“Because he used it instead of just fiddling with it like you do.”
“He’d joined the army and wound up in besieged Mafeking in the second Boer War. He was gravely wounded and sent home to die. A wandering journeyman was drawn to his power, as he lay on his deathbed, and saved his life. Grateful, and no doubt weary of war and of the world, he rejoined us and gave us Stour Manor for our new college.”
“You haven’t always been here?”
“We have to move every hundred years or so.”
“So you don’t get caught?”
“You make us sound like criminals.”
“No, only kidnappers and traitors to your country.”
“Hmm, well. Mostly we move because we have to spend time circulating the Essence in each part of the island, to keep it healthy.”
“I don’t know much about geology, but I bet there are fellows who could prove that you didn’t raise England from the sea, and the earth is doing just fine without you.”
“They’d be wrong,” he said flatly, and having argued herself red in the face with fanatics before, Phil wisely let it drop.
When they neared Weasel Rue, Phil said, “It’s odd your Headmaster would say he doesn’t believe in interfering with the outside world, when it’s plain he’s cast a spell over all of Bittersweet.”
“Ah, yes—that. But it’s for our protection, not to exert any influence or control.”
“You’re keeping hundreds of people from doing their part. Bad enough you all are cowards—well, not one of you, maybe—without manipulating an entire village into being cowards, too. How do you do it?”
“The Headmaster reaches inside them and directs their thoughts. Here and in London, too.”
“But that’s a violation!” The idea of someone changing her thoughts was as bad a physical assault. “And why on earth, if you can do that, can’t you reach across the Channel and meddle with Hitler’s brain?”
“It’s not as bad as you think,” Arden assured her. “We can’t actually make anyone do what he doesn’t want to do; we only make it easier for him to do the easy thing, you see? People will always prefer to ignore the unpleasant parts of life, so it’s simply a matter of making the people of Bittersweet turn away from anything that doesn’t immediately concern them.”
They both leaned against a tree while they waited for Fee and Thomas to bid each other farewell. Phil heard a sigh close to her ear and felt warm breath on her cheek, but when she turned her head, Arden was staring at the stars. She was profoundly glad that she was immune to the Essence and couldn’t be manipulated into doing something she suddenly wanted to do, quite badly.
“I wish I could have persuaded Rudyard to let you live at Stour,” Arden said, as the lovers’ murmurs drifted from the darkness.
“You certainly have changed,” Phil said, and leaned her cheek on the rough bark, wondering if he’d turn his head toward her, too.
But Arden, remembering his last doomed love affair, said stiffly, “It’s only practical. If you have a guard dog, you don’t bring it to visit, you chain it in the yard.”
Stung, Phil stalked away.
Arden, alone, wondered why he was such a fool.
When I heard we were going to a farm, I worried we’d be with some strait-laced stickler who would impose a curfew and look askance if we wore makeup,” Phil said to Fee as they crept into the pitch-dark house. “But I like Mrs. Pippin’s laissez-faire attitude toward boarders. Bed, meals, and independence.”
“She does look askance at your makeup, Phil, but then, so do I. You wear a bit too much lipstick.”
“So do you, only you kiss it away. Well, has the shine rubbed off your romance?”
“Thomas is as heavenly as ever, thank you. He recited all of The Lady of Shalott.”
“How romantic. To be cooped up in a tower and then die the moment you escape in search of your true love.”
“Phil dear, you’ve read more poetry than you let on.”
“No, I’ve been kept awake too many nights with your reciting. Even German began to make sense after Mr. Somerset droned it into my ear for a few years. Oh, what a waste that was. I wonder if he’s interned?”
“He wasn’t German, silly. He was as English as you. Oh, damn!”
“What on earth?”
“The chickens!” In a flurry, Fee dashed out into the night to see if her feathered charges had settled themselves without her assistance. (They had, and she only succeeded in convincing them all that she was an invading fox and sending them into a squawking terror.)
