by Anna Reader
“I’m only teasing you,” Flora said, softening, and pushing him lightly on the arm. “Give my love to Cynthia-Rose. And do be careful, Bertie. Don’t trust anyone – that’s what Uncle Antal said, after all.”
“Flora,” Bertie began, suddenly serious as he and Flora walked out of the front door, “it’s of the upmost importance to me that you don’t think I fabricated our friendship. Notwithstanding the rather sobering circumstances, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed spending the past few days in your company. In fact,” he added, taking a step towards her, “I should very much like to kiss you.”
“And perhaps I might let you,” Flora replied serenely, whilst taking a step backwards, “once this is all over. I don’t think that it would do either of us any good, Bertie, to complicate matters when we need to focus our minds on toppling the Germans. If I’ve learnt anything from living in a girls’ boarding house, it is that affairs of the heart are the most crippling distraction. Pongo, for instance, very nearly flunked her Highers because her young man was spotted holding hands with the barmaid from the Dog and Whistle. And I don’t intend to make the same mistake.”
Bertie threw his head back and laughed. “Well said, Flora,” he said at last. “Let’s shake hands, then, and I shall be on my way.”
Smiling sweetly, Flora extended her arm and took Bertie’s hand in hers. “Good bye, Bertie dear,” she said lightly, before turning on her heel and walking back into the house. Like many of her comrades at St. Penrith’s – and, indeed, the incomparable Magda - Flora despised goodbyes; the briefer the better, as far as she was concerned. Bertie was also the product of a rigorous public school education, and understood this implicitly. And so off he loped to the Cynthia-Rose, determinedly expelling thoughts of her cherry-red lips from his mind.
Magda’s very audible protest against Bertie’s departure had subsided and Flora stood alone in the silent hall, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock and wondering what precisely she should do next.
“Right,” she said aloud, walking upstairs to fetch her gun, “onwards.” Fashioning a kind of holster from a pair of stockings, Flora slung the revolver down by her waist and resumed her search of the castle. She began, where Bertie had left off, in her bedroom. She had unearthed a record player at the back of the wardrobe earlier that morning, and spent a very pleasant hour flicking through her uncle’s library and listening to jazz. The mysterious list was still nowhere to be seen, however, and so Flora made her way methodically from room to room, carrying the record player with her and bobbing gently as she scoured the place for clues, the revolver slapping against her thigh as she moved in time to the music.
She was quite right not to have kissed Bertie, she decided – the fact that she’d discovered that he was in fact a British agent was quite enough to be going on with. Flora had regularly spurned the advances of any young man at St. Penrith’s for Boys courageous or cocksure enough to ask her to the pictures, or to a dance; one of her long-suffering admirers had even been so moved as to compose a sonnet praising her rare beauty before creeping across to the Girls’ School to recite it under her dormitory window in the middle of the night. Flora had felt the faint stirrings of sympathy as Miss Pevensey had dragged him back across the moonlit lawn accompanied by a chorus of heckling from the younger girls leaning out of their windows - but really, she had thought, that wasn’t at all her thing and she’d much rather they focused their attentions on Annette or Muriel, or any of the other girls longing for a sweetheart. Bertie, though, had intrigued her. It was not often that one discovered a naked spy in one’s apartment, only to be offered a ride in an aeroplane and a jolly few days in the most extraordinary circumstances. No: far better, she thought, to keep him at something of a distance until the question of the list had resolved itself. Then, perhaps, she’d let him have another try.
Having searched in every hiding place she could think of, Flora was unable to shake the image of her father’s portrait from her mind. If her uncle had guarded this secret of his so meticulously for the past two years, why, then, would he have made gratuitous comments about her mother’s picture in the only message he ever sent her? It seemed nonsensical and, from what she had learned of him, starkly out of character. Flora lit a cigarette and stretched out on the dust-sheet covering the four-poster bed, tapping her fingers against her stomach as she tried to think. She brought the image of the portrait to mind, and concentrated on every detail: the dark wood surrounded her father’s face, the copper piping sitting on the inside edge of the frame and catching the firelight; the confident brush-strokes of her mother’s hand. Suddenly she sat up, her eyes widening in realisation.
