Continues from….and he feared the pursuit of them might have damaged her.

CHAPTER 2/ December 1945 -- 

Clang! Alarm clock going! Winter coming! War ended! Flash! Like flash cameras. War over! Atom bombs! Death. New cures, medical miracles. Phew, Edwards senior, who is sixty eight now, is chilly, although fully dressed, even sleeping in his old boots.

Was old man Edwards awake – station superintendent at Alderson, West Virginia, a small town stop on the main railway line across the Appalachian mountains? Are these flashes in his mind dreams? 

Awake to what? The reality of the incoming night train which he has to supervise? Awake to a fast changing world of supposed progress? Atom bombs – progress! Medical ‘miracles’, this life-saver penicillin – progress! Last night he read the Green Scarf column by this man Rutland. Progress indeed!

It is pre-dawn, Thursday December 5, 1945. War over plus four months.

All this progress worried him. Then his son was alive thanks to medical progress. Gareth Edwards – Edwards senior’s army electrician son -- was home from war, and alive. Gareth had been near mangled by an exploding German shell.

It happened in the  Ardennes forest, Belgium, Christmas 1944. Last terrible push by the German army.

School boys were fighting on both sides, so casualties were sky high. Progress, indeed!

Scientific progress in explosives. Scientific progress in healing.  Yes, the new drug called penicillin had saved Gareth’s life.  The wounds were bad and could be patched up with surgery. The second danger of war wounds was that the wound, happening in foul conditions, went septic. Penicillin prevented that risk.

His son was alive against the odds. The Japanese capitulated to the atom bombs. The bombs were claimed to save 100,000 American lives. And,  finally, Gareth,  was back in West Virginia, was back from the hospital outside Paris. He keeps saying it. It was a medical miracle.

The left leg was a fraction shorter than the right. He can manage and start his electrical business and walk OK.

It is not entirely all right. In Gareth’s repaired shoulder, he still felt acute pain and his father, Ed senior, heard him in the house at  night, wandering and groaning. Progress! Life saving drug. And at a price, small in the long run. Gareth’s  description of the pain of the injections for this penicillin was grim. It was so bad some men could not take it and, without the penicillin injections, they died. In Gareth’s case, it saved his life.

          Wake, man! The Baby Ben alarm clock was clanging and he put his hand out to stop it. Ed senior is the station master at the little high settlement of Alderson, West Virginia. With war labour shortages he has carried on working past retirement.

          He swings his legs off the bench that is his bed. It’s chilly in his small hut on the station. He’s awake to another day – another night passenger train arrival to supervise.

          The Edwards had come here from Wales late in the nineteenth century when the good Virginia land had gone, scratched a living, were free of English landlords in Wales and built their own chapels. The farm provided a little income and sustenance, more when progress provided the first artificial fertilizer. He joined the railroad as a lad. After a year of grim service in France in the World War, Edwards was promoted to driving the Chicago to Washington Cardinal and big Baltimore and Ohio  trains taking the coal that powered the east coast cities.

          Progress in his life: skyscrapers, electricity for rural places, cars without gear shifts…. Progress had produced bigger highways, passenger air travel. Progress had also brought another war and progress had now brought the railroads to a point where they are struggling to attract passengers. Ed senior liked the column by the reporter, Travis Rutland for the newsweekly NOW!. It was Democratic party-leaning, a  rival to TIME.

A recent ‘progress’ story  had been that the Ivory Billed Woodpecker was pushed to near extinction by logging for war. Rutland wore a green scarf because he hated the unnecessary destruction of forests. This was a terrible and perverse story, A lumber company mocked those trying to preserve rotting swamp trees in  Louisiana which the great woodpecker used to burrow for bugs.

The lumber company had no real need to cut these trees. They were hated because old. Because old and rotting they provided the habitat.

 That was a terrible story of American capital destroying American natural glory.

