In her purse, she carried a copy of the Freewoman in which she had written the blistering review of Marriage. She’d been so proud of it at the time—the boldness of attacking a popular novel by an acknowledged master of the craft, a book unanimously praised elsewhere—but now she was mortified at her hubris, and the invective of the prose. It had never dawned on her that she might one day have to beard the lion in his den. Although the invitation had been mildly worded, simply suggesting that as the author of the book in question Wells would be interested in a candid exchange of views, she wondered if, when it came to it, he might not thunder down at her like Zeus from Olympus. As a very pretty young woman, she had learned from experience that men’s vanity could be so easily pricked.
The lap dog on the seat opposite studied her with an unwavering gaze. Could it tell how nervous she was? And when the train made a special stop at the estate station, even the dog’s owner looked up with undisguised curiosity as Cicily stood.
“Do you know Lady Warwick?” she asked.
“No. But I know H. G. Wells, who leases the rectory on her property.”
This left the woman even more slack-jawed, as Cicily stepped onto the platform and looked around. No one else had disembarked, and no one else was waiting there except for a slight, middle-aged man with a wispy brown mustache, the sort who might have been mistaken for a second-tier solicitor. He was wearing a long brown overcoat, a bowler hat, and muddied walking boots.
“Miss Rebecca West, I presume?” he said, coming forward with a bright smile and an outstretched hand.
“Cicily Fairfield, actually.”
“Ah, at last. I’d had to address the telegram to your pseudonym at the magazine office. Nice to know the true identity of my closest reader.”
“And one of your greatest admirers,” she said, “really. I’m so sorry about the tone of that review. I don’t know what got into me that day. I was—”
But he stopped her with another smile and an upraised palm.
“No need to defend yourself, or the review. I’m a big boy. I’ve weathered worse.”
She had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t burble, that she wouldn’t recant her views, that she wouldn’t melt in the glare of Wells’s celebrity, and here she’d done all three in a matter of seconds. She had to get a hold of herself, especially as he was hardly a formidable figure—he was not much taller than she was, twice her age, and if it weren’t for his kind eyes, which took her in with evident delight and interest, he might have been someone she passed on the street without a second glance.
“Do you mind if we walk to the house?” he suggested. “It’s not far.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “My legs are cramped from the train.”
Why had she said that about her legs? It was inappropriate, particularly on first meeting someone. A gentleman yet. Sometimes she wondered if she was really the firebrand she liked to imagine herself—and that her mother worried that she had become—or just another conventional young woman brought up to be a proper lady. Was she the dutiful Cicily Fairfield . . . or the radical, yet devious, heroine Rebecca West, whose name she had appropriated?
On the way to the house, a stately redbrick Georgian positioned at the top of a hill—before what was no doubt a very green lawn in spring and summer, but sere now—Wells told her a little bit about the countryside, the reason he’d taken the house there. “I have a place in London, of course, but here there are so few intrusions on my time and my writing, and no clanging trolleys or crowds to contend with.” And then there was his landlady, the grand benefactress who had “so generously” given him a long lease on the old rectory.
“It does seem the ideal getaway,” she said. “A sleepy little village like this.”
“Yes, well, it is, except when a zeppelin crashes at your front door. The town is still all abuzz with it.”
“That’s right. Was it far from your house?”
He turned to point across some barren fields. “You can still see the scorch marks on the earth.”
Indeed she could. A long black trail seared into the ground. The war was everywhere these days.
At the house, he scraped his boots clean, then ushered her into a spacious square reception hall, with wainscoted walls and a large chandelier looming overhead, and called out, “Jane! Our Ibsen girl is here!”
It was a clever play on words—the Gibson Girl was once a popular American icon, an ethereal beauty with delicate features and upswept hair, an image that could no longer hold its place in the horrors of a war-torn world—and Wells’s wife answered with a welcoming, “Show the dear girl into the drawing room. I’ll be right down just as soon as I’ve finished cleaning up your mess. Do you know that you spilled a bottle of ink last night?”
“Leave it for the housekeeper.”
“She’s in town getting the groceries.”
Wells shrugged guiltily—“I sometimes work quite late,” he whispered—before beckoning her into the next room. Here, the walls were lined with bookshelves, and Rebecca couldn’t resist going straight to them, to see what the great author himself was reading. Conrad, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Gissing, Kipling, along with a number of less expected books from the likes of Marx, Engels, Henry George, and other socialists and utopians. There were also dozens of Wells’s own books, many in their foreign editions. What must this be like? To see so many of your own works bound in leather, with beautifully embossed covers, and translated into a dozen different tongues? Would she ever be able to see such a display of her own works?
Perhaps Wells had been reading her mind. “Someday,” he said, “if you keep at your writing, you may have the pleasure of surveying your own oeuvre. How old are you now, if I may ask?”
Blushing, she replied, “Nearly twenty,” and he laughed.
“All of that, are you? Well, then, you’d better get cracking.”
