Half Sick of Shadows » Band of Brothers [2]

Epilogue

Jules,

I wrote this out literally ten minutes after it happened (as soon as I got back to my hotel room so don't complain). I've transcribed it to the very best of my ability - in the third person, like you always did - and promise that everything in here actually did happen. I'm no poet like yourself but I hope it meets your standard and earns its rightful place at the end of your 'confessions' (when you eventually get them back). I tried my best so I think it deserves to be there. Just saying. It's your choice but if it was up to me it'd be there. Anyway, here it is:

Thomas Hughes, a devilishly handsome, charming, and humble young man, had to halt in his place on the doorstep. Seeing this, the place where she'd lived before the war, was almost overwhelming. The Jules who had once lived here had been a very different person - she had, after all, left home at sixteen to become a code-breaker, which was when he'd met her. She was twenty-four now. Twenty-four, a retired spy, and a survivor of Gestapo interrogation.

The stack of paper weighed heavily in his left hand as he lifted his right to knock.

The door swung inwards on a woman who looked exactly like Jules, only older. She had the same mass of brunette curls (beginning to grey with time and, perhaps, stress), the same soft features, the same kind smile. She was a spitting image, except for the bright blue eyes Jules had always described with such admiration - 'the brightest blue eyes you've ever seen' Jules had always said. She was right.

Jules had always described her mother as the most beautiful person in the world, and she was indeed very beautiful. He just thought it was a shame that she had thought she looked nothing like her - that she hadn't seen that same delicate beauty in herself. Jules was just like that, though; she never saw in herself what others did.

"Hello, there," Jules' mother greeted, her voice soft and lilting. "Can I help you at all?"

She spoke like Jules too.

"Yeah. Yes. Hi," Tom replied, trying to get himself back under control. "I'm, uh..." How to go about this? She thought Jules had been dead for seven years. In the end, he decided to just go for it. "I'm a friend of Juliette's."

The woman gasped. Her eyes fell shut instantly and a hand came up to press against her heart. It made him want to cry, but he didn't. He rushed to continue, "I thought you may want to know some things about her. Some things you haven't been told."

"I'm not sure I understand," the woman managed to whisper. When she opened her eyes, they were shining with tears.

Tom held up the stack of paper. "Jules wrote this. It spans exactly what she experienced from the September of 1943 to the end of the war."

"I don't - but she's -" The woman cut herself off. Her eyes visibly widened in shock and her jaw fell open as she caught sight of the first page. "That's her handwriting."

Tom nodded, a hint of a smile on his lips. "I know."

The woman peeked back up at him and sniffled, pulling herself upright in one fell swoop and appearing once more that same elegant woman he'd first come upon. "Would you like to come in?"

Jules' childhood home was almost as 'quintessentially British' (as she had described it) as their house in Aldbourne had been. A large fireplace dominated the east wall of the living room, framed photographs lined up on top of it. Tom went over without even realising he was doing it and picked up one of Jules and a boy who looked quite like her.

"That was the last photograph we got of her," her mother explained quietly. "That's Juliette and her brother, Eliott, just before she left. Eliott died a little bit over a year ago."