The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  Just before they reached it, Mr. Petersen turned to Sophie. “We’ll speak again before long,” he said.

  Sophie stared at him. “Aren’t you coming with me now?” she asked.

  She didn’t understand it. They’d been walking for ages without him saying anything. If they weren’t to go on together, his silence became not surprising so much as completely infuriating.

  “I can’t,” said Mr. Petersen. “I’ve got loose ends to tie up, and we can’t afford to have you waiting around while I take care of them. The commander you met that night in the Castle will be here within the hour, and once he gets his hands on you, it’ll be impossible to spring you.”

  “Oh,” said Sophie, feeling somewhat bereft.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m handing you over now to somebody who will take extremely good care of you.”

  They reclaimed Sophie’s bag from the guard and passed out of the compound into the sandy flat area in front of the gatehouse. There she looked at Mr. Petersen, and he looked back at her, and both of their faces expressed a shared sense of unfinished business.

  Sophie waited to see whether he’d say anything else, but he didn’t. And she wasn’t about to say anything herself.

  After a few minutes, a Crossley roadster pulled up in front of them. Mr. Petersen shook hands with the driver, then turned to give Sophie an awkward hug.

  “Have a safe journey,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  In a daze, Sophie fumbled with the door and let herself into the passenger seat.

  “Thank goodness you’re all right,” said the driver. “Hostage situations are always touch and go. I was extremely relieved when Mr. Petersen radioed to let me know you’d survived unscathed.”

  The driver was Miss Chatterjee.

  FORTY-TWO

  THE HISTORY TEACHER’S unexpected appearance as getaway driver made Sophie feel confused as well as relieved. It was a better thing, of course, to be handed over to someone familiar than to a complete stranger. But what was Miss Chatterjee doing here?

  The teacher took a left turn onto the feeder road that would take them to the highway leading east back to Edinburgh and the port of Leith. “Surprised to see me?” she said.

  Sophie just nodded.

  “I must make my confession,” Miss Chatterjee went on, politely ignoring Sophie’s distress. “Mr. Petersen was not the only teacher at the Edinburgh Institution for Young Ladies who served two masters. Like him, I have been on the payroll of the Nobel Consortium for some time. Indeed, the Consortium paid for my education and set me up in Edinburgh more than ten years ago. It is very much the Consortium’s way to prepare for all possible eventualities, taking the longest view.”

  Sophie turned and stared at her. This was utter betrayal, worse—much worse—than learning the truth about Mr. Petersen. Was that what Miss Chatterjee had meant the night she warned Sophie not to think of her as a hero?

  “I can imagine how you feel,” said Miss Chatterjee when Sophie didn’t say anything. “I wish I could have told you before, but the Consortium is quite strict about us keeping our identities concealed. If I had let you in on the secret, I would have been recalled to the central office in Stockholm, where I could have done you no good.”

  Sophie was tallying up all the clues she’d missed: Miss Chatterjee’s lovely clothes, well beyond what one might purchase on a teacher’s salary; the elevated circles she moved in; most of all, the air she had of life being interesting and important. She remembered Priscilla’s canny observations about Miss Rawlins and wished she’d thought of asking her about Miss Chatterjee. But the thought of Nan and Priscilla and Jean, and not being able to say good-bye to them, made Sophie start crying in earnest.

  Miss Chatterjee offered a silk handkerchief, and Sophie wiped her eyes and blew her nose and generally tried to pull herself together.

  “The day the headmistress called a special meeting for all the teachers,” Miss Chatterjee said when Sophie had collected herself, “it became clear that things were in a parlous state. Her news—that Parliament was certain to take virtually all of you girls for IRYLNS—made us see that you were in even graver danger than we had anticipated. Neither Mr. Petersen nor I was quite sure what happens at the Institute, but enough stories have trickled out that we thought we’d better come up with a plan to get you out of danger. In that sense, all this business with the minister and her assistant just precipitated things a little sooner than we expected.”

