Slattery, who ran the town livery service, used a pitchfork he was carrying to draw a line in the dirt and warned a couple of children not to cross it. Mrs. Willoughby, who helped Jane with the household chores, was wringing her hands and muttering something to the tobacconist, Mr. Spool. The Boy Scout was sitting astride his bicycle, his duty done, bugle dangling from one hand.
“You’ll catch your death all over again,” Wells heard, as Jane came up behind him, squashing a hat onto his head and wrapping a woolen scarf around his neck. It was all oddly like a harvest bonfire, though the festive note was entirely replaced by one of alarm.
And then, like a worm wriggling up out of the earth, Wells saw something emerge from the shattered remnants of the rear gun turret. An arm was flung out, and then another, followed by a head scorched as black as ink, except for the whites of the eyes, wide with fear.
The bugle boy cried, “Look there!”
“One of ’em’s still alive!” Mrs. Willoughby shouted.
The gunner slithered on his belly away from the wreck, smoke and even a touch of fire still smoldering from his leather pants. His fingers were digging in the sod to pull himself along, a few inches at a time. His legs looked broken. Goggles hung down from his neck.
How on earth could he have survived the fire, and the crash? Wells wondered.
Slattery stepped over his own line, and strode to where the man was now panting on a tiny patch of grass and weed. Wells assumed—though why?—that he was about to pull him farther away from the flames.
“Bitte,” the gunner said, too injured even to lift his head. “Bitte.”
But Slattery didn’t say anything. He simply straddled him, one foot on either side, raised his pitchfork with both hands, then plunged it into the gunner’s shoulders, pinning him to the ground like a butterfly to a mat. Still leaning down hard on the handle, and putting his full weight on it, he muttered, “Baby-killer.”
CHAPTER TWO
The next day, the downed zeppelin was not only the talk of the town, but of the whole country. The late edition of the London papers made space for it on their front pages. At the tobacconist’s shop, Wells picked up a sheaf of the newspapers, along with his usual haul of whatever magazines, pamphlets, and tabloids caught his eye. One on the rack was new—the Freewoman, which billed itself as a monthly journal aimed at the free-thinking (read “suffragette”) women of England. He added a copy of that to his pile on the counter—he always liked to keep up with current opinion of every stripe—and as Mr. Spool toted them all up, Wells asked, “Has your business been up today, what with all the national attention?”
“Oh, yes,” Spool said, making change from the fiver Wells had handed him. “Lots of folks stopping for directions to the site.”
“That doesn’t do you much good,” Wells said. “Directions.” His own parents had owned a small and unsuccessful shop, and he remained sensitive to the plight of shopkeepers.
“Oh, I manage to sell them a packet of Woodbines or a good cigar before they go.” With a stringy finger stained yellow from nicotine, Spool pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Not that they get to see much. The army’s pretty well got the whole field roped off.”
Wells had seen some signs of it before coming into town; two or three military cars and a pair of lorries, with a half dozen soldiers in each, had bucketed past him as he’d walked along the road.
By the time he was heading back home, it was dark out, but on the far field he could see that lights had been set up and he could hear some commotion. Jane would worry that he was late for dinner, but he couldn’t resist, and detoured toward the meadow. He was still a few hundred yards off when a sentry stepped into his path.
“Sorry, sir, but this is as far as you can go.”
“Saw it all last night.”
“Must have been quite a show.”
Was that what it had been? Hard to think of it that way at all, especially as the one moment that had come back to him all night—and all that day as he’d attempted to work on his new manuscript—had been the livery driver finishing off the German gunner.
“Were there any survivors?” Wells asked.
“From the zepp? Not very likely. Why?”
“I thought I might have seen someone fall, or jump, before the crash.”
This appeared to give the soldier pause. The question was above his pay grade. “Can you wait here? I’ll have to get my CO.” He started to turn away, then said, “Oh, and may I ask your name, sir?”
