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and treasure, bleed them in labor camps, repress all dissent. And now he had a new one, one that would make up for the Franz Shroeder fiasco. He would hand the Fuhrer an atomic bomb in three or four months, several of them in fact. The so-called world war that was about to start would be over before it really began. London would be in ruins, and perhaps Paris as well. The Thousand Year Reich would officially begin.

Chapter 6
    North Oxford, August 31, 1939, 5:00 p.m.
     
     
    It was rare for all four of Professor John Ronald Tolkien’s children to be home at once. He was pleased, and, more important, he could see how quietly happy Edith, his wife of twenty-three years, was as she worked in and around the kitchen of their modest home on Northmoor Road. If any home with eight bedrooms and a study as spacious as this could be considered modest, the professor said to himself, looking up from his desk and pulling on his pipe. He had had the wall between his old study and the drawing room removed in the spring to accommodate his growing library. Looking around, he felt a familiar tinge of guilt creeping up his spine. Edith had encouraged this expansion, and the rambling old house was certainly no less rambling as a result. Still, he fought regularly with what some modern thinkers were calling the ego, but what he knew as pride and selfishness. Edith accused him of going obsessively to confession. Perhaps she was right. He loved his books; alas, and the pleasure they gave him, and therein lay the rub.
    He knew that Edith, an orphan like him, had been abandoned by the little family and few friends she had extant when she converted to Catholicism before their marriage; that the one, perhaps the only, source of true joy in her life was her children. And him, if he might dare think it. She did love him, he was certain. And he loved her, so much so that his mind always turned to Edith, the beauty he met when she was nineteen and he only sixteen, as the model for a half-elven, half-human princess he was beginning to describe in the book he was writing. A book he had turned to with renewed energy when he returned from his travels in Germany the year before.
    He neatly stacked the pages of this book that he had written that afternoon, sharpened the pencil he was using, and placed it on the top page of the manuscript on his desk, his ritual for ending his writing for the day. Sitting back, he listened to the sounds of his home—the clatter of china and silverware as Edith and Priscilla set the dining room table, the soft whirring of the lawnmower as John pushed it back and forth across the front lawn, the muted chugging of the model railway he had built for Michael and Christopher in an empty bedroom upstairs. Don’t touch the wiring, he had admonished them, but who really knew what penetrated the heads of eighteen and fourteen-year-old boys.
Don
’
t blow the house up
might have been the thing to say.
    He had written all throughout the late summer day, relishing the presence of all of the Tolkiens under one roof, not minding the least the one or two times Edith had come into his study to jiggle a window that was stuck. It was a hot, humid day, and she wanted as much air as was possible circulating in the house, especially in his study where pipe smoke tended to gather in the corners. He was about to relight his pipe, but decided against it when he heard her footsteps approaching.
    “Dear one,” Tolkien said, when Edith appeared before him, wiping her hands on her apron.
    “Ronald.”
    “None other.”
    “Arlie Cavanagh is here.”
    “Arlie Cavanagh?”
    “To see you.”
    Silence. Then Tolkien said, “I was going to take Chris to see the Cheltenham Flyer on Saturday.”
    “Today’s Thursday. Surely…”
    “My dear Edith, you know what happened the last time Arlie appeared out of thin air.”
    “Oh, Ronald. He’s probably just stopping to say hello. Shall I…?”
    “Of course. Send him in.”
    Edith nodded, then said,