by Jo Walton
Carmichael ran around the curve, his bad leg dragging and slowing him. His heart was racing. There were two German soldiers outside the entrance to the Royal Box. They brought their pistols up and trained them on him as he approached. “I am Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard,” he said. He had never expected to be mistaken for a crazed assassin. He showed them his papers, which they examined minutely without a word.
“Has Viola Lark been up here today?” he asked.
They looked at each other. One of them said something in German. “Yes, she flowers bring-ed,” the other said.
Carmichael felt almost calm now his guess had been confirmed, although he knew that the bomb she must have brought could go off at any moment.
“Those flowers were probably a bomb. We need to evacuate the box, get everyone out quietly, do you understand? There could be a timer, or there could be someone in the audience who could set it off if they see trouble.”
“Ja,” the soldier said, and rapped twice on the door of the box. A tall SS captain came out immediately and gave Carmichael an assessing look. The soldier spoke to him in German. His eyebrows raised.
“I suppose you have evidence?” he said. “Let me see your papers.”
“I have a chain of circumstantial evidence,” Carmichael said. “Miss Lark’s sister Siddy is a communist and has been part of a plot to put a bomb in this box, along with an Irishman who is still at large.” Carmichael handed over his papers and waited while the SS man examined them, almost beside himself with impatience. He could hear the sudden hush and then the opening words of the play beginning again.
The captain frowned. “I find this very hard to believe, but very well. I will bring the Fuhrer out, and then the others.”
“Do it with as little disturbance as possible. If there’s someone in the audience watching the box they could set off the bomb as soon as you move.”
“Give me some credit,” the captain said. “Besides, I think this is all a horse’s nest. Lady Viola’s other sister is sitting beside the Fuhrer. And why would they wait this long, all the first half of the stupid play? But I will move carefully.” He unholstered his pistol and went back into the box.
Carmichael stepped away down the corridor as the captain went back in. The door opened again after a moment, and Hitler came out, closely followed by Celia Himmler. Carmichael saw Normanby behind them, then there was a shot from the box. Hitler came another few steps down the corridor towards Carmichael, and then the whole wall of the box blew out, knocking Normanby forward. Hitler staggered a little, and Carmichael steadied him. Celia Himmler opened her mouth as if she were screaming, but Carmichael didn’t hear her. Blast deafness, from the concussion. He remembered it from the war.
He pushed her out of the way and went towards Normanby and the German soldiers who were on the floor. Normanby was unconscious, and had a large chunk of wall on top of him. The gash on his forehead was bleeding sluggishly, so he was probably alive, for now at least. Carmichael couldn’t see anything immediate to do for him. One of the German soldiers was as unquestionably dead as Royston. The other, the one who had said that Viola Lark had brought flowers, was staring in horror as blood pulsed out of his arm. He had been on the safe side of the corridor, like Carmichael, but he had been unlucky and hit by a piece of flying shrapnel. It must have nicked an artery. Carmichael remembered that from the war too. Funny that these very men might have been trying to kill him then. He took out the silk handkerchief folded into his jacket pocket and made it into a tourniquet, then twisted his pencil into the knot. “Hold it!” he shouted at the soldier.
Then, suddenly, there were police and German uniformed soldiers everywhere. “Get an ambulance,” Carmichael bellowed.
One of them detached the hysterical Celia Himmler from Hitler, whom she had been embracing, and led her off down the corridor. Most of the others then started to fuss over Hitler, who was unharmed, but some of them came over and started to clear the fallen bricks from Mark Normanby. Another said something he couldn’t hear and looked apprehensively at Carmichael. He couldn’t understand why until he looked down at himself. He laughed. “It’s not my blood,” he shouted. “Have you called an ambulance?”
The policeman nodded emphatically, having worked out that Carmichael couldn’t hear. He would have a terrible earache later, he remembered, and a whistling noise that might last for weeks.
Hitler was pointing at Carmichael and saying something. One of the SS men, not the captain he had spoken to before, came over and tried to speak to Carmichael. He pointed at his ears and gestured. The German took out a pad and wrote neatly in small letters, “The Fuhrer thanks you for your warning and for the first aid to the guard. He will see you are given a German medal for bravery.”
