On wings of devotion, p.8
On Wings of Devotion, page 8
The smile faded. This was more than a spark. This was her whole life’s plans going up in flames. “I apologized for taking out my anger on you when I was eleven. I must confess I don’t feel so inclined today.”
Another shift of his eyes, but this time they simply dropped to the bloodied handkerchief still in his hands. “What did he tell you?”
“What his mother told him. That his sister is with child, and the babe is yours. Will you deny it?” She leaned back in her chair, wanting to see his body language as well as his face.
His shoulders sagged. All the answer she needed.
Her own nose ached, as if she were the one who’d just taken two fists to it. Blasted tears, threatening her again. She drew in a long breath to tame them. Something she’d practiced for the last fifteen years and perfected in the last four. No crying in the wards—that was the hospital matron’s first rule, and one with which Ara heartily agreed. “I only ever asked you for three things, Edmund. Honesty, fidelity, and a family someday.”
“I know.” Torment clawed at his voice. Should that soothe her? Should she be glad he was clearly distressed by his own choices? He raked the curls off his forehead and forced his gaze up again. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, Ara. Please know that. I never wanted to hurt you, never wanted to betray you. I didn’t set out to do so. I wasn’t just seeking my own pleasure, like some of the chaps do. I just . . . you’ve met her?”
His face changed even with that roundabout mention of her. A light in his eyes, a brightening.
Arabelle wanted to curl into a ball to ward it off. She nodded. “She’s a sweet young lady.”
“She’s friends with the wife of one of the other officers. We met about a year ago, I suppose, but we didn’t . . . I mean, I never tried . . .” He blew out a breath and lifted a hand to rub at his nose in the way he always did, only to wince away from his own fingers at the first brush. “This is blighted awkward.”
She dug her fingers into her legs. “Don’t think you have to spare my delicate sensibilities, Brax. I’m a nurse to an ever-rotating ward full of injured servicemen. My sensibilities have long since been numbed. Obviously you were attracted to her.”
His cheeks actually flushed. “It’s not the sordid details I’m trying to avoid discussing. It’s that . . .”
Her heart twisted. “You fell in love with her.”
He stretched forward and caught up one of her hands. “I didn’t mean to do so—didn’t want to do so. I denied it for so long, determined to be true. I suppose that’s why, when it got the better of me, I forgot myself so fully.”
She stared at his fingers on hers. He’d held her fingers like that when he’d proposed, when he’d slipped his grandmother’s ring onto one of them. But other than that, he’d never really touched her. Never even a hand to her back to guide her into a room.
“You have a choice to make.” She’d already thought out each of the words she had to say to him. Already devised the test that would determine what she did tomorrow when she got back to London. She didn’t tug her fingers free, though she wanted to. Just concentrated on keeping her back straight, her chin at that strong angle, and her eyes locked on his. “You can marry me—a friend who perhaps someday you may come to love—and save Middlegrove. Or you can marry Cassandra—the woman you love, whose future you’ve put in jeopardy, who is having your child—and risk your home. The decision is yours.”
Obviously a question he’d been mulling over since Cassandra told him the news, given his initial responses to the Camden family. But perhaps it had been shock and fear that had made him refuse their pleas then.
Because now he scarcely even blinked. Just squeezed her hand and gave her that sad, let-her-down-easy smile. “I’m sorry, Ara. I am. But I won’t be any more unfair to you than I’ve already been. You deserve more than a husband who’s given his heart to another. More than one only after your inheritance.”
Her smile was no doubt every ounce as sad as his. And a few pounds more sardonic. “It isn’t about me.” It never was. “It’s about her. As it should be at this point.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Go. Tell her you mean to make her your wife. She’s in the library.”
First he leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I know I can’t make this up to you. But if ever you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask. Please.”
What she needed was a family of her own. The one thing he couldn’t give now. She put on her practiced smile and nodded. “I know you’re a friend when I need one.”
He squeezed her fingers again. And then was gone. Out the door as swiftly as the wind, in search of the girl he loved.
She gusted out a long breath.
“What exactly was that? I thought you said the engagement was over whether he agreed or not.”
She jumped at the voice, blaming her overly loud exhale for her lack of attention. Though it could well have been her mental distraction that kept her from hearing the step of Phillip Camden as he’d entered the room and come to scowl at her.
Shouldn’t he be thanking her? Perhaps such words weren’t in Black Heart’s vocabulary. All of a sudden the day seemed to have stretched on forever and weighed heavy on her limbs. She just wanted a quiet place. Some darkness. The leisure to cry. “We value more dearly what we choose freely, Major.” She nodded toward the empty door. “I simply gave him the opportunity to choose Cassandra.”
Camden grunted and sat in the chair his mother had occupied earlier, beside the hearth. She’d never have thought he could look so at home in a room like this. It was all soft colors and feminine touches and well-loved, well-lived-in comfort. Whereas he was all sharp angles and male arrogance and hard edges.
Yet he looked perfectly at home in his mother’s chair. So comfortable that he had no qualms about narrowing his eyes at her. “And if he’d made the wrong choice?”
