The Poison Tide

by Andrew Williams

  The doorman at The Rag recognised him although it was a year since his last visit. He would have made a good spy. Cumming was waiting in the same private room, with its guns and spears and portraits of Empire soldiers. Advancing with just one stick now and a broad smile of welcome – ‘Good crossing? First class, wasn’t it? Suppose you deserved it’ – peering at him through his gold monocle, in his particular way – ‘you’re thinner.’

  ‘Probably. Yes.’

  They sat in the same leather armchairs by the hearth. ‘Did the war seem a long way from America?’ he asked.

  ‘Not when the Germans are trying to kill you.’

  ‘I meant the fighting in France. The newspapers say you could hear the guns firing for this new offensive in London. I didn’t hear them.’ He removed his monocle and inspected it for a few seconds, then slipped it back in his eye. ‘Country’s expecting a decisive victory.’ There was just the suggestion in his voice that he didn’t share the general optimism. ‘I hear there are a lot of casualties.’

  Wolff nodded slowly. There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t sound either bitter or trite.

  ‘Sir William thinks we can expect more trouble in America,’ C continued. ‘Our lawyers say anthrax is illegal –’ he laughed grimly – ‘illegal! Be sure and tell the police, I told them. But the politicians are a-flutter. They want to know what will happen if the Germans try the same thing here – with something nastier perhaps. “What about civilians?” they ask. “I don’t know,” I say; “ask your scientists.” “You must have spies,” they say; “find out what they’re thinking” – as if it were as simple as marching another battalion over the top.’ C leant forward, his large sailor’s hands resting on top of his stick. ‘I’ve tried to understand why I find the use of these diseases so shocking.’ He sighed heavily. ‘It’s a long way from the Battle of Trafalgar, isn’t it?’

  For a while neither of them spoke, C restlessly tap-tapping his stick against his shoe. Lifting his Punch-like chin at last, he asked: ‘Did Roger Casement know about the anthrax, I wonder? He put the Germans in touch with the Irish in America, didn’t he?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have approved.’

  ‘Well, Wolff, you must have a higher opinion of him than the rest of us,’ C remarked tartly. ‘Count Nadolny was handling both Casement and Dilger. So I think we can assume . . .’

  ‘Another reason to hang him, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t think we need another reason.’ Cumming was fidgeting, trying to keep his temper. ‘Ironic that you were betrayed by the same man, don’t you think – that Norwegian sodomite Christensen.’

  Wolff shook his head a little. ‘Actually, I’m glad. It was a relief.’

  ‘You’re a strange fish. Did you know Casement was like that, by the way?’

  ‘No,’ he lied.

  ‘I don’t think I believe you.’ C bent his head to one side, gazing at him thoughtfully. ‘We will hang him, you know. How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Does it matter how I feel?’

  ‘No, not really, I suppose. There’s a lot of bitterness, you see. They – we – put him on a pedestal, didn’t we? No one’s inclined to be forgiving, not the way the war’s going – and not with Irishmen dying in khaki for their country.’

  ‘I’m sure there will be plenty of his compatriots who think he’s doing the same.’

  ‘There may be some, yes,’ he conceded. ‘Not sure they’ll feel the same when they hear about his proclivities.’

  ‘Why would they?’

  He looked awkward, even shifty. ‘Not my business – Special Branch are handling those things. I think it . . .’ He hesitated, ready to say more, then thought better of it. ‘Anyway, thought you should know.’

  ‘Know?’

  ‘That they’re going to hang him.’

  ‘You’re very sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said firmly, ‘I am sure.’

  Wolff tried to sound matter-of-fact. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t hate yourself for it, Wolff, you’re not responsible. The bloody fool should have stayed in Germany.’

  There was another long silence, with C scrutinising him through his damned monocle like Reid at the hospital in Baltimore. ‘You’re battered and bruised but safe – I’m glad,’ he said, levering himself from his chair. ‘I must let you go.’ They drifted towards the door. ‘Take a few weeks’ leave. I can see you need a little more time to recover.’ Then, more jauntily, ‘And I almost forgot, you’ve been promoted – Commander Wolff. Thoroughly deserved – congratulations.’

