The Explosionist (12 page)

The aide disappeared and came back a few minutes later with the duty clerk and a medium-sized metal box.

“One key, a ten-shilling note, two shillings and threepence in coin, one pair of shoelaces, one pocketknife, three safety pins, a length of fishing line,” the clerk read out from a form.

Mikael signed the form, swept most of the things into the front pocket of his trousers, then knelt to feed the laces through the eyes of his boots. His hands were shaking.

Mrs. Lundberg arrived just then, the worried-looking professor in tow, and pounced on Mikael with a little scream.

Minutes later they all found themselves thankfully outside the Castle walls.

“Mikael, you look done in,” his aunt scolded. “And whatever will your mother say? She’ll be furious with me for not doing a better job at keeping you out of trouble.”

“Mrs. Lundberg,” said Sophie, feeling quite sick with the
need to confess, “you must know that it’s all my fault. It was because of something I asked Mikael to do that he ended up in this mess. I am so sorry and I beg your forgiveness, I really do.”

Miss Chatterjee looked mildly pleased at Sophie’s taking responsibility for the whole thing, but Mikael’s aunt shook her head. “I’m sure you’re very sorry, Sophie,” she said, “but I wish you’d thought of this beforehand and been more careful.”

“Don’t be angry with Sophie!” Mikael said, tugging on his aunt’s hand.

“I’m fed up with both of you, that’s the long and short of it,” said his aunt, “and don’t expect me to forgive either of you before next Thursday at the very earliest.”

She climbed into the front seat of the professor’s car.

“Mikael, get in the back,” said the professor. “Sophie, I believe that was an invitation. We hope to see you at teatime on Thursday next week, just as usual. Will you be all right getting home?”

“Yes,” said Sophie. “Miss Chatterjee will take care of me.”

“We’ll drive the girl home,” added the woman constable, who had reappeared as they passed out through the gate into the esplanade.

Sophie and Miss Chatterjee were back at school by ten o’clock, whereupon the teacher sat Sophie in a chair and gave
her a thorough dressing-down.

“I hope you know the trouble you’ve caused,” she said. “I have ahead of me what will no doubt be a long and unpleasant conversation with Miss Henchman, one in which I fear I’ll be hard put to persuade her not to suspend you. And yet I suspect that Miss Henchman is the least of your worries.”

Sophie didn’t know what to say.

“Thank you,” she finally said. “Thanks for coming with me tonight, and for knowing how to talk to that awful man.”

“That type,” said Miss Chatterjee disdainfully, “will never understand why he is not so prepossessing as he thinks.”

“You’re my hero,” said Sophie.

The teacher gave a wry smile, as if it pained her.

“Heroism is a fairy-tale concept, Sophie,” she said, her voice sharper than before. “The real world corrupts everything it touches. Don’t make me out to be anything more or less than a real and quite imperfect person.”

Though the others were all agog to hear what had happened, Sophie used the excuse of it being after lights-out to postpone explanations until the next day. She fell asleep almost at once, her dreams haunted by the bulky shape of a female body splayed out in a pool of blood.

A
T
H
ERIOT
R
OW ON
Friday evening Sophie suffered through a lecture from Great-aunt Tabitha that was an almost exact reprise of one she had received from Miss Henchman the day before, and on Saturday morning she presented herself in the hallway in the regulation white dress that all the girls wore to the Waterloo Day celebrations at school. Great-aunt Tabitha had booked a taxi for nine thirty. When they got to school, she paid the driver and escorted Sophie to the playground, rigged up for the occasion as a kind of amphitheater. There she plowed through the crowd to a pair of seats in the area cordoned off for Very Important Visitors, Sophie trailing in her wake. As a member of the school’s board of governors, Great-aunt Tabitha was entitled
to sit here, but Sophie would have preferred to join the other fifth-form girls and their parents. Jean and Priscilla waved at her from across the way, but she saw several other girls pointing her out to their families, and the feeling of being stared at was not at all pleasant.

Once everyone had taken their seats, the school orchestra fell silent, and Miss Henchman stepped up to the podium. Seated behind her on the platform were half a dozen visiting dignitaries, including a figure whom Sophie recognized only when Great-aunt Tabitha gave a quiet hiccup of indignation. It was the minister of public safety, their war-loving dinner guest from the week before. Sophie couldn’t see Nicholas Mood on the platform but felt sure he must be lurking nearby.

The headmistress gave the same speech every year. Sophie’s attention began to drift, and Great-aunt Tabitha took out a tablet and began jotting down notes for a forthcoming lecture to the Glasgow College of Psychical Science.

Half asleep, Sophie realized that Miss Henchman was introducing a second speaker. It was the minister herself!

