It was almost as if Jane had seen the wheels turning in his mind. “What are you thinking of?” she said, just as Churchill came to his mind.
“A solution,” he said, still running through the obstacles and impediments that would have to be surmounted. Winston, for one, would surely want to exact a price for such a concession; in return for his sponsorship, he would want to interrogate Kurt on everything from the zeppelin’s internal engineering—the only examples that the British had been able to study were burnt and demolished—to the logistics, such as where it had been launched from. If Wells could assure him of Kurt’s cooperation, he felt confident that Winston, an eminently practical man, would agree to the transaction.
But would Kurt cooperate?
“You say the boy is out back?”
“Yes. But why? What’s this solution?”
“Let me get the lay of the land first,” he said, rising too quickly—he had to brace himself against the table for a moment—“and then we’ll see.”
Once dressed, and bundled into his overcoat, Wells stepped out the back door and into the cold gray afternoon. The ground, hard as concrete, was dotted with patches of ice that crackled under his boots. Looking around, he saw no sign of Kurt. He saw no sign of anyone. Thinking he might have gone into the barn, Wells pushed the doors open wide and surveyed the interior. Aside from the flitting of some birds in the rafters, there was nothing. Hadn’t Jane warned him not to wander off?
Looking out across the barren fields and meadows behind the house, he still saw no one, and on a hunch, he walked around the side of the house and out to the front lawn. He wouldn’t be foolhardy enough to return to the scene of the crash, would he?
As Wells crossed the road, and entered the empty cornfields, he remembered the night of the accident—the exuberance of the crowd at the fall of the dreaded “baby-killer,” the roaring fire, the smell of burning oil and human flesh . . . the rear gunner crawling from the wreckage. Impaled by Slattery’s pitchfork. In the field, the steel framework of the fuselage, scorched and bent, still lay where it had crashed, like the bones of a beached whale. And standing in its twisted carcass, Wells saw the German boy. Had he lost his wits altogether?
Wells was within twenty yards before the boy even noticed him, and then, as he turned to run, Wells shouted, “It’s only me, you bloody fool!”
When he got closer, Wells said, “But what if it hadn’t been? What are you doing here?” He had to remind himself that the boy spoke only a few words of English, though he seemed to have had no trouble understanding the import of Wells’s words.
Gesturing at the wreckage, Kurt said, “Friends. Freunde.”
“Dead friends,” Wells corrected him. “Tod. Gone. And you will be, too, if you’re spotted out here.”
The boy looked at him blankly.
“We’re trying to help you, you damn fool, though I’m not entirely sure why.”
“Es tut mir leid,” Kurt said, bowing his head, and Wells grasped that it was an apology for the fight the night before.
Wells whisked a hand in the air to indicate that it was all forgiven. “I’ve got something important to discuss with you,” he said, knowing full well that only the tenor of his voice could carry any meaning.
But before he could cajole him back to the house, where Jane and the bilingual dictionary could help to make his case, a shotgun blast echoed across the field. From the same copse of trees that had sheltered Kurt on his parachute landing, a flock of birds flew out in all directions, wings beating in terror.
Wells grabbed the boy by the sleeve and dragged him away from the zeppelin’s skeleton.
A second blast reverberated in the air, and Wells shoved Kurt toward the house. “Run!”
He turned to see if they were being pursued, but couldn’t spot anyone. The hunter must have been shooting from the other side of the grove of trees. Wells ran, close on the heels of the hobbled young soldier. Jane had heard the shots, too, and was standing at the open door. She shooed Kurt into the house and up to the attic, and as soon as Wells, winded and holding a hand to his chest, stumbled through the door, too, she slammed it shut and peering between the curtains in the front windows, kept watch for the next minute or two.
“What do you see?” Wells said, slumped into an armchair.
“Nothing so far. Maybe it was just a hunter.”
“Looks like it.”
“But you don’t think he saw you two?”
Wells couldn’t be sure. But he did know that there was no time to lose in explaining his scheme to Kurt, and as long as he was in agreement, getting him out of the rectory and into the sanctuary of the Olympia internment camp as fast as humanly possible.
Next time they might not be so lucky.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“That’s the damnedest story I’ve ever heard,” Churchill said, once Wells had finished. “Jane, harboring a wounded Hun in your own attic?”
This, even though Wells had done his level best to make it seem less extraordinary than it was.
“And all while you were at the Front,” Churchill added, “wielding your mighty pen as a war correspondent.” It was one of the many things that had bonded Wells and Churchill—in his youth Winston had served as a reporter in the Second Boer War, and despite his immense governmental duties, had been an inveterate writer ever since.
“But good Lord, you haven’t left your wife alone in the house with him?” he asked now, incredulous.
“She’s quite safe,” Wells replied. “If he was going to commit any mischief, he’d have done so by now.”
“Mischief? I call dropping bombs from a zeppelin something more than mischief. We need to get this Kurt fellow into custody and interrogate him as soon as possible.”
“And in return you’ll give him what I’ve asked—a safe berth in one of the internment camps?”
