Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I put those papers back in the portfolio for now. They would soon reside in the false bottom of my Gladstone, along with his clothes. That wasn’t me yet, and if that face didn’t absolutely have to be mine, I didn’t want anything to do with it.

A note on generic American embassy letterhead was written in the same hand that accompanied the Berlin hotel information. Two words: “Good luck.” No signature. But no signature meant Trask. No signature was him looking at the end of his cigar.

I was nearly finished packing when the telephone on the desk rang. I answered.

It was the front desk. “A woman to see you, sir.”

I went down.

In a corner of the lobby, rising from a red settee framed in two palms, was the pretty-like-a-farm-girl suffragette from my mother’s dressing room. She was wearing the dark skirt and white shirtwaist uniform she’d had on the other night, though she’d come with her tricolor suffrage ribbon discreetly omitted from her ensemble and a straw boater with a blue bow on her head.

I moved to her. But it beat me how she knew I was here.

“Mr. Cobb,” she said when I’d drawn close.

She offered her hand for a shake.

I took it. I remembered her shake being a meek thing the last time. Now her grip had a little spunk to it, befitting a woman ready to chain herself to an iron fence in Piccadilly Circus so she could vote.

“You’ve been working on your handshake,” I said.

Her cheeks bloomed quickly.

“Now you have to work on suppressing the blush,” I said.

We were still shaking and she withdrew her hand quickly at that.

“I don’t mean to be critical,” I said. “I share my mother’s convictions about your cause.”

“Good,” she said, looking down.

I had to admit to myself, particularly on this late afternoon, that this woman stirred me. I liked a woman trying to be strong. Better still, I liked a woman already strong. Strong even beyond seeking the right to vote. But trying was also attractive to me. I’d been bred into a sympathy for suffragism. How could I not, with a mother who lived her life, always, as if she could be anyone, could do anything.

I put the tip of my finger gently beneath her chin and lifted it.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” I said.

“It’s not just them has to change,” she said. “It’s us too.”

“Neither is easy,” I said.

She fixed her eyes on me — they were the color of horse chestnut — and she set her jaw and she smiled a downright comradely smile.

I matched it. Her blush was gone.

And then she abruptly disengaged her eyes and let go of her smile in the flurry of almost having forgotten what she was there for.

She dug into her small brown suede bag and withdrew an envelope. She handed it to me. “From your mother.”

The envelope was sealed. It had upon it my full name in her ornate hand: Christopher Marlowe Cobb .

“When did you see her?” I asked, too sharply, the tone driven by my surprise and by the reflex assumption that the chronology of delivery was the chronology of composition.

But she stood her ground, this suffragette whose name I’d avoided asking and still did not know. “Thursday night,” she said. “At the closing party.”

The night before we went to Stockman House.

The lesser mystery resolved itself as well. This was how I’d been found by a virtual stranger. Mother had known all along where I was. It was she who’d sent the play ticket, and now she’d dispatched her suffragette as a courier.

I gentled up my voice. “She must think highly of you,” I said.

My sharp tone had braced her. This tone caught her way off guard. She fluttered into the self she was trying so hard to leave behind, and she cast her eyes downward.

“I was honored to help,” she said.

“What did she ask you to do?” I struggled to keep her from hearing the sense of urgent business that I felt.

She lifted her face again. I couldn’t read her mood now.

I added, “If I might ask.”

“She said if I hadn’t heard from her by three o’clock on Sunday to come here and wait for you and give you that envelope.”

If the weekend had gone as planned, we were to have returned by noon today. And presumably I wouldn’t have received this.

My hands went itchy to tear the thing open. I wanted to do that alone. But I found I also wanted to spend a few more minutes with this suffragette, who smelled of something nice but appropriate to the woman she was trying to become. Patchouli and musk and maybe some sweeter things too but only in the background.

“Can I have a few moments with this?” I said.

“Of course,” she said.

“But don’t go entirely away yet.”

She braced up again, as if I’d spoken sharply to her. That sweet, wide mouth moued a little, but it was an ironic moue, an amused moue.

She glided away toward another settee across the lobby.

I tore open my mother’s envelope. She wrote:

My Darling Kit,

If you are reading this, things may have gone terribly wrong. I fear you will never see me again. “Accurst be he that first invented war.”

The quotation was from the playwright for whom she named me. Though my present worries for her were, of course, rooted in the very risk she invoked, the fact was that she was very much alive. That she had, however, contrived to speak to me from the grave turned this all into an overplayed Isabel Cobb performance in a second-rate melodrama.

I am sorry if ever I have wronged you, by things I have done or by things I have failed to do. “Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me, and hide me from the heavy wrath of God.”

Marlowe again. She was at the edge of the stage in my head, playing to the back row though I was in the front row and able to see the tears, which she was so adept at producing, run through her makeup.

I have come to this end from love of country. I write this letter from love for you, my son. I have always loved you. Always. From wherever I am now, I love you still.

The words ran instantly in my head: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

And she too turned to the words of the character she’d recently portrayed. His death scene, of course:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity for a while, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.

Though this too was a quotation from her recent performance, she had removed the quotation marks, had made the words her own, had become, herself, the tragic figure. And since she assumed that my own mortal risks on the same mission had proved to be not as great as hers, I was spared in order to tell the tale of Isabel Cobb’s sacrifice for her country.

I have done my best, which is all anyone can do. The rest is silence.

Your mother

I folded the letter and placed it in the envelope and then into my coat pocket.

She played Hamlet’s death more convincingly than her own, in spite of the liberal quotations from two masters and a little bit of quasi-plagiarism.

I looked across the lobby.

The suffragette was already striding my way.

Perhaps she had thought over our conversation so far and regretted the moments when she seemed a little intimidated, a little weak, a little too traditional in her femininity.

She arrived.

“I saw that you’d finished,” she said.

I held up my two empty hands to confirm her impression.

“You didn’t wish for me to go away,” she said.

“That’s right.”

She waited for a beat to see if I would carry on from there. I chose not to fill the brief silence, interested in what she would do.

She filled it almost at once. “The skies are clouding up, but not much. It is a Zeppelin night. My friends gather to eat and drink and wait and take shelter. Would you care to share the event with me?”