Authors: Jenny Davidson
“I know what we should do!” he said. “Mother, you know we haven’t been to swim in Sortedamsø at all this summer— you wouldn’t mind if we slipped over there for a quick dip, would you?”
“You’re not meant to swim there outside of the summer months, and we’re well into September,” Fru Petersen said, though Sophie could tell she wasn’t wholeheartedly against the idea.
“Oh, do let’s, though!” Mikael said. “It may well be the last night that’s warm enough—the weather’s sure to turn any day now.”
“Sophie, are you a fairly strong swimmer?” Fru Petersen asked. “You mustn’t go if you don’t think you’ll be safe.”
“Strong enough, I think,” said Sophie, who counted swimming as one of her few genuine enthusiasms on the athletic side of things. She had learned to swim in the heated saltwater lido on the cliffs at North Berwick, and had never been daunted by the chilly air and relatively cool waters of Scotland’s eastern coast. She was more enthusiastic than skillful or speedy, but she could swim a strong and steady crawl, the Australian stroke whose introduction into the northern hemisphere by the glamorous Annette Kellerman had led to the industrialist Henry Ford’s seeing Kellerman swim in a display tank in Detroit (Sophie had watched a very good film about this once) and falling in love with her and courting her by designing an amphibious vehicle in which they departed from their wedding reception on the island of Alcatraz, with the vehicle itself later reaching its apotheosis as the mass-produced sea-to-land tank/boat hybrid that would play the decisive role in the Californian war against Mexico.
Wearing their bathing costumes under their clothes, they walked over to the canal. A surprising number of other pedestrians were out and about in the streets, taking advantage of the last of the warm weather.
A footpath ran the whole length of the three kilometers of the canal known as Sortedamsø, and several bridges crossed it at various points, but even at its narrowest, it was still at least a hundred and fifty meters across, and for the most part closer to two hundred.
Mikael and his brother stripped down to their trunks. Sophie turned away from them, pulled her dress over her head, and folded it neatly beside her leather sandals. She slipped into the water without looking in the direction of the others, hoping that they, too, had done her the courtesy of turning their eyes away.
She yelped a little at the feeling of the cold water on her skin, but really it was lovely. She windmilled to warm up her arms and legs, then rolled over onto her back and lay there floating and looking up at the starry skies above.
Arne struck out almost immediately in the lengthwise direction of the canal, but Mikael and Sophie, in unspoken agreement, set out together at a more moderate pace across its width. They rested at the other side and caught their breath for a minute before swimming back over to where they had gotten in.
Mikael’s brother was long gone by now. They could not even hear the quiet
splish-splash
of his hands entering the water.
Sophie stood up. It couldn’t be more than three feet deep this near to the edge, and she wondered whether it got much deeper even in the middle. She wrung the water out of her hair, then splashed a handful of water onto her face and turned her eyes up again to the sky.
Mikael was floating on his back nearby.
“Sophie?” he said, coming upright and turning around to look at her.
“Yes?” she said, wading toward him and scrunching up her eyes to make the water run off her eyelashes.
They stood next to each other for a moment without speaking. Then Mikael leaned over and cupped his hand very softly around the back of Sophie’s head. He drew her toward him and planted a very gentle kiss on her lips, then drew back so that he could look at her.
Sophie’s heart was pounding. She didn’t know what to say. She had hardly any clothes on—and it was not a very flattering bathing suit, either!
Mikael seemed more frustrated than flustered.
“Sophie!” he burst out. “You must know I have been wanting to kiss you, only I promised my mother I would do no such thing while you were under our roof as a guest!”
Sophie had to laugh. It was not very romantic to have Mikael’s mother brought into the conversation, but she could see why both Mikael and his mother would believe it was only honorable to leave a guest untouched.
“But, Mikael,” she said, unable to keep the quaver of a smile out of her voice, “surely you are equivocating! When your mother said ‘under our roof ’—or whatever’s the Danish equivalent—you know that really she meant the whole time I was living with you in København, not
literally
under her roof!”
“I hope you do not think I have behaved dishonorably,” Mikael said.
