Chapter 12: : Chapter 11

Tension from a myriad of disquieting possibilities pulled at Charles’s face as he lifted the knocker on the door of the granite cottage. But Mélanie also caught a spark of schoolboy anticipation in his eyes at the reunion with his old friend. Giles McGann meant a great deal to him. And yet until McGann’s name had appeared on the list she had decoded, Charles had never mentioned McGann to his wife.

The clang of the iron knocker on the deal planks echoed through the damp morning air. Mélanie glanced round the short expanse of garden between the house and the road beyond. Someone had taken care in laying it out, but now weeds spilled over the beds of primroses and wood anemones and sprang up between the cobblestones that formed the path to the house.

Charles clanged the knocker again and called out, ‘Giles.’

The word echoed in the fog-choked air. Charles frowned and without further speech walked round to the back of the cottage. The spreading branches and spiky needles of a Scots pine half hid the back door, lower and narrower than at the front. Charles knocked and called McGann’s name again. When another minute passed with no answer, he felt about on the ledge above the doorframe and retrieved a tarnished key.

Mélanie followed him into a stone-floored kitchen. Copper pans glinted on the walls in the murky light, but no aroma of recently prepared food lingered in the air. Instead the room had a musty smell, as though it were some time since a fire had been kindled or the windows opened. She touched her fingers to the deal table. A film of dust showed on the French gray of her glove.

Charles pushed open the kitchen door and went into a narrow hall, calling McGann’s name. He opened a door off the hall onto a sitting room, crossed to the window, and pushed back the faded print curtains to let in the fitful morning light Bookshelves lined the room, crowded with books of all shapes and sizes, stuck in at odd angles and stacked crosswise to make the most of the space. Not unlike Charles’s study at home.

His gaze roamed over the bookshelves, the smoke-blackened fire grate, a fire screen so faded it was impossible to tell what it depicted, a tarnished brass ink pot and penknife on the writing desk against the far wall. Each one seemed to hold a story. Part of the tapestry of memories of which Mélanie knew nothing.

A book lay open on a three-legged table beside a threadbare velvet wing-back chair. A candlestick with dried wax pooled round the pewter base and a glass stood beside the book. Mélanie crossed to the table and held the glass to the light. Sediment crusted the bottom, and it still had a faint, nutty whiff of port.

She showed the glass to Charles. ‘It’s dried,’ she said. ‘It’s been here for days. Perhaps longer.’

Charles grimaced. ‘McGann’s never been the tidiest housekeeper. But—’

He went back into the hall and quickly climbed the steps to the first floor. Mélanie followed him into the bedroom at the head of the stairs. The oak bed was made up, the quilt and sheet turned back, a faded blue wool dressing gown tossed over the foot of the bed. As though in readiness for the occupant. Save that there was a film of dust on the linens as well.

Fear gathering in his eyes, Charles opened the scarred doors of the wardrobe to reveal a full set of clothes.

He touched his fingers to the frayed gray wool of a coat, as though trying to conjure memories of the man who had worn it. ‘If he left of his own free will, his departure was abrupt. Perhaps—’

They both went still. A creak had sounded from the floor above that had nothing to do with the stirring of wind. Charles moved toward the door. She followed, holding her sarcenet skirts taut, sliding her half-boots over the floorboards with as little noise as possible.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor, testing the treads to avoid telltale squeaks. They hadn’t brought their pistols with them. A mistake, perhaps, but experience had taught that weapons could create as many problems as they solved.

The second-floor landing opened onto a corridor shrouded in shadows. Heavy worsted curtains were drawn over the windows, letting in only meager light. Doors opened on either side of the corridor. Charles jerked his head toward the door to the left. Mélanie flattened herself against the curtains, ready to spring on anyone fleeing from the room.

Charles turned the door handle, eased the door open, and stepped into the room. He disappeared out of her line of sight. Silence followed. Her senses keyed to the room beyond, she scarcely registered the stir of the curtains at her back. Not until an arm closed round her throat and she felt the press of a knife against her ribs.

‘Don’t look round, whatever you do,’ a voice said in her ear. ‘Just stand still while I go down the stairs, and you have nothing to fear.’

Mélanie went limp in her attacker’s hold. He stumbled beneath the force of her weight. She caught his wrist and twisted away from him just as Charles lunged through the open doorway and came to a frozen stop. His eyes blazed with fear and fury, then narrowed. ‘Belmont, you reprobate. Get the bloody hell away from my wife.’

The Honorable Thomas Belmont, second son of the Earl of Lovel, put up a hand and straightened the intricate muslin folds of his cravat. ‘You really ought to keep a better eye on her, old boy. You never can tell who may be skulking behind the curtains. My profoundest apologies, Mélanie.’

Mélanie righted her bonnet. ‘You’re getting shockingly lazy, Tommy. You should have known I could get away from such a commonplace neck hold.’

‘Not one of my more shining moments.’ Tommy leaned back against the faded curtains and gave Mélanie the smile he’d given her while waltzing with her in an embassy ballroom; while she was bandaging a knife cut in his arm in an Andalusian bam; while he sighted down a rifle barrel in the Cantabrian Mountains. ‘I don’t suppose you’d believe I came to Scotland for the fishing?’

‘Yes, actually,’ Charles said. ‘But not the sort of fishing one does in a lake or a stream. I take it Castlereagh sent you?’

‘Not exactly a brilliant deduction, Charles, considering we both used to work for the man.’

‘And you still do.’ Charles’s gaze was as hard as the knife Tommy had pressed to Mélanie’s side.

Tommy grimaced. ‘He’d skin me alive if he knew I was talking to you. He warned me not to let you know I was here. He said you’d be difficult, which was a bit redundant—you’re always bloody difficult.’

‘Which is why you put a knife to Mélanie’s ribs and tried to make your escape.’

‘Should have known it wouldn’t work. But I had to at least make an effort.’

Charles folded his arms across his chest. ‘Last we heard you were in Paris.’

‘I still am, officially.’ Tommy looked from Charles to Mélanie, much like Colin when he’d been caught climbing on a chair to peek into drawers that were supposed to be off limits. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Fraser, stop it with the damned high-handed expression. It was tiresome before we were a year into the war. I agree that explanations are called for, but perhaps we could go downstairs? I think I saw a bottle of port in the sitting room. I don’t know about the two of you, but I could do with a drink.’

They trooped downstairs in silence. Charles produced three chipped glasses from a dresser in the corner, dusted them with his handkerchief, and poured out the port. Change the surroundings slightly and they might have been in the embassy library in Lisbon. Or sitting round a campfire in the Spanish mountains on the way to meet a contact or deliver a document.

‘Quite like old times.’ Tommy dropped down on the settee. ‘Charles poking his nose into inconvenient places and asking awkward questions and annoying our superiors and generally making life hellish for those of us who just like to get the job done and get on with the dancing and drinking.’

‘Questions are awkward only when you find the answers inconvenient, Belmont.’

‘Damned right I find them inconvenient. You have a tiresome habit of forgetting whom we’re fighting.’

‘An interesting argument, coming from a man who just held a knife on my wife.’

‘You know bloody well I’d never have—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, you two.’ Mélanie clunked her glass down on a three-legged table. ‘Stop behaving as though you’re on the playing fields of Harrow.’

Charles leaned against the drinks table. ‘Where’s McGann?’

Tommy’s gaze darted over his face. ‘You mean you don’t know, either?’

‘Mélanie and I just got here.’

‘So did I.’ Tommy took a sip of port. His face was leaner than Mélanie remembered, sun-weathered and set with lines that sat oddly with his boyish insouciance and white-blond hair. ‘I suppose now we all dance about trying to figure out who knows what.’

‘Or we could just make it easy and try telling the truth.’ Charles watched his former fellow diplomat with a steady, appraising gaze.

‘The truth? Good Lord, Charles, what have we come to? Still, I suppose trying something new always has a certain piquancy.’ Tommy gave the sort of disarming smile that had been setting hearts aflutter in diplomatic ballrooms ever since he was first posted abroad as an attaché. It didn’t, of course, mean he intended to tell anything remotely close to the truth. ‘I’m sorry about Francisco Soro,’ he added. ‘I never quite trusted the man, but I know he was a friend of yours.’

Mélanie’s gaze went involuntarily to her husband’s face, as Charles’s went to her own.

‘Oh, yes, I know about Soro,’ Tommy said. ‘I know most of what you know, I think.’

‘Is that why Castlereagh sent you here?’ Charles asked. ‘Because of Soro?’

‘Indirectly.’ Tommy crossed his legs. The light from the window picked out a film of dust on the gleaming leather of his Hessians. ‘I’ve been involved in investigating something in Paris for some time now.’

‘Something?’

‘A spy ring of sorts. A ring of former Bonapartist officers. Called the Elsinore League, of all things. We haven’t been able to determine exactly what they’re up to, but we suspect it’s something serious. Soro seems to have gone to work for them when he came to France.’

