A Winter of Spies Read Online Free PDF

even if he was stopped. He’d done it before. His English accent was a great help. But if the Tans caught him with a weapon he was finished – ‘shot while trying to escape’ was what they called it now. With that accent, they’d take Simon for a traitor pure and simple . He’d probably be dead before he even got to Beggars ’ Bush barracks, down the road.
    It had suited Sarah very well to brave the Tans. It felt good to be finally helping in the struggle, and it would show Martin Ford that she was capable. It had all gone very well. Now, she thought, he’d let her help again. At last her family was playing its part: she’d save the honour of the Conways, even if she had to do it in spite of them. All she had to do now was to make absolutely certain that none of the family found out what she’d done. Saving the honour of the Conways didn’t seem to count for much with Da any more. Sarah wondered whether the native government would give out war medals after the English were gone; it would be nice to have a medal of her own.

6
  N EW N EIGHBOURS  
    ON THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY AFTERNOON Sarah sat out in the garden with Mrs Breen. Mrs Breen was over seventy now, but she was a great believer in the benefits of fresh air. She liked to sit outside on reasonably mild days, even in winter. Sarah often joined her in the garden seat.
    Sarah liked Mrs Breen very much, and the old lady seemed to feel the same way about her. She’d told Ma once that she liked to think of Josie and Sarah as the granddaughters she’d never had. Sarah, though, was her special friend.
    They sat now, side by side, on the metal seat. Mrs Breen was knitting. Sarah sat watching the thin fingers expertly working the long needles. She hadn’t seen this piece before.
    â€˜What’s it going to be?’ she asked.
    Mrs Breen smiled without looking up from her work.
    â€˜A scarf,’ she said. ‘For Jimmy, for the winter.’
    â€˜It’s a lovely colour,’ Sarah said.
    â€˜Do you think so? I thought he might find it a bit gaudy.’
    Sarah giggled. ‘Sure, what harm if he does,’ she said. ‘I’ll only rob it off him anyhow, and I think it’s lovely.’
    Mrs Breen gave her little laugh. She loved having children in the house. It brought a place alive, she always said. She knew Sarah could be a bit wild, and Lily Conway was forever giving out about her dangerous rebel talk. But Mrs Breen had never heard her say anything too extreme. Besides, as she always said, there was no harm in it so long as it was just talk.
    â€˜I hope tomorrow won’t be anything like last Sunday,’ Sarah said. ‘That was a bad thing in the street, with all them soldiers.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Mrs Breen said, shaking her head in disapproval. ‘And those low curs of Black and Tans, too. Though some of the troops are not much better nowadays. It’s shocking . Sometimes lately I think our boys are better out of it.’
    The Breens were lifelong loyalists. They’d had two sons – ‘our boys’ – both of whom had joined the British army. The elder son had been killed in the Boer war, twenty years ago now; the second had died in an accident in Egypt in 1908, the year before Sarah was born. Mrs Breen often talked about them. She couldn’t understand how things had changed since their day.
    â€˜Even the army’s not what it was,’ she’d say. ‘It’s because of that awful war, of course. So many fine young men gone.’
    Like most people the Breens loathed the ‘Auxies’ and the Tans, but nowadays they’d lost their illusions about everything official, even the government. They weren’t stupid, and had to know that some of the visitors who came to Conways’ were suspicious characters. But they never mentioned anything.
    Sarah never talked about politics with the Breens. She was sure she could tell Mrs