Half a Crown

by Jo Walton

  I stood up. My knee had stiffened, and I lurched for a moment and grabbed on to the arm of the sofa. I was exhausted. A hot bath sounded like the best thing in the world, even if there wouldn’t be any perfume to put in it. All the same, I was curious about the caller, and lingered in the hall to see her coming in. Anyone less like an assassin you couldn’t imagine. She was plump, had gray hair pulled up in a bun, and a dark gray coat with a white collar. She looked like a pigeon. I almost laughed as I went off into the bathroom.

  8

  Carmichael wondered what Lady Eversley could possibly want. It was just like her to bother him at home, probably for something entirely trivial. Yet there was something strange about this. He would have thought it a clandestine visit, but a terrorist wouldn’t have allowed a weapons search, and the visitor hadn’t given any of the Inner Watch passwords. He wasn’t sure what to expect.

  Mrs. Talbot turned out to be a stout woman in a severe dress. Carmichael guessed at once from her bearing and manner that she wasn’t an assassin, and relaxed. He stood up and came forward to shake her hand, but she gave him a stiff old-fashioned bow.

  “Mr. Carmichael,” she said, and he could hear in her voice a slight trace of Westmorland.

  “Do sit down,” he said.

  “Would you like tea?”

  “China tea will do very well for me,” she said, surprisingly, and smiled at him almost conspiratorially. She sat on the sofa where Elvira had been until a few moments before.

  “Has Mr. Normanby been gossiping about my tastes in tea?” he asked, uncomfortably. Jack raised an eyebrow and left for the kitchen.

  “Not Mr. Normanby. I feel as if I know you from a different mutual friend. I once had the honor of being Lucy Kahn’s governess, and I have recently been editing her manuscript for publication.” Mrs. Talbot smiled as if this astonishing information was a bit of cheerful gossip.

  “Her manuscript?” Carmichael asked, dumbfounded. “Lucy Kahn’s manuscript?”

  “She has written an account of what happened at Farthing the weekend of Sir James Thirkie’s murder, from her own point of view, of course. She wrote it quite a long time ago, immediately after it happened, in fact, but only recently has there been any possibility of publication. She sent it to me to edit for style and consistency and, well, certain other things.”

  “I see,” said Carmichael, who didn’t see at all. He remembered poor Lucy Kahn only too well. She and her husband were the first innocents he had betrayed.

  “She talks quite a lot about you, of course. She mentions certain things about you, such as your tea drinking and some of your . . . other proclivities.”

  “How the devil did she know?” Carmichael blurted, entirely disconcerted.

  Mrs. Talbot laughed comfortably. “Lucy always had an instinct for that sort of thing.”

  “She can’t go around making that sort of allegation based on her instinct! She could ruin my reputation. There is still a law of libel in this country.” Carmichael drew himself up.

  “There are a great many laws in this country, many of them excellent, and others of them perhaps less so,” Mrs. Talbot said, not moving, or looking at all intimidated, and continuing to meet his eyes comfortably. “But Lucy’s account couldn’t possibly be published here in the present political climate. It’s going to be published in Australia and in Switzerland. We do expect copies will percolate abroad.”

  “Are you attempting to blackmail me?” Carmichael asked.

  Jack came with the tea tray and almost dropped it on hearing Carmichael’s remark. The cups clattered and rocked on their saucers and a stream of tea from the spout of the teapot spurted onto the cloth.

  “I resent that accusation,” Mrs. Talbot said, her sharp eyes taking in Jack and the tray. “Indeed, if I didn’t already know other things about you from Lucy’s manuscript I might be inclined to leave without saying what I have come to say, which I think you will find worth the time it takes you to hear.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carmichael said, stiffly. “Will you pour the tea?”

  Jack gave him a look of inquiry as, having put the tray down, he turned his back on Mrs. Talbot to leave. Carmichael gave him a tiny nod of reassurance, though he was still by no means sure what on earth was going on. Mrs. Talbot poured the tea and Carmichael took his cup. He would have preferred a peg of whisky at this point, but something about the severity of Mrs. Talbot’s clothes suggested that she would disapprove.