‘So Castlereagh told me,’ Charles said, neglecting to comment on whether or not he believed the Foreign Secretary.

Tommy nodded. ‘We have a couple of men infiltrated into the Elsinore League, or at least the league’s outer circle. We thought we were finally on to something.’

‘We?’

Tommy met his gaze for a moment. ‘Castlereagh had me running the operation. It’s gone on for several months now.’

‘Since before I left Paris.’

‘Yes.’ Tommy smoothed a crease from the glossy blue superfine of his sleeve. ‘No one can be involved in everything, Charles. Not even you.’

‘And my sympathies have been considered a bit too Bonapartist since the war.’

‘You said it, old boy, I didn’t.’ Tommy took another sip of port. ‘If Castlereagh told you that much, he must have told you Soro apparently reached the point where he couldn’t stomach the group’s activities. I always thought he was too soft for his own good, though I could never tell which way he’d break. He came to England, probably with evidence against his former associates. He sought you out. He trusted you.’

‘Which may have been a fatal mistake on his part. I didn’t do a very good job of protecting him.’ Charles’s fingers whitened round his glass. ‘You followed Soro to England?’

‘No. I came because we’d stumbled across evidence linking the Elsinore League to contacts in Britain.’

Charles’s shoulders straightened, an involuntary sign of quickening interest. ‘Go on.’

Tommy ran his finger over a chip in his glass. ‘Why did you come to see Giles McGann today?’

‘Why did you?’

‘Here we go again. This circling round really is tiresome. I’m guessing you were doing more than simply calling on an old friend. But I don’t think you quite realize what McGann was involved in, Charles.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘One of the members of the Elsinore League, a Colonel Coroux, hanged himself in his cell in the Conciergerie three weeks ago.’

Charles gave a quite brilliant impression of never having heard of Colonel Coroux. ‘You’re sure it was suicide?’

‘We’re bloody well not sure of anything. My agents bribed the jailer to give them a quarter-hour to search the cell. They didn’t find any evidence of foul play. But they did find some papers hidden in the straw in Coroux’s mattress. Part of a list. Judging by the jottings, it looked like something he’d decoded. Or encoded. It seemed to be some sort of network.’ Tommy looked up at Charles, his blue eyes hard as tempered steel. ‘Giles McGann’s name was on the list.’

Charles’s eyes widened. Given what they already knew, Mélanie thought some of the surprise in his gaze was feigned. ‘What the hell would a Scots farmer have to do with a ring of former Bonapartist officers?’

Tommy shifted his position on the frayed tapestry settee. ‘Castlereagh didn’t tell you the whole story. A number of the members of the Elsinore League are former Bonapartist officers, that’s true. But we think the group itself is far older than Waterloo. Older even than Bonaparte’s regime. We’ve traced it back to the early days of the Revolution.’ He rested his arm along the back of the settee. ‘McGann had sympathies with the Revolution, didn’t he?’

‘I could name you a dozen MPs of whom one could say the same.’

‘Fair enough. Perhaps if McGann had been in Parliament he’d have expressed his views in that way. Instead he seems to have been acting as a sort of courier for this group, relaying messages and supplies. Holding things in safekeeping for them.’

Charles folded his arms. ‘That’s a good story. But I’ve heard a lot of good stories lately.’

‘Christ, Charles, are you going to take Soro’s word over mine?’

‘Do you really have to ask me that?’

‘Given our history? No, I suppose not. You’ve always been quick to trust anyone other than those in authority.’

‘Francisco’s been at least as honest with me in the past as you have.’

Tommy sat forward, hands gripping his knees. ‘Damn it, Charles, Castlereagh would skin me alive—’

‘I can think of a number of situations where that hasn’t stopped you.’

‘You know as well as I do there isn’t always proof—’

‘If there’s no proof, I don’t see how you can be certain of your claims, either.’

Tommy grimaced, swore, and knocked back the remainder of his port. Finally, he pulled a paper from inside his jacket. ‘I found this locked away in a box in your friend McGann’s writing desk.’

Charles took the paper, glanced at it, and went still. Without speech, he held the paper out to Mélanie.

McGann, I have a delivery for you.

In place of a signature, it bore a stamp in red ink, as from a signet ring. Not the castle of the Elsinore League, but a small picture of a falcon.

‘Do you recognize it?’ Charles asked Mélanie, his voice without a hint of betraying inflection.

She studied the crimson image. ‘It seems as though I should, but—no.’

He took the paper back and stared down at it. Fear flickered in his eyes for a moment, sharp and wounding. ‘Have you heard of Le Faucon de Maulévrier?’