by Dan Simmons
“What next?” I asked.
“Well, Mr. Khan and his associates allowed me to raise the one tent so that I could cut the bullet out of you and let you rest a few hours,” he said softly, “but they won’t allow their camp to be set up anywhere near here. Evidently they feel that Guru Rinpoche, Dzatrul Rinpoche at Rongbuk Monastery, will be displeased when he hears of the violence here today.”
“I thought the Guru Rinpoche liked spreading stories of yetis being up here in the Rongbuk Valley,” I said. “Remember the fairly new mural in the monastery? It helped keep his people and monks away from the hills here.”
“Well, Mr. Khan and his friends insist that we start on the voyage back to the east right away—this afternoon. They have Mongolian ponies for both of us.”
“We can’t leave here,” I said, shocked. “Reggie and the Deacon…”
“Will not be coming down…this way at least,” said Pasang. “Of this I am certain. So we should go with Jimmy Khan and his friendly bandits, Jake. They’ve offered to lead us almost due east from here and then south again across the high Serpo La. That will take us straight down into India. And since we’re traveling so lightly, and if the weather on the high pass holds, the entire trip back might be made in three weeks or less rather than five weeks the way we came in. Jimmy Khan and his band will ride with us and protect us the whole way to Darjeeling, providing a palanquin for you if your wound and headache begin acting up.”
“He must be demanding something for all this friendly help,” I said dully. “Even his old friend Reggie had to pay him so that we could pass through his band’s territory.”
“I offered to pay him one thousand pounds sterling when we’re safe at Lady Bromley-Montfort’s plantation.”
“What?” I cried. “We don’t have a thousand pounds to pay these bandits with! We don’t have a hundred quid between the two of us.”
“You forget, Mr. Perry,” Pasang said sadly. “Lady Bromley-Montfort left the entire tea plantation in my hands—full ownership if she does not return, which I sincerely pray to our Savior that she does. And soon. Her only stipulation was that I pay one-third of the annual profits to Lady Bromley in Lincolnshire as long as the aunt lives. Suddenly—and I pray God, temporarily—I find myself awash in funds. At any rate, considering the importance Mr. Deacon and Lady Bromley-Montfort placed on what you’re expected to deliver directly to London, I agreed that a thousand pounds was reasonable for Khan’s protection and ponies on our voyage back. Khan’s men rarely travel as far into India as the outskirts of Darjeeling, so Mr. Khan is being generous. He will even leave two of his men to stay here near Base Camp for two weeks just in case our friends do come this way.”
I had nothing to say to that.
I looked up toward Mount Everest—mostly hidden by snow clouds, wind blowing wildly from the North Ridge and North Col—and then back at the two Germans’ staring heads on the boulder. The vultures were very busy now.
“If we’re not going to wait here days or weeks in person to see if Reggie and the Deacon end up coming down this way,” I said slowly, trying to think clearly, “then we might as well get headed toward Darjeeling sooner rather than later. Let’s go see what shaggy ponies they’ve chosen for us.”
28.
London in mid-August on rare occasions can be sweltering, but there was a chill in the air that reminded me of our visit to the Royal Geographical Society ten months earlier. Of course, the leaves on the trees weren’t changing in August, but there was some tinge in the air…smoke from coal and wood fires in the houses and buildings, I decided. I was wearing my second-best suit—three-piece, heavy wool, since my one bespoke suit had gone missing in my absence—and I hoped that the brief cold front would make the choice of apparel stand out a little less.
The building was brown with age and soot, its lobby quite imposing. Footsteps echoed on tile and marble. I told the first guard I encountered about my appointment with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he led me to a receptionist, who led me to a clerk, who led me to the important man’s aide, who parked me on a tattered leather couch in a wallpapered waiting room for only a two- or three-minute wait before I was shown into the Chancellor’s inner office.
