by Kate Quinn
Beth didn’t answer.
“Never mind. Tell me where they are, and I’ll see you out of here.”
“What gives you that authority?” she replied. “Why would you have any right to dictate my future?”
“I’m MI-5 now, Beth. Recruited after the war. I’m not the contact on file here at Clockwell, handling your case, but my bosses won’t think it odd if I start taking an interest in you, considering we used to be friends. I can volunteer to take your case, put in a report that you’ve got your mind and your self-control back. You’ll be released.”
To be free. Fresh air, buttered toast, a bed that smelled of starched linen and not of old piss stains . . . Beth bit the inside of her cheek. It was an illusion and she wasn’t going to be tricked by it.
“Do something for me,” she heard herself saying. Her hand crept up, fidgeted with the ragged ends of her hair. “Please?”
“Anything.” He bent down, took her hands. “I want to help you.”
“Every night, tell yourself what you told me. How you’re a patriot, not a traitor. How you’re the hero of this story, not the villain.” Beth smiled. “Then remember that you got an innocent woman locked in a madhouse to save your own skin, and ask yourself: how goddamned heroic is that?”
He said nothing. His face had gone white.
“By the way,” Beth added, “how long have you been selling MI-5 secrets to Moscow? I’m guessing since your first week on the job.”
He turned even whiter. Beth sat down on the bench, thinking, Checkmate. It had just been a guess.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said at last.
She smiled contemptuously.
“How—” he began, and stopped.
We won the war and no harm came to BP—even with your meddling, Beth thought. But who knows what damage you might cause now, interfering in MI-5 business?
“The Soviets aren’t our allies anymore. How do you justify that, Giles? Selling to our enemy. Are you calling this patriotism, or is it just cold hard cash now?” Raising her eyebrows. “Or maybe it’s self-preservation. You give them what they want or they turn you in? Are you only now realizing the hold they’ve got on you, as long as they want it?”
“It won’t be forever.” His face hardened like a stubborn child’s. “Just a few bits and pieces, then I’m done.”
“Is that what they’re telling you? Or what you’re telling yourself?”
He seized her hand, a gesture that would have looked friendly to any nurse watching from a distance, but he bent her little finger back almost to the wrist. A spike of pain drove up Beth’s arm, and she cried out in surprise.
“I was trying to do this nicely,” he whispered. “But if you’re going to be stupid, I’m done dancing around. Give me what I want.”
“No.” Beth tried to yank free.
“Yes. Because if you don’t, you’ll be a drooling idiot forever. The new head physician has reviewed the case of Alice Liddell, and he has a suggestion to improve your moodiness and your occasional fits of violence. Oh, and your promiscuity—apparently you propositioned an orderly in a closet recently. Can’t have promiscuous acts among the patients; it wouldn’t be good for the place’s reputation.” Giles leaned closer. “Do you know what a lobotomy is?”
The pain was still screaming down Beth’s arm.
“It’s a neurological procedure favored in America. Surgical severance of the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain.”
Beth’s skin crawled as if a rat had run over her nerves.
“They shave your scalp and drill into your skull, then shove a metal spatula in there and hack until the links are severed.” His voice was brutal. “You’re awake the whole time. The nurses encourage you to sing songs, recite poetry, answer questions. The procedure is over when you’re no longer able to speak.”
Horror slithered down her spine. Beth saw herself on an operating table, her head in a vise, singing When Cunningham won at Matapan by the grace of God and Beth. Struggling to find the next line. Falling silent—
Like her Go partner.
“After the operation, you’ll be in a state they call surgically induced childhood.” His words rolled over Beth in waves. “Sounds spiffing, doesn’t it? Didn’t we all adore being children? But it might not be much fun the second time around, once you get past toilet training. Ideally you’ll remain in an infantile state, and they’ll guide you into a more docile, accepting personality. Results vary, of course. You might end up a vegetable pissing her sheets for the next fifty years.”
Beth managed to wrench away. Her whole arm was numb; she stood clutching it and trembling.