“Wells. H. G.”
The soldier nodded quickly, starting to turn again, when the name struck him. “The author?”
“I like to think so.”
The soldier loped off toward the wreckage in the distance, but not without one backward glance at the famous writer. Wells was used to it, but still enjoyed the recognition. God knows he’d spent enough time at his desk to have earned it.
When a Lieutenant Talbot arrived, looking just as young and callow as the sentry, he began by burbling about Wells’s books and how much he had enjoyed them as a boy, before getting to the matter at hand. “We’ve found the remains of perhaps a dozen men inside and around the wreckage,” he said, “but the fire was so intense it’s hard to know for sure if we’ve found them all. You say you think you saw someone escape before the crash?”
“Off behind that copse of trees, to the south, there.”
The lieutenant looked that way and said, yes, they’d searched there. “And at least a quarter mile in every direction,” he added.
“Were any parachutes found?”
“None. And judging from the trajectory and speed of the descent, there wouldn’t have been time to deploy one properly.”
Maybe he’d been mistaken, Wells thought. Either way, it was out of his hands now. “Would it be possible,” he said, “for me to get a look at what’s left of the zeppelin before you haul it all away?”
The lieutenant wrestled with it. “Orders are very strict about that; no civilians are to be—”
“For my writing,” Wells said, playing his ace. “The Evening Standard has requested anything I can give them.” Not strictly true in this instance, but if it helped . . .
The lieutenant folded like a house of cards; how could he refuse such a request from the most famous writer in the world? Nodding at the sentry, as if to warn him to keep mum about this breach, he escorted Wells the few hundred yards between where they’d been conferring and the sodden pile of bent metal and scorched fabric, all thoroughly drenched by the fire brigade, and now bathed in the harsh glare of arc lights powered by two rumbling field generators. While soldiers kept up a wide perimeter around the site, a few experts were still picking over the remains, looking for all the world like men exploring the innards of a beached and eviscerated whale. The rounded struts rose up like broken ribs above their heads; the propellers resembled wounded tail fins. The twin Daimler engines, the beating heart of the beast, had already been removed and were lashed to platforms tied to the back of the lorries.
A dozen canvas body bags were discreetly being loaded into a pair of hearses.
Wells was standing on the very spot where the gunner had been dispatched with the pitchfork. He could still see the divots torn in the soil by its prongs, and perhaps the lieutenant had noticed them, too.
“We found a crewman here,” he said, “who’d managed to crawl away. He’d made it this far, but he was pretty well burnt and had a number of wounds, and no one has been able to tell us if he was able to say anything.”
Wells remained silent.
“Standard military protocol dictates that enemy combatants, when captured, be treated with decency.”
Wells nodded thoughtfully.
“Did you observe anything that would not conform to such a view?”
Had the puncture marks been so evident? “No, but then I was not among the first on the scene.”
“It appears,” the lieutenant said dryly, “that no one was.”
There was nothing Wells could say without indicting Slattery. And he knew for a fact that the livery man had had a special reason for what he did. His sister and her family had been killed in Sheringham, in one of the very first zeppelin raids. Not an excuse necessarily . . . but under the circumstances understandable. Wells would not be the one to bring down further calamity on the man’s head, especially as the German gunner had looked only moments away from death, anyway.
“Would you mind if I just poked around a bit on my own?”
“I guess it would be all right,” the lieutenant replied, “so long as you don’t get in the way of the inspectors.”
Wells deposited the bundle of newspapers he was carrying on the hood of one of the army cars, and gingerly approached the carcass of the airship. Hard to believe that just the night before it had been a mighty behemoth, ruler of the sky, dealer of death and destruction. Now look at it. Bits of glass ground under his shoes. He was thankful that the corpses of the crew had already been removed; indeed, he could hear the hearses starting up and slowly driving from the field back toward the road, their headlights briefly sweeping across the scene and adding to the unnatural glare. Wells had to hold his arm up in front of his eyes until they had passed.