“My god,” she said aloud. “Of course.” Dashing downstairs, Flora made her way into the study and peered at the frame, her face only inches from the wood.
The copper edging on the frame was decorated with a kind of intricate, swirling pattern - or at least that’s what she’d thought when they had first examined the picture. As she stared at the wood the swirls gradually took on the shape of a cursive script. Flora gasped - and then the world went dark.
“Flora! Crikey, she’s out cold, Teddy…. Flora! Can you hear me?”
“There’s a woman tied up and gagged in here!” Teddy cried from the library. “What the devil is going on? Hallo? Do you speak English, madam? I don’t think she speaks English, Ali!”
“She’s opening her eyes!” Alice cried out in relief. “Flor? Can you see me, Flor?”
“Alice?” Flora asked in some confusion, feeling an incredible pain shooting down her neck as she moved. “Lord, my head hurts.” She winced and sat up, feeling distinctly nauseous as she did so.
“Careful, there,” Alice said, gently supporting Flora as she tried to stand, “don’t rush yourself.”
“What,” Flora asked, gingerly turning to look at her dearest friend, “are you doing here, Alice?”
“I say,” Teddy declared, charging into the room, “there’s an extremely irritated Hungarian woman in the next room – as soon as I removed her gag she started screaming at me. I don’t think she’s best pleased. Ah, Flora!”
“Teddy?” Flora cried, recoiling as the sound of her voice rang in her ears.
“Hallo, old girl,” he replied cheerfully.
Flora felt distinctly faint. Raising her hand to the back of her head she carefully probed the egg shaped bump, grimacing as she did so. And then realisation pierced the fog of pain. “Oh lord,” she said quietly, staring at the empty space on the wall where the picture had been. Dashing out in to the hall as fast as she could, she ran out of the front door and looked frantically for signs of life. The Buick, she noticed grimly, was gone. In its place, however, was a very smart Beauford.
“Magda!” she shouted, running back into the house and almost bumping into the raging housekeeper who had by now emerged from the library. “Are you alright?”
“No, I am not,” Magda declared, her face purple with rage. “That intruder tied me up! Not before I hit his damn sling as hard as I could, though,” she added with blood-thirsty delight.
“What man?” Flora asked urgently. “Was he German? Tall? A duelling scar on each cheek?”
“Yes,” Magda confirmed, her eyes gleaming with loathing. “That’s the Ördög.” She spat onto the stone floor in disgust. “You know him?”
“I shot him two days ago,” Flora replied grimly, before swearing in particularly colourful Hungarian.
Magda looked at her with a new respect; first for the shooting, and secondly for the swearing.
“Did you see where he went?” Flora demanded, seizing Magda by the shoulders. “It’s very important, Magda.”
“No,” the housekeeper replied, feeling rather wobbly now that the shock was beginning to wear off. “I heard him take Mr Antal’s car, though – that foolish boy will insist on keeping the keys in the ignition.”
“What the blue blazes is going on here, Flor?” Teddy asked, interrupting this flood of Hungarian. “Who would want to knock y
ou over the head?”
“A German spy,” she replied coldly.
“What?” Teddy and Alice cried in unison.
“Teddy, is that your Beauford?” Flora asked, looking up at him in urgent appeal.
“Indeed it is,” he replied proudly. “About this spy, though, Flor….”
“Right,” Flora said, groping for the stocking holster and finding with some relief that her revolver was still in its rightful place. “We need to follow that German.”
To her relief, Teddy and Alice readily grasped the urgency of the situation and charged out to the car without asking any more questions.
“Magda,” Flora said, turning to the housekeeper. “You’ll find a radio in a hamper in Bertie’s room – turn it on and tell the person at the other end that the Germans have the list. Tell them that Uncle Antal had the names etched into the copper piping on the frame. I doubt they’ll understand you at first, but just keep talking until they find someone who can speak Hungarian.”