When Jane came down, she had a warm smile, but did not extend a hand. “My skin’s stained blue from the ink.”
“I’m sorry, dear, I must have fallen asleep at the switch,” Wells apologized.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Jane said good-naturedly, motioning for them all to be seated. Rebecca took a wingback chair to one side of the fireplace, and Wells sat directly opposite. Jane sat on a well-worn loveseat, and picked up a bit of knitting from the side table. Rebecca suspected that she was glimpsing them in their accustomed spots, and felt all the more like an intruder. How in the world had she wound up here?
To put her at her ease, Jane asked several questions about her journey up from London, and Rebecca was only too happy to fill in the trivial details. Then the conversation moved on to her family—her absent father, who had simply vanished six years before, her two sisters, her attempts to be an actress. “My mother was dead set against it, but that only made me more determined than ever.”
“But you’ve dropped those plans?” Wells asked.
“They were dropped for me,” she replied, with a smile. “I enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and after giving several performances there that were, shall we say, less than well received, I saw the writing on the wall.”
“But you did take away something from your stage career,” Jane prompted her, and Rebecca laughed.
“If you mean my new name, yes—Cicily Fairfield was retired forever, in favor of Rebecca West, the last part I played.”
Tea was served by Mrs. Willoughby, now returned from the market, and when that was done, Jane excused herself to attend to some correspondence. “I’ll leave you two to discuss literary matters.”
And that was when Rebecca felt, for the first time, the full force and effect of Wells’s personality and his undivided attention. Although he had struck her as rather ordinary when she had first seen him on the train platform, now she was entranced by the blue-gray eyes that looked at her with such penetration—she was used to male attention, but not from someone so deeply interested in who she truly was—and even more so by the ungovernable tide of his conve
rsation. She had never heard one man throw off so many brilliant ideas, so many casual aperçus, with such ease, or ask her—a young woman most noted up until now for her good looks—for her own opinions and views. With some of them, he was in agreement—women’s suffrage, for example—but with others, even when he disagreed, he did so with such respect and intelligence that she never felt the least bit slighted or condescended to. Before she knew it, she had missed the last train connection back to London, and was invited by Jane to stay for dinner and the night.
After the last of the wine and cheese, Jane ushered her to a bedroom upstairs, and provided her with everything she might need, including a voluminous white flannel nightgown. “You’ll look like an angel once you’ve put that on,” Jane said, and with a chuckle Rebecca replied, “If only my mother could hear you say that.”
Before turning in, she looked out the window at a freshly painted barn, quite white in the moonlight, and a boxed herb garden under a winter screen; a covered stone well that might have served as an illustration in a children’s book stood beside it. She could also just discern some croquet wickets, and the rough borders of a tennis court, with a drooping net.
It was like a little paradise that Wells and his wife had constructed here, she reflected, before banishing the very thought, because if that was true, then that left only one role for her. It was a meaty role indeed, playing the serpent—the kind of role that actresses vied for—but hadn’t she given up on such dramatics?
She heard the soft patter of slippered feet outside her door, and Wells’s muted voice, saying, “Good night. Sleep well.”
“Thank you, and good night, Mr. Wells.”
There was a short pause. Was this exchange meant to continue?
But then the footfalls receded . . . and she was left to wonder what might have happened if—and not as the proper Cicily Fairfield, but as the bold Rebecca West—she had opened that door.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kurt pressed his eye to the peephole he had whittled into the wall of the hayloft—it hadn’t been easy, using only his jackknife—and looked out at the back of the big brick house. In the three days that he had been hiding in the barn, he had become accustomed to the rhythms of the house and the comings and goings of its inhabitants. A middle-aged couple, an occasional housekeeper, a gardener now and then. But tonight, something was different—another light was on in one of the upstairs rooms, and he caught a glimpse of a woman, younger and trimmer than the other women, standing at the window in a white nightgown. Then she drew the curtains, and moments later extinguished the light.
He lay back on the hay, exhaling slowly, trying to ignore the ache in his rib cage and the throbbing pain in his broken ankle. He had been lucky to survive at all; he knew that. When the flames in the fuselage had come charging at him, he had strapped on his parachute and leapt from the zeppelin, but too late, and too low, for the canopy to open properly. He had been buffeted wildly in the wind from the failing rotors, and then hurled into the top of a grove of trees, which had probably saved his life but done considerable collateral damage. Winded and hurt, he had still had the sense to gather in the shredded chute and clutch it to his chest. It had provided him with the warmth to make it through the worst night of his life, hidden among the uppermost boughs.
The zeppelin died a minute later, nosing into the ground like an enormous pig hunting for truffles, engulfed in flames. From what he could see through the thick tangle of branches and dead leaves, it was soon surrounded by English people, running across the fields. He thought he had heard a bugle. He’d started to wipe away the black smudge of oil on his face before thinking better of it and spreading it around for camouflage instead.
