Wells remained silent.
“Standard military protocol dictates that enemy combatants, when captured, be treated with decency.”
Wells nodded thoughtfully.
“Did you observe anything that would not conform to such a view?”
Had the puncture marks been so evident? “No, but then I was not among the first on the scene.”
“It appears,” the lieutenant said dryly, “that no one was.”
There was nothing Wells could say without indicting Slattery. And he knew for a fact that the livery man had had a special reason for what he did. His sister and her family had been killed in Sheringham, in one of the very first zeppelin raids. Not an excuse necessarily . . . but under the circumstances understandable. Wells would not be the one to bring down further calamity on the man’s head, especially as the German gunner had looked only moments away from death, anyway.
“Would you mind if I just poked around a bit on my own?”
“I guess it would be all right,” the lieutenant replied, “so long as you don’t get in the way of the inspectors.”
Wells deposited the bundle of newspapers he was carrying on the hood of one of the army cars, and gingerly approached the carcass of the airship. Hard to believe that just the night before it had been a mighty behemoth, ruler of the sky, dealer of death and destruction. Now look at it. Bits of glass ground under his shoes. He was thankful that the corpses of the crew had already been removed; indeed, he could hear the hearses starting up and slowly driving from the field back toward the road, their headlights briefly sweeping across the scene and adding to the unnatural glare. Wells had to hold his arm up in front of his eyes until they had passed.
The bodies might be gone, but there was still a lingering odor of death. A fiery one at that.
Wells dug in the pocket of his coat and removed his pad and pencil—no writer worth his salt went anywhere without one—and a nearby inspector, kneeling among some metal bits, gave him a quizzical look. “Just a few notes for the War Office,” Wells said, in a jaunty yet authoritative tone. “Memory’s not what it used to be.”
The inspector went back to his task, and Wells began not only jotting down notes, but making quick sketches of the scene—the twisted fuselage, the long trail of wreckage, the flattened gondolas where the gunners had crouched. He’d always been a quick hand at drawing—the only part of the draper’s trade, to which he had once been apprenticed, at which he’d excelled; even in his private correspondence, he often relied on what he jokingly called his “picshuas” to recapture certain scenes. These hasty sketches would no doubt prove useful in the construction of some future novel or story.
When he was done, he looked up again at the night sky. The stars were out and the moon had no rival tonight. Then he turned his gaze toward the distant copse of towering oaks and elms where he had thought he’d seen something fall. Perhaps his eyes had been strained from overwork . . . it would not be the first time.
Thanking the lieutenant, he picked up his parcel of newspapers and trudged the rest of the way home. Jane, popping her head out of the kitchen, said, “I don’t even need to ask where you’ve been.”
He plopped the papers on the hall table, then hung his coat and hat on the rack by the door.
“But if you catch pneumonia,” she said, “don’t come to me for tea and sympathy.”
After a dinner of hot roast beef and burnt potatoes, followed by a good Stilton, Wells and Jane retired to their usual armchairs on either side of the fireplace. He had a glass of Scotch on the table at his elbow, she had a cup of chamomile tea. The haul of newspapers from the tobacconist’s shop had been duly divided, and each was reading through his or her allotment.
Wells’s latest novel, entitled Marriage, had come out the week before, and the reviews were starting to appear. The Daily News had already praised the book for its “almost vicious gaiety,” and the Sphere had claimed it was “alive with flashes of the most perfect insight at every turn.” All the reviews so far had been laudatory; he hadn’t had such a uniformly good reception for a novel since The War of the Worlds—his terrifying tale of a Martian invasion, replete with three-legged mechanical monsters brought down in the end by Earth’s humblest organisms. And that had been, what, nineteen years before? He had published a trove of other books of a similar ilk. The Invisible Man, where a mad scientist discovered the secret of invisibility, but not its cure. The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a ruthless vivisectionist had relegated to himself the powers of God, hewing humanoid creatures from tortured beasts. The First Men in the Moon, in which a pair of explorers landed on the moon and encountered a race of insect-like creatures. Not to mention The Time Machine, the book that had launched his career, featuring a gentleman inventor who traveled into a far future where cannibalistic Morlocks preyed upon the helpless Eloi who lived above ground.
No, this new book had been an attempt, hardly his first, to put his epic tales of science-inflected fiction behind him and broaden his audience. He had begun to write more domestic and contemporary stories, ones in which he could explore and explain his views on social mores and issues of the day. He had a lot to say on such matters, especially those pertaining to love and sex, and books like this one, and Ann Veronica before it, were his way of doing so.
“Here’s a good notice,” Jane said, without looking up from the paper in her lap. “‘Mr. Wells has put all his cleverness into this long story of an engagement and marriage between two attractive and, we may add, perfectly moral young people.’ From the Spectator.”
Wells harrumphed. “Not sure I like that morality bit.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” Jane said, carefully tearing the review from the paper for Wells’s later and full perusal.
There was nothing in the next two papers, but in the third Wells struck gold again. “From the Daily Chronicle,” he announced. “‘A book that thrills with the life, the questioning, of to-day. Whatever the publishing season may produce, it is not likely to bring us anything more vital, more significant, than Marriage.’”
“And they never like anything,” Jane said.
Wells had just finished reading the whole review and put it to one side, when he noticed Jane’s now furrowed brow.
“What,” he said, “a dissenting voice?”
But she didn’t answer immediately. He craned his neck to see what she was reading, and saw that it was that new journal he’d never read before, the Freewoman.
“How bad is it?”
“You won’t be happy.”
“I’m braced.”
“You’d better be. ‘Mr. Wells’s mannerisms are more infuriating than ever. One knows at once that Marjorie is speaking in a crisis of wedded chastity when she says at regular intervals, “Oh, my dear . . . Oh, my dear!” or at moments of ecstasy, “Oh, my dear! Oh, my dear!” For Mr. Wells’s heroines who are loving under legal difficulties say “My Man!” or “Master!” Of course he is the old maid among novelists; even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely old maid’s mania, the reaction toward the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids.’”