Her fingers wanted to dig into her legs again, but she resisted. Brax hadn’t noticed such a thing, but she had a feeling Camden would. “Then he’d have found his selfishness netted him nothing.”
But he’d made the right choice. It hurt her, but it was still the right choice. Which meant he’d netted everything.
She stood, holding herself upright by sheer will. “Excuse me. Your mother said she had a room where I could tidy up.” And fall apart in peace.
7
London had seemed lovely six months ago. Of course, six months ago it had been August, the height of summer. Diellza tugged her coat tighter and pulled her hat a little lower. The snows of Switzerland had changed to a decidedly English rain during her trip, but somehow it didn’t feel any warmer here than it had in Zürich.
A man jostled her from behind, but she didn’t react other than to catch her balance. The last thing she wanted to do was draw any attention to herself in this particular line. Not the official’s attention, and not the attention of any of the other passengers who had just disembarked with her and now stood waiting to be given entrance into the country.
Or sent away.
She told herself she had no reason to be nervous. They wouldn’t find the secret compartments of her three trunks; they wouldn’t realize she had anything suspicious with her.
“Next.”
The couple in front of her moved onward, and the official motioned her forward. Diellza pasted on a smile and offered her passport.
He took it with the air of a man who did this exact task thousands of times a week and flipped it open. Looked at the photo. Looked at her.
Don’t hold your breath. You have no reason to be nervous. She and Friede had always looked nearly identical. She’d taken care to style her hair the way her sister had done for the grainy little photograph. She’d used her kohl to paint a mole into the place where Friede had one, just above her left eyebrow. This low-grade civil servant surely wouldn’t question her.
His eyes moved to the words, and he made a note in the ledger open before him. Even without really looking, her mind interpreted each line and curve that he wrote. Friede Boschert. He made a few more notes, but she looked away with careful disinterest.
“Purpose of your visit, Mrs. Boschert?”
She glanced back to the man again and put on a smile, at half its usual brightness. “I have come to stay awhile with my cousin in Essex. She needs help with her little ones.”
“Cousin’s name?”
“Marie Miller.” She had no idea to whom the name really belonged, but it had been the one on the sheet of paper Alwin had told her to memorize. A Swiss native who had married an Englishman just before the war, the words had said. Presumably if they looked into it, they would find truth enough to appease them.
He made another note. “Length of stay?”
“A month. Just until after the new babe is settled.” She offered another smile, as if the thought of squalling infants and fussy toddlers made her knees turn to pudding.
Friede has a fussy toddler and a squalling infant who now will never know their Mutter.
She blinked the thought away.
The official stamped Friede’s otherwise empty passport and handed it back with a bored smile. “Have a pleasant visit, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” She tucked the booklet back into her handbag and stepped through even as the man called out, “Next!”
Phew. Her hands had the slightest tremor in them, but that was easy enough to hide as she clipped her way through the crowd to where the train’s baggage compartment was being unloaded. Her trunks were already on the platform, one of them open as a uniformed man poked through them.
There were other men doing the same to other trunks. No cause for alarm. Still, she would have liked to snap at him to get his paws off her things. Instead she waited calmly until he closed the trunk’s lid and refastened it. He’d not found any of the hidden compartments, given that he casually moved on to the next group of luggage.
Diellza caught the eye of a scrawny-looking stevedore who couldn’t be more than fourteen and motioned him toward her trunks.
The adolescent loped over with a hopeful-puppy smile. “Can I help you, miss?”
“Yes, please.” She handed him the slip of paper she’d already prepared. “Could you deliver my trunks to this direction?”
“Aye.”
She didn’t stick around to supervise. According to the information Alwin had provided, her new boardinghouse would close its doors for the night within the hour, and she didn’t fancy being locked out.
She knew which tube line she needed to get there and the stop at which she should get off. Still, by the time she stepped back into the chilly rain, darkness had crept over the city. The neighborhood wasn’t exactly dismal, but it wasn’t exactly not. She put up her umbrella and hurried along as fast as her pumps allowed, searching each building she passed for the glint of tin numbers.
Finally, there it was. She hurried up the doorstep and rang the bell, willing the landlady to answer promptly. Her shaking now had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with the wet and the cold.
After an eternity—or perhaps half a minute—the door opened. Diellza blinked at the onslaught of light and tried to make out features rather than silhouette.
“Yes? Come in, please.” The woman stepped to the side and motioned her in. “Oh, you poor dear. You’re all wet. Are you by chance Mrs. Boschert?”
Diellza shook the rain off her brolly as she lowered it and then stepped inside. Good thing she’d once practiced answering to that surname when she thought it was she who would marry Max someday. She smiled and nodded. “Mrs. Humbird?”
The woman closed the door behind her. “That’s right. The telegram from your brother said I ought to expect you this evening. Are you hungry? I saved supper for you.”
Diellza sagged a bit in her soggy shoes. The woman looked to be only in her forties, her hair a vibrant blond and her face scarcely lined. She was beautiful, if a bit faded. Tired-looking and thin, but not sour-faced. “Supper would be lovely.”