Carmichael stared at it for a moment then waved it away. He looked up and saw Hitler smiling at him. The bricks had been removed from Normanby, and people were lifting him carefully onto a stretcher. Carmichael moved to let someone come past him and found himself looking down at the dead face of Daphne Normanby as she was carried past him. She looked years younger, all the wariness drained out of her with her life.
He swallowed hard and felt the half-forgotten yet familiar sensation of pain in his ears. Jacobson arrived, running. “We have to stop the audience from leaving,” Carmichael said, in an ordinary tone of voice. They could hear him even if he couldn’t hear them. “And I have to go around to the front and arrest Viola Lark. Don’t talk to me, I’m deaf from the blast, but I’m all right. Come on.”
Jacobson hesitated for only a moment, then nodded. The SS man helpfully offered him the pad and paper. He wrote neatly, “One man shot dead. Audience fleeing.” Carmichael read it then led the way down the corridor to where the bobbies had linked arms to control the crowd.
“Don’t let anyone leave,” Carmichael said. “Check everyone’s papers.”
The bobby’s lips moved. Jacobson touched his arm, and wrote, “Lots of people left already, crowding out from the ha’pennies and the stalls. Shot, explosion, panic.”
Only to be expected really. Carmichael sighed. “And heaven knows what the newspapers will be saying. Too late. All the same, check as many papers as you can. Hold any Irishmen, Jews, foreigners.”
The bobby nodded, and Jacobson added something. Then the stretcher bearers came up behind them with Mark Normanby groaning between them, and they moved aside to let them through.
Carmichael and Jacobson followed them downstairs and into the stalls. The two policemen at the doorway saluted and let them through. The stalls had clearly been emptied out in a rush. Some seats had coats lying on them. Empty chocolate boxes and programs caught under Carmichael’s feet. The stage was empty of actors, though still dominated by a bed and something that looked like a great fire screen. Carmichael rubbed his ears, which were beginning to ache. He realized he had no idea how long it had been since the explosion.
There was a uniformed bobby standing over the body in the front row. He had fallen with his head towards the stage, so it was clear that he must have been standing. He had something clutched in his hand. “Radio detonator!” the bobby bellowed, pointing.
“German?” Carmichael asked. His ears were ringing now, and his hearing was beginning to come back.
“Probably Russian,” Jacobson wrote, then underlined the last word. Germans had developed the radio detonator but the Russians had not been slow in copying them. Another communist connection?
Carmichael put the detonator out of his thoughts and stared at the bomber. He had been shot through the head, and was unquestionably dead. Any questions he could have answered were dead with him. By his build, he was the Irishman who had been introduced to Carmichael as Connelly. “Get Viola Lark, bring her here right away,” Carmichael said to the bobby. Then, as he scurried off, Carmichael turned to Jacobson. “Keiler must have got him,” he said, “I warned him, and he went in and warned the others, and this fellow must have stood up and pushed the button and Keiler was looking and shot him
right away. I’m surprised he had time to push the button, really. It must have been damn near simultaneous.”
He looked up at the ruins of the box, where uniformed German soldiers were poking about, then back at the body. Jacobson was saying something he couldn’t hear. Then the bobby came back with Viola Lark. He was holding her arm protectively, but she was not struggling. She looked pale and somehow shrunken. Her face had no expression at all. She was wearing a white nightdress, which, with her still face, made her look like a sleepwalker.
“Here she is, sir!” the bobby bawled.
“Arrest her under the Defence of the Realm Act,” Carmichael said to Jacobson. He half-heard Jacobson going through the ritual words. She didn’t react at all, she was looking past them, to the body.
“I am Inspector Carmichael, of Scotland Yard,” he said, making an effort not to shout, and wondering if this was the last time he would introduce himself that way, as he would have his new Watch title soon. “We met once before.”
“Just about here,” Viola Lark said, not shouting, but pitching her voice to project, so he could hear her more plainly than he could hear the others.
