We all now vaguely drifted in the direction of the set tables until Buffington’s voice boomed from behind us. “Gentlemen, the food and the drink will soon follow, and there will be more of both. But first a word.”
We stopped drifting. We began to turn toward our host.
He was drawn up to full height, hands behind him, framed against the final swoop of the staircase. He watched us turning to him. He approved. He waited. He encouraged us as we gathered our attention to him by addressing us once more. “Gentlemen.” Firmly he said it, though the tone of his voice had mellowed up as well, become comradely, almost affectionate.
When at last he had the full and silent attention of every man before him, he said, one more time, “Gentlemen.” This time he rolled the word out as if he were asking us to consider its full meaning. Which no doubt he was, for he went on, “They come now, showing their true and savage selves. They come in the night, sneaking in, dangling beneath gas bags to throw bombs on our homes and schools, on our women and our children. And a few months ago they unleashed poison gas upon our troops at Ypres, violating what civilized men from time immemorial have understood to be fields of honor. This is no longer a war of nation against nation. It is a war of civilization against a new barbarism. We fight to preserve the entire world from a second dark age.”
As if, offstage, the sound effects man heard his cue, a bomb thumped distantly and shuddered faintly beneath our feet.
Buffington paused only for a single beat as if to let his point sink in. Before me and to the side I could see most of the men in the room, and I knew I could assume the same of the others: not one of us had flinched. And here in this London home, the bomb’s fading vibration in our feet and legs and chest supported Buffington’s point.
He said, “Gentlemen, if we fail, this dark age will be longer than the last. Those previous five centuries will seem the winking of an eye compared to this. And the new dark age will be infinitely more terrible. Mankind’s vaunted advances of manufacturing and technology can be used for good, but they can just as readily and effectively be used for evil.”
One more drub of a bomb, much closer, rattled our knees and stirred the silverware on the tables.
Buffington boomed in response, “Consider that the call to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
We all certainly were happy to take that attitude, but no one moved. Not even Buffington. We waited for the next one. This moment and the next. The Germans were still working on aerial warfare. So far the raids were widely spaced and had come with one or two airships following a single, ongoing path across the city and flying away. This bomb was very near and from the direction of the earlier, distant blasts; the next would either be farther away along the flight path or it would be right on top of us.
We waited.
“Shall we sit?” Buffington’s voice had diminished a little. This was a question now, not a defiant suggestion.
And there was a stroke of sound. More distant. Barely felt in Buffington’s cellar.
“Bloody hell,” someone said nearby, very low, to himself.
We heard no more until we were sitting with four others at the far table. Trask and I were beside each other and I could look, if I wished, between two steel-gray, slick-maned Brits across from me and down the darkened corridor leading to the rest of the basement floor. We heard one more bomb before the food, like a distant stroke of thunder, someone else’s storm.
And then we ate. Our companions introduced themselves but did not declare their work, nor did they ask ours, which made me suspect they were Foreign Office types, secret service no doubt, at least some of them. Their talk was casual but it was bluntly critical about Britain’s progress so far in the war. About the disastrous four-week gap between the sea attack and the land attack in Gallipoli, about the severe shortage of artillery shells, about the hasty training of a million new troops, about the U-boat threat and the Zeppelin threat and the sudden vulnerability of sacred British soil after centuries of comfortable insularity.
Trask and I said little.
When the four began to lean toward each other and debate the need to dissolve the government and form a new one, I leaned too, toward Trask, and said, low, “Are all these guys in your line of work?”
Trask nodded. “In varying degrees.”
The four men stopped talking abruptly.
I thought at first that they’d overheard us, trained as they perhaps were. But their faces had turned not to us but to a point higher up and beyond Trask’s far shoulder.
I looked, and Buffington had arrived and he put his hand on the shoulder of a stout man with a crooked cravat sitting next to Trask. The man needed no word. He nodded and rose and moved off and Buffington sat down.
He said to the other three, “Sorry, gentlemen. Continue.”
And they did, with one of them saying Kitchener — who was the secretary of state for war and who all three agreed was responsible for the shortage of artillery shells — had to resign no matter what they did with Asquith.
Buffington drew Trask toward him. I leaned along as well and neither of them made the slightest gesture to suggest I was not invited.
Buffington said, “Stockman’s throwing a weekend house party.”
“Your man?” Trask said.
Buffington said, “In the vicinity.”
Trask nodded. And then he made the tiniest intentional movement of his head, so tiny that I instantly doubted my perception, figured I was an example of how you can overtrain a secret service agent. The movement, I thought, was this very slight turn in my direction — since I’d drawn near, behind Trask’s right shoulder — as if it was a subtle gesture to Buffington, reminding him of my presence. “Is she ready?” he said.
What did all that have to do with me?
I sat back in my chair.
My eyes moved across the table and between the two steel-gray heads, who had sat back as well, now that they’d agreed to throw out Asquith and Kitchener and all the rest of them.
I looked into the darkness of the corridor.
And the darkness moved.
That was the first impression, lasting only a brief moment. The darkness shifted, swelled, and then points of light began to clarify into a face, hands, and a piano started playing the instrumental introduction to a song — and I recognized it, the intro to “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—and the face emerging from the shadows of the corridor, heading this way, became clear, and now I recognized it as well, even as I had a sense of movement to my left, Buffington no doubt standing up to address us all. He said, “Gentlemen, in the interests of preserving civilization as we wait out this latest barbarous attack, I give you the great Isabel Cobb.”
My mother emerged fully into the room, dressed in black, and she stopped, framed in the doorway, as the men at our table wrenched around, turned their chairs, applauded, and cried out “Hear! Hear!”
The introduction was over and Mother shot the piano player a brief glance as he fumbled a bit with the transition to the verse. I glanced with her, and it was the stout man Buffington had replaced at the table. This was a select and secretive group; Isabel Cobb’s accompanist was drawn from one of our own number. He wasn’t terrible at this, however, and he found his way into the verse and Mother looked back to us and began to sing.
I heard her voice, but for a few moments, as far as I knew, she could have been singing a soliloquy from Hamlet, as I grappled with my surprise at her presence here. And then she was inserting that phony ache into her voice that she was so good at. Phony mostly to my ear, of course; fans loved it. But, indeed, she drew even me in with it now as she sang: