Mr. Churchill's Secretary: A Novel Read online

  Maggie watched the country’s preparations for invasion with a mixture of terror, disbelief, and admiration. She remembered how, just a few years ago, occasionally the newspaper would have an article or two about Hitler and his growing power, or how then Minister of Parliament Winston Churchill made speeches about the growing Nazi threat in the House of Commons—only to be ignored.

  Just a year ago, when Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister, promising peace and offering appeasement, Winston Churchill had been one of the few voices warning against the growing threat of Nazi Germany. In speeches and articles, he’d said that Britain couldn’t turn a blind eye to Hitler’s invasion of Poland the way she had with Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia. England must honor her treaty to back the Poles or else face disgrace. And England must rearm to defend herself or else risk enslavement by the Nazis.

  The audience booed and even threw papers at him, calling him crazy and worse.

  Then Chamberlain declared war—and Winston Churchill became the new Prime Minister.

  Without preamble, the man himself strode into the room.

  The P.M. was in a rage. Fury seemed to radiate off his compact body. His brow was furrowed, and he paced the length of the room in apparent frustration. In turn, Maggie tried to make herself as invisible as possible.

  It seemed to work, as he took no notice of her.

  Mr. Churchill turned to the windows, where Maggie was better able to contemplate him in profile. He was shorter than she’d thought, with a stout and imposing physique. His face was rosy and plump, and his head was almost bald. He was wearing a navy-blue suit with a burgundy bow tie. From his waistcoat hung an engraved pocket watch. Gold-framed reading glasses perched at the end of his nose.

  Without a glance in her direction, he began to speak, absorbed in the matter at hand: the problem of former King Edward VII now known as the Duke of Windsor. Since abdicating the throne to marry the American divorcée Mrs. Wallis Simpson, the Duke had set off for Madrid, then to Lisbon. Now he wanted to return to England.

  “Sir, may I venture upon a word of serious counsel,” the P.M. dictated. “Many sharp and unfriendly ears will be pricked up to catch any suggestion that your Royal Highness takes a view about the war, or about the Germans.” As the words rolled from him, he paced the length of the carpet, hands clasped behind him. The cigar clamped in his mouth didn’t help Maggie in understanding him. His delivery was far less distinct than it was for his speeches at the House of Commons or his BBC broadcasts.

  “Even while you have been staying at Lisbon, conversations have been reported by telegraph through various channels which might have been used to your Royal Highness’s disadvantage.” And so on. But Maggie was able to catch what he was saying and keep up. She became almost hypnotized, engrossed in her task as he went on and on—she imagined herself not as a typist but as an extension of him, a link between himself and the page. They went on in this manner, with various letters, for almost an hour before he finally looked at her.

  “You’re not Mrs. Tinsley!” he exclaimed, looking aghast.

  “No, sir,” Maggie replied, heart racing.

  “Where is she?” he barked.

  Oh, goodness. “She’s sick, sir.”

  “Sick?”

  “Y-yes. Sick, sir.”

  He contemplated this for a moment and paced a bit, grimacing.

  Then he glared at her over the frames of his glasses. “What’s your name, girl?”

  “Margaret Hope,” she whispered.

  “Holmes?”

  “Hope,” she blurted, her voice too loud in the quiet room. She reddened and fell silent.

  “Yes, yes—Margaret Hope,” he repeated, considering. His face lit up, and he broke into a beatific smile, unrecognizable from the stern figure of moments before. “We need some hope in this office,” he muttered to himself.

  “Yes, you may stay, Miss Hope,” Mr. Churchill said, another pull on his cigar, watching the blue smoke rise, “while we see how you get on.”

  John passed Mr. Snodgrass in the hallway outside Winston Churchill’s office. The older man beckoned the younger over.

  “Yes, sir?” John asked.

  “Miss Hope is in there. With the Boss. Alone.”

  “What are you insinuating, sir?”

  “No, no—nothing of that sort, of course. But you know how sensitive these things are. I was against having her here as a private secretary—and I’m not convinced her working here as a typist is any better. But I suppose it’s all the better to keep an eye on her.”