Chancellor of the Exchequer. How very cute Reggie and the Deacon had been with their mildly coded talk about “our mutual friend who now likes to write cheques” and “our friend who really prefers gold.” The latter phrase, I’d learned just by reading and asking questions during my long solo boat trip from India to England, referred to this Chancellor of the Exchequer’s decision, under the Baldwin government, to return the British economy to the gold standard.
This had happened the previous May, while my friends and I were climbing Mount Everest, so I don’t know if Reggie and the Deacon had heard of the actual return to the gold standard, but they’d obviously known this man’s preference for an economy based on gold. I’d also read all about this return to the gold standard—and the continuing hubbub and disapproval of it and disapproval of the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself by many economists—during my boat trip to England.
The male secretary left us, and I was looking across a broad room with a rather worn carpet, a large desk and chair—currently empty of its occupant—and a very rotund man with his back to me. He stood silently looking out a sooty window as he smoked a cigar, his legs wide apart in almost a pugilist’s stance and his pudgy hands clasped behind his back.
He turned a minute or so after his secretary or adjutant or whatever the hell he was announced me and looked me up and down, frowning a bit—perhaps at my wool suit—and said, “Perry, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good of you to come, Mr. Perry.” He waved me to an uncomfortable-looking chair while he took the large padded chair behind his desk.
I’d heard the name Winston Churchill during the months I’d stayed in London prior to the beginning of our expedition, but I didn’t recall seeing photographs of him. I dimly remembered that there’d been a buzz about him in the press in 1924 when he rejoined the Conservative Party after having left the Conservatives to join the Liberal Party some years before. I remember the Deacon laughing at an edition of the Times as we were sorting gear in our London hotel room and quoting Churchill to Jean-Claude and me (on whom the humor was totally lost)—“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.”
Evidently the re-ratting had worked: Churchill now had an elected seat in Epping as a Tory and this high position in Baldwin’s Conservative government. The only other thing I’d learned about the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer was that it earned Churchill the honorific of “the right Honorable” and a rent-free home at No. 11 Downing Street, evidently right next to the Prime Minister’s digs.
“You’re an American, Mr. Perry?”
Had that been a question? “Yes, sir,” I said.
I confess that if this man was the intelligence chief for whom Lord Percival Bromley died—and most likely former captain Richard Davis Deacon and Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort as well—he certainly didn’t fit the role of spymaster. He reminded me more of a big baby in a pinstripe suit and waistcoat, with a cigar in his mouth.
“You American fellows are putting me—and His Majesty’s Government—in the most frightful position,” he boomed from across the wide desk. He opened a box of cigars and shoved them across the expanse. “Cigar, Mr. Perry? Or a cigarette, perhaps?”
“No, thank you, sir.” I had no idea what he was talking about with the “frightful position” line. Certainly it couldn’t be in the pending handover of the envelope holding seven damning photographs and negatives that I had tucked in my oversized jacket pocket. I just wanted to get on with that exchange and to get the hell out of this office, and London.
“It’s the war debt, man,” said this Churchill person. “Great Britain owes you Yanks the rather preposterous sum of four billion, nine hundred thirty-three million, seven hundred one thousand, and six hundred forty-t
wo pounds. The annual interest payment on that alone is more than thirty-five million pounds a year. And your President and Secretary of State and Treasury Secretary keep clamoring for payment on time. I ask you, Mr. Perry, how will that be possible until France pays His Majesty’s Government more of what they owe us on their war debt? Heaven knows France is getting its reparation payments and share of German steel sales coming out of the Ruhr Valley, but the French are as slow to pay as a renter who puts all his monthly income on the lottery rather than give it to his landlord.”
I nodded vaguely. My throat had improved sufficiently during my weeks in India and at sea that I could speak now with only a slight rasp rather than my former frog’s croak, but I could think of nothing to say. All I knew was that the envelope with the photos seemed to be burning a hole into the upper-right part of my chest, and if this fat little man didn’t shut up and quit blowing cigar smoke in my direction, I was going to leap across that too-broad desk and strangle the son of a bitch, American-British relations be damned.
