The Explosionist (30 page)

F
OLLOWING A DISCREET
interval involving towels and large quantities of warm water (storybooks never said anything about the crying and vomiting part of having adventures), Sophie and Mikael crept up to the top deck of the merchant steamer for a breath of fresh air. The ship was still at anchor, shortly to depart.

Sophie still felt extremely queasy, but as her stomach was now completely empty, she thought there wasn’t much chance of being sick again. She sipped small mouthfuls of fizzy lemonade from a bottle, having rejected with a shudder Mikael’s offer to procure some brandy (supposed to be good for seasickness) from one of the stewards.

“Are you sure it’s safe for us to be on deck like this?” she asked.

They were quite alone, for the weather had taken a definite turn for the worse and everything more than about fifteen feet away was wreathed about with the cold mist called the haar.

“We’re quite safe,” Mikael said. “For one thing, the police haven’t a clue where you are. For another, as soon as you came on board ship, you passed out of Scottish sovereignty. Miss Chatterjee visited me yesterday afternoon to give me all the paperwork I’ll need if anyone questions your right to be here; the Danish embassy has accepted her application on your behalf for asylum, and I’ve got that and a proper ticket for you as well. We won’t have any difficulties.”

The word
asylum
had a harsh sound, but there was nothing to be done about it. They sat in the deck chairs, wrapped up in blankets to protect them from the cold damp fog.

“I’m awfully glad you’re here, Sophie,” Mikael said. “Everything will be fine from now on.”

“I don’t have much luggage….”

“That’s all right. There’s a small commissary on board. And my mother will fit you out properly once we’re in Denmark.”

“Your mother doesn’t even know me!”

“Sophie, you’re looking awfully green again. Are you all right?”

As it started to rain, they raced back down to the cabin
just in time for Sophie to be sick for a second time.

“I’m afraid I’d better lie down,” she said. “I’ll tell you the whole story later on.”

“That’s fine,” said Mikael. “I won’t bother you; I’m sure resting will make you feel better.”

She lay down on the nearest bunk, and he sat on the opposite one to watch over her. It was strange to think of sharing a cabin with him, and even stranger to contemplate living together with his mother once they got to Denmark.

“I almost didn’t come,” Sophie said after a minute.

It was a more confessional statement than she would usually have made, but she was feeling so sick and sleepy that the usual mechanisms of self-censorship seemed to have stopped working.

Mikael didn’t say anything.

“When I telephoned you yesterday evening,” she continued, “I was sort of on the verge of changing my mind, if only you’d tried to persuade me, but you sounded as though you didn’t even want to talk to me. I swore not to make a fool of myself by going where I wasn’t wanted.”

She was distracted by a funny sound coming from the heap of luggage in the corner of the cabin. She turned her head and saw a wicker basket fall to the ground.

“The ship must have embarked,” she said, though she hadn’t detected any obvious change in its motion.

Mikael followed her eyes to the basket and started laughing.

“You know, I had a very good reason for not being able to talk yesterday,” he said. “There was something really important I had to do, I told you that. Look at the scratches!”

He leaned over to show his hands to Sophie. They were covered with puffy, sore-looking red scrapes.

“I’ll let him out now,” Mikael added. And to Sophie’s amazement, when he unfastened the clasp on the basket, a huge black cat leaped out.

“What’s that cat doing here?”

“It’s Mrs. Tansy’s cat. Don’t you remember? That was what I had to go and do last night when I couldn’t talk on the telephone.”

And Sophie had been so sure that Mikael cut their conversation off like that because he was angry with her…. It was a good reminder not to jump to conclusions.

“I took that landlady at her word when she said she’d put the cat on the street. And even though Blackie here’s a tough customer, I didn’t fancy his chances with those terrible kids.”

Sophie didn’t have the energy to make a joke about the originality of the name. The cat didn’t seem to mind one way or the other. It stopped racing around the tiny cabin long enough to press its muzzle against Sophie’s outstretched fingers. After a minute or two of sniffing around the bunk, it curled up next to her and began to lick its hindquarters.

“Well, will you look at that?” said Mikael, sounding more than a little piqued.

Lying on top of the bed, the cat’s warm body pressed against her side, part of Sophie still couldn’t believe she was about to leave behind her entire life in Scotland.

Though she had learned things in the past few weeks that completely changed her view of the world, there were still an awful lot of mysteries to be solved.

Nobel’s motives remained an enigma. What did the Swedish industrialist want with her?

Why had Mr. Petersen been so cagey about the curious technical drawing that appeared over the pantelegraph, and had it anything to do with Nobel’s missing plans?

What had really happened to Sophie’s parents? Would Nobel be able to fill in the story for her, or would she have to live with the gaps?

She was surprised how little it took to reconcile herself to missing the exams. The thing that really gave her a pang, strange to say, was the thought of missing the appointment with Mr. Braid the following week. What a pity! She was curious, most curious, to know what her second self had written under hypnosis. Would the doctor keep the pages quite safe until she could come back and find him again?

Though it was galling not to know the answers to any of these questions, there was still something comforting about
having questions one cared enough to ask. Surely everything would come right in the end. If only she could know in advance that Jean and Priscilla and Nan would be safe….

“Sophie!” Mikael said, breaking into her thoughts. “Do you want to come out on deck with me now? Surely the fresh air will do you good.”

