His Majesty's Hope Read Online Free PDF Page A

milk.
    “Marthe and I are going to have a lovely time, aren’t we?” Elise said to the bird, who looked at her quizzically, and then began pecking an errant seed on the bottom of the cage. She turned back to her friend. “And Ernst, how is he?”
    “Not well,” Frieda managed between mouthfuls. “Since he’s married to a blond shiksa, he’s safe, for now, but they’re makinghim …” She swallowed. “He has to deliver letters to Jews, telling them to report for deportation to the camps. It’s the letter everyone dreads. After a day of delivering, all he can do is sleep. It’s all he does anymore—sleep. Sleeping is preferable to this new reality, I think.”
    “I can imagine.” Elise pictured Ernst, once a pediatric surgeon, so full of vitality and energy. She wondered how he looked now, not a surgeon anymore, banned from the hospital.
    “But enough about me.” Frieda took another sip of milk. “How are you? How’s your piano playing?”
    “Fair,” Elise said. “I’d rather be studying for the boards, even if we can’t take them until the war’s over. But Mother has this party coming up and wants me to accompany her, so …” Whatever her mother wanted, Elise usually did. Although not without a fair amount of resentment.
    Frieda gave a grim smile. She knew exactly who Elise’s mother was in the Reich, and her reputation at the Abwehr. She was terrified of her. But keeping her husband alive and in Berlin was her biggest and most overwhelming challenge now. “And … how is she?” Frieda managed, trying to sound normal.
    Elise did her best to distance herself from her mother’s Nazi affiliations, saying that medicine and science had no politics, and thus she had no politics—certainly not her mother’s.… But she and Frieda both knew the truth. They did their best, for the sake of their friendship, to avoid talking about it.
    “I haven’t seen her yet today, Frieda. But I promise you—I’ll speak to her about Ernst tonight.”
    “I know the Abwehr’s not in charge of deportations, but I saw a picture of her in the newspaper, at a concert with Himmler.… She must have some sort of influence?”
    “I promise you, Frieda, I will do everything in my power to help you and Ernst.” Elise made the sign of a cross over her chest.
“Hand aufs Herz,”
she vowed. Her stomach lurched as she said the words, for she remembered how her mother had screamed and shouted the last time she’d brought up protection for Ernst.
    Frieda also made the sign. “Cross my heart.”
    SOE was no ordinary spy organization. It was unconventional, fluid, rogue. And its goals were not military. No, the goals of SOE were sabotage and subversion, often collaborating with local resistance groups in enemy territories to thwart the enemy, working toward the ultimate liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe. Based at 64 Baker Street in London, its motley crew of administrators and agents were sometimes called the Baker Street Irregulars, after Sherlock Holmes’s men. They were charged by Churchill to “set Europe ablaze!”
    Sir Frank Nelson, the Director of SOE, was at his massive wooden desk in his office. He had high cheekbones, thin lips, and fine hair held fast with a copious amount of Brylcreem. He pulled over a heavy file labeled margaret hope. Stamped on it, in thick red letters, was top secret.
    The papers in the file were typed, single-spaced. British by birth, but raised in the United States for most of her life, Margaret Rose Hope had started off in May 1940 as one of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s secretaries. She’d cracked a secret code that a Nazi sleeper spy had put in a newspaper advertisement, and saved not just the Prime Minister’s life but also St. Paul’s Cathedral from destruction.
    These strengths, along with her fluency in French and German, led to her being recruited by Peter Frain, head of MI-5. Her increased strength and endurance, honed at Windsor Castle while protecting the young