Excerpted from THE LAST LIGHT OVER OSLO, provided courtesy of William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2024 by Alix Rickloff.
THE LAST LIGHT OVER OSLO
BY ALIX RICKLOFF
CHAPTER 1
March 1940
Oslo, Norway
My dearest Anne,
It’s 1914 all over again.
This disturbing thought has been rolling around in my head ever since the news broke last September that Great Britain would come to the aid of Poland and join the fight against Germany. But never has it seemed so near as it has after this long deadly winter. My mind keeps returning to our years in France during the last great cataclysm, and I want to weep all over again for the failures that have led us back, barely twenty years later.
Caught up in a web of memories, Daisy paused, her pen resting on the paper. The afternoon light faded to silver, fog shrouding the Oslo city streets surrounding the US minister’s residence. Kim dozed at her feet, the old German shepherd whuffling as his back legs twitched in dream. A few cars grumbled their way up the narrow street of Nobels Gate and turned into the legation’s drive. It would be the wives. Five of them were meeting downstairs. Daisy had begun these weekly knitting parties as a way to support the Norwegians and show US solidarity, two neutral countries standing shoulder to shoulder. But the afternoons had become a welcome respite, a way to keep hands and minds distracted when every broadcast and newspaper article brought unsettling news.
The new heating system rattled and groaned as it fought a losing battle to warm the residency. Not for the first time, Daisy wished her office had a fireplace like the one in the drawing room. She shifted in her chair, feeling every one of her sixty-nine years in the groan of her hips and the ache along her back, but immediately dismissed her discomfort as nothing an aspirin and a small sherry wouldn’t cure. Besides, it was only four in the afternoon. After her knitting circle, she had meetings at the foreign office followed by a cocktail party at the French embassy then a small reception at the palace. She would be lucky to find her bed before the wee hours of the morning.
It was times like this when she questioned the wisdom of accepting President Roosevelt’s appointment. She could be tucked up comfortably at home in Washington, DC, with nothing more daunting than a cozy dinner with friends or a leisurely hack in Rock Creek Park ahead of her. She blamed it on Ethel. Her daughter had practically dared her to take the ambassadorship. An adventure, she’d called it. As if Daisy hadn’t already lived a life greedy with excitement. A box seat on America, her friend T had once called this strange luck of hers that allowed her to be witness to the country’s shaping. Was it luck, or was it her unquenchable curiosity and enthusiasm that led her to places few women dared venture?
A dot of spreading ink drew her back to the present, the period at the end of her sentence now outlandishly large and spidery. She thought about starting her letter over and decided against it. Mail delivery had grown spotty since war had broken out, and she wanted to make sure the letter went out this afternoon. Her sister-in- law’s declining health kept her trapped at home these days, making Daisy’s regular correspondence more important than ever. A fact made clear to her when Anne’s latest note hinted that Daisy’s silence must mean she was off on another of her little jaunts, traipsing about the Arctic with craggy fishermen or playing starry-eyed tourist in Saint Petersburg.
A rather unfair assessment of the situation, Daisy thought. Those trips had been part of her work. The best part, of course, but work nonetheless. If she didn’t know better, she’d think Anne had been talking to Jefferson Patterson. While an enormous help in so many ways, her former deputy chief of mission had never quite approved of those trips either. He saw them as time not spent at her desk. Time not engaged in the serious work of the legation. He’d never quite blamed it on the fact that she was a woman, but it was there beneath the polite words and the accommodating smiles all the same. Still, she preferred his veiled condescension to Vice Consul Whitney’s more obvious disdain.
A tap at the door brought Kim instantly awake and alert, but it was only Miss Kristiansen with the tea tray. Accompanying the pot of Earl Grey and plate of jammy biscuits was a less savory stack of folders and a bundle of envelopes with very red, very official-looking stamps.
Daisy’s secretary offered Kim a treat from her skirt pocket then poured out a cup, adding sugar and lemon. “Just as you like it, Mrs. Harriman,” she said with a smile.
“Thank you. I’m sure it will help me choke down the news from Washington.”
The US legation had been fortunate to gain the services of this daughter of an American nurse and a Norwegian merchant seaman. Petra Kristiansen spoke both languages fluently along with Danish, French, and a smattering of German and was also a skilled clerk and typist. But it was that certain Scandinavian something that made her invaluable to Daisy. She had a confidence and easy grace that allowed her to move in any circle and adapt to any situation, all while looking positively flawless.
If Daisy had been forty years younger, she’d be jealous as hell.
Thank heavens Petra and that young assistant military attaché had formed an attachment. It didn’t pay to have a girl that pretty stirring up drama among the unmarried staff.
“There is an important cable from the president, ma’am, and”—Petra slid an envelope to the top of the pile—“ a letter from Mrs. Vanderbilt.”
“Oh dear. I haven’t even finished replying to her last letter. I hope it’s not bad news.”
Feeling only slightly guilty, Daisy set aside FDR and tore into Anne’s letter, but only a few words in and she was setting down her cup with a rattle that nearly broke the saucer before she rubbed at her temple, where a headache threatened.
“Is anything wrong, ma’am?” Petra asked.
“Wrong doesn’t begin to cover it.” Anne was fine, thank heavens. But Daisy’s goddaughter Clementine was missing.