Chuckling, Phil cut herself a thick slice of bread—not from the slops larder this time—and sat down at the kitchen table to spread it with butter and honey. She was proud of herself, proud of her swollen knuckles and the slightly sick feeling lingering in the pit of her stomach. I fought a German! she thought. She knew full well that instinct and adrenaline rather than any real skill had saved the day, but it was enough to encourage her.
I’ll get the boxing vicar to help me give lessons, she thought, and now that we have a few guns, surely there’s someone in Bittersweet who knows how to shoot. I’ll train with the villagers and do what I can for the magicians. And before long, they’ll be willing to help me—with far more than weapons.
Finally, she knew what the magicians needed: the very thing they despised her for, her invulnerability to the Essence. If she could help them in their struggle against the German magicians, surely they’d return the favor by helping England against the German army.
She heard a click and the whisper of the back door swinging carefully open.
Licking the last honeyed crumbs from her fingers, she called out softly, “I’m going to take a bath, Fee. See you in bed.”
In the small morning hours, the house was hushed and still. Phil felt her way down the hall to the bathroom, which stood between their room and Uncle Walter’s. What a shame he’s become a pacifist, she thought as she turned on the tap. Still, she didn’t entirely blame him. After the Dresden magician disappeared, all she had wanted was to be somewhere nice and safe where she never, ever had to do anything remotely like that again. It was only when her nerves settled that she was sure she could do it all over, if she had to. If she could just convince Uncle Walter—the only real soldier in Bittersweet, except for Algie, of course—to teach her real military tactics.
“Of course he’s antiwar,” she murmured as she ran her hand under the hot water. “Who wants war? But he has to see that when someone attacks, you defend, and not only defend, but crush them. What rot about a tennis match! You don’t keep the game going forever—you win it, as fast and as hard as you can, and do your best never to play another. Oh, thank goodness they haven’t heard of the five-inch rule here,” she added, guiltily filling the tub with scalding water to the rim.
The rest of the country was urged to take infrequent, shallow baths, to save on fuel and water. She’d meant to comply, even when not compelled, but “Oh, how heavenly!” she sighed as she sank to her chin. Steam rose from her skin, and she closed her eyes, thinking about Arden.
For the life of her, she couldn’t figure him out. Did he hate her or not? And if so, was it because she couldn’t feel the Essence, or because she was a woman, or because she was a troublemaker? It was as if he were an actor who kept slipping out of character, being kind, honest, even sentimental for minutes at a time, then remembering his role and putting his mask back on.
Or was the cold arrogance his real self, and the warmth no more than an act?
She was glad she’d have ample time to find out for herself.
“And if I don’t like what I find,” she whispered, her lips, just above the water line, making ripples, “then I can always claim his life.” Not that she ever would, but she rather enjoyed the idea that she could hold it over his head like the sword of Damocles.
The bathroom had no window, so she was permitted the luxury of light at nighttime without any fear of alerting overhead planes with the slightest glimmer. Sudd
enly, the room went black.
She sat up and heard the door open. “Damn fuses,” she said. “Fetch a candle, Fee, and I’ll get out. It’s still piping hot, and I didn’t do anything unpleasant in it, I swear.” She started to stand but slipped on the soap and splashed down on her backside just as the room seemed to explode around her. By the flare of muzzle-flash, she saw a hulking form in an olive field tunic reacquire its target: her.
She screamed, and since there was no retreating, she slithered out of the tub, clumsy as a seal on land, and tried to lunge past her attacker to the door. She hit his knees in the darkness, and they both went down, tangled, on the slippery floor. Another shot went wide, into the ceiling, and in the blaze of gunpowder incandescence she saw a face at least as terrified as her own. In a language she couldn’t understand, he chanted what sounded like a paean of sorrow and resignation. Somewhere in the house, a light flipped on, and as the man hauled himself up and aimed a final shot at her chest, she could see tears streaming down his face.