  “In Lucy’s account she explains how you telephoned Farthing so that they could get away in time,” Mrs. Talbot said.

  Carmichael stared at her. Someone else knew! He had somehow never thought of Lucy Kahn telling anyone, let alone writing out her account and having it published, though from her point of view he could see the utility of it.

  “Naturally I have changed all the names and taken out that reference and the other references that might be damaging. I have also elided the help I gave her in getting out of the country.”

  “They got away safely, then?” Carmichael heard himself asking, as if from a long way away. “I’ve always hoped so, but never known for sure.”

  “They’re in Canada, up in the north. David runs a little airline that connects the mining communities, and Lucy runs a school for the children of miners and Eskimos. Heaven knows what she teaches them!” Mrs. Talbot smiled fondly at the thought. “They were in Montreal during the sack, but they got away that time too.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it.” Carmichael sipped his tea.

  “This isn’t why I’ve come to you. So far I’ve just been presenting my credentials so that you’ll listen to what I have to say. Also, so that you know I have kept your secrets all this time, and will continue to keep them. If I’d gone to an ordinary Watchman with this, I’d have been putting myself and my connections in considerable danger, yet I do want you to know. Mr. Carmichael, I am a friend.” She paused, as if what she’d said was of great import.

  It took him a moment to grasp the significance of what she was saying. “A friend? Oh, a Friend. A Quaker, you mean? The Society of Friends?”

  “It isn’t illegal to be a Friend, but since 1955 it has caused us to be viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. You were more lenient then than you might have been.”

  “You registered Jews as part of your congregations,” Carmichael remembered. He tried not to think about 1955 more than he had to. “It isn’t illegal to be a Jew either, for that matter, unless you’re in the wrong place or trying to pass yourself off as something else. Between us now—you’re not Jewish?”

  “I do not have that honor.” Mrs. Talbot looked as if she meant it. “My parents were also Friends. I was born in Kendal, where there is quite a large congregation.”

  “I’m from Lancashire myself,” Carmichael said. “I’ve often noticed the Friends Meeting House in Lancaster, down the hill from the railway station on the way into town.” That was in fact the only reason he knew that Quakers were called the Society of Friends at all. Quakers didn’t tend to commit many crimes that would bring them to his attention.

  Mrs. Talbot nodded, with just a touch of impatience at this geographical reminiscence. “Because I am a Friend, I am in contact with certain people who are in contact with other people who, well, move people around and procure papers for them. That is how I managed to get David and Lucy out of the country, and plenty of other people before and since.”

  “You’re smuggling out Jews?” Carmichael sat right up and almost dropped his tea.

  “Mr. Carmichael, you can arrest me if you want to, but I won’t lead you to any contacts. We’ve all made sure of that before I came here.” She stuck out her chin and looked ready to go to the stake.

  Carmichael laughed, then hesitated. He should be cautious. She had no poison tooth, as members of the Inner Watch had, no protection against being made to talk. Yet he trusted her, and he had to make her see that she could trust him. He threw caution to the winds. “Mrs. Talbot, I have more desire to embrace you tha
n to arrest you. My first question would be whether you could take any more. I do what I can in that way myself, but the problem is always having somewhere to send them.”

  Mrs. Talbot laughed in turn and turned quite pink. “Call me Abby,” she said. “All my friends do. I apologize for not shaking your hand. You must be very discreet. I had no idea. Whoever would have dreamed of such a thing. An underground railroad in the middle of the Watch!”

  “We send most of them to Ireland, where they take them in just to spite the English. It’s so hard to find anyone who will accept them, and it’s not as if there’s a vast outflow of people from the British Isles to hide them among.” Carmichael sighed. “We can issue false papers, of course, and we do, but there is oversight and we have to be careful, because if any of us were caught the whole thing would be over. And when it comes to expanding the operation, the problem is always of who to begin to trust.”

