Jeffrey nodded. “You’re right. Center’s right, this is hurting the Chosen more than us . . . but it’s got to stop, nevertheless.”
Harry Smith was waiting in the car; dozing, actually, with his head resting on his gloved hands. He woke as the two men approached. “Sorry, sir, Mr. Jeffrey.”
“Why the hell weren’t you in the shelter?” John asked, his voice hovering between resignation and annoyance.
“Wanted to keep an eye on the car,” Smith said.
John sighed. “Home.”
Home was in the North Hill suburbs, beyond Embassy Row. There was little direct damage there; no factories, and none of the densely packed working-class housing common further south on the bank of the river, or across it. The streetlights were still blacked out, and so were the houses. The steamcar slid quietly through the darkened streets, passing an occasional Air Raid Precautions patrol, helmeted but with no uniforms beyond armbands—many of them were Women’s Auxiliary volunteers. Once, an ambulance went by with its bell clanging, and once, they had to detour around a random hit, a great crater in the middle of the street with water hissing ten feet high from a broken main. There might be gas, too; sawhorse barricades were already up, and Municipal Services trucks were disgorging men in workman’s overalls.
“That looks a bit like our place did,” Jeffrey said; the younger Farr’s household had been the recipient of several Land two hundred and fifty pounders, luckily while everyone was out. “Thanks again for saving us from the horrors of Government Issue Married Quarters, officers for the use of.”
John snorted. The car paused for a moment at wrought-iron gates, and then the tires hummed on the brick of a long driveway.
“Get some sleep,” John said to Smith. “We’re going on a trip in a few days.”
Smith grinned. “With some old friends, sir?” John nodded. Smith put on a good imitation of an upper-class drawl. “Just the time of year one likes a little vacation on the Gut, eh?”
A sleepy butler opened the front doors of the big, rambling brick house. He stumbled backward as a four-year-old made a dash past his legs and down the stairs, leaping for Jeffrey.
“Daddy!” The girl wound herself around him, clinging to his belt. “Daddy, we all went and sat inna basement and sang!”
“That’s good, punkin, but it’s past your bedtime,” Jeffrey said, hoisting her up.
She wrinkled her nose. “You smell funny, Daddy.”
“Blame the Premier and his tobacco—ah, here’s Irene.”
A nursemaid came out, clutching her sleeping robe around her and clucking anxiously. “There she is, Mr. Jeffrey. Honestly, sometimes I think that child is part ape!”
“A born commando. Off to bed, punkin.” John was still smiling as he walked up the stairs, fending off the butler’s offer to wake the cook. There were advantages to being a very rich man, but a good deal of petty annoyance came with it as well. He might have raided the icebox and made a sandwich himself, if he’d been living in a middle-class apartment, but rousting someone out of bed at one o’clock to slap some chicken between two pieces of bread was more trouble than it was worth and hubristic besides.
The light was still on in the bedroom, but Pia was asleep. Her reading glasses were lying on top of a stack of documents on the carved teak sidetable beside a silver-framed picture of Maurice in his pilot’s uniform. John smiled; his wife was living proof that not all Imperial woman got heavy after thirty. Just magnificent, he thought, undoing his cravat.
She woke, stirred, and smiled at him. “Hello, darling,” she said. “I can smell the Premier’s tobacco, so I know you told the truth, it was politicians and not a mistress.”
John grinned. “You can have proof positive in a moment, if you’ll stay awake.”
“Hurry then.”
* * *
Gerta forced her hands to relax from their white-knuckled grip on the armored side of the car.
“I hope you’re getting every moment of this,” she muttered to the cameraman beside her.
The Protégé nodded without pulling away from the eyepiece of the big clumsy machine clamped to the side of the vehicle. His hand cranked the handle with metronomic regularity, and geared mechanisms whirred within it. Beside it a small searchlight added to the dawn gloaming, bringing the ambient light up enough to make filming practical.