Slane shifted so his shoulder was to the window once more. “Because living well is all you have. You know the truth in your heart. Live by your own standards, and let the world find theirs.”

  Adele let that idea swim about in her mind, until the three knocks plus two more came softly.

  “Stay there, I’ll get it,” she told Daniel and went over to the door and unlocked it.

  Melville tilted his head, his gaze from her shoes to her flattened, pinned hair, and everything in between.

  “You said don’t be noticed,” she pointed out.

  Melville’s florid moustache lifted on one side. “Lady Adele,” he said in acknowledgement, as he brushed past her. “Cannot sleep again, hey?”

  She locked the door once more. “Not a wink,” she confessed.

  Melville took off his overcoat and held it out to Adele.

  She put her hands in her pockets.

  Melville cleared his throat and turned to hang the coat himself. He paused, for both nails were occupied. So he moved over to the back wall and dropped the coat on the camp bed. He glanced at Daniel. “Leighton.”

  “Followed them home, came up here,” Daniel explained. He sounded very tired.

  Melville went over to Slane. “Anything to report?”

  Slane lowered the glasses. “We learned he’s made inroads into the upper levels of society. And that he’s a violent user of women. Other than that, the man hasn’t done anything suspicious at all.”

  “All this time we’ve spent watching him…it’s wasted,” Adele added.

  “It’s never a waste,” Melville told her.

  “We’re not even sure he’s a German agent,” she pointed out. “All we have is the fact that he speaks flawless English with an American accent.”

  “And he worked with me to uncover a plot to assassinate the Kaiser, here in England,” Melville reminded her.

  “That makes him a good German citizen,” Daniel said. His tone was slightly more alert. “Not an agent.”

  Slane hung the binocular glasses on the nail driven into the frame of the window and moved away from the window. After two steps, he stretched mightily, then put his hand against the small of his back and bent that way.

  He yawned and headed over to the bed and lowered himself onto it, with weary heaviness.

  Melville pushed his hands into his pockets and stared at the house. He rocked on his toes thoughtfully. “Steinhauer has worked for the Pinkerton Agency in Chicago.”

  Adele straightened from her wickedly comfortable slouch—something she could do only when she wasn’t wearing her corset. “Pinkerton? They are a detective agency.”

  “Which takes government contracts and has fingers in many international pies,” Melville said. “Steinhauer has acquired very interesting training. And he is in the Kaiser’s favor. I hardly think the Empire would send him to England to sit on his rear and play footsies with the upper crust.”

  “Put like that, I don’t think so, either,” Adele admitted. “But the man has done nothing out of the ordinary. He’s a womanizer, but so is any man, given the chance.” She didn’t give anyone a chance to dispute her. “Apart from being German, Steinhauer has done nothing to deserve this scrutiny.”

  “That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?” Melville replied. “And perhaps that is what he wants us to think.” He took the glasses off the nail and held them in one hand, still watching the gardens, below. “The problem, Lady Adele, is that you have yet to meet a very clever agent.”

  Adele laughed. “You mean all the ones we’ve come across so far are idiots?”

  “They were not highly trained,” Melville admitted. “Some of them were reluctant to do the work, or too afraid to do it properly and thoroughly.”

  Lady Winnifred, Adele thought. The seemingly innocent, very frightened girl who had taken the real Winnifred’s place in society.

  “Others were too arrogant to think they could fail, which was their downfall,” Melville added.

  Peter, Baron Stroud, an Englishman who had betrayed his country and tried to assassinate her King.

  “Still others made mistakes, which forced the Germans to hasty coverups,” Melville finished.

  She thought of the agent who had been fished from Belfast Harbour with a hole in his calf from Adele’s bullet. The Germans had not let him live to regret his errors.

  “The smart agents disguise themselves well,” Melville said. “They don’t do strange things or show erratic behavior. They live ordinary lives. They are very, very careful.”

  “No one is perfect,” Slane growled.

  “Which is why we watch Steinhauer even though it seems like a waste of time. He is perfectly placed to be a most effective agent. You said he has inveigled himself into society?”

  “He brought Lady Mary of Farnsworth home with him tonight,” Adele said.

  Melville nodded.

  “He doesn’t linger on the docks of Portsmouth, recording the movements of Navy ships,” Daniel said.

  “He has others do that for him,” Melville said. “Someone directed Johann Simons and his associate. Why not Steinhauer?”

  Slane yawned again. “You mean, because the man does nothing unnatural, we should naturally be suspicious of him?”

  “Perfectly natural behavior is the mark of a professional,” Melville replied.

  Natural. The word rolled through Adele’s mind, picking up associations and references…

  She gasped and straightened. “Natural!” she repeated.

  Melville didn’t turn away from the window, not even to put his shoulder to it so he could look at her, too. “Lady Adele?”

