7th August 1945, Liverpool, early hours of the morning
"I brought scotch," George Paget Thomson told James Chadwick, as he opened the door. Rain blustered its way in and splattered the parquet floor. "Though, whether you wish to drink it is another matter."
Chadwick, bone tired after travelling all the way from New York, back to England in a BOAC aircraft, which was uncomfortable, to say the least, nodded heavily, closing the door behind the younger man. Thomson pulled off his rain coat and hung it on a hook in the hall, perching his hat above it.
"I appreciate the gesture, Thomson," Chadwick replied, though the weather might yet change their minds. "At least we know the bomb will work."
"At least your name, Blackett's name, Cockcroft's name, Pieirls's name, Frisch's name will be distant from this, for good or ill," Thomson said, kicking off his shoes at the door and pacing, sock-footed into the living room.
It hadnt been tidied for a good amount of time, many months at least. This was the Chadwicks' home, bought in Liverpool to suit Aileen, but hardly occupied because of James Chadwick's work in Los Alamos.
The twins had grown up in Canada, and there they would probably stay, Liverpool being unrecognisable as their home, even if they did remember their home city, because of the bombing that had taken place, sometimes suffering even worse than London, for though Britain was blacked out, Ireland, a neutral country, had not, and so the shape of the east coast of Ireland had been as incandescent on the night of the 3rd September 1939 as it had been on the night of the 2nd.
"It worked, Thomson," Chadwick told his former - and current colleague. "The whole thing has worked. Frisch and Pieirls had their calculations correct; the Americans had conceptualised the whole thing. The brightest and the best had worked on the bomb, Szilard, Bohr, Fermi; Oppenheimer had pulled it all together."
He hadn't said, but Robert Oppenheimer must have appreciated the irony: once under the direction of Thomson's father, under Rutherford, Blackett, and even Chadwick himself at one point, he was the man in charge.
"Please, sit," Chadwick offered, gesturing towards the fire. He smiled. It would be good to dry off beside it on such a miserable evening. "Perhaps we should open the whisky, given the weather?" Thomson handed it over.
"Jura," Chadwick nodded, approvingly, perching it over the fireplace. Two glasses appeared by it but, Thomson noted, Dr. Chadwick had not uncorked it.
"You plan to give these to Mr. Barrow as well?" Thomson asked him, when he saw what was in James Chadwick's hand. Letters, more letters, kept back from Thomas Barrow, written by his wife.
"Perhaps," Chadwick conceded, "We alone should decide. Lindemann is not in favour with Attlee any longer; his policy, as well as to show the world we have a testable bomb, is to design and build an atomic power station. The Ministry of Defence had already been in talks with Cockcroft."
"He's back then," Thomson asked, "From America, I mean?" He pulled out his pipe and raised it towards Chadwick, who nodded.
"Be my guest," he told George Paget, as he withdrew his own pipe, striking a match on the hearth, then offering it to his guest. Dr. Thomson leaned forward and Chadwick lit it for him, then doubled back and lit his own. He was disgusted how Bush and Roosevelt engineered to divorce us from our work and, in effect race off with an American bomb. But Churchill had written evidence a collaboration had been made and, too, passed through the US Supreme Court under the Ottowa Agreement. Now, Chadwick had the know-how long denied the British scientists, and they were making good use of it.
But they were not the only ones. Living with them, in his home in Birmingham had been another physicist, fled from Nazi Germany with Rudolph Pieirls. Fuchs was a communist, and intelligence had suggested that he had been passing on all the secrets of the bomb to the Russians. He had been imprisoned, now, but that didn't get the state secrets back. So Britain was in a race now with the Soviets, to make a bomb and demonstrate its use for, ironically, the prime purpose of not using it.
"Blackett has been interviewed too, over the Fuchs affair," George Paget told Chadwick. "Kapitzki went back to Russia to fight for his country and he was imprisoned for being a captialist."
