Chapter 22 London
Chapter twenty-two
London
Crispin stepped out at midmorning to smoke a quiet pipe in the alley behind the Colonial Office.
As he shielded it to light it, there came a sudden flurry of footsteps.
He turned to face whoever it was running up behind him but too late—for at the same moment a bag made of some rough fabric descended over his head.
His shout of alarm was drowned out by a coughing fit from a motorcar. For a moment, he thought it might run him down, but arms hedged him in on either side, and he was rushed into its rumbling interior instead.
A low voice said, “It’s him, let’s go,” and they were off.
“See here,” Crispin said as soon as he had collected his wits, “I think you’ve got the wrong man. I’m just the fellow who makes the maps.”
As soon as he’d spoken, he regretted it.
He should have pretended to be whoever it was they were after—that was the sort of thing chaps did in novels where things like this happened on the regular.
Then they got a chance to be the hero by protecting whoever their valuable doppelg?nger turned out to be.
“Crispin Fairweather of number 14 Brunswick Square?” the voice said.
“Oh,” Crispin said, “right, then.”
He felt almost pleased for a moment. Then a great many unpleasant ideas flitted across his mind.
The worst of them was that he might be used as a bargaining chip to get at his father.
But his mind was at work on other data, too—he’d had one glimpse of a sleeve as the bag had been brought down, and there was the smell of the motor they had brought him in.
All of it made his mind work like mad. Here was a mystery with himself at the centre. He felt as if he had woken up from a nap.
It wasn’t a bad feeling. Not yet, anyway.
When the bag was whisked off twenty-eight minutes later, Crispin found himself in a bare room that could have belonged to almost any building in London.
The two men who were now leaving the room looked just as he’d expected from the sleeve and the motor—perfectly ordinary. One of them looked back over his shoulder at him diffidently, as if he was faintly embarrassed by the whole affair.
“He shouldn’t be long,” he said, in the sort of tone secretaries in government offices used.
“Oh, good,” said Crispin, because it seemed the right thing to say.
The man gave him a final blank glance and shut the door.
The key turned in the lock.
Crispin went quickly to the window. It wasn’t locked.
He opened it and leaned out to get his bearings.
It looked onto a blind alley. The sun—weak as usual in the London sky—was on his left.
He scanned the environs thoroughly. He couldn’t see anyone, and the building across appeared by its broken windows to be abandoned.
But Crispin had grown up in this city, and he knew that even the most derelict building in it harboured life.
“Oy!” he shouted, and a dustbin below seethed until a dirty face looked up at him from it.
Crispin pulled out his pocket notebook and quickly scribbled a note with a nub of pencil he always kept in his breast pocket, wrapped the note round a coin, and tossed it down.
The boy scrambled for it, looked up at him, tipped his hat, and ran off.
Crispin heard footsteps outside the door. It wasn’t the same fellow that had been here before—these steps had a little squeak to them. Crispin quickly pulled down the sash, in case they hadn’t known it was open, and turned round to face his abductors.
The door opened and the Home Secretary appeared in a pair of extremely shiny shoes.
“Sir!” Crispin exclaimed. “I say—if I’d thought you really wanted to see me—“
“Oh, do shut up, Fairweather, and take a seat. Here’s your pipe back.”
Crispin took his pipe and sat down. The Secretary sat opposite him.
“Did you ever try to get into the forces, Fairweather?”
“No, sir.” Crispin waited. This was a lot of trouble to ask such a simple question. Clearly, something more was coming.
“Well, then,” the man said. “I want you to tell me three ways you could get out of this.”
Crispin cleared his throat. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.”
Crispin thought rapidly. For some reason, he was being tested. And Crispin was rather good at tests. They brought out his competitive streak. It was this that distracted his mind from the uncomfortable nature of his present situation.
“Well, the window is open,” he noted. “I could jump down. I’d probably break a leg or two, but it might raise a bit of a rumpus.”
“Next.”
“Well, I could find out what you want and give it to you.” He paused, then asked almost wistfully, “I don’t suppose you’re in need of a map?”
The Home Secretary snorted.
“No,” Crispin said with a faint smile. “Well, there’s always fisticuffs.”