“Es tut mir bahng,” he wept. “Es tut mir vai.”
She tried to push herself into the hall, but her bare feet skidded on the pooled water, and she squeezed her eyes shut as a gunshot filled her ears.
She opened them a moment later to see Uncle Walter clad only in a pair of boxers standing over her, a pistol in his hand. Her attacker bled out on the tile, convulsed, and was still. His countenance was oddly calm, as if he had expected no different end.
Uncle Walter stepped over the corpse and handed her a towel, averting his eyes until she was wrapped. She was shaking so badly that she fumbled it, and by the time she was covered, one corner was soaked in blood.
Not quite coherent yet, Phil said weakly, “You’re not chained to the radiator?”
Uncle Walter knew what she meant, though, and said, perfectly steady and sane, “There are times to kill. This was one of them.”
The front door slammed, making Phil take a quick terrified breath. But it was only Fee coming in from her chicken checking. “Oops,” she said softly at the bang, then, as she came into the hall, “Oh no, I woke you all!”
Then—though later she always tried to deny it—Phil succumbed to mild hysterics, babbling incoherently about German assassins.
Mrs. Pippin ran from her room, took one look at the situation, made exactly the same sound she made when a sheep did something foolish and fatal, as sheep so often do, and bustled the girls into their room.
Algernon, cursing profusely at his blindness, stumbled into the hall with a shotgun at his shoulder. “Will someone point me in the right direction!” he shouted.
“You stand guard over the girls,” Mrs. Pippin told her son, figuring a blind man with a shotgun had a reasonable chance of success against a potential enemy trapped in a doorway. “And you, Walter, at the front door. I’ll ring for the constable, and I suppose the doctor, too, though I’ve seen stuffed Christmas geese on the table with more blood left in them than that man. Who is he? Looks a desperate wreck, to be sure.”
With the same efficiency with which she coordinated a harvest or butchered a rabbit, she marshaled the household into action.
She should be the one leading the Home Guard, Phil thought in admiration when she’d calmed down. And how is it that everyone seems to have a gun? No one volunteered theirs when I was looking for some to train with. It never occurred to her that people, well-trained soldiers in particular, might not trust teenage girls with their weapons.
The constable arrived, bleary-eyed and mussed. “A stranger to these parts,” he said when he’d examined the body. “Any of you know him?” No one did. “Perhaps he’s some disgruntled city boyfriend?”
“Phil said she’d never seen him,” Algernon told him. “She thinks he’s . . .” It was almost too silly to say aloud.
“Out with it,” the constable said.
“She thinks it’s a German assassin.”
“Why on earth would a German assassin be here, and if he was, why come after a girl in her bath? Did he offer her insult?”
“Aside from trying to shoot her? No.”
“Then he must be a lunatic who broke into this house at random,” the constable theorized. This was his first deadly crime, and he wanted it wrapped up swiftly and neatly.
“I think she believes he was trying to stop her from organizing the local Home Guard,” Algernon said. “She was a bit beside herself, but she went on about her being the only one who could fight them.”
“Germans on the brain,” Mrs. Pippin said dismissively. “As if any would come here.”
“He is German,” Uncle Walter said, coming out of the girls’ room. “A German Jew. I heard him speak. We had several Yiddish-speaking German Jews working as agents for us in the”—he gulped, and steadied himself—“in the last war.”
“What did he say?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Are we sure the girl doesn’t recognize him? Let’s bring her out for another look.”
“That wouldn’t be wise,” said the doctor. He’d just come from the girls’ room. “She’s had quite a shock and is still overwrought. It will do her no good to see a bloody corpse again.”
But the constable, sensing his authority was being undermined, insisted, and Phil was brought out without much resistance. Truth be told, she wanted to see the man again. Something about him was bothering her.
“You don’t have to go with me,” Phil told Fee. “I can manage, and you don’t want to see him.”
