Mr.Churchill's Secretary(98)

“But cutting the white is destroying the truce, such as it is,” Frain said.

“Orange or white, then?” Maggie said, heart in her throat, hot sweat beading on her upper lip and lower back.

“That is the question,” Frain muttered.

Then it came to her. It was Chuck—Chuck in the pub, on Maggie’s first day of work at No. 10, so long ago. What had she said? “I love Ireland and her green, white, and orange flag with all my heart, but the IRA makes me ashamed to be Irish. That’s the point of the goddamned flag, you know. Green for the Gaels, orange for the Protestants—and white for the peace between them.”

“What if it were a British and Nazi flag!” Maggie blurted suddenly.

Frain and Archer looked at her.

“No, really—blue for Britain, white for truce, black for Nazism. If we’d made the bomb, which one would be cut?”

“Black,” Frain said unequivocally.

“Black,” Archer seconded.

“Me, too. I’d cut the black wire, too,” Maggie said. “So then—it has to be orange. We need to cut the orange wire.”

“Fifty-fifty chance at this point,” Archer shrugged.

“Well, Mr. Archer?” Frain said, looking at the golden pocket watch, with less than a minute to go. “Will you do the honors?”

Archer picked up a pair of slender wire cutters and took a deep breath.

He snipped the orange wire.

The ticking stopped.

“Oh, gods,” Maggie muttered, hearing a ringing in her ears. It’s the end. After all this, it’s finally the end.

A few moments went by, and the three stood, still as statues, as though afraid their tiniest movement would set the ticking in motion again.

Finally, Frain turned toward Maggie and Archer. “Well, Mr. Archer, Miss Hope,” he said. “Well done.”

In the dim light, Archer’s face looked unusually moist. “I—I think I need to sit down.”

“Me, too,” Maggie echoed, the enormity of what had almost happened pressing upon her for the first time. “Me, too.” Then she found herself adding, “I don’t suppose anyone has any tea?”

* * *

David and John were in the crowd outside, and they rushed over to Maggie when they saw her emerge from the cathedral and walk down the steps with Frain and Archer. “Maggie, are you all right?” John asked, his brows knit with concern.

“You look like the devil,” David offered.

John shot him a look.

“Well, she does,” he mumbled.

“I’m fine,” Maggie said. In a low voice, she added, “We found McCormack; he brought us to Devlin. There was no override key, so we had to choose which wire to cut.…”

Maggie looked up at the dome of St. Paul’s with its colonnaded drum, stone lantern, and golden ball and cross, soaring high above them. In the middle distance it shimmered against the brilliantly blue morning sky.

People walked past Maggie, John, and David, talking and joking and laughing. Oblivious to what had almost happened.

The dome, more than two hundred years old, stood silent and steady.

Spent from anxiety and worry, they leaned against the wooden barricades. A few men in dark double-breasted suits, long umbrellas tucked firmly under their arms, walked by quickly. Housewives in flowered dresses, lips red with lipstick, carrying woven willow baskets, came from the shops with short steps. An exhausted-looking mother reached inside a pram and gave her wailing baby back his pacifier, while a young girl, her glossy auburn hair in soft pin curls, took a soldier’s arm. A few gray pigeons flapped and pecked.

Traffic passed by, and a black taxi beeped in annoyance at a couple who’d stopped to kiss in the middle of the crosswalk. An older woman with perfect posture in a russet felt hat stood still and averted her eyes as her well-groomed corgi relieved himself against a car tire.

Maggie wanted to climb atop the barricade and shout, “Don’t you realize what almost happened today?”

And then she thought about Sarah and Paige and Claire and her father—and even Richard Snodgrass, who was a far better man than she’d ever given him credit for being.

This—this is the world we’re fighting for.

John said, as though reading her mind, “And they’ll never know.”

“And that’s as it should be,” Maggie said. People had enough to worry about, what with the war and being bombed most nights and wondering and waiting to find out if their loved ones in the military would return or not. They didn’t need to know about every near miss.

“So what happened?” David asked.

“Obviously, nothing,” Frain replied.

“And you—you’re all right?” Maggie asked her father. It was a little early to be hugging.