‘You said you’ve flown sixty-three?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Does that mean you’ve only flown three so far, here?’
He grimaced. ‘Yes. We’ve had a lot of stand-downs. The weather … ’
She nodded, and didn’t have to work too hard to calculate how many more flights he’d have to survive as a pathfinder before he could hope for a safer posting in training, or on the ground. It was a simple sum, and forty-two was the answer: fifteen more than it would have been if he’d been doing another tour with an ordinary squadron. Pathfinding was still a new practice, and the pilots spearheading it had been handpicked from the cream of their previous squadrons (‘Think of themas bomber command’s cricket first XI,’Iris’s CO in Norwich had told her and Clare; he’d been fond of euphemisms); they were given higher pay, and a jump in rank, but in return were expected to do the most dangerous work, leading attacks, flying low and laying targets that were a beacon to their own presence, for longer.
She eyed Robbie’s badge on his chest: the hovering eagle, glinting in the firelight, that was given to all pathfinders. They weren’t allowed to wear it on operations, because of the interrogation they’d face if they fell into the gestapo’s hands. Assuming they survived that long.
Raising her hand, she placed her fingertips to the eagle’s metal, and watched Robbie look down, his eyes on her touch.
‘Why did you agree to this?’ she asked him. ‘You could have said no.’ She dropped her hand. ‘Everyone’s allowed to say no.’
‘Then someone else would have had to do it instead of me,’ he said, lifting his gaze back to hers. ‘And at least this way, I’m doing something to get the bombs landing where they’re meant to be, not on schools, or hospitals.’ The lines around his eyes deepened in a frown. ‘It’s something.’
Iris nodded.
It was.
They left the cottage at a quarter to five. Despite the blanketing dark, they were careful to rejoin Doverley’s driveway out of sight of the house, not wanting to risk anyone spotting them leaving the woods together. They both knew the rules prohibiting what the adjutant had referred to asmischief. Senior as Robbie was, he wasn’t exempt from them. Iris certainly wasn’t, and she had no interest in running the gauntlet of a dishonourable dismissal. Especially when she still hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
They were quieter for their walk back to the house; sober, now that the night ahead had become so suddenly imminent.Iris didn’t have to report to the control tower for another two hours, but it would be all activity for Robbie from this point on, checking his plane, attending his intelligence briefing, changing into his flight gear, readying his crew.
They bade one another goodbye in the carriage turning circle, standing a careful distance apart. Iris shivered. The sky had cleared, and the temperature plummeted even further. The rising moon, unblanketed by cloud, was dangerously full.
‘You should head in,’ he said. ‘Thaw out.’
‘It’s even colder inside,’ she reminded him.
And he smiled.
But tightly.
Distractedly.
He needs to be gone, she thought.
I need to let him go.
‘Good luck tonight,’ she told him, looking to the airbase.
‘Good luck to you, too,’ he said. ‘I’ll be listening for your voice.’
‘I’ll be listening for yours,’ she said. ‘Or your wireless operator’s … ’
‘Henry.’
‘Henry,’ she echoed.
‘All right.’ He drew a sharp breath, seeming to brace himself to leave. ‘All right.’ And, with a nod, he turned and went.
For several paces, she watched him walking away, shivering more, from the cold, and fear too. It was so much worse, now that he was going, to think of where he was heading to. Because Italy might not be Germany, but it was still Italy, and even as she stood here, on this frozen Yorkshire gravel, breathing in this frigid British air, there were people on the ground over there, preparing their guns and searchlights with the sole objective of shooting planes like his down.
He knew that.
Of course he knew that.
