Bitter Seeds

Lambeth Bridge. Stephenson's driver swung the car north on Millbank when they passed beneath a granite obelisk and its pineapple finial at the far side of the Thames.

Soon Victoria Tower loomed out of the night, a square stone giant wrapped in fog and lamplight. They passed the Perpendicular Gothic filigrees of Westminster Palace: Tudor details on a classic body, as somebody once said. Marsh noted the gradations where the crumbling Yorkshire limestone was being replaced with honey-colored clipsham.

They skirted Parliament Square, passed the Cenotaph, and continued north onto Whitehall.

“Sir, where are we going?”

Stephenson turned. “Do you know what I miss the most about the old days?”

“Your arm?”

“Ha. Cheeky lad,” said the older man. “No. Back then, we didn't have so many damnable meetings. Now it's all we ever do.” His eyes twinkled. “This one's a bit above your regular pay grade, I'm afraid. I trust you won't mind, just this once.”

Oh, hell. That meant sitting in a room full of tossers who would discount Marsh the moment he opened his mouth. He'd had quite enough of that at university.

The car passed through the narrow arch of a long, low screen into the courtyard of a pseudo-Palladian three-story brick building. The Admiralty.

Marsh followed Stephenson through a side door into a neoclassical rabbit warren. Their footsteps echoed through marble colonnades, twisting stairwells, and narrow corridors. At length the older man stopped before a single door of simple walnut. He knocked.

A pale man—any one of countless bureaucrats in this lightless den, Marsh thought—ushered them into a dark room. Marsh smelled brandy and the mustiness of old paper when he stepped inside. A pair of brass lamps with jade-green lampshades stood on twin davenports flanking the room. The lamps cast their illumination in tight circles near the center of the room, leaving the periphery in deep shadows.

Fabric rustled in one corner of the room, as of somebody shifting in a chair. Elsewhere somebody suffered a coughing fit. Deep shadows, but not empty.

“About time, Stephenson.” A man with a great aquiline nose glanced at his pocket watch. Marsh recognized the Earl Stanhope, First Lord of the Admiralty.

Marsh leaned toward Stephenson. “Sir,” he whispered, “may I ask what I'm doing here?”

“I'd like you to tell these gentlemen”—his gesture encompassed the room, shadows and all—”about your experience in Spain.”

“It's all in my report, sir.”

“Yes ... but I believe they should hear it straight from you. Indulge me.”

Marsh did. He took care to emphasize the peculiar nature of the fire, its rapidity as well as the conspicuous absence of petrol, oil, and other smells. For their part, his audience appeared to take the story in stride. But Marsh felt a subtle disdain in the silence, a tacit acknowledgment among these men that he was not one of them. Still, they listened without interruption until:

“What do you mean this fellow was on fire?”

“Blazing like the Crystal Palace. Spouting flames which quickly spread from his body to the furniture to the walls, and in moments the entire hotel was ablaze. In other words, he was on fire.”

Stephenson touched Marsh's arm as if to say, Easy, lad. Don't get your dander up. Marsh wrapped up with his arrival in Barcelona, describing the film fragments and the Frankensteined gypsy girl.

The flare of a match briefly silhouetted the profile of a rotund man in the corner as he lit a cigar. Before the light faded, Marsh also glimpsed Commander Pryce, and Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who was Stephenson's superior and the head of SIS.

Sinclair spoke up next. “Leaving aside the more improbable portions of this tale ...” He trailed off into another coughing fit before continuing. “What do you make of this, Stephenson?”

Stephenson's shrug was a peculiar lopsided gesture on the one-armed man. “I don't know what to make of it, sir. But I'd say we have a bloody great problem on our hands.” He enumerated the points of his argument on his fingers. “First, we know Krasnopolsky witnessed things that frightened him half-dead. Second, he died in a fire that arose quite spontaneously. If Commander Marsh says there was no external fuel, I assure you gentlemen there was none. And third, the circumstantial evidence on the film suggests the Jerries have tapped into something rather unnatural.”

Unnatural. The old man's comment jarred something loose at the back of Marsh's mind. The half-forgotten memory of a drunken misad-venture back at university. He'd long since attributed the hazy recollections of that night to drink—he had been rather pissed. But now recent events conspired to resurrect the memory, casting it in a new light.

It took Marsh back to Oxford, and a long night spent searching the Bodleian for anthropodermic volumes with an irrepressible friend. A grisly night, but harmless ... until Will found the object of his quest and read aloud from it. Marsh crossed his arms, warding off a frisson of disquiet. He'd never returned to the Bodleian after that night. Nor had they ever spoken about it. One sensed that Will had committed a whopping great indiscretion, even by his standards.

Unnatural. Marsh had comforted himself with hopeful self-delusion, disregarding the whole affair as a faulty memory and perhaps a lesson on the perils of drinking to excess. Except, of course, Will had been sober as a deacon. And now as he listened to Stephenson and reflected upon the events in Spain, Marsh confronted the possibility that his memory was unscathed.

Marsh returned his attention to the conversation at hand. Somebody had turned on another lamp. The room had split in two factions: those who believed Stephenson and Marsh were crazy, and those who believed they were merely mistaken. Arguments flew back and forth until Admiral Sinclair clapped his hands for silence.

“Gentlemen! This is leading nowhere. I'll issue an all-section directive to flag and compile any information regarding this von Westarp character. Until we know more, there is nothing we can do. I suggest we table the issue.”

Marsh's thoughts were still in Oxford. “That's a mistake,” he blurted.

Stephenson coughed, the corners of his mouth turned up behind his hand. He loves it when I make an ass of myself.

Somebody muttered something about “Stephenson's pet gorilla,” Marsh's nickname back at SIS. They saw him as a rough fellow, brutish, and—because of his class—no doubt endowed with disgraceful manners. A gorilla.

The Admiral leaned forward, fixing Marsh with a cold stare. He coughed again into his handkerchief before responding. “I beg your pardon, Commander?”

“Forgive me, sir, but I was there. And I'm telling you, the Jerries are on to something here. If we wait on this, it'll be too late to do anything.”

“Well, then,” chimed the First Lord. “Thank you so very much for sharing your vast wisdom and expertise.” He shifted in his chair, turning his attention fully on his peers. A none-too-subtle indication that Marsh was dismissed and disregarded.

Thinking of Will, Marsh murmured to Stephenson, “We need to recruit specialists.”

“Specialists?”

Well, hell. In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Marsh. He nodded at Stephenson. The old man regarded his protege through narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” said Marsh. “Experts in the unnatural.”

There was no point in Marsh announcing the idea. But Stephenson had the respect of these men, and so he voiced Marsh's suggestion as though it were his own.

The room erupted in pandemonium.

“Right, then. We'll just open our doors to every crank we can muster, shall we? Press them into service?”

“—may as well issue faerie wands to the troops while we're at it—”

“—off his rocker—”

“—wasting our time—”