The Amber Shadows

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘The bird.’ The Captain took a deep breath. So he had opened it. He fiddled with his pipe, tapping it out and filling it again. He smoothed his wrinkled hands over the blotter on the desk, found a speck of ink and picked it away.

  ‘My father . . .’ Her voice cracked. ‘Was Russian. A few months before I was bom he fled the country, into Hungary we heard first, where he had a great-aunt, then Russia. He was a composer. He was experimenting with codes, using mathematical patterns in his music. He left my brother a cipher book. He worked in Leningrad after the revolution, he played, he conducted. And his favourite piece was always The Firebird. Dickie saw him conduct it when he was a child. It’s his earliest memory, at the opera house. We didn’t know where he’d gone at first, but Dickie used to keep an eye out in the newspapers, and sometimes he’d see something with our father’s name in it.’

  Captain Tiver didn’t meet her eye. ‘And what was that name?’

  ‘Korichnev. After he gave up music he worked as a curator at the Detskoye Selo – the Pushkin Palace, the old Catherine Palace. He was the guardian of the Amber Room. You know about the Amber Room being taken by the Nazis to Königsberg? It came through on the intercepts last year.’

  Tiver looked away. ‘Five thousand signals pass through this estate every day. I did not know about the Amber Room being looted.’

  ‘But you think it’s possible? That my father smuggled out pieces of amber from it before the room was pillaged? You think it’s possible that he’s sending me messages, not because he knows I’m here – the packages came via London 222, via the Foreign Office — but because he wants us to connect? And that after all is why I’m here. I’m not here because my stepfather knew someone at a club. I’m here because I know how to work with codes. I understand codes. I have an instinct for the machines and I can learn languages and the only reason I know how to do any of this is because my own father, my blood father—’

  Tiver looked into her eyes very suddenly and said, ‘No, Honey. You’re here because your stepfather knew someone in a club.’

  The words slammed a guillotine between them.

  Honey stopped short, shocked by the cut thread of her thought. Her emotions tangled together in a ball. Slowly she let them all separate out from each other; what she thought of herself, what brought her to where she sat now; how she had spent the past week reconstructing, evaluating the different bits of herself and where they might have come from. What she was left with after the thoughts had divided up was shame, anger and humiliation.

  She wanted Dickie, only Dickie, and yet she felt his pull leading her down into an underworld of gloom. But he was the only one who would understand. And now he could never defend her.

  Tiver watched her expression change. She felt like one of his wounded battlefield soldiers being appraised for duty. His brow creased.

  ‘You’re very tired and you’re grieving, and it’s very late at night,’ he said. ‘Go home.’

  ‘But my father, my real father—’

  ‘Your real father as far as we are concerned is Henry Deschamps. That’s good enough for us.’

  ‘No.’ .

  ‘Honey.’ He made a shifting motion in his chair. He watched the blue glow of the gas fire flame for a second, looked at his pipe, then thought better of refilling it. ‘We are at war. And at war you cannot dwell on what is past. You can only look forward. Ask your friend Beatrix. Ask anyone who has lost someone. It does not do to seek blame. It does not do to dig up things that might be best left alone. Recrimination comes later. Bright now we only have the present and the future.’

  ‘You know the truth about him, don’t you?’

  Tiver shook his head. ‘For our purposes your father was Henry Deschamps.’

  Honey said softly, ‘But it’s your job to know everything. You said that, you said it on my first day. “We know everything about your past. Don’t try to pull the wool . . . you’ll be shot, beheaded,” you said it.’

  ‘I didn’t say beheaded.’

  ‘Shot then. Captain, tell me the truth. If no one will, I must be able to trust you. You are my commander.’ Her voice came out shrill and quiet, a trapped wail. She found herself, without warning, wanting Felix’s arms, right then, his strange little eyes, his beaten hands.

  Tiver looked across the table and kept his gaze steady on her. His wrinkles were picked out deeply in the light. It did not flatter; it made him glow orange and monstrous. When she coughed he broke the gaze, and looked again at the fire instead. He kept looking at it as he spoke.

