All Clear

He was finally picked up by an elderly clergyman going to the next village to substitute for the local vicar. “He’s volunteered to go over with the troops as a chaplain,” he leaned out the window to tell Ernest. “The village is only two miles on. Are you certain you don’t want to wait for a better ride?”

Ernest wasn’t certain at all, but by then his feet hurt so badly, he climbed in, only to immediately have a Jeep with a pretty WAC driving it appear out of nowhere and shoot past them. So when the clergyman let him out, he turned down a ride in another lumbering farm truck—a truck that turned out to be the last vehicle on the road for three hours.

He didn’t make it to Hawkhurst till nearly ten that night, which, when he reflected on it—and he’d had hours to reflect on it—was probably just as well. There was no way to guarantee that Mr. Jeppers wouldn’t mention his having been there to Cess when he got to Croydon, and if he did, Cess would want to know what was in those articles that was so important. And he was already too interested in what Ernest was typing.

Ernest was too bone-weary to sit in the pub room nursing a watered-down pint and spreading false rumors about the invasion. He hardly had enough energy to wrench the sneakers off his blistered feet, fall into bed, and sleep through his best chance of a ride to Dover. “You just missed Mr. Hollocks,” the barmaid told him when she served him breakfast. “He was going all the way to Dover.”

The story of my life, he thought, and spent the next day inching toward Dover in lorries filled with chickens, pig muck, and a bull he was convinced was the same one he’d faced down in that pasture. He was glad when the farmer turned down a muddy lane and let him out, though he was still “some way” from Dover and it looked like it was going to rain.

It did. By the time he reached Dover in midafternoon, on the back of an army corporal’s Douglas motorcycle, it was pouring, with a blustery wind that drove the rain straight into his face.

Poor Cess, he thought, heading for the docks. On the other hand, Captain Doolittle would still be here. No one would take a boat out in this.

He made his way along the rain-slick dock between wooden crates and coils of rope and tins of petrol, reading the names painted on the boats’ bows—the Valiant, the King George, the Dreadnought. No Mary Roses or Sea Sprites here, he thought. The war had changed all that. They all had either militant or patriotic names, and their decks were hung with camouflage netting. The Union Jack, the Dauntless …

The damned Mlle. Jeannette was going to be the very last one. He’d be drenched by the time he got there. The Fearless, the Britannia …

Here it was. The Mlle. Jeannette.

But it couldn’t be the boat he was looking for. Its hull was covered in barnacles, and its paint was peeling. It didn’t look like it could stay afloat long enough to make it out of the harbor, let alone do a mission for British Intelligence. It looked almost as unseaworthy as—

“Ahoy, there,” a tough-looking young man called from the bow. “You got business ’ere?” He was wearing a jersey and denim trousers and had evidently been working on the engine. His face and hands were streaked with black, and he was holding an oily wrench as if it was a weapon.

“I’m looking for Captain Doolittle,” Ernest shouted up to him. “Is this his boat?”

“Aye.” He motioned Ernest aboard. “ ’E’s below. Cap’n!” When there was no response, he went over to the hatch and shouted down it, “Cap’n Doolittle!

Sommun’ ’ere to see ya!” and returned to the engine.

Ernest hurried up the gangplank and then stopped, staring around at the unvarnished deck in bewilderment. This couldn’t be … she’d been sunk. But the ship’s wheel, the lockers, even the hatch looked exactly like it.

Oh, my God, he thought. The Mlle. Jeannette. I should have recognized the name.

“What in tarnation are you bellowing about now?” a voice from below shouted, and there was no mistaking that voice, that yachting cap, or, as he emerged from the hatch, those bright eyes and that grizzled beard.

You’re alive, Ernest thought wonderingly.

“Who are you? And what the bloody hell do you want?”

He doesn’t recognize me, Ernest thought, thanking God for the knitted cap and the stubble on his face. “Are you Captain Doolittle?” he asked.

“I am.”

“I’m Seaman—”

“Come below out of this rain,” he said, and motioned Ernest to follow him down the ladder.

Ernest climbed down it after him. The hold looked exactly the same—the littered galley, the bunk with its heap of gray blankets, the same four inches of brackish water on the floor. And the dim, flickering hurricane lamp over the table, which, hopefully, wouldn’t illuminate his face too much. If he could deliver the package and get out of here quickly enough …