  Wolff said thank you, and he supposed he was grateful. In the taxicab to Devonshire Place, he wondered why, and reasoned that it was probably natural to take pleasure in promotion even if he despised most of what he’d done to earn it. His apartment was clean, tidy, empty and soulless. Returning to it after so long, he felt like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, catching on the breeze the telegraphic current of the past, not happy times but thrilling ones. The housekeeper had folded Violet’s scarf and placed it on the arm of a couch. She must have left it the night he’d spent ashore from the ship, just a few months – or was it weeks? – before she’d become the Honourable Mrs Lewis. Lieutenant Snow had seen to his luggage and it arrived within the hour. He didn’t unpack: he was sick of the closeness of the old city already.

  First thing the following morning he sent a telegram to his mother, then took a taxicab to King’s Cross. Rumbling north felt like a journey through his life, a familiar roll call of stations and memories, home on leave from the sea, undergraduate outings at Cambridge, and school visits to Ely, the ship of the Fens, its lantern tower brilliant in the July sunshine. At King’s Lynn Station he paid a cab to drive him the last few miles across the Great Ouse into the open Lincolnshire farmland, drained and settled by the Dutch for centuries and more recently by his own family. Hamlets, isolated farms and the breeze from the Wash shaking the hip-high barley and wheat, still a few weeks from harvest. Above all, a vast tent of sky: wondrous as a boy, wondrous still. He thought perhaps that something of him had been shaped by its moods, its emptiness, its deep summer blues and angry winter greys, the shifting chiaroscuro of the Fens, clouds scattering and amassing in infinite variations, like a great unfinished symphony.

  The farm was a mile from the village of Gedney, a large but undistinguished red-brick house and three low barns sheltered by trees. His grandfather had purchased the land with money he’d earned as a merchant captain with the Netherlands Steamship Company. It was the old man who’d taken him to school every day, rising before six to harness the horse and chaise.

  The cab dropped him at the gate and he carried, half dragged his bags to the farmhouse. His mother discovered him bent double on the step.

  ‘Trying to catch my breath,’ he gasped.

  She gave him a quiet smile of welcome and he rose to kiss her cheek.

  ‘You look older, Sebastian,’ she observed with characteristic bluntness. ‘Are you unwell?’

  ‘I’m getting better.’

  She nodded. ‘You look more like your father.’

  She led him into the kitchen and he sat at the old oak table as she prepared their supper of boiled ham and potatoes. I’m older but she’s just the same, he thought, as he watched her at the range, her grey hair – had it ever been anything else? – swept severely off her face in a bun, small like a chapel mouse but spirited, and sometimes fierce. A practical woman, strong, she liked to say, in the knowledge that Christ was her sword and shield. While she peeled and chopped and stirred he spoke of New York skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty. As always, she listened with mild curiosity but asked no questions. ‘I don’t want you lie to me,’ she’d explained once.

  Later, she talked of the farm and how hard it was becoming to work with the young men away. The Baker boys had gone and John Vickers from Gedney Marsh, she said, and the Kidbys of Green Dyke had lost their eldest son already. It was a sin, and she’d told the minister so after chapel. ‘“Stop preaching
nonsense,” I said – my goodness, it was there on the wall above his head – “Thou Shalt Not Kill”.’

  She made Wolff say grace before supper and after it they wandered the farm together, the sun dipping into the barley. ‘Will you stay for harvest?’ she asked. He said he’d try to.

  ‘It’s a good life here, you know. A good Christian life.’ She sounded sad, perhaps because she knew it didn’t mean as much to him as she’d always hoped it would. ‘We must hold on to that in these times.’

  They stopped at the eastern edge, beyond it the old sea bank and the salt marsh stretching out to the Wash. Above them, an exaltation of larks chirruping gladly, a sound that always conjured this place for him.

  ‘It’s harder for clever people to be happy – sometimes it’s a curse,’ she said suddenly. ‘I used to say that to your father. Do you have a lady friend?’

  ‘There was someone for a time. She decided she didn’t like me.’

  ‘Was she a good woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She might change her mind. Perhaps you’ll persuade her.’

  ‘Perhaps – one day.’