“Well, not your fault, not your fault,” said Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill. “Do you have the items with you?”
I said, probably breaking fifty rules of spy craft, “Do you mean the photographs and negatives from Lord Percival, sir?”
“Yes, yes.” He stubbed out the cigar and crossed his pudgy fingers over his chest.
I removed the envelope and set it as far across his desk as I could reach without standing up. To my shock, Churchill didn’t even glance at the envelope before one of those pudgy hands swept it up and slipped it into a red briefcase propped next to his feet.
“Good, then,” he said.
I took that as my dismissal and stood to leave.
“This is Friday,” said Churchill, still sitting, not rising even to shake my hand before I left. And I knew what goddamned day it was. I’d made the appointment with his lackeys for this day.
“I believe we should chat about the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of these items,” said Churchill. “Do you have anything on for tomorrow?”
On for tomorrow? What the hell was that supposed to mean? I’d never felt as alone and stranded as I had the last few days waiting here in London without the Deacon and Jean-Claude. These British people spoke a strange and cloudy language.
Churchill must have seen my vacant look, for he said, “For dinner, I mean.”
“No, sir,” I replied with a sinking feeling in my gut. I didn’t want to socialize with this…mere man…who I was sure had gotten three of my dearest friends killed, as well as my friend’s cousin.
“We shall plan on you dropping down to Chartwell sometime in the afternoon, then,” he said as if it were already an agreed-upon thing. “Clemmie’s not there this weekend, but we have a few very amusing dinner guests, and of course the children will be there. Come get a good meal, Mr. Perry, spend the night, and we shall talk more at length when we have some privacy.
“We do dress for dinner,” continued the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I’d read somewhere that he was 50 years old, but between the roly-poly appearance, flushed fat-baby cheeks, and bouncy energy, he seemed much younger. “Did you happen to bring white tie, tails, that sort of thing with you to London?”
“No, sir,” I said. I was already sick unto death of calling this Churchill nobody “sir.” “Just this suit I’m wearing.”
Churchill nodded judiciously, then pushed a lever on a contraption on his desk. The male secretary who’d seen me in appeared as if by magic. “Colonel Taylor,” said Churchill, “could you run this chap around the corner to my tailor at Savile Row and have him expedite a proper suit of evening clothes as well as a summer and autumn suit or two and perhaps a pair of pyjamas and some shirts and proper ties…by tomorrow noon, please. And tell them the bill is to be paid by His Majesty’s Treasury.”
I didn’t even know what to think of this, much less what to say—since all I wanted to say was I don’t need white tie and tails and I don’t need your damned charity, either—so I nodded at Churchill, who’d lighted a fresh cigar and was already perusing some papers even before I was out of the room.
“Wait,” I said, stopping and turning. “One thing.”
The round face with its cherubic little smile looked across the width of the room at me and waited.
“What and where is Chartwell?” I heard myself ask.
29.
Chartwell was Churchill’s country place near Westerham in Kent, some twenty-five miles from London. I dropped by to pick up my new clothes at the tailor’s at noon, tried them on, let the tailor pronounce them proper, stayed in one of the white shirts they’d chosen for me and in the tan linen suit they’d just made for me—the tailor chose a modest green and burgundy tie for it—and caught the 1:15 train with the help of a waiting car sent by the Ministry. (Which “Ministry” I had no idea.) Another such chauffeur-driven limousine picked me up at the Westerham station and drove me the few miles to Chartwell proper.
I’d expected another huge estate such as Lady Bromley’s or the one I’d heard described that Richard Davis Deacon had given up after the War, but Chartwell looked more like a comfortable house in the country somewhere in Massachusetts. I was to learn much later that rather than its having been in the Churchill family for a dozen generations, Chartwell—a rather plain brick house made ugly by additions and bad landscaping in the 1800s—had been fairly recently purchased and more or less rebuilt by Churchill’s workmen.
