The Explosionist (5 page)

It was a relief to learn that the spirit visit had not erased all common sense from Great-aunt Tabitha’s mind. The same question had occurred to Sophie, and she eagerly awaited Mrs. Tansy’s answer.

“I just had a feeling,” said the medium, her eyes sliding away from Great-aunt Tabitha’s, “a strong intuition that the young one needed to see there was no fakery about the business.”

“What kind of a feeling?” Great-aunt Tabitha persisted. “Was it—?”

As Sophie leaned forward to hear what the medium would say, though, her arm brushed against a stack of books and papers. Sophie reached out her hands just too late to prevent the whole mess from toppling slowly to the floor.

“Sophie—”

“I’m sorry,” Sophie gabbled, falling to her knees on the
floor and desperately piling the things together again. What an idiot she was! Stupid, stupid, stupid…. “I didn’t mean to—I’ll—”

Great-aunt Tabitha cut her off. She looked at the enameled watch she wore pinned to her front.

“Goodness, Sophie, it’s
hours
past your bedtime. Off you go! No, not a word—we’ll talk tomorrow evening after you’ve finished your homework. Say thank you to Mrs. Tansy, please, and make sure to clean your teeth before you go to bed.”

Sophie’s great-aunt seemed not to know whether to treat her as a small child or someone quite grown-up. It led to an odd jumble of different kinds of advice. Sophie reached obediently to shake Mrs. Tansy’s hand, but when the woman clasped Sophie’s hand in her own, Sophie felt a sharp pain in her palm, and then a significant pressure.

She looked quickly up into the woman’s face; Mrs. Tansy pursed her lips and gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head. She clearly meant Sophie not to attract her great-aunt’s attention.

Once she reached the upstairs landing, Sophie opened her hand. She was holding a miniature metal iron, just like one of the counters on the Capitalism board, and a business card with Mrs. Tansy’s name and address on it. How very strange!

In her bedroom, she draped her dress over the back of the chair, pulled on a nightgown, and tucked the card and the
metal token into her school satchel for safekeeping.

Mrs. Tansy’s words about the “feeling” that made her ask Sophie to watch the disrobing had not been uttered with the same stolid certainty as everything else. Had she been lying? If only Sophie had been allowed to stay for the rest of the conversation!

Great-aunt Tabitha would almost certainly want to determine whether Mrs. Tansy’s feeling fell into one of the categories devised by Arthur Conan Doyle, the great detective novelist and theorist of the occult, who divided psychic intuitions according to whether they were based on precognition, telepathy, or some other, as-yet-unknown form of clairvoyance.

Sophie wanted to know something more practical. Who sent the warning, and what did it mean?

Could Sophie have a secret enemy?

It was easy to imagine how Nan, Jean, and Priscilla would react to the words
secret enemy
on Monday back at school.

The thought of her friends consoled Sophie and she rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position. But though her body was bone-tired, she had slept too long in the afternoon to fall asleep now. Despite the house’s heavy walls, the door to Sophie’s bedroom cleared the sill by almost an inch, and the parquet floors amplified every footfall. She listened to the medium getting dressed again in the room across the hall and
being shown downstairs by the maid, and the sounds of the last visitors leaving. She heard Peggy locking the outside door and putting out the lights. She lay awake in bed long after the rest of the house had gone quiet, the hall clock striking three before she finally fell into a restless sleep.

T
HE WEEKEND PASSED
in a blur of homework and bad dreams. On Monday morning Sophie was woken earlier than usual by Annie, the maid whose job it was to bring up the brass hot-water can for the washstand. The house had no bathrooms, and Great-aunt Tabitha had refused to modernize on the grounds that what was good enough for her father was good enough for her and Sophie.

The maid blethered away self-importantly as she shook the warm towel off the top of the can and poured the water into the basin. Sophie felt strangely groggy, almost as though she were still dreaming.

“A bomb?” she echoed stupidly, sitting up and trying to collect herself.

“Yes, Miss Sophie, didn’t you hear the telephone first thing this morning? The crack of dawn, it was.”

Now that Sophie thought about it, her morning dreams (a dark confusing blur of unpleasant emergencies)
had
included the buzzing of an egg timer and the beeping of a radio-wave apparatus for detecting enemy aircraft.

“It was the minister of public safety,” Annie continued, opening the curtains and picking Sophie’s clothes up from where they had fallen on the floor. “Calling to tell Miss Hunter that a bomb’d gone off in St. Giles’ Cathedral.”

“But surely the cathedral must have been quite empty?” Sophie said, her brain finally starting to work.

