The Explosionist (3 page)

“If you’re going, then,” Priscilla said, after a long pause, “best do it now, while the hall monitors are still in their rooms.”

Avoiding the main hallway, Sophie made it out through the delivery entrance without a hitch. Closing the door behind her, she heaved an enormous sigh of relief. She still felt as if she might burst into tears at any moment, but at least she was out of range of anyone she actually knew.

The tram stop was almost deserted. Was it because she was so much earlier than usual? No: surely it was due to the morning’s attack that the streets were so empty. She shivered in spite of the warmth of the day.

When something moved suddenly behind her, she whirled around to face it, clutching her satchel in front of her chest as if it would shield her from danger. She relaxed when she saw it was only the old man she privately called the Veteran. He had lost both legs in one of the colonial wars and wheeled himself and his belongings around the neighborhood on a little platform on casters. From a distance he could easily have been mistaken for a bundle of old rags.

“Didn’t mean to frighten ye, miss,” he said, leering at Sophie. “Have ye a penny for a poor wretched beggar, then?”

There was something almost comforting in the familiar small pressure of his extortion. Sophie dug around in her pocket for a coin and gave him sixpence.

He winked at her. “Early you are today?” he said, the rise at the end making it a question.

“That’s right,” said Sophie, though it was strange and a bit frightening to think of him keeping close enough tabs on her to notice a departure from the routine.

The tram pulled up and she got on in a rush, showing the conductor her student identity card and moving to an empty seat in the middle of the car. She looked back once and saw the Veteran’s gaze still fixed on her as the vehicle turned the corner into the next road. Then she scrunched her eyes tightly shut and buried her face in her hands.

S
OPHIE LET HERSELF
in at the front door and crept upstairs to her room on the top floor. Bedroom door safely closed behind her, she reached up and pulled the sticking plaster off her forehead, absently rolling it between her fingers as she put away her school things, kicked off her shoes, and threw herself down on the bed. After a minute she crawled under the duvet (Great-aunt Tabitha believed eider-down quilts made central heating completely unnecessary), pulling it up around her shoulders and tucking the edges underneath to seal herself in a tight bundle.

Great-aunt Tabitha served two masters, and neither one was Sophie. Her deepest affections were reserved for the Scottish nation and the spirit world, though she had taken
Sophie in when she was a baby, which was very good of her, or so Sophie was informed at regular intervals. Great-aunt Tabitha’s rare bedtime stories, for instance, concerned Michael Faraday’s death-bed revelation about the unity of electromagnetism and spiritualism or the rationalist peer Lord Kelvin’s conversion, following his daughter’s death, by a spiritualist medium who put him in touch with the little girl.

Sophie woke late in the afternoon with the buttons of her blouse pressing deep into her skin and the pillow beneath her face damp where she had dribbled onto it. Only hunger made her finally drag herself out of bed.

Crossing to the washstand, where her comb and brush sat beside the porcelain basin, she stumbled and stopped short. The temperature of the air had dropped twenty degrees or more.

An icy feeling crept down from her face to her hands and feet. She clenched her fists, breathing fast. What if she tried to move and found she was really and truly frozen to the spot? She took a step forward, and the coldness of the floorboards almost burned the soles of her feet.

She told herself not to be ridiculous. This couldn’t be a ghost or anything like that. The newspapers had been saying it was the coldest summer in Scotland since they began keeping records, that was all.

Something itched in her nose and Sophie sneezed, the
sound breaking the spell. The cold melted away and she moved cautiously to the washstand. But when she leaned up on the tips of her toes to brush her hair in the small smoky mirror over the washstand—a mirror placed too high for comfort, so as to promote tidiness without vanity—her own face was nowhere to be seen. Instead she saw the head and shoulders of a very pretty young lady, her hair up in a style that was at once flattering and out-of-date, a gaudy necklace clasped around her neck.

Sophie blinked. It had to be a trick of the light. The mottled surface of the mirror often distorted Sophie’s image in unexpected ways.

But blinking did nothing to clear her vision, and as she looked more closely, the smiling eyes in the mirror actually met her own, and the woman reached her hand out toward Sophie as if to caress her hair. She looked very much like a photograph Sophie had of her mother, but the hair and dress bespoke a far distant time and place.

Sophie shut her eyes, counted to ten, and stamped her foot. To her great relief, when she opened her eyes and looked in the mirror, it showed her nothing more unusual than her own face, red lines still printed across her cheek by the folds of the duvet, a scratch on her forehead just beneath the hair-line.