"Blackett's is a socialist," James Chadwick conceded, puffing on his pipe, "Though, that does not make him a communist - I would trust Blackett with my life: in fact, I have trusted Blackett with my life, at the Cavendish, when one of the barium plates shattered." He saw Thomson's eyebrows raise, and coughed, though it was nothing to do with the pipe smoke. "Before your time," he added. "You are the next generation, the new blood."
"I was," George Paget Thomson replied, "Before my father died. But it is an even newer generation occupying the Cavendish now, molecular biologists," he added. He glanced down, and pulled a letter at random.
"You make the final decision, Chadwick," Thomson told him. "You knew her better than me, and him. The butler." But he looked at the letter anyway, unfolding it, and strained to read Milo's messy hand.
"...He walks with the Pathfinders, a group who go out for whole weekends, fishing, camping..." He looked to Chadwick. "Who's this?" he asked.
"Heisenberg," he replied, choosing one for himself to look at.
"...but I was outraged when the man touched my arm. Aitch Bee told him to meet him outside, and I could not work out what was going on until he told Schroedinger that the only reason he wasn't killing the man on my behalf was because he needed the whole world to see how impossible his equation was, to make him look foolish, you might say. But I know he was deeply put out by the incident. He fears for my safety, which I feel foolish about. Planck has given up a room in his home for me, and it is just a moderate walk to the university..." Thomson looked up. "She talks a lot aboiut Heisenberg," he added, looking at a second one. "And here, Dirac in Goettingen, talking about is resolution of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics, explaining to Milo that are equivalent to one another."
"Oppenheimer must have been there at the time," Chadwick noted. "And they go to the Solvay Conference here, in this one." Thomson peered over, and points to a paragraph at the bottom. "...and you were going to go without a word? With Guy Dexter? To America? Are you no longer my friend, Thomas Barrow?..."
"Here is another, where she chides him for sending a forwarding address, in California," Chadwick told Thomson, gesturing with the butt of his pipe. "She tells him she will never write again. That was what Lindemann was going for, looking for an excuse to confiscate her letters." He shook his head. "He hated us, those who worked with Rutherford, Milo the more for being female and being given access to a laboratory position."
"He's really as bad as all that?" Thomson asked. Chadwick shook his head.
"Worse. Because of his arrogance, his narcissim, he believes he is always right. He claims to be leader of the Cherwell research team, but they have barely researched anything, and have spent three times longer than we did ourselves in our own breakthroughs just confirming our results." He shook his head. "I am only glad Sir Ernest was not alive to witness Lindemann's disastrous management of it all."
Chadwick passed Thomson more letters, and again George Paget opened them, reading the first in the pile.
"Ah this does not seem to be to Thomas at all, this is to a Mrs. Daisy Mason, expressing her concern at...a thwarted assassination?" Chadwick immediately got up and looked at the letter that Thomspon held out to him. James Chadwick craned at the letter.
"...I take heart that Tom Branson thwarted Major Chetwode in his assassination attempt, and that he was thanked by the king..." Chadwick looked at the letter again, looked at the date - June 1926.
"Did you hear of this?" Thomson shook his head, examining another.
"But I did hear of this." Chadwick looked up from that letter, pushing his spectacles up his nose.
"Yes, well, the less said about that the better. But, of course, it was surely Thomas Barrow's antics wuth this...Richard Ellis...that drew his attention to Lindemann. The Prof is astute if he is anything, and was probably waiting for something of this incediary nature to fall into his hands." Thomson looked at him incredulously.
"Against Ashby?" he asked.
"A very petty man," Chadwick told him. "Holds grudges almost as long as the Irish." He leaned closer to Thomson, and gestured with his pipe again. "Frederick Lindemann saw a woman head and shoulders above himself, academically speakingh and it riled him, and her close relationship with Heisenberg and the others at Goettingen - don't forget, he immigrated himself in the '90s; coming to a country that his father had lauded as the most superior in every way."
"Well - " began Thomson.