“Oh, no, it certainly does not count as dishonorable behavior,” Sophie said gravely. For the first time in her life, she felt as though she might be speaking in a way that could be described as
flirtatious
. Honor mattered to her at least as much as it did to Mikael, and she did not want to tease him about something important, only it was irresistible!
“Perhaps it is more like the way there are special rules on board a ship, where the captain’s word is law,” she added, “or like how magic is supposed not to work over running water. So long as we’re not on solid ground”—she lifted her feet up off the bottom, leaned back, and began treading water—“we might be in a moonlit land of faerie, where all ordinary daytime rules are suspended. . . .”
“That is something like what I thought, though mine was not so poetic,” Mikael confessed, looking out over the path the moonlight seemed to mark for them along the canal. “But, Sophie, I want to be with you, be with you in the boyfriend-and-girlfriend kind of way—how ever will we manage it?”
“By waiting until we grow up?” Sophie suggested.
She couldn’t help laughing again at the horrified look on his face, but in a way it was all one could say. The rigid armature of life in København and the utter straitjacket of honorable behavior made it hard to see how anything very magical could happen between them any sooner than that. “We certainly can’t go sneaking around kissing behind your mother’s back—it’s too sordid!”
Already they could hear the quiet splash of Arne’s steady stroke heading back in their direction. Mikael was looking at Sophie in a way that gave her a warm feeling in her insides, but her hands and feet were growing cold, and she began treading water more vigorously to warm up.
“Your teeth are chattering, Sophie!” Mikael said.
Arne drew up to them and got to his feet. Shaking the water off, he suggested that they should all get out and dry off and get dressed as quickly as they could, then find a café that would serve them a hot drink.
A hot drink sounded distinctly desirable, but Sophie wondered whether they shouldn’t go straight home instead. Fru Petersen might worry, mightn’t she?
“I’ve got things to tell Sophie that I don’t much want our mother to know about,” Arne added, almost as though he could read her thoughts.
Nobel! It must be that Arne finally had a message from him for Sophie; Sophie’s voice almost stuck in her throat, so eager were her questions, but Arne wouldn’t say anything more until they were ensconced around the back table of an attractive little coffee shop with mugs of cocoa (for Sophie) and coffee (for the two brothers) topped with heaps of whipped cream and chocolate shavings.
“Sophie,” Arne asked, “how much do you know about the work your father was doing for Nobel back in the early 1920s?”
“Not much,” Sophie said, surprised that this should be the first thing he would bring up. Surely there were more pressing matters, like when Sophie would meet with Nobel in person and get him to tell her things? “Really only what Mr. Nobel mentioned, that he was working on some sort of a device—and of course, since I’ve been at the institute, I’ve heard bits and pieces from Professor Bohr. . . .”
“Sophie’s father,” Arne told Mikael, “was an inventor of great insight, and even genius. At the time of his death in 1923—an explosion blew up his munitions factory, just over the Finnish border in Russia—Alan Hunter had devised an altogether new kind of weapon, one so powerful it promised to put paid to conventional warfare. All his research, though, had been conducted in such secrecy that when the factory exploded, there were no records of his work elsewhere. The personnel in that part of the compound were all killed, including Sophie’s mother as well as her father; Sophie, who was there that day because her nanny had been called away for a family emergency that later proved spurious, was virtually the only survivor. The blast flung her out through an open window, and the worker who found her in the yard was amazed that she was largely uninjured, aside from some scrapes and bruises and a broken leg.”
Until this evening, Sophie had known only the bare facts surrounding the explosion itself and her own near-miraculous survival. She had never heard anything so particular about the nanny or about the circumstances of her own preservation—how on earth had Arne learned all this?
“Have you actually spoken to people who were there?” she asked him eagerly.
“I have not,” said Arne. “This information was given to me by Mr. Nobel, and there’s no use asking more questions—I don’t know where or how Nobel obtained it, except to say that there is a very good chance he will be in a position to give you the names and addresses of several people who can provide a significantly fuller picture of your parents’ last days. Nobel’s most concerned just now, though, with what happened to the plans your father was working on fifteen years ago.”
