Mr. Churchill's Secretary (39 page)

“Where is she, Maggie?” he called. “Where’s Claire?”

She bit her tongue and kept digging at a furious pace.

Maggie jumped when she heard a crack and felt the shell of the Anderson shudder and shake. He must have punched it.

“She didn’t get to Churchill. It was all for nothing. Well, I’ll tell you, Maggie Hope, I’m not going to let you—and her—ruin everything I’ve worked for.”

“She’s in a women’s prison, just outside of Sheffield. Just go away. Please.” She kept digging.

From the distance, she heard John’s voice calling, “Maggie! Maggie!”

“Here!” she yelled, as loud as she could. “I’m here!”

John followed the muffled sound of Maggie’s voice and sprinted around the side of the house.

Michael Murphy heard him coming. He hid himself behind a rubbish bin, let him pass, and then jumped him from behind.

The two men wrestled on the ground, knocking over metal lawn chairs that crashed in the darkness. Murphy kicked John in the groin, then got him into a headlock.

“So you’re the boyfriend, huh? Pierce didn’t get you? Guess I’ll have to finish the job. But first,” he said, administering several vicious blows to John’s face, “I’m going to take care of your girl.”

John lay, writhing in agony, as Murphy took a packet of matches from his inside front pocket and lit one, throwing it onto the Anderson.

It made a sparkling red arc as it flew. The Anderson ignited with a whoosh of air. Bright orange flames crackled merrily on the curved roof.

“She’s in there, mate.” He knelt down to John and whispered in his ear, “Now we’ll both have girls who died for the cause, won’t we?”

Through the aluminum roof of the Anderson, Maggie heard the fire catch and then ignite with a dull roar. Instantly, heat started permeating the shelter. She kept throwing the weight of her body against the back wall, until the metal gave from the fastenings and there was enough room to force her body through.

She wriggled out from the Anderson, choking and coughing, her white dress tattered and covered in dirt, just as the flames engulfed it. Her lungs cried out for oxygen, and her hands were scratched and bleeding. She rolled as fast and as far away as she could, the heat still radiating onto her skin. She retched into the grass, and as she wiped her mouth she realized she wasn’t dead after all.

She crawled blindly on her hands and knees, dress torn and dirty. She saw John lying on the ground a few
feet away, nearly unconscious. “John,” she whispered. “John?”

John, can you hear me? Please be all right. John? John?

Murphy staggered away, still disoriented from grief and anger. He made it back to the road, lit by the flames from the bombed house across the street. The air stank of thick smoke.

He got back into the taxi and turned the key. It was badly damaged and wouldn’t start. “Shit,” he cried, banging his hands on the steering wheel. “Shit, shit, shit.”

A shadow passed silently across the dashboard.

Murphy looked up to the figure of Peter Frain looming over him, pistol in hand. “Do you have a license for that vehicle, sir?” Frain asked pleasantly, pointing the gun at Murphy’s head.

Murphy, battered, bloody, and reeking of gasoline, looked up at Frain. “Fuck you.”

“I’m
so
glad you said that.” Frain pulled the revolver’s trigger. Murphy slumped over, mouth open, eyes glazing, blood running down the steering wheel.

“Michael Murphy,” Frain said with grim satisfaction. “Shot while resisting arrest.”

Arms pumping, David, Chuck, and Edmund caught up with Frain. “Where’s Maggie?” Edmund panted.

Frain holstered his gun. “You two,” he said to David and Chuck, “go inside and call the fire department and an ambulance. Edmund, let’s get started putting out that fire.”

Maggie was cradling John’s head in her lap in the flickering light of the blaze when she saw Frain and Edmund
approach past the clothesline and the vegetable patch. “He’s still out there,” she said wildly. “He’s still there.”

Frain shook his head. “Murphy’s been taken care of.”

They heard sirens wailing in the distance, getting closer.

“It’s going to be all right, Maggie,” Edmund said, bending down and wrapping his arms around her.