“Your belongings?”
“I hired a stevedore to deliver them.”
“Very good.” Mrs. Humbird held out a hand. “Let me hang up your coat, and then I’ll show you to your room. Do you mind eating in the kitchen? It’s warmer there, and the dining room has been set for breakfast already.”
“That will do just fine.” She’d acclimated her ears again to English on the train, but it still felt a bit odd on her tongue. She knew she had a slight accent—and a German accent in England was a dangerous thing right now. But generally any discomfort was alleviated when she let it be known she was Swiss. “It was a long journey from Zürich.”
“A journey I know well.” The lady nodded toward the wall.
Diellza looked over and blinked at the framed photograph. The Grossmünster—one of the city’s most recognized cathedrals—with a beaming Mrs. Humbird in front of it, on the arm of a handsome man who looked about her age. The mister of the Humbirds, were she to guess. Who looked decidedly British. But seeing the woman on that backdrop . . . “Are you Swiss as well?”
Mrs. Humbird laughed and hung Diellza’s dripping jacket on the coat-tree. “That is how your brother found me—we’ve a few mutual friends, it seems. Did he not mention it?”
Her “brother” mentioned only what he thought she absolutely needed to know, apparently. But then, she hadn’t been any more interested in extraneous conversation during their few hours together than he had been. Diellza shook her head. “If he did, I missed it. I do tend to ignore half of what he says.”
Her hostess kept on chuckling. “A sister’s prerogative. This way, dear. Only up one flight.”
The woman chatted a bit about her last boarder—Penny, who had just married her sweetheart while he was home on leave and was now to live with his mum and help with the smaller children—but she didn’t seem to expect any responses. Which was good, because exhaustion was setting in, and English was always harder to speak when she was tired. Though she could probably use German with her landlady if she was also from Switzerland.
More a warning than a welcome. It meant her every mumble would be understood.
“Here we are.” Mrs. Humbird fitted a key into a door, swung it open, and held out the key. “I’ll go over the house rules after you’ve eaten. Nothing one wouldn’t expect. I think you’ll like the other girls—you’ll meet them at breakfast, I imagine.”
Diellza stepped into the room. It was dark, but she turned the lights up and looked about. It reminded her a bit of the bedroom she’d once shared with Friede. A quilt on the bed that had probably been stitched by somebody’s mother or grandmother, cheerful little sprigs of violets on the walls, a few shelves, a deep armoire, a wash basin and pitcher on a stand in the corner.
“Lavatory and bath are just down the hall here—you’ll share with two other girls.”
That was no worse than her flat in Zürich. And though no doubt one of the rules would forbid male visitors, she wouldn’t have to resort to entertaining on this trip anyway, so it hardly mattered. “It is perfect. Thank you.”
Mrs. Humbird gave her directions to the kitchen and then left her to tidy up. She could only do so much without her trunks, but she felt a bit better when she made her way to the cozy kitchen and quite revived after the bowl of hot soup. The stevedore arrived at the garden door while she was eating, so after her meal she could settle in in earnest.
Not having seen any of the other girls yet nor determined where, exactly, Mr. Humbird might be—away at war? Was he even alive?—she set about unpacking.
Perhaps someday, when Alwin had taken her to Germany, she’d have a maid again to do such tasks for her. That was a happy thought. Someone else could hang and fold and roll, and she could curl up before the fire with a fashion magazine while Alwin read a book. She let the image float her away for a moment before her fingers brushed against the false bottom of the trunk.
Her gaze darted to the armoire. There was nowhere in there she could hide her secrets. But she could claim she wanted to keep the biggest of the steamer trunks out of the attic to use as a table. It would fit there, against the wall.
She emptied the smaller trunks and opened their false walls. Took out the two metal tubes—one short, one long—from the one, the two corresponding wooden pieces from the other. Opened the bottom of the largest trunk and slid the sets into place beside the action.
For a moment she just stared at the cold metal. Her father’s handiwork. His design, made especially for her. He’d made this piece himself back in her competition days, laboring with love over each scroll of metal, each coat of varnish, going over the mechanism again and again to make sure it was smooth and perfect. That with a few clicks, she could change out the barrels, the stocks, for whichever purpose she pleased.
This was the closest she’d been to him in years. She knew the lines of metal so much better than she knew the ones in his face these days.
She reached back into the hidden compartments and gathered the accessories too. The stripper clip that would feed the weapon from the top. The cleaning kit. The tools Vater had taught her to use to fix any problems she might have. Then she ran a hand over the polished wood of the rifle stock. “My old friend,” she whispered in German. The one thing she’d taken with her when she left home. The one thing she couldn’t bear to part with.
The one thing that her father had ever labored over for her.
She shut it into the shadows, put a few items that wouldn’t fit into the armoire into the trunk itself, and scooted the trunk against the wall.
Vater might be able to disown her. But he couldn’t make her unlearn all he’d taught her. No matter what he said, she was still the daughter of Switzerland’s premier gun manufacturer.
And with that gun in her hands, she was still one of the best shots in Europe.
