Dreaming Spies (5 page)

I felt almost jilted.

“Whom are you studying so intently, Russell?”

I turned away from the social gathering with a wry smile. “A perfect innocent whom I suspected of hidden plots. Holmes, your misanthropy is contagious.”

“The alert young lady with the muscles of a gymnast?”

“Precisely! What gave her away?”

“Less the build than the balance. A typhoon wouldn’t tip her over.”

“Well, now she juggles books rather than clubs. She lingered on deck earlier, and I feared she might be playing up to me. It would appear that she was merely being friendly.” I glanced at his fingernails, wrapped around a glass. He’d scrubbed away the engine-room grime, leaving the skin a bit raw: I for one had no intention of joining him for lessons from that instructor. “If you’re interested in language tutorials that don’t involve smothering heat and asphyxiating smoke, Miss Sato might be worth asking.”

Thus, from being a suspicious character, Miss Sato became a resource. We were too late to claim her for our table, but she dutifully introduced us to her friend, Fumiko Katagawa, and once I had reciprocated with my husband, “Mr Russell,” the names began to run past us. The Americans were Clifford Adair from New York, dressed in a blinding white linen suit; Edward Blankenship from Iowa, whose evening wear looked borrowed from an elder brother; and Virginia and Harold Wilton, a shy brother and sister from Utah. There were two Australians, nearly identical brothers named John and James Arthur in rumpled tropical suits, who laughed loud and often and who both answered to the nickname of “Jack.”

Then came the five English travellers in my fellow group of under-thirties. Two of them knew no one onboard: an ebony-haired woman in her late twenties with a knowing look and the unlikely name of Lady Lucy Awlwright, and Harold Mitchell, a very young man headed for a job at an uncle’s business in Hong Kong, whose pronounced Northern accent, spotty face, and off-the-rack suit suggested he would find friendship here an ill fit. Two of the others were travelling together, an extended version of the Grand Tour that signalled their families’ enthusiasm to have them safely out from underfoot for a long time: Reginald Townsman and the Honourable Percy Perdue (“I’m Reggie” “Call me Percy”), both of whom were Eton and King’s College. They were acquainted with the other man, Thomas, Viscount Darley, the fair-haired snob who had so absurdly set my hackles on edge the moment he stepped down from the carriage in Bombay. I resolved to be friendly to him, to make up for the slight.

On a simple Atlantic crossing, the numbers of young and unattached passengers would have been much higher, but this was the end of the world when it came to wealthy Westerners, thus the population of the
Thomas Carlyle
was more heavily weighted to married couples in Colonial service, retired Europeans and Americans, and Asians from Sub-continental to Chinese.

No doubt there were more Westerners onboard, attached or otherwise, but on this first night out of Bombay, nine young men and two
women drew together like nervous cattle, pulling into their sphere a pair of Japanese women, a delicate lad from Singapore, a stunning Parsee girl whose husband was abed with a sore tooth—and one Mary Russell.

With a murmur in my ear—“You ‘young things’ are better without me”—Holmes faded away. And it was true: once he had left, the younger men relaxed, their voices growing louder as they began to crow before the women and jostle for superiority.

In no time at all, aided by the emptying of glasses, the competition had sorted itself out on national lines, with the Australian brothers on one side, the four British men on the other, and the Americans undecided between them.

Talk veered, perhaps inevitably, into sport: specifically, the kind of football—or as the Americans called it, soccer—they had witnessed in India. At that point, Thomas Darley lifted his glass and said, “To the Colonies, long may they take our cast-offs.”

American and Australian eyes met, and a common loyalty was declared.

His indiscreet words, added to the slow and deliberate blink of his eyes, pointed to his being well on the way to drunkenness—which surprised me, as he did not seem to be drinking very rapidly. I kept an eye on him as I listened to the conversation, nodding at random points, and saw the deft way in which he stepped aside to take a drink from a passing tray, then re-inserted himself into the circle next to Miss Sato. He sipped from his glass and made a remark that brought a gust of laughter. A few minutes later, he raised his hand to make another comment. When he lowered it again, somehow it ended up across Miss Sato’s shoulder.

She gave Miss Katagawa an uncomfortable little smile and tittered into her hand, but the arm remained heavily in place. After a while, he lowered his head to say something into her ear. She replied, he said something else—but at her next response, his grin locked. He drew back slightly. A few moments later, his possessive hand dropped from her shoulder and slid with feigned nonchalance into his pocket.

What had she said? He was charming (that sinister word again) and
educated and clearly had money at his command: if he hadn’t emerged as the leader of the ship’s rich, bored, and unattached populace by midday tomorrow, I would eat my cloche. He looked about my age—twenty-four—which meant that either he had not seen active service during the War, or if he had, it was limited to the final months. He also looked to be exaggerating his drunkenness as an excuse for misbehaviour.

A few minutes later, he repeated the ritual of freshening his glass, using it to end up beside the Awlwright girl. No: perhaps I would not reconsider my initial impression of young Darley. But as his absence created a space beside Miss Sato, I moved into it.

“Mrs Russell,” she said, with that charming little half-bow. “Not so queasy now?”

“Much better, thank you. But I have to ask. What did you tell the viscount that put him off?”

The look she gave me was wide-eyed and oh-so-demure. “He ask me where I live in Japan. I tell him, Kobe, where my father is big manufacture of guns. Also my four brothers.”

I laughed; she raised her glass, and her dark eyes sparkled at me over the rim. “Well, for fear of inviting a similar rebuke, my husband and I have a rather different kind of proposal for you. We wondered if you might be interested in teaching two foreigners a bit of Japanese, both language and customs?”

She demurred, on the grounds that she was a poor teacher.

