The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  Honey was about to leave for hot water when the messenger boy came in. The door had jammed again and one of the girls nearest scraped it back to let him squeeze through.

  ‘Is there a Miss Deschamps here?’

  Honey’s stomach made a slow crawling movement.

  She felt the final piece of the amber drawing close and it both sickened and thrilled her. But when she looked at the boy’s hands, instead of a lumpy parcel he had a piece of paper. A memo. He handed it not to her but to Mooden.

  ‘Report to Room 2 in the main house.’ Mooden handed Honey the slip. It was signed with just an initial, T.

  On the short walk between Hut 6 and the mansion house Honey thought her legs might collapse into spaghetti. She might as well have been walking to the firing chair. She saw the words ‘ABDOMINAL PLUG SHOT’ making a chain in her head, looping along and coming back at her.

  It was Moira.

  It was the amber.

  It was Dickie? This time, could it be Dickie? Was he here? Did someone know about the egg and the cipher text?

  Had Betty Somebody received a note when she was summoned before Tiver to explain her coded letters? She might as well have swum across the cold lake to the house for the wet chill she felt. Was this how Joan Fontaine had felt when Cary Grant brought her that glass of poisoned milk? Ah, but the milk hadn’t been poisoned after all, had it? And Tiver, despite his threats, had not yet shot her.

  Honey had not set eyes on Captain Tiver since her first day, when he had pulled out that gun and sat it on top of her freshly inked signature. The men who worked in the house dined in different places. They arrived in smoky-windowed cars. They didn’t go to Hut 2 when they wanted beer.

  Tiver’s office was in the old conservatory, with windows spreading out to let in a fan of bright winter light. In this puddle of illumination sunlight spears picked out individual items on his desk: brown envelopes, opened letters, the red ‘Most Secret’ stamp. A paperweight in the shape of a brass battleship sat crushing a pile of memos; next to it rolled a fountain pen with three initials monogrammed.

  He was army, but he wore no uniform, instead a dark blue blazer and a striped tie. When Honey walked in he was standing by a wooden rack of pigeon holes, stuffing his pipe with threads of tobacco.

  Katie Brewster, his secretary, had knocked twice and without waiting for an answer turned the handle smartly and swung open the door. When she closed it the click brought to mind his revolver. He had been in uniform that first day, Honey was sure of it. She remembered three gold stripes, green serge, unless her mind had made that up afterwards.

  ‘Miss Deschamps.’

  He was staring. She blinked away the memory.

  ‘Do you know why I called you in here?’

  She took time to appraise his face as a tide of twined possibilities rose in her guts. Tiver had a tanned, weatherworn brow, lined and bronzed from time spent overseas somewhere hot and volatile. Across his nose, a legacy from the last war was scattered, tiny flecks of shrapnel, black pepper. His brows were overgrown and reached down towards his eyes in thin claws. His cheeks were the only sign of comfort in his military life, fleshy and threaded with a web of broken port veins.

  ‘Have a seat, won’t you?’

  She shuffled into the chair opposite, untucking her skirt when it rumpled underneath her. A light sweat was taking grip on her thighs and palms, not eased by the menstrual padding.

  ‘Smoke.’ It wasn’t even a question, nor did he proffer any tobacco, but she shook her head anyway. The smell of his pipe was syrup-thick and rich as he lit it and began to puff away. ‘Listen, I’ll make this quick as can be. It’s a dirty business but I’m sure your involvement is accidental.’

  He pushed a little official printed leaflet across the tabletop towards her. It was government-headed, in the same typeface the Ministry of Information used for their gardening leaflets or air-raid warning packs. It had at the top ‘War Cabinet’. Below it said, ‘Areas Out of Bounds’.

  How had he . . .? She hadn’t even shown the man with the chevrons her pass. She hadn’t shown anyone. He hadn’t even been close enough to shine the torch beam in her face. Sickness reached up her throat.

  ‘Come on, Miss Deschamps, let’s make this simple. You tell me it was an accident, I mark your card and send you back to Hut 6. What were you doing round the back of those huts at Wavendon?’