“You’re telling yourself I’m lying. I’m not.” He looked down at her, biting his lip as though he were the one in pain. “Dr. Seton is very enthusiastic about the procedure. He’s already begun lobotomizing some of his other patients; perhaps you’ve noticed. He really shouldn’t have told me you were on the list, considering I’m not the MI-5 contact on record in your case, but I can be very persuasive.”
Beth collapsed back onto the bench, breath coming in gasps. Holes drilled in her skull. Toilet training. She could imagine herself sitting on this bench, smiling vacantly, remembering something about keys and roses, but having no idea what it all meant. Sitting on this bench for the next fifty years.
You’re lying, she thought. But she no longer believed it.
“MI-5 won’t contest your doctor’s recommendation, Beth.” Giles dropped onto the bench beside her. “Maybe you’ll end up fine, a little fuzzy around the edges. But maybe you’ll be a shell with a head full of mashed turnip.” His voice rose. “So give me what I want, or you’ll find yourself strapped to a table as they go at your skull with a drill.”
Beth screamed. She clapped both hands over her mouth in time to contain it, but it went on and on inside her head. Her head, her brain. She was nothing without her mind. She’d survived here for more than three years because of her mind.
“I didn’t suggest this, I’ll have you know. I didn’t even know the procedure existed. But I’ll let it happen.” He leaned closer. “You want to know why I’m finally here talking to you? Because I’m tired of worrying if you’ve figured out it was me. I’m on my way up, I’ll have a family soon, and I’m done worrying if you might be a threat to all that. So tell me what I want to know. Either you walk out of this place with no proof against me, or you stay here forever unable to remember what proof you had. Either way, I’m free.”
He stood. “Think about it. Because I hate the thought of anyone cutting into that admirable brain of yours, but my God, I’m tired of living on the edge.”
He waited.
Beth flung herself on him. She couldn’t stop, couldn’t think, couldn’t reason, just flew at Giles and tried to tear him to pieces. She would have clawed his eyes out of his sockets, but he threw her away like a rag doll before the orderlies could even descend.
“Your surgery is scheduled for the afternoon after the royal wedding.” He stepped back, straightening his tie. “I’ll ring here that morning. Tell the doctors you wish to see me—I’ll speak to the MI-5 chap handling your file, get the surgery stopped, and volunteer to take your case. Say nothing, and the surgery goes forward.” Pause. “I like you, Beth. I always have. So don’t make me do this.”
Chapter 71
Since when can you drive?” Osla asked Mab as they motored out of York.
“My husband taught me.” Mab took a sharp bend with confident speed. “He’s Australian; grew up eight hundred miles from anything important and four hundred miles from anything at all, so he learned to drive in the cradle.”
Osla slanted a glance at her. “What did you tell him about this day trip?”
“Visit to an old friend. The best lies have the most truth.”
“That’s certainly true.”
They exchanged guarded glances as the Bentley halted at a four-way stop. Maybe we can get through this day without fla
shing any more claws, Osla thought.
“You didn’t used to wear trousers,” Mab said with a glance at Osla’s sleek red slacks. “They made you look squat. This prolonged rationing is such a blessing for some people . . .”
“You’re not in Casablanca,” Osla shot back, “so stop wearing your hat over one eye like a third-rate Ingrid Bergman.”
Mab glared. As they climbed up into the high moors, Osla outlined the route to Clockwell. “About a two-hour drive.”
“And when we get there?” Mab steered the Bentley round a bend. “How are we getting in?”
Osla outlined her plan. “The matron on telephone duty shouldn’t have told me so much, but I detoured her onto a nice long gossip about the royal wedding, and there’s really nothing most women won’t tell you right now in exchange for royal wedding gossip. I let it slip that the bridal bouquet would be myrtle and lilies, and I tell you, that woman was mine.”
“Is the bridal bouquet going to be myrtle and lilies?”