She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding
and picked up the brush. Ghosts were
stupid
; only foolish people believed in them. If only the woman hadn’t looked so real! Sophie could almost feel the soft touch of her hand on her own cheek. She attacked her hair with savage vigor, pressing the prickly bristles of the brush deep into her scalp.

Downstairs in the kitchen Sophie found the housekeeper Peggy, her faded reddish hair waved in the rigid curls of her Friday morning wash-and-set, an effect made comical by her stout figure and the beads of sweat that stood out on her bright red face as she stirred the saucepan.

Sophie went over to kiss her, trying not to breathe the fumes from the pan. Peggy was friendly and funny and the closest thing Sophie had to a mother, but she had a sort of negative instinct for cookery, a lack of ability amounting to a perverse genius. Her poached eggs were like golf balls, her fried potatoes soggy and undercooked, the nut cutlets which Great-aunt Tabitha (a strict vegetarian) insisted on having instead of meat as tough and tasteless as the soles of Sophie’s school shoes.

“Well, now, Sophie, I didn’t even hear you come in,” said Peggy, continuing to stir the sauce as Sophie tucked her feet up under one of the rush-backed chairs at the table.

Sophie opened her mouth to explain and then realized she couldn’t face the questions that would follow the admission she’d been home much earlier. She always tried to give
confession a chance, but concealment was a practice of long standing.

“Your great-aunt wants you to join herself and the other ladies for supper,” Peggy continued. “They’re invited at half past seven for eight o’clock, and she says you’re to go to that séance after.”

Peggy said “that séance” as she might have said “that nasty mess the dog made on the floor.” Peggy thought poorly of the spirit world; she believed in spirits, of course, but that didn’t mean she had to like them. Sophie herself found supernatural things intriguing and worrisome in roughly equal measure.

“Do you think I might have something to eat first, Peggy?” Sophie asked. “I don’t think I can wait until supper.”

“The poor bairn, famished-like! The dinners at that school aren’t fit for pigs,” Peggy muttered grandly, slamming around a pan to show partisan resentment. Considering herself in contention with the Edinburgh Institution for Young Ladies over Sophie’s heart and stomach, Peggy was liable to single out the school’s food for special condemnation. “Shall I fry you up a nice bit of fish, then?”

“No, I don’t want to put you out,” Sophie said hastily. “You must have plenty to do before supper, with all those ladies coming,” she added, aware of perhaps not having sounded very polite.

“Aye, that’s so,” Peggy said, though Sophie could see she had already peeled the huge vat of potatoes. “Those old witches eat like there’s a famine on. You go on into the larder, then, and help yourself. Just mind you don’t touch the gooseberry fool; that’s for pudding this evening.”

Sophie averted her eyes from the bowl of fool, which looked like something a cat might have sicked up. She hacked a hunk of cheddar off the half wheel on the shelf and put it on a small blue-and-white plate, along with an apple that she cut into quarters. Then she helped herself to two gingersnaps and asked Peggy if she minded whether Sophie ate in the kitchen. Peggy liked to have her there, on the whole, but it was best to acknowledge her sovereignty by asking permission.

As Sophie finished her tea, the sitting-room bell rang on the board above the sink. Peggy cast her eyes up to the heavens and began very, very slowly to take off her apron. The bell went again, and Peggy plodded up the basement stairs, mumbling under her breath as she went.

Within minutes she was back.

“Herself wants you in the sitting room,” she said.

“Did she say what for?” Sophie asked, hating herself for being such a coward.

“Those that don’t ask won’t be told no lies,” said Peggy, clamping her lips shut, though Sophie guessed her to be just as much in the dark as Sophie herself.

Sophie rinsed her plate off under the cold-water tap in the pantry, the only running water in the house, and wiped it dry. She folded and refolded the tea towel before bracing herself, walking up the stairs to the hall, and knocking at the sitting-room door.

“Come in,” a voice called out.

Inside Sophie found her great-aunt standing by the mantel with the mauve-and-gold Louis XVI carriage clock in her hands.

“Clock’s stopped again,” she said to Sophie.

Great-aunt Tabitha barely topped five feet, but Sophie had once seen her overpower two enormous Alsatians by the force of her glance alone. She still dressed in the style she and her friends had adopted as forward-looking female undergraduates in the 1890s, and today she wore the usual long serge skirt and crisply ironed white cotton shirt of masculine cut, its sleeves rather inky. She had a beaky nose that Sophie was glad not to have inherited and a disorganized wispy bun of hair whose color had reached the shade known as salt-and-pepper (a suitable phrase, Sophie always thought, for someone so very peppery herself).

