Princess Elizabeth's Spy(16)

“So you’re off on Friday, then?” David asked, after they’d quieted somewhat.

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Frain suggested you drive me.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” He smirked. “Fine, as long as MI-Five gives me petrol rations.”

There was a comfortable silence, then David ventured, “Are you going back to the house?”

“No, I haven’t been back. I don’t want to go back.” She smoothed her skirt. “I’ve rented it out to several of Chuck’s fellow nurses. Apparently, the old pile is still standing.”

“I understand. But it might be good for you to go back. Get rid of some old ghosts, perhaps?”

“Too much—too much happened there last summer. I have no wish to go down memory lane.”

“I’m not sure denying everything that happened is helping, though, Mags.”

“I’m not ready,” Maggie snapped. Then, more gently, “And how are you doing with all this?”

“Well, you know the Old Man promoted me, yes?” Prime Minister Winston Churchill had named David as head private secretary—his right-hand man.

“Yes, congratulations. You deserve it.”

“It’s serious stuff, Mags. As the Old Man says,” David said, pulling in his chin and affecting his best Churchillian tones: “ ‘The price of greatness is responsibility.’ ” Maggie had to laugh, remembering all of Mr. Churchill’s mannerisms and verbal tics.

“Look at this.” David pulled a small silk drawstring pouch from his pocket.

“What is it?”

“One of the ‘perks’ of my position.” He opened it and deposited its contents on the table. It was a single oval capsule. “Cyanide tablet. The brown is rubber casing,” he explained, “to protect it. If I need to use it, I’ll have to crush it between my teeth.”

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “Put it away.”

“I try not to think about it.” David grinned as he put it back in the pouch and deposited it in his pocket. “It’s been good at Number Ten, Maggie. Only …?”

“Yes?”

“It’s not the same. With you away, of course.” David paused. “And—without John.”

“Yes.”

“I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

“He’s not gone. His plane was shot down. That’s all we know. Everything else is speculation and conjecture.”

“Maggie, if there were anything to know, any hope to hold out, I think the office would know. The Old Man’s pretty torn up over it too. John was practically a son to him, after all.”

Maggie swallowed. “I refuse to give up hope.”

“Good for you, Mags—good for you. It is your name, after all.”

Maggie had a sudden memory of her first day working with the P.M. He’d called her Miss Holmes by mistake, and when she’d corrected him, he’d said, “Yes, yes—Margaret Hope,” and then, “We need some hope in this office.” Maggie was convinced it was one of the reasons he’d accepted her and let her stay on, at least in the early days.

“Besides—it’s just like Schrödinger’s cat, after all.”

“Cat?” David said, roused slightly.

“Schrödinger’s cat,” Maggie insisted. “Surely you must have discussed it in physics class? Erwin Schrödinger’s illustration of the principle of quantum theory of superposition.”

David groaned. “Oh, Maggie. I’ve been out of university for far too long. This war’s killing all my brain cells.”

“Look, Schrödinger proposed that you place a—theoretical, of course—cat into a steel chamber, along with a vial of hydrocyanic acid and a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill poor Mr. Puss.

“Now, an observer won’t know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. And since we cannot know, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive—according to quantum law, at least—in a superposition of states. It’s only when we break open the box and learn the condition of said cat that the superposition’s lost, and the cat becomes either dead or alive.”

“So John’s dead? And alive?” David said. “And, this being the real, not theoretical, world, he may never come back and we very well might not ever discover a body. What I’m trying to say is—we may never know, really.”

The words dead and body hung in the air. Maggie realized the pain David must be feeling. He and John had been best friends at Oxford and had gone to work for Churchill together. They’d defended him when all of England thought him crazy with his Nazi warnings and worked together through the first of the Blitz. They were brothers in all but blood.