The Explosionist

by Jenny Davidson

  It was as if she could read Sophie’s mind! Sophie resolved to keep her face completely expressionless for the rest of the evening.

  The party fell naturally into two groups: a main one composed of Great-aunt Tabitha, the minister, and her assistant, and an onlooker one made up of Sophie and Miss Grant.

  After they had watched the others for a few minutes, Miss Grant turned to Sophie and began speaking in a quiet voice.

  “It’s an interesting dynamic, isn’t it? That young man is in the agonizing position of being caught between two powerful women, not quite sure which one it’s more politic for him to concentrate on pleasing this evening….”

  It was true that Nicko Mood’s body language was showing an alarming twisty-turny aspect as he reoriented himself to whichever woman was speaking. Sophie felt too shy to say anything in response, but she liked the way Miss Grant spoke to her almost as an equal.

  “Your great-aunt invited me here this evening to assess the minister’s real state of thought on various political affairs,” Miss Grant confided. “Pay attention to the conversation at supper, and see what you think—it never hurts to get another perspective on these things.”

  “I don’t think Great-aunt Tabitha would put much weight on my judgment,” Sophie confessed. “She doesn’t think I’m old enough to have an opinion.”

  “Well, then it’s about time she started paying a bit more attention, isn’t it?” said Miss Grant. Sophie wished she could have even one-tenth the woman’s poise and confidence. “Personally, I’ll be interested to hear what you make of young Nicko. I find there to be something vaguely sinister about him, but he likes to pass himself off as something of a lightweight.”

  Her voice had returned to full volume by now, and the word lightweight fell into a moment of silence. The other three turned toward Miss Grant, who promptly burst out laughing.

  “My mother says my brother’s had the most terrible effect on my language,” she said with disarming breeziness. “He likes to box, and she’s constantly reproaching me for the awful slang I’ve absorbed.”

  Sophie was horrified and impressed at the cover-up. Did Miss Grant even have a brother?

  Over dinner, Sophie learned only that the minister was overbearingly talkative. The conversation was so boring that even Nicko looked hard put to maintain his expression of avid interest. Miss Grant fiddled a lot with her napkin and drank several tumblers of water, while the thin pinched line of Great-aunt Tabitha’s lips told Sophie how trying she was finding it to stay quiet as the minister’s words rolled over them in great waves of bureaucratic bossiness.

  After Peggy had brought in the cheese and fruit and served the coffee, Sophie’s great-aunt rapped her saucer with a silver teaspoon.

  Everyone turned to look at her, the minister stopping in midsentence and affecting an air more astonished than displeased at the interruption.

  “Joanna, you’ve been waffling on all evening like a talking press release,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “What I want to know is what on earth you mean to do about these wretched assassins?”

  Trust Great-aunt Tabitha to go directly to the point!

  “How would you respond,” said the minister, leaning back in her chair and taking a sip of coffee, “were you to learn that the European Federation has been funneling money and explosives to the Brothers of the Northern Liberties?”

  The minister’s question made the other two women in the room flinch. Nicholas Mood had chosen a pear from the shallow bowl at the center of the table; his peeling technique was admirable, and the yellow-gold skin descended to his plate in a single mesmerizing spiral. Now his knife faltered.

  “Surely that’s simply a conspiracy theory,” Miss Grant interjected, her eyes bright, “a farfetched story meant to damage ordinary people’s confidence in the integrity of the government? The Brothers of the Northern Liberties are run-of-the-mill separatists. They despise government meddling and the centralized power that Europe exemplifies. It beggars belief that the Brothers should choose the Europeans for their allies.”

  “My dear Miss Grant,” Mood broke in, “such charming naïveté! Did the minister say the Brothers supported the European government? She merely asserted that they have accepted material aid, in the form of money and ordnance, from them. Did you never hear the expression, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”

  Showing no offense at the young man’s rudeness, Miss Grant poured herself another cup of coffee. Sophie admired her calm. The nastiness of Mood’s tone had something to do with Miss Grant’s being quite young and pretty and not yet very important. Why couldn’t men talk to women exactly as they spoke to other men?

