Duchess

Chapter 9

One month later
A cool hand on my shoulder made me jump from my desk at the OSS, and Benjamin's whispering voice behind me said, "Agent."
Grinning, I turned around and pulled him by the collar so our noses were touching. "Major General."
Caleb Sullivan, one of Ben's closest friends and my neighbor in the office, threw a ballpoint pen at us with a laugh. "Save it for after work, would you? How am I supposed to write this report with you two going all doll-dizzy on me?"
Benjamin laughed and nodded, "Agreed. You keep working; we'll go down to my office and go from there."
"Talk a little quieter," I whispered, linking my arm in his and looking around to see if anyone else had heard, "You of all people should know that a scandal is the last thing we need."
He raised his eyebrows and Caleb looked between us inquisitively. "We're married, for heaven's sakes, Lou!"
The three of us laughed and Ben continued, "But in all seriousness, darling, they've called both of us for a meeting upstairs."
I cocked my head and grabbed my bag, unrolling the paper from my typewriter and tucking it into my desk for the sake of preserving the classified information.
"Why? I've already debriefed everything from my entire time in Europe to them."
"Who knows," he answered wryly, leading me towards the stairs.
I knew what he was thinking. Please don't let her be assigned to another mission. His desperation to keep me close was endearing, but we both knew it wouldn't last forever.
We entered the main conference room to find a table full of generals, commanders, and cabinet members—some of whom I'd never even seen before.
They stood politely when we came in, but it was obviously a tense room. Benjamin and I exchanged silent glances.
     "Is something wrong?" I asked calmly as we sat down across from them.
     "Good afternoon, Major General and Mrs. Tallmadge."
     "Agent," Ben corrected softly.
     "I'm sorry?"
     Louder, he said, "Her title is Agent Tallmadge, sir."
     There was an awkward silence but I was proud of Benjamin for saying something about it. I was always called just Mrs. Tallmadge because the superiors didn't feel comfortable having such a title for a female. I usually didn't mind, but I knew it made Benjamin mad as a hornet.
     "Alright," a general said, "Agent. We wanted to ask a few more questions about the concentration camp train you boarded in Munich. It says here that you jumped out of a train car filled with Jews in a field outside of Stuttgart, correct?"
     I nodded slowly.
    Another man piped up, "And this was early morning on October 2nd?"
     Again, I nodded, trying to figure out what the point of all of it was. Benjamin shifted in his seat.
     "Prior to your escape from this train, was there any kind of lock on the outside?"
     "Yes, it was a heavy padlock. I used Mr. Lovell's new silenced pistol to get it off," I glanced at Stanley Lovell, one of my good friends and the chemist in charge of providing every gadget and chemical I brought with me during missions, but he looked down at his hands nervously.
     "Mrs. Tallmadge," a man in a tweed suit said, "we have received reliable intelligence reports that every prisoner on that train was killed when they reached their destination at Natzweiler. As a punishment and example when they found a padlock missing and an open train car."
     I froze. Their words didn't even seem real, and I tried to process what they were saying. They were all dead.
     Taking a deep breath, Benjamin slipped his hand into mine under the table and said softly, "Are you blaming her for this? That is unfair, and you all know it."
     My breath caught in my throat, and I realized that Benjamin was wrong. It truly was all my fault.
     "Do you have any doubt that this was your train, Mrs. Tallmadge?"
     Filled with dread, I tried to answer but I couldn't speak.
     The man who spoke English, the girl I gave the soup to, the children, the mother fighting to give her infant a place by the little window, the man who had lost all three of his daughters, the woman my age who had dreamed of being a concert pianist, the little boy who just wanted to sit next to me. Murdered.
     "How was she supposed to know?" Benjamin said, leaning forward furiously as I sat there in shock, "She had just been brutally attacked by the Gestapo and had risked her life to bring you information! How could any of us have known that this would happen? For all we know, that would have been the fate of those prisoners anyway."
     I couldn't stop imagining them panicking in the gas chambers.
"Did you not think about what the Germans would find upon reaching Natzweiler, Mrs. Tallmadge?" One of them said, "You took advantage of those prisoners' weakness to save yourself some time."
Benjamin squeezed my hand, seething, and I glanced up at him. I didn't want to speak for fear of bursting into tears, and I knew he understood. Besides, these men wouldn't listen to anything I said, but hearing it from my husband would perhaps make some difference.
"That is so far from the truth," he said angrily, "and you all know it."
"Is it, Major General? That's 700 men, women, and children, that were sent to the gas chambers because of your wife's actions. Do you underst-"
     Ben stood up and slammed his hand on the table. I jumped back instinctively as though it were the sound of a gunshot.
"That's enough. Let's go, Louisa," Ben spat, gently taking my hand.
     Numb, and unable to keep the tears from falling, I stopped and turned back to look at the men before following Ben out the door.
     "If I am to be dismissed," I said with a shaky breath, "I'll accept it. But I never," the tears burned in my eyes as I whispered, "never meant for any harm to come to any of them. I would give my life to bring even a few of them back."
     I shut the door behind me and collapsed into Benjamin's arms in the marble hallway, sobbing silently. He pulled me close and let me cry, his hands running through my hair as he tried to comfort me.
"I killed them all," I whispered.
He held my face in his hands and looked me intensely in the eye. "Lou, you need to listen to me. You did not do this. You are not responsible for the deaths of those people, do you hear me?"
I couldn't stop crying. We both knew that I really was to blame, at least in part.
"Listen, darling," he continued, "most of those men have never stepped foot out of this country before. They don't understand what it's like. They can't imagine what you've been through."
He guided me down another hallway and sat beside me on a plush couch.
"It's still my fault," I sobbed, leaning into him and letting him hold me to his chest, "and I don't even care about losing this job anymore. How could I ever face them again knowing that I'm responsible for hundreds of innocent lives because of my own carelessness?"
Benjamin sighed and said, "You have to stop saying that. They were on their way to Natzweiler, Louisa. They weren't going to," he hesitated, shaking his head before continuing, "What I'm trying to say is that they were sentenced to death the moment they boarded that train. You said yourself that they could turn you in if their lives depended on it. We'll never know the truth of everything that happened, but you did everything you could, love."
     He kissed my hand meekly and looked at me with a small smile. "It looks like we both have the evening off, though. How about dinner?"
     I rested my head on his shoulder and sighed, "I'm not very hungry."
     "C'mon," he groaned, wiping a tear from my eye, "at least pretend to be in love with me. I'm just a desperate old schoolboy, remember?"
     His facial expressions and pitiful voice inflections were endearing, and I couldn't help myself from smiling.
     "Oh bloody Nora," I sniffed, "I'll go to dinner with you. But don't expect me to be happy about it. I just want to lay in bed for the rest of my life and never talk to anyone ever again. Is that too much to ask?"
     He chuckled a little bit and helped me to my feet as we slowly made our way towards the elevators.
     "I'll see what I can do, Duchess." Benjamin put his arm around me lovingly and tugged on my currently brown curls.