  “We used to send people to Canada, and sometimes to the United States, with cleverly forged papers, naturally. These days, of course, Canada isn’t the haven we used to like to think it was, and America—well, President Yolen is doing his best just to hold the country together. He can hardly dare acknowledge that the rest of the world even exists.” Abby sighed. “These days, we mostly send the Jews to Zanzibar. They have a thriving colony there. We have a company that exports Jews and imports spices and bananas. We have three ships that make the trip, and they never sail with empty places. If only we had another ship, we could take more people.”

  “Zanzibar. That’s in Africa, isn’t it?” Carmichael had barely heard the name.

  “It’s an island off the east coast of Africa,” she said, and he saw how she must have been as a governess.

  “Mrs. Talbot—Abby, forgive me—I can see there might be many ways we can profitably work together now that we’ve been fortunate enough to meet. But will you tell me why you came to me? Curiosity is overcoming me, especially since you really didn’t know about the Inner Watch. I’d be happy to talk about how we can help each other afterwards.”

  Abby took a deep breath, set down her empty teacup, folded her hands, and settled herself more comfortably on the sofa. “My organization, unlike yours which stays aloof, is in touch in a vague way with a number of other organizations. We overlap, we have members in common, we know people. The Friends are strictly nonviolent, but sometimes a violent organization wants us to smuggle someone out of the country, or hide someone for a while. Likewise we sometimes need funds. When we hide fugitives we don’t ask who they are or what they’ve done. You understand?”

  Carmichael nodded, not at all clear where she was going, but following her so far. This overlap was why the Watch tried to infiltrate any opposition group, no matter how seemingly innocent; he was well aware of the theory.

  “Through these channels I have heard certain rumors for a while now, but discounted them, largely because there are always rumors through such channels, and most of them nonsense. But this was a more persistent rumor than most, and coming from people who call themselves followers of Lord Scott, concerning support for their cause from the Duke of Windsor. Then, a few days ago, the parents of one of the children at my husband’s school, respectable people, unconnected so far as I know with any underground activity, mentioned the British Power movement, within the Ironsides, and that the Duke of Windsor, who they called King Edward VIII, was involved in some way with it. Putting this together with what I have heard from friends with Scottite affiliations, I believe that the Duke of Windsor is going to attempt a coup d’etat, using both the Ironsides and the poor deluded Scottites. Bad as things are in Britain now, Mr. Carmichael, I believe they’d be considerably worse if that wicked man were to come to be in charge.”

  “Do you know him?” Carmichael asked, curious at her vehemence and the use of the word wicked.

  “I have met him. He used to come to stay at Farthing in the early part of the thirties.” Abby pursed her lips. “There’s no doubt whatsoever of his fascist sympathies, or of his overwhelming vanity and sense that he deserves whatever he wants as soon as he wants it. He would have made an appalling king, and it’s as well that there was an excuse to get him off the throne. I believe that was the best day’s work Mr. Baldwin ever did. As king, as a legitimate and constitutional monarch, he might have sapped the will of the nation—but he couldn’t really have done anything like the harm he could if he were to seize power illegitimately now.”

  “How could he be worse than Normanby?” Carmichael asked, cynically.

  “Mr. Normanby has at least a fig leaf of constitutionality. He keeps Parliament in session. There are elections and an opposition. There is lip service at least to our traditions of freedom. Bad as things are, for most people they are very little different from how they have always been. And better the devil you know, Mr. Carmichael.”

  Carmichael stood up and paced the length of the sitting room. He stopped in front of a watercolor of a moorland landscape and stared at it, not really seeing the familiar pattern of browns and greens. “The real problem is that people mostly are perfectly happy with things as they are, or else too afraid to do anything. I sometimes wonder whether if things got notably worse it would be an improvement, because they’d have to take notice.”