“Aye, that’s right,” said Annie, “it went off at the wrong time, they say, and the only one in the building was the night watchman, and he was knocked out but said to be doing well in hospital. Hours ago, it was.”

Though it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, the thought of another bomb going off made Sophie’s eyes water. As she washed and dressed and packed her things for school, she pretended not to have heard anything about the latest attack, but she felt jumpy and upset.

To get to school she walked through Queen Street Gardens and down Hanover Street past the George Hotel to the Princes Street tram stop. The throngs of people passing up and down the street seemed more subdued than usual, and
Sophie had the feeling that any small unexpected noise would set off a mass panic.

When the tram came, she wedged herself into a seat near the back as the vehicle began climbing Calton Hill in the direction of some of her favorite Edinburgh landmarks: the full-scale replica of the Parthenon built to honor the Scots who died in the Napoleonic Wars; the column in the shape of a telescope marking the achievements of Lord Nelson, whose great victory at Trafalgar had been the last bright spot before Wellington’s awful defeat at Waterloo. Sophie’s school sat on the hill’s lower slopes. Modeled on a classical temple, the Edinburgh Institution for Young Ladies had an enormous Doric portico with columns in the center of the main building and walkways along either side leading to the two wings.

Not until after supper did Sophie find herself alone with Nan, Jean, and Priscilla, and it was a great relief when they behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened on Friday morning. Priscilla asked Sophie for help with her sums, Nan gave a tedious account of the Saturday afternoon lacrosse scrimmage, and Jean returned Sophie’s buttonhook, borrowed the week before when her own went missing. Everything felt so familiar and comfortable that the strange feeling in Sophie’s stomach finally went away.

In English that morning they had written responses to a famous writer’s assertion that if he had to choose between
betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country. It was almost bedtime, but the girls were still arguing about whether it made any sense.

“No true friend would ask such a thing,” Nan said. “A real friend would help you serve your country, not betray it.”

“But that’s not the point,” Jean argued. “Isn’t there anybody in the world you care about so much that you’d really do anything for them?”

“I’d give up my life for any one of my brothers,” said Nan, looking determined. “But my brothers would kill me—
literally
kill me!—if they thought I was about to betray my country.”

“What if your brothers were all up in front of a firing squad and you could only save one of them?” Sophie asked. She liked this kind of conversation. “Which one would you pick, and why?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly choose between them,” said Nan, her mouth set in a stubborn line.

“But you must have a favorite,” Jean said, pressing for a better answer. “Everyone has a favorite, if they’re really being honest.”

“That’s not true,” said Nan.

“Yes, it is,” said Jean. “There are lots of people I love—my mother and my baby brother, for instance—but my
favorite person in the world is Priscilla.”

Priscilla looked entirely unmoved by this tribute. Typical, thought Sophie, feeling annoyed.

“I’d do anything to make sure Priscilla was safe,” Jean continued. “Even if it meant betraying my country—which it probably wouldn’t, of course.”

“I agree with Jean about having a favorite person,” Priscilla said in a softer voice than usual. Sophie looked at her, thinking she sounded almost human for once. “My favorite person’s my father. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him.”

“What about you, Sophie?” Jean asked. “Who’s your favorite person, the person you’d do anything to protect?”

Sophie couldn’t help it. Mr. Petersen’s face came irresistibly into her mind, and a flood of heat spread up over her neck and face.

The others began to crow.

“Sophie loves Mr. Petersen,” said Jean through giggles.

“Yes,” said Priscilla, “in the breast of Sophie Hunter lurks unbridled passion and a love that dare not speak its name. Love for the most boring man in the world!”

Sophie felt upset and mortified. She took a few deep lungfuls of air, a breathing technique Great-aunt Tabitha had learned from a Yogic guru and practiced every day before breakfast. It was meant to calm people down, but it
didn’t seem to work very well.

Just then the housemistress appeared to check that they were all in bed; Sophie almost felt she should say a prayer of thanks for the convenient timing. A moment later the second bell rang for lights-out.

A
LL THE GIRLS WERE
seated and waiting attentively the next morning by the time Miss Chatterjee strode into the room and set her books on the table at the front of the class. Born in Calcutta and educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, Miss Chatterjee spoke in a crisp, fancy-sounding English accent that stood out amid everyone else’s respectable middle-class Scottish voices. She was hands down the most exciting teacher in the school.

