The Briar Club

by Kate Quinn

My boss knows,” Nora burst out. “He called me into his office today . . . I don’t know how he found out, Xavier kept my name out of anything in the papers, but Mr. Harris knew. Government men, they all talk. He’d had a word from a lawyer or someone in the police. He knew.” Grace’s voice was quiet. “Have you been fired?” “I will be,” Nora said raggedly, “if I cause any embarrassment to the National Archives.” “Goodness, can they do that?” “Of course they can. Even though my work and my conduct have never been anything but exemplary. Even though it’s none of their business who I see in my private life. Even though they’d never dream of asking a man who he dates on his own time.” Fury smoldered in the pit of her stomach, remembering Mr. Harris’s censorious face as he delivered his lecture. Her potential; her responsibilities to the Archives.

The facts were so stark, when they weren’t muddled up with the way Xavier could melt her heart hunkering down to wrestle with Duke—the way he listened when she talked, as if memorizing every word—the way he took her to pieces just slowly running a thumbnail up her spine. None of that mattered. He was a man on trial for murder, and she was wearing his diamond on her left hand, and she didn’t know how she’d gotten in so deep.

“Someone hurt me. But that excuses nothing. What he did, taking the law into his own hands, that hurts me too.” “You’re a great believer in law.” Nora thought of the Bill of Rights, which she saw in its case every day. “The law is not perfect, but it is perfectible. Scorn that and we’re spitting on our foundations.”

Nothing wreaks havoc like a weak man—because they never learn, so they just go blithely on, leaving pain and wreckage behind them.”

Thanksgiving 1954 Washington, D.C. Briarwood House is getting impatient. The body has been removed from Grace’s apartment and transported to the morgue; the police have tramped around taking pictures of everything; the witnesses have been rounded up in the kitchen—when on earth are things going to get interesting? This has not been at all like Dragnet, the house thinks disapprovingly. Sergeant Joe Friday would have had a theory by now, would have said, “Just the facts” at least once. (The house has become addicted to Dragnet since Pete started tuning in on Grace’s set last year.) But this balding detective and his partner are clearly no Joe Friday and Officer Smith. Maybe that’s all to the good, the house thinks. There’s a lot at stake tonight, after all. It’s not just about who gets hauled off in handcuffs. It’s much, much more.

The house would roll its eyes if it had any. Joe Friday wouldn’t be focusing on Nora’s ex-lover or why he’s here tonight or why he isn’t as calm as he pretends to be. No, Joe Friday would be more interested in why the crowded group settled around the kitchen still looks so tense, and not because Xavier Byrne is in the room, either. Joe Friday would be asking why so many of the women in this room have dried blood droplets on them, as if they had ringside seats to the murder upstairs . . . and yet, not one of these same women is shrieking or pointing fingers. “Okay, time to split ’em up,” the detective is finally saying. “Get some answers, get ’em talking.” He moves into the kitchen, at once the object of all eyes, and just to be spiteful the house rucks the edge of the carpet so he trips.

Grace’s ginger cat is hiding under the kitchen table, ears flattened. The house gives a noncorporeal stroke down the cat’s spine. Grace had been right when she said this place needed a pet. The padding of a cat’s paws on kitchen tile, the thump of a dog’s tail against a banister: that’s another of those things, like the smell of a good meal in the oven, that really makes a house. Makes it more than just a set of foundations and walls. The house whispers a suggestion to the cat,

Grace’s Red gives a yawn and strolls out from under the table as the detective drones overhead. Winds out of the kitchen, across the hallway, pads across Reka’s cane where it had fallen in the struggle and now lay forgotten (poor Reka), and nudges open the door to the parlor . . . Where a certain familiar smell immediately begins wafting.

The house sits back, pleased, as the nearest cop on duty pokes his head around the door and promptly turns white. Another set of tense glances ricochet bulletlike between the sixteen suspects in the kitchen. The detective breaks off in his lecture. “What’s in that parlor?” he snaps. The second body, thinks Briarwood House. And braces itself.

October 1951

Live as long as I have and you’ll realize that whether the organization you put your faith in brandishes a Bible or a copy of Das Kapital, the haves in that organization are rarely interested in sharing with the have-nots.”

“Happiness.” Grace rose, smoothing her skirt. “It’s a choice as much as anything. Or you could choose to be angry, and if you stay angry long enough, it will become comfortable, like an old robe. But eventually you’ll realize that old robe is all you’ve got, and there isn’t anything else in the wardrobe that fits. And at that point, you’re just waiting to trade the robe for a shroud—or at least, that’s what I’ve always thought.”