Churchill grunted his approval. The man was as good as his word, or in this instance his grunt, and it was why Wells had known to take this scheme across the street from the War Office—and away from Colonel Bryce, to whom he had just delivered the text of another dispatch. He had gone straight to the Admiralty House, where his friend reigned as First Sea Lord. Lacking its own entrance from Whitehall, and entered through a sheltered courtyard, the Admiralty was a less imposing building than the War Office—just three stories of yellow brick, but with ornate neoclassical interiors and a rear facade that looked out directly onto the grounds of the Horse Guards Parade.
“Cigar?” he said, lifting the lid from the humidor on his desk, and after Wells declined, took one out and rising from his chair, stood by the window to light it. “As it happens, you can do me a favor in return,” he said, between puffs.
“Name it.”
“You’ve read about the incident down there,” he said, gesturing with the lighted cigar at the herds of horses and mules crammed into the pens outside.
“A small item in the Times.”
“It’s not a small matter, though. We are trying our best to contain the story, though we clearly have failed in that regard.” He turned back toward Wells and summarized what was known so far, before adding that a brass case had been retrieved, a case engraved with the imprimatur of the Colonial Office. “The Imperial Colonial Office,” he added, to make clear that it was of German origin.
“Colonel Bryce mentioned this. He said there were test tubes in the box?”
“It’s a field kit, equipped with syringes and vials of an unknown liquid. They’re over at the biochemical labs right now.”
“What have they found out? Are we looking at some bacterial or viral agent?”
“Too soon to know. But the man who found the box has been taken to the hospital. He’s at death’s door, from what I’ve been told. Before he crosses that threshold, I’d like you to go over there, take a look at him, and see what if anything you can ascertain.”
Although he could guess the answer before asking, Wells said, “What hospital?”
“Guy’s.
The Communicable Diseases wing.”
Of course. It was the natural choice. He felt as if the ghost of Von Baden was summoning him back, and perhaps because of that he felt a sudden twinge between his eyes, which, fortunately, subsided as quickly as it had come. “I’ll go straight over.”
“Take this,” Churchill said, handing him a letter stamped and signed with the Admiralty’s seal, and carrying Wells’s name as the bearer. So Churchill had known in advance, as soon as this appointment had been made, that Wells would take the bait; he was a shrewd judge of men. “Use one of our cabs. There’s always one waiting under the arch.”
All in all, Wells thought, as he crossed the courtyard and hailed the cab, it had been a fair trade. Now he just had to convince Kurt, when he got back to the rectory the next day, to cooperate.
The street in front of Guy’s had been newly sown with sawdust to cut down on the noise of passing traffic, and a wide banner read, “Quiet, please, for our War Wounded.” The shell-shocked, Wells knew, were the most affected by any clamor. Several other men, missing limbs, were bundled in blankets and arranged in a row of wheelchairs by the main gates, smoking or simply turning up their faces toward the weak late-day sun. One of them was holding a cigarette to the lips of another, left with no arms and only one leg. The horror and waste of it all, Wells thought.
Climbing the stairs to the top floor, he heard a familiar voice before rounding the last landing.
“It’s my grandfather,” the voice pleaded. “I really must be allowed to talk to his doctor.”
“I’m afraid that’s impermissible,” another voice, also familiar, replied. It was then that he saw it was Rebecca who was posing as the grief-stricken granddaughter, and the head nurse Emma Chasubel who was blocking her passage into the ward. Emma caught his eye, and attempting to dispense with Rebecca, said, “Nothing can be done about it. Your grandfather is under strict quarantine.”
“I suspected he would be,” Wells said, and when Rebecca turned, she at least had the decency to blush at being caught in her subterfuge. “But I can answer for this young lady.”
Emma skirted Rebecca, and came to Wells, whose hands she took warmly.
“I wasn’t sure if you would ever want to see the likes of me again,” he said, “given the awful news I brought you last time.”
“Oh, no, it was a blessing, really. Terrible to hear, of course, but it’s always better to know. I keep his letter with me all the time,” she confided, patting a pocket in her white smock. “Sometimes, it seems as if I can even feel him with me.”
No surprise there, Wells thought.
“But what brings you here today?” she asked.
He flourished the note from the Admiralty, and said, “I do need to see the patient from the parade grounds, and speak to the physician in charge of his care.”
He saw the light go on in Rebecca’s eyes at hearing this.
“The patient is under the most restricted observation,” Emma said. “You will need to wear a gown and face mask.”
“That’s fine, and please do provide the same to this young lady. I will take full responsibility for her.”
“Are you sure? The doctor was quite explicit about the quarantine.”
“I understand, but she may be helpful to me.”
As Emma went to a closet across the hall, Wells murmured, “What on earth are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“I’m here on orders from Winston Churchill.”
“What’s the Admiralty got to do with this?”
“What’s the Freewoman magazine got to do with it?”
“I think these will fit you both,” Emma said, handing them two white hospital gowns and a pair of face masks.
Rebecca’s gown trailed all the way down to her ankles.
