Chapter 26

Dear Anne,

The last of the travel arrangements have been made, the last of the goodbyes have been said, and we're due to leave Stockholm any moment. My trusty Ford is being loaded onto the train for the trip to Haparanda, where we shall meet up with the rest of our company to begin the long drive north. One thousand men, women, and children counting on me to lead them one thousand miles into the Arctic. It's July, so weather shouldn't be a factor. Whether the war will follow us is my greater fear...

S tockholm Central Station buzzed like a hive despite the late hour, the soaring arched ceiling of the waiting hall directing the sound back down on travelers' heads until Daisy was dizzy with the noise. The kiosks and cafés did brisk business, with passengers standing in line for last-minute coffees or purchasing newspapers to read on the journey. Farther down the hall, a small knot of smartly dressed men loitered near the royal family's private waiting area. Daisy had checked in with the crown princess earlier. Prince Harald and Princess Ragnhild sat quietly on either side of their mother. Only Princess Astrid showed any curiosity in the coming adventure, kicking her heels against her chair as she squirmed and peppered her nurse with questions.

Daisy followed Mr. Whitney to the platform where their train stood waiting. Porters loaded luggage while clerks checked final lists. "We leave in ten minutes, ma'am."

"Have you seen Cleo? She should have been here a half hour ago." The situation felt very familiar. And very disappointing.

"No one's seen her, ma'am, and if I might have a quiet word?" The vice consul seemed to balance on the balls of his feet, his face aglow with suppressed information.

"You're positively vibrating, Mr. Whitney. Spit it out before you have a stroke."

"I didn't want to say anything, and I had hoped it was a misunderstanding, but"—he drew her aside, pitching his voice low as he leaned close—"it's Mr. Kominski, ma'am. He's not as dead as everyone thought."

She went perfectly still despite the sudden pounding in her temples. "You've seen him?"

"A few nights ago. I saw him and Miss Jaffray together. They seemed quite chummy, if you get my meaning."

And they accused women of being gossips.

She was desperate to interrogate him further, but the two of them had come to a détente of sorts. Any tipping of that precarious balance would only make a bad situation worse. "Is that all? You had me worried, Mr. Whitney. Yes, I knew of Mr. Kominski's arrival," Daisy lied, effectively quashing his delight. "I'm sorry I neglected to mention it when it happened but it was quite unexpected. Good news for a change."

His agreement was tepid at best. "Did he explain where he'd been, ma'am?"

"In Paris, I believe." It was easy once begun. The lies just spooled off her tongue like thread. "He'd no idea Cleo had been searching for him. A muddle all the way around, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, ma'am. Very confusing." He paused for a moment as if to prepare for a final thrust. "So you authorized his addition to the American Legion passenger list?"

She let the mask settle over her face as the weight of Cleo's lies settled into the pit of her stomach. "Yes," she replied quietly. "I did."

His mischief blunted, he soon left to harangue the porters loading the last of the luggage, but she knew it wouldn't be the end of it. Giving a coveted spot on the ship to her goddaughter's boyfriend was too much of an I told you so for every man who ever disapproved of women in government.

She clutched her handbag and made herself smile and offer pleasantries to the passengers as they boarded, all the while feeling herself growing harder, burning hotter. Her thoughts were flooded with friends and comrades from her youth. Brave, intrepid women like her beloved Anne who refused to let the world burn without doing their best to put it out—her army of heroines. She had seen Cleo in that role. Had she miscalculated?

These last few months had wrought changes in her goddaughter that went beyond a harder edge to her features and fearsome shadows clinging to her gaze. Daisy had watched her grow into herself—the willful, entitled girl giving way to a determined and capable woman. Or so she'd thought. Maybe it had been wishful thinking. Maybe she'd wanted to see herself in a new generation, that same drive to step into the world and make a difference. Maybe she'd wanted to see what just wasn't there.

The train gave a whistle. Guards began closing and securing doors. The last porter nodded on his way past, trailing an empty cart. The train would leave. Daisy would be on it. She turned away when she heard a shout coming from the stairs at the far end of the platform. "Wait! Please wait!"