The bodies might be gone, but there was still a lingering odor of death. A fiery one at that.
Wells dug in the pocket of his coat and removed his pad and pencil—no writer worth his salt went anywhere without one—and a nearby inspector, kneeling among some metal bits, gave him a quizzical look. “Just a few notes for the War Office,” Wells said, in a jaunty yet authoritative tone. “Memory’s not what it used to be.”
The inspector went back to his task, and Wells began not only jotting down notes, but making quick sketches of the scene—the twisted fuselage, the long trail of wreckage, the flattened gondolas where the gunners had crouched. He’d always been a quick hand at drawing—the only part of the draper’s trade, to which he had once been apprenticed, at which he’d excelled; even in his private correspondence, he often relied on what he jokingly called his “picshuas” to recapture certain scenes. These hasty sketches would no doubt prove useful in the construction of some future novel or story.
When he was done, he looked up again at the night sky. The stars were out and the moon had no rival tonight. Then he turned his gaze toward the distant copse of towering oaks and elms where he had thought he’d seen something fall. Perhaps his eyes had been strained from overwork . . . it would not be the first time.
Thanking the lieutenant, he picked up his parcel of newspapers and trudged the rest of the way home. Jane, popping her head out of the kitchen, said, “I don’t even need to ask where you’ve been.”
He plopped the papers on the hall table, then hung his coat and hat on the rack by the door.
“But if you catch pneumonia,” she said, “don’t come to me for tea and sympathy.”
After a dinner of hot roast beef and burnt potatoes, followed by a good Stilton, Wells and Jane retired to their usual armchairs on either side of the fireplace. He had a glass of Scotch on the table at his elbow, she had a cup of chamomile tea. The haul of newspapers from the tobacconist’s shop had been duly divided, and each was reading through his or her allotment.
Wells’s latest novel, entitled Marriage, had come out the week before, and the reviews were starting to appear. The Daily News had already praised the book for its “almost vicious gaiety,” and the Sphere had claimed it was “alive with flashes of the most perfect insight at every turn.” All the reviews so far had been laudatory; he hadn’t had such a uniformly good reception for a novel since The War of the Worlds—his terrifying tale of a Martian invasion, replete with three-legged mechanical monsters brought down in the end by Earth’s humblest organisms. And that had been, what, nineteen years before? He had published a trove of other books of a similar ilk. The Invisible Man, where a mad scientist discovered the secret of invisibility, but not its cure. The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a ruthless vivisectionist had relegated to himself the powers of God, hewing humanoid creatures from tortured beasts. The First Men in the Moon, in which a pair of explorers landed on the moon and encountered a race of insect-like creatures. Not to mention The Time Machine, the book that had launched his career, featuring a gentleman inventor who traveled into a far future where cannibalistic Morlocks preyed upon the helpless Eloi who lived above ground.
No, this new book had been an attempt, hardly his first, to put his epic tales of science-inflected fiction behind him and broaden his audience. He had begun to write more domestic and contemporary stories, ones in which he could explore and explain his views on social mores and issues of the day. He had a lot to say on such matters, especially those pertaining to love and sex, and books like this one, and Ann Veronica before it, were his way of doing so.
“Here’s a good notice,” Jane said, without looking up from the paper in her lap. “‘Mr. Wells has put all his cleverness into this long story of an engagement and marriage between two attractive and, we may add, perfectly moral young people.’ From the Spectator.”
Wells harrumphed. “Not sure I like that morality bit.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” Jane said, carefully tearing the review from the paper for Wells’s later and full perusal.
There was nothing in the next two papers, but in the third Wells struck gold again. “From the Daily Chronicle,” he announced. “‘A book that thrills with the life, the questioning, of to-day. Whatever the publishing season may produce, it is not likely to bring us anything more vital, more significant, than Marriage.’”
“And they never like anything,” Jane said.
