The bottle’s label said BALTICA, in Cyrillic script, and Sophie guessed they must have been somewhere in the Russian countryside. But who was the other woman?
Again, on the back of the photograph, in a handwriting that was unfamiliar to Sophie but that she guessed might have been her mother’s, a legend: Alan, Rosie, and Miss Elsa Blix, the words read, enjoying an uncharacteristic day of rest from their labors! August 1921.
Elsa Blix—Sophie had never heard the name before. She must ask Professor Bohr whether the woman had been another of the cohort of postdoctoral students at the institute—might she not have been a coworker at the Russian dynamite factory where Sophie’s parents had met their end, in an explosion that would occur less than two years after this picture had been taken?
Without more background information, Sophie could make little sense of either picture, so she turned next to the newspaper story, which she read with an increasing sense of disorientation and dismay.
MINISTRY ORDERS INVESTIGATION INTO SECRETIVE AGENCY. DIRECTORS FACE PROSECUTION UNDER HANSEATIC CODE OF HUMAN RIGHTS.
A police raid on the Adam Smith College in Buccleugh Place revealed a horrifying scene: dozens of young girls, many of them bearing grotesque surgical scars and suffering significant mental and physical impairments. They had entered what they thought was an elite training program for the crème de la crème of Scottish girlhood—the much-vaunted Institution for the Recruitment of Young Ladies for National Security, familiarly known as IRYLNS (pronounced “irons”). Instead they found themselves in a hell of electroshock treatments, neurochemical stimulation, and sexual abuse.
The girls of IRYLNS populate the corridors of power throughout this country, managing the offices of captains of industry and parliamentary ministers; their good looks, charming manners, and impeccable professionalism have made them some of the most sought-after female employees in the country. Meanwhile, the program’s “rejects” are hidden away in an archipelago of secret hospitals and institutions, sequestered in sealed units where doctors and nurses work to conceal these damaged girls from the public eye.
The institute’s director, Dr. Susan Ferrier, was not available for comment, but will be required to answer questions should the rumored parliamentary inquiry proceed. Cofounder Tabitha Hunter, former president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research and a prominent member of Edinburgh society, issued a written statement proclaiming her belief that no sacrifice is too great when it comes to Scotland’s security, and stating that the accusations about abuse have been much exaggerated. She said she had no regrets about her involvement in the scheme, and argued that its failures had to be put in the context of exceptional and widespread success.
Further revelations will doubtless emerge in coming days, not just about the brutalities inflicted upon these innocent young girls but about the scandalous past of one of Scotland’s pillars of respectability.
Was this a veiled suggestion that Great-aunt Tabitha had a scandalous past? It seemed nearly inconceivable, but then Sophie still couldn’t understand how even this assault on her great-aunt’s beloved IRYLNS could have driven Tabitha Hunter to kill herself.
She contemplated the two remaining documents. Which one to open first? She chose the slighter one, broke the seal on the outside, and found inside a notarized copy of what seemed to be a birth certificate. It was Sophie’s father’s birth certificate, she realized a moment later—but why should Great-aunt Tabitha have chosen to send it to Sophie now?
Then she took a second look, feeling as though the wind had been knocked out of her.
Sophie had never known her grandparents, but she had always understood her father to be the son of one of Tabitha’s first cousins. He had been orphaned at a young age, like Sophie herself—she believed his parents had died in a skiing accident—and then been taken in and raised by Great-aunt Tabitha, out of the fondness of her heart conjoined with a strong desire to ensure the survival of the Hunter line.
But the spot on the birth certificate for the father’s name was blank, while the mother’s was quite clearly and explicitly filled in: Tabitha Hunter, spinster.
Sophie’s father had been Tabitha’s illegitimate child!
Tabitha—a mother?
Great-aunt Tabitha hadn’t been Sophie’s great-aunt at all, but her grandmother!
The conclusion was inescapable. Sophie’s hands seemed to act independently of her mind as they shuffled the picture of Tabitha and Alfred Nobel out of the pile. She looked at it again now with a horrid surmise.
There was no father named on the birth certificate, but it would have been very natural for the unmarried Tabitha to keep the father’s name secret—indeed, she must have gone to considerable trouble to suppress the fact of having given birth to a child, for Sophie had never heard even a whisper of a stain on Tabitha’s blemishless reputation. There must have been a ruthless eradication of evidence— presumably Tabitha’s belief in the power of truth and her respect for the historical record had won out over the need for secrecy and respectability, but Sophie guessed it would have been a close call.
But Sophie knew her great-aunt’s—her grandmother’s!— way of thinking. Taken together with the birth certificate, the message of the photograph was unequivocal.
Tabitha wanted Sophie to know that Alfred Nobel was the father of her child. That meant Nobel was Sophie’s grandfather.
Sophie involuntarily heaved a huge sigh. What would Tabitha spring on her in the letter?
