Gossamer Wing (25 page)

“That remains to be seen,” Dexter said, though he had his suspicions. To Charlotte, he murmured, “There’s nothing wrong with my head.”

He felt irritated, cross with himself and Charlotte, and he knew that was a ridiculous emotional response to having just had a steam car explode and nearly kill three people. Later, he expected, he would need a great deal of liquor and suffer many nightmares before he was rid of the trauma. For the moment, though, it simply hadn’t hit him yet. It was all too unreal. His mind was apparently only capable of dealing with one minor detail at a time, and it had chosen to concern itself with Charlotte’s less-than-ideal reaction to his unplanned declaration.

Dexter felt nominally better when Charlotte tipped her head back to study his face, lifting a hand to brush the hair back from his forehead and whispering, “I know there’s nothing wrong with your head, my delicious slice of coconut cream pie.”

“That one needs work,” he said automatically, feeling a glimmer of giddy happiness even less appropriate to the situation than being irked.

“It was the best I could do on the spur of the moment,” she replied, nestling into the crook of his arm as the first wave of police arrived on the scene.

Eighteen

PARIS, FRANCE

“NO. IT’S ABSOLUTELY
out of the question!” Dexter insisted.

Charlotte clenched her fists, wanting to strike out at something and vibrating with the effort to restrain herself.
How
dare
he?

“Out of the question for whom, precisely?”

“This has gone well beyond any reasonable expectation of danger you might have encountered
flying about
in
a
balloon
.” Dexter’s face had turned fierce and hard. Charlotte thought his jaw looked as tightly bunched as her fists, and made a mental note not to punch him there if she decided she simply couldn’t hold herself back. She’d be more likely to hurt her hand than his face.

“You do realize it was a spy balloon? And that I was using it to gather vital documents and conduct covert surveillance on potentially deadly enemies? I understood you were aware of all that.”

Dexter dug his fingers through his hair, gripping it so tightly Charlotte was surprised he didn’t pull out two handfuls. “Charlotte, be reasonable!”

“I am being reasonable,” she said, forcing herself to calm down. The situation called for education, not rage. “I’m being a very reasonable agent of the Crown, still on an assignment. That’s why we’re here. Besides, stowing me at the embassy for safekeeping would be pointless. We’re not in any more danger today than we were yesterday, Dexter. We weren’t the targets.”

“I’m sorry? We nearly got blown to bits.”

“In
Murcheson
’s steam car. A steam car nobody expected us to be in,” she reminded him.

“It would have been easy for somebody to—”

“No. The driver was only away from the vehicle for fifteen minutes during the middle of the first act. He left it to pick up some tobacco for Mr. Murcheson, as he’d been instructed to do, and when he returned he didn’t notice anything amiss. Whatever was done to the steam car was done very quickly while he was gone. Well before Murcheson volunteered his car to take us back here. That implies advance planning. So unless you suspect Murcheson or his driver of plotting our demise . . .”

Dexter shook his head and sat on the end of the bed with a grunt. “Damn. I feel like I’ve been run over by a tractor.”

“Me too. You should try a warm bath. I left some Epsom salts for you.”

“That won’t help my ears to stop ringing, I suppose?”

“Only time will help that, I’m afraid.”

She bent over and untwisted the rough huckaback towel from her hair, letting the damp strands fall where they would as she stood back up. Dexter was watching her with nothing like the keen interest she had come to expect, and the change upset Charlotte more than she cared to admit.

“I want you to be safe,” he said gently. “I won’t apologize for it anymore.”

“I understand that. I do. It’s just that . . . well, who do you think you are?” It took Charlotte a second to register the hurt on Dexter’s face, and realize how she’d phrased herself. “No, no, I don’t mean it like that. I meant . . . in all this. What’s your role in all this, as you see it? Who do you think you are?”

She watched him think it through, discarding the first answer he bit back, deciding how to phrase it in some more acceptable way than “your husband.” Finally he shook his head, unable or unwilling to put any other words to it.