  “And what would come of it if they took notice at that point?” Abby asked. “It would be too late for them to act. It is possible to make people brave, and clear-sighted, and open-eyed. I do it with my pupils. But I do it individually, and it’s hard work that takes years. I don’t know how to do it for a whole country, so that they’d look at what their government is doing in their name instead of ignoring it, and then throw them out instead of making excuses. But they have to have the power to throw them out if they do wake up to it. At the moment, the inertia and the institutions are still just about there. If we took them away, as they have been taken away in Germany, if we installed a king to rule over us by divine right, what would a waking-up avail but a massacre, as happened in Vienna two years ago?”

  Carmichael had paced back the length of the room and found himself at the window; he turned back to her. “Every day I see men and women betraying their friends and families because they are afraid. It’s easy for me to despise them, but I do my job for the same reason. I betrayed Lucy and David Kahn when I had proof that they were innocent, proof! But it wasn’t enough when nobody would accept it, when I was threatened myself.” He hesitated, wincing as he spoke, still bitterly ashamed ten years later and after all that had happened since. Not even to Jack had he talked about it this clearly. “They knew I’d warned Lucy, they knew about what you called my proclivities, they threatened me, they threatened Jack, they cut me off so I couldn’t have achieved anything by speaking out, and in the end I sold my soul to them.”

  “It wasn’t the end,” Abby said, twisting on the sofa to face him head on. “Your soul is still your own. You know how to be brave. Think what you have done since, how many souls are alive and free in Ireland instead of slaves or dead on the Continent. You failed a test, yes, that one and perhaps others, but you have never surrendered your soul. And I believe it’s the same for the whole country.”

  “I think you are the most extraordinary person I have ever met,” Carmichael said, walking back to his armchair and sitting down again. “I’ll do what I can, and have the Watch do what they can, to stop whatever the Duke of Windsor is attempting.”

  “I felt sure you would, sure enough to come here even without knowing very much about you,” Abby said.

  He held up his hand for silence and picked up the receiver of the telephone that sat on the little table beside his chair. “Home Office, please. Who’s that? Oh, Atkinson, good, didn’t know you were taking the evening watch over there these days. It’s Carmichael. Do you know about this Duke of Windsor business? Well, please take a message for whoever is dealing with it. Tell him with reference to the query he sent us about the Duke of Windsor, on consideration, the Watch feels it would be better if he were kept out
of the country. Could you write that up as a memo and drop it on his desk, and also the Duke of Hampshire’s desk for first thing in the morning?”

  He listened to a few moments of polite wittering. As he listened he could hear, in his own flat, the sound of the bath draining. “Thank you so much, good-bye,” he said, and grinned at Abby. “I wish it was all so easy.”

  Footsteps padded down the corridor. Abby raised her eyebrows. “My ward. She doesn’t know anything about anything. If she comes in, don’t say anything,” Carmichael said. The footsteps passed the door and went on down towards the kitchen. “Probably looking for a cup of hot milk before bed.”

  “Well then, about Zanzibar,” Abby said.

  “Wait a moment. You said you needed money. I can put you on our payroll as an informer. You did just give me some very good information, and I can also explain your visit that way. What you do with the money, putting it towards paying forgers or buying ships to export Jews, is your business. Our budget for information is high.”

  Abby looked as if she almost disapproved, but after a moment she began to laugh.

  9

  The next morning, which was Thursday, I woke up in my bed in Uncle Carmichael’s flat and for a moment had no idea where I was. The bed was narrow, and the room was narrow, and for a second I had the ridiculous fancy that I was in a cabin in a ship. The sun was quite high, so they’d obviously let me sleep. I stretched and yawned and got up, feeling a million times better than I had the day before. I riffled through my trunk trying to find something I could wear, but it was no good. I had grown and styles had changed while I’d been in Switzerland. I had clean knickers, and I found a vest, but had to put on the same bra and cashmere sweater and tweed skirt I had been wearing for what already felt like an eternity. I had taken the silk shirt off the night before, but I had no hope of getting it on again without help because it buttoned up the back. I made a mental note to find clothes I could get into without help before Oxford. I didn’t want to take a maid to St. Hilda’s, and I wouldn’t have Betsy. Poor Betsy. I wondered how she was as I slipped the embroidered lavender bag she had made me back into my bra.