“It’s this way,” she said, leading them into the long ward where Wells had been before. In a couple of the beds, he recognized the occupants; in others, there was a new, but equally sickly, patient. The windows were propped open to let in fresh, if chilly, air. As they walked all the way down the ward, his eyes flicked to the bed, surrounded by the muslin curtain, from which he had seen the apparition—hallucination?—of the German officer arise. The bed was now tenanted by a wheezing British soldier with a white bandage across his eyes—blinded, perhaps by gas?—and skin of an ashen hue. He could not be long for this world.
At the end, Emma guided them into a short corridor behind an iron gate hung with a sign that read, “Authorized Staff Only—Danger of Lethal Contagion.” The walls were whitewashed and the cells, which numbered no more than half a dozen, were separate, each one with a steel door that had a glass window, crosshatched with wire, for viewing. One door stood ajar and inside the dimly lit room Wells saw a tall, thin doctor, wrapped in a gown with its collar raised and all but his glasses concealed behind a mask, like the ones Wells and Rebecca and Emma were all wearing, with a white cap covering his hair and rubber gloves on his hands. My God, Wells thought, he looked as if he were in the same sort of disguise that his own invisible man, in the novel of the same name, wore. Maybe Oscar Wilde had had a point about life imitating art.
In the bed, his head thrown back, mouth gaping open to reveal the bare stubs of a few brown teeth, lay the frail but still breathing body of Silas Drummond. One of his hands was loosely tied to the iron bedstead, as he gently rocked himself to and fro, mumbling what sounded like some children’s nursery rhyme. His skin was peppered with welts and boils, some of which were leaking noxious fluids into the linen dressings, and his face was as inflated as a balloon. His nose was red, while his eyes, leaking tears, skittered about, from the blank walls of the cell to the group of visitors now assembled outside. It was as if the man were deliquescing before their very eyes.
When the doctor stepped out—lowering his mask and introducing himself as simply “Phipps, chief of pathology”—Wells proffered his letter. After the doctor had taken a moment to review it, Wells asked him, “Will Drummond survive?”
Shaking his head, the doctor said, “Lucky to have made it this long.”
Wells could not imagine the man’s condition to be considered lucky under any circumstances.
“But what is it that ails him?” Rebecca queried. “He looks like he’s being ravaged from within.”
“And you are?” Phipps said.
Before she could perpetuate her ruse, Wells leapt in by saying she was there under his authority—he could feel her bristle without even looking at her—and asked what Phipps could tell him of the case.
“I’m aware of your background in science, Mr. Wells—and let me say that it’s an honor to meet you—so I believe you’ll understand when I say that this appears to be a zoonotic disease, most commonly seen in solipeds, consistent with percutaneous infection.”
A transmissible equine disease, in other words, introduced through a skin prick or open skin lesion.
“The symptoms—excessive lacrimation, photophobia, copious nasal discharge—indicate a unilateral axillary lymphadenopathy.”
Even Wells needed a second to sort through all that. Did the man always talk like this? But it would account for the swollen face, raw nose, and encrusted tears.
“What about pulmonary involvement?” Wells asked, as that would be the most dangerous route to widespread contagion. Was the patient simply dangerous to touch, or could his very breath be deadly to anyone in close proximity?
“Mr. Drummond does present pleuritic chest pain, high fever, and mucoplurent sputum, all of which would point to a disseminated infection.”
“But the lungs?” Wells pressed. Could the man ever speak in plain English?
“We’ll need to do the autopsy to see which organs have been most colonized by the bacterium, but I would hazard a guess—a highly confident guess—that we will see abscesses in the spleen, the liver, and yes, the lungs. I haven’t seen anything like it since just before the war. A veterinarian was admitted, sick with a much less virulent variant.”
“Do you remember his name?” Rebecca burst in.
The doctor, taken aback by her sudden interruption, said, “As a matter of fact, I do. It was an unusual name, a German name. Eulenspiegel.”
For some reason Wells could not imagine, Rebecca clapped her hands together as if with satisfaction. What was so marvelous about that discovery?
“Would you have his address?” she asked. “Or any other information about him?”
“Do we?” Phipps asked his head nurse.
“I’ll have to check his records, but I would assume so.”
“Then I would like to see what you have,” Wells said, trusting that Rebecca had asked for some important reason.
Emma, indicating the cell, cautioned, “Doctor, I think something is happening.”
As all three turned, Silas raised a quivering arm from the bed, and, like the ancient mariner, pointed a finger at them. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that emerged was a bubble of blood.
“I haven’t seen him move like that,” Phipps said, raising his mask over his mouth and nose again. “I wonder what’s stirred him up.”
A moment later, Silas was on his feet, the loose bandage with which he had been tied to the bed trailing onto the floor like a mummy’s rag. By the time they realized he was lurching for the door, it was too late, and he had flung it open, staggered through, and lunged at Rebecca. She fell back, with Silas’s bony fingers clinging to the bottom of her white gown. He was still trying to speak, even as his knees buckled and he slid to the floor. Wells grabbed him by the collar of his blue hospital shirt and tried to yank him away, but the old man’s grip was tight.
“Let go, damn you,” Wells barked, “let go of her!”
Emma threw an arm around Rebecca’s waist to steady her and keep her from being dragged down, and when Silas did lose his hold, he swiveled his head, raising his bloodshot eyes so imploringly Wells wondered what it was he wanted.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 22
