Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)
Page 42
Marsh agreed. “Von Westarp’s work is no longer a threat to us. And with all the warlocks dead”—his voice hitched when he said this; he saw the commander swallow a lump in his own throat—“the Eidolons are closed off.”
The commander asked, “You’ve burned the lexicons?”
Marsh rolled his eyes. It wasn’t the first time the commander had asked. “Yes. They’re destroyed.”
“You’ll watch for interest in children. Newborns and orphans.”
“Yes.”
They topped a rise. The Firth of Clyde lay spread before them, and beyond that, the gray shimmer of the North Channel and Irish Sea. The commander started to fidget as they approached Port Glasgow. Still, there was little that remained to be said.
Poor old codger. He’d been through so damn much for the sake of Britain. But now he had to leave it behind.
Marsh walked the commander to the pier. He pretended not to notice how the older man kept rubbing at his eyes.
When he did speak, the commander’s voice was rougher than usual. “Give my love to Liv and Agnes?”
“Every day of my life.”
They shook hands. Marsh said, “I never thanked you properly for saving them. Doubt I ever could.”
“Yes you can. Be a good husband and father. Be the man I never had a chance to be.” The ferry blew two short, impatient bursts of its air horn.
“Well. That’s mine,” the commander said. He paused at the base of the gangplank. “If you do hear rumors of the Reichsbehörde technology, you’ll contact me?”
“You know I can’t.”
The commander sighed again. “Right.”
He climbed the gangplank. At the top he gave Marsh a little wave and salute. Marsh returned it.
Marsh stayed at the port until the late dusk of the northern latitudes, watching the ferry until it disappeared in the darkness. Then he started the car, and drove to Edinburgh. From there, he caught a night train to London. To home. To his family.
That December, America entered the war.
epilogue
23 October 1953
Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, England The cricket ball nicked a fence post. It bounced up, still spinning, and landed on the pavement beyond the garden. The gate creaked open a few seconds later. A boy ran out to retrieve the ball. He looked about ten years old. He tossed the ball back into the garden, and then, after studying the gate for a moment, decided it would be more fun to shimmy over the fence.
He never noticed the old man, who watched from the car across the road.
The man had been there for several hours. He’d have to leave soon. His ship to Buenos Aires departed Liverpool in the morning. It wasn’t safe for him to stay. But he’d gone to a bit of trouble to find this house, and now that he was here, he wanted to see what he could see.
There had been another house, years ago. But this was larger than the place in Walworth. It had to be. It needed room for a family of four.
He’d come to London for a funeral. But it would have been too risky to stand at the graveside while they buried the one-armed man; he’d attended the ceremony with the aid of binoculars. After the burial, he’d discreetly followed a pair of mourners to their home on the outskirts of London. And he’d been parked outside ever since. Just to see what he could see. To hear what he could hear.
He listened while the boy reenacted Denis Compton’s recent career highlights. Great cricketers like Compton had come to be seen as a source of hope and inspiration for a country still emerging from a war eight years past.
The ball whistled over the fence again. It bounced on the pavement, skipped across the asphalt, and banged against the driver’s side door. It rolled to a stop in the middle of the road.
A girl’s voice said, “Now you’ve done it.”
The boy dashed through the gate again. But when he saw the dent, and the man in the car, he hesitated. The old man stepped out of the car to retrieve the ball. It was almost new. The shiny red leather had taken a few scuffs from the fence, and rain puddles had stained the bright stitches. The boy retreated into the garden. He looked ready to run for the house.
The old man called out. “Wait! Not so fast.”
He struggled to speak clearly, so the boy wouldn’t be alarmed by the gravely rasp of his voice. The cold, damp leather evoked an arthritic twinge from his fingers. He wasn’t ancient, a few years short of seventy, but he looked a fair bit older than that. He crossed the street.
“I believe this is yours,” he said, lobbing the ball over the fence. The boy caught it one-handed.
Like the house itself, the garden was a bit bigger than it had been in Walworth. There was a shed, of course. Furrows in the dirt marked the places where beets and carrots had recently been planted for the winter garden. Rye provided a bit of ground cover for keeping out winter-hardy weeds. The remains of a few mushy tomatoes, rejects from the autumn crop, dotted the garden. A girl sat on a stool beside the shed. She had turned thirteen in May.
The boy glanced at the dent in the car door. “What will you do to me?”
The man shrugged. “Nothing. It’s not my car.”
The boy stared at him. “What happened to your face?”
“Don’t be horrid,” said the girl.
She had long, dishwater blond hair. It had pulled free of the hair-slides holding it back, so the curls brushed her shoulder when she frowned at the boy. A handful of freckles dusted the pale skin of her face. She held a book in her lap. The title on the canary-yellow cover said, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
The boy said, glumly, “That’s my sister. She’s supposed to read the scores, but she does it wrong.”
“Hello, Agnes,” said the old man. “It’s wonderful to meet you. You’re growing into a lovely young woman.”
He stared at her so intensely that the girl blushed. She shrugged, frowned, and went inside. The man looked stricken. A snippet of music escaped the kitchen when she opened the door. A woman with a fine voice sang along to the wireless. The girl closed the door behind her. The music disappeared. The man made a funny sound and rubbed his eyes.
