'Daddy, I think the Bolsheviks are plotting to kill me.'

Daddy leant back on the stool. His shoulders began to shake. The tremors moved to his arms and head and it was only when he opened his mouth that she realised he was laughing. He took a pull on his cigarette and swung round to face her.

'Oh, Delphy.' His painting hand settled on her shoulder. Gauze crackled as it gripped. 'One whiff of a foreign accent and you think you're Richard Hannay.'

She tried to slip loose from his grasp. His hand clung.

'It's not a joke! Mr Propp is a spy.'

'He's not a spy. He's a teacher and a thinker and a healer. He's going to make us all well again.'

Delphine stared into her father's eyes and saw only clean burning zeal.

'But I heard him,' she said.

'Perhaps you misheard.'

'But he was so angry.'

'Perhaps he had good reason.'

Delphine could feel her resolve melting. What had seemed a minute ago like a fat and damning dossier now felt wispy as a fading dream. She looked down at her sandals.

'I want to go home.'

'Come now, Delphy, what did I say about whingeing?' Fingers grabbed her chin and tilted her head up. He breathed yellow smoke in her face. 'For now, this is our home.' He had shaved unevenly. Black bristles dotted the curve of his upper lip. 'I know it feels new and strange, but you mustn't worry. Everyone here wants to make the world a better place. Be a good girl and play your part.'

Smoke stung her eyes. 'But I'm scared.'

'I won't let anything happen to you. Please. Give the Society a chance. It would make me very happy. You want me to be happy, don't you?'

Her head was pounding. Over Daddy's shoulder, the canvas churned crimson, raven's wing, Passchendaele brown. She let her arms go limp.

'Yes, Daddy.'

CHAPTER 6.

UNHAPPY AND FORSAKEN TOAD.

April 1935 Mr Garforth hunched over a rumbling cauldron, boiling blood off gin traps. Delphine watched him from the doorway of the cottage. He wore a pair of grubby cloth gloves. Steam condensed on his cheeks and brow, droplets tugging at his whiskers. Using the head of a pick, he hooked out a pair of dripping steel jaws, rinsed them with a ladle of cold water, then tossed them into the dirt with the others.

Mr Garforth bought the traps from Mr Wightman, the blacksmith, for twenty-nine shillings a dozen. They were big enough for rabbits but he used them for rats. He said the smaller traps were apt to amputate a limb, letting the rat escape. He said they were too light, and if you forgot to peg them down a rat might drag a gin off into the undergrowth.

Once he was done boiling the traps he would bury them in the ground for a week to get rid of the scent of humans. Then he would replace any sprung traps along runs or around the sitting boxes. Delphine said it seemed like a lot of fuss. Mr Garforth said there was fuss and then there was fuss, and if rats gnawed their way into a box they could devour all the eggs and strip the broody to a skeleton in a single night. He said he'd heard stories from men back in France who'd had to burn the bodies of horses that had frozen to death on the battlefield, and once the fire was lit hundreds of rats began pouring out of the horses' mouths. He said he knew of a private who lost a hand when a rat bite went bad, another who woke to find a black rat gnawing at his eyelid.

'Gas is nasty, granted,' he said, throwing a gin trap onto the pile, 'but there's not a soldier living who didn't learn to fear and hate rats. If you see one, kill it. They're vermin.'

'I thought you didn't like the word vermin,' said Delphine.

'I don't,' said Mr Garforth, 'and I don't like rats.'

Delphine chewed her twist of liquorice and said nothing. She thought of how she had checked the traps for him that morning, walking through crunchy, fragrant fields, collecting the traps that had caught something, springing and resetting the ones that hadn't. She thought of how she had found the dead weasel, blunt gin teeth champing its spine, and, in front of it, in a plum-dark pool of blood, a shivering infant rat, barely bigger than her thumb. She thought of its downy hair, of how it had not tried to run away.

She had tightened her grip on the coal shovel Mr Garforth had given her for dispatching anything still alive. She had held it above the rat; the shovel had cast a Zeppelin-shaped shadow. She had braced herself for the coup de grace.

Then she had scooped the creature up and carried it back to the Hall. She had put it inside an old liquorice allsorts tin with a saucer of water and a handful of porridge oats. She had stabbed holes in the lid and hidden it under her bed.

She watched Mr Garforth work the fire with a set of bellows. He added more water to the cauldron, then handed her the bucket to refill at the pump.

The rat would probably be dead by the time she got back. Part of her hoped that it was, if only to assuage the guilt she felt every time she looked at Mr Garforth. How could she witter on about defending King and Country when she didn't have the guts to kill a single baby rat?

