1
Michael Schaeffer had not killed anyone in years, and he was enraged at the fact that he’d had to do it again tonight. He drove the big black sedan along the deserted, winding British lane toward the south under the lightless sky, keeping his speed near the limit of his ability to control the car. Strapped upright with the seat belt in the passenger seat beside him was a man with a small, neat bullet hole through the side of his head. In the rear seats two more men with more pronounced firearm wounds were strapped upright. In the trunk of the car—he still thought trunk even though everyone around him said boot—was another corpse that had bled profusely and was wrapped in a tarp. The sun would rise in a few hours, and he would have to be rid of this car and far away from it before then. He went over his memory of the way this had happened. It had started with a normal conversation with his wife, Meg.
Meg’s family had kept a house near the Royal Crescent in Bath for a couple of centuries, and Bath was where she and Michael had met decades ago and still lived for most of the year. Each spring, she would pick a day when it was time for their retreat from Bath. One day a few weeks ago, she’d had her laptop open on the big Regency desk in her study when he walked in.
Meg had already checked what she called “migration day”—the end of the spring semester in the academic schedules of American universities. She usually began with the ones in and around Boston. During the winter, Boston held over 250,000 students, and each summer a great many of them would be heading for England, most of them stopping in Bath, population 84,000. She used American students as bellwethers, because their movements were predictable, but there would also be hordes from other countries.
“I’ve checked the spring-semester exam schedules. It’s off to Yorkshire no later than May fifth this year.” She meant the family’s historic home, the old estate a dozen miles outside the city of York. York was also a destination for tourists and students in the summer, but the house was off the main routes and was not the best historical example of anything or the site of an important battle or a Roman ruin.
“Got it,” said Michael. “I should be able to pack a razor and a toothbrush by then.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be reminded. Many times.”
Whenever they stayed in the Yorkshire house, they slept in the second-floor bedroom remodeled in the 1650s for the earl of that generation and his wife and last modernized five years ago. It was one of eight large chambers for the family, but Meg and Michael were childless and the older members of her family had died years before. The lower level of the old house had been designed for public functions: a central dining hall, a big kitchen and pantry behind it, a drawing room, and a library—all modernized in the 1630s, over stone laid in the 1300s, and refurnished many times since then. The top two floors had contained an attic and the servants’ rooms, but were long unoccupied. Meg had spent every day since they’d arrived planning and arranging her annual May party, and Michael helped with the practical work but stayed as unobtrusive as possible most of the time.
Then it was their tenth day back at the Yorkshire house, the day of Meg’s party. The party was important to her, because it was her way to issue greetings to her York friends and their families and the web of relatives and ancient connections who lived in the north. Her May party had gone on for enough years now that it was seen by many as the unofficial start to the part of the year when the island became less cold and wet.
Few if any of the minor aristocracy could afford to keep the garrisons of workers these houses had once employed. So once a year for her party, Meg would retain a gardening company and a crew of cleaners for ten days, a party rental company, a good caterer, and a group of parking attendants.
In her unabridged form Meg was the Honourable Margaret Susanna Moncrief Holroyd. Her family’s holdings in York were first granted in the time of King Edmund in 941, after he had restored Anglo-Saxon control from the Scandinavians. In 946 he was murdered at age twenty-five by a robber in his royal hall at Pucklechurch, near Bath. In 1472 Edward IV granted the estate again to that generation’s earl, his close drinking and whoring buddy. When Meg told Michael about it, he laughed, because it had cost the king nothing: it had already belonged to his friend’s family for five hundred years.
The manor house had been given several major renovations over the centuries. The last large one was the result of the April 29, 1942, bombing raid that Hitler ordered after the RAF bombed Lübeck and Rostock. Ninety-two people were killed in York that night, none of them on the estate, but the central hall received a bomb through its roof, which needed to be repaired and restored.
Meg’s party always began as soon as anyone appeared at the front gate and wouldn’t end until she detected a diminution of gaiety late in the evening. In the morning there was a cricket match on the huge south lawn, where the party rental company had set up tables so that Meg could provide tea, pastries, and other refreshments for spectators. At one o’clock the caterers served lunch on the long tables of the great hall. In the afternoon a chamber orchestra performed and a church choir sang. Older adults played sedate outdoor games like croquet, lawn bowling, and lawn darts, and there were foot races and other sports for the young and the irrepressible. The caterers set out a buffet dinner at six, and at eight a rock DJ began playing music on the old pasture on the east side of the house.
That evening the party did not show signs of exhaustion until 11:00 p.m. Meg stopped the music at 11:30 and sent the parking attendants to direct traffic so that cars could get off the estate without hitting each other. She had drivers offer van rides to anyone who needed or wanted one.
Meg was triumphant. “It went smoothly this year, don’t you think?” she asked.
Michael nodded. “Yep. You’ve outdone yourself again.” Meg’s party was one of his least favorite days of each year. Meg was not only an extrovert, but was also strikingly attractive, and had the money and taste to be glamorous. She was generous, witty, irreverent, and socially in demand even now, in her fifties. There were people from the North Sea to the English Channel at intervals of about a half mile who considered her one of their closest friends. Thirty years ago, when she first got romantically involved with an American who had typical American tastes and manners, there were some people in her social sphere who had been horrified, and others who simply shrugged and said that scandalizing snobs was her chief delight, but there was nobody who wasn’t a little sick about it.
As soon as they met, Michael had realized that a man in his special circumstances had no way to survive except to become part of the background. The day he had flown to England, he had left many people in America who wanted him dead, people either burning for revenge or eager to collect on one of the contracts out on him, or whose job it was to put him in prison.
Once he was in England, he made an effort to avoid conversation when he could, and to cut it short if he couldn’t. When Meg’s friends asked what he did for a living, he said he was retired. When they wanted to know from what, he said he’d been in business. When they asked what business, he said it had been so dull that he had promised himself never to bore anybody else about it. He also maintained a lack of visible interest in most things other people said about themselves, and he had learned to keep Meg at the front, where she would attract all the attention.