Ruby laughed. “That’s all right. What I need most of all is advice. You see, I’m American.”
“American?” Charlotte was momentarily dazzled. She’d never met an American before; the immigrants she knew were from eastern Europe. “But America is so far away.”
“Indeed it is. I fell in love with a Frenchman and followed him across the ocean to live here. He has lived in this building for a long time. Perhaps you know him?”
“Yes, of course, Monsieur Benoit. Well, my maman and papa know him.”
“I see. Well, Charlotte, this is my problem, and it makes me rather sad: sometimes, people treat me differently because I’m American. They judge me before they know me.”
It was almost exactly what Charlotte had been trying to explain to Papa! To think that the glamorous woman next door had the same sort of problem! “I suppose that’s rather silly of them,” she said slowly.
“How so?”
“Well,” Charlotte said, struggling to put her thoughts into words. “The fact that you are American doesn’t change who you are on the inside. It is just one piece of you.”
“Hmm. That’s quite a good point. But what do you think I should do about the way I’m feeling?”
Charlotte thought about this. “You can’t always change other people’s minds. But you can change whether or not you listen to them, can’t you?”
“Why, yes,” Ruby said. “You know, Charlotte, I think I was right. You are very wise indeed. I will think about what you said.”
“Okay,” Charlotte said, suddenly shy again. She wanted to ask Ruby many more questions. What was America like? Where had she learned to speak French so well? What did she think of Paris? Was she worried about the war that everyone said was coming to France? But Ruby was already moving toward the door of her terrace, and Charlotte realized with a great swell of disappointment that she had missed her chance.
“Thank you, Charlotte,” Ruby said. “I hope we talk again soon.” And then she was gone, leaving Charlotte alone to overlook the moonlit courtyard.
Only later did Charlotte realize that her kitchen window was open a crack, and that if Ruby had already been on her terrace, she would have heard Charlotte’s whole conversation with her parents. The thought made Charlotte feel a bit silly at first, but by the time she went to sleep that night, she felt a little less alone.
CHAPTER FOUR
January 1940
It was icy cold and rainy when Thomas Clarke arrived at the Little Rissington airfield in the Cotswolds for the first time. Not a very good welcome, he thought. The conditions at Desford, where he’d learned to fly DH 82 Tiger Moths, hadn’t been much better, but Little Rissi was supposed to be the real deal, the place where he would earn his RAF wings, where he would learn to fly fighters. He had imagined, somehow, wide-open, verdant fields and babbling blue streams. Instead, the world here seemed to be a study in all the shades of brown and gray, with the wind turning the raindrops into vicious projectiles. By the time he and Harry Cormack made it inside the brick building at the front of the complex, their brand-new RAF blues were drenched straight through.
“If Marcie could see me now,” Harry muttered, glancing down at his sopping uniform as they waited for the station commander. “You’re lucky you don’t have a sweetheart, Thomas. There’s no one to see you in this state.”
“Yes, lucky me.” Thomas rolled his eyes at the man who’d become his closest friend at Desford, where they’d survived the harrowing first weeks of make-or-break flight training together. He refrained from mentioning that Harry likely wouldn’t be seeing his love anytime soon anyhow. The world was at war, and there was a rush to get the newest recruits into the skies. Besides, Harry seemed to have a new girl every few weeks. Where did he find the time? And how could he worry about wooing the young ladies who hung around the pub they frequented when there was battle to be waged? Surely that sort of thinking was a distraction they couldn’t afford.
“Attention!” a warrant officer bellowed to the soaked RAF hopefuls. Thomas and Harry sprang to ramrod straightness and turned their eyes toward the door.
A beak-nosed man with close-cropped white hair strode in, fixing them all with a steely gaze. “Welcome to RAF Little Rissington,” he barked after the warrant officer had introduced him as the station commander. “You may have thought that your early training days were easy, but things are about to change. This is where we separate the men from the boys. It’s up to you to decide which you’ll be. Your studies here will be tough, your training relentless. Remember: the planes cost a bloody fortune. You, on the other hand, are easily replaceable. Act accordingly.” He strode off without another word.
“Cheerful chap,” Harry muttered.
“He was just trying to scare us,” Thomas replied. But it had worked. As he and Harry trudged through the downpour toward the mess hall a few minutes later, Thomas’s heart was in his throat, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether he actually belonged here.
Thomas was assigned to bunk with Oliver Smith, who’d also come from Desford, and Harry was four doors down. The next morning, they all made their way to stores to collect their assigned flying kits, parachutes, and huge piles of textbooks.
“Are we meant to read all of these?” Harry asked, feigning distress under the weight of the books.
“The planes cost a bloody fortune, chaps,” Thomas deadpanned. “You are replaceable.”
Harry and Oliver laughed, and soon, they were all choosing lockers in the crew room of Number 2 Hangar. As Thomas extracted his new helmet, his leather gloves, his Sidcot suit, and his pristine flying boots, he felt a surge of pride and trepidation. He was ready to be a man, for there was no room for anything else. He had to do all he could to protect England.
“WHY DID YOU JOIN UP, sir?”
The question came from Jonathan Wilkes, Thomas’s flight sergeant, as they took off from the airfield at Kidlington, just east of Little Rissi, in a Harvard training aircraft. The low-wing monoplane was nothing like the Tiger Moths that Thomas had learned to fly at Desford, and he was still a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of controls on the squat beast.
“It felt like the right thing to do, Flight,” Thomas replied, guiding the trainer up through a sharp gust of wind. The stick shuddered, but Thomas kept his grip steady. “Helping the cause, and such.”
“How so?” Wilkes persisted. His tone wasn’t combative, merely curious. “You could have joined the army and been on the ground already.”
“But I can do more here.”
“Even if it’s dangerous?”
“Danger is a part of war, isn’t it?”
“Indeed,” Wilkes replied, and Thomas had the feeling he’d passed some sort of test. “Well, then, I’m going to show you now, sir, what it feels like to stall in this aircraft. You’re going to bring us out of it.”
“Yes, all right.” He’d gotten accustomed to stalls in Tiger Moths, after all. How different could this be? “Ready when you are.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when the Harvard choked and whipped nearly to a dead stop in midair. An instant later, they were plummeting nose-first toward the ground.
“Dear God!” Thomas shouted, but the words were lost in the sudden shrieking of the plane’s descent, the air outside biting at the wings.
“Easy on the stick, sir.” Wilkes sounded calm, but his tone didn’t do much to slow Thomas’s racing pulse. The aircraft shuddered and whined, and though Thomas knew the cabin was sealed, he felt as if there were sharp gusts pulling at his flight suit. The air screamed as the barracks on the ground below came into focus. Thomas pulled back sharply, following his instinct to raise the nose of the plane, but it shook and stalled again and continued its plunge toward the earth.