Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)

by Ian Tregillis

  “I’m not sure there’s room,” I managed.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” she said. “I promise you’ll not get drummed out for being PWP.”

  PWP. Pregnant Without Permission. Liv had been in the WAAF. Up with a lark and to bed with a Wren, as the saying went.…

  I wondered if she’d always teased other men like this when I had been her young husband. But I wanted her to do more than tease me. Oh, yes.

  I sat, gently. My clothes stuck to my skin in the close air of the shelter. The heat left me delirious. Sitting on the low cot roused the ache in my bad knee.

  Liv sang quietly to our baby. Agnes’s eyes slid closed when she drowsed off, but opened again when the thunder of the bombing raid shook the ground beneath our feet. A reverberating crash left the Anderson ringing.

  We sat in the half light, sweat trickling down our skin, while Jerry rained bombs on London. The explosions drew closer, sweeping across the East End until they were all around us.

  When Liv inhaled, her weight shifted just enough to brush my knee with hers. The slight pressure pushed all thought from my head and filled the void with a crushing awareness of her. I silently wished her to hold each breath, just to prolong the contact for a few seconds. Just once. Just for me.

  She’s not yours, I told myself.

  We might have been killed at any moment. But the bombing raid was the furthest thing from my mind. The effort to ignore Liv left me trembling.

  “Are you frightened, Commander?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.” But not of the Germans, not of the Luftwaffe. Not at that moment. No, I was afraid of myself. Afraid of what I wanted.

  I wanted my younger self never to return. I wanted him to leave Liv a widow.

  Wanted to scoop her up. Wanted to lay her down.

  Would Gretel grant me that boon? Would she destroy him, that I could live? I could take up his life so easily.

  Airily, Liv said, “You have something on my husband, then.” I flinched. Liv must have noticed, but she made no point of it. “Raybould would never admit to being frightened by a few Jerry airplanes.”

  “He’s a fool.” Maybe I’d have a reprieve if I got under her skin. Drew out that sharp tongue. But Liv was having none of it. Instead she fell silent for a moment. I could feel her eyes on me, studying the wreckage of my face.

  “It was queer, what you said earlier.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “‘Is it still in the shelter,’ you said.”

  Damn. “Nothing strange about that. It seemed reasonable you’d have a bag prepared in the shelter.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Odd way of phrasing it.”

  Inwardly, I sighed. That was Liv. Once she got something into her teeth she wouldn’t let it go. My discomfort drew her as blooded water drew a shark. Dishonesty riled her, but condescension infuriated her, and now she sensed I was guilty of one or both.

  Once she decided I was hiding something she’d pick and pick again until I relented. It drove me mad. Because it didn’t matter one jot whether I was being truthful; once she got it into her head that I wasn’t, nothing could convince her otherwise. More than a few fights had started this way.

  “Don’t you agree?” she prodded. She shifted Agnes in her arms. Now Liv’s knee rested against mine. Physical contact stoked the fire inside me; searing desire torched a hole through my ability to think clearly. The tightness in my trousers became a pinch.

  “Why—” I caught myself. Dared to look at her.

  Auburn hair shining with lamplight. Not yours. Sweet breath. She’s not yours. Freckles on milk-pale skin. You’re not her husband. Breasts …

  I wasn’t strong or brave or honorable enough to stand and distance myself from her. Instead I leaned, just enough to break the contact. A fraction of an inch, but room enough to think. My inclination was to rise to Liv’s bait. Defend myself. Become defensive. But I didn’t dare act naturally. What would Raybould Marsh never do?

  “You’re right, Olivia. I apologize. I waited here in the Anderson before speaking to your husband.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I knew it.”

  “I truly am sorry.”

  The cacophony of battle swallowed Liv’s response. The drone of bombers, the chuff-chuff-chuff of antiaircraft guns, the ceaseless crash and rumble of detonations. Agnes began to cry. Another nearby hit shook the earth and nearly tossed Liv to the floor. I caught her.

  We held each other while the Luftwaffe did its best to destroy London.