“How the blithering hell should I know? I made it up. As for getting admitted to visiting hours without identification—” Osla ticked through the last details. “If they double down on us, we start up the waterworks. We’re so distressed to be coming here, doctor, please, we’ve come all this way.” Osla dabbed an imaginary handkerchief. “It’s amazing what men, even doctors, will do to get weeping women off their hands.”
“You can cry on command?”
“Of course. Frightfully useful.”
A pall fell over the car, maybe just a cloud sliding across the sun. “What do you think will happen?” Osla heard herself ask.
Mab stared straight ahead. “We’ll realize Beth’s mad as a hatter and be off the hook.”
“That’s what you hope will happen. Rather beastly of you, too,” Osla couldn’t help adding.
“I’m a beastly person, Os. That’s been made abundantly clear lately. By you, by my—” She stopped, jaw set.
“In some ways, I’m glad you’re beastly.” Osla curled her feet beneath her. “If Beth’s not mad and not lying, we’re going to have to put things right. I’d much rather have a cast-iron bitch on my side for that fight than a fainting ninny.”
“Get your shoes off the seat!”
Osla ignored her. “Who do you think the traitor is?”
“Maybe it’s you,” Mab suggested.
“Do shut up. The traitor—”
“Look here, do we have to go on saying the traitor? I feel like I’m in an Agatha Christie novel, and not in a good way.”
“I’m floored at all points here trying to imagine a good way to be in an Agatha Christie novel.”
“You’re the corpse in chapter one,” Mab suggested, smirking.
The car was winding further into the fells. “You’re very nearly enjoying this,” Osla observed. “That must have been quite the up-and-downer with your husband, if you’re on the verge of enjoying a drive to a lunatic asylum with me, darling.”
That got her a withering look.
“Just the glare, no quip? You’re losing your touch, Queen Mab.” Maybe Osla could enjoy this moment too, just a bit. “If I call the traitor the informer instead, will you keep glaring?”
“I will allow informer.”
“Topping of you. What if the informer is . . . someone we know?”
“If Beth knew them,” Mab replied grimly, “we probably do, too. Odds are it’s a woman.”
“How do you figure that?”
“There were more of us at BP. And people don’t suspect women.”
“Don’t talk slush!” Osla snorted. “We can’t walk off alone with a man without being called fast, we can’t check into a hotel without suspicion we’re there for hanky-panky—”
“People suspect women of hanky-panky,” Mab corrected. “But they never suspect women of espionage. No one thinks women can keep secrets.”
“What are the three fastest means of communication?” Osla quoted the old joke, then she and Mab chanted the answer together: “Telegraph, telephone, tell a woman!”
“You have no idea how I hate that joke,” Mab said.
“Darling, I have a very good idea.”
They fell silent. The car scraped past an elderly farm truck trundling along an exposed spine of country road, mud splatting across the windscreen. “Why did you settle in Yorkshire of all places?” Osla asked.
“Because my husband got a job here, and because it was far away from London and Bletchley,” Mab said shortly. “Because it had no memories at all.”
Osla twisted the big emerald around her finger. “You said you had a family now . . .” Oh, blast, she couldn’t ask if Mab had children, given the phantom that was little Lucy, hovering between them—it would drive the knife in to the hilt.
“I have twins,” Mab said unexpectedly. “Eighteen months old.” The flash of love through her face was the first softening Osla had seen since clapping eyes on her yesterday.
“I’m happy for you,” Osla said honestly. “What are their names?”
“Edward—Eddie—and Lucy.”
Osla felt the phantom glide of a little girl’s wrist wrenching out of her grip. “Mab . . .”
“Don’t.”
Osla looked straight ahead to the road twisting down the slope. “Go on hating me,” she said. “I hope it helps.”
“I don’t hate you, Os.” Mab’s eyes were invisible behind her huge sunglasses. “I try not to feel much of anything these days—love or hate. I love Eddie and Lucy, because you can’t help loving your children, and that’s how it should be. But it’s easier if I don’t feel much of anything for anyone else.”
“Easier to do what?”
“Endure.”
They motored on in silence.