“You introduced this dead man as Devlin Connelly. Is that his name, or is he in fact Sir Aloysius Farrell?”
She looked down at the body, tenderly, averting her eyes from the blown-away face. Then she looked up for an instant at the empty theater, not at the ruined box but farther up, towards the ha’pennies. “Of course he is,” she said. “And he’ll be buried in the Farrell tomb in Arranish, in Ulster, with gold sovereigns on his eyes, not shoveled into a pauper’s grave making do with a pair of ha’pennies.”
Carmichael wondered if she were entirely unhinged. “Did he make you do this?” he asked, gently. “He and Siddy, Lady Russell?”
“ ‘For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot,’ ” she said, and began to cry. Carmichael recognized the words from the play, she had said them about Hamlet’s father being remembered, but could not see their relevance.
Just then Celia Himmler, clearly recovered from her hysterics, swept up to them. “Stop bullying my sister!” she demanded.
This took Carmichael’s breath away. “Your sister has been part of a conspiracy which killed your husband and Mrs. Normanby and almost killed you, and I was asking her to identify the body of her coconspirator.”
“There must be some mistake,” Celia Himmler said.
“Oh Pip, Pip, I’m sorry,” Viola Lark said. She would have stepped forward towards her sister but for the bobby’s protective grip on her arm.
Celia stared at her sister for a moment, then slapped her face. “Pull yourself together,” she said, ignoring the rest of them and holding out a hand to Viola, who shrank away. “Now come on.”
“Your sister is in custody, and you’re not taking her anywhere,” Carmichael said, rubbing his ears. “One of your other sisters, Lady Russell, also appears to be even deeper in this conspiracy.”
“Siddy has flown to Moscow,” Viola said. “I’m sorry, Pip.”
“To Moscow?” Jacobson echoed.
“We’ll see how your evidence stands up in court, if it ever comes to court,” Celia said to Carmichael.
“They don’t hang people like me,” Viola said, and laughed, then dissolved into tears again. “You see to it, don’t you? I’m sorry I tried to kill you, Pip, and even more sorry that I killed poor Daphne who never did anyone any harm. But we were trying to kill Hitler, and Normanby. We could have changed everything. I know it isn’t what you want. But it’s what we wanted.”
As she spoke, for the first time Carmichael realized what he had done. He wanted to laugh, or perhaps cry, himself, but he simply stood there, trying to catch his breath. He had saved Hitler, saved Hitler and Normanby, when if he had simply sat still in his box he could have rid the world of them. He could hardly believe he had been such a fool.
Then, as he stood there staring at the sisters, he realized that it didn’t matter in the least that he had saved Hitler. It wouldn’t have made any difference. He couldn’t say it to poor unstable Viola, but he wished he could have said it to Lauria Gilmore, who might have understood. Hitler and Normanby were evil men, and there was a time when killing them would have changed everything, but that time had gone. If they had been killed tonight, it would only have been more ammunition for their side, would have driven Europe deeper in the direction things were going. When men like Kinnerson and girls like Rachel Grunwald began to turn in their friends and family, fascism wasn’t something that could be killed by a bomb. He had learned from the Farthing Set that you couldn’t just change things from the outside, you had to change how people felt. If people stopped being afraid, they’d get rid of the dictators for themselves.
He would take the Watch, he thought, as the theater filled up with policemen, and make of it something they didn’t expect. He would be a hero with a medal, he might not be able to escape them, but they couldn’t lightly get rid of him either. He would stay here with Jack, adopt little Elvira Royston if they could, and do what he could to make people brave again.
He turned to one of the sergeants from Hampstead. “Take Frau Himmler outside, please,” he said.
He looked back at Viola, meaning to ask her more about the Moscow connection, but before he could she swept into an elaborate curtsey and began to quote Hamlet again. “ ‘Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank you, and sure dear friends, my thanks are too dear a ha’penny.’ ”
Turn the page for a preview of
HALF A
CROWN
Jo Walton
Available in October 2008
A TOR HARDCOVER
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1621-9
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1621-8
Copyright © 2008 by Jo Walton
A week before she was due to bring me out, I overheard Mrs. Maynard saying I was “Not quite . . .” That’s just how she said it. “Elvira’s not quite . . .”