“I am indebted to your headmistress for this wonderful opportunity,” said Joanna Murchison. “
Waterloo
…we associate the word with the deaths of men who gave up their lives to keep this country safe. To our neighbors on the Continent, though, the word’s a synonym for Nemesis, something that might stop a respected adversary in his tracks. Schoolchildren
in France are taught that Wellington ‘met his Waterloo’ on the eighteenth of June in the year 1815.

“Speaking to you now,” the minister continued, “exactly a hundred and twenty-three years after that defeat, I say that it is time for us to reclaim Waterloo for ourselves: to embrace the idea that we may engage European troops once more on European soil, and that this time, not we but
they
will meet their Waterloo!”

The crowd had begun to mutter, but the minister continued speaking. “Only one thing will let us reclaim the legacy of Waterloo. We must meet the combined forces of the European Federation on the battlefield, and we must beat them!”

The noise in the audience rose. A small disturbance had broken out in the aisle leading up to the speakers’ platform. Suddenly something very low to the ground shot out past the front row, and a small squat figure swung up the metal scaffolding onto the platform itself. It was the Veteran. He had made his way on his low wheeled cart past the security detail, and as the audience looked on, he grasped the minister’s legs and pulled her to the ground, calling out all the while a string of words that sounded to Sophie like “Where’s my money?”

Within seconds the guards reached the platform and tore the assailant off the minister, who got to her feet, looking shaken but not hurt. She was immediately surrounded by four
of the bodyguards, and there was Nicko giving his arm to her and leaning over to whisper something in her ear. They all began to move at once, and in a flash she had been whisked away into a bulletproof chauffeured car.

Meanwhile several other security officers had hauled the Veteran away, and a minute later the only trace of the assailant was the overturned dolly, its wheels spinning uselessly in the air.

After a brief consultation behind the podium, Miss Henchman stepped up to the voice-broadcasting system.

“Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed,” she said, sounding self-important. “The man who just accosted the minister is a local vagrant with a grudge against the government. The minister was never in any real danger, but unfortunately the security staff have decided she must leave at once. Sorry as we are to be deprived of the rest of what promised to be a remarkably rousing speech, we must put the minister’s safety before our own enjoyment. A round of applause for the minister!”

Her request prompted only sporadic clapping, perhaps due to the suggestion that the minister’s safety mattered more than everybody else’s.

“I always said Joanna hadn’t any spine,” said Great-aunt Tabitha after the school song and the moment of silence. They stood in a pocket of stillness amid a mad rush for refresh
ments. “Sophie, I simply can’t afford to take the time to negotiate that tea tent, and I don’t want to leave you here without a chaperone, not after what happened the other day. You’re to come with me now to IRYLNS, and while we’re there, I expect you to keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.”

IRYLNS? Sophie had always wondered what IRYLNS was like. It was a pity her curiosity would only be satisfied as a sort of penalty for misbehavior.

They got into one of the taxis waiting outside the school.

Great-aunt Tabitha asked the driver to stop in front of the Braid Institute for Neurohypnosis in Buccleugh Place, near the university. The cabbie had sized up Sophie’s great-aunt as soon as they got into the cab and shook his head with resignation when she didn’t give him a tip.

As the car pulled away, Great-aunt Tabitha took Sophie’s hand and virtually dragged her ten yards further along the pavement to the front door of an ordinary-looking house next to the Braid Institute, a door whose brass plaque read
ADAM SMITH COLLEGE
.

Great-aunt Tabitha rapped the knocker, which was decorated with a knobbly pair of hemispheres like the meat of a walnut. Just as Sophie realized they were bronze casts of the halves of the human brain, the door opened to admit them, and she had no time to puzzle out the meaning of this sinister icon.

A
PRETTY GIRL IN A NURSE’S
uniform escorted them down a long corridor to a pair of bolted doors at the back of the building.

“Have you permission to bring in the girl, Miss Hunter?” she asked.

“Not yet,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “I suppose you’ll have to telephone Dr. Ferrier and see if it’s all right?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Hunter, but the rules are quite clear regarding visitors, and I couldn’t—”

“Yes, yes,” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “I wrote the instructions myself, and I’m well aware you could lose your job for letting anyone in without the proper authorization. Well, get on with it then, why don’t you? We haven’t got all day.”

The girl dithered for a minute, then hurried back the way they’d come.

Great-aunt Tabitha tapped her foot with irritation, then turned to Sophie, who tried to erase the puzzlement from her face. Why were they here, and what was Adam Smith College?

“What are you thinking?” her great-aunt asked her.

“Are—this isn’t IRYLNS, is it?” said Sophie.