When she reached the pump she found a white feather had stuck to her sandal. She peeled it off and tried to fling it away, but it wafted back and landed at her feet.

The pump squeaked as she filled the bucket. Delphine dipped her hands into the icy water, washing them again and again and again.

Later that afternoon, she hid inside the wall and watched the old lady sleeping: the swell and sink of the duvet, the skin that hung from the ancient jaw like gills. Delphine found herself thinking of a shrunken head she had seen at the carnival when she was very little the smell of damp sawdust and canvas, the hushed dark of the tent, and a scrunched brown thing, rather like a toffee apple, framed by matted hair, its lips fastened with twine. She remembered gazing, transfixed by the sad, lidded eyes, waiting for it to draw breath, to speak. How Mother had scolded Daddy for showing his daughter something so frightening! And so Delphine, not wishing to get him in more trouble, had kept quiet when, for the next three weeks, the head stood watch at the end of her bed, heavy and silent as a bag of suet, vanishing whenever she opened her eyes.

Delphine watched the old lady and felt a prickling wonder. She could not imagine being so old, existing inside such ruin. The old lady turned, made a noise in the back of her throat. Veins tattooed her bare scalp. Beneath mottled amber lamplight, she was a wreck, breaking up on the tide that came with each stuttering breath.

Delphine drew back from the spyhole, rested against the wall. The air in the passageway was muggy and perfectly still.

She heard a whine from the other side of the wall. Delphine put her eye to the spyhole and saw Mr Propp.

He had his back to Delphine. He lowered his dumpy body into a chair at the bedside. The old lady was awake. She was crying. Mr Propp gripped her hand and smoothed her long pale fingers. As he leant in, shadows picked out tiny dents all over his bald head. Tears streamed across the old lady's cheeks. She howled, a faint, ululating sound that made Delphine's skin prickle.

Propp's lips squeaked as he kissed the old lady's brow.

'Shh shh shh shh.' His voice was steady and sonorous. 'Shutov k'ancni.' He held her.

Delphine felt drowsy. She was falling prey to his mesmeric arts. She told herself to resist, yet a second impulse willed her to succumb. Part of her wanted to give in to him, wanted to be important enough for him to notice and control.

Slowly, the old lady slackened and fell asleep. Mr Propp rested the back of his palm against her cheek, muttering the same incantation: 'K'ancni. K'ancni. K'ancni.'

He slid his hand away, reached for something on the bedside table. Delphine heard a metallic scrape, like coin on coin. Propp lifted his plump frame from the chair. He took his heavy silk robe from a hook on the door. From the seat of his pinstripe trousers hung a leather holster. In his right hand was a revolver.

'Mr Propp has a gun.'

Mother did not break stride. 'Delphine. Not now.'

'He has a gun. I saw.' Delphine struggled to keep pace as they marched through the long gallery that ran west to east along the ground floor, connecting the smoking room to the old banqueting hall. Mother had insisted she 'dress appropriately' for the symposium a stupid pond-weedy heap of a frock that made it hard to run.

'Saw? Saw? What do you mean you "saw"?'

'I saw him put a Webley Mark 6 revolver down the back of his trousers.'

'Oh, don't be so ridiculous!'

'It might have been the new Mark 4 .38. I only saw it for a second.'

'Really.'

Delphine accelerated so she could turn and look Mother in the face. 'Please. I think he might be '

'Enough!' Mother jerked to a halt and snatched Delphine's wrist. 'You will not start again with your, your . . . fantasies.'

'But Mr Propp '

'Very well may have a gun. Many, in fact most of Lord Alderberen's male guests will have brought at least one with them for their stay here.'

'Not a shotgun. A revolver.' Exasperated, Delphine mimed a pistol with her free hand and aimed it at her mother's head. 'And he was carrying it with him.'

Mother stopped beside a bust of Cicero. She swatted Delphine's hand away.

'Even if I did consider you remotely trustworthy, I don't see what business it is of mine and, more to the point, yours, if Mr Propp chooses to carry his own property about his person. If he did have some underhand purpose in mind, I scarcely think he would have let a nosy little girl stand there and watch while he armed himself.'

'He didn't know I was . . . that is . . . ' Delphine caught herself. 'I'm not sure that he saw me. I was coming down the corridor, towards his room. He was standing there. He must have just locked the door. He had his back to me.'

'Delphine, please.' Mother took a step back, silver evening dress hanging from her shoulders like a popped balloon in a thorn bush. 'Not tonight, of all nights.' She hooked a finger through the chain round her neck. 'This is your father's first symposium. It's so important to him.'

