Read Online The Spy by Marc Eden - Free Book Online

to the eerie trilling of birds. Where the branches joined overhead, the country road seemed particularly narrow. Then, the sun would come streaming through, between the gaps of the leaves, sketching cobwebs on the slate of a child’s frightened mind. The air today was tasting hot and sweet, magnetic as if touched by a current. She licked her lips. Could the beams of light, high in the limbs spearing through the tops of the trees, curving down the coast, be the reason “Golden Cap” had received its name? She stepped to one side—into the leaves—and listened. A face was there. Except that it wasn’t a face. Trying to photograph it, it was gone. A voice...
    It will move through the trees ....
    Valerie returned to the road, not daring to glance sideways at the Inhabitants . Within the grove, bronzed with sepia, shadowy beings were standing in the sunshine. Silvery at twilight—they were waiting to play with her. It was because she had to go away, she told them, but she had not told them why....
    For security reasons.
    She glanced back towards the house. Voices were drifting across the field. Someone was laughing. Valerie squinted. A sound, like wind. Thirty feet up, a giant rook exploded out of the branches, and flapped across her path!
    Click !
    She passed a rotted bench where the road bled away into slippery sheets of grass, tumbling down to the edge of the cliff five hundred feet above the sea. The church, tarnished with time and the weight of childhood memories, loomed out of the dusk as ominous and threatening as a forbidden book—possibly one of those by Frank Harris, Havelock Ellis, or Rudjer Boskovic that her father kept locked in a special cabinet in his bedroom.
    But there was something about her father’s books that he didn’t know. She thought of them as genies, hiding in a box from which they jumped forth at twilight, just before dark, to gather in the secret places of the woods, fearful and forsaken, or to crowd forward about the walls of the church, the sight of which was now causing dread to swell in her heart....
    It was where death lived.
    She entered the vestry, found a seat, and turned to the wall on the right. There, on the Roll of Honor, was the name of her brother. In alphabetical order, a short list of the living, the longer list, of the dead. Names of local young men mostly, navigators and cadets: Battle of Britain pilots who had gone up into the cold, dark, terrible air. Next to each name killed gleamed a cross, polished in brass, and down near the bottom, the name of Basil Sinclair. Her mother had explained it. Though he had not come from this parish, her father had made the arrangements. Valerie, who had not been consulted, considered it a personal intrusion.
    The vicar meant it as a surprise.
    She recalled the day she received the dreaded telegram that read, “ THE LORDS OF THE ADMIRALTY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND BASIL SINCLAIR IS MISSING, BELIEVED KILLED ON WAR SERVICE .” Her father had talked with her at length. Afterwards, he had told her, “You must remember, my dear, in a war like this, no one is privileged.”
    â€œYes, Father, I’ve noticed.”
    Bombs had fallen on the small town of Bridport.
    Still in the church, the candidate said a short prayer. She closed her eyes. “Please, God, if you love me, be with me on this mission, and help me...to...” Tears came, words would not follow. In her heart, she knew prayer could not deliver her and neither could their God. The horrors of Hitler filled her future—there, in its ashes, where she would walk.
    She got up and walked out of the church.
    She saw the sun dancing, and it was like a disk—two disks shimmering, blue-grey silver rimmed with gold—and she intentionally let it burn her eyes for a few seconds. A third disk emerged from the second, vertically, and at right angles to the first. The south poles joined. She blinked, and uncrossed her eyes.