Page 57 of The Paris Agent
“Yes. Howdidyou know to ask that?”
He turns toward me. Our eyes meet and lock, and we’re fully clothed and sitting outside, but there’s something almost intimate about this moment.
“Remember yesterday when I told you that history is personal?” When I nod, he goes on. “It is true that I am most likely an orphan, but I know virtually nothing about my birth parents. I lived in an orphanage until I was seven, and then went to live with the Sinclairs. I adore them, truly. They’re a brilliant couple and they did everything they could to build a family around me. As I grew older, my curiosity about my birth parents started to really burn within me, and that always felt like a betrayal of the Sinclairs. It didn’t help that when I tried to ask them about my other family, they would only tell me that my biological parents both died in the war. That I should be proud of them for fighting for their country, but that I had to leave it at that.”
“They were afraid of losing you.”
“Yes, I think so. And perhaps they were worried I’d be disappointed if I went looking for answers and couldn’t find them. I wanted to respect their wishes, but around the time of my eighteenth birthday, I thought I’d go mad if I didn’t try. I waited until they were out one day and went through the drawer in their bedroom where they kept special paperwork. I found my official adoption documents and the name of the orphanage, along with a transcript detailing some very curious remarks from the judge who officiated over court proceedings about me.”
“Curious how?”
“The words ‘unknown identity’ and ‘undocumented surrender’ featured heavily,” he says, smiling weakly as I gasp. “I couldn’t leave it alone after that, regardless of how much Mum and Dad wanted me to. A few weeks after my birthday, I told Dad I had to drive to the university to clarify course options and he let me borrow his car. Instead, I drove to the orphanage. It was hours away from our house in London, way down in Hampshire in the middle of nowhere.”
“Were your parents angry?”
“They still don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t suppose they would be angry now. At the time, it was probably the worst thing I’d ever done. I was a child who liked to please, you see.”
“I’m sure,” I say wryly. “I’ll have you know, I was an angelic child, too.”
“Yes, even from this angle I can see the faintest trace of your halo,” he says wryly, and I smile in spite of myself. “My memories of the time before the Sinclairs took me in had been foggy but as soon as I arrived, I remembered the place. St. Brigid’s, it’s called—it’s a convent, but they also run a school and an orphanage. Once I introduced myself, the Mother Superior remembered my surrender because it was such an odd situation. Out of the blue, a man arrived with me in tow and begged her to help. He said my mother had been posted overseas and there was no one else to care for me. He assured them she would be back to collect me within a few months.”
“Wasn’t there paperwork? A birth certificate, or some kind of admissions form?”
“No,” Theo says, sighing. “Mother Superior had been told that my situation was fraught and it was best if she knew little about me—for my own protection, supposedly. It seems madness by today’s standards but you have to remember, the world was in chaos. She really thought she was doing the right thing. It was an immense shock to learn that I was surrendered without so much as a surname or a date of birth.”
“Of course it was,” I murmur. “You poor thing. What birthday do you celebrate?”
“What my parents call my birthday is the day I was surrendered. They rounded down by a few years—so it roughly matches my biological age, I suppose.”
“And that was just...it? Your parents never returned for you?”
“Mother Superior said they came back just the once a few weeks after my surrender. The man—my father?—called and asked them to take me to a park some distance away. He specifically insisted that someone not wearing a habit or identifiable clothing be the one to accompany me. Mother Superior agreed because she assumed I was still in grave danger. That was the last time anyone heard from either one of them. The orphanage cared for me for a few years after the end of the war, hoping my parents would return, but they never did. They just disappeared without a trace.”
“How awful,” I say. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be as disconnected from my own history as Theo is from his. I feel my mother’s absence every minute of every day—but at least I know the shape of the space she used to fill. “I’m really sorry about all of this, I really am, but what does this have to do with Professor Read?”
“Ah, this is where it gets complicated,” Theo says. “At eighteen, I was upset by what I’d learned but too anxious about having disobeyed my parents in digging into it, so I kept it all to myself. Time marched forward. I went to university and majored in history and gradually narrowed my study focus to the war. That’s when I discovered that I had been wrong in my estimation about that little convent orphanage in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it is little, and it is a convent orphanage...but it happens to be in Beaulieu. That’s the tiny village right in the epicenter of the cluster of properties used for the SOE’s finishing school.”
“Oh!” I say, comprehension dawning. “You think your father was in the SOE?”
“I suspect both parents may have been, actually,” he says. “It’s the only explanation I can think of for the secrecy. I suppose the other thing you need to know is that when I arrived at that orphanage, I didn’t speak a word of English.”
“Were you mute?”
“Oh, no. Mother Superior told me I was quite the chatterbox and I learned English quickly enough, but when I first arrived there I spoke only French.”
“My goodness,” I say, shaking my head. “You are an interesting man, Theo Sinclair.”
“Only in this aspect,” he laughs. “The rest of the time I’m a dreadfully uncool history teacher. My dad is an Oxford man so I’d been studying there, and he just about disowned me when I transferred to Manchester, but when I joined all of the pieces of my own past together, it was clear to me that Professor Read was probably the only person on earth who could figure out who I really was.”
“And did he?”
“Much like you and Noah, I assumed that I would be able to tell him what I knew and that he would fill in the rest of the picture. As you now know, it doesn’t work that way, but Harry is a very kind man. He told me he was very sorry for my situation but that he couldn’t reveal anything that remained classified. I was disappointed at first, but also genuinely fascinated by his work, so I did spend a lot of time lurking in his office in my final year of undergrad studies. After a while, he told me there was one agent who had a child around my age, but that child does not share my name and was never surrendered to an orphanage. So, I had to let it go, and for a long time, I did. I had just about completed my Master’s, and Harry was helping with my PhD application—he was to be my supervisor.” His eyes grow distant for a moment and I know he’s thinking about what might have been, but then Theo shakes himself and continues. “One day, I left his offices. I got all the way to my car before I remembered I left something on my desk I needed that night. My office was in one of those little rooms in the rabbit warren hallway between Mrs. White’s desk and Harry’s office, and he obviously didn’t hear me come back. He’s a mild-mannered sort and it’s rare for him to raise his voice, but he was so excited he was just about shouting into the phone. It was something about a medical record accidentally placed in another agent’s file. All I remember is Harry laughing and saying, ‘You have to admit it was starting to look as though she disappeared into thin air—this is all we’ve ever found.’ Well, obviouslythatcaught my attention—especially when I heard him explaining that this file mentioned a woman’s abdominal surgery in 1942 and speculating about whether this was a euphemism for an ‘illegitimate’ pregnancy.”
“No!” I gasp.
“I couldn’t just barge in and let him know I overheard a call he’d obviously timed for after I left, but I barely slept a wink that night wondering. I hoped he’d fill me in the next day, but he didn’t say a word. We were working together in his office that afternoon, reviewing a transcription I’d made from a recorded interview, when Harry got up to go to the bathroom and I realized he’d left his keys on the desk...” Theo sucks in a breath, then covers his eyes. “Charlotte, you can’t tell anyone this. Promise me. Both Harry and I could get in all kinds of legal trouble.”
“Of course I won’t,” I promise.
