She has been sitting here for almost an hour. She has a thermos of hot coffee in the satchel at her feet but has yet to open it. Her wrist is badly sprained and she cannot work up the enthusiasm to further aggravate it by untwisting the lid. She’s been through a lot these past weeks. She’s learning her trade. They’re showing her the ropes. They’re putting her through her paces. Retired sergeant majors are teaching her how to shoot a pistol and whereabouts to thrust her blade if called upon to put an enemy beyond return. She has been thrown around as if she were a scarecrow. Big, broad-shouldered, ruby-playing types have kicked her legs out from under her and struck her beneath the jaw with the heel of their hands. She has had her head yanked back with a fistful of hair and dirty water poured into her gaping mouth and nose, hands pinioned at her back, eyes round and blind and popping as questions were whispered in her ear by a man who smelled of American cigarettes and bourbon. She hasn’t yielded yet. Her group has already lost three members, dismissed for giving in, giving up, giving themselves away. Cordelia is now the only woman left in the intake. Even if she wanted to she knows she can’t give up now. Can’t quit. She feels a responsibility to her sex. People have spent a lot of time telling her what she can and can’t do and she’s never taken any notice of their opinions. She’s not going to start now. She has serious doubts about her own suitability for the role but she has the sense to keep them to herself. She’s started this and she’ll finish it – even if doing so means a career to which she is hideously ill-suited. She fancies that she’ll make a rather good spy. She just isn’t sure whether, in so doing, she will be making the world better or worse. Her moral and political philosophies lean more towards the subversive than the state-sanctioned. She dabbled with Communism at university. She’s marched for women’s rights and wrote letters to foreign governments urging them to alter foreign policy or at the very least, remove themselves from Vietnam. She’s not remotely patriotic. How can a person be proud of being born in a particular country? It’s not as if they have any choice. She doesn’t mourn the death of the Empire and cannot understand those who wish to once again paint the maps of the world in glorious pink. In truth, she finds the whole business of international espionage faintly ridiculous. It all seems to come down to stealing secrets, and she can’t help feeling that a secret isn’t even interesting until somebody else knows about it. Nevertheless, she’ll see it through. She’s clever and tough and dogged and can’t think what the hell else to do with herself for the next fifty years. She’s been given an opportunity, a reward for her small part in unmasking a killer, and the idea of returning home to the big empty house in the Borders fills her with the kind of dismay that the grey sky and opaque seas seem to be trying to mirror. The only thing she misses about home is her best friend, Felicity. She writes to her often though she rarely posts the letters. She can only be truly honest with herself when writing to Flick, and true honesty is something that is going to be denied her if she continues down this path. So she writes what she thinks and what she feels and then she burns them in the grate and watches the ghosts of spilled words climb blackly, greasily, into the haze of cigarette smoke that swirls in the low roof of the barrack room where she is quartered.