“Well, as a former British colony themselves …” David began. John gave him a swift kick under the table.
The P.M. didn’t notice. “It would serve them right if the Japanese attacked them in the Far East—they might not have ‘colonies,’ but they do have territories. Guam, the Philippines, Samoa. Even their Hawaiian Islands are territories, not a state of their Union …”
Miss Stewart, one of Mr. Churchill’s long-suffering typists, entered the room. “Excuse me, Mr. Churchill, gentlemen,” she said, her white chignon glistening in the firelight. “But this Friday’s list of figures has just arrived by courier from Porton Down.”
“Yes, yes, Miss Stewart, thank you—just leave it here.” The plump older woman did so and departed.
The Prime Minister put on his gold-framed glasses and read over the document, the typed figures sent by the War Cabinet every Friday, detailing the progress made on chemical and biological weapons. His forehead creased with concern.
“Not enough,” he muttered, “not nearly enough.” To the room he growled, “Those concerned should be beaten soundly, by Jove!”
“Sir?” David said.
“Still—we must KBO! Mr. Greene, please make sure a memo goes out to Beaverbrook—Miss Stewart can type it for you—that the absolute maximum effort must be used with priority to make, store, and fill into containers the largest possible quantities of gas. Largest possible quantities! It says here, mustard is running at only one hundred and thirty tons per week, a third of the full capacity. Tell Brookie we damn well need to ginger things up.
“And be sure to ask him who exactly is responsible for this failure. I will not tolerate ineptitude, especially with something so important!” The P.M. took out one of his Romeo y Julieta cigars from his breast pocket and began to gnaw on it. “At any moment, peril may be upon us.”
“Yes, sir.” David took the memo and left the room to find Miss Stewart.
The Prime Minister turned his attention back to the other men. “Dilly! Why the long face?”
Dill swallowed his sip of port, then replied, “Sir, I would like to discuss N, our new biological weapon. I know you’re keen on developing it, but I want you to think seriously about the moral implications of our using it. I wouldn’t want it in play unless it could be shown either that it was life or death for us, or that it would shorten the war by a year or more.”
“What?” Churchill growled, finally clipping, then igniting his cigar with a heavy silver lighter. “Moral qualms getting the better of you? Angels and devils on your shoulders? Won’t mean much when there are Nazzies on our doorstep.”
Dill smoothed his mustache. “It’s absurd to consider morality on the topic of mustard gas when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists of the Church. On the other hand, the bombing of open cities was once forbidden. Now everyone does it as a matter of course. It is simply a matter of the fashions of war changing, as long and short skirts for women. However, N …”
The Prime Minister chewed harder on his cigar, then banged his fist on the table, making Nelson jump. Nelson pretended to groom himself to restore his dignity, then slunk off.
“When your back is up against the wall, do you play by the rules of the Geneva Conventions?” The P.M. poked the air with his cigar. “Do you consult the International Committee of the Red Cross? Hitler’s not playing by those rules, and I don’t believe we need to, either. Mr. Sterling, I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would benefit us to use this new N that my warlocks and wizards at Porton Down are creating in their cauldrons.”
“Sir, if I may—” John ventured.
“Well, speak up, Mr. Sterling! That’s why I keep you around!” Then, remembering the man had served as an RAF pilot and had been shot down over Nazi territory, the P.M.’s voice softened. “Go on.”
“I don’t have any qualm about our using every weapon in our arsenal to stop a Nazi invasion, but it is nonetheless true that chemical weapons and gas have a particular … unpleasantness … about them. Part of that is because they’re really not that easy to control in a tactical way—their sole purpose is to kill and incapacitate people downwind. That makes them much more indiscriminate. It’s the equivalent of the weaker party in a fight resorting to throwing a fistful of sand in the stronger party’s face.”
“I meant it when I said we would fight on the beaches, and that includes throwing sand—or anything else my wizards at Porton Down conjure—in the faces of Nazzi invaders.”
