The Wild Rose (52 page)

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

“. . . and Jennie’s gathering the statistics on the number of single London women under thirty who own property, which we’ll need for the letter-writing campaign to the Commons,” Katie Finnegan was saying.

But Jennie didn’t hear her. She was sitting in Fiona and Joe’s drawing room, attending her Tuesday-night suffrage meeting, but she was a million miles away. Katie was talking about the group’s latest campaign—a push to lower the voting age for women—but Jennie was back at the Brambles, two nights ago, listening to Sid’s dreadful story. She was feeling her blood run cold as he told them why he had gone to Teddy Ko’s, what had happened to him, and what he had learned—about Maud, and about Max von Brandt. She was remembering how she had sat there, barely moving, barely breathing, as Sid told them that Max was in all likelihood a German spy, and a murderer, too—Maud’s murderer. She remembered India’s terrible shock at the news—and her grief. And she remembered Joe’s fury.

“We have to tell the PM about this. Immediately,” he’d said. “Von Brandt left London, but it sounds like his man Flynn’s still moving information. He has to be caught. And stopped. Now. Before any more British lives are lost.”

“Hold on, Joe,” Sid had said. “John Harris—the man who saved my life—is all mixed up in this. He never wanted to be, but he had no choice. Madden threatened him. I promised I would help him, that I would get him and his family out of London. We can’t make a move on Flynn until we figure out a way to do it that won’t land John in prison.”

“But we can’t allow Flynn to remain at large,” Joe said. “He could do a runner at any second.”

“We have a few days,” Sid said. “Today’s Sunday. John told me that the next rendezvous would be this Friday. That’s when we have to move. We have to catch Flynn with the goods on him or we’ve got nothing—just an innocent man, wrongfully accused.”

Nobody had noticed Jennie as they talked. Nobody noticed how pale she’d suddenly gone, or that her whole body had begun to tremble. And ever since then, she’d been veering wildly between belief and denial, between terror and despair, and it was tearing her in two.

One minute she would tell herself that Sid had made a mistake—Max was on the side of peace, just as he’d told her. The next minute, she would believe that he was all the things Sid said he was. After all, what reason did John Harris have to lie? No honorable man engaged in a good endeavor would have anything to do with the likes of Billy Madden. No honorable man would buy morphine from a drug lord, and no honorable man’s paramour would turn up dead from an overdose only days after he’d bought it. Max von Brandt was a German spy. He’d been hurting the Allies, not aiding them. He’d been sending thousands upon thousands of British fighting men to their deaths. And she, Jennie herself, had helped him. She had blood on her hands as surely as he did.

The truth of this was so unbearable that Jennie could not accept it. So she didn’t. She told herself, again, that Sid was wrong. And John Harris, too. And that it would all come out when they found the man they were searching for—Flynn. He would tell them who Max really was and what he was doing. He would set them all straight.

“Do you think you could have those figures ready by early next month, Auntie Jennie? Auntie Jennie?”

It was Katie.

“Oh! I’m so sorry, Katie. I don’t know where my head is tonight,” Jennie said.

“You look a little peaky. Are you all right?”

Jennie, smiling, waved her concern away. “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

Katie asked her question again, and Jennie said she would indeed have the figures ready for her next month. Katie thanked her, smiling sympathetically. Jennie knew that Katie would attribute her fatigue to the scare the whole family had been through with Sid, but in reality it was the dreadful doubts she’d been entertaining about Max that made her feel ill. She had a headache all the time now, and often felt attacks of nausea, or shivered with a sudden chill.

With difficulty, she forced herself to listen and participate in the rest of the meeting, but she was glad when it was over and she could return to Wapping—to James and her father. As usual, she walked to the bus stop with Gladys Bigelow. They rode the same bus east, though Jennie got off it earlier than Gladys did. When the bus had stopped for them, and they’d climbed aboard and seated themselves, Gladys wordlessly handed Jennie an envelope, as she had been doing for more than three years now.

Jennie was just about to put the envelope in her carpetbag, when instead she took hold of Gladys’s hand.

“What is it?” Gladys asked her, in that flat, dead voice of hers. “What’s wrong?”

“Gladys, I have to ask you something,” Jennie said.

Gladys’s eyes grew wide. She shook her head. “No, you don’t,” she said.

“I do. I have to know about Max.”

Gladys yanked her hand free of Jennie’s grip.

“I have to know, Gladys,” Jennie said. “I have to know that he’s who he says he is. He told me he was a double agent. That he’s helping sabotage Germany’s war efforts. I have to know what’s in this envelope.”

Gladys shook her head. She started laughing, but her laughter quickly turned to tears. She turned away from Jennie and would not speak. Watching her, Jennie realized with a sickening certainty that Sid was right—Max was a German spy.

“Gladys,” she said. “We have to tell someone. We have to stop him.”

Gladys turned around. She grabbed Jennie’s arm and squeezed it hard. “You shut your mouth,” she hissed. “You don’t tell anybody anything! Do you hear me? You don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s capable of. But trust me, you don’t what to find out.”

“Gladys, you’re hurting me! Let go!” Jennie said.

But Gladys didn’t. She tightened her grip. “You keep delivering that envelope. Just like you’re supposed to. The war will end one day, and then we can put it all behind us and never talk about it, never even think about it, again.”

And then she stood up, took a seat away from Jennie, and stared out of the window into the darkness. She was still sitting like that when Jennie reached her stop.

As Jennie walked home from the bus stop, she felt anguished. She didn’t want to believe the worst of Max, but it was getting harder and harder not to. If he was indeed working for Germany, she had to tell someone. It was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.

But then something that Gladys had said came back to her:
You don’t know what he’s capable of. But trust me, you don’t want to find out.