“Stop gawping like a dullard,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “Really, Sophie, with your mouth hanging open like that, you look almost subnormal.”

Sophie shut her mouth and went to have a look at the
clock, a prized family possession bestowed by the second Marquess of Bute on Sophie’s great-great-grandfather to mark his thirtieth year of service on the estate. As soon as her hand made contact with its casing, Sophie felt a kind of hiccup, like an electric shock. Her hand jerked back, and the clock began ticking.

“Well!” said Great-aunt Tabitha, looking at Sophie with surprise. “If worse comes to worst, you can always apprentice yourself to a clock maker.”

She led Sophie over to the uncomfortable straight-backed chairs by the window, chairs Sophie had hated for as long as she could remember.

“One of these days,” she said to Sophie, “you and I must have a serious talk about your future.”

“I suppose nothing can be decided until after I sit my exams in August,” Sophie ventured. The exams loomed over the fifth-form girls; Jean had actually been sick the other night, she was so worried about calculus.

“Sophie, you must work hard and perform to the utmost of your abilities on those exams,” her great-aunt said, looking straight into Sophie’s eyes. “If your marks aren’t high enough, we won’t be able to keep you at school for your final year, let alone send you to university.”

Sophie did not need to be told to work. She loved all things academic; the science subjects were her favorites.

“I’ll do everything I can,” she promised, feeling an ache in her stomach.

“Yes, you’re a good girl, Sophie, and I know you will. But given the present situation, it’s difficult to persuade the authorities to spare even a handful of girls for university education, what with the need for Land Girls, Women’s Auxiliaries, and nurses, not to mention girls for IRYLNS.”

The acronym—pronounced “irons”—had loomed large over Sophie’s childhood. The mission of this elite government-sponsored training scheme—in full, the Institute for the Recruitment of Young Ladies for National Security—was to supply Scotland’s leaders (members of Parliament, captains of industry, doctors, ministers, and so on) with the highly competent assistants they needed. Great-aunt Tabitha was one of its founders, along with several of her university friends, and it had come to represent almost the most prestigious choice a girl could make of career, assuming she wanted one; most of the best Edinburgh families gave up a daughter or two to IRYLNS, rather in the spirit of their long-ago ancestors’ willingness to dedicate a son to the ministry.

Sophie desperately wanted to study at university, but hardly any women were accepted to St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and in the last few years, most of the academic types at Sophie’s school had chosen to go straight to the training program at IRYLNS (Miss Henchman
was on the board of governors).

“I’ll go to IRYLNS instead, if it’s more important,” she said, wanting to show Great-aunt Tabitha that she was considering not simply her own selfish desires but also the National Good, a phrase heard frequently in Heriot Row. IRYLNS wouldn’t be too bad, not so long as she could assist a team of scientists or engineers or something like that.

“Sophie, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” her great-aunt snapped.

Sophie was taken aback. Though they hadn’t talked about it before, she had always imagined her great-aunt would be pleased to find Sophie willing to consider this alternative to a university degree. IRYLNS was her pet project—why would Great-aunt Tabitha jump down Sophie’s throat for suggesting it? Did she not think Sophie good enough?

“So long as I have any say in the matter—and it may not be for much longer, not if war’s declared—you’ll go into IRYLNS over my dead body,” pronounced her great-aunt.

“But—”

“I don’t want to hear another word,” Great-aunt Tabitha said.

It was one of her favorite phrases.

Sophie felt mortified and hurt, but there was nothing she could do about it. How she hated being talked to like a child!

At that moment the doorbell rang.

“That’ll be Janet,” said Great-aunt Tabitha.

Miss Janet Gillespie was a large, untidy woman, Great-aunt Tabitha’s most loyal lieutenant. She idolized Sophie’s guardian and had a nasty habit of looking at Sophie and shaking her head, as if to say how fortunate Sophie was to have a relation who didn’t scruple to sacrifice her own comfort and peace of mind for the sake of a poor wretched orphan.

“Sophie, I expect you to join the ladies for supper—Peggy’s cleared off the dining-room table and laid places for ten—as well as the séance afterward. Miss Hodge telephoned this morning to say she couldn’t be here, so you are needed as a sitter.”

Dismissed, Sophie slipped upstairs just in time to avoid the inevitable awkward encounter with Miss Gillespie in the hall.