Warlight(36)

“Schumann’s ‘Mein Herz ist schwer.’ You know it, Nathaniel. It’s what we used to hear once or twice a week in our house, late at night, with the piano like a thread in the darkness. When you told me you imagined our mother’s voice joining in. That was the schwer.

“We were damaged, Nathaniel. Recognize that.” She pushed me gently to the door. “What happened to the girl you never told me about?”

I turned away. “I don’t know.”

“You can look. Your name is Nathaniel, not Stitch. I’m not Wren. Wren and Stitch were abandoned. Choose your own life. Even your friend The Darter told you that.”

She was carrying her baby and used the child’s small hand to give me a half wave. She had meant me to see her son, not to talk to me. I left the small room and found myself in darkness again. Only a thin line of light under the door I had just closed behind me.



Arthur McCash

What I came upon first was a cache of records of Rose’s early activities as a radio operator during the war, beginning with her work as that supposed fire watcher on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel; then later at Chicksands Priory, where she intercepted enciphered German signals and sent them on to Bletchley Park for decoding as directed by the “deceivers in London.” She had also made journeys to Dover to identify, among those giant aerials along the coast, the individual rhythms of specific German Morse operators—the art of being able to recognize the touch of a key being one noted example of her skills.

It was only in later files, buried deeper and more enigmatically, that it became clear she had also worked abroad after the war ended. Her name cropped up, for instance, in the investigation of the bombing at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, as well as in fragments of other reports involving Italy, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in the Balkans. One report noted that she had been based briefly with a small unit near Naples, two men and a woman sent in, the report bluntly stated, to “loosen the linch-pins” of a group still covertly operating. Some of her unit had been captured or killed. There was mention of a possible betrayal.

But most of the time I found only the names of cities stamped blurrily in her passports, along with fictional names she’d used, with the dates erased or crosshatched, so I gave up being certain where she had been exactly and when she had been there. I realized the wounds on her arm were the only real evidence I had.

—

I ran into Arthur McCash a second time. He had been abroad, and after a cautious conversation we went out for a meal. He never asked me what I was doing there, just as I did not ask him where he had been posted. I was adept by now in the social codes of the building and knew our conversational path at dinner that evening would need to avoid all significant mountains. I did at one point, feeling it was acceptable and on the innocent side of the information boundary, wonder out loud about The Moth’s part in our lives. McCash waved the question away. We were in a restaurant a good distance from our office but he instantly looked around. “I cannot talk about this, Nathaniel.”

Our days and nights at Ruvigny Gardens had taken place far from Whitehall territory, but McCash still felt he couldn’t discuss a person I assumed had nothing to do with government secrets. Whereas it had everything to do with Rachel and me. We sat in silence for a while. I did not wish to give in or change the subject, annoyed that we were forced to be formal strangers to each other. Half taunting him, I asked if he remembered a beekeeper who often came to our house, a Mr. Florence. I needed, I said, to reach him. I now had bees in Suffolk and needed some advice. Did he have a contact for him?

Silence.

“He’s just a beekeeper! I have a dead queen to replace. You’re being ridiculous.”

“Perhaps.” McCash shrugged. “I should not even be having this meal, this repast, with you.” He moved his fork closer to the plate and was silent while we were being served, then began talking again as he watched the waiter depart.

“There is something I do want to say to you, Nathaniel….When your mother left the Service, she did so eliminating every trail behind her for one reason only. It was so that no one could come after you and Rachel again. And there were guardians around you, always. I essentially began arriving at Ruvigny Gardens a couple of times a week to keep an eye on you. I was the one who brought your mother—when she was briefly in England—to watch you dance at that club in Bromley so she might see you, from a distance at least. Also you must know the people she worked with, even after the war was supposedly over, people like Felon, Connolly, were crucial shields and spear-carriers for us.”

Arthur McCash’s gestures were what I would call “English Nervous.” As he talked, I watched him move his water glass, a fork, an empty ashtray, and the butter dish several times. It told me how quickly his brain was firing and it was clear the movement of those obstacles helped slow him down.

I said nothing. I did not wish him to know what I had been discovering on my own. He was a dutiful official and lived by the rules.

“She stayed away from the two of you because she was fearful you might be linked to her, they would use her to somehow strike at you. Turned out she was right. She was rarely in London, but she’d just been recalled.”

“My father?” I said quietly.





There was barely a pause. He just made a dismissive gesture suggesting fate.