“Well, they haven’t caught him yet. Still on the lam, the last I heard.”
“They’ll catch him. I’ll bet the FBI has never hunted a man down so ferociously. Dogs after a rat. Of course, his wife claims she never knew a thing.”
“And I’m sure everyone believes her, too,” Iris says grimly.
“Except Fox. I guess you taught him a thing or two about housewives.”
The breeze picks up a little, lifting the ends of Iris’s hair. She’s about to suggest they put Gregory back in the pram, head back to the house, when Ruth speaks up, a little raspy—
“What if they never find him?”
“Fox? Oh, darling, they’ll find him—he’ll turn up—he’s indestructible—”
“No, I mean Sasha. I mean your husband.” Ruth turns her head and looks at Iris over the tuft of Gregory’s pale hair. “Or was it all an act?”
“It wasn’t an act. Not completely.” Iris pauses. “Anyway, he sacrificed himself for us, didn’t he? In the end, he loved us more than them.”
“Then what about Beauchamp?”
Iris stares at a fishing smack, all by itself on the choppy Channel, beating off the leeward shore. In the liquid morning air, she can see every detail—the pure white sail against the blue water, the fisherman untangling his net in the stern.
“He’s the best man I’ve ever known,” she says.
They put Gregory back in the pram, but instead of heading back to the house, they walk along the cliff path, talking for once. The ice—not broken, maybe, but cracked in a few places. Iris gathers her resolve and brings up Fox.
“You know he’s been in love with you for years,” Iris says. “Since he first started investigating you.”
Ruth’s voice registers disbelief. “Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to. I just knew. Also, Fox was the one who suggested that extraction signal. That I send you a postcard when we were ready to leave.”
Ruth stares at the ground as she walks. The tip of her nose is bright pink. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They’ve got him now. They won’t let him go.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. He has more value alive than dead. Propaganda. Or a spy exchange—they do that all the time. They only really execute their own people.” Iris glances sideways. “The best thing is to keep busy until there’s news. You’ll be headed back to New York soon, won’t you? You have your modeling business to run.”
“Actually.” Ruth kicks away a stone. “I got a cable the other day. It seems this new model of mine—name of Barbara Kingsley, you’d love her—she’s become such good friends with my dear old boss, helping him manage and all in my absence, she’s thinking she might do better behind the scenes than inside them.”
“Oh? How do you feel about that?”
Ruth squints at some object in the meadow. “I’m thinking I don’t know what I feel about anything anymore. Say, speak of the devil.”
“The devil?”
“Beauchamp.”
Iris turns her head. Philip angles toward them with the long, purposeful strides of a man who has serious news to communicate. Iris’s heart drops into her stomach. Beside her, Ruth stops and puts a hand on the edge of the pram.
“What is it?” Iris calls out, when he’s within earshot.
Ruth stands silent and colorless as Philip approaches. When he reaches them, she says in a harsh voice, “Is it Fox? Is he dead?”
Philip glances at Iris and hands Ruth the telegram in his hand. She snatches it and turns away to read it.
“Oh, Christ,” she whispers.
“What’s happened?” Iris says.
Philip stares at the side of Ruth’s cheek. “They’ve found him in Berlin. Dumped on a side street.”
“Oh, God.”
Iris reaches for Ruth’s shoulder. Ruth turns beneath her hand. Her eyes are wild, her skin flushed. She speaks in a hoarse whisper. “But he’s alive. He’s alive.”
“Alive!” Iris exclaims. “Philip, what—”
“The Americans are flying out a medical team from Northolt at ten thirty.”
“How far is Northolt?”
Philip looks at his wristwatch. “If we hop in the car this instant, I can drive you there in time.”
“Will they let me on?”
“By God,” says Philip, “they’d better.”
For a moment, Iris and Philip stand to watch Ruth as she bounds to the cottage to collect her toothbrush and passport. Her gold hair flies from the patterned silk scarf around her head. In the perambulator, Gregory’s eyes flash open. His mouth screws in preparation for a good yell. Iris puts her hand inside Philip’s hand.
“Will he live?” she whispers.
He turns his troubled face to her and smiles.
“Fox? Of course he’ll live. He’ll live for her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Can you think of a better reason?”
In the distance, the sun flashes against Ruth’s bouncing gold hair. Gregory lets loose with a lusty cry. Philip takes the handlebar of the Silver Cross perambulator to guide them back to the cottage.
Author’s Note
I became familiar with the Cambridge spy ring sideways, while I was researching something else. The more I learned, the more desperate I became to set everything else aside and write about this.
In Great Britain, their names are as synonymous with treason as Benedict Arnold’s is in the United States—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross—and the flight of Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union in May 1951 is the stuff of legend. Recruited by the Soviet spy agency NKVD in the 1930s, when communism was fashionable among the young elites of Oxford and Cambridge, they graduated and duly entered the corridors of power, where they served up their country’s vital secrets to the Soviet Union for the next two decades, using their influential positions and the cultural capital of an Oxbridge man—no Englishman could possibly imagine a traitor among the chaps he went to school with, college with, clubs with—to avoid detection. Eventually it all came tumbling down, of course, but not before Stalin was privy to all the British negotiating points at Yalta, not before the minutes and papers of the Atomic Energy Commission were delivered into Soviet hands, not before the secrets of the nuclear program allowed Soviet scientists to create their own weapons, not before countless brave intelligence agents had been unmasked, tortured, executed.
But it was more than that. These men sat at the top of the British intelligence and diplomatic corps. The nation’s faith in its political and academic elites was permanently shaken, and the partnership between the US and UK spy agencies became a minefield of distrust and paranoia at the very moment that the West needed a united front more than ever.