Jane in the audit office.  Brilliantly evoked office ambiance, including typical office politics & idling by raindrop racing.  Actually 'Jane in The Audit Office' could be a title of one of those books (not Enid Blyton exactly, but you know what I mean, full of spies, secret tunnels etc)....  Goes with that film scenario I mentioned in the previous chapter's DFL comments.

There is something special about auditing and fiscal inspecting that i'm catching on to.  It seems to symbolise something deeper, e.g.:

<<"That's part of it.  We need to consider a range of questions.  How much goes to the troops involved in the thick of the fight?  How much to support troops?  How much to those who will restore and keep order after the conquest?  The matter is very complicated.  Take the support troops, for instance.  Some, like the artillery, should have finished their work as soon as the city surrenders.  Others, such as the baggage and supply trains, will continue indefinitely.  The battle for a major city raises a lot of fiscal questions.">>

And the dusty audit documents archives – the dust and the mud outside when Jane goes on an errand for cleaning fluid etc, and the subterfuge of swamp fever by a Nurse visiting the office (spoiler alert!).  The aura of old-fashionedness  is paradoxically seen from within an assumed far future setting and  gives this novel so far a unique flavour that only your actual reading of it can give a clue as to itself.

Jane's relatively young age becoming more significant as well as questionable from outside as well as inside the plot....

Office politics morphs into deeper politics. Codes. Madge's tea trolley. Unrepeatable offers. The ethos of deceptions. The 'Jacqui Blood' books – popular literature not a million miles away from 'Jane' itself, except perhaps without the Sapphic moments of love?  Whatever the case, this all continues to be compelling reading.

Nerve-wracking = Isn't 'nerve-racking' strictly correct?

Typos:

come of think of it

Unwilling to add any money of own

Jane and Nicola, with Jane's return home, old school friends and fiscal inspectors both, exchange (over rosehip tea in a tearoom) girly chat (re fashion and Skirt City where they live and jingles and ballads) as well as gossip regarding Jane's trip to Essex (about which Nicola initially feels jealous) – and hints about Jane's liaisons not only with Modesty Clay but with the Empress herself (following the sweaty tennis match) – and intrigue and spies.  Much of the ambiance reminds me of nineteen-forties black and white morale-boosting films that contemporaneously depicted wartime in England involving enemy spies etc....

<<" Forget the cheese and beetroot," I amended my order.  "Make that two egg sandwiches, both eggs fried solid in beef dripping.  Thickly sliced, thickly buttered, crusty bread.">>

By contrast with above, the ostensibly chaste relationship of these two girls is brought into focus: chasteness and nostalgia and well-being and growing maturity of observation of those younger (and, indeed, of those, like their respective mothers, older) than themselves, with later implications (over whiskey in the wood) of future non-chasteness between them.

<<"The trunk we're sitting on must have still been a tree when we were little.  But – no – the wood doesn't seem much different.  And we're still loony.  I hope we always are."  She sounded slightly sad.>>

=================

Jane Brewster goes home to her Mum, along with two coachwomen, including one called Daisy

"This was the Daisy the coachwoman" – omit the first 'the?

Much mother / daughter homeliness as well as home truths, some home truths more subtle than others, beautifully depicted, mainly in dialogue.

It is as if both characters are holding back secrets from each other. Jane acts as if she's been on the 'Big Brother' tv show and ashamed if her Mother had seen her actions on it. But it's much more serious than that, and more touching.  I sense the Mother knows more than she's letting on. That there is a skein of random truth and fiction in synchronisation.  We only have a feeling of omniscience via Jane.  Omniscience via signs more subtle than this world's semaphore system.

Play on the word 'modesty'. And the name Brewster is discussed, vis a vis the past. Not Jane's father's name.

Cream cakes. Songs and ballads with inner meanings. Reference to her Mother's possible past connections with Modesty and someone called Lisa-Louise.

Her Mum is homely, but well-educated and 'this plot's past'-experienced.

 Matters discussed skirting guilt, espionage, tell-tale love-bites on Jane. Her Mother not for one second believing these are from a man but from a woman.

 Double entendres.  And a lot else to be mined by the careful or careless reader alike. All conveying much as well as little, and you will only know what I mean if you read this remarkable literature. All artfully done, as judged by my own well-experienced, if sometimes constructively clumsy, sense of literariness.

This passage below is telling as well as hinting at an omniscience in hindsight from the future!

