Iris reaches for Ruth’s shoulder. Ruth turns beneath her hand. Her eyes are wild, her skin flushed. She speaks in a hoarse whisper. “But he’s alive. He’s alive.”

“Alive!” Iris exclaims. “Philip, what—”

“The Americans are flying out a medical team from Northolt at ten thirty.”

“How far is Northolt?”

Philip looks at his wristwatch. “If we hop in the car this instant, I can drive you there in time.”

“Will they let me on?”

“By God,” says Philip, “they’d better.”

FOR A MOMENT, IRIS and Philip stand to watch Ruth as she bounds to the cottage to collect her toothbrush and passport. Her gold hair flies from the patterned silk scarf around her head. In the perambulator, Gregory’s eyes flash open. His mouth screws in preparation for a good yell. Iris puts her hand inside Philip’s hand.

“Will he live?” she whispers.

He turns his troubled face to her and smiles.

“Fox? Of course he’ll live. He’ll live for her.”

“Are you sure?”

“Can you think of a better reason?”

In the distance, the sun flashes against Ruth’s bouncing gold hair. Gregory lets loose with a lusty cry. Philip takes the handlebar of the Silver Cross perambulator to guide them back to the cottage.

Author’s Note

I became familiar with the Cambridge spy ring sideways, while I was researching something else. The more I learned, the more desperate I became to set everything else aside and write about this.

In Great Britain, their names are as synonymous with treason as Benedict Arnold’s is in the United States—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross—and the flight of Burgess and Maclean to the Soviet Union in May 1951 is the stuff of legend. Recruited by the Soviet spy agency NKVD in the 1930s, when communism was fashionable among the young elites of Oxford and Cambridge, they graduated and duly entered the corridors of power, where they served up their country’s vital secrets to the Soviet Union for the next two decades, using their influential positions and the cultural capital of an Oxbridge man—no Englishman could possibly imagine a traitor among the chaps he went to school with, college with, clubs with—to avoid detection. Eventually it all came tumbling down, of course, but not before Stalin was privy to all the British negotiating points at Yalta, not before the minutes and papers of the Atomic Energy Commission were delivered into Soviet hands, not before the secrets of the nuclear program allowed Soviet scientists to create their own weapons, not before countless brave intelligence agents had been unmasked, tortured, executed.