  Adele got to her feet, as more and more unassociated facts connected up together in her mind. “It all looked and sounded perfect natural,” she said. “So natural, we all missed it.”

  “Missed what?” Slane asked tiredly.

  “Lady Winnifred—I mean, the German girl posing as Lady Winnifred. When I pulled her from the river, she fought me. She was so afraid of “them”. She said…” Adele cast her mind back. “She said, ‘They will kill me. You don’t know them. The doctor—’ and then she went under again, and I hauled her out. We knew someone was directing her. You think it might be Steinhauer, Melville?”

  “There is a master spy out there, somewhere,” Melville said, his tone firm. “Is there a point you are trying to make, somewhere in this review?”

  “Hear her out, Melville,” Daniel said. He no longer sounded sleepy.

  “There are two more points I have to make,” Adele said crisply. “The second point is when I saw Slane’s body.” She hesitated. “I apologize for reminding you, Torin. But I was there and saw your brother.”

  “Accepted,” Slane said. He didn’t sound tired, either.

  “When I was there, I spoke to the maid who had discovered Slane. She was somewhat hysterical. I asked her if Slane was alive when she found him, and she said…’Oh, oh! Yes, he was! He begged me to fetch the doctor! Over and over.’”

  “That sounds, well—” Melville gave a harrumphing sound. “Perfectly natural,” he finished.

  “But what if she misunderstood him?” Adele said. “What if he had simply been saying over and over, ‘the Doctor, the Doctor’…?”

  “Two ‘doctors’,” Slane said softly.

  “And the third was the note in the milk bottle last month,” Adele added. “It was addressed to ‘Herr Doctor’ and we missed it because it was also perfectly natural and didn’t draw attention to itself.” She squeezed her fists tight. “This is what I have been trying to remember for over a month. I didn’t know that until just now.”

  Melville turned to consider her.

  “The spy master you think is out there is a doctor, then,” Daniel said, with deep satisfaction. “That will narrow down the list of possibilities.”

  “Not necessarily,” Melville said slowly. “It might just be a name. A code the others use to refer to him—”

  “Or her,” Adele slipped in.

  “Code names let agents avoid using real names in any communications which might be monitored or discovered,” Melville continued on, as if she had not spoken at all.

  “And all these references to doctors could be coincidental,” Slane pointed out.

  Adele wanted to scream at him. She held her teeth together.

  Melville shook his head. “Three times is too great a number to be coincidental. Lady Adele has noticed a pattern that we must investigate. For now we will work on the assumption that the man who is coordinating the agents in southern England is called the Doctor. It might be Steinhauer, and we will continue to watch him until we are satisfied he is not an agent.”

  He turned back to the window. “The Winnifred woman and her companion are being held…somewhere in England. Adele, you must question them about this Doctor and determine if there is something to the pattern that we should follow up on.”

  She jumped. “Me?”

  Melville glanced at her. “You don’t want the assignment?”

  Daniel cleared his throat. “Adele doesn’t want to work for you anymore, Melville.”

  Melville stiffened. Then he said over his shoulder. “Daniel, take over for a moment.”

  Daniel rose stiffly to his feet and moved over to the window.

  Melville turned to face Adele. “Explain this to me.”

  “Daniel is mistaken,” Adele said, her heart thundering. “I am not quitting.”

  “But you thought about it seriously enough to discuss it with these two,” Melville said. “I can’t use half-hearted people, Lady Adele.”

  Adelaide gave him a small smile. “And I agree with you that up until five minutes ago, I was half-hearted and shouldn’t continue the work.”

  “But now you’ve figured out about the Doctor, you don’t want to quit?” Daniel asked over his shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  Melville put his hands in his pockets. “Explain that to my satisfaction, please.”

  “I’m not sure I can, even to my own satisfaction,” Adele admitted. “I didn’t even know I was trying to work this out. But something got stuck in the coal cellar of my mind—”

  “Three somethings,” Slane said.

  “Three somethings, yes,” Adele said. “And I’ve been trying to put them together ever since…until just now. And now I can see that…oh, there’s someone out there I can’t quite see, and he’s…I think that, if he really is as good as you say, Melville, then I think he’s laughing at us, for our puny efforts. Until now, he was laughing because we didn’t even know he was out there, except in a theoretical way. But now we know he has a code name, that he’s real and we know people who have seen him, who may know his real name…and I want to find the bastard.”

  Daniel gasped, and Slane chuckled.

  Melville smiled a little. “You’ve been hooked.”

  “Hooked?” she asked.

  “Like a fish,” Melville said. “Most people who find their way into the work we do, do it for their country, or their families, or their wives and children. Every now and again, though, I meet someone who does it for all those reason, but also because they like it. They like the thrill of the chase, of uncovering truths that have been buried so deep, they must be recovered by chipping away at ancient stone.”

