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at Mauthausen in Ger man-occupied Austria. A short while later he was reported dead, shot while trying to escape.
    Ilsa was despondent. For a time, she considered re turning home to Oslo but quickly decided against it. Victor would have wanted her to stay and carry on their work. Besides, her brief experience with the Under ground had given her a taste of the game the men were playing, and she liked it. Even when the rumors of war grew too loud to ignore, even when Hitler's saber rat tling started to shake foundations from Warsaw to Paris, she stayed in France. When, in September 1939 the Wehrmacht attacked Poland, she knew she had made the right decision.
    She did not worry about her family. Scandinavia was small and unthreatening. Aside from Swedish iron ore, it had nothing the Germans either needed or wanted. Letters from home gave no cause for alarm. Then in April 1940 the Germans attacked and conquered Nor way. The King fled to London, and the letters from home suddenly stopped. When next she heard from her mother it was a month later, and the news was terrible indeed: her father was dead.
    Ilsa watched the city flash by her window as the taxi maneuvered northeast through the rainswept, twisting streets. To her eye, London's gray, imposing buildings were clumped along the carriageways like descendants of Stonehenge, silent, magisterial, and more than a little forbidding. On this day they matched her mood.
    London was nothing like either Oslo or Paris, she reflected. Her hometown was small and hilly, perched on the water's edge as if getting ready to cast its fishing nets into the sea at any moment. Oslo's houses were smaller than London's, less regimented, more neigh borly. They were narrow, gabled, and made of wood. In the brief summer, they were ringed with greenery and bright flowers made all the more cheerful by their impermanence; sealed tight against the elements during the long, dark winter, the homes were warm and inviting. Paris straddled the Seine serenely, incorporat ing the river into its very conception of self, as if man, not God, had put the water there for the pleasure of the Parisians. Oslo was happy to let nature dominate; Paris was pleased to allow nature to participate.
    The Thames was London's lifeline to the sea, but unless you were a dockworker or an MP, you could go for days without encountering the river. The buildings were at once grander and less elegant than their French counterparts, and the city's inhabitants moved more purposefully. The rainy weather and the sooty fog often erased the sun, but London preferred to ignore the elements rather than accommodate or kowtow to them. The business of London was not business but power, and it was to the keeping of that power that the country had rededicated itself in this war. Did Hitler know what a formidable opponent he had in the British? She doubted he did.
    "Here, driver, here!" she cried as they turned into Myddleton Square in Islington. She threw a handful of coins at the cabby, leaped out, and rushed up the steps to her mother's flat, her heart beating furiously.
    Inghild Lund rose to answer the doorbell. She opened the heavy door and beheld the daughter she thought she might never see again.
    Before she could say anything, Ilsa threw her arms around her and the two women stood on the doorstep, hugging fiercely.
    "I can't believe it's you," whispered Inghild through her tears of joy.
    "I'm here, Mama," cried Ilsa, "I'm here."
    They stayed locked together for longer than either of them knew, not caring about the passersby or the rain, until Inghild at last released her daughter. "Come in side and tell me what miracle has finally brought you back to me."
    The little flat was homey and comfortable; though it was far from Norway, to Ilsa it sang of home. A picture of King Haakon VII hung on one of the walls, and on a small side table stood a photograph of Edvard and Inghild Lund, taken on their wedding day in 1912. How handsome her father was in