I fought my way up from the bottom of an endless cold black sea where the whole of me was frozen except my hands and feet, and they were on fire.

After a bit I remembered where I was, and how I’d got here, and I opened my eyes.

I didn’t recognize the room. I remembered vaguely that Mother had been there, though, and it was pretty obvious she had, because I was surrounded by snowdrops and daffodils. There was a colony of jam jars full of dainty white drooping blossoms on the stand beside my bed, and a forest of white and yellow flowers in jugs and medical beakers on a wheeled steel trolley at my feet, and tall spears of unopened green buds were stood in buckets on the floor all around the walls. There must have been a thousand of them.

And my wee German-speaking sister was there, at work filling the windowsill with more daffodil-stuffed jam jars, wearing her blue WAAF uniform and looking like herself again. She’d got rid of the operatic plaited crown of hair and the ridiculous fake eyelashes. Bit of lipstick, hair done up in that French-style twist our grandmother liked, still elegant. But more ordinary. Without the mask.

“Oi, Sergeant Lind,” I croaked. “People will recognize you.”

She let go a handful of two dozen half-opened daffs, scattering bright yellow flowers all over the floor around her feet, and raised her head. She looked as if she’d been awake all night crying.

“Jamie-lad,” she breathed. “How are you?”

“Och, no bother.”

“Liar.”

She dragged the one chair over by me and rested her chin on her folded hands on the bed next to my head. My own hands lay swaddled in bandages so that nobody including me could see what had happened to them, and my feet were under a little tent to keep the bedclothes off them. She was careful not to touch me.

“Who’s the bloody liar?” I accused. “‘Sergeant Elisabeth Lind!’”

“Lind is part of my name. And I borrowed Elisabeth from the Queen. Lots of people call me Queenie.”

“Only Ellen does that,” I disagreed hoarsely. “Why did you have to get assigned to Windyedge, of all places?”

“I was supposed to collect a German coding machine for Intelligence,” she hissed in my ear, “only some bugger from the RAF had stolen it and set up his own private special operations ring so he could go on submarine hunts.”

God, my hands and feet hurt—that wasn’t a dream. I didn’t dare to move, and I didn’t want to think back to that last flight.

“I thought you’d help me,” she added petulantly.

“We damn well did help you. It wasn’t easy, though, with you being in disguise as a Swiss milkmaid. Ellen and I had a job not to fall about laughing and blow your cover.”