Not missing as she had been since she’d run away from home on the eve of her wedding, precipitating the scandal of the season. But truly missing as in not a soul had seen or heard from her in months. The last anyone knew, she was living in sin with a jazz musician, trailing after him like a camp follower. But that had been before the war. There was no telling where she might be by now.
“Sorry, Franklin. Family comes first,” she muttered. Crumpling her earlier letter, Daisy tossed it in the trash, uncapped her pen, and started over.
Dear Anne . . .
“Velkommen til Oslo, Frøken Jaffray!”
Cleo winced at the young woman’s perky salutation as she handed back Cleo’s papers. It was far too early in the day. Cleo had had far too little sleep. And the dangerous steamer crossing from Hamburg dodging British mines had left her pea green with seasickness and jumpy with nerves. She put her passport and travel documents away carefully, taking time to guarantee they would be safe. Papers were more valuable than gold these days. “Takk,” she mumbled. “Thanks.”
The woman smiled wider. “You are American?” She switched to English, her accent thick but understandable. Thank heavens. Cleo knew exactly three phrases in Norwegian, gleaned from looking over the shoulder of a fellow traveler with a guidebook—thank you, please, and I do not understand.
“That’s right.” Cleo wobbled as the ground under her feet continued to sway ominously, her stomach rising into her throat. She and boats had never been friends. Not as a girl in Newport retching over the side of the very eligible Jimmy van Speakman’s sporty little ketch. Not now with tons of steel and three decks between her and the Baltic. If there had been any other way to get to Oslo, she’d have taken it in a shot. Train, taxi, horse-drawn sledge. But she was broke, her purse containing only a tiny jumble of various coins and none of them adding up to enough for anything but the price of a third-class steamer ticket. If only the necklace she wore was real, she might have arrived in style trailing her luggage with a handsome young porter to help her. But the pink costume diamond, while gaudily pretty, wouldn’t even buy her a sandwich and a cup of coffee from the steamer’s canteen. Still, it meant more to her than any treasure from Tiffany’s. “Can you tell me how to get to the US legation?”
Immediately, the woman sobered as if suddenly noticing Cleo’s scuffed and mismatched luggage, her worn coat with the matted fur collar, and her general air of nervous tension that had only grown worse since she’d left the Hungarian city of Kassa alone and nearly broke. No doubt, she wasn’t the first American caught out by this ridiculous war that the customs clerk had come across. But at least here she was safe. Norway was neutral, like the US. There would be no checkpoints. No daily humiliations. No smirking soldiers whispering sordid invitations one always risked turning down.
“There is a taxi stand outside,” the woman said, already starting to turn away to the next passenger.
Being rushed through the weather in a warm dry taxi sounded the height of luxury, but even stretched, Cleo’s coins wouldn’t be near enough. “And if I decided to enjoy a nice walk to clear my head? How far would it be?”
The woman snuck a glance out the windows of the terminal to where a cold sleet slanted like needles from a slate gray sky. She chewed her lip for a moment before digging in her pocket. “Here.” She handed Cleo a few banknotes. “Take this.”
Once pride would have prevented Cleo from stooping so low as to accept a handout. Not anymore. It was amazing what poverty and fear did to one’s vanity. She’d learned to live with the poverty, but she’d never grown used to the fear. Even now, the copper tang of it seemed to settle at the back of her throat, sit like a stone in her stomach. She rubbed her arms as if she could wipe herself free of it.
“Takk,” she repeated. “Takk very much,” and hurried out onto the sidewalk in case the generous official changed her mind.
Outside, the sleet numbed her cheeks while the March damp gnawed into her bones. She thought New York winters were harsh. Scandinavian springs were ten times worse. She shrugged deeper into her hand-me- down coat. Not much farther, and she could finally rest. At least that was the hope she’d carried with her the last few weeks.
Aunt Daisy would help her.
Aunt Daisy would find Micky.
Based on true events, this gripping historical novel set in Norway and Sweden in 1940, follows one of the first female US Ministers, Daisy Harriman, and her niece as the two are unexpectedly caught up in the German invasion of Norway.
Cleo Jaffray was an American. A war in Europe had nothing to do with her. She told herself that right up until the man she loved went missing in Poland and Cleo was forced to turn to the only person who might be able to help—her aunt Daisy, the US Minister to Norway.
Daisy Harriman has never shied away from a challenge, be it canvassing for women’s suffrage or driving Red Cross ambulances in WWI, so as only the second woman ambassador, she is determined to prove the naysayers wrong and succeed in her post. When her disgraced niece Cleo lands on her doorstep, penniless and demanding help to find her lost lover, Daisy must balance her responsibilities as a diplomat with her desire to help her family.
Their search for answers is interrupted when Germany invades Norway and the pair find themselves on the run in a countryside that is quickly becoming a battleground. Then as Daisy is given the task of escorting the Norwegian Crown Princess and her young children to America, Cleo’s lover resurfaces with a story that doesn’t add up and dangerous enemies on his trail.
This riveting historical novel, based on the astounding life of Daisy Harriman and a real-life royal rescue, vividly captures a desperate time and a fearless heroine.
Women's Fiction Historical [William Morrow Paperbacks, On Sale: August 6, 2024, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063286207 / eISBN: 9780063286214]
Alix Rickloff has never been able to decide who she enjoys reading more; Austen or Tolkien. That lifelong indecision drove her to create stories of her own, combining those distinct loves. Her writing awards include a final in the Golden Heart, while Romantic Times Magazine calls her work both compelling and original.
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