It was Cleo, her traveling case banging against her hip. Hair escaped her pins, flying in a wispy dark cloud around her face, and if you looked closely, she wore one navy and one black pump.

"I'm so sorry, Aunt Daisy. I had some last-minute work I had to finish."

"Would that work happen to include Mr. Kominski?" Daisy hoped even now that Mr. Whitney had been wrong. That he'd jumped to conclusions. But the stunned widening of Cleo's eyes gave the game away. Daisy found her chest tightening with unexpected anger. No, not anger. It was betrayal that burned in her throat like acid. Betrayal, not just of Daisy, but of everything she believed. Of the life she'd chosen to live, the values she cherished. It was as if Cleo had tossed them all aside. As if she'd tossed Daisy aside.

She was tired of being discarded. Tired of being treated like an old fool, the grandmother with the nice hats. She'd earned her place here. She'd scratched and clawed and worked like the devil to make it this far. She'd be damned if Cleo was the reason it all fell apart.

"I had to hear about his return, not from you, but from Whitney, who was quite happy to be the bearer of such titillating news."

"I'll bet he was," Cleo muttered.

"Is there a reason you didn't tell me he was not only alive, but in Stockholm? Or that you'd finagled him onto our passenger list?" Daisy didn't wait for an answer. "I was right. You're very much like your father. Selfish, immature, and a bloody great fool." The words leaped from her throat, cruel and cutting, designed to hurt.

Cleo's chin jerked back as if she'd been slapped, her face flushed. "If you'll let me explain—"

"That's all you've done since you arrived on my doorstep, Clementine. Offered up excuses that I've grown weary of hearing." Daisy swallowed the rest of her words, angry with herself for allowing her emotions to carry her away. Angry with Clementine for distracting her when she needed her wits about her for the coming days. Angry with Mr. Whitney for sowing his suspicions until she questioned everything.

Cleo's eyes glittered with a wash of tears, color splashed high across her cheekbones. "I'm sorry I let you down, Aunt Daisy."

"So am I, my dear. You don't know how much."

C leo had never seen Aunt Daisy lose her temper. She'd always been the one in control—calm, sensible. No bluster or flying off the handle. Not like her mother, who lived at the whim of her emotions. Cleo had learned early on to tune out half the nonsense her mother said, the crushing effusions of love as well as the biting disapproval. If only it was as easy to ignore Aunt Daisy. Instead her words banged against Cleo's throbbing temples.

To combat her misery, she tried reimagining the scene where her reaction didn't give the game away, where her lies tripped off the tongue more easily. She imagined herself telling Aunt Daisy the truth and handing over the necklace, relieved at relinquishing a weight that grew heavier with every breath. But that fantasy hadn't lasted more than a moment. This was her problem. Micky was her mistake. She'd let Aunt Daisy think the worst. If it meant keeping her clear of Cleo's problems, she could live with that.

The bump and rattle of the train worked to ease the stretch of cramped muscles. They passed over a crossing. A convoy of trucks waited for them to pass, headlights spearing the dark. Were they headed west into Norway? Did they carry supplies? Weapons? Soldiers? The village fell behind them, and the train was once more cutting its way north through heavy pine forests and stands of white-trunked birch that shone like pale ghosts in the flickering lights. She tried closing her eyes, but her chest ached and there was an emptied-out feeling in her stomach.

"Coffee?"

She sat up, surprised and blinking at the gray light filtering through the window. How long had she slept? "What time is it?"

"A little after nine in the morning," Bayard answered. "We just pulled out of the town of Ume?. Another six hours or so should see us to Haparanda."

Cleo's back ached from sitting, and grit clung to her eyelashes, but the gnawing emptiness of last night had receded to be replaced by the pinch of hunger. The coffee was black and sludgy, but sweet with a hint of...

She looked up to catch him tucking a flask back into his breast pocket. "A little brandy to ease the morning afters." He pulled a paper bag from his coat pocket. "And half a sandwich if you want it. I grabbed it in the station café before we left."

"Are you sure you want to be seen with me?" she asked as she accepted the sandwich and his company. "I'm not exactly woman of the hour these days."

