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anyway the subscriptions had not followed him to his new address when he went away to school two years later.
    In her new affluence Andrew’s mother had enrolled him in St. John’s, a Catholic boys’ boarding school in old Windsor, across the Thames and four miles downriver from Eton. The school was a massive old three-story brick building at the end of a birch-lined driveway, and he slept in one of a row of thirty curtained cubicles that crowded both sides of a long hallway on the third floor—no hardship to someone used to sleeping in an eighteenth-century box bed—and ate in the refectory hall downstairs with an army of boys ranging from his own age, nine, up to fourteen. To his own surprise,he had not suffered at all from homesickness. The teachers were all Jesuit priests, and every day started with a brief Mass in the chapel and ended with evening prayers; and in the busy hours between he found that he was good at French and geometry, subjects his mother had not been able to teach him, and that he could make friends.
    Obedient to his mother, he had told his new companions about his youth in the Cotswolds but had not ever mentioned the circumstances of his birth, and never told them about his peculiar corporate “godfather.”
    His mother had motored down to visit on three or four weekends in each term, and had written infrequent letters; her invariable topics of discussion had been the petty doings of her neighbors and an anxious insistence that Andrew pay attention to his religious instruction, and politics—she had been a Tory at least since Andrew had been born, and though glad of the failure of MacDonald’s Labour Party in ’31, she’d been alarmed by the subsequent general mood in favor of the League of Nations and worldwide disarmament: “Not all the beasts that were kept out of the Ark had the decency to perish,” she had said once. Andrew had known better than to try to introduce topics like his father, or the mysterious King’s men in the rooftop building in London. In the summers Andrew had taken the train home to Chipping Campden, but he had spent most of his time during those months hiking or reading, guiltily looking forward to the beginning of the fall term.
    In the spring of 1935 one of the Jesuit priests had come to Andrew’s cubicle before Mass to tell him that his mother had died the day before, of a sudden stroke.
    Andrew Hale let the dapper old man in the homburg hat walk on past him at a distance of a dozen yards, while Hale squinted through his cigarette smoke and scanned the misty lawns back in the direction of the gazebo and Queen’s Walk. The only people visible in that direction were a woman walking a dog in the middle distance and two bearded young men beyond her striding briskly from north to south; neither party was in a position to signal the other, and they were all looking elsewhere in this moment of the old man’s closestapproach to Hale; clearly the old man wasn’t being followed. And neither was Hale, or the old man would have seen it and simply disappeared, to try to meet later at a fallback.
    Now the old man had halted and pulled a map from an inside pocket. Hale’s eye was caught by the flash of white paper when the man partly unfolded the map and began frowning at it and glancing at the distant roofs of buildings. In fact the building on top of which Hale had first met him was only a ten minutes’ walk to the east, past St. James’s Park and Whitehall, but Hale knew that this flashing of the map was a signal; and so Hale was looking directly at him when the old man caught his gaze and then raised his white eyebrows under the hat brim.
    Hale took one last deep draw off the cigarette, and tossed it away onto the grass, before walking over to where the man stood. His heart was still thumping rapidly.
    “Lost, Jimmie?” he said through exhaled smoke, with muted sarcasm.
    “Without a clue, my dear.” Jimmie Theodora folded up the map and tucked it back inside his