  “What are you getting at, Nicko?” asked Great-aunt Tabitha, giving him a hard look. “Rumors about Europe’s supporting the Brothers have been circulating for months. There’s no reason to think there’s any substance to the stories.”

  Mood looked to the minister for permission; receiving a small nod, he puffed up his chest with consequence.

  “We stand poised on the verge,” he said (it was uncanny how closely his speech patterns followed the minister’s), “of acquiring hard evidence of their involvement. Irrefutable evidence, and we’ll soon make it public.”

  An indrawn breath from Miss Grant, some flinching on Great-aunt Tabitha’s part: Sophie felt frightened. Great-aunt Tabitha was impervious to intimidation; if she was afraid…

  “The next step, of course,” Mood continued with suppressed excitement, “would be to mobilize our own troops in preparation for declaring war on Europe. If we are able to offer the Diet at Stockholm decisive proof that the Europeans have contributed to cause civilian deaths on Scottish soil, the other nations of the Hanse will be obliged to support us.”

  “War between Europe and the Hanseatic states?” said Great-aunt Tabitha, her voice fainter than usual. “You can’t mean it. Surely we’ve not forgotten the destruction the last war wrought….” She trailed off.

  “The European Federation threatens our sovereignty by its very existence,” Joanna Murchison said, then heaved a sigh that to Sophie’s surprise sounded quite heartfelt. “The last ten years have seen the slow erosion of civil liberties—”

  “Yes, and at your own hands, too!” said Great-aunt Tabitha, giving the rim of her coffee cup a quick rap for emphasis. “For shame!”

  “I don’t deny it,” Joanna Murchison said, looking almost bowed down with the weight on her shoulders, “but it has been vital to national security. You know perfectly well that in times of war, small personal liberties must be suspended for the greater good. Afterward—ah, then we will be able to remake the Republic of Scotland as its founders conceived it.”

  Sophie was confused. She hated the feeling of not knowing enough to understand, and made a resolution on the spot to begin reading the newspapers religiously.

  “You genuinely believe what you’re saying, don’t you?” Miss Grant said suddenly, throwing aside her napkin and pushing her chair back from the table.

  “Why do you suspect me of dishonesty?” said the minister. “I only have the country’s best interests at heart.”

  The silence that followed felt almost suffocating. Nicko was eating bites of his pear, licking the juice off his fingers with disgusting voluptuary greediness.

  “Nicko!” said the minister.

  “Minister?” he said, setting the last slice of fruit down on his plate uneaten and turning to her with unctuous readiness.

  The minister stood up, her napkin falling to the floor, and Nicko followed suit.

  “We must make our farewells. No, Tabitha, we are fully capable of seeing ourselves out. Good night, Tabitha. Good night, Miss Grant.”

  The minister shook each woman’s hand, ignoring Sophie. Nicko Mood bowed to them both and nodded at Sophie.

  “You meant exactly what you said, didn’t you?” said Sophie’s great-aunt to Miss Grant as soon as the others had left.

  “I’m sure Murchison wasn’t lying,” said Miss Grant. “She sin
cerely believes that only war with Europe will make Scotland safe. That is not to say, of course, that she doesn’t have other motives beyond that oh-so-noble desire to protect the country. She holds half a dozen directorships in munitions companies, for one thing, and she’ll not turn down the chance of amassing a small fortune in the event of war. But money’s far from the primary goal here. No, Tabitha, though I despise her, I fear there’s no way around it. The Society for Psychical Research will have to support her, if indeed it comes to that.”

  What? Sophie thought she must have misheard.

  But Great-aunt Tabitha was nodding her agreement. “It’s a great tragedy,” she said. “I’m almost certain that any evidence linking the Europeans to the Brothers of the Northern Liberties will have been cooked up for the occasion. But whether or not that’s so, the story will be virtually impossible to refute once it’s made public.”