  ‘Or there’ll be someone else.’ She threaded a grey hair behind her ear. ‘Goodness, after this war there’ll be plenty of women to choose from.’ Then, pointedly, ‘You’ll be forty soon.’

  He turned away from her to gaze out to the darkening sea. Is she lonely? he wondered. Perhaps she was worried about the future of the farm, the comfort of family, and grandchildren in old age. But if she wanted those things, she wouldn’t say so.

  There was no electricity at the farmhouse but she lit the oil lamp he’d always used and carried it up to his bedroom. Everything was how he’d left it when he went up to Cambridge. There was almost nothing to change. Black cross on whitewashed wall, a few sticks of homely furniture, a single bed and a shelf of books. He picked up a favourite his grandfather had given him as a boy, its spine broken by over-eager young hands. It told of the voyages of famous Lincolnshire explorers, Flinders, Franklin and Bass, and Vancouver from King’s Lynn. They had played their part in nurturing his restless spirit.

  Over the next days, he rose early and rolled up his sleeves to repair fences and clear ditches, climbing up on the old barn to replace the broken tiles. In the afternoons he wandered through green lanes choked with kingcups and cow parsley, skirting fat wheatfields and striking across the old salt pans to the sea. Striding home late one evening, the sound of a tolling bell rolling across the fen from the tower at Gedney touched him deeply. Sempiternal, mysterious in childhood when death was so confusing – especially his father’s – it was now an affecting reminder of the war and the poems White had read to him in hospital of ploughboys who would never grow old.

  ‘Say a prayer for John Vickers,’ his mother said, as she was readying his lamp a few hours later. ‘He was only nineteen. He shouldn’t have gone. He wasn’t the sort to be a soldier.’

  The following day Wolff rode the old cob into the village and ordered the newspapers. ‘Do you want to know?’ he asked his mother, spreading them on the kitchen table.

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘The Times is calling it the Battle of the Somme. It says: fighting intense – another day of spectacular gains – relentless advance. I don’t know,’ he paused, ‘but I’m sure the correspondent doesn’t either.’

  There was a report that troubled him more, although he didn’t speak of it to his mother. Somewhere on all the front pages was a column or so for Casement. His friends were seeking a reprieve but most of the newspapers were determined he should hang. To be sure they carried the public with them, they were blackening his name.

  ‘Are you all right?’ his mother enquired.

  ‘Yes. Fine,’ he said, ‘fine. I think I’ll chop that wood in the stable.’

  ‘Don’t exhaust yourself.’

  Swinging the axe with all his strength, splintering the log in two, and again in four, and another, and another, full of rage and disgust at the cruelty. C had known, of course. ‘They’re going to hang him,’ he’d said with certainty. He’d known that the police were ready to tighten the noose. Wolff could recall the distaste in his voice when he spoke of Casement’s ‘proclivities’. Whitehall was intent on a double death, trying him for treason, then again in the press for immorality, on the front page, forcing the stories of soldiers dying on the Somme inside.

  Crack. The log splintered into four with one blow, leaving him gasping and the stable spinning. Christensen in the cemetery; his forefinger trailing down a marble bust. ‘I copied it from his diary,’ he’d boasted with a sly grin. ‘You’d be surprised what there is in there.’ And now Special Branch was leaking it to the jackals on Fleet Street. Wolff picked up a log and hurled it at the wall. How was the News of the World reporting it? Nobody who sees the diary will ever mention Casement’s name again without loathing and contempt. Peddling poisonous stories of liaisons with Indian boys to blacken his character. Is this what we’re fighting for? he wondered. Putting the axe down, he sat in the straw to smoke a cigarette. I didn’t bring him to this, he reflected in its haze, but I did betray him. He’d lied to a lot of people, betrayed some and been betrayed, all in the name of duty. He’d betrayed Roger, then used him to betray others – Laura. Christ, the irony of it. Two people with a vision of how the world could be better, so the sacrifice wasn’t a waste. For that, they were intent on casting Roger Casement down, from saint of the Empire to sinner and degenerate, falling to at least a rope’s length. Sickening. And Commander Wolff wrings his hands and feels guilty.