Charlotte approached him, speaking as gently as she could. The impulse to lash out had been replaced by an aching compassion; she could see Dexter was suffering, and she hated to know she was the cause of it. He’d said he loved her. She couldn’t allow him to keep thinking along those lines. “You came here to do a job. I came here to do a job. The rest . . . is compelling, I grant you, but it doesn’t mean I can forget the mission, even if I’ve accomplished my main task. I’ve tried more than once to make that clear, though I know I haven’t done very well at following my own terms. I’ve let you muddy the waters, and I’ve muddied them myself. Still, the fact remains, I don’t report to you,” she concluded, “I report to Murcheson. To Whitehall.”

Dexter reached out to coax her closer, then leaned his cheek against her stomach, hands resting on her hips for a moment before sliding around to clasp her waist. After a moment, unable to help herself, she started stroking his hair. The soft, straight strands fell through her fingers in a soothing flow, an interesting contrast to the prickle of whiskers she could feel through the linen of her night rail.

“This is why
they
advise against this sort of entanglement, I’m sure,” she murmured.

Dexter chuckled, the vibration and the heat of his breath warming her skin. “
They
never like any of the really enjoyable things. I don’t know why we all keep listening to
them
, anyway.”

“We didn’t listen, and look where we are.”

“I can think of worse places to be.” He gave her a squeeze. “Charlotte, when all this is over, I—”

“Don’t,” she warned him, tapping him on the head sharply a few times with one fingertip before she resumed carding his hair in slow, smooth sweeps. “Don’t.”

* * *

THE FLASK OF
brandy was empty by lunchtime, and the bottle too. Martin tipped one then the other into his glass, idly watching the last lonely drops creep down the side of the tumbler to pool in the bottom. Most of it evaporated on the way back to the rim when he tried to eke a final swig from the dregs.

Empty, empty, empty
. The flask. The bottle. The disgusting leather pouch. Martin tried to make himself throw it away, but he couldn’t do it. He’d had it for years, that little pouch. He couldn’t even remember its original purpose now, but he had used it to stow loose papers as a schoolboy. He’d strung a rope under the flap and slung it over his shoulder when he worked as a bicycle courier for a few short, miserable months in his sixteenth year.

Years later he still had it, and it had been the first thing to hand when he thought to run to Simone’s office at the agency after learning of her death. Before anybody else thought to do it. An instinct he had thanked the heavens for at the time, and cursed shortly thereafter and ever since.

“You are a metaphor for my entire life,” he said, raising the empty glass to the pouch. It sat on his table silently, refusing to respond to his toast. “A promising start. Then one wrong turn and the next seven years wasted. Unable to serve any useful purpose, stuck in the dark to molder and rot. By the time you’re free once more, it’s far too late for you. You contain no secrets, have no more power, no more teeth with which to bite. Empty and hideous. You’re fit only to discard.”

You’re boring a leather pouch with drunken philosophy, imbecile
. Martin transferred the tumbler to his right hand, pulling a lever near his wrist. His more-than-fingers began to tighten, squeezing inexorably closer until, with a pop, the glass shattered, sending shards to the ground.

Martin didn’t bother to sweep up the pieces. The landlady could take care of the mess. He’d never been particularly fond of her anyway.

“Time to pay a final call on Monsieur Dubois,” Martin said to the flat, which was too small and mean to echo in reply. “Today I call his bluff, or I die. But either way it will be the same to him.”

* * *

CHARLOTTE HAD DECIDED
to lend more credence to her cover and spend the morning shopping again while Dexter reviewed his plans for the work at Atlantis Station. Even with two agents assigned to cover her she was jumpy and uneasy, prone to glancing over her shoulder, then checking to make sure her guards were still in place.

Tittering with salespersons and bargaining poorly in atrocious French took all her energy, and by noon she was more than ready to find Dexter and repair to some quiet bistro where they could pretend to be a honeymooning couple in love.

When she walked into the suite, however, Dexter was packing his trunks.

“The glass is ready. Arsenault just sent a wire. It’s being delivered to Le Havre, so I’ll need to start work there tomorrow. We can stay in the same hotel we used before, in Honfleur.”

“We’ve barely settled into the suite here,” she sighed.