  7 September 1940

  Berlin, Germany

  Marsh’s captors finally came for him a month and a half after the Eidolonic visitation. He’d tried to convince himself that it had been a nightmare. Why would Milkweed locate him, then leave him to rot? It didn’t make sense. If they didn’t intend to set him free, Stephenson’s only alternative would have been to silence him. But that hadn’t happened either, though Marsh had prayed for it.

  At first he thought the scrape and rattle of a key in the lock was also an echo from some deep corner of his imagination. But then light flooded into his cell, painful as railroad spikes to the eyes. Strong arms hauled him to his feet, but Marsh could stand on his own. They’d fed him regularly. Marsh reckoned that was Gretel’s doing.

  A hard shove sent him stumbling into the corridor. The light here was even worse, painful even through his eyelids. He lowered his head. Long, greasy strands of hair fell over his eyes, helped to shield them from the glare.

  “Shit, he reeks,” somebody said. “How long has he been down here?”

  “A few months.”

  Marsh couldn’t smell anything. He’d become inured to the smell of the privy bucket.

  “We can’t put him in front of the Reichsführer like this. He won’t tolerate it.”

  “He won’t care. He’s seen worse.”

  “He hasn’t smelled worse. Not in his own office.”

  Marsh swallowed. They were taking him to Himmler. This had to be why Gretel sent him here. She wanted Marsh to be in Himmler’s presence on this day. Why? What was he supposed to do? Why didn’t she tell him? And what would happen if he got it wrong?

  “Well, let’s hose him down. Quickly.”

  They pushed him along the corridor into a room that echoed, as though it were a large empty space with walls of brick or concrete. Stripped him. Sprayed him with frigid water, hard enough to leave welts. It pounded at every aching part of his body, all the bruises caused by sleeping and exercising on bare concrete. The chill penetrated to the marrow in his bones. His breath came in gasps.

  Marsh had rolled into a ball on the floor before they finished. He clutched his knees, teeth chattering.

  By the time the guards had wrestled him into clothes that weren’t crusted with grime, his eyes had remembered how to filter out the worst of the light. He could crack them open without overwhelming pain. His first glimpse of SS Haus showed nothing but a slotted drain in the center of a slick gray concrete floor. Water trickled through the stubble of his beard, dripped to his feet. The too-small shoes pressed painfully against his overgrown toenails.

  They pulled his arms behind him and cuffed them at the wrists. From the shower they led him through a series of doors in what appeared to have been a laundry at one time but which was now filled with filing cabinets. Marsh also spied a cavernous room carved into the bedrock beneath the hotel. It had the look of a wine cellar, though this, too, was filled with row upon row of shelves and files. Somewhere nearby resided the Schutzstaffel operational records of the REGP. Marsh staved off dispiriting thoughts of needles and haystacks by concentrating on his mission. Gretel had put him in place to do this, and now it was up to him to seize the opportunity when it arose. If Himmler didn’t have him executed.

  The Reichsführer’s office resided on the top floor, three stories above Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. It was, in every way, the diametrical opposite of von Westarp’s nest at the farm. Where the doctor’s inner sanctum embodied chaotic disorder, the Reichsführer-SS ke
pt his office clean, precise, orderly. The stacks of paper on his desk were clearly kept to a minimum, and their arrangement reminded Marsh of soldiers at parade inspection: not a single corner out of true, all aligned with the straight edges of the desk. On the walls hung photographs of Himmler with the Führer; Himmler inspecting Waffen-SS troops; Himmler at a rally, a little girl in blond braids on his lap. The girl must have been his daughter, Gudrun.

  Sunlight glinted from the wings of a glazed porcelain eagle on Himmler’s desk. Several more pieces of Allach porcelain adorned the shelves. Each was pure white, like the eagle, and decorated with a different arrangement of swords, swastikas, eagles, and wreaths. Some were stamped JULFEST 1937, JULFEST 1938, JULFEST 1939. The most colorful object in the room was a gilt and painted porcelain figurine depicting Frederick the Great on horseback.