And by Churchill himself.
After I’d been shown to a room by a servant and had time to “freshen up” a bit, an older male servant came to the room and told me that Mr. Churchill would like to see me and asked if the time was convenient for me. I told him it was.
I expected to be led into a huge library, but instead the tall gray-haired servant who’d answered my query about his name only with “Mason, sir” led me around to the side of the house where Winston Churchill, wearing a white fedora and a dark mortar-spattered coverall, was laying bricks.
“Ho, welcome, Mr. Perry,” he cried, using a trowel to level off some mortar before laying another brick in place.
It was a long wall.
“I spend ten hours a day in my office in London, but this is my real work,” continued Churchill. I’d already come to realize that the monologue was his favorite form of conversation. “This and writing histories. I took care to contact the bricklayers’ union before I did my first wall. They made me an honorary member, but I still pay my dues. My real work this week has been two thousand words written and two hundred bricks laid.”
He set the trowel down and, taking me suddenly by the elbow, led me around to the back of the house.
“The ‘Cosy Pig,’ I call it,” said Churchill.
“Call what, sir?” I said.
“Why, the house, of course. Chartwell. And if you’re Mr. Perry, then I am Mr. Churchill; no more ‘sirs.’”
“All right,” I said, just avoiding uttering the “sir.”
We stopped on a patio amidst a low formal garden, but it wasn’t the garden that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had brought me around the house to see. “This is why I bought the place three years ago,” he said.
I knew he meant the view from this hilltop. It was then—and remains today—the single most beautiful and verdant view of a peacetime countryside I’d ever seen. There were distant forests of beech, chestnut, and oak, countless wide green meadows, and the longest, grassiest slopes I’d ever encountered.
“The Cosy Pig sits in its eighty acres of all this,” said Churchill, “but it’s this view of the combe and the larger Kentish Weald that convinced me to buy the place, although Clementine said it was—and would be in its rebuilding—too dear for me. For us. And I suppose it has been.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, realizing how inadequate the words were.
“Not as beautiful as Mount Everest, I would imagine,” said the heavyset little man. His bright eyes were watching me carefully.
&nb
sp; “That’s a different beauty, si—…Mr. Churchill,” I said. “All rock, ice, harsh light, air. Almost everything, including the air, is so cold it cuts. There’s no green there, usually, above Base Camp, not even a lichen. Nothing alive but the climbers and the rare raven. No trees, no leaves, no grass…almost nothing soft, Mr. Churchill. Just rock and ice and snow and sky. This is infinitely more…gentle. More…human.”
Churchill had been listening carefully, and now he nodded. “I’d best be getting back to work. When I finish that wall for what will be the final terrace extension to Clementine’s bedroom, I need to build another dam.” He waved his short arm and chubby hand to the left. “I built those ponds as well. Have always enjoyed looking at water and things that like to live in water.”
The ponds were beautiful and natural-looking. But this time I said nothing.
“Make yourself at home, as you Yanks like to say,” said Churchill. “If you’re hungry at all, tell Mason or Matthews; they’ll have cook make up a sandwich for you. The liquor’s in the drawing room, and there is some good whisky—Scotch, I believe you fellows call it on your side of the pond—in your suite. There are books in your room, but feel free to borrow from the library. If you can’t reach the book, it’s because you weren’t meant to be able to. Anything else is fair game. We’ll have sherry or whisky at six, dinner’s at seven thirty—early tonight because one of our guests had his people bring a projector with a motion picture for us to see later. Or for the children to see, I should say. I think you’ll find all our dinner guests amusing tonight, but three of them especially so. See you in a while, Mr. Perry.”
The first guest I met was T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” the American reporter Lowell Thomas had called him during and after the War—who was descending the stairs for drinks just when I was. Lawrence was wearing the full robes of a prince of Arabia, complete with a jewel-handled curved dagger tucked in his sash.