  ‘I thought—’ She thought back. She had followed that man because she had thought he was Felix. And she had wanted to follow Felix because he was her route to the amber. And the amber was her route to . . . ‘I got lost. After the lavatory hut. Who told you?’

  ‘Things trickle down.’

  ‘I was looking to find my way back to the dance hut.’

  Tiver took a long suck of his pipe and drummed his fingers on the desk.

  ‘Winman thinks it boosts morale to have his workers know what’s going on around here. I’m not so sure it doesn’t lead to mutiny. The lines get blurred between where you should and shouldn’t go.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to venture anywhere I shouldn’t. There was no wire, no signs.’

  ‘No, Miss Deschamps, we went with the more traditional doors and walls.’

  She felt her cheeks colour and looked at her skirt.

  ‘But I didn’t open the door,’ she said gently. She hadn’t seen or heard a thing. Nothing more than she had heard every day from Hut 11.

  He gave the memo a tap. ‘No, you didn’t open the door, did you? And that’s the other reason you’re here.’

  With one hand – the one not cradling the pipe – he slid out the top drawer of his desk. She felt her skin seize, imagining the gun about to emerge, but when he pulled his hand free he only brandished another leaflet.

  He pushed it across at her. A government booklet for every occasion. Dig for Victory. Careless Talk Costs Lives. A Woman’s Place Now. ‘Fraternising with Foreigners’, this one said, beneath the stamp.

  She looked up. ‘Is this why you brought me in here?’

  ‘This is guidance from up top. It relates to war, Miss Deschamps.’

  ‘I thought war meant we all pulled together. The foreigners and us.’

  He sighed long and wearily and took pains to light his pipe again. When he had it glowing and the sweet smoke was clouding he leaned back in his chair. ‘It’s not a warning, Deschamps. It’s a friendly reminder of guidance. We don’t circulate this to Bletchley folk in general because we didn’t think we would have to.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said bullishly. ‘We don’t befriend foreigners?’

  ‘I’m on your side, I wish you wouldn’t take that scowling tone. Look, I know you redheads like a bit of the exotic.’

  ‘I don’t even know that boy. I’ve never seen him before.’

  ‘But you can understand why being seen behind the back of a hut with him, opening the door to an out-of-bounds hut, might pose some sort of concern for us. You can see that, can’t you?’

  She turned her head to face the door. For a second the anger and the humiliation mixed so sharply that she forgot clean about the amber. She forgot why she had followed the man in the first place. She forgot why her stomach was now turning anxiously and she couldn’t understand it. When she turned back Tiver’s eyes held her. She thought about the orders he must have given in the last war, in the trenches; she wondered, looking at the brown eyes, where the tanned skin had come from, where and who had given him the shot-marked brow.

  He puffed on his pipe and his nostrils flared. He took back the paper and tucked it under the brass battleship weight, and his eyes lingered on the ship.

  ‘Go back to work.’

  Honey pushed her chair away from the desk. Tiver was looking down at the blotter pad and she thought for a second she might have embarrassed him somehow.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said before she was out of the door. Her hand snagged on the wood frame; she felt the prick of a splinter and winced. ‘Something came for you in the post.’ He reached down and
pulled open the drawer again. The churn struck up once more, in her stomach. He left the drawer hanging open for a moment before dipping his hand in, watching her face. As Honey’s horror rose, he extracted from it very slowly a parcel about the size and shape of a fist, trussed in brown paper and string.

  ‘I told the messenger boy he could leave it with me to give to you. He was on his way to deliver it. Extremely unusual, the markings. Looks Cyrillic. Any idea what it might be?’ He levered the object up and down in his hand, as if he were at a gala and might be guessing its weight to win a bag of sweets.

  Honey shook her head but already her face was colouring to the shade of her hair. Tiver continued to stare. Very suddenly he extended his arm with the parcel. The movement of his hand, the way it sank and rose with the weight of the thing, gave her the impression he was passing her a grenade.

  She took the creased paper in both hands. It was about the weight of a stone, maybe heavier. It surprised her and gave her wrists a sharp strain. The handwriting was the same as on the other packages. And there was a scent to this one too, stronger but similar. Sweet resin, perhaps muskier, more subtle. Distinct now in her mind as amber.

  ‘Open it.’