“Indeed it is,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, her voice neutral at first but warming into enthusiasm. “IRYLNS represents the fulfillment of the vision of humanity sketched out long ago by Adam Smith in his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
and brought up-to-date by modern medicine in light of a twentieth-century understanding of the social psychology of the Enlightenment. What a good thing—what a
very
good thing—that people can now be made incomparably happier and more productive by the rationalization of the emotions!”

Just then the breathless young nurse reappeared, full of apologies, with the doctor’s note and a fistful of forms for Sophie to sign. Not wanting to annoy her great-aunt by taking the time to read through them properly, Sophie scrawled her name at the bottom of each sheet, though it gave her a pain in the pit of her stomach when she caught a glimpse of the phrase
Official Secrets Act
.

The hallway in which they next found themselves was bright and airy and led to an attractively furnished common
room looking out over the garden at the back. Girls not much older than Sophie occupied themselves here with all kinds of activity, several of them knitting stockings and scarves, others winding skeins of wool into balls, and a whole row of girls in blindfolds practicing touch typing, their machines muffled to prevent the noise from disturbing the others. Though the blindfolds added a bizarre touch, the sight of the girls with their bright-colored dresses and glossy bobs was otherwise a pretty one.

Great-aunt Tabitha strode through this hive of activity without stopping, Sophie hurrying to keep up with her, and turned into another hallway. At last they arrived at an office into which Great-aunt Tabitha flew like one of the new aerial assault drones. She barged past the receptionist in the outer room and straight into the big inner office.

The room suffered from not having any windows, but provided one didn’t mind the bunkerlike feel, it was attractively furnished, with clusters of delicately wrought chairs arranged around several small circular tables and a comfortable-looking chaise longue in the corner beside a long narrow table that evidently served as a desk.

Fearing Great-aunt Tabitha’s speed meant something ominous, Sophie relaxed when the elderly woman seated at the desk jumped up and flew into Great-aunt Tabitha’s arms.

“Tabitha, what a delightful surprise! I didn’t like to ask
you to take the time on a Saturday—a national holiday—”

“Not another word,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, beaming at her friend. “I’ve brought my niece with me today; Sophie, this is Dr. Susan Ferrier, one of my oldest friends and a very dear colleague.”

“Delighted to meet you, Sophie,” the doctor said, wringing Sophie’s hand with bone-cracking enthusiasm. “I’ve heard so much about you, and it’s a great pleasure to make your acquaintance in person; I had almost begun to feel you must be a figment of Tab’s imagination!”

“No, Sophie’s quite real,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, sounding rather sorry that this should be so. “She’s generally a good girl, but she got into a mess this week and I thought it time for her to get a good look at what we do here. Show her why she’d better keep her nose to the grindstone and earn a place at university….”

Was Sophie here to be taught a lesson?

“Tabitha, Tabitha,” said the doctor, shaking her head. “You know the work we do here has almost invariably positive results. Most girls who go through the program benefit immensely.”

Great-aunt Tabitha sniffed. It sounded as though they must have had this argument before.

The doctor turned to Sophie. “You wouldn’t turn up your nose at working for a cabinet minister, a brigadier general, a
museum director, or the rector of a university, would you?”

Then, when Sophie said nothing: “
Would
you?”

“I didn’t know it was the kind of question that wanted answering,” Sophie said, not sure why the doctor sounded so angry. She was starting to get a bad feeling about IRYLNS. What weren’t they saying? “Of course I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a job like that!”

“Almost all the young women in the civil service have passed through our doors at one time or another,” the doctor said huffily. “Last year we sent half a dozen girls to the office of the prime minister himself!”

“Is that the kind of thing most girls do when they leave IRYLNS?” Sophie asked in her most polite voice, the one she didn’t usually use because it made her feel so smarmy and Harriet Jeffries–like.

“Yes, indeed, and it’s very naughty of Tab to suggest you’d be better off at university.”

“If you or I had been trained somewhere like this rather than at university,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, not bothering to hide her impatience, “neither of us would have been able to contribute an iota to IRYLNS.”

“True, true, but who’s to say that would have been for the worse?” said Dr. Ferrier, her mood sunny again. “Someone else would have made the contributions and got the credit—but they also serve who only stand and wait, as the poet says.
Besides, neither one of us was pretty enough to be a top-notch candidate for IRYLNS!”

Though Great-aunt Tabitha greeted this remark with hearty laughter, Sophie couldn’t see what the two things had to do with each other. People said sometimes that someone wasn’t pretty enough to get married, though one met some very plain married women and some very pretty unmarried ones. But what did prettiness have to do with being a good secretary, which was presumably the main point of the training one received at IRYLNS?

The doctor ushered them over to one of the little tables and used the speaking panel on the wall to order tea from the receptionist.

“Sophie, do you know much about the work we do here?” she asked.

Sophie confessed her ignorance.