  ‘We talk about truth as if it always has some kind of special dignity. Your real father was a man called Ian Kurtz. He lived in London and he was a cocktail pianist in a number of hotels. You’re right, I know everything. That’s how I also know that those forged censors’ stamps were made with British ink. Do you know why I know this? Because it’s my job to know secrets. You’re right. I do know everything about every single person we employ here at the Park, and I judge who to tell what and when. And if I get it wrong, then a boy on a ship may die a very cold and very watery death. Or a family in Coventry may wind up with their house razed to ashes. Your brother Dickie was considered as a recruit for the Park but we deemed him mentally unfit. He is a fantasist and a storyteller.’

  Honey clutched the wooden arms of the seat. She felt as if she were the one on a ship. The ground kept swelling. She had never wanted so much to leave the skin she was in and run from it, lie dormant for a while under the ground until it was safe to come out.

  ‘Your father was a drunk and a bully and he died . . . in a brawl outside a public house in Smithfield one evening late in the first war. He never conducted The Firebird at the Royal Opera House. He wasn’t Russian, he was halfScottish, half-German. And he was never exiled to Hungary or to Russia; he died in Britain. We have his death record. The Park doesn’t employ people with foreign parentage except under special circumstances. Since you never met the man, and were brought up as a Deschamps, you were deemed safe.’ Tiver softened. ‘He may have had a cipher book that he gave to Dickie; a child’s gift.’

  ‘But Dickie was certain about The Firebird. It was his first memory.’

  ‘Miss Deschamps.’

  ‘That was never my name. Korichnev—’

  ‘Deschamps. Yes it is. You wanted to leam the truth. I’m sorry if it’s disappointing. I respect my staff here but you must respect me in return.’ He spoke quietly and calmly and Honey realised that perhaps that was what she had wanted. In time the truth would settle on her like skin after a scar. But right now she only wanted the old comfort she knew. She wanted to take back the old story. Tiver was right, it did not do to dredge up the past, she wanted to put back his words, to bum them in the fire until they were nothing but grey ash.

  ‘I don’t know why Dickie sent you those things. But he did. The little bird ornament we checked went through a post office just north of London.’

  The last part hit her the hardest. There was no Russia. The hoax felt crueller than a noose.

  ‘Go home, Honey.’ Tiver looked at the clock. ‘It’s almost midnight.’

  ‘My shift’s about to start.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. The other girls will draft someone in.’

  The thought of someone filling in for her, while all she was left to do was go home and contemplate her own idiocy, surrounded by the trinkets that had never passed through the hands of her father, her dead father who didn’t exist, whose Firebird was only ever a fantasy — it was too horrible to contemplate. Her skin felt hot and cold and as if it wasn’t hers but a snake’s, and she must now shrug it off for it was shedding-time, time for renewal, a new body, new skin.

  She wanted to take Dickie and shake him by his livid blue shoulders. He was a wretch. He was a fool. What had he meant? Did he even believe his own story? There was only ever one story, that was what Dickie said. She thought of how viciously he had pressed the story of The Firebird at her: Stravinsky’s version, not the one she had fo
und in the Russian fairytale book. Hers had been wrong, his had been right. His version of the truth dominated. But why? Dickie, why? For his own ego. That was Dickie all over. Dickie Deschamps the dancer; with a secret genius in his past. Dickie who deserved to be on the stage because it was in his blood, the blood that was wronged by his father’s exile.

  But how did she know Tiver was telling the truth? He might know everything, but knowledge and lies were different things. Tiver had not grown up with her. Tiver had not danced the Firebird prince with a passion that could not have been made from lies. She had never seen Tiver cut his knee and cry for his father to come home from Russia. Even now she felt Dickie’s version of the story slipping its iron fingers up from the grave and wrapping itself around Tiver’s.

  Dickie’s voice kept creeping in on her. It cut through Tiver’s story with its stony persuasion, so that now, in the grey icy smoke of the office confessional, she thought that it could be Tiver who was the liar.