John didn’t flinch. “Nevertheless, sir, to use chemical and biological weapons is to cross a dangerous threshold, especially when used with civilians. The Americans would be horrified to learn of our research.”
“The Americans don’t need to know everything we’re thinking,” the P.M. rumbled, “especially when they’re sitting pretty and don’t seem to be bothered much by Britons killed by Nazzi bombs.”
Dill interjected, “Our experiments with N include putting them into cakes of grain, which would be dropped for livestock to eat.”
“So starvation’s better than gas or poison?” John asked.
“Mr. Sterling, you are certainly correct—the dead are dead in any case, and it’s unclear that having someone choke to death while convulsing is somehow worse than burning them to death with jellied gasoline, or causing a firestorm, or blowing them up, or shooting them in the head, or even instituting a blockade that denies them access to food and medicine.”
The P.M. puffed on his cigar; he looked tired, his eyes were ringed with red. “War is a terrible, terrible thing. Robert E. Lee allegedly said that it is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. And now we have witchcraft and magic added to the mix. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.’ Find out what progress there is on our hell-broth boiling and broiling in Porton Down, Mr. Sterling!”
John rose. “Yes, sir.” He left the room.
Only Dill and Ismay remained with Churchill. “And these developments are not something we will share with the Americans,” Churchill decided, rising and pacing, jabbing at the air with his cigar. Blue smoke wove tendrils around his head like the tentacles of a man-of-war.
“Understood, sir,” Dill said.
“Yes, sir,” chimed in Ismay.
Abruptly, Churchill changed the subject. “Odds of Russia falling?”
“I should be inclined to put it even at this point, sir, with Old Man Winter giving Mother Russia the edge,” Dill replied.
“The Balkans are a sticking point—but if Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons. If we’re still standing alone by the end of ’41 …”
Churchill bellowed, “Fetch me the women!” referring to his typists. “I’m going to dictate another letter to President Roosevelt,” the Prime Minister stated. “Let’s meet up again later—at one, back here, to discuss these matters further, once Greene and Sterling have procured more information.” He left the room, muttering,
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Chapter Five
By Clara’s calculations, it was 3 A.M. on November twenty-sixth—three months to the day since she’d been taken into British custody. None of her many overtures at brokering a peace treaty had been taken seriously. Her daughter wouldn’t meet with her. She’d continued to refuse to offer British Intelligence anything without her daughter’s intervention. And so, like the German spy Josef Jakobs before her, she was to be executed. The date of her death had been set: Sunday, December 7, 1941.
Clara stood at one of the barred windows overlooking the Thames and began to sing, her once golden voice now breathy and raspy. What she chose for her debut at the Tower of London was Olympia’s aria, “Les oiseaux dans la charmille,” from Offenbach’s opera Les contes
d’Hoffmann, her voice gaining in strength, and she went along, muscle memory stirring. Olympia was a mechanical doll with whom Hoffmann fell in love and so Clara accompanied her singing with stiff, robotic, doll-like movements, as though in performance. As she sang, her voice steadied, returning to its former glory.
Les oiseaux dans la charmille
Dans les cieux l’astre du jour,
Tout parle à la jeune fille d’amour!
Ah! Voilà la chanson gentille
La chanson d’Olympia! Ah!
Tout ce qui chante et résonne
Et soupire, tour à tour,
Emeut son coeur qui frissonne d’amour!
Ah! Voilà la chanson mignonne
La chanson d’Olympia! Ah!
When she had finished, the last sweet notes dying in her cell, she fell to the cold stone floor.
Maggie’s screams woke her.
It was a different nightmare every night—variations and permutations of her time in Berlin. There was the one where she saw Gottlieb Lehrer, part of the German Resistance and ardent Catholic, shoot himself in the head rather than be taken alive by the Gestapo. There was the one where she saw the small Jewish girl cry for water. And the one where her sister Elise looked at her as if she were a monster, after she had killed a young German man, really no more than a boy.