  Snodgrass set off down the corridor, and John followed, saying, “Surely, sir, you don’t think she had anything to do with—”

  “Of course not,” Snodgrass snapped. “But she’s here, and she’s taking notes and writing memos on sensitive information.”

  “As do we all,” John countered.

  “As do we all,” Snodgrass repeated, rounding a corner. “But not all of us have the family connections Miss Hope has.”

  “Miss Hope is unaware of her family connections.”

  Snodgrass stopped. “For now.” He started again down the hall, quicker in his stride.

  John easily caught up with him. “How’s the investigation going?”

  There was a pause as Snodgrass turned to descend a flight of stairs, his hand on the cold metal rail. “It seems we have a witness to Miss Snyder’s murder.”

  “A witness? In the blackout?”

  “Yes, apparently there was a waxing moon. One of Miss Snyder’s flatmates was in and saw something out the window. Didn’t think much of it at the time, but now that MI-Five is involved …”

  “Can she identify a face?” John asked, jaw tense.

  “The witness is being questioned today.”

  Because of the imminent threat of invasion, attendance at the Saturday Club’s meetings was swelling. That week’s gathering had adjourned, and a few of the members had taken their conversation to Malcolm Pierce’s Cadogan Square flat. The parlor was papered in a faded gold japonaiserie print of geishas smiling coyly behind flowers and fans; the carved mahogany furniture was dark, and the brocades and silks were worn. Moth-eaten crimson velvet drapes were pulled over blackout curtains. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, and the gramophone played a recording of Kirsten Flagstad singing Die Fledermaus.

  “What will happen if there’s an invasion?” asked Mrs. Linney, her hands twisting her large diamond ring. Even though the evening was warm, she was wearing a tawny fox-fur collar. The fox’s shiny black glass eyes looked crossed and slightly maniacal in the dim light.

  “We’ll be lined up and shot, I suppose,” Pierce said with a serious face, then smiled, flashing his dimples.

  Mrs. Linney’s plump cheeks creased. “Oh, Malcolm.”

  “Look,” he said, taking a sip of tea. The gold-rimmed cup was thin and fragile. “The press is largely under Jewish control, yes? So we’re not truly getting the real story. Hitler will take care of Churchill and his Zionist gang, but as for people like us, well, once the dust settles and they know what we’ve been doing for their cause, they’ll most likely give us medals.”

  “More tea?” Claire said, pot in hand. She’d made herself at home.

  “Don’t mind if I do, dear,” Mrs. Linney said. Claire poured and then took a seat, crossing her legs at the ankles.

  “The Jews brought it on themselves, you know,” Pierce said. “Hitler’s said again and again he wanted nothing—nothing from England. But then Chamberlain had to get involved after Poland.…”

  “Hear, hear,” said old Mr. Hodgeson, a Great War veteran in the corner. “We don’t need English boys going to war again, just for the bloody Jews. Excuse my language.”

  “Poland and Czechoslovakia are Jewish interests, it’s true,” Pierce said. “That’s the reason I’m adamant that we don’t belong in this war. Look at this young woman,” he said, nodding to Claire, who smiled back. “She’s seeing a nice young chap, she tells me. Well, what happens when this nice young c
hap joins up with His Majesty’s forces? What happens to her then? I’ll tell you—he’ll come home blind or maimed or worse, in a mattress cover secured with large horse-blanket safety pins. Slaughtered, just because Germany invaded Poland. And she becomes a widow—or ends up spending the rest of her life with a cripple. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again—this is an unnecessary war.”

  There were tears in Claire’s eyes that threatened to overflow. “But what can we do?” she said, her knee touching Pierce’s.

  “My dear,” Pierce said, his leg pressing against hers. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  SIX

  MI-5 WAS OFFICIALLY known as the Imperial Security Intelligence Service—but no one called it that. Headquartered in a small office building at 58 St. James’s Street, MI-5’s mission was counterintelligence. Protecting secrets. Catching spies.

  And with the Prime Minister’s blessing in wartime, at any cost, by any means necessary.