  Himmler himself sat with hands rested flat on the desk, framing a pair of folders laid before him. The trimmed and manicured nails on his soft, pink hands came off distinctly feminine. He had a round, puffy face which, coupled with one of the weakest chins Marsh had ever seen, gave him a neotenic appearance. Like von Westarp, he wore wire-rimmed spectacles with round frames, though the lenses in Himmler’s pince-nez were thinner than the doctor’s. Himmler’s blue-gray eyes reminded Marsh of Reinhardt, but while the salamander’s gaze shone with fanaticism, the Reichsführer’s unemotional stare might have been at home on the face of a banker or actuary.

  Himmler dismissed the guards. They left Marsh standing in the center of the office, hands still cuffed behind him. The leader of the Schutzstaffel hardly moved while Marsh was brought before him. Only when the two men were alone did he show any sign of being something other than a wax figure.

  He opened the folders side by side. Marsh glimpsed the word REICHSBEHÖRDE on one; AHNENERBE, WILIGUT, and IRMINENSCHAFT on the other.

  “Tell me about the warlocks,” said Himmler. “Tell me about their magic.”

  Marsh kept his eyes downcast. It gave him the posture of an obedient prisoner. It also enabled him to read the filing numbers stamped on the folders.

  12 October 1940

  Walworth, London, England

  A month of bombing rendered Marsh’s neighborhood unrecognizable. The Germans had attacked London every night for a month straight with no sign of stopping; they’d sent bombers during daylight, too, for most of September. That had begun with a particularly heavy pounding of the East End. It was as though a band of fairy-tale goblins stole into the city each night, but rather than pinching children from their beds and replacing them with changelings, they swapped entire buildings for heaping piles of shattered brick, broken timber, shards of glass and heirloom china.

  Will made it a point to check on Liv regularly. She refused to leave the city. She wouldn’t put words to it, but he knew she was waiting for her missing husband to return. Foolish girl. He’d have nothing to return to if the Anderson shelter in the garden took a direct hit.

  In fact—

  The taxi slid to a halt. Ice congealed at the bottom of Will’s stomach when he looked through the windscreen. A new rubble pile, still smoking in places, had slumped into the roadway. Just a few streets from Liv’s house. One of Jerry’s bombs had cratered a terraced house, obliterating the center and leaving the homes on either side open to the elements. Will glimpsed a Wren uniform still hanging in a wardrobe. It fluttered in the breeze. Wreckage of the pulverized unit had run into the street like a landslide, tearing down everything along the way except for a bright red postbox sticking up straight and proud from the debris. The top of the rubble was heaped higher than the top of Will’s taxi. A quartet of rescue men clambered over the pile, carrying a stretcher. Will looked away.

  His visits to Walworth had become a study in anxiety. Liv’s luck wouldn’t last forever. Nobody’s would, if the bombing didn’t let up soon. He didn’t much care if the Kensington flat took a hit. But if something were to happen to Liv or Agnes while Marsh was away …

  Traffic inched past the obstruction under the direction of a man in denim overalls far too large for him and a forage cap far too small for him. His armlet was printed with the letters L.D.V. though the Local Defense Volunteers had months ago become the Home Guard, on Churchill’s suggestion.

  Will could smell gas. Not uncommon these days. But the rescue men were about in force, and the Home Guard were letting traffic through, so the leak must’ve been plugged.

  The driver cleared the obstruction and accelerated again. Will’s mouth went dry, as it always did when they rounded the corner. But the house came into view looking apparently none the worse for the previous night’s bombing. He released a pent-up breath.

  His voice cracked when he said, “Hi, hi, driver, you can let me here, thanks.”

  Will tossed the man a five-pound note. The taxi driver blinked twice. He opened his mouth to object, but Will was already on the pavement.

  “Wait here a bit, won’t you? There’s a good fellow.”

  The driver shrugged. He maneuvered the car aside so that it didn’t block the road, then killed the engine. He pulled the brim of his flatcap across his eyes, crossed his arms, and dropped his head until the second of his chins brushed his chest.

  Will walked the rest of the way, struggling to conquer the cold hollow in his gut. It seemed concern for Liv’s well-being had taken months off his life. He’d found a gray hair in the mirror yesterday. He rehearsed his arguments, vowing to convince her to put her stubbornness aside and get out of the city while she could. She could be mulish as her husband at times. Will supposed that made them a good match, although he’d always thought Liv to be more sensible than that.