" - And then, suddenly, Germany became the place to be as a scientist. By then, though, Lindemann was Lord Cherwell, and was loathe to give up the title and the money. And here was this woman who was brilliant and unassuming, fitting key-like into the lock of Goettingen University. Even Sommerfeld, who had been against Ashby being in Germany as Heisenberg's parents were for her, well, for her existing, admitted a positive influence on Professor Heisenberg. But it was that very same influence that, I suspect, prevented him from moving from Leipzig and taking up Sommerfeld's professorship at Munich."
Thomson's eyes moved to the whisky again. He had thought this evening was going to be just a genial chat, although, if they had not been discussing Milo Ashby then they would be talking about the atomic bombing of Japan, in any case.
"And the ironic thing was that she was in contact with a Mr. Harold Levinson for at least a dozen letters and she could so easily have gone to America, to Princeton, or Yale or Harvard to do the same research as she had in Germany - better, perhaps, because Mr. Levinson, though his means were now modest - had assured her of introductions to people he knew. They wouldn't have looked down on her as the Goettingen physicists did." Chadwick puffed on his pipe again.
"Wouldn't they? Come on, Dr. Chadwick, it wasn't easy for us working with the Yanks."
"True, true," Chadwick conceded. "But Heisenberg was not in America." Despite the incessant rain, despite the fire crackling in the fireplace, he still felt cold. But his heart was also uneasy: he did not know where Melusina Ashby was, despite petitioning Lindemann, who claimed he did not either.
..."If she has been imprisoned, executed, you need to tell me!"... Chadwick had stormed, when he had discovered all of Frederick Lindemann's involvement in Melusina Ashby's fate.
..."Why?" Lindemann had told him, a curl to his lips. "What has she done that is traitrous, tell me that?"...
"What are you smiling at?" Chadwick asked, as he glanced over to Thomson. George Paget looked up and held up a letter.
"Another, ninety percent Heisenberg, and Goettingen, ten percent expressing her regret at the death of the Dowager Countess of Grantham." Chadwick smiled. He had always felt irked at her wedding to Thomas Barrow. Yes, he had done it for nobler things, but then Werner Heisenberg had come along, and it was clear to everyone with senses Milo's feelings for him. Would it have been different if she were free? Or, would she not have been able to work at all?
"But she came back, didn't she," George Paget remarked. "With us until your determination of the neutron."
"With us, beside me. Ashby was indispensible," Chadwick told him. " "I will never forget hertelling me that the spectrograph showed that the masses were just too heavy for there to be only protons in the nucleus of atoms." "
"And to think I was only concerned with beta radiation," Chadwick told him. "Electrons, ejecting from the nucleus of the atom could only be leaving behind a proton. And it had been Rutherford who had proposed that perhaps there was something else, something that could not be detected by electrical plates, but had mass all the same." He looked down into his lap, giving more letters to George Paget.
"That you are married, I hope I will be forgiven for saying this, Thomson," Chadwick said, glancing down yet again to the address on the front of the envelope, "Downton Abbey" scrawled with haste across the centre, "But you were not disappointed that Ashby remained behind."
It was a pleasure to watch George Paget Thomson raise his head, a curl of pipe smoke around his head as he made eye contact with the very tired eyes of James Chadwick.
"It's true," Thomson admitted. "I had...great affection for her." He sighed. "I asked her out several times, to the tearoom she liked, to the "talkies". But each time she said no, and I asked her once why not. "Because your father would not approve, so I would not approve," she told me." He laughed quickly. "It's true, I thought her marvellous, but I can see now that sort of...fraternisation...might have cost her her position. Father would have disapproved, and would very likely have dismissed her."
"And I wouldn't have a Nobel Prize," Chadwick remarked, wryly. "For others would have got there before me, Strassmann, Meiter, Ashby's most revered scientist. So I too am glad you didn't Thomson!" He clapped the younger man on the shoulder in a jovial manner, but Thomson only looked back to him, wretchedness on his face. Then, he opened another letter, and began to read.
"...how my heart is full of joy that you are now back in England," Thomson read aloud. Chadwick looked up from his own, and gave a little, "Hm?" of interest.
"Thomas Barrow," George Paget told Chadwick. "She is pleased he has returned to Downton Abbey and been given his position back. She is pleased he is living in her old house, and begs him forgive her for not writing sooner."