Chapter 72
Twelfth November. Nine days before Beth’s surgery, for which she’d been receiving increasing examinations; eight days before the royal wedding, which the nurses blathered about endlessly. “They say the bridesmaids are wearing white, but with the princess wearing white . . .” Chattering and chattering as Beth sat with her Go partner, desperately trying to engage the woman.
“Just one move. The black stone.” Nothing. “Would you rather try chess?” Beth laid out the chessboard. “Remember when you first taught me how to turn a pawn into a queen?”
Nothing. The woman who had played chess like a grand master now sat utterly still, utterly vacant, occasionally shitting herself. Her eyes were blank as shaded windows. It can’t end this way, Beth screamed inside. Not for you, and not for me either. It can’t!
But then it came:
“Special treat for you, Miss Liddell,” the matron cooed.
A vise for my head. Then the whine of a drill, the wet shoving sound of a surgical tool cutting through her brain . . .
Had they moved the procedure up?
Panic hit Beth in a wave, and the chessboard upended in a scatter of black and white pieces as she tried to run.
Chapter 73
Only a two-hour drive to the asylum, but everything had gone wrong. A road was washed out and they had to detour for hours; a tire blew, then a torrential downpour of rain hit. “That snaffles it,” Osla had seethed. “Visiting hours will be done by the time we arrive.” She and Mab had ended up spending a resentful night at a drab hotel two miles from Clockwell and making their way through the asylum gates the following morning.
Mab steered the Bentley through the grounds and parked in the indicated lot. There was no trouble about their names or any request for identification when Mab and Osla strode in with their most confident swing of hips and handbags. “Here to see our sister Alice Liddell—Mrs. Riley and Mrs. Chadwick.” Giving the names of Beth’s married sisters.
The matron at the front desk rose. “I’ll show you to her. We do ask, of course, that you not mention your sister’s upcoming surgery during the visit.”
Osla’s heart began to thud. “What surgery?” This place had looked so friendly when they rolled up: a mellow stone cou
ntry house with two extended wings, surrounded by rambling gardens. Now the bright winter light streaming through the windows looked glaring, a spotlight to cut down anyone who passed through it.
“The surgery was discussed with her parents, as her next of kin. It’s a procedure that has had tremendous success improving the temperament of moody or emotionally distressed patients. Simple surgical severance of the connections between the—”
“In English, please,” Mab said. Osla gripped the edge of the desk, pulse beating ominously.
“It’s a new wave in advanced treatment of the mentally impaired. Much more common in America, but our new chief physician is versed in the latest techniques.” The matron smiled. “It’s called a lobotomy.”
“What’s a lobotomy?” The word gave Osla the shivers.
“A harmless procedure, I assure you. Your sister will be much the better for it.” Twinkle. “Now, come with me.”
THE GARDEN WAS dry and dead, but white-smocked, empty-eyed women still wandered through it. “Patients have the grounds in the afternoon for exercise . . .” Osla ignored the matron. They’d been brought to wait beside the stone benches in the center of the rosebushes, and she was about to see Beth, on whom she hadn’t laid eyes in three and a half years. At her side, she could see Mab blinking too rapidly for calm, though she was the picture of elegance with her smartly slanted hat.
“No—” A raspy voice startled Osla, the edge of desperation so sharp it raised her hackles. “I don’t want a treat, I know where you’re taking me—”
“You silly girl, your sisters are here.” A nurse’s exasperated voice approached through the roses. “Don’t you want to see them?”
Beth stumbled into the center of the rose garden and stopped dead.
Osla and Mab froze, too. This was Beth? Their old billet-mate who had transformed herself from a beaten-down spinster in a moth-colored jumper to a star codebreaker with a Veronica Lake wave? This woman looked like a haunted-house apparition, stripped down to bones and tendons and raw, raging will. Beth’s nails were bitten bloody, her blond hair chopped at her shoulders, where she fidgeted constantly with its ragged ends. She started violently at every sound, yet Osla didn’t think she looked afraid. She looked too maddened to know what fear was: a writhing mess held barely upright by fury.