     That night, I tried my best to enjoy our dinner on the terrace of Le Catalan in downtown Washington, DC.
     Ben knew how much I was hurting from the news earlier, and tried to lighten the mood in any way he could, especially by telling ridiculous medical jokes and trying to remind me of all the good times we'd had together.
Ben had been studying to be a doctor at Yale when the war started, and his flaming passion for the Allied cause made him drop out of school and join the British army as the same time I was quitting my horrible job at a newspaper in Philadelphia to join the British Air Force.
We both knew how much he wanted to be back in medicine, but his ascension into such a high position in the OSS had practically guaranteed him a life of politics and spying until he retired. He made up for his lost career by attempting to diagnose every complaint I ever had and telling the most terrible jokes about things nobody understood but him.
     "Excuse me, Mister and Madame Tallmadge?" someone said behind me, "I was wondering if I could take your photograph for my newspaper."
     A man in suspenders and a white shirt was seated in the table behind us, his big camera in his hands. I glanced a Benjamin with a bit of amusement, who gave the photographer a quick nod.
    "Thank you so much," he gushed, "Now just keep eating, and pretend like I'm not here."
The reporter leapt from his table and crouched down across the aisle from us to catch a good angle, an awestruck look on his face.
"Madame Tallmadge?" Benjamin chuckled quietly as he took our photograph, "That's even better than Agent."
"Shh," I said through a smile, "Let's not offend the poor man; I think it's sweet."
He came up and shook both of our hands and said, "Madame, may I ask who you are wearing tonight?"
Benjamin looked at me warily, unsure of whether I wanted to keep doing this, but I smiled and responded, "This dress is an old Claire McCardell I've had for years. Lately, I haven't had many opportunities to go shopping, so I've very happily reverted back to my old clothes. I like giving them a modern twist."
The man grinned as he wrote my words down. "Would you say this is you doing your part in the war effort?"
I was at a bit of a loss for words.
My part in the war effort was going undercover in Munich, watching my friends die in front of me, feeling utterly alone for months at a time, being stabbed, beaten, and shot at, lying about my age on my enlistment form just to be shot down over France and almost die one year later.
My war effort was feeling like it would be easier to have just died in that plane crash, instead of living with the trauma. War efforts were miserable, terrible things you never recovered from. It had nothing to do with wearing last season's luxury evening dress.
Taking a deep breath, I said, "Yes. We all have to, ah, make sacrifices for our country. Textiles are needed on the warfront, and we ought to be resourceful."
"Thank you," he said, looking between us excitedly, "Thank you so much. I'll never forget this. Look for it in the Washington Chronicle tomorrow!"
He thanked us all the way out the door, and Benjamin looked back at me incredulously. I held up a hand.
"I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking the same thing, but it could have been worse. Let's just have our dessert, okay?"
     Ben scoffed and leaned in close. "Does he even know who you are? How inconsiderate-"
"The poor man wasn't being inconsiderate, he just wasn't thinking."
"Is there any difference?"
"The public doesn't know everything I've done. They never will."
He sipped his water and sighed. "And they know every 'valiant' thing I've done, when in reality all I do is sit in an office everyday. My job is just waiting for the message to come in that my wife was shot in Paris, or kidnapped in Vienna. Or stabbed in Munich," he added, glancing up at me with a smirk.
"Just accept the praise, darling," I said, "and I'll accept being your fashionable housewife that has rumors of spying in her past."
     We looked at each other with eyes that had seen too much. We both knew that even if the war ended that very hour, our lives would never go back to normal.
The scars of war and the emotional blows that came with our celebrity would never go away. People would always see me as the defenseless wife of a Major General, but I didn't mind that as much as he did.
     Benjamin took a deep breath, muttering, "You could be the queen if you wanted to."
     "I'd rather be yours."