"Because she was working with me," Chadwick told him. "But it was '32, and we went to the Royal Society because Rutherford was still president, we all did, except Ashby. We presented our findings then. But Ashby had already left, bound for Germany again, bound for Heisenberg, for he had written to her of his delight and pride at being awarded his own Nobel for his "Uncertainty Principle".
He held the letter aloft, words written, not in Milo's crabby, untidy hand, but by someone with careful shaping of letters, neat and spick and span. This was Werner Heisenberg's own letter to Milo, and to Thomson it looked well thumbed, from its crinkled edges and rounded corners. There was a fold right down the middle, too.
"I...do remember," Thomson admitted. But then resolved to say nothing more on the subject of his heart and Melusina Ashby. "John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton spoke at the Royal Society, as I recall, for their work on splitting lithium atoms with accelerated protons in a particle accelerator of their own devising."
But Chadwick was not really listening. He was reading another letter, his hand shaking a little as she told Thomas of her life Germany.
"Do you know a Douglas Hartree?" Thomson asked Chadwick, changing the subject. Chadwick broke from the letter he was reading, grateful for the interruption.
"He worked with us, a long time ago I believe, at Manchester."
"He is tutoring the boy now..." Chadwick gave a brief nod, and then returned to his letter. This was dated February 1933, and it was in reply to one from Margarethe Bohr.
"...I am sorry you were shocked at my unexpected appearance," Milo had written, for wherever she was staying in the north west of Germany. "I do not believe you need to inform Professor Rutherford, or Professor Thomson. I am not returning to England until after the child is born..." He watched George Paget Thomson raise his head, watched him wave the letter until it was opened a little more, and then read on.
"...I do not want the professors to be... disappointed, although as you will know my work is finished. I only desire to speak to Professor Bohr." And that caused George Paget to look away.
"There's more," Chadwick admitted.
"Tell me." Chadwick looked at George Paget, raising his eyebrows.
"It does not make for pleasant reading." George Paget leaned back in his chair and inhaled on his pipe.
"What of this is pleasant?" Thomson asked. "We're going over her letters, through her private thoughts, deciding which can be passed on to Barrow." He lowered the one in his hand. "She seems so scared, yet she did it anyway, gave birth to a baby who became the child living at the workplace of her husband. Apart from this letter, we don't know if she told anyone other than the Scholtz family about her circumstances." He glanced up to the whisky. Heavens, he really could do with a little of that just then.
"...I have to submit to ethnicity tests. The registrar told me she had to be assured of the child's history, that there were no undesirable races in his background."
Thomson was on his feet and beginning to pace as Chadwick added, ""I can guarantee the parents who will adopt him will be fully Aryan German!" she told me. Like that matters, as long he is safe and well cared for!" Chadwick broke off.
"If you aren't going to open the damn thing then I will!" George Paget told him, and Chadwick waved towards the bottle and glasses, giving assent. Thomson neared the fire, placing his pipe on the mantelpiece before twisting out the cork and throwing it into the fire. He didn't think there would be any need to replace it tonight, considering the weather, considering what he was hearing about Milo. The closest he had ever got to her had been to take up her soft, delicate hand once, at the Cavendish.
Chadwick clearly was in need as well, getting up and standing before Thomson, who watched as his former tutor tipped the contents of the glass down his throat. Thomson added more, and this time, Chadwick sat back down. Thomson lowered himself into the armchair too, and leaned towards Chadwick, ready to hear Milo's words.
" "...and she told me to name the baby, so I did. He is Ernest, and I have left him my wedding ring and our marriage certificate. Mr. Scholtz put it all into an envelope and shook my hand, as Mrs. Scholtz cooed over the baby. "Er ist Ernest Ashby" I told her. And the mother nodded, and repeated, "Ernst Ashby Scholtz," nodding over him. Then she told me, "Ein Fhruligskind, Er ist glücklich", a lucky child to be born in the springtime. But, I know not all babies who are born in the springtime can be lucky. Aitch Bee and I were walking from the university and we saw a woman with a baby who just have been born last springtime - that child was not lucky,tossed from his pram, his mother kicked in the street, a yellow David's star on her coat - " We must stop," Chadwick told him. "Let us...put on the wireless let us hear about the day again." But Thomson shook his head.