“I do have to. What happens to you happens to me, too. You know that. If I see it, I can share it, and then it will be it easier for you. You shouldn’t be alone in this pain.”
It is a pain, Phil thought. How well Fee understands. I ought to feel frightened, or panicked, or relieved, or angry, but somehow I’m only sad. Why is that? she wondered.
One look at her attacker, and she understood. She’d been in no condition to notice before, in the flash and thunder and terror of the gunshots, but now, in the deathly quiet of the crime scene, she finally got a good look at the man who had tried to kill her.
Looming in the darkness in his baggy fatigues, he’d seemed a giant, as big as Orion in the sky. But in death, it seemed as if he’d hastened the transformation into skeleton. His face was gaunt, with deep-sunken eyes and dry white lips. His wrist looked too fragile to bear the weight of his gun. She could just barely see something moving in his hair: lice.
“He’s starving,” Phil said.
“If it’s food he wanted, why ever didn’t he steal it from the pantry?” Mrs. Pippin wondered. “There’s a wheel of cheddar on the table that would have fed him for a week.”
And suddenly Phil knew, with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, why this man had been sent to kill her. With the realization fled the last remnants of terror, replaced by a seething fury she’d never felt before, not even when the bombs fell on London.
“Is it all right if I go to sleep now?” she asked, her voice trembling.
“Of course, poor child,” the constable said. “I have enough for my report.”
The doctor fetched something from his black bag. “Here,” he said, slipping two pills into her palm. “Take these, one for each of you, and you’ll be out until noon tomorrow. Best thing for you.”
Phil nodded, and the girls went to their room.
As soon as the door closed, Phil pounced on Fee in a flurry of furious tears. “He’s a prisoner!” she said. “A German Jew, Uncle Walter said. He’s from a forced labor camp, I know he is! Oh, the beasts, the filthy, filthy brutes! I could see it in his face, how much he hated what he was doing. He was weeping, Fee—weeping! The Dresden magicians must have threatened him, or his family...or promised him freedom if he did what they ordered. The poor man. They work them to death in those camps. He was no more than bones.”
“You can’t be sure,” Fee began.
“I am sure,” she said, pounding her fist on the bed. “And I swear to you, I will make them pay!” Her face wa
s a mask of animal rage.
“Maybe you should take a sleeping pill,” Fee said.
“No, there’s no way I can sleep,” Phil said, tucking the pills into a pocket of her gas mask satchel. “I have to talk to Uncle Walter.”
“You’re not going to tell him about the magicians, are you?”
“I might.”
“He’ll think you’re as crazy as he is.”
“He’s not crazy,” she said. “He proved that tonight. He just thinks war is the most inhumane thing in the world. After he hears this, he’ll know there’s something worse than mere war. People just need a good reason to fight. I was his reason tonight. When he knows about that poor man, he’ll have another.”
She slipped out, and before long Uncle Walter heard urgent knuckles rapping at his door.
Chapter 12
Phil, with the resilience of youth, really did sleep until noon, even without the pills. When she woke, the corpse was gone, the bathroom scrubbed clean, and the bullet holes were patched. Soon the only sign of the fray was the fresh, slightly damp plaster at the level where Phil’s head had been.
“Did you have any luck with Uncle Walter?” Fee asked over tea and oatcakes. She’d been asleep by the time Phil returned.
“Yes and no.”
“Don’t tell me he believed you?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think he particularly cares whether it’s true or not. I think the idea that it could be true is enough.”
“Like when I read about bamboo slivers under the fingernails— ugh!”
“Er, yes, something like that. What he actually said was, ‘It’s a crime against nature to shoot pretty girls. Any reasonable civilization tosses ’em in the harem. These Germans must be worse than I thought.’ In any event, he offered a compromise. He agreed to train me, but not the Home Guard or the magicians. I was a little vague, and I think he prefers to believe they’re an academy of stage magicians like us.”
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