“I know it is,” she replied. Then she started to laugh. She laughed and laughed and laughed, until tears ran down her face and her stomach hurt.

Out of the corner of her eye, Maggie could see Frain and Edmund look at each other with concern. David ran out of the house to join them, taking in the sight of Maggie—hair disheveled, dress torn and muddy, face covered in dirt, arm and hands bleeding. She reeked of gasoline. “Merciful Zeus, she’s lost it again, hasn’t she?” he said in awe. Beside him, Chuck could only stare in shocked silence.

Even John managed to open one eye. “I say …” he managed. “You all right, Maggie?”

She managed to choke back laughter and gave a few snorts and hiccups. “I’m fine, John,” she said, smoothing back his unruly hair. “Thanks to you.”

Then, to Edmund, “I was just thinking,” she said, wiping her eyes with the hem of her dress and then dabbing at her nose. “I was just thinking—how on earth are we going to explain all this to Aunt Edith?”

B
ACK AT
N
O
. 10 the next morning, there wasn’t much time to talk to the Prime Minister about changing jobs.

There were memos to type, papers to file, and notation to take. And when Mrs. Churchill, slim and elegant, with intelligent eyes and a strong jaw, came by his office in the mid-afternoon, the P.M. announced to her, “Clemmie, Chartwell this weekend.” While it was easier for Mr. Churchill to take his weekends at Chequers, he preferred the family home.

“Winston, you can’t,” she said, coming around the desk behind him. She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the top of his shiny head. “It’s closed—and there will be no one to cook for you.”

“I shall cook for myself,” Mr. Churchill pronounced. “I can boil an egg. I’ve seen it done.”

She sighed. “All right, Chartwell it is, Mr. Pug. I’ll tell the staff.”

Maggie pretended to read over her typing as Mrs. Churchill kissed him again, this time on the lips with an audible smack, and left.

Later that evening, they heard it had been decided: The Churchills would spend the coming weekend at Chartwell, and as Mrs. Tinsley’s son was home on leave,
Maggie would be the secretary to accompany them. She was elated by the news. She’d been longing to see Chartwell, the Churchills’ private estate in Kent.

And this was her last chance.

Maggie was expecting to take dictation as they drove to Kent in the black Bentley, followed in another car by Detective Thompson; Mr. Churchill’s faithful butler, Mr. Inces; and several Royal Marines. She had her pen and paper on her lap, at the ready. But Mr. Churchill was silent.

The city landscape segued into misty gray-green plains and orchards, branches heavy with rosy apples. As they covered more and more distance, the pinker and more cherubic Mr. Churchill’s face became and the more his blue eyes twinkled. They rode on in silence for a while, as he smoked yet another cigar.

Maggie was nervous—she wasn’t used to being alone with him for this long when they weren’t working. She tried not to drum her fingers or tap her toes.

Finally, he spoke.

“Miss Hope, I’d like you to know—while I appreciate your actions of recent days, a dead employee is of no use to me, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It would be highly inconvenient. I need everyone on my staff alive and kicking if we’re going to win this war. Do you hear me, Miss Hope? Kicking, I say.”

“Kicking. Yes, sir.” She tried not to giggle.

The P.M. gave her a stern look.
Women!
He was not good with women, at least not professionally. Of course, women were to be admired, to be wooed—they were creatures of romance and moonlight and mystery. Then they were to be left in the parlors, the bedrooms, the nurseries—doing God knows what—while the menfolk got down to business over brandy and cigars. He’d had
severe doubts about giving women the vote and was not impressed by those who’d made their way into Parliament, particularly that infernal Nancy Astor. However, times had changed. They had indeed changed.

“Mr. Frain tells me that you might be better suited to espionage work.”

What exactly had Frain told him?
“Sir?”

“And from what I understand, you have the intelligence and pluck to be a spy—a
spook
, as they say.”

He chewed on his large Romeo y Julieta cigar impassively for a few moments and gazed out the car window at the countryside rolling by.

