Читать книгу Death and the Butterfly - Colin Hester - Страница 12

Three

Through this second-story window, you could see the tall iron palings of the palace’s fence and then the twin columns of the North-End gate. Beyond the gate a double-decker bus, freighted and tippy with waving youngsters and belongings, tacked like a high red dory around the stone of the Victoria Memorial and headed northeast, leaving the Mall. A man stood at the window watching the bus. He was stocky, his facial features at once blunt and fierce, and watching the bus’s departure he frowned, then after a moment reconsidered and smiled. Behind him a door opened and he turned to find a servant—his head bowed—holding it open as a slim man with weary eyes entered. The slim man was attired in the olive-cloth uniform of a British Army officer and he began to speak—or rather attempted to do so, for the words seemed elusive to him like a rainbow in an aviary.

“Puh—Prime Minister,” the uniformed man finally managed.

“Your Majesty,” the man at the window—Winston Churchill of course—said and he bowed and the servant stepped back and out into the hallway and closed the door.

The room the two men inhabited was small, decorated white with Victorian chairs, a high but shallow Rumford fireplace and a large portrait in oil of Admiral Nelson above the mantel. From the ceiling hung a modest chandelier that glittered even in the late-afternoon light and by the fireplace was a tall mahogany cart on wheels. On the cart awaited cut-crystal glasses and varicolored bottles and a trio of swan-necked crystal decanters, and the man in the uniform—George, king of England, emperor of India—gestured expansively towards the tray and said, “Cognac?”

“If Your Majesty is having one.”

“I am.”

The king crossed the cashmere of the carpet as soundlessly as a shadow and slid forth two large snifters. He selected a black long-necked bottle—its base stout as a Dickensian squire—and he poured first one then another drachm then repeated it so they had doubles. He set the bottle back in its slot and picked up the snifters, holding them where the scoop of their large bowls met their stems and with one in each palm he walked to the man by the window and said with effort yet with slow and careful clarity, “If we had a fire, my dear Winston, we might warm them.”

The king handed Churchill his brandy. They both swirled their drinks, the liquid snatching in dark orange flames at the flawless crystal glass.

“There is warmth enough in this great palace, Your Majesty,” Churchill told the king, “to anneal a thousand such glasses.”

Standing there by the window, they lifted their glasses and drank.

“I’ve been watching the buses of children drive by,” the king said.

“And?”

“And, they wave.”

“And does Your Majesty wave back?”

“Yes. Though doing so troubles me.”

“Why is that, Majesty?”

“Hmmm? Oh.” The king placed his brandy snifter on the windowsill and dug into his trouser pockets for his silver cigarette case. Withdrawing it, he used his thumb to press its release and it unfolded in his palm. The cigarettes were Turkish plain ends—that is, unfiltered—and were initialed G. R. He selected one and with the lighter built into the spine of the case lit it. He took a deep pull from his cigarette allowing, as he took it from between his lips, the release of a small fist of smoke that he immediately re-inhaled. Once held deeply in his lungs, he blew out the smoke slowly in a long dancing fringe that in the window’s embrasure lingered, a shimmering isthmus.

Churchill remained quiet.

The king now addressed Churchill’s earlier question:

“Why does the children’s waving, and my own, bother me, you asked?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

The king looked away from the window and looked tiredly at Churchill. “Because I—I can’t decide if they’re waving hello or—” (and here he groped for the enunciation) “—or guh—goodbye.”

“I’d prefer to think they are waving both their loyalty and their love, Your Majesty.”

The king considered this, then said:

“I need an ashtray.” He walked to the fireplace and fetched one and returned, taking another deep drag on his cigarette. He set the ashtray onto the windowsill beside his snifter of cognac. He exhaled in precisely the same way he had done moments before, and he scooped up his snifter and drank. Churchill did likewise.

The king said:

“The bombing of London last night.”

“Yes?”

“You think it unintended?”

“I think it an error,” Churchill said. “Navigational perhaps—let the historians wrangle and gather clues—but a grave error, an error that will cost the Germans dearly.”

“The bombing of Berlin?”

“The loss of the war, Your Majesty.”

The king very slowly placed his snifter back on the windowsill. He straightened and looked directly at Churchill and asked, “How?”

“I intend,” Churchill told him, “to retaliate not just once, tit for tat as they say, but repeatedly.”

“Repeatedly?”

“Every night, Your Majesty, and of Berlin.”

“But—but why?”

“Your Majesty, our Number Eleven Fighter Group has received extensive damage at five of their forward airfields, not to mention the six sector stations. On the Kentish coast, Majesty, Lympne and Manston—well, for days, unfit for our fighters to operate from. As for our field south of London—”

“Biggin Hill?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“What of it?”

“For the past week, it’s been so damaged that only one fighter squadron could operate from it.” Churchill paused, then continued. “Your Majesty, we have lost—lost the Battle of Britain.”

“Lost?”

“Yes. But we shall win—win the War of London.”

“How?”

“By our incessant retaliation of last night’s mistake. And, in doing so, by goading Hitler and his strutting Air Marshal Goering into changing their plan of attack from England’s military targets—our air defense targets, our precious and heavily damaged air fields—change their attacks from those targets to—to England herself.”

The king thought for a second. The cigarette in his hand emitted a soft undulating crimp of smoke and turning to the window he crushed it in the ashtray. He took a moment then faced Churchill.

“You mean London?” he said with no unmarked gravity. “The City itself?”

Churchill nodded.

“The people themselves?”

Churchill remained silent, motionless.

“Good God,” the king said.