  Sophie remembered overhearing Miss Chatterjee ask on the day of the coffee spill whether the decision to send the girls to IRYLNS was really a matter of protecting the girls or just of promoting the interests of the country. That must have been the day they decided Sophie had to be rescued.

  “You didn’t send me a little metal toy iron by way of the medium, did you?” Sophie asked. “As a kind of warning?”

  Miss Chatterjee gave her a blank look, and Sophie wondered whether the medium had given Sophie the warning of her own accord. Many secrets must have gone to the grave with Mrs. Tansy; as much as she had disliked the woman in life, though, and resented her for getting Sophie mixed up in the whole business to begin with, Sophie still felt she owed her something.

  “Miss Chatterjee?” Sophie asked.

  “What is it, Sophie?”

  “What can be done about the other girls? Can’t you stop Jean and Priscilla from going to IRYLNS?”

  Just then a radio receiver in Miss Chatterjee’s handbag, on the floor by Sophie’s feet, now began emitting short sharp bursts of speech.

  “Would you mind passing me the radio?” Miss Chatterjee asked.

  Sophie dug around in the bag and found it. It was one of the new transistor ones, like Priscilla’s.

  Both Miss Chatterjee and the person at the other end spoke in code, so Sophie couldn’t follow most of what they said, but there was an ominous change in Miss Chatterjee’s body language. She didn’t drive any faster—she probably didn’t want to alert whoever might be watching—but she looked suddenly much tougher than before.

  “Sophie, it’s bad news, but nothing we can’t deal with,” she said after signing off. “Apparently our old friend Commander Brown has cottoned on to the fact that a crucial witness has left the scene. He’s put out an all-points bulletin and instructed the police to mount a series of roadblocks. We’re still miles away from Leith, but we’ve got to hide you right away so that if the car’s stopped, they won’t see you.”

  Sophie didn’t know how to respond.

  “Don’t worry,” Miss Chatterjee added. “We planned for this contingency, and the risk is minimal.”

  The word risk made Sophie’s stomach hurt, but she thought she’d rather know the details than not.

  “What’s the plan, then?” she asked.

  She knew Commander Brown wouldn’t kill her, but his finding her would surely initiate exactly the series of events she most wanted to avoid, beginning with a serious interrogation in the Vaults and almost certainly ending with matriculation at IRYLNS.

  “Well, let me put it this way,” said Miss Chatterjee. “How do you feel about small enclosed spaces?”

  Five minutes later Miss Chatterjee pulled over at a spot where the road got wider and opened the boot of the car to show a steamer trunk—quite a large one, though it didn’t look big enough to hold a person, which was part of the point. It had a false bottom and breathing holes, and Miss Chatterjee assured Sophie that there was really plenty of room for her inside.

  When she saw Sophie’s doubtful look, she sighed. “Yes, I know it’s awful, and I wouldn’t like it much either,” she said. “But I borrowed it from my friend Harry, who’s a stage magician and twice your size, and he gets inside it every night.”

  She showed Sophie the safety latch that she could use to let herself out if she accidentally got stuck in the hold of the ship, rather than in Mikael’s cabin as planned. She would have ended up in the trunk sooner or later, even without the roadblocks, Sophie suddenly realized, for
this was how they intended to get her on board ship without the proper visa.

  “What about Jean and Priscilla?” she asked urgently. “You must tell them they can’t go to IRYLNS!”

  “Don’t worry about them,” said Miss Chatterjee, handing Sophie a flask of water. “Your job now is to protect yourself. We can’t afford to lose any more time—get into the trunk!”

  Despite her conviction that a police car might come into view at any moment, despite her horror at the idea of being taken into custody, despite her fear of IRYLNS, something in Sophie rebelled at the thought of shutting herself up in this awful cramped box.

  “Do I really have to?” she said.

  “You must,” said Miss Chatterjee.

  The sky had become cloudy and overcast.

  “Hurry up, Sophie!”