To her credit, and bemused as she no doubt must have been, Magda nodded in understanding and told Flora to be careful. “That German was a nasty piece of work,” she said darkly. “If I see him again, I will shoot him.”
“Not if I get there first,” Flora replied. “Lock the door after us.”
And with that she leapt into the back of the Beauford, and was off.
“Drink this.” Alice poured a measure of brandy into a flask half-full of coffee, and thrust it into Flora’s hand. It certainly helped to steady her, and to numb the throbbing pain at the back of her head.
“I have no idea where he might have gone,” Flora declared, accepting a cigarette from her friend and desperately looking about her for signs of the Buick.
“There’s only one road leading away from this castle of yours,” Teddy reassured her. “Whoever this fellow is, he’ll be heading west.”
“Towards Germany,” Flora said bitterly. “It’s absolutely imperative that we catch up with him before he reaches the border.” Realising that she was yet to establish how it was that her friends had turned up in her uncle’s study, Flora turned to Alice.
“Now, Ali,” she said, “would you mind explaining what you and Teddy were doing in my uncle’s castle?”
“Oh, it’s quite simple, really,” her chum replied brightly. “Miss Baxter gave me the most shocking grilling the morning after your escape, demanding that I tell her where you’d gone, and with whom. It was such a bore, Flor, I can’t tell you – she told me I was gated of all things, as though I were some naughty fourth former who’d skipped Games – so I called Teddy and asked if he’d come and fetch me. Well, as we were on our way to Oxford I had the most appalling feeling – as though you were in some kind of trouble. I really can’t explain it, Flor - and you know that I’m not usually the superstitious sort - but it felt jolly real. When Teddy saw what a state I was in, he suggested that we should pop across in the Beauford to find you. And if it turned out that you were perfectly alright, we could make a holiday of it. He’s such a darling.” She laughed and ruffled his hair.
“I drove to Switzerland with my brother a couple of summers ago,” Teddy explained, glancing back at Flora, “and Hungary was only a smidgen further. Besides, I’ve been in a spot of bother myself, and thought a continental jaunt would be just the thing.”
“Spot of bother?” Flora asked, accepting a second brandy from Alice. “What have you been up to, Teddy?”
“He was caught distilling gin in his bathroom at College,” Alice said proudly. “He calls it Fortesque’s Revenge – it’s really very good.”
“I’ve got some in the back actually,” Teddy said with a modest smile. “Thought you might like to try some, Flor. It makes rather a good martini, if I do say so myself.”
“That was incredibly thoughtful of you, Teddy,” Flora replied, extremely moved. “Thank you.”
“Now, Flora,” Alice said seriously, “never mind Teddy’s gin, what on earth have you been up to? We had the devil’s own time of it trying to find you – Teddy’s got a smattering of French and my Italian’s not too shabby, but it’s been such a struggle – no-one speaks a word of English. We really could have spent days ambling aimlessly around Xanadu” - (“Szentendre,” Teddy interjected cheerfully) - “as people just kept staring slack-jawed when I tried to get directions to the castle. Thank heavens I made you tell me your father’s name during that game of truth or dare when we were in upper fourth, otherwise we’d really have been in the soup.” She paused to light a cigarette. “My heart nearly stopped when we found you on the floor like that, Flor,” Alice said, raising a hand to her chest and turning rather pale. “Just too awful.”
Alice and Flora had always complimented one another rather well when it came to their emotional rhythms; whilst Flora had a tendency to lean towards a kind of implacable stoicism, Alice was something of a dramatist. Their friendship meant that they generally kept one another somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and only rarely strayed into the extremities. Alice was sorely tempted to do so now, given the circumstances.
“It’s rather a long story, I’m afraid,” Flora confessed.
“Plenty of grub in the back there if you’re hungry,” Teddy announced before Flora had a chance to begin. “We picked up some wonderful saucisson when we were passing through France, and there’s an excellent baker in that town of yours. I think there’s some claret swimming around in under my seat, too, if you fancy a tipple.”