  Now Great-aunt Tabitha sat back in her chair and put a hand over her eyes. Sophie thought she had never looked so old and tired, as if the surge of energy just now had burned out her circuits.

  “Isn’t there something you can do about Nicko Mood?” Sophie ventured. “He seemed so—so cunning….”

  The two women looked at each other. Then Great-aunt Tabitha gave a grim laugh. “Don’t worry about him,” she told Sophie. “Nicko knows I’ve got his number. Unlike Joanna, who’s dangerously idealistic, Nicko’s in this for the sake of one thing only, the personal advancement and professional ascendancy of Nicholas Mood. If the minister’s star were no longer on the rise, Nicko could be easily enough persuaded to make quite different choices about where to devote his energies.”

  Sophie thought there had been something vaguely fanatical about Mood that Great-aunt Tabitha didn’t seem to be taking into account, but there was no point persisting.

  “Sophie, I count on you to keep this completely secret,” Great-aunt Tabitha added. “Not a word to anyone. Understood?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sophie, rather thrilled to be trusted for once.

  “Off to bed, now. Peggy will give you a cup of warm milk in the kitchen if you can’t sleep. Try not to think about what you’ve heard this evening. And remember, things may turn out perfectly all right in the end.”

  She didn’t say it as though she meant it.

  On an impulse, Sophie crossed over and kissed her great-aunt on the cheek before saying good night to the two women. She went straight upstairs to bed without stopping in the kitchen; Great-aunt Tabitha never remembered that Sophie hated milk.

  War, she said to herself, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep. If the minister gets her way, the country will be at war by the end of the summer. At war not because of justice or the need to protect national boundaries or save lives, but simply due to one woman’s desire to force the world into alignment with her vision.

  Sophie distracted herself by translating the sentence into Latin. The Latin version was different from the English because you had to put both parts into the future tense: If the minister will get her way, the country will go to war.

  She drifted off to sleep with the grammatical constructions running through her mind like sand through one’s fingers at the beach.

  TEN

  ON THE WAY TO MEET Mikael after a reassuringly indigestible Sunday lunch, Sophie found the streets almost empty. Her destination was the foyer of the central branch of the public library, but as she passed under the Corinthian colonnade through to the grand marble entrance hall, Sophie got a nasty shock. A loud clatter sounded just behind her, and she turned and saw the Veteran on his cart. He leered at Sophie, and she hurried up and made her way inside without delay.

  How unusual—how unpleasant—to see him on Saturday and Sunday as well as during the week. Usually she only saw him hanging around school.

  She tried to push him out of mind, rubbing her temples with her fingers to dispel a slight headache. She had to stop being silly and concentrate on the task at hand.

  Mikael was waiting in the lobby, lounging in a way that proclaimed great satisfaction at his having got there before Sophie.

  “Sophie, what kept you?” he said virtuously.

  “I’m not late!” Sophie protested.

  “No, it’s true,” he said, laughing. “I was here early, but I knew just what you’d say if I hinted you were late.”

  Sophie kept her face still so he wouldn’t know she was upset, but inwardly she seethed. Why, oh why couldn’t she have been born with the sort of thick skin and easy temperament that made Nan, say, completely impervious to teasing?

  Something else had caught Mikael’s attention.

  “What are those things?” he asked, pointing to the row of booths running all along one side of the lobby.

  “Those?” Sophie said, surprised. “Don’t you have them at home?”

  “I can’t tell you if we do until I know what they are! Seriously, are they for voting in elections, or perhaps for getting your photograph taken automatically?”

  Sophie had forgotten the way Mikael’s insatiable curiosity made her notice things about Edinburgh she normally took for granted.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” she said, still not quite certain he wasn’t pulling her leg. Everybody knew what the machines were for, though it wasn’t much talked about.