Sophie’s legs felt like cotton wool, and Mikael had to drag her up several steep staircases, but she was glad she’d come. The haar had cleared a little, and they could just about make out the shore.

As they watched, the foghorn blew and the crew lifted anchor. The ship began to make its way down the Firth of Forth to the open sea.

Though the ship was really moving away from shore, it looked as though the land was receding from the ship. The country vanished in a mist that made it hard to believe Scotland even existed, as if all life up till now had been a dream, and this the awakening to a new day.

I
HAVE ALWAYS BEEN
in love with the idea of north. In the summer of 2000, I took a long-awaited trip to St. Petersburg and found myself absolutely in thrall to the sheer beauty of that northern landscape, the magic of Russia’s imperial past, and the heartbreakingly shabby grandeur of the present-day city’s buildings and parks. I was surprised, though, by how much St. Petersburg reminded me of Edinburgh, a city I visited regularly as a child, since my Scottish grandparents lived just a few miles outside of it in a town called North Berwick. The similarities between the styles of building and ways of living, the visual quality of those long evenings of summer light, the closeness to the water, and the lingering Enlightenment presence: all these things made me
feel as though I had entered a strange secret northern world with the feel of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

Over the next few years, I went to Tallinn (in Estonia) and Stockholm, then to Copenhagen (or København, as it is spelled by the Danish), and I began to dream about what it would be like to live in an alternate universe in which these northern cities, so strongly united by culture and geography, were also politically connected. What if the medieval northern European trade alliance, called the Hanseatic League, had found a second life in the modern era, due to calamitous developments in European politics? This world would have split off from our own when Napoleon beat Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.

What would it be like, I asked myself, to be a fifteen-year-old girl growing up in a Hanseatic-identified Scotland that was still being run along the principles of the eighteenth-century period known as the Enlightenment, with its passion for rationality and science? At a time when the world—as it did in our own version of 1938—seemed to stand on the brink of total war?

As in our own world, the 1910s in Sophie’s world saw a Great War; here, though, it lingered on into the 1920s and ended with England falling to Europe. Now the countries in the Hanseatic League, including Scotland, are able to hold out against the Europeans only because they also happen to be the
world’s premier suppliers of top-quality munitions, which Europe needs. This is the legacy of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and industrialist whose invention of dynamite in 1867 changed the landscape of
The Explosionist
’s Europe even more decisively than it changed our own. (The real Alfred Nobel lived from 1833 to 1896—assuming he was born in the same year in this world, he would be almost ninety-five years old, though the old lady at the factory hints to Sophie that Nobel only survives as what she calls “a brain in a jar.”)

Nobel’s name is best known today for the awards he funded, including prizes in Physics, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace, for one of the paradoxes of the dynamiteur’s life was that he was also a devoted pacifist. The Nobel factory at Ardeer where the novel’s final showdown takes place really existed, and the abandoned buildings of the dynamite factory can be visited to this day.

The world I imagined comes out of real places and real history but also out of fairy tales and counterfactual paths not taken. The people in this world are preoccupied with technology (everything from electric cookers to high explosives) but also with spiritualism, a movement our own world largely abandoned in the early twentieth century. Sigmund Freud is a radio talk-show crank, cars run on hydrogen, and the most prominent scientists experiment with new ways of contacting the dead.

Some of the same figures are prominent in this world’s history as in our own, in many cases for roughly the same reasons (the scientists Kelvin and Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell are mentioned, for instance, as are the psychologists Pavlov and William James). But in this world, Wittgenstein is a physicist rather than a philosopher, and Harry Houdini (born in 1874) is still alive—in fact, he’s the real owner of the trunk used in Sophie’s escape.

In general, I have relied very extensively on actual historical sources. In our world, we can’t talk to spirits—but some of the most respected scientists of the late nineteenth century devoted a great deal of energy to trying to show that we could. Most valuable of all to me were memoirs of Scottish life in the 1920s and 1930s, including Muriel Spark’s autobiography
Curriculum Vitae
and her brilliant novel of education
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
.

Technology developed quite differently in this world than in our own. The fuel cells that Sophie learns about during her driving lesson would have been unobtainable in the real-world 1930s. On a more peripheral note, the transistor technology that’s alluded to several times was only invented in our own world in 1947–48 but seems to have been discovered here in the early 1930s, perhaps because the continual threat of war proved such an effective spur to scientific inventiveness. Transistor technology is also required for the aerial assault
drone to which Great-aunt Tabitha is likened—a point first noted by my father, whose background as a native Scot with an engineering degree has made his advice particularly indispensable to me while writing
The Explosionist
.

My enormous outright breach of the unofficial rules governing alternate history concerns Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both writers were born in Edinburgh—Stevenson in 1850 and Conan Doyle in 1859. It has often been observed that Stevenson’s tale of double selves, though it is set in London, casts more light on Edinburgh. Meanwhile, though Sherlock Holmes also resides in London, Conan Doyle based his most famous character on Dr. Joseph Bell, one of his medical school professors at the University of Edinburgh. The story of
The Explosionist
is so deeply indebted to these tales that it seemed to me they had to have shaped the imagination of my fictional characters as well as my own.

Jacket art © 2008 by Mark Tucker/MergeLeft Reps

Jacket design by David Caplan