“Hey,” said the boy, tugging on the old man’s sleeve. “I didn’t tell you her name. How’d you know that?”
The old man pulled his gaze away from the kitchen door where the girl had disappeared. He looked at the boy. His eyes shimmered with tears, but the corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile.
“What’s your name, lad?”
The boy’s gaze flickered from the old man’s eyes to the tangle of beard and scar tissue along the side of his face. He considered the question for a long moment, as though weighing consequences.
He stuck his chin out. “William Marsh, sir.”
“You’re quite a clever lad, aren’t you, Master Marsh?”
“That’s what my dad says, sir.”
At that, the old man smiled. “I suppose he would.”
“You know my dad?”
“A bit.”
Movement caught the corner of the man’s eye. Somebody pulled the kitchen curtains aside. He glimpsed auburn hair.
“I have to be off.” He raised a hand, tentatively reaching to tousle the boy’s hair, which was the color of wet sand. The boy tensed. The man lowered his arm. “Say hello to your mum and dad for me.”
He had just reached the car when the kitchen door opened behind him. A woman’s voice, the same voice that had been singing a few moments earlier, said, “William? Who were you talking to?”
“I dunno. Some codger. Said he knew you and dad.”
Footsteps scraped lightly on the garden gravel. The old man opened his car door. The dent screeched along the running board.
“Hello? Sir, may I help you?”
The man stopped. He drew a deep breath, then turned.
The woman gasped. She touched a hand to her lips.
The man said, “You have a lovely family, Mrs. Marsh.”
She swallowed. “Yes. I know.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper
. “Thank you.”
He sat in the car. She gestured at the house. “Would you like…”
He hadn’t meant to speak to anybody. Hadn’t meant to be seen. It was dangerous to be seen with him; he was a wanted man. She knew this. He shook his head. “I have to be off.”
“Oh,” she said. “Do you have a family?”
He thought about that. “Yes. But they live far away from me.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
He started the engine.
“Wait, please.” She crossed the garden. Leaning over the fence, she said, “Are you well?”
“Yes. Well as can be.”
“Are you lonely?”
The old man looked down. He couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Sometimes,” he lied. Then he added, “This helped.” Which was somehow true, although the hurt was worse now than it had been in years.
“I wish you could stay.”
“Me, too. More than anything.”
She looked like she might cry. She looked like he felt. “I’d begun to wonder if I had imagined you.” She hugged herself. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
“You’re welcome, Liv. Always.”
Then he put the car in gear and drove away. He didn’t have the strength to look back.
Author’s Note
The Milkweed books have always been, at heart, an attempt to tell an entertaining adventure tale. But no fiction could ever equal the true-life heroism, evil, and intrigue of the Second World War. Thus the story borrows heavily from real historical events and details, not only to lend (one hopes) a sense of verisimilitude, but also to identify the nooks and crannies of history where this story might have unfolded.
The following isn’t a complete list of research sources, but it does include the material consulted most frequently during the writing of this trilogy. Regardless of research, the speculative nature of the story required perpetrating a fair bit of violence to history. That lies at my feet and mine alone.
Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War. 6 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1948–1953] 1985.
Dallas, Gregor. 1945: The War That Never Ended. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Dorril, Stephen. MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
Gilbert, Martin. The Second World War: A Complete History. New York: Owl Books, [1989] 2004.
Höhne, Heinz. The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS. New York: Penguin, [1969] 2000.
Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin, [1990] 2005.
Kynaston, David. Austerity Britain: 1945–1951. New York: Walker & Company, 2008.
Liddell Hart, B. H. History of the Second World War. New York: Da Capo Press, [1971] 1999.
Longmate, Norman. How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life During the Second World War. London: Pimlico, [1971] 2002.
Reitlinger, Gerald. The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945. New York: Da Capo Press, 1957.
Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, [1959] 1990.
Trustees of the Imperial War Museum. The Home Front: Documents relating to life in Britain, 1939–1945. London: Imperial War Museum, 1987.
Trustees of the Imperial War Museum. The Battle of Britain: Documents May to September 1940. London: Imperial War Museum, 1990.
Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, [1994] 2006.
BBC WW2 People’s War Archive: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/
Also by Ian Tregillis
Bitter Seeds
The Coldest War
About the Author
Necessary Evil is the third novel in Ian Tregillis’s alternate-history series, the first of which, Bitter Seeds, won such praise as “A combination of Alan Furst’s brand of historical espionage with the fantastical characters of graphic novelist Alan Moore”—New Mexico Magazine. Tregillis lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the George R. R. Martin Wild Cards writing collective. Visit him on the Web at www.iantregillis.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
NECESSARY EVIL
Copyright © 2013 by Ian Tregillis All rights reserved.
Cover art by Chris McGrath A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Tregillis, Ian.
Necessary evil / Ian Tregillis.—First edition.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2152-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-42994302-4 (e-book) 1. World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3620.R4446N43 2013
813'.6—dc23
2012042627
e-ISBN 9781429943024
First Edition: April 2013
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraphs
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Interlude: Gretel
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Interlude: Gretel
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Interlude: Gretel
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Ian Tregillis
About the Author
Copyright
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraphs
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Interlude: Gretel
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Interlude: Gretel
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Interlude: Gretel
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Ian Tregillis
About the Author
Copyright