  “No, I don’t know, and if you don’t tell me, I’m not going to help you find this quack medium of yours, either! Only one person’s gone into a booth while I’ve been here, and he hasn’t come back out yet, or I’d ask him instead. There was an old lady who wanted to, but a younger woman—I think it must have been her daughter—stopped her.”

  It was hard to find the right words to explain.

  “You said someone did go in?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “How long ago?” she said.

  “Oh, five or ten minutes,” Mikael said.

  “Watch, then.”

  They turned to face the machines.

  “What am I looking for?” Mikael asked after a bit. He was still grinning and seemed to suspect Sophie of playing a minor practical joke.

  “You’ll know when you see it.”

  A minute later, two ambulance men came in through the front door, carrying a stretcher and accompanied by a constable in uniform. Clearly they were in no particular hurry; they stopped to chat with the porter on duty before they sauntered over to the third machine in the row of eight.

  The constable took a key from his belt and inserted it into the lock, then held the door open as the ambulance men leaned in and pulled out the corpse of the man Mikael had seen.

  The way they handled the body made it quite clear he was dead.

  “What happened to him?” Mikael gasped. “Did he die of a heart attack? How did they know where to find him?”

  “A signal went off at the police station,” Sophie said. Oh dear, she could see she’d have to say it outright. “Mikael, they’re suicide machines. Machines for the Voluntary Removal of Life, that’s the official name. I thought they had them in all the Hanseatic states. Have you really nothing of the sort in Denmark?”

  “Sophie, in København, they’d throw you into prison just for suggesting it! Suicide is illegal in all civilized countries. Do you mean to say that a man can go into one of those things and kill himself, just like that?”

  “Well, you can’t get in without a special token,” Sophie said. The expression on Mikael’s face made her flush a little, but there was nothing to be ashamed of, was there? “You can get one from a member of Parliament, a doctor, a minister, a licensed spiritualist, or the senior librarian,” she added, hating how defensive she sounded, “but they’re not supposed to give you one unless they’re convinced you’re in your right mind.”

  “In your right mind, but bent on suicide? Impossible!”

  Sophie could perfectly well imagine being in her right mind and yet at the same time wanting to die, but Mikael wasn’t the kind of person who would understand.

  “Once you insert the token a
nd go in,” she continued, deciding to stick with pragmatic rather than philosophical considerations, “the machine kills you with an electric shock and then it summons the police. There’s another lot of machines at the main post office, and almost every village has one now too, even the places too small for a Carnegie library.”

  “And the government actually lets people commit suicide?”

  “How can suicide be prevented?” Sophie countered. “Even in olden times, people found ways of killing themselves. It’s much more sensible to make it safe and legal.”

  “Safe? Sophie, just listen to yourself!”

  “I don’t see why you’re getting so worked up about it,” Sophie said, uneasily conscious that it had taken Mikael’s reaction to reveal what was troubling in the familiar practice. She suddenly wondered whether she might be blind to other things about Scotland as well. But the Scottish government was the best in the world; that was what Great-aunt Tabitha said, and Sophie’s great-aunt was always right about politics, even if she didn’t seem to understand much about Sophie.

  “This country’s got an awfully distorted relationship with death,” Mikael said, gesturing around him in disgust. “Enough of this arguing, Sophie. Let’s go and see what we can discover about that medium.”

  “Did you find her the other day?” Sophie asked.

  “It was really strange, Sophie,” Mikael said. “I went to the address on the card—it was a seedy place in the nastier part of the Old Town—and knew at once I’d found the right spot. The lady in the shop next door described Mrs. Tansy perfectly, and I found a pack of kids who told me she used to be picked up most evenings in a chauffeured motorcar and taken off to her appointments. But the flat was completely empty, and the landlady couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me where she’d gone, or when.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Sophie, puzzled. “Why would she have given out a card if she didn’t mean to stay at that address?”

  “Fishy, isn’t it? It wasn’t hard to track down the carter who took her things, but that didn’t get me much further. He’d taken her goods to a long-term storage warehouse in Leith, where she paid on the spot for six months’ storage. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.”