"I heard about that." He sipped at his coffee, hair mussed from his own uncomfortable sleep and stubble shadowing his chin. "She's a reasonable woman. I'm sure she'll come around now that it's over." He continued to stare. "It is over, isn't it?" When she didn't reply immediately, he frowned and his shoulders sagged. "It's not over." He looked like he could down the rest of that brandy in one swallow. "What have you done now, Cleo?"

"Micky was going to go to the press about the necklace. He was going to tell them I was in on his scheme. I couldn't let him do that so I made him an offer, which he accepted in lieu of the necklace."

"He's on the train?"

"Don't be daft." She smiled. "He's on a bus."

"Are you crazy?"

"I didn't care about me, but I couldn't let him hurt Aunt Daisy. She deserves better."

"Why didn't you tell her that?" He sighed, already knowing Cleo's answer and already knowing he'd never get her to change her mind.

"She didn't give me the chance. She was too busy telling me what a bonehead I was." She put on a brave face she didn't feel. "It's just a few more weeks. Just until we reach New York."

"Swirling chaos," he muttered, scrubbing at his face. "You're a hard one to make out, you know that?" There was a tightness around his eyes, but there was also laughter tugging at the edges of his mouth, which gave Cleo comfort that she hadn't burned all her bridges.

"I thought you had my kind all figured out," she teased.

"I did too."

"It's easy to box people in, isn't it? To see only what you want to see and pretend the rest doesn't exist. It's simpler that way. You don't have to work at putting all the pieces together to make a picture that might not be perfect."

"Is that what I did?"

"We all do it."

Aunt Daisy was right. Cleo had been spoiled and thoughtless and foolish. But now she knew her father, a man held up to her as the heroic ideal, had been just as spoiled and just as thoughtless. Yet when it was necessary, he'd done the right thing.

She could do that too.

I t was late afternoon by the time they arrived in the town of Haparanda, where their ship's company would gather for the next leg of the journey. As the train pulled into the junction, it passed a field of enormous canvas tents erected alongside flimsy prebuilt huts. Ambulances and open-bed trucks came and went out of a gate guarded by two armed guards. Cleo followed the line of passengers out of the station and down the street toward their hotel, which, even from a distance, had a decrepit and dingy air.

A woman ignored the guard's shout as she passed out of the encampment. Her arms were wide in welcome, her sharp-boned sun-tanned face making her blue eyes shine brighter. "Cleo Jaffray! Welcome to Haparanda!"

Sofia was dressed like a soldier in a faded jacket and dungarees, her braided hair wound over her head like a crown. The only sign of her medical profession was the red cross on her shoulder bag. She enveloped Cleo in a spine-straightening hug, nearly lifting her off the ground.

"What are you doing here?" Cleo gasped.

"I am preparing to head back into Norway to help as best I can."

"By yourself?" Sofia Kristiansen had the ancestry of a Viking and the tongue of a wasp. Cleo could easily see her taking on a battalion single-handed.

"As part of the American-Scandinavian Field Hospital." Sofia motioned toward the camp behind them. "I am assisting Dr. Fishwick, our chief surgeon. We have enough staff and trucks to outfit a hundred-bed facility, but we are waiting for a shipment of medicine and surgical equipment that is being held up while everyone squabbles over their share of the payment."

"Have you heard anything more from your family? Are they okay?"

Bitterness soured Sofia's mouth, her chin thrust forward, jaw lifted. "I have heard my brother has made it to England, but nothing about my parents for the past month. I am hoping I can find them. Bring them back into Sweden, where they will be safe. Then I can make these bastard Nazis pay in blood for every inch of land they occupy. For Petra and everyone they have killed in their desire for power."

Cleo eyed the medical bag. "Rather bloodthirsty words for a doctor, don't you think?"

"It just means I have a better understanding of how easy it is to kill a man." Sofia smiled when she spoke, but Cleo had a feeling she was all too serious. She reminded herself to stay very much on Sofia's good side. "Come," Sofia said. "Let's find something to eat. You look starved."

She bought both of them a dinner of pyttipanne , which turned out to be a lot like ham hash but better. Carrying their food down to a park by the river, they found a bench as the setting sun turned the wide sky rose and gold and orange, reflected in the water lapping almost at their toes. Sofia pulled out her usual pack of Petter?e's and lit one, her gaze focused on the dark line of trees on the far bank. Finnish trees sheltering the Finnish border city of Tornio, which hugged the opposite side of the river from the Swedish border city of Haparanda.