          This was not progress, for the white man to destroy the most lovely bird in the nation, once present over all the southern states and in thousands, reduced to a couple of pairs, now surely extinct.

          Huge numbers of these birds had been hunted for the late 19^th century women’s hat trade. Then a pernicious hatred of old forests lessened their numbers more.

          Or is Rutland going on too much? Too much dark side of science and progress?

          Awake, Edwards senior knows not to burn the latest NOW!. He crumples some other newspaper, opens the stove, flares the embers, adds some coal.

The fire now burning hot, Ed senior warms his arthritic hands and does up his boot laces. Rutland had just written, the November 5, 1945 edition on  these Nobel Prizes, about which Ed senior had not heard until the article – prizes for science given far away in Stockholm. ‘An eerie scientific symmetry comes out of this terrible war,’ Rutland said. ‘We have the accelerated development of a drug that could change human life, penicillin. And we have the accelerated development of a process called fission, exploiting certain instabilities in the element uranium. So far this process has given us only devastation, on a scale not before seen. The atom project is the most highly funded scientific research in history, costing billions…. penicillin at over $30,000,000, a largely British discovery that became an American possession, as, I suspect, did the uranium work.

‘This is hard to report. The technology is secret. Nasty disputes between the British and the Americans are secret. I suspect the theft of British work – call it ‘absorbing ’ of British work -- in both the cases of uranium fission and penicillin -- will be papered over in the name of an Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.

Why’s he reading this? He is supposed to be outside.

This had puzzled Ed senior. Sometimes you had to ponder Rutland’s column. He has his jacket on and scarf. He has his flags.

          He is outside. The platform lights show slowly falling snow flakes. It’s dead still, at freezing point, snow  just beginning to settle. Smoke from the hut’s metal chimney showed that the fire is burning well now and the hut would be warm for when he signs over a woman prisoner who is expected.

          He loves this place and the Federal prison has brought needed jobs. It still makes him uneasy.  Cupping his gloved hand to his ear, he picks up the first, far-away wail of the train’s siren.

          Between the whistles he relishes the sound of the river, the patterns of large snowflakes as they fall, thinks of fishing. This reverie, this moment away from the complexity of modern time – yes, he knows many people in the state lack electricity. He was brought up without any electricity in his house or his school.

          How much progress do we need? It nags and nags and younger men don’t agree with his asking the question. He’s and old man full of regret.

Damn! Enjoying the river sound, his attention is caught.  He hears the tires whisper, then sees a green station wagon draw up, the prison car. Stopped, its engine is still running.

That was progress, cheap gas.

In the car’s headlights, the snow looked heavy now. The car would be collecting the new intake. About-to-be-incarcerated women made scenes sometimes, the railroad station their last free place. 

Running the engine! The prison station wagon driver was a so-and-so called Evans. Wasting gas. It was only recently on ration for the war. Evans collected the intake and was always rough, said the criminal girls were the work of the anti-Christ.

Edwards, the station man, crossed himself, in mind, if not in gesture. He hated that wasteful man and talk of what some of the prison girls would do for hooch. Low they might have stooped: they were God’s creatures, even if fallen. It was a religious conviction of the station master that these incarcerated women had good inside them.

He waited, could hear the wail of the train’s siren, also still hear the river across the platforms. Snow was now settling..

          Then it was here. The leading Baldwin engine was on him,  vast, black and marvellous, snow swirling in its beam of  headlight. This train was the lifeblood of Ed’s imagination. Even after all the years of railroad work he loved the thrill -- the movement, smoke, steam, the silver of pistons, the smell of hot oil. With railway precision, the conductors opened their doors, lowering their steps. Ed was in his usual position, midway down the train. This train was progress and if it went away: what then?

          He dealt with some parcels and an automobile axel that were delivered. He noted three passengers getting on and five descending. The arriving passengers had people to meet them, Williams the county judge among them.