This night, however, there was a cat in her bed. She’d made him his own place to sleep—a wicker basket lined with fabric scraps, near the radiator. But at some point during the night he’d crawled in with her, curling up into a tight furry ball encircled by her torso. Now he was purring, and rose to pad over to her head and try to lick her hair.
“What the—?” Maggie said, still disoriented. “No, I don’t need a bath—no, thank you!” The cat’s tongue was starting to catch on the long red strands, and he couldn’t get them out of his mouth. He shook his head repeatedly. She pulled out the offending hairs from his mouth and sat up. “Are you trying to groom me?” she demanded of her small companion. She had to admit it was pleasant to have company; no more Sister Anne in the Tower.
The cat regarded her with concerned eyes. “Meh.”
She scratched him under his chin and he leaned into her, purring. “Look at us,” Maggie said, unsure of what to say to him. She’d never had a pet before. “Two broken-down and battered creatures. Red-haired strays. Kindred spirits?”
The creature blinked, not at all impressed with her self-pity or sentimentality.
“Oh, so it’s stiff-upper-lip then, I see. Good, you’re a proper British moggie through and through—I like that.” Maggie reached for her tattered flannel robe. It was freezing in her small bedroom. She stood up and put on heavy slippers, then pulled the blackout curtains open.
It didn’t make much difference to the way the room looked: It was bare as a nun’s cell, with only a postcard of Robert Burns’s Diana and Her Nymphs that the previous occupant had left, and E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics, an old battered volume of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and a borrowed copy of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. On the floor next to the bed was a bag full of the knitting Maggie had started since she’d returned from Berlin—socks for soldiers, which she knitted with the Morse code for “victory” around the cuff.
The clock on the night table said it was just before 6 A.M., but it would be at least two more hours until the sun rose. This perpetual darkness of winter in Scotland isn’t helping things … Her fingers found the hard outline of the bullet. It was still there, becoming even more prominent as it worked itself closer to the surface of her skin.
The higher-ups at Arisaig House said that she’d earned having a private flat in the gardener’s dwelling, as opposed to rooming with the other instructors in the main house, because she was the only female. But Maggie knew it was also because of the nightmares.
And the screaming.
The rooms were over the gardener’s flat, but had its own entrance. Maggie had three rooms: a bedroom, an efficiency kitchen and small table with two chairs, and a W.C. During the short winter daylight hours, she could look out mullioned windows for a view of one of the sheep-dotted fields, as well as the snow-covered mountains in the distance. If she craned her neck a bit, she could see the blue-gray waves and rocky shore of the loch.
The tabby peered at Maggie with large green eyes. “Hmm,” she said to him, peering back. “I suppose you’d like your breakfast now?”
The cat blinked, and rubbed against her. “You know that word, don’t you?” Maggie asked, petting his coarse fur. He was rough to the touch, unkempt, but warm. No wonder Mr. Churchill so often slept with Nelson.
She remembered how the Prime Minister had once barked at her, when she was being slow: “This feline does more for the war effort than you do! He acts as a hot-water bottle and saves fuel and power!” She now saw the P.M.’s point. She gathered the cat in her arms and pressed her cheek against his furry back. He had a faint scent, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Like freshly washed sheets hung outside to dry in the summer sun.
She set him down and headed for the loo, closing the door firmly behind her. “Excuse me, I do need at least a moment of privacy, if you don’t mind.” But apparently, the cat did mind, for he scratched at the door until she was finished. When she was washing her hands, he jumped up on the toilet seat and squatted over the bowl.
Maggie was speechless. She stared, and he stared right back with his glowing eyes, as if saying, Woman, did you actually think I was going to use a box? Like an … animal? Maggie shook her head in disbelief, then—giving him the privacy he’d denied her—went down the narrow hallway to the kitchen.