When she let her voice trail off like that I knew precisely what she meant. I knew it in the pit of my stomach. I had been coming down the stairs to join them in the drawing room when I heard her speaking, and stopped dead, clutching the handrail in my left hand and the bunched seersucker of my skirt in the other. It was 1960 and skirts in the spring collections were long enough that they had to be lifted a little to avoid stepping on them on the stairs.
Mrs. Maynard’s friend, Lady Bellingham, made a little sound of inarticulate sympathy. There could be no question what Mrs. Maynard meant, no way that I could think—or that anyone could think—she meant not quite ready, or not quite well, though I knew if I challenged her that’s what she would say. “Not quite out of the top drawer” is what she really meant; “not quite a lady.” I was still “not quite up to snuff,” despite eight years in the best and most expensive girls’ schools in England and a year in Switzerland being “finished.” At eighteen I still had two distinct voices: the voice that went with my clothes and my hair, the voice that was indistinguishable in its essentials from Betsy Maynard’s, and then the much less acceptable voice of my childhood, the London Cockney voice. My past was never to be forgotten, not quite, however hard I tried.
“Then why ever are you bringing her out with Betsy?” Lady Bellingham asked, her voice positively oozing sympathy the way an eclair oozes cream.
“Well her uncle, you know,” Mrs. Maynard said. “He’s the head of the Watch. One doesn’t like . . .”
Spending time with Mrs. Maynard, you get used to trailing sentences with everything explicit but nothing spelled out. I could have run down the stairs and pushed into the drawing room and shouted that it wasn’t anything like so simple. Mrs. Maynard was bringing me out because her daughter Betsy had begged me to go through with it. “I can’t face being a deb without you!” she had said. Betsy and I were friends because, in the alphabetically arranged classroom at Arlinghurst, “Elizabeth” and “Elvira” happened to fall next to each other, and Betsy and I had both felt like misfits and clung to each
other ever since. I didn’t give more than half a damn about coming out and being presented to the Queen. What I wanted was to go to Oxford. You may think it was an odd ambition. Half the people I met did. Going by my born social status rather than my acquired one I couldn’t even hope to be admitted. Still, I had been interviewed and accepted at St. Hilda’s and had only the summer to wait before I went up. It was April already. Most girls I knew would have hated the idea of grinding away at their books, but I’d always found that side of things easy; it was parties that bored me. But Betsy and Uncle Carmichael had set their hearts on my coming out, so I had agreed I would do that first.
Besides all that, Mrs. Maynard was bringing me out because my uncle, who wasn’t really my uncle at all, was paying for me and subsidizing Betsy. However County the Maynards might be, they never had much money to spare, at least by their own standards. By the standards I’d grown up with they were impossibly rich, but by those of the people they moved among, they were struggling to keep up appearances. Anyway, people with money are often horribly mean; that was the first thing I’d learned when I’d started to move among them. But, sickeningly, none of that got a mention. Mrs. Maynard’s trailing off made it sound as if she was bringing me out despite my deficiencies because she was afraid of my uncle.
“Might I trouble you for a little more tea, dear?” Lady Bellingham asked.
The banisters were Victorian and rounded, like chair legs, with big round knobs on the newel posts. Between them I could see down into the hall, the faded cream wallpaper, the top of the mahogany side table and a crystal vase of pinky-white carnations. The house was narrow, like all Victorian London houses. I could see the drawing room door, which was open, but I couldn’t see in through it, so I didn’t know if Betsy was sitting there too. It seemed terribly important to find out if she was listening to all this without protest. I let go of my handful of skirt and slipped off my shoes, feeling absurd, knowing that while I was fairly safe from Mrs. Maynard, the servants could come out of the back part of the house at any time and catch me. They probably wouldn’t give me away, but it would still be frightfully embarrassing. I ran one hand lightly down the banister rail and tiptoed gingerly down the strip of carpet in the center of the stairs to the half-landing, where I could see through the drawing room door if I stretched a bit.