          Then he saw….an apparition? She was a manacled young woman and she was odd….yes?... taller than the two federal marshals with her, one to her right a man, one to her left a woman. They brought her down the platform.

          Wanting to watch, drawn in, he had to take his eyes off this ethereal sight.

Ed senior oversaw as the conductors put up their steps, saw there was no one near the train and the signal green, waved his green flag to the driver.

          When he turned towards the ticket office and his temporary bedroom, smoke coming from the chimney now, he saw, not an apparition -- a young woman who was slim and, yes, tall and in a long coat, black fabric that fell without a belt. She was ethereally beautiful, with delicate features and, close too, as they came into the light of the building, small freckles.

          Or was she beautiful? Was her long face hardened and gaunt? She was young, yet silver hair showed under her headscarf. There was a single handcuff dangling from her left wrist.

          Why not properly manacled as the regulation was?

          Something dreadful had happened? Why was she here? A film star on drugs?

The procedure was that a railroad official – he, today -- sign as witness when a prisoner was handed from the federal marshal, or marshals, to the prison authorities. Evans, the driver was there and belched, smelled of the demon alcohol. The man federal agent  had the transfer papers deep in his pocket, coat up against the snow.

As the man fumbled, the tall girl caught Ed senior’s eye. Her mouth was small and he saw her lips move a fraction. It was her look that entangled him in what he was sure was profound injustice against her. There was no smile on her face, in her big eyes, yet there was a profound sense of her patience and humanity.

He had a biblical sense. Like Christ, she was on top of her persecutors and he was chosen to see. Impossible!

Yet, he’d never seen anyone like her. She evoked an authority you did not see in women and part of this was a sense that her dignity was hard won. Now she was to be jailed. She was going to prison.

          He noticed something then that made the situation odder. Her ID document was not American.  It was a blue British passport. Her name – she was married…. There was a ring on the almost childishly small hand and ring finger ….Nathalie Armstrong, born in London September 1914, so now thirty one. Mrs Armstrong.

          She was elegant and about the tallest woman he had met. Suppressing fury – she just induced you to help her -- he copied details from the form the marshal had into his ledger. He blotted the wet ink. The handcuffs would be taken off.

          Evans the driver was there. The woman marshal unlocked the manacle. Evans had his own set. Evans grabbed her right arm and she winced. Ouch!

          The woman marshal said: ‘you can’t do that sir. She has a withered hand.’

          Evans looked, for a moment, non-plussed. ‘What is this?’ he said, and grabbed again for the woman’s right hand. ‘Freak! Another freak!’

Ed had now noticed. Her right hand was gloved but under the cuff of her overcoat, not emerging from it like the left hand.

          So Evans who was strong and brutal took her left arm above the elbow. She winced again but kept her cry mute. He picked up her green leather suitcase and turned her.

          Edwards saw she gasped with pain. Evans was with the girl now facing Edwards. He nodded defiantly as if his cruelty might not be approved. ‘She’s yours now, buddy,’ the male marshal said which had a twist. Hicks in West Virginia called each other ‘buddy’. Evans swore silently.

          Mrs Armstrong said quietly: ‘Thank you Mr. Edwards.’

          How the hell did she know who he was? Of course he could not ask her.

          She knew he was Edwards. No one had referred to him as that. His name was not visible on any sign. She knew he was Edwards. She knew he was Edwards.

          Baffled and suppressing tears, he was outside. Evans marched her, half lifting her so she could not walk normally, across the now covered concrete to the prison station wagon which was in a haze of exhaust smoke with its door open. He twisted her, opened the back door and roughly pushed her forward to the car door so that she stumbled and must have hurt her shins on the metal running board.

          Ed felt the brutally inflicted pain on his own shins. With no flesh above the bone, the shins when knocked can be excruciatingly painful. Foul tempered, Evans threw in her green suitcase that was of nice leather and looked as if had travelled many miles.