“The name
Adam Smith College
isn’t just a cover story, a red herring, or a silly joke,” said the doctor. “Adam Smith was the first person in Scotland to come out and say explicitly that human emotions and passions—those things that gave the ancient Greeks so much trouble—should be redirected for the good of the community. His ideas lie at the heart of the philosophy of the Communitarian Party, which operates on the belief that individuals have a moral obligation to put aside selfish desires to promote the good of the group. Thanks to
modern medicine, we’ve been able to take the concept several steps further. The crucial insight—”

“
Susan’s
crucial insight,” Sophie’s great-aunt interjected.

“Your great-aunt’s name joins mine on most of the patents,” the doctor told Sophie, affecting a not-very-convincing modesty. “Tabitha’s downplaying her own role in all of this.”

Patents? What on earth could they be doing here? Feeling equal parts confusion and alarm, Sophie paid close attention to the woman’s next words, though they did not much clarify things.

“It’s long been said,” said Dr. Ferrier, “that behind every successful man stands a good woman. When people say that, they’re usually thinking of his wife or his mother, but in truth it’s more often a secretary or a head nurse or a really excellent administrator who makes sure everything runs smoothly in a man’s personal and professional life. The ideal assistant must be cheerful, flexible, reliable, patient, and thoughtful of others. She must also be willing to toil without recognition, often without getting even the most cursory thanks; Tabitha always jokes that we should institute a supplemental training scheme to teach men how to treat our young women properly.”

“Important men don’t usually know what to do with their negative emotions,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, “other than to bluster at people and browbeat them and generally make
everyone miserable, including themselves. They also tend to be selfish and inattentive to the needs of others. The real problem is that the women who marry them or work for them have needs too, and when those needs go unsatisfied, everything stops functioning.”

It sounded like the men were the real problem, not the women. Why didn’t Dr. Ferrier and Great-aunt Tabitha develop a scheme to make men less selfish and angry, and leave the young women alone? Sophie’s stomach growled. It must be almost lunchtime.

“Fortunately the central procedure we perform here—the J and H procedure, we call it—makes that fact about human nature completely irrelevant,” continued the doctor. “After they undergo a modest amount of surgery and a battery of hormonal and behavioral therapies, our girls are no longer capable of
having
needs. They can’t be offended by some imagined slight or by a pattern of overwork, neglect, and verbal abuse. They’re happy, well-adjusted workers with all their intellect intact, and yet with none of the temperamental disadvantages—self-absorption, irritability, laziness, a tendency to feel hard done by—that limit the utility of the common secretary. Indeed, in the cases where we see the best outcomes, these young women are even able to become repositories for the anger and desire of the men they work for, rather like human lightning rods.”

Human lightning rods? It wasn’t a very reassuring comparison. Nicko Mood was very devoted to the minister’s interests, but he didn’t seem to serve as a repository in this way—it must only work for male employers and female assistants. Sophie couldn’t quite follow the underlying principles, although she thought as long as Great-aunt Tabitha was involved, it couldn’t be too bad. Sophie’s great-aunt might sanction girls undergoing a rather difficult and painful training scheme, but she wouldn’t put people into actual danger. Would she?

Suddenly this pleasant room felt almost as dangerous as the vaults beneath the Castle.

“Do you have any questions?” said the doctor.

“What do the letters
J
and
H
stand for?” Sophie asked almost at random, not daring to ask about anything of substance.

The way they responded told her she’d blundered. The two women looked at each other, then both spoke at once.

“No, you first,” Dr. Ferrier said.

“The letters
J
and
H
,” said Great-aunt Tabitha with a sly look at her friend, “stand for
Joy
and
Happiness
.”

There was an embarrassing sound to the words that made Sophie feel as she had the year before when Miss Hopkins lectured them on the birds and the bees.

“And how does the procedure work?” she ventured.

“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in the technical details,” said Dr. Ferrier.

There was something ominous about the doctor’s obvious reluctance to specify, but they were interrupted at this point by the receptionist’s arrival with tea and biscuits. Though she felt like the condemned man eating a hearty meal, Sophie had three biscuits and a piece of cake.

As they finished their tea, Great-aunt Tabitha looked at her enameled watch. “We must get down to business, Susan,” she said. “I’ve worked through the numbers on the last several rounds of graduates, and a few ideas come to mind for improving the next set of statistics. Have you got anybody who can take Sophie around while we work? It’s a pity for her not to see the rest of the place while she’s here.”

The words sounded almost menacing.

The doctor thought for a minute.

“Yes,” she said, “that won’t be a problem—Alison can take half an hour to show Sophie the sights, then park her in the garden until we’ve finished.”

Having disposed of Sophie, they turned to a stack of files and were at once immersed.