“I hardly think Flora wants claret at a time like this,” Alice retorted, remonstrating gently with her beloved bon viveur. “If anything, we ought to open the Riesling, what with all this talk of Germans.”
Alice had said this in jest, but Teddy thought it was an excellent notion and invited her to climb into the boot to fetch it.
“Not until I hear Flora’s story,” Alice replied firmly. “Flor?”
And so Flora regaled her friends with her version of recent events, keeping half an eye on the road ahead at all times in the hope that she might catch a glimpse of the Buick. I won’t regale you with a verbatim description of Flora’s report, since to do so would repeat much of the past seven chapters and, I fear, test your patience. Instead I shall offer you a selection of Alice’s reactions, from which you may adduce the highs and lows of Flora’s narrative arch.
“Nothing but a bunch of grapes?....He flew you here?....In the arm? Well done, you!….I can’t believe he was a spy, although it is rather romantic, Flor….My god, that’s ingenious – although it sounds highly time-consuming…”
“So where is this Bertie fellow?” Teddy asked, rather liking the sound of this enigmatic adventurer.
“He should be in Austria by now,” she replied, before lighting a cigarette and leaning as far as she could out of roofless car, scanning the landscape. “I can’t see anything,” she called back to her companions. “The thought that we might’ve gone the wrong way makes me feel quite ill.”
“I really don’t think we have, Flor,” Teddy offered in reassurance. “If this fellow is heading back to Germany then he must be going this way. Stands to reason. And if he’s not…well, we can only give the thing our best shot.”
Fields sped past them, mottled with cows. Alice did eventually scramble into the back and locate the wine, but when even Teddy refused a glass, staring instead at the road with a particular intensity, it became clear that all three of them were suddenly feeling the weight of history upon their shoulders. It was up to them, then, an aspiring opening batsman for England (Teddy); a revolutionary with her eyes fixed firmly on Westminster (Alice); and a winsome enigma whose ambitions remained a mystery even to herself (Flora), to protect Britain. Not even the idea of a sandwich made from Victor’s unparalleled bread could tempt them from their silent introspection, and Flora, who had so far managed to retain a remarkable sense of calm, began to feel rather under the cosh.
“Good lord, Flora, look!” Teddy cried suddenly, letting go of the wheel and pointing urgently towards a p
ath veering off to the left not five hundred yards ahead of them. “Is that the car?”
Flora followed the direction of his finger and positively yelped with delight as she spotted her uncle’s Buick. “Oh well done, Ted!” she cried, clapping him enthusiastically on the shoulder. “And is that smoke coming from under the bonnet?”
“It looks as though the German has over-heated it,” Flora declared, applying the surprisingly advanced grasp of mechanics she had acquired from a former boyfriend in the Royal Air Force. “He’s blown the ruddy gasket.”
“Can you see him?” Flora asked as they neared the now useless vehicle. “Is there any sign of the picture?”
Teddy pulled the car to the side of the road and the trio clambered down, rushing over to the Buick. As they had each feared would be the case the car was empty, the only sign that the German had been there afforded by a nasty looking truncheon abandoned on the passenger seat – no doubt the weapon used to bash Flora over the head. Leaping up onto the driver’s seat, Teddy scanned the horizon with the eyes of a practised huntsman; not for nothing was he reckoned to be the best detector of partridge in Sussex.
“My god, I see him!” he cried in delight. “He’s running across the fields towards what looks to be a town.”
“Does he have the picture?” Flora demanded, leaping up beside him and resting her foot on the steering wheel for balance as she tried to spot the German amongst the long grass.
“It’s either the painting of your father, or a very unusual hat,” Teddy concluded. “He’s definitely holding something square above his head. Very awkwardly too, I might add.”
“One of his arms is most likely in a sling,” Flora reminded him. “I’m so glad I shot him when I had the chance.”
“Come along, then!” Alice exclaimed, dragging Teddy down from the car and flinging her very fetching scarf across her shoulders in preparation for the cross-country dash, “let’s follow him!”
“Shouldn’t we take the car?” Teddy asked, rather bemused, looking longingly back at his Beauford.