<<"You're right, Jane.  War is always terrible."

This remark had me shivering, but for a moment I couldn't think why.  Then it came to me that Mum had spoken the first half of what my spymistress would say to me – War is always terrible, but peace can be worse. >>

 =================

First Entr'acte

 Although that is the name of this section, there is much meaty plot-moving, a bombardment of incidents and names, evocatively conveyed through passages of honed prose and dialogue. After a tearful farewell to Modesty, I could actually sense with many senses the sea trip, the sea battle, the sea-sickness, the subsequent ceremony.  I wallowed in the emerging Imperial politics, the description of the Empress who takes more than just a simple fancy to our fiscal inspector heroine.  I trust some of these machinations will become clearer, particularly the 'gynogenesis' procedure and how the Empress' daughter is here being set up as a  major player in this magnum opus of great literature later?  I'm confused, but nicely confused. Jane is, too, because she seems to be already known by the Empress and somehow full of some unknown destiny.

The Sapphic urges continue to be majored upon, even to the extent of priming Jane for the Empress with a sweaty game of tennis. 

I am now going to surrender the desire to quote passages that please me (both prose and dialogue) because there are far too many.  You must do yourself a favour and read everything for yourself.  I shall occasionally pick out a passage here or there that I think conveys something special I've spotted, for example the generality derived from this passage:

"Whilst parting from my lover would certainly return to haunt me; that was yesterday's and tomorrow's affair.  My shipboard sense of belittlement had fallen to third place in the ranking of my immediate concerns."

seems to convey some core of ethos important to 'immediate concerns', and anything else being someone else's business?  Not hedonism alone, but a thrusting living of life for the moment.  The politics, for example, swirling around do just that – swirl around immediate concerns.  The reader need not trouble his or her 'pretty head' further?

"Never throw into the wind."

Should that be 'throw up'?

manoeuvred:

there seems more than one variant spelling of this word in this section, i.e. also without the 'o'.

Captain Muriel Young:

Does she have a Pussy Cat Willum? (joke).

The essentral matriarch code: essential?

Three riders are seen to approach the camp and, while inexplicably ('each slid her hood backwards')anticipated to be female, once revealed, they are much younger (and well-descriptively more beautiful) than expected.

The results of Jane's liaison with Modesty seem to be the investigative goal of these riders.  Innovatively concerned with legends or ballads and posterity, I soon gather.

And the accuracy of Jane's audit. All grist to he investigation's mill.  Intriguing stuff, played out as I write these thoughts down in real-time.

The plot thickens even as it clarifies:

"And," Susan added, "we have already remarked that Modesty is the subject of ballads.  The matter is very delicate.  It seems strange that a young and inexperienced girl was selected for the task.  Again we need to ask why.  I believe, Jane, that you were chosen for this mission by Coral Frobisher."

The investigators seem to know everything that has been going on.

The larger picture, not minor indiscretions, is in focus.

All concomitants are brilliantly described by the I-Narrator (with PFJ's help?) and en-dialogued.  As brilliant as the audited accounts themselves. Potentially not a ha'penny error, it seems.

Spot checks.  Almost as if we're auditing the plot with spot checks ourselves.  Or made to feel as if we are.

Then the plot itself sort of sets sails in prospect as Jane is told of her mission.

Passwords and passing-places.

There seems to be a lot going on here below the surface.  Then a clinking toast. Toast after toast

I feel entrusted with facts and figures and celebrations that I may squander through unrefined reading on my part.

But then I am reassured I may be in tune with the words' music, viz this text:

"The third toast was one I could accept with no shadow of doubt.  My glass clinked without taking thought.  It was not until the liquid reached my throat that I realised all of our enterprises would include my being reunited with Modesty some day.  Why not?  I'd arrived in her camp as a fiscal inspector, but left it as a spy.!"

A legend in the making. Jane's legend?

Is this correct: "Captain and auditor forbidden love."?

More songs and ballads. This novel really now as got a swing.

More telling dialogue between Modesty and Jane:

"I thought that next time we met, it might be on more equal terms – you as an officer, me as a spy."

"You still don't think that a fiscal inspector is as good as an army captain?"

In fact all the dialogue is natural as well as purposeful.

Some of this dialogue sounds familiar but I may be jumping ahead of myself:

"It was New Year's Eve, and the Usurper held a masked ball.  Just as midnight turned, there was a loud crash.  The spymaster fell through a large skylight to the dance floor.  He was dead, surrounded by broken glass and splintered wood.  I remember seeing a snow flake redden as it melted."