“Yes, you box, don’t you?” A glint in his eye at this. Crispin registered it—the Home Secretary had been doing research on him? Then the man waved his hand to dismiss the idea. “Assume I can overpower you. Got anything else?”
Crispin shrugged and shuffled his feet, straining his ears for noises from the street.
“Not really. Except for…them.” He motioned with his head.
The secretary looked at Crispin sharply.
“Whom?”
Crispin got up and opened the window a crack.
A pounding below them in the street and a voice bellowed, “OPEN IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!”
Crispin shut the window again, muffling the shouts. He was tremendously relieved, but it wouldn’t do to show it.
The Home Secretary’s eyes travelled over Crispin. Now that he no longer felt in danger, he felt increasingly shabby. Crispin suppressed a cough.
“Do you mind if I smoke, sir?” Crispin asked.
“Go ahead.”
The secretary was watching him intently now. Crispin needed to distract him, and quickly.
“If you don’t mind my asking, sir…”
“Not at all.”
“The bicycle. Why ride a bicycle through Johannesburg when it was held by Boer forces?” Crispin asked, lighting his pipe.
The man snorted. “The Australians took the horses. You couldn’t get one for love or money, not with those blighters about. The upside was that the Boer didn’t expect anyone of note to come through on a bicycle—so it probably saved my neck. Any other questions?”
“Well,” Crispin said. “To begin with, I didn’t realise kidnapping was part of the scope of the Home Office.”
This almost raised a laugh. “Have you heard of the Secret Service Bureau?”
Crispin tried to breathe as steadily as possible as he drew on his pipe. “Only slightly.”
“Good. That’s the general idea. It’s new, just last year, and we’re looking to grow the ranks. As it happens, we usually recruit from the diplomatic corps, or military intelligence. But I want someone with a more civilian touch, and, thanks to your father, I had a hunch about you.”
Crispin’s breath hitched, but he covered it with a long exhale of smoke. His father? Had his father nominated him for this? As far as he knew, his father had never put Crispin’s name forward for anything.
“You and your father share an unusual trait,” he went on.
“Really, sir?”
“I find you both nearly impossible to read.” He leaned forward. “And I’m very good at reading people.”
“So you think I’d make a good spy.”
“Call it a hunch.”
“I make a pretty decent cartographer, as it is,” Crispin pointed out.
The Secretary sat back in his chair.
“When I arrived in Africa, Fairweather, I was your age. I soon realised that nothing was going to just happen for me there. If I didn’t take matters into my own hands, I’d have come home no better off than when I arrived, a war correspondent cutting his teeth.
You’re a clever young Englishman at the start of a brand-new century.
The world is before you, and it’s changing faster than ever before.
” He leaned forward. “I wonder—do you want to keep sitting at a desk and mapping it? Or do you want to have a hand in deciding where the lines are drawn?”
Crispin’s heart was thrumming in his chest now, and he could feel his breath tightening, narrowing to a point. He wouldn’t be able to keep this up much longer.
“I hear cartographers live a lot longer than spies,” Crispin said lightly, trying to cover the shortness of his breath.
“Well, if it’s long life you want…” His eyes fell on Crispin’s pipe. “That’s not tobacco, is it?”
Crispin swallowed. “No.”
“What do they give asthmatics these days?”
Crispin couldn’t speak for a moment.
The man knew. Of course he did. He’d known about the boxing. He’d done his research.
Crispin took another long draw of the medicinal smoke before he spoke. But the pressure was lessening now, probably because he didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t there.
“Belladonna,” Crispin said.
The secretary nodded. “As I thought. A deadly poison makes it possible for you to do something other fellows of twenty-one take quite for granted—to breathe. It’s why you didn’t go into the armed forces, isn’t it?”
Crispin looked at him in surprise. Even his father hadn’t ever said it aloud.
“I knew they wouldn’t have me,” Crispin said.
“But we would,” the man said, without hesitation.
Crispin couldn’t speak for a moment. This was all a test, he told himself desperately—what a time to almost go to pieces!
“May I—may I think about it?” he said, and his voice sounded odd in his ears, but calm at least.
“Of course.” The man stood, and looked over Crispin one last time. “Not too shabby, by the way.”
“Sir?”
The esteemed Home Secretary’s expression was something between a wince and a smile. “The last fellow was sick all over my shoes.”