  He had opened the door into the hallway. This time there were no warnings about the Official Secrets Act. No stern decrees. There was only sorrow and sympathy for a silly girl who had believed in a silly story. He must think her just like Joan Fontaine, the first time Cary Grant dupes her over the chairs he has gambled away, her father’s chairs. She felt the itchy wool pulled over her eyes, the tricking of a wolf somewhere. But which wolf, and why?

  As she left the room Beatrix stood, her arms outstretched. Honey sank into them, relieving herself of her own weight, and nurtured the only silver lining she had left. She had not told Tiver about the wax-covered codes.

  Chapter 16

  Beatrix smothered her with perfumed cashmere. Honey knew then that she would remember the scent for years to come and associate it with hollow sadness. Her body was shutting down, each switch tripping offlike lights in a house about to be left abandoned. A numbness swept her up and she found she couldn’t cry or connect to the sense of everything she had just lost.

  It was not uncommon, she thought, for a girl to lose both her brother and her father in wartime. She was commonplace. Her grief was no bigger or heavier than anyone else’s. But it seemed to her more shameful somehow, to lose a father not because he had died in glory, with shot across his nose like Captain Tiver, but because he had never existed in the first place.

  ‘Are you still in there?’

  Beatrix’s voice came down through the frizzy channels of her ruined wave. Honey nodded slowly, and felt it odd that her movements could be so slow and sad when her mind was racing.

  ‘I’ll take you home.’

  ‘Will she be all right? I can call in Matron.’

  Tiver’s night secretary’s voice and Beatrix’s drifted in soft murmurs over her head, dulled by the embrace. Her ear was pressed against the shoulder of Beatrix’s cardigan. What was that scent? Dior. And pearls. Did pearls have a scent? Or was she wearing amber? The voices drifted the way they did through the nursery floorboards when her mother had been giving a dinner party.

  Her mother. Her mother who had married Henry Deschamps, the soap man – ‘the man who keeps me in lavender’ she would gaily laugh again and again when anyone asked. Always the same joke. Sometimes the flowers would be different: ‘the man who keeps me in roses’. Her mother who threw extravagant parties because Henry Deschamps’ wealth was as big as the Palace Theatre. Her mother who sang at the Royal Opera House, great warbling arias that Dickie hated. ‘Verdi and Puccini are vulgar. All Italian composers are vulgar. Wagner was a fascist.’ Dickie only danced Russian ballet to Russian scores. Dickie only listened to his Russian ballet mistress.

  Her mother must know the truth.

  ‘You must make sure someone keeps an eye on her.’

  ‘She’s in a billet with a couple. The woman doesn’t work.’

  ‘Call this telephone number if you need the Park doctor.’

  ‘She’ll be fine. The body repairs itself, it’s clever that way.’

  The secretary hesitated. Beatrix squeezed Honey’s shoulder, which was the cue for her to lift her head in a dignified manner, like she had seen the tragic heroines do on the great silver screen time and time again, affect a smile, take a look back over her shoulder at the closing door of Tiver’s office, try to meet the eye of the man who didn’t return her stare, and follow Beatrix out into the chill night.

  From over on the lake came jubilant screams. A wild scraping sound, like metal being dragged across glass, was carrying on a breeze. ‘You can’t use a trestle as a bloody sled, you’ll—’ The crack cut them off and then a shriller scream from a woman came with shrieks of laughter.

  ‘Midnight dip,’ Beatrix murmured. ‘Takes all sorts to work here. Come on. I’ll drive you home. Let me deal with Roache.’ They walked in step towards the small parking area round by the Research Cottage. Every time Honey went to open her mouth she could only think of trite observations, empty things to say for the sake of saying something. She imagined herself saying to Beatrix, ‘This grass is so frosty. The darkness is so grim. This cold is so brutal.’ In the end she couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth at all.

  Beatrix snapped the car door open and shut her in. The leather seats were freezing, and in the small amount of time it took Beatrix to walk round to the driver’s side the silence and darkness in the car seemed to Honey like the inside of a tomb. She wondered what her father had seen in his last moments. Did it feel cold to lie there on the ground? Was a doctor sent for? Was he taken to hospital?

  But what if he hadn’t had those last moments yet? What if he wasn’t in a tomb, wasn’t even in a grave? He was in a hideout, hoarding secrets to keep them safe from Nazis.