“I can understand if you’re not interested, but we would be happy to pay you.”

At that, she turned pink and tittered through her fingers. “Oh, no, I could not take your money!”

“Still, think about it. We’d be grateful for any time you could give us, paid or not.”

“But I would be most happy to meet with you and talk about Japan, teach you useful phrases. Many people in America did such for me. This would repay some kindness.”

“Say, I’d like to learn a little Jap-talk—er, that is, Japan-talk, too.” This from the corn-fed Iowan, Mr Blankenship.

I realised belatedly that I should not have made my request in such a public venue, since every young man in earshot chimed in to say they’d love Japanese lessons, too, followed (with a degree less enthusiasm) by the women. I started to object, then thought the better of it. Instead, I extended my hand to my petite neighbour. “That is most generous of you, Miss Sato. Shall we say seven o’clock tomorrow morning, in the library?”

The early hour rather deflated the interest of the others, which was what I’d had in mind, but Miss Sato gave a little bob and said she would see us then.

When the dinner bell sounded, Holmes collected me for our stroll down the grand stairway to the First-Class dining room, and our chosen table. He claimed a chair with a clear view of the Captain’s table: I did not comment, merely greeted our invited fellows as they arrived, making introductions all the while. A few deft questions dispelled any awkwardness, and soon the table was launched into the discovery of shared enthusiasms. When the purser came by with his seating chart, halfway through the fish course, none at our table indicated that they might be moving elsewhere.

The two schoolteachers—a man and a woman—discovered a mutual passion for Greek mythology. The deaf artist, when she’d had the topic shouted into her ear, happily turned the page on her small sketch-book and began to punctuate the conversation with a series of witty (and occasionally risqué) interpretations of Olympus, with Zeus bearing a striking resemblance to our captain and Athena wearing a pair of spectacles remarkably like mine. Even the botany professor chimed in, with his opinion that the rites of Dionysius were fuelled not by wine but by a particular mountain herb, and that led to a merry debate on poisonous plants and the difficulties of determining cause of death. All in all, an auspicious beginning for a lengthy voyage.

Holmes, in between comments and food consumption, kept his eye on the Captain’s table. I, too, glanced that way from time to time, but all I could tell was that Lady Darley and her stepson were (as happened, when inheritances were on the line) barely on speaking terms, and that she was more quick-witted than her husband. Still, even in his slowness,
Darley possessed a certain easygoing attraction. The Captain seemed honestly to enjoy him, and certainly the rest of the table laughed at his remarks. Granted, one might expect a blackmailer to have mastered the art of easy banter, as a tool to disarm the unwary, but easygoing conversation did not a villain make. Some men just liked to talk.

We came to the meal’s end. The schoolteachers shyly agreed to risk an attempt at the after-dinner dancing. The artist tore off a few sketches and handed them around. While the botany professor went off to examine the contents of one of the large flower arrangements, the young mother said in a wistful voice that she ought to go and see if her children needed her—then rapidly allowed the two schoolteachers to talk her into just a few minutes of dancing.

I watched the Captain’s table disband, and was relieved to see the two elder Darleys head for their cabins rather than the Palm-Lounge-turned-ballroom.

Holmes had been hoping to draw both male Darleys into a card game, but not even Holmes would try to follow a man into his private quarters.

Cups of morning tea:

Clear, clean, Japanese for me—

Or cool English murk?

That first night of dancing went on until late. At seven the next morning, there was not a young man to be seen.

I had not slept terribly well myself. First came the racket of late-goers to their bunks, then a vivid and dread-filled dream about a flying deck of playing cards—no doubt born of an overheard conversation between an earnest child and her bored nanny, and the dawning horror that I was trapped for three weeks with a juvenile whose devotion to
Alice in Wonderland
knew no bounds. Eventually, I pushed the dream away, but in no time at all, the rush of hoses and clatter of mop buckets and holystones on the deck outside wrenched me into a still-dark day.

At seven sharp, Miss Sato appeared in the door of the library, fresh as a spring flower. Holmes rose as she came across the room.

“You are here,” she noted.

“You were in some doubt?” Holmes replied.

She gave a complex little motion of the head to indicate that she
would not have been entirely surprised if some more important activity had claimed us. We shook hands as Westerners, copied her bow as students of Japan, and sat down again.

She looked at the table, and her eyes went wide. “Tea!”

Two trays sat on the library table, and two pots. One had all the paraphernalia of the English tea-set, with porcelain cups, silver spoons, a silver strainer, sugar and milk.

But the other held a small earthenware pot, no spoons or extraneous substances, and little cups without handles. She reached for the pot, tentatively poured a dribble of pale liquid into the diminutive bowl, then held it to her face to breathe in the aroma. Her face glowed with pleasure.

“Where did you find proper tea?” she exclaimed.

“Between the ship’s seventeen Japanese passengers,” Holmes said, “and six of the ship’s personnel, I knew that at least one of them would have something you would consider drinkable.”

She took a sip with the reverence of a Catholic at a Vatican mass, then set down the cup and stood. The bow she gave Holmes was several degrees lower than the one she’d used earlier, and held for longer. The eloquence of respect.

She resumed her seat, and her back straightened in the attitude of every schoolmaster I’d ever had. She touched her cup and pronounced a slow string of syllables, then pointed at my cup with its beverage of milky brown, shook the finger from side to side in admonition, and repeated the syllables, with a small difference:
Korē wa ocha des’; sorē wa ocha de wa nai des’:
This is tea; that is
not
tea. Our lessons had begun.

That first morning we learned a nice collection of nouns and a few key constructions: This is … Where is …? I am … She had clearly already decided that, given the few days at our disposal, we should concentrate on the spoken word rather than attempt a conquest of the writing.