“I owe you everything,” she said. “I want you to know how much I respect you for this. Like Julian, you’ll write history rather than
“What rubbish! You’ve been reading too many posters. Nothing’s happened up there in months. The only attacks are launched by the lice. It’ll simply be a time without bathing, that’s all. Just like Eton, actually.”
“Robert?”
“Stop that damned crying and let me shake your hand,” Florry said. “You shall have your adventures and I shall have mine.”
She tried to smile but it was wrecked by the intensity of her emotion. Florry took her hand and meant to shake it primly and ironically and angrily after their sweet night together. But he surprised himself by pulling her to him. Everybody on the train was cheering and making suggestions of what to do with a lovely young girl and he didn’t give a damn. He could see her eyes widen in surprise as he brought her close and he brought her closer, feeling all the war gear on his back encumbering him, but he didn’t care about that, either. He crushed her body in his arms, taking pleasure in it, feeling the give and yield of her slight bones, smelling the soft sweetness of her, and he kissed her, hard, on the mouth.
“There,” he said, speaking quite brutally. “Now that’s a proper send-off for a soldier boy, eh? Now smile. Show Florry some teeth, darling.”
She looked at him, shocked.
The train whistled and began to move.
“Good-bye, Sylvia. I’ll put in a good word for you to Julian. Perhaps you and he can have tea when this is finished.” He jumped up on the doorstep of the train as it pulled out of the station. He hung there until he could see her no longer, and then they pulled him aboard, cheering and happy for the romantic Englishman.
He hated her. He loved her.
Damn the woman!
13
THE MAJOR
In London, it was well after midnight. Holly-Browning had become almost a vampire: he lived by night, as if the sun’s touch were lethal. He sat, isolated, chalky complected, his eyes black-ringed, working with furious concentration on the message Vane had so recently brought up from Signals.
The major had a gift for codes, or at least an enthusiasm for them. The message was encrypted in the standard Playfair cipher of the British army, and he had no difficulty pulling its meaning from the nonsense of the letter groups that faced him. He merely compared them against a square formation ? five letters by five letters ? from the key group and extracted, off the diagonal, the bigram of each two-letter unit. The key group, curiously enough, was always drawn from a verse of standard English poetry; the code was made secure by changing the key ? the verse ? each week, by prearranged schedule. That week’s verse happened to be from one of the major’s favorites, Rupert Brooke. “If I should die, think only this of me,” it went, “there’s some foreign field that’s forever England.”
Sampson’s dispatch yielded its secrets and its purposes swiftly and cleanly as the letter groups tumbled into words, the words into sentences. When the major was done, he sat back. It was a longish document, nicely crafted, tightly constructed, succinctly covering recent developments.
Yet it struck the major with a peculiar, cold authority. He looked to the fire, which had burned low, and felt the shame come across him like a shudder.
A soft noise sounded in the darkness and he looked up to see Vane standing silhouetted against the illumination of the open door.
“Yes, Vane?”
“Sir, I wondered if there’s a reply?”
“No, I think not,” said the major, and as effortlessly as he had arrived, Vane began to slip away.
“Vane, stop. Do come in.”
“Sir, I?”
“No, I insist.”
Vane padded vaguely through the darkness and took the leather chair opposite Holly Browning’s desk.
“Drink, Vane?”
“No, sir.”
“I’ve got some very fine brandy. I’ve some whiskey. I’ve got a bottle of scotch barley somewhere and I’ve?”
“Thank you, sir, but?”
“No, that’s fine. Suit yourself.” He removed the bottle and a glass from his desk, poured himself a finger of brandy, brought it up, and swallowed it quickly. He remembered the stuff from 1916, when extra rations had been issued before the big jump-off at the Somme. It had certainly came in handy
“It’s very good, Vane. Are you sure you won’t have any?”
“No, sir.”
“As you wish. Good heavens, these have been long days, haven’t they?” He had no idea how to make conversation.
“Yessir. If I may say, sir, you really are working too hard. Wouldn’t want to damage one’s health.”
“Working?” the major said, pouring himself another finger of the brandy. “Actually, I’m not working at all. Sampson’s doing the work. Sampson and poor Florry.”
“Perhaps you should take a holiday, sir.”
“Er, perhaps I should. Perhaps I will, too. Vane, tell me. Have you ever been to Moscow?”
“No, I haven’t, sir.”
“All right. Come with me. I’ll show you something.”
The major rose and walked from behind his desk to the window, a journey of just a few paces. There, he threw the heavy curtain. They looked from MI-6’s old Broadway offices just a few blocks toward the Thames and the gaudy, crenellated buildings of Parliament. It was utterly peaceful, a serene composition off a Yule card. The moon, a bright half circle, shone in the sky at the center of a blur of radiance and its cold chill touched everything, especially a sheath of new-dusted snow that lay upon the roof of Westminster Abbey.
“Vane, what do you see?”
“Nothing, sir. Silent London. That’s all.”
“Look over at Whitehall.”
“One can hardly see it, sir. All the lights are out.”
“They are, indeed. Think of it, Vane, all those empty offices, locked and silent. All those chaps gone home, now in bed or reading or working at their hobbies or off to the theater, what have you. But the truth is, at this precise moment, so certain is the British government of its place in the world and the stability of its empire, it can actually afford to cease to exist for a full twelve hours. Every day, the British government disappears for twelve hours. Extraordinary, isn’t it? A daylight government.”
Vane said nothing, as if the thought had never occurred to him.
“Vane, in Moscow in the winter of ’nineteen and again in ’twenty-three, the lights were never out. They blazed away each evening until dawn. Those chaps were figuring out ways to beat us. They were, Vane. Strategems, ploys, plots, subversions. They were like Wells’s Martian intelligences, cool and implacable. It used to haunt me, those burning lights. Our people in Moscow with the embassy, they tell me that the lights burn brighter than ever these nights.”
“Surely, sir, they are merely attempting to figure out ways to get their electric plants to cease from conking out every two weeks or learning how to get their harvests in on time under that terrible?”