Inside that inferno, his fellow crewmen were all already incinerated, except, as it turned out, for one. He could never be sure but for some reason he thought it was the rear gunner, Otto, whom he saw crawling away from the wreckage, writhing like a worm on the ground. A few of the English had looked on as one of them—a burly bearded man—had stood over him and then stabbed a pitchfork through his back. Kurt had felt the pain as if it had been his own body.
But wasn’t this exactly what he had always been told about the barbaric English people? Wasn’t it one of them—a man he would never be able to know, or to exact his revenge upon—who had killed his brother Caspar in some Belgian battlefield? And an English pilot who had shot down his brother Albert’s plane over the Channel? The night he’d been told about Albert, while sweeping up the factory floor in Stuttgart, he had sworn to make the English pay, and the next day, sneaking out of the house so that his parents would not stop him, he had fudged his real age and enlisted in the air corps.
Propping himself up on one elbow, he looked out again at the house. All was silent and dark. His stomach growled from hunger, and he licked his chapped lips. He wondered what time it was. Late enough that everyone would be safely asleep? Inching his way across the loft, his feet felt for the rickety wooden ladder. Climbing down, he was careful not to put too much weight on the broken ankle, or to do anything to disturb the barn’s only other occupant—a gray owl with a baleful glare.
He cracked open the barn door, waited several seconds after the creaking had subsided, then poked his head out and looked all around. A light wind was making the bucket swing above the well. He went to it, lowered it quickly, and drew it up half-filled. He gulped the cold water down, feeling it run down his chin, onto his chest, under his torn shirt and scorched leather flying jacket. Bending his head, he poured the rest over his bristly blond hair and scrubbed the remaining oil from his face. Then his hunger couldn’t wait any longer, and he limped around the side of the house to the scullery door, where a refuse bin was kept. Inside it, he found a veritable treasure chest—scraps of fatty beef, potato skins, bones from which the marrow had not yet been sucked, the hard rind from a very aromatic cheese. He stuffed some in his mouth, the rest in his pockets, and made sure to leave the lid off the bin; that way, if they noticed that the bin had been pillaged, they’d attribute it to animals.
After another quick survey of the yard—the only thing stirring was a rabbit, foraging in the herb garden—he scurried back to the barn. The owl, perched on a beam overhead, fluttered its wings and hooted three or four times. “Schlafen,” Kurt said softly, “schlafen sie gut”—then clambered up the ladder to his hiding place. He flopped back onto the hay, his ankle throbbing from the exertion, and he clutched his leg hard, just above the knee, to keep the pain from traveling. Staring up at the rafters, he wondered, how long could this last? How long could he stay undetected? How long would it be before the English people, whose savagery he had read about in all the German newspapers and had now seen firsthand, found him and finished him off, just as they had the rear gunner Otto?
One thing he knew—he could expect no quarter, and should give none in return.
CHAPTER FIVE
“And where will you be off to now?” Wells asked, as he helped Rebecca off the train at Charing Cross Station.
“The office of the magazine, I think.”
“Have you got a piece to turn in?”
“Much better than that!” she exclaimed with a wide grin. “I’ve had a personal interview with none other than Herbert George Wells himself.”
“What?” he protested. How had he forgotten that she was a journalist? “You are not going to attempt to capitalize on a personal encounter, are you? Everything said at the rectory was strictly off the record.”
She laid a hand playfully on his sleeve—a gesture whose intimacy was not lost on him—and said, “Oh, I’ll honor that. But may I not at least boast of having been invited to your house and even spending a night under your roof?”
“You might be wise,” he said, mulling it over, “to leave out the part about spending the night.” He already had a reputation that he was trying to live down, nor did he wish to see her inadvertently do any damage to her own. “But I give you permission to admit the rest. Just make me out to be madly dashin
g.”
“That won’t be hard at all.”
With a quick peck on his cheek, she turned away, and he stood still to watch her go. She was small in stature, but carried herself with a winning assurance as she made her way toward Trafalgar Square and its bustling crowds. He noticed young men turning their heads as she passed, and just when he was ready to move on himself—his appointment was in ten minutes—she swiveled her head, caught him staring, and wagged a finger. He blushed, despite himself. When would he learn?
Although the building that housed the War Office had been built in 1906, it was a vast neo-baroque affair, trapezoidal in shape and punctuated by dozens of spires, with over a thousand rooms and probably twice as many windows. He made several wrong turns and went up and then down a couple of wrong staircases, before finding the Ministry of Military Information. But even then he thought he must have gotten it wrong, because slouched in an armchair by the desk was his brash, outspoken friend Winston Churchill.
“What on earth are you doing here?” Wells said, shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Has the Admiralty office thrown you out for insubordination?”
“No, no, I am what you might call on loan. To Colonel Bryce,” Churchill said, indicating the tall, lean man standing stiff as a ramrod, his khaki uniform adorned with a neat row of medals, behind the desk.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 3