'Think so?'
“Yes.”
'Then prove me wrong.' He bit off the words. A cloud covered the sun and Peter Whiteside stolidly held forth on Salisbury Plain, quoting from memory his file on the Fowler family.
Stephen Fowler had been pink, Whiteside insisted, as long ago as his undergraduate days at Princeton. 'It was during the Depression, don't forget,' Whiteside said, 'and that brought a lot of bright young men to some rather radical conclusions.'
Capitalism had failed both the nation and the Fowler family, Whiteside clipped along, and young Stephen sought an explanation. A student of history and political science, he wished symmetry in his solution. Marxism offered it in generous doses. There was further the romanticism of the era as well as the intellectualism. Stephen obviously thrived upon both as an undergraduate of Princeton and a divinity student at Yale.
'He traveled abroad and would have you believe he was in England and France,' Whiteside concluded. 'Which he was, for a while. But we suspect he made the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage,' Whiteside repeated for emphasis. 'All the way to the Kremlin wall and mother Russia itself. At that time he offered his services to Stalin's government and the offer was accepted. What he's doing in America now, I don't know, Laura. Whether he's an active agent or simply a pulpit propaganda pusher is another question, too. I don't know. We don't know. I'd wager even money that the American authorities themselves haven't the faintest clue as to what Stephen Fowler is up to. And to some degree it might not even matter. It doesn't even mean the man is evil or even any more dishonest than the rest of us. God knows, if Hitler steps another inch in any direction, we'll all be praying for the blood-thirsty Bolshevik army to step in and pin down fifty panzer divisions along the Vistula. Stephen's your husband and I hope you're happy. But you wanted to know, Laura. So I've told you.'
Peter Whiteside gently released her arm. He wore an expression that begged her forgiveness. Her own thoughts conflicted in more ways than they came together. And there was something very awkward and very terrible about the whole moment. For several seconds she lived and breathed in limbo. She was terribly shaken and knew it.
Yet, beneath this all, there was Stephen. Her Stephen. What right did these men like Peter, with the agencies of government behind them, have prying into the beliefs of a New Jersey minister?
“Do you have any proof as to what you’re saying, Peter?” she asked.
“Proof?” he repeated. “Sadly, no. Just theory, and we know an American fitting his description --
Laura rallied and interrupted. 'I curse you and all those like you, Peter,' she said in remarkably civil tones. 'Whatever my husband believes, it is his right to believe it. He's done nothing to you or anyone else, has he?'
Whiteside answered softly. 'Not that we know.'
'Then stay away from him. Let him live his life. For all I know, people like you are the reason he has to behave as he does.'
She turned to walk away from him, but his hand was on her arm again. 'Just one condition, Laura,' Peter Whiteside said.
She looked at him and waited.
'We spoke in confidence,' he said. 'You must respect that much. We spoke in strict confidence!'
'I'll give you that much, Peter,' she answered. 'But no more. I cherish you as a family friend. But don't come to me with any of your bloody cloak-and-dagger stuff ever again. It's a dishonorable, dirty activity. I don't like it. I refuse to take part in it.'
She turned away.
'Laura…?' he called as she left. 'Good luck to you, Laura. I mean it. Good luck to you.'
But she never looked back. She felt Peter Whiteside's eyes boring into her for several hundred yards as she hiked. Only once did she look over her shoulder and that was from a considerable distance. Peter was just a distant figure in black by then. Very small, he was, and very undistinguished and unimportant from that perspective. She was angry with herself for ever allowing him to get her so upset. What kind of world was it, after all, where grown men played such games?
*
She took the bus from High Street. When she arrived home there were raindrops again. She pushed through the iron gate before her father's home and, once indoors, saw the day's post waiting for her.
The letter from Stephen was on top. She set down her book and opened it. She began to read as she walked upstairs, thinking her father might be napping.
At the top of the stairs she stopped. She reread, as if Stephen's handwriting made no sense. But it did make sense. And her old Stephen had emerged from his year-and-a-half rumination.
…There is nothing in the world more precious than you, Laura… my own fault that you left me… more than anything else, I pray for your safe and early return… darling, Laura…
The phrases leaped out at her. It was as if a prayer had been answered. Laura yelled with joy. She ran from room to room looking for her father.
He was not in his bedroom, nor the sitting room. Her concern grew as she rushed downstairs, the letter still in her hand, and moved to his study where he often fell asleep on the couch. She still did not see him. She ran to the music room, the conservatory, and the library.
'Papa?… Papa!' No answer. She returned to the front door, where he often left a note if he had been called away suddenly. No note. And his raincoat was still on its hanger in the closet.
Frantic, she turned and looked in the kitchen in the rear of the main floor.
Then she saw her father. She stared in horror through the kitchen window and saw her father on the lawn behind the house. He was slumped in a frightful angle against one of his prized pear trees. From the distance, his face seemed ashen and lifeless, his arms at his side like those of a marionette with severed strings.
Then Laura was moving faster than she had ever moved in her life, She was down the back stairs to the pantry, out the back door, and across twenty yards of garden.
'No! No!' she shrieked, tears flowing down her cheeks now, mingling with the raindrops that failed to rouse her father.
Nigel Worthington did not move.
She slid to her knees beside him, embraced him, and yelled again, shaking him as if to raise him from the dead, and for half of a tormented moment, she thought that was exactly what she had done.
Dr. Worthington's eyes flickered dumbly, failed to focus, wandered, then zeroed in on his daughter.
'Papa!' she cried, half a gasp, half a plea.
'What the…?' he asked. He raised his arm and put it around Laura's shoulder.
'Can't a man take a nap without scaring his daughter half to death?' he asked.
She was crying so hard she was laughing now, or maybe it was the other way. 'No!' she said. 'Not under a tree in the rain!'
He looked around. He heard the rustle of raindrops on his fruit trees.
'It doesn't rain under trees,' he protested mildly. 'It only rains on trees.' He paused, rallied, wakened some more, and added, 'What's Stephen got to say?' he asked. 'The good-for-nothing parson wrote to you, did he?'
“He loves me, Papa!' she said. 'He still loves me! I'm booking passage. I'm going home!'
Nigel Worthington hugged his daughter as hard as he could. He laughed with her in a way in which he had once laughed with her mother. Then he reminded her of something that he had always believed; that sometimes things work out on their own.
Laura laughed with him, grinned, and nodded, now comfortable in the fact that, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, two men loved her and there were no silly rumors about the devil's tale beneath her skirts.
Or none, at least, that she had heard. She booked passage on a ship back to New York the next morning. On a whim, she choose the French Line over Cunard.
NINETEEN
On Monday, August 28, the German ambassadors to Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg announced that the Third Reich would respect the sovereignty and neutrality of those countries. On Wednesday, Hitler received from