“In general, of course, I detest these so-called career women. Didn’t even see why you women wanted the vote! But Clemmie, my daughters, the women of my staff, the women of England—you’ve all shown considerable mettle. Courage under fire. And we can always use someone in MI-Five who’s proven herself.”

She nearly fell over from shock. “Y-yes sir,” was all she could manage.

“Of course,” he continued, “you could still find a nice young man from a good family, settle down, have a few babies. Four, as Clemmie and I had.”

He stubbed out his cigar in the car door’s ashtray, rolled down the window, and threw out the end. “Let there be women!” he declared out the open window, as though for all England to hear. As he cranked the window back up, he gave a heavy sigh of resignation.

Before she could even think of responding, he went straight into dictation.

Chartwell in October was even more beautiful than Maggie had ever imagined it: practically a picture-book illustration of the English countryside. A rose garden with a sundial in the center was still in bloom. Glimpses of burgundy, scarlet, apricot, pink, and yellow petals
could be seen in the distance. The lake at the bottom of the hill sparkled in the golden afternoon sunlight.

On the south side of the house was another flower garden surrounded by a brick wall built, Mr. Inces told her proudly, by Mr. Churchill himself. There was “Mary Cot,” a child-sized brick playhouse he erected for his youngest daughter when she was nine. Between the playhouse and the great house was a large orchard of apple trees—Orange Pippin, Worcester Pearmain, and Bramley’s Seedling—heavy with ripe fruit. There was a tennis court for Mrs. Churchill and the children. There was a pond with goldfish and black swans and, of course, the painting studio. Cats, dogs, geese, goats, and even foxes roamed freely.

The house itself was quintessentially English inside and out. “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us,” Mr. Churchill had once said, and Maggie could now see why. It was perhaps not to Maggie’s taste, but she could see why the P.M. loved it so—the views of the countryside. It had been built in the fifteenth century and was said to have housed King Henry VIII for a time. Inside was a crest with the Churchill family’s coat of arms and Spanish motto:
Fiel Pero Desdichado
—Faithful but Unfortunate.

The house’s interior reflected two distinct tastes in decorating: Mrs. Churchill’s was elegant, while Mr. Churchill’s was surprisingly flashy. Since Maggie had seen only their relatively austere quarters in the Annexe, she was amazed to see so many of Mr. Churchill’s personal treasures: an ornate Fabergé cigar box; engraved plates of gold and silver; a gold-headed walking stick engraved by King Edward VII, “to my youngest Minister”; and Mr. Churchill’s firearms from the Great War.

She and John sat next to each other in the back of the P.M.’s study as he stood and spoke from his high Disraeli-style desk with a slanting top into the large
microphone that would broadcast his speech across all England.

“It is quite true that I have seen many painful scenes of havoc, and of fine buildings and acres of cottage homes blasted into rubble heaps of ruin,” the P.M. said.

“Notice how he left out Saint Paul’s,” John whispered to Maggie. “We wouldn’t want to scare people.”

“The government? Keep information from citizens during wartime?” Maggie whispered back behind an upheld hand. She rolled her eyes. “Perish the thought.”

“… The British nation is stirred and moved as it never has been at any time in its long, eventful, famous history, and it is no hackneyed trope of speech to say that they mean to conquer or to die.”

“Even the secretaries,” John said with a sly grin, nudging Maggie.

“
Especially
the secretaries,” she said.

“What a triumph the life of these battered cities is over the worst that any fire or bomb can do …” the P.M. said. “This is indeed the grand heroic period of our history, and the light of glory shines on all.”

John squinted at her. “I think I see your ‘light of glory.’ ”

She elbowed him in the ribs. “Shut up.”

“Last time I spoke to you I quoted the lines of Longfellow which President Roosevelt had written out for me in his own hand. I have some other lines which are less well known but which seem apt and appropriate to our fortunes tonight, and I believe they will so be judged wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies.”