A whistle sounded as a train inched out of the junction on its way back south to Stockholm and civilization. Cleo wished she was on it. She was a city girl. She didn't like the wide vistas of cloud-streaked sky and endless forests of scrubby pine. The remote homesteads and narrow logging tracks broken only by the occasional crossroads town. It was too wild. Too empty. Too exposed. Or maybe it was the company. Sofia, like her sister before her, had a way of seeing deeper than Cleo wished, noticing parts of her she preferred to keep hidden.

Sofia tossed her cigarette away and pulled something from her coat pocket. "This is for you."

Cleo marveled at the enameled brooch: a delicate gold butterfly, its lacy scalloped wings decorated in blue and green. "This was Petra's."

"She wrote in her letter that she wanted you to have it." Sofia pinned it to Cleo's coat. "She said to tell you that you are not a grasshopper. You are a butterfly."

Guilt rushed over Cleo like a wave. "I can't accept it."

"You'd turn down a gift?"

"I don't deserve it. I double-crossed her. I took advantage of... of the situation to... and with the lieutenant... I didn't mean to. Really. It just happened. But Petra..."

"Is dead." Sofia's face took on an uncharacteristic softness. The golden glints in her blue eyes shimmered. "Do you care for this lieutenant?"

"More than I should."

"And does he care for you?"

"I don't know. I think so."

"If you are asking for my sister's blessing, you will be waiting forever. She is past being betrayed or being in love. And with the world in flames, she would wish you both to find happiness." Sofia grinned like a devil. "Or maybe she will haunt you for the rest of your lives. Who is to say with Petra? She was full of surprises."

It might not have been a blessing, but Sofia's complete disregard for Cleo's distress was cathartic. As if Petra spoke through her sister. Cleo felt her shoulders drop, the ache at the base of her skull ease, and the sick weight in her stomach dissolve. She touched the butterfly as once she touched her diamond. "Thank you."

Sofia shook another cigarette from the pack and placed it between her lips, pausing with the lighter in her hand, as if a thought had struck. "You head north tomorrow. Into Finland."

"That's right." Cleo ran a finger over the edge of the butterfly's wing.

"I have something else for you. What every good woman should be wearing these days." Cleo jumped when Sofia pushed an unholstered revolver into her lap, but just as quickly she relaxed under the weight of the weapon. "It's a long road through rough country. The Germans hide in plain sight. Dressed as Red Cross workers. Finnish veterans. Even the old man living in a burned-out hovel could be an enemy soldier in disguise."

"Why would they care about a convoy of Americans?"

Sofia's eyes hardened to ice, fury etched into every line bitten into the once soft curve of her cheek, the angle of her cheekbones.

"Of course." The answer was like a fist to Cleo's jaw. "They want Prince Harald." She shuddered now with nerves and cold, a shiver that raced over her skin like an ice cube. "Does my aunt know?"

"There is nothing to know. Only whispers and rumors. Sometimes they are false. And sometimes they are truth, which is why it is best to be prepared."

"If I take your gun, what will you use?"

Sofia's smile was practically feral, her warrior ancestry burning in her gaze. "That will not be a problem." As if her duty was done, she seemed anxious to return to camp. She stood, stamping her feet to bring feeling back into her toes. "I should go, but I will hope to see you again when we have won this war."

When. Not if. It didn't sound so far-fetched when Cleo imagined an army of Sofias marching into battle. But such an army needed supplies and equipment and money to purchase them.

"Wait." Cleo dug into her purse until she felt the wrinkled crunch of brown paper. "A gift deserves a gift." She slid her fingers along the fold until they touched the curve of cold metal, the warmth of a stone the size of a hummingbird's egg. She placed it in Sofia's outspread palm, the enormous diamond a vibrant watermelon pink in the arctic sunset, the rubies red as blood. "This should buy enough to outfit a dozen medical units and then some."

Sofia considered it for a moment before pulling Cleo into another hug that had her gasping for breath. "Petra saw something in you that gave her hope. Now I see it too."