  Down in smoke-filled windowless offices crammed with battered wooden desks, dented gray filing cabinets, and worn green carpeting, junior MI-5 agents toiled in obscurity.

  “Mark, I need you on something.”

  Mark Standish, a youngish man with tortoiseshell spectacles, looked up from the piles of photographs on his desk with tired, red-rimmed eyes. He was dark-haired and doughy. “What is it?”

  “I just spoke with one of our agents,” Hugh Thompson said. “There’s a high probability that someone from the watch list was spotted in London yesterday.” Hugh was taller and slimmer, with a high forehead and deep-set green eyes. He had a tendency to stick his hands in his hair when he was frustrated, which was often, and so it stuck up at odd angles.

  “Nazi?” Mark asked.

  Hugh shook his head. “Bloody IRA. Suspected of coordinating several bombings, including the one at Euston.”

  “Euston, you say? Bad one, that.” Mark shuffled through some papers. “Let’s see.… Our agents in the field have picked up some leads in the last week about a possible attack by the IRA.” Mark shuffled through some papers and picked one up. “Here it is, from Agent Dunham.”

  “What was the target?” Hugh asked.

  “Saint Paul’s Cathedral. But the time-and-date window passed.”

  “Passed?”

  “Yes.”

  Hugh looked at the memo again. “What if the agents got the date wrong? Would be terrible if something happened to it. Change the skyline, terrify people, crush morale …”

  Mark shrugged. “Don’t know, old bean.” He surveyed the mountains of papers and maps and photographs of suspects. “But I’ve got at least fifty IRA leads that are even more specific, and I suggest that’s where we put our manpower. Most of them somehow connected with one Eammon Devlin.”

  “Fine,” Hugh said. “But I’m taking this memo up to Frain.”

  As Hugh reached for it, Mark pulled it closer to himself. “I can take it to him,” Mark said, smelling an opportunity.

  Hugh snorted. “Why? I thought you had at least fifty leads that were more specific.”

  “You know, you’re really a transparent bastard. Stop trying to brownnose Frain. He doesn’t like it.”

  Hugh scratched his head, unwilling to push the matter. “Fine. Forget it, then.” He snatched the memo back and jammed it underneath a towering stack of papers. He sighed, unbuttoning his top button and loosening his tie. “Anything else?”

  “Ah, here’s something—that girl who was murdered in Pimlico.” Mark picked up a piece of paper with a photograph clipped to it. He gave a low whistle. “Too bad—she was a real looker.” He handed the photo to Hugh.

  Hugh replied, “Thought that was a police matter. Open-and-shut case.”

  “Not when it’s someone connected with the Prime Minister’s office.”

  Hugh looked down at the photo again. The girl had a doelike quality to her. Not that it meant anything. “Think it was more than a murder, then?”

  “Frain found a witness—one of the girl’s flatmates caught a glimpse of a man lurking around. Didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  “In the blackout?”

  Mark leaned his bulk back in his chair. “There was a moon that night. Almost full. Said she got a decent look.”

  “Was she able to make an identification?”

  “Not a conclusive one. She picked out a few men from photographs. The other two were decoys. But one was IRA—name of Michael Murphy.”

  “Murphy? That bastard’s still in the country?” Murphy was implicated in a series of IRA bombings in London earlier in the year, which had killed almost fifty people.

  “Apparently.”

  “But if it was Murphy, why her?” Hugh gave Diana’s picture a hard look, as if she could somehow answer him. “And why now?”

  At No. 10, Maggie was learning that Mr. Churchill could often be irritable, incensed, and sarcastic.

  When she made a mistake—and she made plenty—her hearing, her education, and her country of origin were all called into question.

  She single-spaced lines instead of doubling them. She typed right instead of ripe, fretful instead of dreadful, and perverted instead of perfervid. She made mistakes from anxiety, wanting to please so badly, and also from ignorance—making a mess of foreign names and places until she grew to know them.