          He looked around. Nothing said he was an Edwards, no badge or sign, nor any of the mumbled words between him and the northern marshals. He saw the tail lights of the car Evans drove up the hill to the prison and then the heavy snow obscured them.

          He knew one thing. She was passing a message. He had to tell his son who had come back from the war cured by the super drug, penicillin.

          It could not be….? Could it? That woman who made sure Gareth lived, who gave him the special treatment with the new drug and pulled him from dying to living?

          Nathalie Armstrong who likes to be known as Mrs Armstrong is in the back of the prison station wagon with a partition separating her from the bastard Evans. Both shins are smarting. Professionally she knows well enough how to fall so she minimised the hurt. At the intelligence school in Wales so long ago, they taught you about jumping from heights and how to fall. They taught her how to strangle a man. She already knew to kick them in the balls and where on the jaw to aim for with a swinging arm. Ball bearing in the fist and swing.

          Ever since childhood when  her father’s dreadful religious family took away her brother because her mother was foreign and when her father’s binoculars were stolen… she’s experienced moments of white fury. Long ago she developed the will to contain the moment and the urge to lash out. Wilfred Partridge was the best friend she ever had. When young she would claim to have seen rare birds she could not possibly have seen and make a scene to which  he reacted with kindness while in and out of school her white moods were met with anger.

          Men do not do what Evans did to her. And perhaps it is well enough that there is a partition. She could strangle him from behind with her leather belt. She has not killed a man. She has been in a position to do so. And the British agent who tried to kill her is dead.

          She swallows, holds her bad hand in her good and takes a long breath inwards, finally exhales. The white moment has gone and she may have scored. She did send the signal to Edwards.

          Her good and bad hands represent fortune and misfortune. The good holds the bad. She’s OK. It is only a few minutes drive. She’s been here before.

          The prison is a series of residential ‘cottages’  and other buildings. The driver stops in the snow which is now an inch or more deep. As a returnee she does not have to go though the grim induction period. In 1943 she was brought in under the Espionage Act which is dangerously broad.

          The Espionage Act of 1917 is defined as An Act to punish acts of interference with the foreign relations, and the foreign commerce of the United States, to punish espionage and better to enforce the criminal laws of the United States, and for other purposes.[i] It has been applied, for example, to communists within the USA.

          It is terrifying. It covers almost anything. At the end of 1943 she was released and given a posting to work on the new drug penicillin with the US army. She should never have come back. As she said to her loved friend Wilfred Partridge, ‘things happen fast’, notably when you are in the high stakes game to do with twisting of science and the US likely to make millions from the essentially British discovery of penicillin.

          Which was where he life became rich and complicated.

          And Judith Doyle is here, one of the coloured women who, in her first stint, protected her before from butch white women. Judith is a big, maternal girl from Detroit with seven children. She had killed Doyle, her abusive Irish husband, cut off his head and was caught taking the severed head across the state line, from Michigan into Ohio. Which made it, like Nahalie’s, a federal crime.

          The Biblical Judith is Nathalie’s model, a girl -- rare in espionage -- who did not let herself be seduced to get to where she went. Judith gets into the enemy camp, promising the general, Holofernes, information on the Israelites, gets him drunk and… she doesn't screw him. She decapitates him. She has his head on a plate.

          If she wants the sadist Evans’ head on a plate, there are bigger fish to fry.

          She wants to get out. And while she can never tell the story of her work to the child she bears, she wants it to be somewhere. There are people in history who are important and you hear about it and people in history who are important and largely work unseen and without publicity. She is one of these.

          Only her people really knew all the parts of what she saw and achieved. She and the men worked under the law both in Britain and the USA. Because of this much of what she did was not really recorded. One thing that cannot be recorded is the father of the child she has.

          One day, perhaps, the child can know, who her mother had really been. Boisey – she’s going to call her son Boisey. It is code for where he was conceived, for love that must be hidden to protect all.

 Read on to Chapter 3, set in spring 2018 >>>>