  The unfamiliar note of anxiety in the teacher’s voice provided the necessary spur. Sophie reminded herself that she didn’t dislike small dark spaces, but climbing into the trunk still made her feel as if she were going voluntarily into her own coffin.

  “If things go as they should, I won’t see you again for a long while, so I’ll say good-bye now,” said Miss Chatterjee. “Sophie, it’s been a pleasure teaching you. And I swear to you I will deliver this trunk into the keeping of your friend Mikael on the Gustavus Adolphus if it kills me. Mr. Petersen was most precise in his instructions!”

  The top of the trunk closed over Sophie and she found herself in pitch blackness, clasps shutting loudly over her head.

  Would Sophie escape? What would happen to Jean and Priscilla?

  Within five minutes these concerns looked trivial beside the need to prevent herself from being sick.

  Sophie had already felt nauseated sitting in the front seat of the car. It turned out that the motion of the car as it affected her now was about a hundred times more sick-making than on an ordinary car ride. She wished she’d thought to retrieve Peggy’s barley sugar from her bag before Miss Chatterjee had tucked it in beside her in the trunk’s secret compartment, but there was hardly any space to move about in. Besides, even the slightest movement made being sick that much more likely.

  The car twisted and turned, it sped up and slowed down, it even stopped a few times for long enough that Sophie would have been absolutely terrified had all her attention not been engaged in the desperate struggle not to throw up.

  It seemed an eternity before the car came to a halt. The engine stopped and Sophie heard the passenger door open and close again. She thought she wouldn’t even mind if Commander Brown was outside and about to order the car searched, so long as she never again had to endure such a ride.

  Someone opened the boot and the whole car shook. Sophie hoped the last little bit of movement wouldn’t trigger actual vomiting. She was only barely holding on. Aside from the sheer unpleasantness of it, the sudden sound and smell of a person throwing up inside the trunk would let the authorities know that something was very wrong.

  The trunk somewhat muffled the sound of their voices, but Sophie was relieved to hear Miss Chatterjee negotiating the fee with a porter rather than, say, explaining her actions to a police officer. Then the trunk was heaved out of the boot of the car and slotted onto some kind of handcart. Someone outside thumped the trunk a couple times; it might have been Miss Chatterjee bidding Sophie farewell.

  She could hear the shrieks of gulls and smell salt air even through the dark masculine scents of the trunk, but it continued to be a great effort not to be sick as they rolled up the steep gradient of the gangplank and she began to feel the quiet movement of the ship.

  Had there ever been such a test of the power of mind over matter?

  It seemed an interminable wait, with lots of jerking around and sudden sharp yaws and pitches in unexpected directions, before Sophie’s trunk finally came to rest on a flat floor. She heard a boy’s voice saying “That’s for your help” and an older man thanking him and then the sound of a door opening and closing.

  The top of the trunk opened now, and though Sophie was still trapped beneath the false bottom, she couldn’t help letting out a groan of relief.

  The next thing she knew, Mikael had lifted up the decoy shelf above her and leaned down to help her out.

  Her arms and legs were incredibly stiff, but Sophie struggled out as fast as she could.

  “Thank goodness,” said Mikael. “I’d begun to be afraid—”

  Sophie cut him off.

  “Where’s the basin?” she gasped.

  “Right there. Sophie, you must tell me everything! What happened—”

  But though superhuman fortitude had helped so far, Sophie couldn’t hold it in for another second. She doubled up and to her great shame and mortification began to be sick into the porcelain basin on the washstand.

  FORTY-THREE

  FOLLOWING A DISCREET interval involving towels and large quantities of warm water (storybooks never said anything about the crying and vomiting part of having adventures), Sophie and Mikael crept up to the top deck of the merchant steamer for a breath of fresh air. The ship was still at anchor, shortly to depart.

  Sophie still felt extremely queasy, but as her stomach was now completely empty, she thought there wasn’t much chance of being sick again. She sipped small mouthfuls of fizzy lemonade from a bottle, having rejected with a shudder Mikael’s offer to procure some brandy (supposed to be good for seasickness) from one of the stewards.