Modern European history was a subject one couldn’t
not
be interested in, at least in Sophie’s opinion. Every one of the abuses and atrocities that filled the daily papers could be traced back in one way or another to the fatal day in 1815 when Napoleon defeated Wellington and slaughtered
the British forces at Waterloo.

The previous week they had been reading Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution.

But Miss Chatterjee stymied them all with her opening question. “Why was Edmund Burke,” she asked, “so very
angry
with the French revolutionaries?”

“Because the leaders of the revolution were wicked,” Priscilla said flippantly when nobody else spoke up.

Miss Chatterjee sighed. “One may denounce the wrongs done by people whose political beliefs one does not endorse,” she observed, “without mounting an impassioned assault on the very foundations of their philosophy. I ask you again, why was Burke so angry?”

“Because his whole world was threatened by what was happening in France,” suggested a small, very serious girl called Fiona.

“And what features of his world did Burke wish to protect?” Miss Chatterjee asked, perching on the edge of her desk, stretching out one long nylon-stockinged leg and examining the handmade calfskin shoe on her left foot.

“Kings and queens,” Nan said.

“Inheritance from one generation to the next,” said Priscilla in a submissive voice.

“Private property,” offered Harriet Jeffries. Something about the way Harriet talked always reminded one that her top marks
were in penmanship and deportment; Sophie still hadn’t forgiven Harriet for being so horrible on Friday after assembly. But then, Harriet was always horrible, so there was no point expecting anything different. “Lords and ladies and country estates.”

“The English constitution,” Sophie said firmly. Harriet sounded much too enthusiastic about the lords and ladies, in a lending-library-romance sort of way. She really was a most awful girl.

“And what do
you
think of those things?” said the teacher. “Were they worth defending with the vehemence Burke musters for the occasion?”

“The constitution was worth protecting,” Sophie said, a little shocked by the question. “Look what happened when England lost it….”

Along the line of Hadrian’s Wall now stood miles and miles of concrete bunkers and concertina wire. Many girls had lost family members when England fell to Europe in the 1920s, and rumor spoke of concentration camps and mass graves. Ordinary Scottish citizens rarely received permission now to cross at the official checkpoint at Berwick-upon-Tweed; most in any case wouldn’t risk passing into what amounted to enemy territory.

“What about the king and queen?” said Miss Chatterjee. “Do you believe monarchy is a political good worth hanging on to?”

Several girls shook their heads, and Fiona spoke up.

“All the countries in the Hanseatic League have abolished their monarchies,” she said. “The Scottish parliament voted not to restore the Stuart line after we split with England, and Sweden and Denmark no longer have kings and queens.”

“What about Burke’s defense of property?” said Miss Chatterjee, her voice rich and smooth, like butter. “How does that sit with us?”

“The Scottish government has raised taxes and death duties on the principle that the very wealthy should subsidize health care and education for the poor,” Nan said slowly. “And everybody thinks that’s a good thing, even the people who have less money now they’re being taxed at higher rates.”

“Well, perhaps not
quite
everybody,” Miss Chatterjee said, laughing a little, “but certainly most of us do.”

“So the answer would be no,” Nan continued, answering the teacher’s question. “Burke’s defense of property seems like almost the opposite of what we would approve of.”

Miss Chatterjee nodded.

“Very good, Nan,” she said. “Now, what would you say if I told you that most of the models for Scotland’s constitution, and for the constitutions of the other Hanseatic states, can be found in the writings of precisely those individuals whom Burke abhors? That the sympathy with which we have read Burke is at the very least ironic, and possibly altogether mis
placed? That if Burke represents politics as a matter of ‘us’ against ‘them,’ history would align us not with Burke but with his mortal enemies, the revolutionaries?”

But it was the political repression and state-sponsored violence of the European Federation that had their roots back beyond Napoleon in revolutionary France! How did Miss Chatterjee so reliably manage to turn Sophie’s brain inside out and make her see things in an entirely new way?

Lunch was much worse than usual: gray meat decorated liberally with gristle; starchy potatoes boiled down almost to mush; the smelly yellowish-green miniature cabbages that had been known as Brussels sprouts until Napoleon made that city his capital; and a disgusting pudding called a “shape,” made from milk, water, beet sugar, and gelatin substitute. It was a good thing Sophie was inoculated against disgust by Peggy’s cooking. At least at school she was spared the need to assuage the cook’s feelings by eating everything on her plate; here one of the dinner ladies would happily scrape whatever was left into a tin bucket for pig swill.

