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anything,” Ramsay went on, ignoring him. “We’ll check when the next train departs for Italy.—Which way’s the ticket office?”

 5 
Liaison to the Admiralty
    The British battle cruiser HMS Dauntless steamed out of Plymouth in the grey light of dawn. Its course would take it westward through the English Channel, then north through the Irish Sea, and around the west and north of Scotland to the sheltered waters of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. Much of the crew was still relatively raw, and it was no time to risk encountering a German U-boat in the Channel or the North Sea, where the whole fleet command was in terror of the German submarines. It was the first time in its history that Great Britain’s sea barrier of safety had been breached. Throughout the United Kingdom people feared the U-boats entering their very harbors undetected. The news was full of it. Never had the British people felt so exposed and vulnerable.
    The crew of the Dauntless would complete its training en route and in the Orkneys, then join the Mediterannean fleet later in the year.
    Belowdecks in his private cabin, Commander Charles Rutherford—his commission in His Majesty’s Navy newly activated—special assistant to the captain and personal liaison to the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, stood at his porthole gazing at the passing landscape of the Devonshire and Cornwall coast.
    The emotions stirring within him were many and conflicting. The feel of the sea beneath his feet reminded him fondly of his youthful service in the navy. Those had been happy times, and were associated with his meeting and then falling in love with Jocelyn, and their first contented years together at Heathersleigh Hall.
    But watching the coastline pass reminded him also of the present, and the wife he was leaving behind. Times were different now. Today’s was a dangerous world. He had seen the anxiety in her eyes of what this parting might mean when they said good-bye two days ago.
    â€”———
    But, Charles,” Jocelyn’s voice had pled, “I still don’t see why you have to go. I’ve almost reconciled losing a son to the war . . . but a husband as well!”
    â€œYou are not losing us, Jocie,” replied Charles. “We’ll be back before you know it,” he added, trying to sound cheery and optimistic. “Don’t you know what all the papers are saying, that the war will be over by Christmas?”
    Despite his words, neither of them believed the reports.
    Charles had had too many frank discussions with the First Lord of the Admiralty not to realize the gravity of the situation, and the personal risk to which he was exposing himself by answering Churchill’s summons to the war effort.
    â€œCome, Jocie,” said Charles after a brief pause, “let’s have one more time of prayer together in the heather garden.”
    Husband and wife left the house and walked slowly across the lawn toward the wood. In front of them spread the heather garden, which had become such a special place of prayer as they had developed and expanded it through the years.
    No one in the family knew when the first species of the wiry shrub had been planted at Heathersleigh Hall. But following Charles’ and Jocelyn’s own spiritual awakening, and encouraged by their friend, London pastor Timothy Diggorsfeld, to use it as a prayer garden on behalf of their daughter Amanda after her painful departure from Heathersleigh, Jocelyn and Charles had cultivated and widened it to its present state.
    The heather garden had now become a complex maze of twisting paths through more than a hundred plants of heather of probably three dozen varieties. It was most spectacularly colorful during the two prominent blooming seasons, between July and September for summer varietals, and from Christmas to February for winter species. However, on hand also were more unusual forms