it. “Gee, thanks a lot, Watson.”
“Bertie, I did try to wake you, but you were dead to the world,” Dad put in. “I’ll get you some tea.”
“We both went from our schools to the command post, but you weren’t there.” David opened the blackout shade; I squinted as gray winter light flowed in. “Warden Ita said you saved Mr. Humphrey last night. Are you all right?”
“I cut my hand a little but it barely bled,” I said. “And Little Roo deserves the credit. She led me to Mr. Humphrey.” I paused and rubbed my eyes. “Hey, did I miss the history test?”
David grinned and pretended to be Mr. Turner. “ ‘Since Mr. Bradshaw has chosen to absent himself, and the Roman invasion is his specialty, I’m postponing it until Monday.’ ”
I groaned. “Well, I couldn’t have studied last night, anyway….” I reached for a pile of papers under the bed.
“You were trying to crack the code for Violette’s last message, weren’t you?” asked Eleanor. Before I could answer, she said, “Bertie, I was up late thinking about the notebook too. I’m ready to go see my father. But I don’t want to face him and explain everything alone. That’s one reason we came over. I want us all to go.”
“David and I will go with you…but maybe not quite yet,” I said.
“Do you have a theory, Sherlock?” asked David.
“Not a theory—answers.” I held out a piece of paper. “It’s all here—well, almost all. And it was something Mr. Humphrey said that helped me unlock the cipher.”
“You cracked it?” Eleanor’s jaw dropped. “You might have started with that, Bertie.”
“What sort of cipher is it?” David asked.
“It’s the same kind Leo Marks told you about. The key phrase is THE INVASION IS COMING,” I explained. “It makes so much sense: Violette started her notes that way too.”
“Oh, Bertie, this is wonderful.” Eleanor gave LR a big hug. “Did you decipher the entire message?”
I nodded. “It’s just one page. I’ll read it to you as we go.”
“Where are we going?” they asked together.
“To spring Violette’s trap, of course.”
* * *
—
While they waited in the kitchen, I dressed quickly. Dad brought me some tea and toast on a tray. He stood uncertainly for a minute, and then perched on the edge of Will’s bed.
“Bertie, I’m proud of what you did last night,” he began slowly. “But from now on, you have to promise to leave the rescue work to the adults who are trained to do it. I know you feel guilty about what happened to Will. Risking your life won’t change that.”
“I know, Dad.”
He pulled at the end of his mustache. LR jumped up beside him and snuggled close. He scratched behind her ears, and she leaned into his hand. If LR was a cat, she’d be purring, I thought.
Dad cleared his throat. “I reached your mother by phone this morning. We had a long talk.”
I swallowed hard, wondering what was next.
“It made sense when Will was recovering from operations for him to be safely out of London,” he went on. “But even though we don’t know how long these new raids will continue, Mum and I agree that our family can’t go on this way.”
“Mum thinks it was my fault. You know she does,” I said quietly. “She barely spoke to me for months and months afterward.”
“She was half out of her mind with worry about Will. Remember, he almost didn’t make it,” said Dad. He sighed. “You and Mum do need to talk. She knows she
has to try harder too, Bertie. She wants to be a mother to you both.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again. I remembered what Warden Ita had said about taking things one step at a time. “All right, Dad. I’ll try.”
Dad smiled as he gave LR one last scratch. “Mum misses you. So does Will. He’s going to continue treatment and go back to school here in London. In a few days, they’re coming home to stay.” He grinned. “And I bet this little dog will be glad to have two more plates to lick after meals.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Great care is needed in using codes and ciphers. One error may result in the message being indecipherable and cause a serious loss of time.
—SOE Manual
“Hold on a minute,” I told David and Eleanor as we left the flat. I handed Eleanor LR’s lead and walked over to the reception desk, where George Morton was on duty.
“Uh, George. I just want to say…,” I began. “Well, I’m glad you were there last night to help Mr. Humphrey.”
George waved a hand. “All in the line of duty. He’s quite a character, ain’t he?”
“He is. Also, can I ask…do you still have yesterday’s newspaper?”
George sighed. “I was just about to catch up on the sports news.”
“I only need the personals.”
“The personals?” He raised an eyebrow. “Whatever for?”
I struggled to come up with a reason. Then a real one popped into my head. “My brother, Will, is coming back to London to live. I want to…to find an old bicycle for sale. It might take him a while to learn, but I’ll help him.”
He grunted, dug out the right page, and pushed it toward me. “Here you go.”
As I turned to leave, George called me back. He lowered his voice so David and Eleanor couldn’t hear. “I have an old chum, a veteran of Dunkirk, who I’d like Will to meet. Once your brother’s back, how about we have an outing? We’ll treat you to tea at the big Lyons Corner House on Coventry.”
I opened my mouth to say thank you, but George waved me off. “Go on, then, Bertie. Your friends are waiting.”
We stepped outside and were instantly enveloped by a thick, stinky gray fog. I shivered in my old jacket and pulled my cap down low.
“Bertie, I’m bursting to know what’s going on,” exclaimed Eleanor.
“Let me check something first,” I told David and Eleanor. The dense fog made it hard to read the tiny newspaper print, but it didn’t take long to find what I wanted. I folded the newspaper and stuffed it into my pocket along with the last section of Violette’s journal. “I was right. Let’s go! Hopefully we can find our way there in this pea soup. We might have to wait until we get there for me to read you what I decoded.”
David groaned, pulling his cap down lower against the damp, thick mist. “I’m as impatient as Eleanor. At least tell us where we’re headed!”
I turned to David. “You’re the real Sherlock expert here. What do you observe?”