  He smiled and moved over to the bed. Slane was stretched out on it, his hands behind his head. Melville bent and picked up his coat, tumbling Slane’s legs to one side. He came back to Adele. “I have a couple of little things for you.”

  He dug in the pockets and withdrew an object, which he held out to her on the palm of his hand.

  It was a small revolver, and in the moonlight, it shone with a silvered gleam.

  “It’s not a Derringer,” Adele said. “It’s too big for that.”

  “It is a Harrington & Richardson Victor 5 Shot revolver,” Melville told her. “Point 32 caliber. You complained about the heaviness of revolvers. This one should suit you. Take it.”

  “I thought you had forgotten about that,” Adele murmured. She reached out and lifted the gun from his palm. It was light. She opened the barrel. Five bullets were loaded. She closed it and turned to aim the gun at the side wall.

  “I’ve never heard of Harrington & Richardson,” Daniel said. “Are they new?”

  “Established in 1871,” Melville said, watching Adele raise and lower the gun. “It will do, then?”

  “Yes, I think it will,” she admitted. It was small enough that it would fit neatly into her reticule…or her pocket, when she had one, as she did now. She slipped the gun into her jacket pocket.

  “Decades ago…” Daniel muttered. He was a sports hunter and knew guns quite well. “Are they up north? I thought I knew all the gun makers in Britain.”

  “They’re in New York,” Melville told him.

  Adele smiled. “That’s why it took so long for you to get it.” She paused. “Not that I wish to appear ungrateful, but you did say ‘a couple of things’.”

  “Right. Yes.” He delved into his pocket once more. “Here. This is for that left hook of yours.” He held out a set of rings, joined together, that flashed golden in the moonlight.

  Daniel chuckled. “Brass knuckles.”

  Adele slipped the fingers of her left hand into the ring and clenched her fist around the thick spine. “They actually fit.” She had tried fitting a set of brass knuckles onto her hand, once, in Cape Town, but they had stretched her fingers too wide to be comfortable.

  “They were made for a woman,” Melville said. “There is a trigger by your thumb. Push on it.”

  She found the little trigger and pushed on it. A knife blade shot out of the end of the barrel inside her fist, and clicked into a seated position.

  Adele could feel her mouth open in surprise.

  “The knife is set at the wrong angle for a serious knife fight,” Melville said. “But it will gut someone if you jam it in hard enough.”

  “I’ve never used a knife.”

  “Learn how,” Melville said flatly.

  She nodded, as she studied the knuckles to discern how to push the knife back inside the barrel. It slid back in when she depressed the trigger and held it down. The spring was strong and she had to work at it. “I like it,” she admitted, and slipped it into her other jacket pocket.

  “Good,” Melville said shortly. He hesitated. “I’m glad you’ve chosen to stay on, Lady Adelaide. You have an instinct for the work. It would be a blow to lose you.”

  She stared at him, feeling a touch stunned. “I…er…thank you.”

  Melville waved her away. “Go home, Lady Adelaide.”

  “Only if you stop calling me Lady Adelaide. I am Adele,” she said firmly. “Or if you’d really rather, call me Becket.”

  “Adele,” Melville repeated. Then he cleared his throat and pulled at his ear. “Becket,” he said, sounding firmer and more assured. Then he growled, “Leighton, make yourself useful and see her back to her house, will you? You’re both cluttering the place up.” He pushed Daniel away from the window with a rough movement.

  Adele smiled and went to get their coats and hats.

  •

  They were forced to walk all the way to Chelsea Bridge Road before they spotted a cab with its flag up. The streets were white with frost and nothing moved on the minor roads. The electric streetlights had been extinguished hours ago, and even the moon was drifting downward. Every house they passed was silent, the windows dark.

  Daniel whistled and waved his arms to catch the driver’s attention.

  “Yer lucky to nab me,” the driver said, when he halted the motor car beside them. “I woz on me way ‘ome. ‘op in, mates.”

  Daniel gave the driver Adele’s address, closed the window between them and sat back with a deep sigh. Then he glanced at her. “Business is done for the night, yes?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, sighing out her own exhaustion. The bones in her face ached with it. She leaned back against the seat the way Daniel was, taking care that her Homburg did not dislodge and reveal her face.

  “I was thinking,” Daniel said, even more softly, “that it’s so late, there is hardly any point in me travelling all the way back to Kensington once I’ve dropped you.”

  Adele rolled her head to look at him. She raised her brow.

  “That is…if it is alright with you?” Daniel added. His green eyes were steady upon her face.

  She picked up his hand and squeezed. The driver would not see that in his mirror. “Yes,” she whispered.

  Although she wasn’t sure that she had the energy to face anything more than her pillow, once she was home. But there was always tomorrow morning. This morning, she corrected herself. A rare, lovely moment with Daniel, before the work began again…

  And even as she anticipated that moment, she slept.

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