  She looked at him. He nodded to her. His face looked blank, expectant, as if he had wrapped it himself and couldn’t wait to see her smile at the thing inside. She swallowed and her lips felt sticky. As she reached beneath the strings, she found a small tear already there, next to the glue. Tiver was still; his eyes said he knew already what she would find beneath that paper.

  Her fingers had begun to tremble, sweat. Heat rose on her neck. She thought of Felix and his black belted coat, his greyhound, muscular, leggy, sniffing. Of Dickie in a theatre somewhere in central London. She thought of the things that were forbidden: Stravinsky, and Figley’s Book of Ciphers, and the exile of a man she never knew, and of the name Korichnev. Would all these things now have to be dredged up like the wreck of a battleship, covered in slime and slapped on the table between them for Tiver to pick through? Her family secrets; Felix Plaidstow.

  The paper slipped off like dead skin. It was softened by its journey, toughened by water or salt. The postmarks and censors’ marks had all smeared; they had the weary look of being at the end of their road.

  She knew what it was long before she saw it. She had known as soon as she saw the sides of the box, the foliage twining round the codes. There was only one thing, one piece that could complete the final picture. Something to sit inside that forest of flaming bronze, which seemed almost to glow with the lives of the trees and insects it held trapped in its sticky fossil coffins.

  Underneath there was tissue. It ripped as she pulled it off. She concentrated on Tiver’s pipe smoke to stop herself from fainting. The dizziness was coming. Her cheeks were hot, but her veins thrilled with ice: up and down the cold blood went as she pulled the tissue free. Just before she lifted the final sheath she looked again at Tiver. He had a plain, military blankness in his face, no hint of a question in his eyes, no suggestion of criticism or amusement. He was on alert mode, absorbing her actions, and she didn’t like it.

  Her thumb brushed the final sheet of tissue. She began to push it aside. But at that moment their heads were both turned by a boom and crack, followed by a terrifying cry.

  The Captain looked at her. The muscles in his face gave an odd twitch then fixed into a map of ridges; each decision a line. He made his movements in succinct order. He spun to the window, put his pipe in the ashtray on his desk, and dashed out of the door. Honey followed, stuffing, as she ran, the package back into its brown paper, pocketing it in her cardigan where it weighed down the wool.

  More men and women from the downstairs offices had joined the crush. There was a scuffle to get out of the front door.

  ‘Why the bloody hell are we running towards it?’ Katie Brewster was yelling. ‘If there’s bombs, it’s the basement, the shelter in the basement—’

  ‘It’s not ruddy bombs, you idiot,’ a man in naval uniform spat back. ‘If it were bombs, we’d have heard the planes for starters and then—’ He stopped, They all did, as they reached the outer front step of the manor.

  Already a crowd had gathered from the various huts. They were a motley crew, standing out there on the lawn like some sort of roll call, each in their different chorus groups. Ships that so rarely passed one another in the working day. From the Cottage, Knox’s research team – the ‘fillies’ — stood fussing in tweeds and patterned scarves, some still with pencils and paper in their hands. The WAAF girls from the administration hut had joined along with the FANY transportation women in khaki boiler suits. There was a scattering of men from Hut 8, one of whom was sporting a kimono, another his pyjamas, and a third a jacket so patched that one of the sleeves looked quite a different colour to the rest.

  The debs or ‘gels’ from the secretarial units were there too, shivering in cashmere and pearls.

  But it was from the Wrens’ Hut 11 that the blast had come. The door was flung back, dangling on one hinge, and a rancid plume of smoke danced and teased out, blowing black dragons on the air. A girl was crying at the centre of it, and in horror they all watched as she stood up, lifted her head and revealed a wide scarlet sticky gash across her pale cream throat.

  Chapter 10

  The girl with the cut throat stumbled and tripped a few steps forward. She blinked tears and dirt from both eyes. Her cheeks were scorched with dust and there were furious scratches on them from whatever had slashed her neck. But the blood had stopped flowing from the wound for now and was static and bright on her skin. Honey saw one of the other Wrens, a young woman with her uniform twisted, come forward and take the girl by the wrists, embracing her. The silence in the yard made her voice carry.

  ‘Show me . . . come on, show me.’