  He was still brooding when his mother called to him an hour later – and when he went to bed that evening and rose the following morning. ‘Something’s troubling you,’ she observed at breakfast. ‘No. Still a little tired,’ he lied, because how could he explain?

  In the days that followed, he read of appeals for clemency from Ireland and America but also more calculated poison, more calumnies. This is what Laura will believe I am, he thought. Why should it matter? But it preyed upon him continually. He walked his old routes still but not with the same unconscious pleasure. If I’m well enough, I might run, he reflected, fast and hard, outpacing his shadow like a middle-aged Peter Pan. Drop it like a hat and stick at the cloakroom of a London club or in an armchair in one of its smoke-filled rooms. But no, his part was always with him; he’d brought its sadness home to the fen, to his family’s sky-filled fields, out to the salt marshes and into the secret lanes where he’d run easy as a boy.

  ‘There’s a telegram for you, Sebastian,’ his mother said when he returned one afternoon. ‘Behind the clock.’

  It was a summons to the Admiralty signed by C.

  ‘We should start harvesting next week,’ she said, gazing at him over her spectacles. ‘We’ll be short if you go.’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘I’ve got five women and Griggs who’s too old to fight, Atkin the butcher’s boy from Long Sutton, and our neighbours will help when they can.’ She closed her eyes, the care lines obvious in the lamplight. ‘I expect I’ll manage.’

  ‘I’ll come back – I said so.’

  His instructions were to report to Naval Intelligence at precisely four o’clock the following day. He arrived in his old country suit, patched at the elbow, flannel waistcoat, green tweed tie.

  ‘You’ve caught the sun. You look healthier but like a bumpkin,’ C observed as they walked slowly up the stairs to Admiral Hall’s office. ‘Disrespectful, Wolff.’

  The Director of Naval Intelligence was on the first floor of the new building, with large south-facing windows overlooking Horse Guards Parade. The white stone heart of our Empire, he’d once observed to Wolff, with its view of 10 Downing Street, the Admiralty, Parliament and the Foreign Office and, craning east, the top floor and roof of the War Office.

  Hall greeted him with a reproachful frown. ‘Undercover, are we?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Well, sorry to drag you from your fields then. Though
t you might help us win the war. Sit down.’ He retreated behind his desk but remained standing, hands resting on the back of his chair. ‘Last night there was an explosion at an ammunition depot in America – the largest.’ He paused, blinking furiously. ‘Are you smiling, man?’

  ‘Was it the Black Tom yard?’

  ‘You think it’s sabotage?’

  ‘Ask von Rintelen. You still have him, don’t you?’

  ‘Captain Gaunt thinks so too. Two million pounds of ammunition and explosive – broke windows twenty-five miles away and damaged the Statue of Liberty. Like the Somme, Gaunt says – how the hell he knows, I can’t imagine,’ Hall observed dryly. ‘But that isn’t why you’re here.’ He reached down to a file and slid a piece of paper from it across his desk. ‘Take your time.’

  It was an enciphered signal in number groups of five, bearing the legend at the top: BRITISH EMBASSY, PARIS. Rendered in English beneath:

  French advise arrest of German agent. Sugar and glass phials in possession contain Bacillus anthracis. His orders to infect animals in holding pens close to Allied front line. Received anthrax and instruction in use at laboratory in Berlin from man he called DELMAR.

  Wolff lowered the telegram to the edge of the desk.

  ‘Seems your Dr Dilger is set on turning this into an industry,’ Hall remarked grimly. ‘Who knows what else his laboratory is cooking up. I suppose it was naïve to hope the fuss in America would end it all.’

  C leant forward to place his large hand on the telegram. ‘One of our people needs to question the German agent,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect we’ll get any more but . . .’ He was deliberately avoiding Wolff’s eye.

  For a time no one spoke. Admiral Hall stepped out from his desk, dragging his fingers across its bright surface. ‘Can you imagine the panic out there if the public thought it was under attack from some disease?’ A battalion of soldiers was stamping rhythmically beneath his window. Turning, it began to advance on Downing Street in close order. ‘The War Office is setting up a new experimental station so some of our scientists can run tests on anthrax and a few other diseases . . .’ he paused, leaning closer to the window, ‘. . . just to see how we might fight an attack – understand what we’re up against.’