  Then there were just plain dumb errors. One day, in a move that reduced David to tears of laughter, she’d typed the Air Minister—as opposed to the Air Ministry—was “in a state of chaos from top to bottom.” Needless to say, when the Prime Minister saw the memo, he roared his disapproval, kicking the wastebasket across the room and shouting, “I’ll feed you to Rota!”—the lion from the London Zoo.

  At least the rest of the staff thought it was funny.

  Late one evening, he’d commanded, “Gimme klop!” Klop? Klop? Maggie panicked, not knowing what a “klop” was. After searching frantically, she brought in an entire series of books, written by Professor Kloppe, that she’d found in the library. No. Wrong. He’d meant the klop—the hole punch—as Mr. Churchill always required things punched and tagged instead of stapled or paper-clipped.

  For “Gimme Prof!” Maggie was expected to know he meant Lord Cherwell, his science adviser. One night, in a vile humor, he bellowed, “Gimme Pug!” She thought he was going to take off her head when she brought in one of the small, wriggling pug dogs who freely roamed the halls of No. 10, along with Nelson, the cat, and a poodle named Rufus. No, no, no! She was a fool, she was an idiot, and he stamped his feet in frustration. No, by “Pug” he’d meant General Ismay, the link between Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff Committee, whose face did have certain puggish qualities.

  David watched in amusement as Maggie learned her way around No. 10, looking more like a decapitated fowl than a brilliant math scholar. While nothing could quite extinguish her looks, often her red hair would come free from her tortoiseshell clip, creating a halo of fuzzy curls. On the days when she wore makeup, a smudge of mascara would inevitably land on her cheek or flecks of red lipstick migrate to her teeth.

  An order from the Old Man to “Gimme moon!” nearly sent Maggie over the edge.

  “Why, good evening, Magster,” David said in passing. Then, taking a closer look at her dark-shadowed eyes and slightly hysterical expression, “What’s the Old Man got you running after tonight?”

  “He wants the moon!” she whispered, biting her lip and trying not to wail in frustration.

  “Ah, the moon, you say? Well, that’s easy. I shall get you the moon, my dear Maggie—not to worry.” And with that, he turned on his heel and left.

  Maggie sat down at her desk and tried to organize the mountains of papers, with little result.

  David returned. “Here you are,” he said, handing her a sheet of paper. It was a schedule of the phases of the moon.

  “The moon. Of course,” she said, knowing that the phases of the moon were crucial for planning nighttime raids. “Thanks, David. I mean it.”

  Finally,
late, late one evening after being roared at for more than ten minutes (and she watched the clock tick those minutes away as the Prime Minister shouted, stomped his feet, and kicked the wastebasket), Maggie had had enough.

  Something in her face must have changed, for the P.M. suddenly stopped. “What is it, girl?” he said, jabbing his cigar at her. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Maggie was silent.

  “Tell me!” the P.M. raged, kicking the wastebasket again, this time hard enough to knock it over. The sound reverberated through the room as papers spilled onto the carpet.

  “Sir,” she said, slowly and calmly, “with all due respect, I’m not the enemy. If you plan on treating me like a Soldaten of the Wehrmacht, I’d like to request a transfer.” A pause. “Sir.”

  The P.M. blinked. Once, twice.

  Three times.

  None of the women who typed for him had ever spoken to him like this. How dare she! This, this—girl.

  But …

  Perhaps this was what Clemmie had warned him about in her letter, lecturing him on the danger of being “disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic and overbearing manner.”

  His face softened. Perhaps he had been too hard on her. On the whole staff, for that matter.

  “But I need Hope in my office,” he said, his tone now wheedling, like a little boy’s. “You can’t leave. I simply won’t allow it.”

  Maggie understood the risk she had taken in standing up to him—and also that this was as close to an apology as she was ever going to get. “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  “Keep Plodding On, Miss Hope. KPO,” the P.M. intoned, making a stabbing motion at the typewriter with his cigar, referring to his motto. “That’s what we do here—KPO.”

  * * *

  “Can’t I just address the letter?” Claire asked, sitting at Pierce’s long walnut desk in his Cadogan Square apartment’s study.