  Things didn’t look as if Marsh were likely to return any time soon. Not that he’d mention that.

  It is here. It is far away.

  Almost three months on, and the warlocks still hadn’t deciphered what the Eidolon had said about Marsh before it decided to go on a stroll and terrorize half of Westminster.

  Nobody understood how that had happened, either.

  Musical laughter came from inside the house. Liv had company. Will was glad for that. Things had been difficult for Liv since her husband had up and disappeared someplace even the Eidolons couldn’t articulate.

  He knocked. She opened the door, still talking over her shoulder to somebody in the den. Her eyes widened, along with her grin, when she saw him. “Will! Hello!”

  He doffed his bowler. “And hello to you, my dear. Thought I’d drop in, be certain that you and the little one are none the worse for last night’s festivities.”

  Liv’s expression clouded over. “Dreadful thing. Let’s not dwell on it.” She ushered him inside, closed the door, and brightened. “But I’m glad you’re here, Will. I’d like to introduce you to a friend.”

  Will followed her into the den, where he stopped in his tracks, and found himself speechless. For sitting in the den, rocking Agnes’s bassinet, was none other than Lieutenant-Commander Liddell-Stewart. Will couldn’t have been more shocked had she been playing hostess to Mussolini and Hitler.

  An awkward silence pervaded the room, pregnant as a doe rabbit in June. They blinked at each other. Liv jumped in, smoothing over the unease she interpreted as Will’s reaction to the commander’s scars.

  “I’d hoped for a chance to introduce you. I think you’ll get on famously,” she said. “Commander, this is my dear friend Lord William Beauclerk. Will, this is Commander Jonathan Liddell-Stewart.”

  Liddell-Stewart stood. “Lieutenant-commander,” he mumbled in his broken voice.

  Will tried to recover as best he could. He crossed the room, stuck out his hand. “A pleasure,” he said.

  “Likewise,” said the commander. A stiff and cordial handshake. “Olivia speaks highly of you. Lord William.”

  “Just Will, if you prefer.”

  “I wouldn’t presume to be so familiar.”

  The commander was rigid. Uncomfortable. As well he ought. Just what the devil was he doing here?

>   “I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything important.”

  Liv said, “Heavens, no. The commander had kindly offered to mend the kitchen sink, but when you knocked I was just explaining that I’m saving that for Raybould. It’s one of the first things I’ll have him do when he returns. Even if I have to chain him in the kitchen until it’s done. He’ll spend hours in that garden of his, but ask him to mend a leaky faucet and you’d think I asked him to wrestle down the moon. But you don’t care to hear about that.” She motioned Will to sit, pointed at the tea service. “Cup?”

  Will declined. “I won’t be long.”

  The commander said, “Indeed? Then what brings you by, Lord William?”

  “Oh, I like to check on our Olivia and little Agnes from time to time. Especially now that the Luftwaffe has taken to visiting so regularly,” said Will. He again turned to Liv. “I had a bit of a scare in the taxi just now. Did you know there was a hit just a few streets over?”

  Liv nodded, sadly. “We felt it in the shelter.”

  We? Now that was interesting. At least the commander had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “Perhaps,” Will said, “you should consider what I said about visiting your aunt.”

  The commander sat ramrod straight, fast enough to slop tea over the lip of his cup. “No!”

  Will and Liv both turned to stare at him. He wiped his hand on his trousers, rasping, “I think that’s a bad idea.”

  Liv explained, gently, “The commander thinks we’re better off in London.”

  Ah. So that’s it. That’s why Liv hasn’t seen fit to leave the city for a while. Liv’s obstinacy isn’t the issue. It’s the commander. But why?

  “Does he, now?” Will pointed to the window. “Excuse me, but have you seen it out there?”

  But the commander’s attention had fallen on sleeping Agnes. He laid his hand on the bassinet again, slowly rocking it forward and back. “Williton isn’t safe,” he said.

  “Really? Is there a second bombing campaign we’ve not heard about? Because unless that’s the case, I think you’re talking nonsense.”