  As if she had broken a seal, people began suddenly to sweep forward. Honey was propelled along by them. A man came up beside the girl, supporting her weight. She pressed him back with a hand and continued to weep, shaking into the other woman’s arms. The rip in her throat didn’t seem to be giving her too much bother.

  ‘I’m shocked, that’s all.’

  ‘She needs a doctor,’ the man spat.

  ‘Ambulance, man! What are you waiting for?’ someone shouted from the crowd.

  Honey managed to pick out Tiver, and saw with relief that she had slipped to the other end of the crowd from him. His face was back in that curious absorbed expression again, the action all stayed for now. He conferred with a couple of men in factory coats and they went into the smouldering Hut 11.

  It was then that the girl noticed her throat.

  She put her fingers to the sticky patch and rubbed, then pulled her hand away and looked at it. People around held their breath.

  Confusion crossed her face, turning to horror. She stared at the stain. Then she laughed, cawing and raucous.

  ‘Is that what you’re all staring at? Bloody hell, I saw it come flying at me.’

  The young Wren holding her tipped the girl’s chin up and peered at her neck. Then she began to laugh too. ‘God, they’d have had you to the cottage hospital.’

  ‘Lipstick!’ the girl cried, and she began to tell her tale. It filtered in whispers and tittle-tattle back into the thickened crowd, the story splintering into different versions even as she told it.

  She had placed her metal compact mirror on the shelf of one of the machines, and taken out her lipstick. (Some said she had the lipstick on the machine already). An electrical fault had tripped the thing – or perhaps with the mirror being metal it had made a battery and conducted the electricity; at any rate, the metal had melted in a flash, sparks had shot out and the lipstick had gone flying out of the girl’s hand straight across her throat.

  The shock had gripped the crowd tightly, and the release came hard and fast. The laughter was hysterical, the chuckling frenzied. Honey didn’t know why but she was trembling and couldn’t get the image of the woman’s throat away from her mind. The
red finger as the girl had held it up; she had laughed while the sticky gunk still shone. Honey didn’t feel the escape they all did, slapping each other’s backs, using the break from work as a chance to light cigarettes, ‘hallo’-ing across the crowds to colleagues they hadn’t seen for a while.

  She looked down at her cardigan instead. It was sagging at the pocket. She scanned the lawns for Tiver but he was long gone, inside, onto another problem, for another hour.

  She pulled the thing up and it dropped out of the paper solid into her hand, filling her palm. It was exactly as she knew it would be: a bright, blazing vital amber, as if it had blood and a pulse. Its wings were half-spread, like it planned on taking off, or perhaps it was extending an embrace, like it did to Prince Ivan, that first time they met in the garden of the golden apples. The choke in her throat caught her. Its eyes were perfect tiny globes. Not that the rest was rough, but there were lumps and patterns missed along the feathers, a skew on the feet. And yet the eyes were perfect, as if the best attention in the carving had been paid to them. To make them as real as possible, to make her believe the thing could see, and see her again one final time. The firebird.

  The Firebird was their favourite ballet. Dickie had told her that their father knew Stravinsky while he was writing it, and had heard all his stories and gripes about the commission and the dance and the this and the that. He had explained to the seven-year-old her that ballets were made from stories, like a code. The composer took the letters of the original story and put them into a sort of machine that would blow steam and stank and would churn them round and round and out the other side would pop music, which the dancers would dance to. The dancers would know instinctively from the notes of the music what steps to take. That was how ballets were made.

  He had danced while he had told her, round and round; playing the role of the firebird. When he danced at home, he was the firebird. She was never to tell this to their mother or the black-haired ballet mistress. The ballet mistress had told him that if she caught him dancing the firebird in the studio she would cut off his feet, for little boys could not play the roles meant for little girls and vice versa, and that was a very serious offence. But in secret, in the nursery or in his bedroom, or sometimes in the parlour, he would practise the fluttering hands and the open kicks of the firebird; he preferred it to being the base partner, Prince Ivan. Later, when he began to dance professionally, he forgot all this; Ivan became one of his favourite roles. Maybe it was the name Ivan. Dickie said he had seen a glorious performance of their father conducting The Firebird just before he left for Russia.