It was almost a relief when Fru Petersen at that moment called her to supper. The letter could wait till afterward. Sophie had to force herself to swallow the chicken and dumplings she was served, and she ate her plate of stewed fruit and custard so absentmindedly that she could not even have said, once the china had been cleared, whether the fruit had been plums or apricots. Mikael wanted to play checkers, but Sophie made her excuses and returned to the bedroom, throwing herself down on the bed and removing the letter from the waistband of her skirt, where she had tucked the entire envelope of materials for safekeeping.
Friday, ten o’clock
My dear Sophie,
It is with deepest regret that I set pen to paper to wish you farewell. As a child, my heart thrilled to the heroic deeds of the ancient Romans. It seems ludicrous now, but I thought myself a sort of junior Cato or Brutus, and practiced falling on my “sword”: in reality, a rake I had filched from the garden shed at Heriot Row—for as you know, Sophie, I grew up in the same house where you spent your childhood, though you should feel no obligation to keep it if it proves a millstone—the lawyers will administer the trust on your behalf, and when you are twenty-five you may decide how to dispose of the property, with the exception of my books and papers. The former, of course, will go to the library at the Society for Psychical Research, while the latter will be sealed for fifty years and placed in the archive of the National Library.
By the time you read this, I will be dead. A melodramatic pronouncement! Alas, despite that youthful admiration for Socrates and Seneca, I had not imagined I would ever be put in a position where the most attractive avenue available to me was death by my own hand. You will have read at least the initial newspaper story about IRYLNS. Susan Ferrier is determined to see things through, and believes that some remnant of the program may be salvaged. She intends to testify in support of our cherished scheme. But as the events of the past few weeks have unfolded, I have come to deem myself so great a liability that my continuing presence on the scene can only further discredit a program whose successes are everywhere evident and whose few blemishes—nay, I will use the word failures—are now receiving undue attention from a country forgetful of what it owes to several generations of young women willing to give up their own pleasures and potential for the sake of the greater good.
I stray from the matter of my letter! When did the habit of digression creep upon me? What you do not know, Sophie, is that one of the reporters responsible for the story about to appear in the Scotsman has got hold
of some highly incriminating information about my past, and his threat to expose it, though I would not shrink from the scandal merely on my own account, is part of a plot I will not brook! He means to halt all the progress we’ve made at IRYLNS, to disband the program and send all the girls home to their families, thereby depriving the country of one of its most valuable resources at a time of great—one might even say the greatest—need.
If you have looked at the other things I enclosed for Mr. Erskine to send to your attention in København, you will not be surprised when I confess to you the deepest secret I ever kept: I gave birth to your father myself, and covered up his origins so successfully that not just the world at large but even he himself never suspected it.
The summer after I finished my undergraduate degree, I went to Italy. I have no remorse. I fell in love, I forgot myself. . . .
At the time I made the choice to cover up my transgression (as some would call it, though in truth it has always struck me as unfair how unequal the consequences should be for the man and the woman in such cases), giving birth to a child outside of marriage would have been enough to exclude me forever from circles of respectability. Alfred Nobel was already married, though he and his wife had been separated for the best part of a decade. Marriage was therefore out of the question, and I cannot honestly say that marrying Alfred would have suited my own idea of what I was meant to do in life: perhaps in the future marriage will become less restrictive, but not, I think, in our own time (and I use the pronoun our advisedly, Sophie, for there has hardly been much change on this front over the forty-odd years I’ve spent working on behalf of women’s equality). Ah, again I digress!
I suppose, Sophie, this is all more difficult and unpleasant for me than I am quite comfortable saying.
I knew I was with child, and that I would need Alfred’s help to conceal my condition in circumstances of reasonable comfort and propriety. He willingly settled an annuity upon me, and I took a room in a pension in Switzerland. Alfred was very sorry that I would not marry him, but as I told him, if he had wanted a divorce from his wife, he could have obtained it at any point during their separation, and I did not choose to precipitate so dramatic and necessarily public a rearrangement of his personal circumstances.
I gave birth late that spring to a baby boy—your father, Alan Hunter—and hired a wet nurse for him. I also began to fabricate a history that would later account for his presence in my life in Scotland, meanwhile returning to Edinburgh and picking up the threads of my real life.
Nobody thought twice the year after, when I became the guardian of a cousin’s child, an infant boy—it was generally accepted (it is what he always believed himself) that he had been tragically orphaned in an avalanche in the Alps—and I was able to watch over Alan’s education very closely, though of course he never knew that I was his mother. There was no need for him to possess a piece of information momentous enough that a child might have found it difficult to keep the secret—just as I never saw fit to tell you, Sophie, that the story about your father’s adoption was a falsehood.
It was a very great blow to me when your father was killed. I hardly knew your mother, but she surely made Alan very happy, and (I believe) he her; the letters he sent in the months before his death were full of excitement about his life with the two of you, as well as about the project he was working on. I know little of that work beyond the fact that it grew out of what he had done at Bohr’s institute; your mother became increasingly involved in it, too. The other person who loomed large in those letters was a slightly shadowy figure called Elsa Blix. She is the other woman in the second photograph I have enclosed—your mother spoke very highly of her, and your father seemed taken with her to a point only just this side of idolatry, but I detected some cooling off in the last few letters I ever received from him. Unlike your parents, Miss Blix was not killed in the accident, and it may be that she is the person living who can give you the fullest account of your parents’ last months. You have been very good, Sophie, about not pestering me with questions I was in some instances unable but perhaps more often merely unwilling to answer; I suspect, though, that the desire to uncover more of that story may live still in your heart.