The food still sat heavily in Sophie’s stomach as she plodded, lagging behind the other girls, along the strip of land adjoining the New Burial Ground to the school tennis courts. Sophie was such a poor athlete that the games mistress turned a blind eye to her skiving off, so long as she made some
pretense of helping to carry the equipment. Sophie had a funny halfway status that gave her more liberty than the real boarders, although a bit less than the school’s handful of day girls, but she was careful not to abuse it.

In tennis season, Sophie served as ball girl, and whenever too many balls vanished over the stone wall to the gardens of the houses behind the courts, she would scramble through a hole to retrieve them. That was how she had befriended the professor, a Swedish neurologist now retired from the University of Uppsala and living in one of these houses. After a serendipitous tennis-ball-related encounter, Sophie developed a habit of visiting him once a week or so for lessons in everything from entomology to the Russian language. Unlike most grown-ups, the professor did not tell Sophie that she was too young to understand the sort of thing she liked talking about, whether it was the theology of Count Tolstoy, the novels of Richard Wagner, the verse of Albert Einstein, or the operas of James Joyce.

After they had finished that day’s lesson, the professor’s housekeeper—a pleasant, somewhat stern woman called Solvej Lundberg, who had come with him from Sweden—would bring in a tray of tea.

Today it was Sophie’s favorite, toast with anchovy paste and a Battenberg cake with its checkerboard of pink and yellow cubes. She had picked up the habit of pulling the cake
apart and eating each cube separately, a trick that would have earned her a scolding in Heriot Row. When she took a bite of toast, though, she found she wasn’t hungry after all. Her eyes had a twitchy feeling that might mean she was about to cry.

“We have a surprise for you today, Sophie,” said the professor, cutting into her thoughts.

“Oh?” Sophie said dispiritedly. “What is it?”

Rather than answering, he held a finger over his lips and cocked his head to listen. The street door opened, then slammed shut. The loud footsteps in the hall told Sophie everything she needed to know.

“Mikael!”

Mikael was the housekeeper’s nephew. His mother shipped him over to Edinburgh every so often from Denmark when she felt she couldn’t manage him, and Sophie was very fond of him.

It was as if Sophie’s wish for someone to confide in had been magically granted—Mikael was the cleverest person Sophie knew, with the exception of Miss Chatterjee (but teachers didn’t count).

“I didn’t know you were coming!” she said after Mikael had helped himself to an enormous hunk of cake.

“Oh, yes. By the way, Aunt Solvej,” said Mikael, giving Sophie a sly wink, “I wouldn’t say no if you rustled up a new lot of buttered toast, no anchovies.”

Two of Mikael’s most noticeable traits were his bottomless hunger and his excellent colloquial English, spoken virtually without an accent.

Mrs. Lundberg returned shortly from the kitchen with plain buttered toast and several new kinds of biscuit as well, including chocolate digestives and coconut macaroons with glacé cherries on top. It was surprising how much hungrier Sophie felt now.

“Join us for our repast,” the professor urged, but Mrs. Lundberg would never sit down in the presence of visitors. Instead she cleared the cups and plates and rumpled Mikael’s hair as she passed.

It was rather a blow when Sophie looked at her watch and saw the time.

“Sophie, you wretch, you mustn’t go yet,” said Mikael. “I’ve only just laid eyes on you!”

But Sophie had to leave if she wanted to reunite with the tennis players before they all walked back to school. She kissed the professor on the cheek and said good-bye to Mrs. Lundberg, who pressed a packet of cake and sandwiches into Sophie’s hand.

Mikael stepped out into the garden with her. Often these days Sophie came and went by the front door, but the way through the garden and over the wall was quicker and less conspicuous.

“It’s good to see you,” she said to Mikael outside in the garden, feeling shy now they were alone together. “How long are you here for?”

“Till July,” Mikael said, grinning. “Good, isn’t it? My mother’s really fed up with me; she told me to stay away till she cooled down.”

“What did you do this time?” Sophie said.

“Oh, I borrowed someone’s motorcar and had a bit of an accident.”

“I didn’t know you could drive!”

“My brother gave me a few lessons last summer. To tell the truth, though, I really
don’t
know how to drive!”

“Will you have to pay for the repairs?” Sophie asked.

“No, fortunately the car belongs to my mother’s ‘gentleman friend,’ and he’s simply rolling in money,” said Mikael breezily. Sophie looked at him with envy. In his place, she would have been dying of mortification. “Anyway, I’ve got all sorts of things to tell you about. Friday afternoon, the usual time and place?”

“Perfect,” said Sophie.

They stood smiling at each other for an awkward moment. Then Sophie clambered over the wall and returned to school.