“I sometimes think this country is an eternal battle between our best and our worst angels. Hopefully we’re listening to the good angel more often than the bad one.” She sighed. “We do that, and change will come.”

eat on a summer day, in between bouts of singing the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League “Victory Song.”

God, I’ve missed that, Bea thought, landing with barely a twinge of pain. Maybe her knee couldn’t take a whole season, but it could take a sandlot game.

Sure, put the fat girl in the catcher’s mask and make her squat,” Claire groused. “You don’t make the fat girl the catcher, you make the meanest bitch the catcher,” Bea shot back, and that made Claire grin. They were all grinning now, even the elegant Mrs. Sutherland, who had borrowed a pair of shorts from Grace to play in and handled her fielder’s glove like it was a Buckingham Palace teacup. “I do not understand this game,” she was saying in her soft British accent to Grace. “I just do not understand it at all, even as long as I’ve lived here.” “Oh, honey, I don’t understand this game, either, and I was born here . . .”

Bea could almost hear the roar of a crowd, the snap of the manager’s chewing gum, the announcer’s voice: Aaaaaaand introducing our home team, the Briarwood Belles!

Bea had his timing by now, and her swing started from her heels and traveled all the way up through her shoulders and into the bat like a bolt of lightning. She connected with a crack she felt clear down to her toes, and maybe it wasn’t going five hundred and sixty-plus feet like Mickey Mantle’s Griffith Stadium moon shot, but it was going plenty far.

Grace applauded along with the rest of the Belles (Bea could tell she was going to think of her housemates as the Belles from now on)

“I think you ladies cheated,” Harland said at the end of a riotous nine innings and a 3–1 victory for the women. “A Briarwood Belle does not cheat,” Bea intoned, slinging her bat over one shoulder. “Or if she does, she is never caught.”

Thanksgiving 1954

The house doesn’t have hands to wring, but it’s certainly wringing its curtains over the idea of losing its ladies. Of being sold off by Mrs. Nilsson and turned into a furniture showroom. How can this be? This entire first floor might very well be gutted, stripped of the well-worn floorboards that give it charm, the chandelier that was put in when the first Roosevelt was inaugurated, the elaborate banister down which both Pete and Lina slid as children (behind their mother’s back). Stripped out for living room sets, of all things. No abomination like a showroom full of living room sets, the house thinks, rucking up the hallway runner just to trip the policemen as they go back and forth.

If this place becomes a showroom, the house will die. It knows that. It knows right down to its baseboards. Briarwood House will die when it ceases to be a home.

If the house could die, well, so might the people in this house who know what really happened here tonight.

I’ll take care of you, the house wishes it could promise, but the promise is futile and the house knows it, thinking helplessly of that first murder inside the green-vined walls of 4B, the one that kicked it all off. The corpse with its red hair surrounded by a halo of blood.

July 1953

“C’n we go to the park?” “Sure, kid.” Claire wanted to ruffle his hair, which had been painstakingly combed into place. He was a nice boy, at least right now. Later he’d probably turn out just like his father, and then he’d have a loud voice and crew for Yale and talk about the Negro problem over martinis with other men just like him, so she might as well enjoy the kid while the nice stage lasted.

“If I had to stand around in the hot sun all day listening to marching bands and patriotic speeches and firecrackers rather than lying in lovely cool sheets with you, I was going to go barking mad.” Sydney dragged her lips away from Claire’s, looking disheveled and kiss-flushed and perfect. “Come upstairs. My husband won’t be home with Bear until after dark.” Who seduced who? Looking back, Claire wasn’t sure. Always a delicate dance, looking at a woman and wondering if her eyes were willing to take a sideways wander from the male of the species.

“All a Kremlin operative has to do is find out who the queers are and threaten to expose them, and they’ll just roll over and start selling state secrets.” “Oh, seriously . . .” “Serious as a heart attack. Hopefully my father-in-law will thump and roar his way into one someday soon.” Claire raised her eyebrows. “You’re that eager to be rid of him?” “Can’t stand the old bastard,” Sydney said candidly. “Forever telling me to leave off the suntan oil, darlin’, so you don’t get any darker than you already are. He has no idea I sit there at his Sunday dinner table pushing overcooked peas around my plate and daydreaming what I’ll wear to his funeral.”

Eat with your lover, preferably in bed, while listening to “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” by Perry Como.

Serve the potato pancakes hot with sour cream or applesauce, and eat with someone you adore, while listening to “No Other Love” by Perry Como. Potato pancakes, Claire reflected, were the food of love—meaning, they were such a colossal pain in the ass to make that no one would ever take the trouble except for love.