“With the documents recovered, there’s no reason to linger in Paris.” Dexter placed a pair of shoes neatly into a drawer-like compartment within one trunk, securing it closed with a snap. “You could always remain here, you know. For a few more days at least, assuming Murcheson doesn’t have anything pressing for you to do in Le Havre. I’ll need a week or so for the installation, and God knows Honfleur won’t offer you nearly as much diversion as Paris during that time.”

Charlotte tossed her reticule on the bed and started to remove her gloves, trying to account for the queasy fluttering in her stomach. “Are you asking me to stay here while you go on?”

He abandoned the pretense of interest in packing and sat on the bed, picking up the yellow silk purse and toying with the strings. “I’m giving you the freedom to choose whichever option seems best to you.”

She wanted to resent him for laying the decision on her shoulders. He was trying so hard to do the right thing, though, that she couldn’t bear him a grudge for it.

“If I were a stronger person I would stay, for both our sakes.”

“If I were a stronger person I would carry you to the embassy kicking and screaming and make them lock you in a room until it’s time to put you on the next ship to New York.” He sounded as though he had given the idea serious thought.

She thought of his possessive anger in the submersible bay, the fierce way he’d taken charge on the train after she’d frustrated him by setting her terms. Not to mention that long-ago fork jabbed into his brother’s hand over a chop. Perhaps that was his usual response to being thwarted in matters of the mind or heart, to settle the matter through brute force and determination. That, to him, was strength. It had probably served him quite well over the years, and Charlotte was suspicious at his suddenly adopting a less direct approach.

“You mean you’re
not
going to club me over the head and drag me off to your cave?”

“Do you want me to?” He smiled wryly. “We both know I’m capable of it. And have essentially done so a few times already. Charlotte, you do know I’m not normally so—oh, never mind, of course you don’t know. That’s the trouble.”

For some reason his humor angered her, where his anger hadn’t. “There’s so much trouble here, I don’t know where to begin. You’re right, I don’t know you. I hardly even know
myself
anymore, since we started this . . . this—”

“Affair.”

“Affair?”
She threw her gloves on the bed and crossed her arms over her chest, feeling a need to shield herself. “I don’t have
affairs
.”

An affair was something temporary, sordid, the business of unhappy wives and jaded widows. Rakehells and faithless husbands had affairs.

What happened to “I love you”?
Charlotte grimaced at her own hypocrisy.

“What would you call it, then,” he challenged, “since you’re determined to end it when we get back to New York? It isn’t a marriage, Charlotte, no matter what people may think. You and I know better.”

“I ought to end it here and now.”

His jaw was tight again, his eyes an icy wasteland. “If you were a stronger person, perhaps you would.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m feeling a sudden surge of strength. Consider our
affair
at an end, Lord Hardison.”

“
Mister
Hardison, if you please.” For a moment they stared at each other in a silent contest of wills, then Dexter spoke again. “Charlotte, I don’t want to do this. Not this way.”

Charlotte looked away, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we were friends before, and we can be friends still.” He rose and offered his hands. Charlotte reluctantly unfolded her arms and let him pull her into the circle of his embrace, slowly relaxing against him as he held her. “Whatever happens, and even if it was all a product of the excitement of the mission, we both know it meant more than just an affair. At least it did to me.”

Charlotte slipped her arms around Dexter’s waist, burying her face in his warm, broad chest for a blissful moment before forcing herself to pull away. She patted his shoulder and nodded. “I know. We’re both just tired, I suspect. It will be so good to get home.”

“Soon,” he said in agreement.

“I’ll come to Honfleur,” she decided, “because you’re being gracious. I’m sure Murcheson can find something for me to do while you’re working on your . . . what did you call it again? Multi-seismical Phototonic—”

“Multi-hyalchordate Phototransphorinating Seismograph.”

“While you’re working on that. Besides, we can hardly make things more complicated at this point, anyway.” She moved to the wardrobe, sighing at the prospect of packing it all up yet again.

* * *

MARGUERITE, THE VASTLY
skilled secretary, flashed Martin a stern look when he entered the vestibule outside Dubois’s office.

“He is occupied, monsieur.”

“He usually is. Yet I see you at your desk now, so I assume he must at least be fully clothed.” He bypassed the two uncomfortable chairs set out for guests, and sat instead on the corner of Marguerite’s desk.