Wells had just finished reading the whole review and put it to one side, when he noticed Jane’s now furrowed brow.
“What,” he said, “a dissenting voice?”
But she didn’t answer immediately. He craned his neck to see what she was reading, and saw that it was that new journal he’d never read before, the Freewoman.
“How bad is it?”
“You won’t be happy.”
“I’m braced.”
“You’d better be. ‘Mr. Wells’s mannerisms are more infuriating than ever. One knows at once that Marjorie is speaking in a crisis of wedded chastity when she says at regular intervals, “Oh, my dear . . . Oh, my dear!” or at moments of ecstasy, “Oh, my dear! Oh, my dear!” For Mr. Wells’s heroines who are loving under legal difficulties say “My Man!” or “Master!” Of course he is the old maid among novelists; even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction toward the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’”
There was more where that came from, and when she was done reading, Jane did not immediately look up. She knew that the reviewer had pricked his vanity—and precisely where it would hurt the most—but Wells was determined not to let on. He took a sip of his whiskey, smacked his lips, and asked, “Who wrote it?”
Jane flipped back to the previous page and said, “Someone named Rebecca West.”
“Never heard of her. Have you?”
“No, but I suspect it’s a nom de plume, anyway. It’s the name of the heroine in Ibsen’s play, Rosmersholm.”
Wells mulled it over. “At least she writes well.” That joke about the ladies’ ardent exclamations in his books . . .
“I think that’s enough for one night,” Jane said, tactfully closing the Freewoman without excising the review.
“I’m going to read for a bit,” Wells said, setting the papers aside and picking up a copy of the latest book by Henry James, a collection of his late short fictions, sent to him by the author himself. “This one ought to make me sleepy.”
“Your friend Henry can be relied on for that,” Jane said, trailing a hand lightly across his shoulder as she went upstairs to her bedroom. They had kept separate sleeping quarters almost since the day they were married. “Just don’t fall asleep in you
r chair again.”
Wells removed his bookmark—that telegram from the War Office asking him to stop by at his discretion for a private conference—opened the book again, but had more trouble than usual focusing on the words. Good God, why couldn’t James ever just say something in plain English? Why did everything have to be so belabored, so drawn out? But it really wasn’t James. That wasn’t what was bothering him. It was that damned Rebecca West, whoever she really was, and her pointed pen. He was both annoyed and intrigued by her nerve. He felt like a bear who’d been stung by a bee.
He picked up the Freewoman and read the entire review, and by the time he was done, he had resolved to invite her to his house and see if she was willing to stand in front of him and stick by what she had written. Yes, he would invite her to lunch at Easton Glebe and see what this young woman—and she had to be young or he would have heard of her already—was made of.
CHAPTER THREE
Cicily Fairfield boarded the train at Liverpool Street Station, and found a seat in a compartment occupied only by an elderly woman and her lap dog. Although Bishop’s Stortford was the closest station on the regular schedule, she had advised the conductor that, per the instructions Wells had sent her, she would need to be dropped off at a private halt a mile or so on, reserved for visitors to the estate of Lady Frances Warwick.
She had fretted for hours over what to wear, attended by her two older sisters and her mother, who had at first refused to believe that she had been summoned to meet the great man at all. They had studied his invitation as if decoding Sanskrit. But her mother, who had often wondered what would become of her willful daughter—until the year before, she’d aspired to become an actress—was openly encouraged by this sign. Perhaps the girl, whose essays and reviews had begun to appear quite regularly in small presses and publications, had real talent after all. But it was of paramount importance, her mother insisted, that she make the right first impression, and so she was wearing a dark green woolen suit and matching hat, with a starchy white blouse fastened high at the throat by a cameo broach Mrs. Fairfield’s mother had once worn to Ascot. Cicily’s dark brown hair, thick and lustrous, was tamed as best it could be, but there was nothing to diminish the flashing brilliance of her big dark brown eyes.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 2