Then some reported rude language that sounded like conversation from the Big Brother reality show.  One wonders at the burgeoning plot into the equally burgeoning future as well as into the equally burgeoning past, conveyed by this long dialogue reverberating with the synchronised shards of random truth and fiction, much like showgirls in reality TV?

Leading to a beautiful passage among many other beautiful passages:

"She sounded close to tears.  Reaching out, I held her tight, lying on the damp grass, a cold breeze playing upon our near nakedness.  It seemed to me, in that moment, that I was the adult comforting she the child.  Never before had I known Modesty so vulnerable.  With an access of wisdom beyond my years, I sensed that her captain's persona masked a myriad hurts from an often painful life.  We kissed chastely, as though I were her mother.  One day, I realised, I would have a daughter – and would strive to protect her from suffering such as my lover had known."

Although 'she the child' seems a bit clumsy?

Enraptured both as reader and in perception of others' rapture at chapter's end.

As well as the generally present (so far) artful dialogue and crystalline passages of description taking the plot onward, each chapter seems to begin and to end with particular pungent atmospheric (almost) prose-poems, such as the first paragraph in this chapter:

"Bright sunlight, warm on my bare arms, shone from a sky of blue and wispy white cloud.  Geese, bustling through the marshes in huge numbers, filled the air with a honking cacophony.  The taste of a typical camp breakfast lingered in my mouth – sausages, eggs and mushrooms.  A plume of steam rose from the mug of sweetened rosehip tea, cradled in my hands.  Its honeyed scent teased my nose."

More telling onward plot in this striking passage:

"There was a sense in which Anna's imminent departure came as a relief.  My fortnight as Modesty's lover had been ecstatic, but an ecstasy mingled with aching worry.  For only brief periods could I escape a sense of our relationship as a fragile object, balanced so precariously that it might shatter with the slightest incautious breath.  The camp formed part of a larger world, and the gossiping despatch rider was not our sole peril."

I'm not sure I was before made aware (if I was, I've forgotten) that Jane is currently only 16.  This surprises me a little bearing in mind her job etc. Perhaps she is precocious.

Other characters, including talkative Becky (who replaces Anna while the latter is doing a sickie with Jill's help).Talk of healthy diet. Talk of going back into education, if Jane's sexual faux pas with Modesty should force her to quit as a accountant or book-keeper?  Going to Bluecoat Academy that is part of Jane's childhood memories.

"The surprising leniency with which we were treated left me feeling that our principal didn't like the Bluecoat Academy much more than we did."

Should that not be "much less than..."?

Modesty and her lover Jane go out on patrol on horseback. Lovely passage:

"After perhaps half an hour, and still within clear sight of the camp, we came upon a ruined village.  This place had suffered much from fire.  Blackened timbers, rising above tumbled walls, retained a strongly smoky smell.  Viewed from the cluster of tents, I had taken this for a large clump of the area's taller vegetation.  No bricks or stone – there remained too much soot to distinguish between these materials – rose above the level of my horse's withers.  The outlines of what had been were obscured by a riot of rosebay willowherb, its bright flowers and fluffy seeds lending the wreckage an almost festive air.  A broken child's doll, darkly smeared, clothed in dun-coloured rags, caught my attention.  Its blue eyes, surprisingly clear, stared vacantly.  Apart from this plaything, I was able to see no intimate memorial to the former inhabitants."

Talk of background history and a sinister 'old time godling' beginning J_____, which presumably refers to Christianity.  And a feminist ethos ('the future is female') and I admire the bravery of a head-lease author creating this I-narrator who deals with credos that may put off half the present population as a readership. :)

Build up of Modesty's character:

"My feeling was that Modesty now avoided places she knew to be the sites of slaughter or the burial of the slain."

And some more wonderful dialogue: 

"There you are!  Angels may be spotless occasionally, but more often they're dirty girls groping their way through this mucky world."

"Angel or not, May, that's what I am – a dirty girl groping her way through this mucky world.  I suppose I'm too young to have found the rules of life."

"More like, Jane, you're too young to have discovered that there are no rules."

"I wish the Ministry agreed with you, May," I said glumly – reminded that I would soon be in trouble.

More childhood memories beautifully told through dialogue etc.