  “Are you sure it’s safe for us to be on deck like this?” she asked.

  They were quite alone, for the weather had taken a definite turn for the worse and everything more than about fifteen feet away was wreathed about with the cold mist called the haar.

  “We’re quite safe,” Mikael said. “For one thing, the police haven’t a clue where you are. For another, as soon as you came on board ship, you passed out of Scottish sovereignty. Miss Chatterjee visited me yesterday afternoon to give me all the paperwork I’ll need if anyone questions your right to be here; the Danish embassy has accepted her application on your behalf for asylum, and I’ve got that and a proper ticket for you as well. We won’t have any difficulties.”

  The word asylum had a harsh sound, but there was nothing to be done about it. They sat in the deck chairs, wrapped up in blankets to protect them from the cold damp fog.

  “I’m awfully glad you’re here, Sophie,” Mikael said. “Everything will be fine from now on.”

  “I don’t have much luggage….”

  “That’s all right. There’s a small commissary on board. And my mother will fit you out properly once we’re in Denmark.”

  “Your mother doesn’t even know me!”

  “Sophie, you’re looking awfully green again. Are you all right?”

  As it started to rain, they raced back down to the cabin just in time for Sophie to be sick for a second time.

  “I’m afraid I’d better lie down,” she said. “I’ll tell you the whole story later on.”

  “That’s fine,” said Mikael. “I won’t bother you; I’m sure resting will make you feel better.”

  She lay down on the nearest bunk, and he sat on the opposite one to watch over her. It was strange to think of sharing a cabin with him, and even stranger to contemplate living together with his mother once they got to Denmark.

  “I almost didn’t come,” Sophie said after a minute.

  It was a more confessional statement than she would usually have made, but she was feeling so sick and sleepy that the usual mechanisms of self-censorship seemed to have stopped working.

  Mikael didn’t say anything.

  “When I telephoned you yesterday evening,” she continued, “I was sort of on the verge of changing my mind, if only you’d tried to persuade me, but you sounded as though you didn’t even want to talk to me. I swore not to make a fool of myself by going where I wasn’t wanted.”

  She was distracted by a funny sound coming from the heap of luggage in the corner of the cabin. She turned her head and saw a wicker basket fall to the grou
nd.

  “The ship must have embarked,” she said, though she hadn’t detected any obvious change in its motion.

  Mikael followed her eyes to the basket and started laughing.

  “You know, I had a very good reason for not being able to talk yesterday,” he said. “There was something really important I had to do, I told you that. Look at the scratches!”

  He leaned over to show his hands to Sophie. They were covered with puffy, sore-looking red scrapes.

  “I’ll let him out now,” Mikael added. And to Sophie’s amazement, when he unfastened the clasp on the basket, a huge black cat leaped out.

  “What’s that cat doing here?”

  “It’s Mrs. Tansy’s cat. Don’t you remember? That was what I had to go and do last night when I couldn’t talk on the telephone.”

  And Sophie had been so sure that Mikael cut their conversation off like that because he was angry with her…. It was a good reminder not to jump to conclusions.

  “I took that landlady at her word when she said she’d put the cat on the street. And even though Blackie here’s a tough customer, I didn’t fancy his chances with those terrible kids.”

  Sophie didn’t have the energy to make a joke about the originality of the name. The cat didn’t seem to mind one way or the other. It stopped racing around the tiny cabin long enough to press its muzzle against Sophie’s outstretched fingers. After a minute or two of sniffing around the bunk, it curled up next to her and began to lick its hindquarters.

  “Well, will you look at that?” said Mikael, sounding more than a little piqued.

  Lying on top of the bed, the cat’s warm body pressed against her side, part of Sophie still couldn’t believe she was about to leave behind her entire life in Scotland.

  Though she had learned things in the past few weeks that completely changed her view of the world, there were still an awful lot of mysteries to be solved.

  Nobel’s motives remained an enigma. What did the Swedish industrialist want with her?