Lee shook his head. He was already becoming enchanted, and they didn’t need fairy-tale names. It would be several days before he decided the girl would be Nanette, named after the puppet she’d been wrapped in, but when he was telling the story of finding her, he would always make it sound instantaneous, hand in glove, the flicking on of a lightbulb.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course; he didn’t even know if he would keep the animals. All he knew was that he’d found orphans. Like him.

17

Ironside and Pishkoff boarded H.M.S. Attentive, which began its zigzag journey behind the siren of the leading ship. It was deep into autumn, winter rehearsing, the afternoon rain showers now bracketed by pellets of hail. In all weather, Pishkoff stood on deck for at least a quarter hour in the afternoons, glumly playing “Turkish Song of the Damned” on his penny-whistle. Ironside meanwhile read Waliszewski’s Peter the Great, the better to understand the Russian people, and a stack of books about Napoleon, just in case the Allied campaign had a different historical precedent.

On the fifth day of travel, there was an extraordinary piece of news: Poole was being recalled to Great Britain for “consultation.” Ironside was to proceed to Russia, however, and would be in charge temporarily.

This had been the curtain for Poole. Pilots had repeatedly told him, beginning in October, that it was no longer safe to fly the Russian skies. Their machines could bear freezing temperatures at high altitude, but on the ground, the ignitions had to be babied, the carburetors wrapped in hot towels, cold traitorous to the grease used on release mechanisms.

But Poole didn’t believe this. An RE 8 was sent up weighted down with four Cooper bombs under each wing, plus a single big-bellied two-hundred-pound bomb attached to the undercarriage. When the pilot, for the last time in his life, hit the release lever, the weather had done its work; only the bombs under the right wing released, causing him to flip over and—still holding all the remaining bombs—collide with the steeple of a local Orthodox church.

The explosion killed the sole priest in the village of Pinega and burned the church to the ground. Though the villagers accepted General Poole’s sincere apology (and he truly was sorry), and allowed Lieutenant Whyte and his engineers of the 310th to build them a new church, headquarters decided he should return home.

Ironside read the news blankly, then went out into the squall and allowed himself to be beaten by sleet to wake himself up to his change in duties. Pishkoff somehow found him (they were enough like a married couple by now that he did not ask how) and said, “You’re top kick. Again.”

“Again,” Ironside murmured.

“History repeats itself,” Pishkoff said, because it would annoy Ironside.