Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  Ruth drops to the grass next to her and pulls the sketchbook away. “Don’t you feel guilty for a minute. Not a single goddamn second. He brought it on himself, and even if he did the right thing in the end—well, he’s only bought salvation for his own soul, maybe. It’s not nearly enough to make up for what he’s done to you. And the kids.”

  “I know all that. You don’t need to worry about me. It’s just sorrow, that’s all.”

  “You have room in your heart for that?”

  “He’s their father.”

  On cue, Gregory makes a series of desperate sobs that culminates in a howl. Ruth climbs to her feet and lifts him out of the pram to cradle him against her shoulder. Iris stares not at her son, but at the ring on her sister’s left hand, a plain gold band. She first noticed it a week or so ago. She didn’t say anything to Ruth, but she mentioned it to Philip. Why don’t you ask her? he said reasonably, and Iris recoiled. If she wants to tell me, she’ll tell me, she said, and Philip rolled his eyes just a bit and told her she was supposed to be a spy, for God’s sake.

  Iris decides to speak up. “What about Sumner?”

  Ruth whirls to face her. “Have you heard anything?”

  Her blue, terrified eyes tell Iris everything she wants to know. She breathes out a zephyr of relief and considers whether she should tell Ruth what she knows, or whether such a tender fact would only make things harder for her sister if—well, Iris refuses to consider the If. There’s always hope, isn’t there?

  “No,” she says. “But Philip’s in close contact with the Americans. He’ll give us any news, the instant he gets it.”

  Ruth turns away to face the sea. Over the edge of her shoulder, Gregory’s red face stares amazed at Iris. She rises from the grass and comes to stand next to her sister, who vibrates with energy or emotion or something, Iris isn’t exactly sure what. Like a dam struggling to hold fast against a weight of mighty floodwater. Gregory’s clean, puppy scent gathers them together.

  “You didn’t have to do it,” Ruth says. “You could have let Digby defect on his own. Washed your hands of him. You knew by then what the bastards were capable of. You could have stayed behind and married Beauchamp. You were already pregnant—you had the boys—you had every reason to stay safe in England.”

  “Wouldn’t you have done the same, though?”

  “God, no. Take the children and walk straight into the jaws of the lion? When I had a fellow like Beauchamp madly in love with me? You’re crazy.”

  Iris runs her index finger along the perfect crest of Gregory’s ear. “Ruth, I spent most of my life just trying to be safe. Trying to hide from what scared me. Letting other people control what happened to me. Then I realized the idea of safety itself is just a delusion. Life is risky. And hiding isn’t living.”

  Gregory starts to drowse against Ruth’s shoulder. His little head bobbles and rests against the soft green knit of Ruth’s cardigan. His eyes lose focus. There’s some connection between these two—the kind of atomic bond that would set most new mothers buzzing with jealousy, but instead gives Iris the same feeling she used to get when the priest at St. Barnabas laid his hand on the children’s heads and said Christ’s blessing be upon you.

  Iris continues, “I remember sitting there by Philip’s bed, day after day, not sure if he would live or die. I thought about what Sumner told me, about a mole right inside the American intelligence service, right near the top, and operatives and agents were dying because of him. I thought about how I had stood by Sasha so stupidly all those years, telling myself that he was only following his ideals. I realized I was culpable, just as if I’d pulled the trigger that nearly killed Philip.”

  “Good old Fox,” Ruth murmurs.

  “Anyway, I went back to Sumner and told him I would do it—I would convince Sasha to defect—but I knew he wouldn’t turn on the Soviets. I would have to do it myself.”

  “I’ll bet Fox loved that.”

  “He was skeptical. But I won him over. I said it was the last thing anyone would expect. I said I was invisible to them, just some silent woman pushing a baby in a pram. And I was right.” Iris touches Gregory’s cheek. “Mummy did it, didn’t she? She found the bad man.”

  “Sitting there in Washington all along. The fox guarding the henhouse.”

  “Well, they haven’t caught him yet. Still on the lam, the last I heard.”

  “They’ll catch him. I’ll bet the FBI has never hunted a man down so ferociously. Dogs after a rat. Of course, his wife claims she never knew a thing.”

  “And I’m sure everyone believes her, too,” Iris says grimly.

  “Except Fox. I guess you taught him a thing or two about housewives.”

  The breeze picks up a little, lifting the ends of Iris’s hair. She’s about to suggest they put Gregory back in the pram, head back to the house, when Ruth speaks up, a little raspy—

  “What if they never find him?”

  “Fox? Oh, darling, they’ll find him—he’ll turn up—he’s indestructible—”

  “No, I mean Sasha. I mean your husband.” Ruth turns her head and looks at Iris over the tuft of Gregory’s pale hair. “Or was it all an act?”

  “It wasn’t an act. Not completely.” Iris pauses. “Anyway, he sacrificed himself for us, didn’t he? In the end, he loved us more than them.”

  “Then what about Beauchamp?”

