Warlight

When Felon is 21 and Rose 14, he teaches her how to hunt birds, fish, and fire a shotgun. Rose learns about wildlife and chalk hills, and she bonds with Felon during her father’s absences. Years later, Felon and Rose reconnect in Suffolk. Rose lives in London with her husband and Rachel, and she is pregnant with Nathaniel. Felon is disappointed that Rose did not pursue a career as a linguist, whereas Rose sees him as the same childhood friend. Felon also lives in London and has a BBC radio program as a naturalist. Secretly, he works for intelligence and rebuilds a private cottage not far from White Paint. Felon’s skill as a spy is often attributed to his background in animal behavior. He will eventually recruit Rose as a radio operative.

As an adult, Nathaniel wonders if Felon chose Rose’s path for her or if she led the life she always wanted.

During the Blitz, Rose evacuates the children to Suffolk to stay with her parents. Her husband is in Asia, and Rose’s mother chastises her for marrying young. Bombers fly over the coastal towns, and when the planes depart, Rose takes Rachel out at dawn and waits for daylight. She recalls Felon’s advice to protect her loved ones and is compelled to get involved and gain control. She walks toward Felon’s cottage.

Felon recruits Rose, and together they work missions throughout Europe. They masquerade as uncle and niece, but Felon develops sexual desire for her. Rose rises in the ranks from working small missions on the Grosvenor House Hotel roof to becoming a chief operative in harvesting data. Under the codename “Viola,” she travels the world and once parachuted into the Low Countries to replace a killed operator.

As an adult, Nathaniel is uncertain of how Rose responded to Felon. He imagines their relationship was beyond teacher and student and included many changing facets as they grew old together.

At the archives, Nathaniel makes a transparency copy of his mother’s hand-drawn map and matches its contour lines to a map in the collection. The drawing is later revealed to be of a location in Italy where Felon was based and where Rose worked as an informant to root out remaining fascists in post-war guerilla groups.

A colleague at the archives requests Nathaniel to translate an audio recording in Italian recovered outside Naples after the war. Nathaniel hears a woman interrogating an Englishman, later revealed to be Marsh Felon. The woman is looking for Viola and blames her for aiding the Yugoslav Partisans who massacred her family and executed countless villagers in mass graves. Felon lies about knowing Viola’s identity but carelessly divulges that she has birthmarks shaped like the astral plough, or the Big Dipper. Nathaniel thinks about Felon’s favorite poem, Thomas Hardy’s “The Eve of Waterloo.”

The narrative flashes back to the brief love affair Rose and Felon had on the night of her parents’ funeral. In another flashback, Rose travels to Italy to warn Felon that his cover has been compromised and he needs to escape. The following day, they are ambushed, and Felon is captured and interrogated. Felon is released once they confirm Viola’s location and identity.

Rose is captured separately and escapes with knife wounds on her arm from the interrogation. Months later, Felon meets Rose in Paris to celebrate the end of their mission. They visit the Bibliothèque Mazarin and wander through the collection. At the hotel, Rose privately reminisces about their friendship and how Felon became a self-made man who guided her. Felon expects to rekindle their affair, but Rose leaves him at the hotel.

Nathaniel remembers his last days with his mother in White Paint. She regarded the house and the generations of women who lived in it as her inheritance. Rose does not see herself in Nathaniel, but she suspects they are similarly distrustful and private. She tells him that her secrecy protected him and Rachel, and she trusted The Moth to keep them safe. Nathaniel retorts that he didn’t feel safe as a child and that they won’t have another opportunity to talk until he returns from college in the winter. Rose replies that silence is a necessity.

Nathaniel imagines Rose’s last moments in October. Instead of an Englishman, it was a young woman who tracked Viola/Rose down and shot her dead through the greenhouse window.

In the archives, Nathaniel learns that Olive Lawrence secretly charted the weather to prepare for the D-Day invasion. He also discovers the dossier and home address of Norman Marshall, The Darter. The Darter had worked for intelligence transporting nitroglycerine in and out of Waltham Abbey, a former gunpowder mill that became a secret research center after the war. Nathaniel sees the heroism of civilians, including chemists, linguists, beekeepers, and ornithologists, who used their expertise to network as undercover agents during and after the war.

Nathaniel visits The Darter at his home and is disappointed that his former mentor is uninterested in reminiscing about the past. Married to a woman named Sophie and with a daughter, The Darter reservedly chats with Nathaniel and focuses on the present. He has not seen Olive and doesn’t respond when Nathaniel asks about Agnes. Nathaniel leaves, unsure if The Darter is angry or hurt by Nathaniel’s own abrupt disappearance from his life.

Only later does Nathaniel recall the framed cloth he saw on The Darter’s wall with an embroidered sentence about “wishing for a large pearl” (270) and a birthdate underneath. Nathaniel connects the reference back to Agnes and remembers that Sophie was her real name. He pieces together the missing details of Agnes’s untold story. When Nathaniel disappeared to the US and then to Suffolk, Agnes was pregnant and had come looking for him at The Darter’s. Nathaniel imagines The Darter confessing to his real identity and taking her in. He pictures a pregnant Agnes working at Waltham Abbey, packing explosives on an assembly line. Agnes and The Darter marry and name their daughter Pearl.

In Suffolk, Nathaniel spends his evenings with his pet greyhound in the walled garden of his house, a place once owned by the Malakites. He reads a book about sea peas, a vegetable that thrived during the war when mines on the beach left the land undisturbed. He thinks about The Darter, Agnes, Olive Lawrence, his mother, and the anonymous people who served as underground agents. Their stories will always remain incomplete yet formative in his life. He wonders if he has hurt anyone in his past and if he will encounter Pearl on the street or see his sister Rachel again. Nathaniel recalls his last night in White Paint after his mother’s death. He washed and ironed Rose’s clothes, hung them in the cupboard, walked across the nightingale floor, and left the house.