Jennie thought back to the time that Max had come to visit her in the rectory. She remembered how he’d told her of his mission and had asked her to help him. He’d been courtly and kind, as he always was, but when she wavered, when she tried to say no to him, his eyes had hardened and he’d threatened to tell Seamie about Binsey.

The memory was like a knife to her heart now. She’d just sent Josie Meadows a letter, with a picture of James. In it, she’d told her old friend what a beautiful child James was, that he was growing strong and healthy, and that he was loved. So dearly.

She’d addressed it to Josephine Lavallier—Josie’s new stage name. She felt frightened now to think that Max knew about Josie, about their letters, about James. She could not bear for Seamie to know the truth about what she’d done, could not bear for James to one day know that she and Seamie were not his real parents.

Jennie arrived at her father’s house. A light was on in the hallway, but the rest of the house was dark. Her father and her son were already asleep. She did not take off her coat and jacket, but hurried directly into the kitchen.

There, she put the kettle on, but not for tea. She was going to steam the envelope open.

It was time to find out once and for all just who Max von Brandt really was.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

Jennie sat at the kitchen table, in the light of a small, single lamp, and stared at the large manila envelope in front of her. The house was quiet except for the ticking of the clock atop the mantel. She was supposed to take the envelope to the church basement and put it in its usual hiding place. Instead, she had steamed it open. She had not yet pulled its contents out and read them, though. She was too afraid.

There would be no going back once she read whatever was inside the envelope. She would find out who Max von Brandt really was. And she would find out what she really was. She would learn if she’d helped him save innocent German lives, or helped him destroy British ones.

“You should have done this years ago,” she whispered to herself. But it had been easier not to. Easier not to know the truth, to believe she was doing good. Easier to accept Max’s help with Willa, than to earn his enmity and have him reveal the truth of James’s parentage.

As Jennie reached for the envelope, a sudden wave of nausea gripped her. She ran to the sink and was sick. When the heaving had stopped, she rinsed her mouth out, wiped her face, and sat down again. She had felt horribly unwell ever since Sid arrived at the Brambles with his news. Her headaches and sour stomach had got worse over the last few days, and she felt feverish now, too. She was certain it was all a reaction to the shock of Sid’s allegations against Max.

“It has to stop,” she said. “Now.”

She pulled out the envelope’s contents, praying hard that all would be as Max had said. What she saw told her instantly that it would not.

The envelope contained carbons of letters from Sir George Burgess to Winston Churchill, First Sea Lord, and to various other high-ranking naval officers, cabinet ministers, and the prime minister himself. In them was information on the movement of British ships, the size of their crews, the number and sizes of their guns, the objects of their missions.

Jennie saw the names of ships:
Bellerophon
,
Monarch
,
Conqueror
,
Colossus,
and
Exeter
. Some were in the Atlantic Ocean. Some in the Mediterranean. There was information on Britain’s oil fields in the Mideast, their production capabilities, and their security.

There were no identity papers of any nature. There were no names of safe houses in Germany and France. No contact information for the people in Britain who were supposed to be providing homes and employment for the dissenters smuggled out of Germany.

It was all a lie.

Jennie stuffed the carbons back into the envelope then put the envelope back into her carpetbag. She couldn’t bear to look at it. She covered her face with her hands and moaned with the horror that confronted her. What had she done? How much information had she helped feed to Berlin? How many men had she helped Max kill?

She was filled with guilt, sick with remorse. She knew she should immediately take the envelope to her brother-in-law, Joe. He would know what to do with it. But she was also frightened. If she took the envelope to Joe, the authorities to whom he showed it would want to know how he’d got it. He would have no choice but to tell them. Would they arrest her? What about her father? It was his church that she’d used to move the documents. Would they arrest him, too? If they did, what would become of James?

Her stomach squeezed again. She tried to quell the nausea roiling inside her. As she did, a fresh, and terrible, realization hit her—those ships, the ones mentioned in Burgess’s letters—some of them were in the Atlantic, others in the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean
.

“That’s where Seamie is,” she said aloud.

Jennie didn’t know the name of his new ship. Seamie was not allowed to mention it in his letters to her, but she knew he would soon be on it, as soon as the injuries he’d received when the
Hawk
was sunk had healed. Maybe he was already on it, patrolling off the coast of Arabia again. And, thanks to Max’s efforts over the last few years—and her own—maybe German submarines were waiting for him.

“Oh, God,” she cried. “Oh, Seamie, no.”

She saw, with a sudden, wrenching clarity, what she had done: She had helped Max von Brandt because she hadn’t wanted him to tell Seamie the truth about her, and about James, but by trying so desperately to hold on to the man she loved, she had likely doomed him.

She bent down to pick up her carpetbag; she knew what she had to do. She would take the envelope to Joe. Now. Immediately. Word had to be got to Burgess and the Admiralty that the Germans knew everything, and that British ships were in greater danger than anyone could imagine.

As Jennie put her coat back on, the nausea overwhelmed her and she was sick again, violently so. When she finished, she stood over the sink for a few minutes, shaking and gasping. As soon as she caught her breath, she opened her eyes and that’s when she saw it—blood in the sink.

Jennie touched her fingers to her lips, but they came away clean. She realized that the blood was coming from her nose. She reached into her pocket to get a handkerchief to stanch it, but the blood was coming faster now. As she pressed the cloth to her face, the room swam suddenly, then came back into focus.

“Mummy?” a little voice said.

Jennie turned around.

“I heard a noise,” James said. “Mummy, your nose is bleeding.”

“James,” Jennie said. Her son looked blurry and far away.

“What is it, Mummy? What’s wrong?”

“James,” Jennie said, right before her legs gave way. “Run and get Granddad. . . .”