David’s dark eyes narrowed. “Well, let’s see. We’re headed south on Lexington Street, which isn’t the way to the command post. And that newspaper must mean something.”
“Oh, wait, I know!” Eleanor cried. “You discovered something related to Violette’s trap.” She stopped and pulled us both into a doorway. “I’m not going any farther until you read us the message and tell us what’s going on.”
Relenting, I took the sheet of newspaper and another folded piece of paper from my pocket. LR plopped down on my shoes, panting. “I’ll read her report first. And then you’ll know why we got the newspaper.”
My name is Violette Romy. I am an SOE agent. My network in France has been exposed. This is my report.
This notebook contains evidence that I served loyally as an agent in the SYCAMORE network. It also points to evidence that a traitor in London has been working with the Nazis to aid their cause and send British agents into the hands of the enemy.
Under the instruction of my network leader, Maurice, I used our remaining funds to escape from France and return to London secretly. I do not know the real name or description of the double agent in the SOE network. But Maurice did reveal to me that he went by the code name TRAVELER.
In the next few days, I plan to lay a trap to draw TRAVELER into the open so that I may at least be able to identify him and convince officials in charge of the coming invasion to question and remove him.
I will use methods I learned for communicating in emergencies, along with my SOE code name, to attempt to trap him.
In the event that things do not go as planned, I am placing this notebook into trusted hands for safekeeping, and hope that it can be decoded and used to prosecute the traitor, whose actions threaten all of us.
Violette Romy
There was silence when I finished. Eleanor shook her head. “So now what? I’m not sure I understand how you figured out her trap.”
“Remember when Violette was learning about the different types of coded messages?” I didn’t wait for an answer, but barreled on. “Well, one way to communicate in an emergency is to place a personal notice.”
David snapped his fingers. “And she says she planned to draw TRAVELER out using her own code name. And we know that is BOOK.”
“Exactly. And,” I added triumphantly, “that just happens to match one of yesterday’s personal notices in the newspaper.”
Eleanor put her mittened hands to her cheeks. “Oh, wow.”
“I think she probably placed the notice in the paper on Friday, Eleanor,” I went on, unfolding the newspaper. “She probably had it run for several days, just to be sure her contact saw it.”
David leaned over my shoulder. “Show us.”
I ran my hand down the column of newspaper ads. “I guessed it would be in the lost and found section. And it was.”
Eleanor and David bent their heads over the newspaper. I put my finger on the spot, and David read the notice aloud:
If a traveler is searching for a lost book, Nelson will have it on Thursday, five o’clock in the afternoon.
“Oh, I don’t get it,” Eleanor said. “Traveler is the double agent, and book is Violette, but what is Nelson?”
“It took me a few minutes to figure that out,” I admitted. “But my dad’s always telling me about plaques and statues in London and—”
“Nelson’s Column!” David thumped me on the back. “That has to be it.”
Eleanor looked at us blankly. “Come on, tell me.”
“Have you ever been to Trafalgar Square, near the National Gallery?” I asked her. “Well, the major landmark there is Nelson’s Column. You can’t miss it. It’s a tall column with a statue on top. And on the bottom is a big granite base. It honors a famous navy hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson.”
“If only Mr. Turner could hear you now, Bertie,” David teased.
Ignoring him, I kept on. “So it seems pretty clear: This is how Violette is trying to lure the traitor. It took her weeks to reach England, so by now the SOE realizes it’s missing an agent. She thinks TRAVELER will come looking for her, perhaps to find out what she knows and how much of a threat she might be to him.”
Eleanor frowned. “But…but how will we know who he is if Violette doesn’t show up herself?”
“We might not, unless it’s Leo Marks,” I admitted. “But I do have another idea to get him to identify himself.” I reached into my knapsack and pulled out a book. “Eleanor, I think you should pretend to be Violette.”
“Me?” she exclaimed. “But how? I’m not nearly as tall.”
I handed her the book. “No, but if you sit on the steps at the base of Nelson’s Column, the traitor might come close enough to get a good look. He—or she—might want to be sure you’re not Violette. We can get a description, and once we find Violette, we can tell her. Hopefully she’ll know who it w
as.”
I knew there were several problems with my plan. For one thing, we had no idea how to find Violette. Or maybe the traitor had already seized her, and no one would show up. But it wouldn’t do any good to jump ahead. One step at a time.
“Brilliant! And this fog will help,” added David. “The person will have to get pretty close to tell if you’re Violette or not.”
“And don’t worry, Eleanor,” I assured her. “David and I will be nearby. If anything happens, we all run.”
Eleanor nodded, drawing in a deep breath. “I’ll do it.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “It’s almost time for our rendezvous with TRAVELER.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London.
—Sherlock Holmes, in “The Red-Headed League”
My heart pounded as we entered bustling Trafalgar Square. This could be it. As I scanned my surroundings, I almost felt like a real spy.
The National Gallery, with its large dome barely visible in the gray mist, seemed empty and deserted. I remembered going there with Dad, Mum, and Will when I was little. But when the war began, its precious paintings had been spirited away to safety.
“They still have concerts here sometimes at lunch,” David said, gazing up at its tall columns. “My foster grandfather took me once. We had to wait in a really long queue.”
Eleanor nodded. “And Nan and I often come to see the picture of the month.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“After the Blitz died down, they started bringing one painting a month out of hiding so people can visit it. They put it up during the day, and then store it overnight in some safe space.”
“That sounds fun,” I said. “A whole museum for one painting.” I found myself wanting to tell Will about it. Maybe we could come again as a whole family.
How I Became a Spy Page 14