She turned on the kettle and looked through the icebox. There was some leftover stew she’d saved; it would have to do.
The cat trotted out to meet her, proud as could be. “Meh.”
“Here,” she said, putting a saucer of it on the worn wooden floor. “It’s cold, and the cook wouldn’t know what to do with a clove of garlic if one magically appeared in front of her. But—” Maggie turned on the wireless on the kitchen counter. BBC. “—in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a war on, Cat.”
The cat blinked a few times, as if to say, Cat? Woman, you denigrate me. Then he tucked into the stew, eating ravenously.
“Well, I don’t know your name.” She crouched down to address him. There was only the sound of the cat lapping at the food in his bowl. He was obviously going to leave this up to her. “Schrödinger, perhaps? Things were rather touch and go there for a bit with the vet.”
He raised his head to glare at her before returning to his breakfast.
“Not Schrödinger,” she decided, “as you are very much alive and not in a state of quantum flux anymore. And so, your name henceforth shall be—Kitty.”
The cat flicked his tail in annoyance. No, not Kitty either, apparently.
“Well then, what is your name, Jellicle cat? Macavity the Mystery Cat? The Hidden Paw, perhaps?”
The cat left his food bowl and stalked over to Maggie. He rose up onto his haunches, putting one paw on either side of her neck. He looked into her eyes and touched his pink nose to hers. “All right, all right,” she relented. “I’ll call you K. How’s that? K for Kitty. K will be your secret-agent name—after all, you’re at a spy training camp. And Mr. K for the veterinarian and on Sundays, when more formality is needed.”
Satisfied, K gave another “Meh,” then dropped down to the floor and began to groom himself.
“Well, glad that’s settled,” Maggie said, getting up to wash and dress. Then she had her tea and a bannock that she’d saved. K was prowling by the door, keen to be let out. “I thought you were an indoor cat?”
K took a running leap at the doorknob, grabbing it with his front paw, and with the skill of an Olympic gymnast managed to fling his small body round the knob. A moment later he had opened the door by himself. “Meh!” he cried in triumph.
“Well, I suppose if you’re smart enough to open the door, you’re smart enou
gh to look after yourself outside, aren’t you?” Maggie reached for her coat and hat.
K paused at the doorway. He touched one paw to the stair landing, then drew it back, as if stung. “Meh,” he complained. The stone was cold and damp, like all of Scotland in November. “Meeeeeeeeeeh!”
“Sorry, I know I may seem all-powerful, but I can’t heat the outdoors for you. In or out, then?”
Hesitating only briefly, K chose out, picking his way over the chill lichen-spotted flagstones of the walk.
Maggie had a self-defense class to teach at nine on the main house’s grass badminton lawn, just past the walled formal garden. Even though it was November in Scotland, the warmer Gulf Stream currents kept the weather in Arisaig more temperate. So the grass was a vivid shade of green and relatively soft to land on, if cold and wet. The sky above turned from darkness to a heavy gray, and the wind whipped about them.
The class was taught by a young American man of Japanese descent, Satoshi Nagoka, who specialized in jujitsu. Maggie had taken his classes, twice, and was on her way to becoming an expert. She was now considered proficient enough to teach the France-bound group while the sensei was off for a special session with the Czech and Slovak trainees.
Arisaig was no-man’s-land during the war, international, without a class system, with women training alongside men. It wasn’t Scotland per se anymore, because it had been taken over by the military, and was “out of bounds” to all locals and civilian travelers. To obtain entrance, one had to show special identification. The instructors and staff of Arisaig and the various houses co-opted by the military for training weren’t necessarily Scottish; like Maggie and Satoshi, they came from the four corners of the earth.
The families who owned the houses had been found lodging elsewhere, and the “stately ’omes” had been taken over by the military—mostly English men of the upper class and a certain age, although there were certainly a number of men in the “thieving” class as well, who provided instruction in lock picking, jumping off moving trains, and other activities considered unsavory in peacetime.
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