  Suddenly the car became not a tomb but a dark shed, a bleak underground workshop somewhere close to a border town. There was a soldier – a guerrilla fighter, a woman in a red sash — who came to him and smuggled the parcels through the military post. Her father’s mind worked overtime, crafting ways in which he could reach her, without letting the British know it was him for fear of capture. He had escaped them once. He wasn’t to trust them again.

  The driver’s door opened and clicked shut and as Beatrix choked the engine to life a powerful petrol smell drifted in through gaps in the steelwork. ‘Right, let’s get her going first. I’ve got half an hour. They’re not doing anything in there anyway. No one’s broken a thing today. They’re all panicking in case the design’s been modified. That’s the rumour going about. It happened once before when they started rotating from five Enigma wheels instead of just three.’

  Beatrix crackled the car over the gravel. Passing the Military Police she wound down her window.

  ‘I’m taking her home. Sick bay orders.’

  The guard waved them past.

  ‘Can tell them anything you like on the way out,’ Beatrix muttered, churning the glass back up. ‘Still, suppose it’s harder getting in. Even the hairdressers have to have passes. There was a girl last week forgot hers – she’d left it inside and managed to slip out for some shampoo. They wouldn’t let her back in, not even when her boss vouched for her. Had to call in Tiver or something. I don’t think he was best pleased.’ Honey felt Beatrix’s gaze flash on her quickly, then back to the road. ‘I hope he treated you well.’

  ‘Fine,’ she murmured.

  They turned past the station, then bent up round the Eight Bells. The slats on the headlights made the road look like a piece of sliced toast. Egg with soldiers, Honey thought. It seemed ages since she had been in a motor car, but then she remembered she had been in one that morning with the police. They passed the phone box where she had telephoned her mother, and the house where she had seen Felix with the painting. Smoke was pouring out of the chimney again. Beatrix turned past the red row of Edwardian villas at the top of Church Green Road and pulled the car to a halt. The handbrake squeaked.

  She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out a broken cigarette and a piece of ribbon. She grunted and placed them both on the dashboard then went fishing again
. This time she retrieved a piece of crumpled paper. She snapped the cigarette in two, picked the stuffings of tobacco from the break and placed half in her mouth, then passed the other half to Honey. ‘Can you have a rummage in there, and see if there are matches?’

  Honey undipped the glove compartment. Maps and bonbon wrappers spilled out.

  ‘Oops. God, if I was caught with maps they’d fry me.’

  ‘Here.’ Honey handed across a rattling box.

  ‘Give me your cig.’ Beatrix lit them both.

  She tossed the matches back then bent forward and smoothed the piece of paper flat.

  Honey took the cigarette from her mouth. ‘What is that?’ Her stomach knotted. She felt as if she were in that mortuary again, with the sheet being peeled back. ‘Is it a decrypt?’

  ‘Heavens, no.’ Beatrix coughed. ‘Stealing decrypts? I’ve not got a death wish.’

  It was almost pitch black outside but the ‘Secret’ stamp stood out crimson, a level down from ‘Most Secret’. She picked it up and held it close to her eyes. The glow of the cigarette bounced off the paper and she let out a small cry.

  ‘I thought you’d need it,’ Beatrix said. ‘You were in there so long that when she turned her back to fetch a cup of tea – well, it was poking its nose out of the file. Burn it, once you’ve been, won’t you? I’m afraid I can’t take you. I told Head of Room I’d only be half an hour.’

  It was a carbon copy of a memo signed by Tiver. The top line told her all she needed to know. ‘Removal of Moira Draper to Bexworth Insane Asylum. Action immediately.’

  Later, in the cooling water of the clean bath, Honey lit another cigarette and looked over the memo again. Mrs Steadman had begrudgingly prepared her the bath. ‘Special circumstances,’ she muttered as she sloshed in the half-warm water from the stove. She had taken a thick indelible-ink pen and drawn a line five inches up the tub. ‘Keep it so I can wash the clothes after,’ she had said. The stolen paper – a flimsy shining carbon-copy tissue – was wilting in the steam.