'He's not even here.'

'He will be. And until he is we have a duty to be seen as a decent, respectable family.' The magnitude of the task seemed to settle on her like a great, black bird. 'Don't you want him to be happy? Don't you want him to get well?'

'Of course, I '

'Then please. Just play your part until he arrives.'

And with that, she began dragging Delphine towards the doors, the smoke, the symposium.

The banqueting hall was a long, rectangular room, its oak-panelled walls decorated with zodiac tapestries, paintings of late medieval battle scenes, circular gilded shields of watered steel (Delphine thought they might be Indian) and bracketed to the wall above the fireplace a huge, gemmed war hammer. Thirty or more guests jawed and puffed, poets and business owners and composers and politicians and philosophers and old soldiers, tweed and flannel and silver Asprey cigarette cases, eyeglasses on silk ribbons and glass eyes in sallow sockets and white shrapnel scars, walking sticks and gleaming cufflinks and facial tics, pipes and cigarettes and alcohol, sloshing, gleaming, flowing.

Somewhere amongst it all was Propp.

Under her ghastly frock, Delphine was sweating. The rank, warm flavour of cigarettes caught in her throat. She stood with Mother beside the wide fireplace, part of a loose group gathered around Dr Lansley. If only she could slip away, just for a minute, to find Propp.

Dr Lansley stood with his eyes half-lidded, one glove pressed to his chest, the other swishing a cigarillo side to side. His dinner jacket squeezed his figure into a lithe S, deaf-aid cable trailing from one ear.

In the past fortnight, Mother's manner towards Dr Lansley had chilled. They now acknowledged one another with the barest of pleasantries, and were rarely seen in the same room save for mealtimes. Perhaps Mother fool though she was was finally growing leery of Mr Propp's associates.

An older lady in a flowing green gown turned to address Mother.

'And how are you finding life at Spim?*'

'We're very honoured Lord Alderberen invited us.'

Dr Lansley's lips formed a half-smile, his little black moustache glinting.

'Oh, come now, don't be modest,' he said, gazing into the fire. 'Of course Lazarus invited you. Your husband's practically family.' His voice dropped a note. 'I hear he and Arthur were very close.'

Mother sipped her Tom Collins and grimaced as if it were vinegar. 'They served together, yes.'

A silence fell over the group. Alice the maid passed with a tray of drinks. Everyone took one. Delphine gritted her teeth. Without a distraction, she would never get away. She cleared her throat.

'Um, excuse me, Doctor?'

Dr Lansley looked at her without turning his head. Mother pretended to scratch her temple, glaring at Delphine pointedly behind her hand.

'Mother is fascinated by these figures.' Delphine pointed to two oak-carved statuettes either side of the fireplace. They were three feet tall and gangly, clad in mismatched bits of armour. She could not tell if they were supposed to be human, or if the ragged shapes on their backs were wings. 'She wondered if you knew anything about them.'

Dr Lansley's eyes narrowed. He looked from Delphine to Mother.

'Is that true, Anne? I thought you'd grown tired of my little lectures.'

'Well, I . . . ' Mother coughed into her drink. 'My daughter exaggerates. I mean, I don't really know . . . '

Delphine began slipping away.

'Ah, Delphine, don't wander off.'

'They're Tudor origin,' Dr Lansley said, directing the group's attention back towards the fireplace, 'Henry the Seventh without a doubt. Look how their hands are clasped. Standard-bearers. Ten-to-one they held banners at tournaments. I'd stake my late mother's life on it.'

'Just getting some more Vimto.' Delphine held up her empty glass, but Dr Lansley was passionately placing the statuettes in their proper historical context, and nobody heard.

'Funny little devils,' said the woman in green. 'Like bats.'

Delphine escaped.

She headed for the edge of the room, where the crowd was lighter. She clipped an elbow and someone tutted. She could not see Mr Propp anywhere.

She leant against the wall and found herself next to Professor Carmichael.

The Professor clutched a sheaf of paper close to his face, mouthing words. His champagne-coloured suit was several sizes too small, stretched taut over his wide shoulders. He had slicked back his unruly brown hair with brilliantine; as he squinted in the light of the chandelier, it shimmered like kelp.

'Professor?'

The Professor started, glancing around before locating Delphine at his left.

'God almighty, girl.' He exhaled heavily. 'Don't sneak up on people like that.'

'What are you doing?' She had to shout to be heard over the chatter.

'What am I doing? What am I doing? Bugger off is what I'm doing. You ought to be in bed.'