I take other secrets with me to my grave, secrets that have nothing to do with our family and that will be revealed to future historians only when the archive is unsealed. I have set the date far enough in the future that (should civilization survive so long, which is by no means a certainty should we continue on the present trajectory) such revelations as may emerge from the pages of my letters and diaries will bring down no governments.
I regret that my decision to conceal this significant chapter in my early life may have colored my subsequent dealings with those to whom I should have been closest—but I trust you will believe it to be only the truth when I subscribe myself, this one and only time, as your fond grandmother,
Tabitha Hunter
The mixture of feelings Sophie experienced in the wake of the packet’s revelations could not be described. She felt betrayed; she felt vindicated; she felt illuminated; she felt mystified. She was very tempted to confide in Mikael, but she shrank (she knew it was old-fashioned) from sharing with him something that touched so explicitly on Great-aunt Tabitha’s sexual past.
After a very inattentive day at school, during which she earned several reprimands, Sophie decided that there was one actual concrete puzzle she could do something about, and she went straight from the tram stop to find Bohr in his office.
Even through her preoccupied haze, Sophie caught some worrying bits of conversation as the secretary put various telephone calls through to Bohr—it sounded as though the president of Sweden and the Finnish minister of defense were both impatient to speak with him, and Sophie couldn’t help but wonder whether the precarious peace between Europe and the New Hanseatic League might be now really and truly reaching its final days.
When Sophie finally got in to see him, Bohr looked even more harried than usual. He offered her a piece of a gigantic American chocolate bar that sat half-unwrapped on his desk, then asked her how she was doing.
“I don’t have long, I’m afraid, Sophie,” he added. “It’s tricky just now—this time it really seems as though the Finns aren’t going to back down. With Scotland’s support and a bit of egging on from the Baltic states, they’re saying that European incursions into Lithuania mustn’t be allowed to continue—who knows where this will all end. . . .”
“I can come back another time,” Sophie offered, sorry that her own personal troubles should impinge on Bohr’s hugely more consequential geopolitical concerns.
“No, no,” Bohr said, though his eye strayed to the clock.
“I will make it quick,” Sophie promised. “There were all sorts of curious things in that packet, but one of the oddest was a picture of my parents with a woman called Elsa Blix.”
“Elsa Blix!” Bohr said. “Yes, indeed, she overlapped with your father at the institute, and though I do not know that her contributions to the project were enormous, she was out there in Russia for most of the time your father was working for Nobel. I gathered that they had some sort of falling-out—she must have been gone for at least a month or two before the factory blew up.”
“What led to their disagreement, do you remember?” Sophie asked.
“I fear it is not a question of remembering—it is something I never knew. None of us did. There were rumors, of course, and malicious gossip hinted that your mother had suspected Elsa of setting her cap at Alan and asked her to leave. I do not believe a word of it myself. Elsa was a singularly ambitious young woman, and it is far more likely that she felt her advancement there to be limited and sought greener pastures elsewhere—the woman I knew would have been unlikely to let something to do with personal relationships get in the way of her career.”
“Do you know where I might find her now?” said Sophie.
“She has become quite prominent in certain circles,” Bohr said thoughtfully, “thoug
h I would not say that her name is generally known. It is many years since she could be described as a pure research scientist, though she was an unusually talented experimentalist—she had the hands for it, as well as the intelligence and the imagination. She had a special interest in explosives, and though it is a reductive name for a role of some complexity, I would have to describe her now as a weapons dealer.”
“A weapons dealer?” Sophie echoed. It was the last thing she had expected him to say.
“They call her the Snow Queen,” said Bohr, his gaze gone somehow misty and vague. “She is rumored to have built herself a stronghold on the remote island of Spits-bergen above the Arctic Circle. If that’s true, it’s an extraordinary place to have chosen to put a factory; it’s virtually inaccessible for whole chunks of the year, and the weather is truly wretched! On the other hand, the island itself is very rich in raw materials, with a well-developed mining industry, so I suppose she must find it worth her while.”
“If I wrote her a letter,” Sophie asked, “do you think she would be able to tell me anything valuable about my parents?”
“I don’t know, Sophie,” Bohr said gently, though Sophie thought he looked wary. “I’m not a great admirer of Miss Blix, in case you hadn’t gathered. I suppose she may well know something that would be worth learning, but I’d approach the whole project of contacting her with considerable caution.”
Sophie felt discouraged. In any case, it wasn’t as though one could just write a letter to Elsa Blix and inscribe the word Spitsbergen underneath the name and expect it to reach her. But her mood brightened when Bohr added, “Let me ask a question or two to put things in motion, Sophie. Alfred Nobel will almost certainly be able to tell me how to find her. I will also see if I can learn exactly what she’s up to these days—I would like us to have a little more information before we proceed.”
Invisible Things Page 6