  Iris stares at a fishing smack, all by itself on the choppy Channel, beating off the leeward shore. In the liquid morning air, she can see every detail—the pure white sail against the blue water, the fisherman untangling his net in the stern.

  “He’s the best man I’ve ever known,” she says.

  They put Gregory back in the pram, but instead of heading back to the house, they walk along the cliff path, talking for once. The ice—not broken, maybe, but cracked in a few places. Iris gathers her resolve and brings up Fox.

  “You know he’s been in love with you for years,” Iris says. “Since he first started investigating you.”

  Ruth’s voice registers disbelief. “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. I just knew. Also, Fox was the one who suggested that extraction signal. That I send you a postcard when we were ready to leave.”

  Ruth stares at the ground as she walks. The tip of her nose is bright pink. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They’ve got him now. They won’t let him go.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. He has more value alive than dead. Propaganda. Or a spy exchange—they do that all the time. They only really execute their own people.” Iris glances sideways. “The best thing is to keep busy until there’s news. You’ll be headed back to New York soon, won’t you? You have your modeling business to run.”

  “Actually.” Ruth kicks away a stone. “I got a cable the other day. It seems this new model of mine—name of Barbara Kingsley, you’d love her—she’s become such good friends with my dear old boss, helping him manage and all in my absence, she’s thinking she might do better behind the scenes than inside them.”

  “Oh? How do you feel about that?”

  Ruth squints at some object in the meadow. “I’m thinking I don’t know what I feel about anything anymore. Say, speak of the devil.”

  “The devil?”

  “Beauchamp.”

  Iris turns her head. Philip angles toward them with the long, purposeful strides of a man who has serious news to communicate. Iris’s heart drops into her stomach. Beside her, Ruth stops and puts a hand on the edge of the pram.

  “What is it?” Iris calls out, when he’s within earshot.

  Ruth stands silent and colorless as Philip approaches. When he reaches them, she says in a harsh voice, “Is it Fox? Is he dead?”

  Philip glances at Iris and hands Ruth the telegram in his hand. She snatches it and turns away to read it.

  “Oh, Christ,” she whispers.

  “What’s happened?” Iris says.

  Philip stares at the side of Ruth’s cheek. “They’ve found him in Berli
n. Dumped on a side street.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Iris reaches for Ruth’s shoulder. Ruth turns beneath her hand. Her eyes are wild, her skin flushed. She speaks in a hoarse whisper. “But he’s alive. He’s alive.”

  “Alive!” Iris exclaims. “Philip, what—”

  “The Americans are flying out a medical team from Northolt at ten thirty.”

  “How far is Northolt?”

  Philip looks at his wristwatch. “If we hop in the car this instant, I can drive you there in time.”

  “Will they let me on?”

  “By God,” says Philip, “they’d better.”

  For a moment, Iris and Philip stand to watch Ruth as she bounds to the cottage to collect her toothbrush and passport. Her gold hair flies from the patterned silk scarf around her head. In the perambulator, Gregory’s eyes flash open. His mouth screws in preparation for a good yell. Iris puts her hand inside Philip’s hand.

  “Will he live?” she whispers.

  He turns his troubled face to her and smiles.

  “Fox? Of course he’ll live. He’ll live for her.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Can you think of a better reason?”

  In the distance, the sun flashes against Ruth’s bouncing gold hair. Gregory lets loose with a lusty cry. Philip takes the handlebar of the Silver Cross perambulator to guide them back to the cottage.

  Author’s Note

  I became familiar with the Cambridge spy ring sideways, while I was researching something else. The more I learned, the more desperate I became to set everything else aside and write about this.

  In Great Britain, their names are as synonymous with treason as Benedict Arnold’s is in the United States—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross—and the flight of Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union in May 1951 is the stuff of legend. Recruited by the Soviet spy agency NKVD in the 1930s, when communism was fashionable among the young elites of Oxford and Cambridge, they graduated and duly entered the corridors of power, where they served up their country’s vital secrets to the Soviet Union for the next two decades, using their influential positions and the cultural capital of an Oxbridge man—no Englishman could possibly imagine a traitor among the chaps he went to school with, college with, clubs with—to avoid detection. Eventually it all came tumbling down, of course, but not before Stalin was privy to all the British negotiating points at Yalta, not before the minutes and papers of the Atomic Energy Commission were delivered into Soviet hands, not before the secrets of the nuclear program allowed Soviet scientists to create their own weapons, not before countless brave intelligence agents had been unmasked, tortured, executed.

  But it was more than that. These men sat at the top of the British intelligence and diplomatic corps. The nation’s faith in its political and academic elites was permanently shaken, and the partnership between the US and UK spy agencies became a minefield of distrust and paranoia at the very moment that the West needed a united front more than ever.