Talk of the timing and details of menstruation in Modesty's camp, eg:

"You put a lot of women together and, after a few months, they… synchronise," May added.

Anna, who is about to return to the job of despatch rider after her fabricated sick leave, seems more friendly (more human) towards Jane, but there is oblique (sinister?) talk at the end (not all of which I understood) about combining the names of two horrible girls from Jane's past to at least partially create the name of Anna's replacement (Stephanie) as despatch rider. (And so were there two replacements: Becky and Stephanie? I'm left slightly confused?).

Despite a few confusions (which is because (as my wife says) I don't follow plots very easily at the best of times), this is impressive and enjoyable stuff.

=================

Links to all my JANE chapter comments:

Jane questions last night's situation where she and Modesty became, in her eyes, lovers.

Scantily dressed, she borrows Modesty' greatcoat to visit the latrine around which male soldiers were present. She remains tellingly self-conscious for a while: "the talk of the bath-house"

A lovely paragraph that tells much of Jane's personal hinterland:

"Five years earlier, or a thereabouts, the place where the centre of Berenice now stands had been little more than a village.  Nevertheless, it had a bustling Comday market.  One evening, Nicola and I had hurried there after school, delighted to find that each of us had enough money in her purse to buy a scarf.  My choice had been this yellow one, still wearing its age well in Modesty's camp – Nicola's had been red.  Stephanie Miles, at school next day, had taunted me: Jane the pain, bad speller in yeller.  Cheek! I'd replied, my spelling's better than yours any day.  Her friend, Rachel Stevens, had added: Nicola the fickler, good as dead in red.  She was probably hoping that Nicola would slap her, triggering retribution from the headmistress – fortunately, my friend kept her temper.  In spite of this, or because of it, Nicola and I had, for two or three years, adopted red and yellow as our colours.  When she had a new red cardigan or skirt, mine was sure to be yellow."

This seemed a bit clumsy: "As I went – me too burdened to prevent it – the breeze blew open my dressing gown."

Then taunting from onlookers about Jane who had shared Modesty's bedroll, with 'accountant' as a derogatory calling-name.    

But the taunters are sorry.  Their regard for Modesty, however, is more like that for a Goddess, perhaps.

later;

"Captain Clay was best part dressed, tugging on her boots, although her shirt remained unbuttoned.  Close to her feet was a bowl of washing water, its colour suggesting the removal of blood.  Anna Milton's thought that I might be having my period was certainly wrong, but I wondered whether Modesty might be having hers.  Surely, if so, I'd have noticed the night before.  No, I concluded, it had to be the bloodshed of battle."

Modesty is still amorous, to Jane's surprise:

"Please don't start crying again.  I'm not ashamed of you.  I should be proud that such a lovely young girl is interested in an old warhorse like me."

But Anna Milton the despatch rider –  to me, a sinister figure – has been witness to these goings-on...

Jane's career is therefore over? 

Modesty doesn't want Jane to be a 'caged bird' as she doesn't like caged birds.  Jane must depart, it seems. But can the departure be delayed to wring out more nights of love?

Plot (involving Jill the surgeon) to keep Anna from broadcasting the already increasing gossip of Jane and Modesty even further afield (although I couldn't see what was in it for Anna to be delayed at Camp pretending to be ill while Jill did her despatch delivering job.)

The story told in this chapter by artful dialogue and crystalline passages of description.

However, I don't like this modern 21^st century expression: "I'm so not in the space for this."

"The sun climbed towards its zenith, but remained well short – mid morning of my twelfth day in the camp.  Having made some progress with my audit, I was taking a break, pleased with myself.  This feeling the right time for another rosehip tea, I headed in the direction of the cooking tent." 

Nobody is ever in stasis. We have caught Jane Brewster at the beginning of this novel, it seems, in a sort of early-life crisis, her insecurities, her position as accountant and now, it also seems, to help with dealing with the injuries of war, her growing self-awareness of body and mind, her protocol in negotiating the people she meets, their interaction by dialogue and glance, e.g. with Modesty Clay, the army surgeon (Jill), the horse groom (Jenny) .... the initiation of sexual encounter, whisky, rain, the smell of horses and latrines, the margins of the camp, dangers .... all mixed with homely nostalgia of her childhood, her family – then brief references to more notable features and figures of the times (present and past) like someone called Nadine Next, and a city called Berenice....

"Modesty Clay and I were lovers, although I never really knew her."