“You must be Grace,” Raquel added, making it sound like an afterthought. But at least Raquel was expecting her as well. Before Grace could respond, Raquel turned back to Mark. “Follow me.” She pivoted on one foot. Her heels clicked against the floor as she led them down a hallway along an endless row of identical doors. They passed several men in uniform, their chests crowded with badges and medals, expressions grave. Tom would have been awed by the whole thing, Grace thought, with a note of sadness. She was suddenly homesick for New York and the messy comfort of Frankie’s tiny office.
“We don’t have long,” Raquel said in a low voice when the men had passed and they were alone in the corridor once more. “Brian—he’s the archivist—is at lunch. We have maybe an hour, tops, before he gets back.” Grace hesitated. She hadn’t realized that they would be sneaking in. But it was too late to back out now. Raquel had opened a door and was ushering them down a back staircase.
“The files aren’t classified?” Mark asked.
Raquel shook her head. “Not really public either.” The consul had said that the records would be sealed, Grace remembered, wondering if these were the right ones. “Brian said they arrived without notice from London earlier this year. He doesn’t think anyone has gone through them.”
“Why were the files brought here?” Grace asked, as they reached a landing and started down a second staircase. It was the question that had been nagging at her. Why had they shipped British documents all the way across the Atlantic?
“I have no idea,” Raquel replied. When they reached the bottom floor, she led them into a storeroom with boxes piled high behind a chain-link gate. “The ones you’re looking for should be somewhere over there.” Raquel gestured vaguely toward the right side of the room, where about a dozen boxes were stacked on shelves. “Just be sure to put everything back as you found it. I’ll be back in half an hour.” Raquel turned and went, leaving them alone in the room full of boxes.
Grace looked at Mark questioningly. “There’s no way to get through all of this in such a short time. How do we begin?”
Mark ran his hand over one of the boxes, clearing some dust. “We’ll each take half. We just need to figure out how they’re organized.”
She studied the side of the boxes. Each bore a single letter, handwritten and circled. “What do you suppose that means?” He shrugged. She thought then of the photographs in her bag. Quickly she pulled them out. There was a small notation on the bottom of each picture. “I remember that the consul said something about Eleanor working for a section of SOE.” Sure enough, on the bottom of each photo there was a small plate bearing the phrase F Section.
Mark was already ahead of her, moving through the boxes and stacks to a place on a shelf. “Here.” She followed him and looked up. At least five of the boxes were marked with an F.
“Same letter as on the box,” she remarked. “I wonder what it stands for.”
Mark pulled two boxes off the shelf and set them on the ground. As he knelt to open one of them, Grace found her eyes drawn to the spot where his collar had pulled back to reveal a pale bit of skin, his brown hair curling against his neck. Stop, she scolded silently. Whatever madness had happened between them in New York, that was all in the past. He was Tom’s friend, doing her a favor by helping her to gain access to the files. That was all.
Grace knelt before the other box on the ground, swiping at a handful of dust and coughing. She opened it. There were files, each bearing a surname on the label. She opened the top file. It contained a black-and-white photo like the ones Eleanor had been carrying, only this one was of a man. The file detailed locations and missions in Occupied Europe, presumably which the agent had undertaken for SOE. “The F is for French section,” Mark called. “It looks like these are all people who were deployed to France during the war.”
She flipped to the next file, then another. “But mine are all men.”
“Mine, too.”
That made sense, Grace reflected. The kind of work Mark had described SOE doing would have been done by men. And except for the F notation on the boxes and photos, there did not seem to be any connection to Eleanor. Grace wondered for a second if the trip to Washington had been all for nothing. She would get a train back to New York tonight and return to work in the morning.
“Here!” Mark called, interrupting her thoughts. As she stood and walked over to where he stood by the shelf, he pulled a thick stack of files from one of the boxes. “Regina Angell,” he read aloud from the top of the file. Then he flipped to another. “Tracy Edmonds. Stephanie Turnow.” She took one of the files from Mark and opened it. Inside was a photo like the ones Eleanor had carried. The name beneath the image was written in the same neat handwriting that Grace recognized from Eleanor’s photos. Some of the SOE agents had been women after all.
But none of the names on the files were the same as the ones on the photos, Grace realized as she thumbed quickly through the box. Her shoulders slumped with disappointment. “The names don’t match. These aren’t the right ones.”
“I wonder how many girls worked for SOE.”
“There are about thirty here,” Grace replied, thumbing through the files. “Plus another dozen if the ones in Eleanor’s photos actually worked for SOE as well.” She was surprised there had been so many female agents. She lifted one of the files. Sally Rider, the label read. Inside it was a personnel file or dossier of some sort, a page of background with a photo, then notes about training. The detail was impressive, line after line about the various schools the girl had been through, how she had performed at various tests and drills, all in that same handwritten script.
Grace scanned the file. Born in Herefordshire, it said. It contained a last known contact, not in England, but America. Impulsively, Grace pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper and scribbled down the phone number in the file. Then there was a list of places: Paris, Lille. The women had been deployed for SOE to undertake various missions in Occupied Europe. The last entry was for Chartres in 1944. Nothing after that.
Grace closed the file and began thumbing through the others. Each had the same basic information, hometown, contact information. It was the list of whereabouts that was most interesting: Amiens, Beauvais. The missions had taken them to all corners of France.
There was something else she noticed, too: lots of lines blacked out. “Someone redacted the hell out of them,” Mark observed over her shoulder.
“Maybe the files on the girls in the photos are in another box?”
But Mark shook his head. “There are seven boxes on F Section in all. The files in the others are all on men.” He reached around Grace to thumb through the box she had been searching. “What’s this?” He pulled out a thin manila folder that had been wedged between two of the personnel files. “This is odd,” he remarked, paging through it.