"It's why they all came, in '33," George Paget reminded Chadwick. "Not only Born, and Einstein and Szilard, Pieirls and Frisch, but Dirac came home, and Schroedinger took up his life agin in Ireland. And then we lost Curie and Haber...Planck and Laue fought to get them out and paid the price; Rutherford helped because he could." Chadwick smiled.
"Were you there when Einstein told your father his reason to going to America?" Thomson shook his head. " "England is a country with too many butlers" he told him," Chadwick smiled and, after a puff on his pipe, Thomson smiled too.
"I cannot see any of these letters would be of any benefit to Thomas Barrow now," Thomson added, once they had sipped the Jura whisky and sat in silence for a time.
"I agree," Chadwick said. "But he is entitled to them." He glanced down at another and smiled. ""This idiocy cannot last forever," she's put," Chadwick told him. He scanned down. "They were Max Planck's words after the memorial lecture for Haber."
"They really thought so," Thomson replied. "But she came home. She was back for your Nobel Prize, I remember that."
"She was working with her cousins at the Marconi company," Chadwick told him, draining his second glass. "She came to see me, and then took a train north - "
" - I have it here," Thomson told him, fluttering out the page. ""June 1936, I have travelled to Brancaster to see, to be frank, Lady Edith. She was in my situation once; I need her to give me the advice she never got..." He turned to Chadwick. "And what was that?" Chadwick shook his head.
"Some of these are so cryptic, I cannot for the life of me work out what they refer to. "I mean, what do you make of, "September 1929, I met Crowborough, Thomas. He will find he has made a poor investment into a guano business he did not know he was investing his life savings into."" Bith men shook their heads. "I mean, perhaps she went to visit the Marquess of Hexham because of the abdication...? The family are nobiity, of course." Thomson shrugged his shoulders, and handed them to Chadwick.
"More to file," Thomson suggested, "Or give back to Lindemann?"
Chadwick didn't answer, simply passed more to Thomson. George Paget gaped at the quantity.
"He kept all of these from their intended recipients?" Thomson asked, mouth open. "He did a thorough job!"
And they leafed through more, reading in silence, the clock striking three in the morning as another small pile arrived in his hand. Chadwick coughed the throaty cough of one who was coming down with something, sipping more of the whisky and began to leaf through ones of his own.
"Heisenberg wrote to tell Ashby he would be in the USA in the summer of 1939," Thomson told Chadwick. James Chadwick raised his head.
"I have another, explaining to her his reasons for returning to Gemany, his family, he tells her, and details the music he and Elisabeth like." Thomson looked at him.
"Music?"
"" I met her at a concert; I was challenged to play. It delighted me that Elisabeth was delighted,"" he tells her," Chadwick told him, coughing again. ""And I am delighted that we were married four months later. I have to say how empty of joy my life has been. I wish you could be with us, Lieblein."" Thomson looked across to Chadwick.
"That would not sit well, I would imagine," he told his former tutor. "Do you have any of when Lindemann recruited her?" Chadwick looked through the rest in his hand and shook his head. "When was this?"
"1940."
"When my father died," Thomson said, quietly.
"And when Ashby was recruited by SOE, by Lundemann. I can see she must have been at a low point, and probably was charmed by the Prof's words. He can be quite persuasive, and if he told her he needed an expert in nuclear physics, you know what she's like, she would have been proud to have volunteered." Chadwick shook his head. "I wanted her on the MAUD project," he added. "With you and I, and Frisch and Pieirls. But, then there was Lindemanm's ace card," he added.
"Barrow and his homosexual tendencies," Thomson replied. "I told him this; I told him Ashby put herself into danger and allowed herself to be called a traitor." He got to his feet again.
"If you asked me to say what I would have done with all of these, Chadwick, I say, burn them all. It is no use going over the past, reminding people, digging up hurts."
