‘When the war started, I handed out white lilies as symbols of cowardice to young men who would not join up. I volunteered as a nurse for a while. My father was horrified and got me a desk job at the Registry instead. Fortunately, I was very good at it—and no one there cared that I was a wisp of a girl as long as I pulled my weight.
‘Of course, real life turned out to be more complex than my ayah’s stories. But it felt good to be able to make a difference.’
‘And the Finance Section does not fill you with that feeling?’
‘I am not a snob. In a war, every soldier is important. But I have more to offer than rubber-stamping classified purchase orders. I like to think so, anyway.’ She frowned. ‘Why do you care about any of this, Peter?’
‘Well, first, I know a few things about being unappreciated.’ Bloom’s voice wavered, suddenly. He paused and made a show of adjusting his spirit crown. Rachel realised that in spite of his calm manner, something had upset him very recently. She wondered exactly where those mud stains had come from.
‘Excuse me. It is not my night with aetheric connections,’ Bloom said after a moment. ‘Second, you may be aware of the issues we have been experiencing in Spain, many of which are the result of a lack of cooperation between Winter and Summer. Your lot recruits assets on the ground, we run them, but we don’t coordinate well enough.’
‘Maybe you should take that up with liaison officers like Kim.’
‘Well, that’s the thing. Many of the young, capable officers in the Winter Court are distracted by ambition. They would rather advance their careers than facilitate cooperation. So some of us have been talking to people like you who do not lack passion but whose future paths are less clear.’
‘Go on.’
‘There might be a few things you could do for us, unofficially. If that is of interest to you, I am happy to discuss further.’
Rachel hesitated. Listening to Bloom, it was much easier to believe that Kulagin’s claims had been misinformation. There was interservice rivalry, and the Harrises’ was exactly the place to try to build ties to address it. Or to trap insubordinate officers like her before the Soviets could recruit them.
Ultimately, it did come down to faith.
‘I would like that,’ Rachel said.
‘Very well. I will arrange an ectophone call. Perhaps next week?’
‘That would be perfect.’
Bloom shook her hand again. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you, Rachel.’
‘Enjoy the rest of your evening. Guy Burgess told me you had plans.’
He stiffened a little, but Rachel could not tell if he blushed under the mask.
‘I always have plans,’ he said after a moment’s pause. ‘Can’t be a spy without them.’
* * *
A little later, Rachel said her goodbyes to Hildy and Tommy. The gathering was likely to go on until the small hours, with more than one guest staying over in the bedrooms on the third floor. Tommy held her hand tight between his and said she was always welcome, but Rachel saw the closed door in his eyes.
She waited for her cab outside, breath steaming in the chill. The cold air cleared her head. She felt a mixture of terror and exhilaration, rubbing her hands against the cold.
A street light flickered and the ectophone in her handbag rattled.
WELL DONE, the brass letters said.
WE’LL SEE, she replied to the ghost of Max Chevalier.
The Special Committee on the Iberian Problem met the following evening, and Peter Bloom arrived late.
He signed the Summer Court entrance book hastily, violated protocol by not waiting for the attendant and nearly got lost on his way to the Chimney.
He had spent the last few hours in intense preparation that had left him feeling transparent and thin, a warning sign of Fading. His work had been interrupted by a furious Pendlebury, who sent him a tart ectomail complaining about soiled clothes and a headache from a poorly tuned spirit crown. Placating him required an ectophone call—another vim-costly journey to listen to the medium’s nasal voice listing his grievances.
But exhaustion and an irate medium were minor worries compared to what waited for him at the top of the tower. Standing in the Chimney’s aethervator, which was propelled to Whitehall by a massive luz counterweight, he wondered if this was what Fascist prisoners in Spain felt like when the firing squad raised their rifles.
He tried to stay calm. The Presence had a plan for him. And surely he would not be permitted in the PM’s presence if the SIS knew about his true loyalties? Unless this was all elaborate theatre to feed the Presence misinformation. And maybe the god-mind knew that, and was playing a deeper game.
He remembered the chill of its rejection, and shuddered.
The journey ana-wards took only a minute. The top of the Chimney overlapped with an electromagnetically shielded room in Whitehall. Peter stepped out of the aethervator into a glowing cylindrical Faraday cage, where C and his stone-faced deputy chief George Hill were already standing around an ectophone’s prismatic circuit. It was strange to see their usual impeccable self-images, nearly identical to the way they had looked in life, superimposed against the stark electrical geometry of the living world.
C frowned at Peter. ‘Kind of you to join us, Bloom,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, His Nibs is running behind as well.’
Peter took his place next to the two older spies. Hill was a lantern-jawed old soldier, a veteran of pre-Revolutionary Russian operations. Rumour had it he was there on the night Rasputin died. Although his face was impassive, hostility radiated from him in chilly waves. Peter gave him a smile and arranged his notes in mid-air into a floating wall of imprinted aether between them.
Then Prime Minister Herbert Blanco West entered the room.
His soul-spark was one of the largest Peter had ever seen and took up nearly half of the Faraday cage. It was a kaleidoscope of thought-forms so vivid you could almost glimpse actual images of what the great man thought and saw. Peter spotted a ship made of blue light, and faces, but they changed too quickly for him to recognise, like flames.
Another living soul accompanied him. This had to be Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the Winter Court, the terrestrial branch of the SIS. Next to the PM, his mind was a tiny moon orbiting a huge primordial planet.
‘Gentlemen,’ West said. His voice was in sharp contrast to the soul-spark, a little wheezy, an old man’s voice. ‘Apologies for my tardiness. Parliament was murder today. I understand you have found a sword to cut through this Gordian tangle of ours. Let us find out how sharp it is.’
As C started laying out the facts of the Spanish situation, Peter could not help staring at the blaze of the prime minister’s thoughts. They reminded him of another fire, and of the night he first heard Herbert West’s name.
* * *
It was 1916, towards the end of the war. Peter was five years old.
His family sat in front of the fireplace in the cosy drawing room, one of the few in the huge Palace Gardens Terrace house they actually used. Peter’s father had just returned from the Office of Communications where he worked. His mother had spent the evening writing poetry. There were stacks of small notebooks at her feet. Peter lay on his special flying carpet—the old velvety rug behind his mother’s chair—almost asleep in the comforting murmur of his parents’ voices.
Later, he picked their actual words from his memory like shards of glass and dissected the details of the scene. The auburn sweep of his mother’s hair, his father’s round face, made apple-like by the soft light from the fire, and the plumpness that would stay with him until the illness and the end.