“When he and I spoke over the telephone that day at Ardeer,” Sophie said slowly, “Mr. Nobel said that after having believed, for many years, that the only set of plans had been destroyed in the explosion, he had recently learned of a second set of plans having survived the accident.”
“Well, that’s the other thing, Sophie . . . ,” Arne said, his voice trailing off.
“What is it?” Sophie asked, putting down her cocoa and staring at him.
“It seems as though it may not have been an accident after all. . . .”
“Do you mean to say that someone blew up that factory
deliberately
?” Mikael asked.
“It was only when rumors quite recently surfaced of a set of plans sounding suspiciously like what Hunter—sorry, Sophie’s father—was working on that Nobel sent a team of investigators to look into it,” Arne said apologetically.
Mikael glowered at him, and Sophie, though she tried to school her expression, felt a surge of distress at Nobel’s cavalier opportunism and Arne’s seeming willingness to go along with his employer’s disregard for Sophie’s need to know everything she could.
“Needless to say,” Arne added, “regrettable as it may be, a tragic explosion at a dynamite factory does not always raise suspicion—there was every reason at the time to think the blast the consequence of a workplace accident. One of Nobel’s own brothers died in a similar explosion, you know.”
“It’s all right,” said Sophie impatiently, “you don’t have to dance around the question. Only if it really wasn’t an accident, it’s a pity they didn’t think of it sooner; surely it is all so long ago by now that it will be impossible to get to the bottom of what happened!”
“What sort of rumors were there, though, about the missing plans,” asked Mikael, digging a spoonful of cream out of his mug and giving the implement a meditative lick, “and what have you been able to learn since?”
“The first we heard of the plans actually came by way of Sophie herself,” Arne said.
“Wait a minute,” Sophie said slowly. “You’re talking about the images that we saw on the pantelegraph machine in Edinburgh, aren’t you? The ones that made you have a fit?”
Mikael looked puzzled, and Sophie realized she had never mentioned them to him, so she quickly filled him in: one day near the end of term back in Edinburgh, a mysterious incident had taken place in which a mechanical drawing had somehow been transmitted from the ether to the facsimile machine Sophie had been operating in chemistry class, to the teacher’s all too evident surprise and dismay.
“That was the first harbinger—then Nobel put the word out that he would be interested in seeing further materials from that set of plans, and soon enough the arms dealers were all abuzz with it. Nobody had actually laid eyes on them, but it sounded as though the documents included details about an explosive process that could unleash exponentially more power than nitroglycerin, along with instructions for safely producing the raw materials needed and initiating the chain reaction.”
“That sounds familiar,” said Mikael, and Sophie gave him an inquisitive look.
“Indeed,” Arne said, “and this brings me to our most recent concern. The process I’ve mentioned, the one in the plans, the one designed to produce an explosion more powerful than anything known to man—”
“Yes? What?” Sophie asked. Arne had the most terribly roundabout way of explaining things that she had ever heard!
“It’s almost the identical process that Frisch and Meitner have just discovered—the one they were talking about this morning in the lunchroom. They’ve come up with the idea more or less independently, though they had read a few papers Sophie’s father published as a postdoctoral student, and it was Bohr’s letter earlier this week on the new reaction that led Nobel to order me to leave at once for København.”
“Does that mean that Mr. Nobel doesn’t need the old plans after all?” Sophie asked.
“On the contrary,” Arne said grimly. “If they should fall into the wrong hands, the consequences could be literally devastating. The thought of their free circulation will be especially troubling if war is declared, as Nobel expects it to be at any moment.”
It occurred to Sophie that several weeks had passed since she’d looked at a newspaper. She could understand only about a third of the Danish radio broadcasts that Mikael and his mother listened to, and somehow it was almost always the inconsequential joining-together words rather than the substantive ones.
People had been talking of war for so long now—all of her conscious life, really—that even all the recent alarm had not quite brought it home to Sophie what profound changes might ensue if hostilities were declared. Sophie was in Denmark only as a visitor, though with the approval of the appropriate consulates and embassies; would she even be allowed to stay in the country, or might she be detained or interned as a foreign national in the event of war?