"I say...you are right," Chadwick told him, "But let us read the rest first. I feel it is wrong to put them to flame when we haven't read them."
And the men sat down again, silence hanging between them as they continued the morbid process of reading Milo Ashby's failed correspondence.
"I have one of the conference in Copenhagen," Chadwick told Thomson at length, and he passed it to Thomson.
"It does not clear anything up," Thomson told him. "Perhaps at best talking at cross purposes."
"It tells us one thing," Chadwick replied, swooping up his whiskey. "It tells us Heisenberg wanted the bomb to be a theoretical one, as did von Weisacker." He pointed to the page where she tells of her journey there. "What with Frisch's confirmation of the writing, Heisenberg could not really have believed was possible. Perhaps his motives were not entirely pure," he added, "Because we know now Pieirls knew how much uranium to use and Heisenberg thought he needed much more for a viable bomb. But that drawing." Chadwick added. But Thomson was on his feet again, as more rain smashed at the windows.
"He must have been at cross purposes, because Bohr told everyone at Los Alamos that Heisenberg drew him a bomb. It was only when Frisch - " Thomson nodded, getting the picture. And this is a man who is used to subterfuge - he received Frisch's inforrmation about fleeing to Sweden which dear Otto had had made into the full stop at the end of a sentence, in ordet to get the newspaper there."
"And do you know how Bohr sent the return message?" Thomson shook his head, "In the tooth cavity of a pilot." Thomson smiled, really smiled, for the first time that evening.
...and they went on reading, about Milo telling Thomas that they had, in August 1942, all of the atomic scientists visited Joachimstal..."how I have wanted to come here, we are here to find the best lode of pitchblende, we are to do Madame Curie's work..."
...and that suspicions were aroused in September 1943 when the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute had been relocated to Haigerloch and Hechingen amongst other places...
"We were in the desert then," Chadwick told Thomson. "Bohr had joined us, Oppenheimer was like a man I had never seen before, commanding, taking charge. There were some young whippersnppers. But then you sent Mark Oliphant." Thomson smiled again.
"He soon came back to Britain, giving the Yanks the benefit of his wisdom," he replied.
"He was damn well refused entry; he had no choice!" Chadwick laughed. But then his face fell.
"She was arrested then, put in concentration camp. She was there with other women, Helene Solomon, Langevin's daughter; Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier...Charlotte Delbo..." He stopped reading. "I think Ashby is the bravest woman I ever knew," the usually stoic Chadwick told George Paget Thomson.
"She was no traitor," Thomson mused. "Nothing she could have done would ever had made a bomb, even if they had had the technology and the Uranium-235 that the Yanks had." Then he looked at Chadwick. "You don't suppose that Lindemann knew that?" Chadwick stopped for a moment, then opened his mouth to say something, but simply laughed.
"No, Thomson," he told him. "Lindemann is all mouth and no substance. All he was good for was a faked death at the hands of the SS when in actual fact she had returned to Haigerloch and Heisenberg and the others."
"Then," declared Thomson, "I think that is all we need to say. Cast them to the fire, my dear fellow," he added, seizing the Jura whisky bottle, now half empty, and refilling their glasses.
"To Milo!"
"To Milo!" Chadwick repeated, and both men drank heartily to Milo Ashby.
"And the end war, give or take a Japanese surrender signature!" Thomson added.
"Wherever she may be!" Chadwick finished. Thomson stopped in his repeat of this sentiment, and looked seriously at his old mentor.
"Where is she now Chadwick?" Thomson asked, suddenly.
"I cannot say," Chadwick replied, lowering his glass.
"Cannot?" Thomson pressed.
"Cannot. For I do not know. Lindemann, in his anger, let her out of Hall Farm and told her to leave. Where she would have walked to is a anyone's guess." Thomson inhaled, and held out his handful of letters. Chadwick nodded to the hearth.
"We are decided?" Thomson nodded, and he watched James Chadwick as he threw every last one of Milo Ashby's letters into the flames.