  Needless to say, this rich ground has been thoroughly plowed by historians and novelists alike over the years, and many a spy thriller owes its inspiration—directly or indirectly—to one or more of the Cambridge Five. But as I dug deeper into these men and their lives, I was less fascinated by the mechanics of espionage—the what and the how of what they did, the narrow escapes and unspeakable blunders—than by the who and the why. How could these intellectually brilliant men cling so willfully and catastrophically to their beliefs, even as the everyday evils of the Soviet state lay so plain before them? How could they betray their friends with such cold disregard? Consign women and men to their deaths without a second thought? How did this constant betrayal and secrecy affect them psychologically? And my God, what did it do to their families? The wives and children who bore the brunt of their inner torment? Were they unwilling passengers or fellow travelers?

  These questions brought me to the marriage of Donald and Melinda Maclean, a fraught and complex partnership if ever there was one. At various points in their relationship, Melinda was his victim and his enabler, sometimes fed up and other times addicted, and easily the steelier of the two. Because the intelligence service dismissed her as a brainless housewife, she was able to facilitate Maclean’s defection in 1951 while eight and a half months pregnant, then slip away to join him with the children two years later. It hit me that the spymasters and spy catchers on both sides were missing a trick or two, and this kernel of inspiration grew and transformed into Our Woman in Moscow.

  Sasha bears a physical and psychological resemblance to Maclean, and certain scenes are inspired by real-life incidents that marked Maclean’s deterioration into alcoholism and self-loathing—the farce on the Isle of Wight, for example, is roughly drawn from a disastrous picnic expedition on the Nile during Maclean’s posting to the British embassy in Cairo. Despite these parallels, Sasha and Iris are fictional characters and the narrative itself arises from my own imagination. Maclean died of natural causes in the Soviet Union in 1983; Melinda returned to the United States permanently in 1979, though not before having had an affair with Kim Philby, who defected in 1963.

  Meanwhile, on a personal note, my own grandfather was born in St. Petersburg at the turn of the century to a British father and a Russian mother. At the outbreak of revolution in 1917, he fled across Scandinavia to England and never returned. As I grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, it seemed impossible to me that Deo had grown up in Russia, speaking Russian as well as English, summering at his grandfather’s dacha near the Finnish border. Of course, I never talked to him much about it, which I now deeply regret, but he and my grandmother had the foresight to write down their recollections in memoirs for the family. The fictional flight from Russia in Our Woman in Moscow might just owe its inspiration to Deo’s flight a hundred years earlier.

  For those readers interested in learning more about the Cambridge spy ring, I can enthusiastically recommend the exhaustively researched Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies, and the Making of Modern Britain by Richard Davenport-Hines, as well as Ben Macintyre’s thorough and intensely readable narrative of the Kim Philby case, A Spy Among Friends. For a gripping account of Donald Maclean’s life and espionage career, reach for A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean by Roland Philipps, which meticulously captures the complex psychology of Maclean and his tortured marriage.

  A final technical note: the Soviet intelligence services combined, split apart, and recombined in dozens of different incarnations over the first few decades of Soviet history, each time with a different name. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to the pre–Second World War agency as the NKVD and the postwar agency as the KGB familiar to Cold Warriors, although it didn’t actually take on this final form until 1954. My apologies to the historical sticklers for this narrative convenience.

  I wrote much of Our Woman in Moscow during the intense stress of the coronavirus shutdown in the spring of 2020, while juggling the physical and emotional needs of my large family all gathered together for weeks on end. For her patience and understanding (and timely care packages of artisan chocolate) I can’t thank my editor, Rachel Kahan, enough. In fact, the entire team at William Morrow came through like heroes during this abrupt change of plan and working conditions—Tavia Kowalchuk, Brittani Hilles, Alivia Lopez, and all my other champions in sales and marketing and production, you are so deeply appreciated! Special gratitude is due to my eagle-eyed copyeditor, Laurie McGee, who kept my timelines straight and my hyphenation in order. My warmest thanks as well to my superstar agent, Alexandra Machinist, and her assistant Lindsey Sanderson, for handling the business side of things so ably while I tangled myself in knots of Cold War history.

  As for my dearest, loveliest lovelies Karen White and Lauren Willig, there are no words to thank ewe for all your support and encouragement during the writing of this book. Certain things only the three of us shall ever know. One truth we’ve proved for sure, though—frie
ndship knows no distance.

  As always, my deepest thanks to my family for your love and patience as I made my endless daily circuits from kitchen to laundry room to writing chair.

  To my readers, whose kind messages and thoughtful reviews revived my spirits at every low ebb, I can’t begin to express my gratitude. This book wouldn’t exist without you.

  About the Author

  BEATRIZ WILLIAMS is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including The Summer Wives, A Hundred Summers, The Golden Hour, and Her Last Flight. A native of Seattle, she graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA in finance from Columbia University, then spent several years in New York and London as a corporate strategy consultant before turning her attention to fiction. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Beatriz Williams

  Her Last Flight

  The Wicked Redhead

  The Golden Hour

  The Summer Wives

  Cocoa Beach

  The Wicked City

  A Certain Age

  Along the Infinite Sea

  Tiny Little Thing

  The Secret Life of Violet Grant

  A Hundred Summers

  Overseas

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  our woman in moscow. Copyright © 2021 by Beatriz Williams. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.