“No, actually,” he said then. “No, I don’t think it would upset me, working for the Crown.”
Theodora had crouched beside a bush dotted with pale-yellow flowers. “All these flowers are supposed to be extinct,” he said, “grown from seeds that were preserved under the old floors, freed at last and thrown onto plowed ground, rich now with ash.” His gaze was oddly intent when he squinted up at Hale. “Do you know what this flower is? Sisymbrium irio, known as the London Rocket. It bloomed all over the City right after the Great Fire of 1666.” He picked two of the little flowers and handed one to Hale after he straightened up.
“London recovered from that,” observed Hale, dutifully sniffing the thing. “They rebuilt her.”
“Perhaps it was the flowers that sustained her life. Some can do that, I think.” Theodora glanced back, so Hale did too—the four surveillance men were following them at a distance. “Of course,” said Theodora, “you won’t say anything to this recruiter about me, nor about having been to that building where we met. You’re a very clean player—your mother was admirably thorough, for an amateur, about leaving no tracks; even ‘Hale’ isn’t the name under which she joined her religious order. Oh I say, you did know about that, didn’t you?” When Hale smiled wanly and nodded, the older man went on, “Well, we’ve advanced a pawn here, and it’s Red’s turn to move. You won’t see me again for a while, after this morning; they can’t possibly be aware of you yet, which is why I’m able to talk to you face-to-face. Whenever you come back, we’ll meet again and I’ll have a lot of questions for you.”
“ ‘Come back,’ ” echoed Hale. “From where?”
Theodora gave him an irritable look. “From wherever they send you, where did you think? You’ll know when it’s time to make your way back to England, and if you’re clever you’ll even find a way. I will almost certainly be aware of it when you return, and meet you; but if I can’t meet you, wait for me—that is, don’t tell anyone about me, nor about your secret purposes. Not even Churchill.”
Perhaps from memory, Hale heard in his head a young woman’s voice say, in French, You were born to this—and he shivered, not entirely in alarm. “What are my… ‘secret purposes’?”
“Tell me about your dreams.”
Hale sighed, then deliberately tucked the stem of his little London Rocket into the buttonhole of his lapel. “All right.” This seemed to be a morning outside of time, in which anything at all could be said, no matter how crazy-sounding, without immediacy nor fear of skepticism or judgment. “Do you remember the ‘wheels within wheels’ in Ezekiel… ?”
Two mornings later Hale’s trunk was packed and stowed in the porter’s lodge at Magdalen; the lorry that was to take him and his things back to Chipping Campden wasn’t due for half an hour, and as he paced the sunny Broad Street pavement he was careful not to meet the eyes of any of the apparently carefree students who strolled past. The formal letter of dismissal from his tutor was tucked in his coat pocket—what use now had been all his study of the Caxton Morte d’Arthur, the pageantry in The Faerie Queene?
When he did inadvertently glance at one of the passing faces, it was because he had noticed that a slim woman in a plaid skirt with a leather purse was for the second time walking past where he stood—and he found himself meeting a pair of brown eyes over high slanted cheekbones in a face framed with short dark hair. Her gaze was coldly quizzical, and he looked away instantly, certain that she must somehow know of his disgrace.
He exhaled and impulsively strode across the street, hoping he appeared to have some purpose besides hiding from the disapproving public view. On the far side of the street he walked under the Roman arch into the Botanical Gardens, bright green ranks of shrubs and midget trees spread across four acres under the empty blue sky, and he crouched by one of the flowering herbs beside the footpath as though to read the description on the little sign in front of it, though in fact he couldn’t focus on the letters.
Andrew Hale, barrister, he thought in bitter bewilderment; foreign correspondent Hale of the Times; the great Oxford dons Lewis, Tolkien, Bowra, Hale. Sweet fuck-all seems more like it.
He straightened abruptly and took several deep breaths, not wanting anyone to see tears in his eyes here.
Eyes; those were Slavic eyes, he thought, in the instant before someone behind him touched his elbow; and when he turned around without surprise it was the woman in the plaid skirt standing there, still with the look of a dubious purchaser. She appeared to be in her thirties.
“I’ve seen you in the Party meetings,” she said.
He was fairly sure she had never been to a meeting he had attended, but he nodded. “Not unlikely,” he said. His heart was thumping under the expulsion papers in his coat pocket. “I’d advise you not to go to any in London.”
“I heard of your misfortune,” she said with a nod, gripping his elbow and leading him along the crushed-stone path. “We are all allies against the monster Germany. How strange that cooperation should be called espionage, and a crime! We’re all working for world peace.” She spoke with no accent, but he thought he detected the spiky cadence of eastern Europe.
“I—wasn’t even doing espionage,” Hale stammered. “To belong to the International Workers’ Party is implicitly to commit what they call espionage,” she told him sternly. “We’re citizens of a bigger thing than any nineteenth-century empires, aren’t we?”
We want you to be persuaded by this person. But Don’t act. “I’ve hoped to be,” he said. “Things look unpromising right now.”
“Knowing the danger now, are you still with us?” She had stopped walking and was staring intently into his eyes. “Now?”
“Yes,” he told her, and he was surprised at the assurance with which he said it; she did represent his only hope of eventual re instatement at Magdalen, but he had spoken from a sudden conviction that he had been waiting for this en garde ever since visiting the SIS headquarters at the age of seven; a conviction that all along he had been more a member of the world that included Theodora and this woman than of the world of St. John’s and the City of London School and Oxford.
She nodded, and they resumed walking between the rows of flowers. “Do you know what they do in Blenheim Palace?” she asked.
Hale glanced at her, but she was looking ahead. Blenheim Palace was six miles north of Oxford. “The, uh, Duke of Marlborough lives there.”
“He has turned it for wartime spy purposes over to MI5, a branch of the British secret service. We have comrades working there, covertly.” She opened her purse and tilted it toward him; he could see a folded buff envelope tucked in there. “In this envelope is a list, copied from the MI5 Registry files, of Comintern agents known by the British to be working in London. I am not a person who ordinarily meets comrades face-to-face, as I am doing now with you; this is important. We need to convey this list right away to a still-unsuspected agent in London, so that Moscow Centre will know who must be reassigned, where fresh agents must be put in place. Also here in photographic miniature are full specifications of the new Napier Sabre aero-engine that is powering the Hawker Typhoon aircraft; the British government has classified these specifications as ‘most-secret,’ not to be shared with allies. It is Soviet Russia that now is doing the greatest work of fighting Germany, at Riga and Minsk and Kiev; if— espionage—helps the Soviets to do this, is it right to impede it?”