Harland Adams enters, sharp-faced in his equally sharp suit. Briarwood House likes Harland well enough—you have to like a fellow willing to fire up the grill on your front lawn and flip burgers all afternoon, making the house smell and feel like an endless Fourth of July day.

Harland Custis Adams looks like he’s about to explode. And Briarwood House doesn’t like it one bit.

I understand that belongs to Mrs. Grace March.” A single nod. Under the table, the house sees Harland’s hands flex. “How well would you say you knew the lady?” A thin smile. Don’t do it, the house begs silently. Don’t do it! But Harland begins. “Not very well, as things turned out.”

March 1954

He was so distressed Grace reflected she could probably get the secret of nuclear fission out of him if he had it, so it was a good thing she was out of the spying business.

Is your mother going to let you compete if you get in?” The girl’s face fell, and Pete answered somewhat grimly, “We’ll fight that battle when we come to it.”

Pete told Grace, “If she gets into the Bake-Off, she’ll compete if I have to drive her to New York over Mom’s dead body. Lina needs this.”

eat with friends of any nation, while listening to “Rags to Riches” by Tony Bennett.

Grace had stabbed a man under the jaw when he came at them. Had Fliss seen the gleam of the little steel spike in her fist?—a blade hardly bigger than a toothpick, which Grace kept in an innocent lipstick tube in her pocket. She was no assassin who could crush skulls with her bare hands, but she’d had training in hand-to-hand fighting; she knew how to keep weapons about you hidden and innocuous. Grace could feel the little spike in its tube in her pocket now as she took her plate of yakitori skewers from Dr. Dan—sharp enough to puncture an eye or tear open a jugular or push a drop of poison through a shirtsleeve. Not that she planned to use it for any of those things, but did it ever hurt to be prepared? She still had her old pistol, too, oiled and loaded, taped under one of her dresser drawers . . .

“I’m in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, I’m invited to New York!” Pete swung her so high her saddle shoes practically scraped the ceiling, Grace got the next hug, Bea leaped around whooping, and Mrs. Nilsson came out to see what all the ruckus was about. “The Pillsbury Bake-Off?” Crossly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lina, you’re not going to New York, it’s completely out of the question.” Pete went red as a fire truck, clearly about to detonate like the shells Grace had watched German Junkers drop down the center of the Nevsky Prospect like a string of exploding pearls. She touched his arm and cut in quickly: “Mrs. Nilsson, have you thought about the advantages here? Our Lina in the Bake-Off, only one hundred competitors chosen from everyone who applied all over the country!

Mrs. Nilsson, all the entrants win prizes just for competing. A hundred dollars cash—” “A Hamilton Beach mixer,” Nora said. “And a brand-new Stratoliner push-button range,” Bea finished. The whole house was expert by now in the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition rules. “Didn’t you say you wanted to update the old kitchen range here?” That nose twitch again. “A Stratoliner?” “You can update this entire kitchen on your daughter’s back!” Grace cooed, holding her smile steady as Doilies blinked. And later that night Lina tiptoed up to Grace’s room, jubilant. “She says I can go!”

Poisons hadn’t been a large part of Grace’s training as a mole—she hadn’t been sent to murder anyone at Edwards Air Force Base, after all, just inveigle diagnostics and logistics out of them for the Bell X-2. But the use of certain quick compounds to gripe the guts, that was a standard tool of the trade. What better way to get access to a man’s office or a woman’s handbag than if they had to suddenly excuse themselves to the bathroom with a churning stomach? Simplicity itself to drop a double dose into Mrs. Nilsson’s orange juice

“We can’t miss that train,” the horrid woman wailed through the door of the downstairs bathroom, the one she refused to let any of the boarders use even if the line upstairs was five-deep. Grace smiled at the sound of retching, not feeling one drop of guilt. Doilies had already made Lina cry that morning, scolding her not to frown when she mixed her cake because judges wouldn’t award anything to a cross-eyed little girl who scowled.

It was going to take at least three cabs to get them all to Union Station: the entire Briar Club (minus Arlene) was escorting Lina to the Bake-Off.

Pete had protested at first, even though his face flushed with pleasure. “It’s such a long way.” “Nonsense, of course we’re coming.” All the contestants would have cheering sections of devoted family and Lina needed one, too, especially if her cheering section largely wasn’t composed of blood relatives. Blood was overrated, anyway, Grace mused, helping Reka along with a hand to the old woman’s elbow as they spilled out of the cabs onto the steps of Union Station.