Gossamer Wing (8 page)

“I vote we eat the young lady first,” the whipcord-thin agent-in-training had said, smirking in her direction. His name was Adams, but they all called him Weasel because he looked like one. “She looks tender.”

“And I’m chopped liver, am I?” the other female trainee, Beatrice, had countered. “Besides, ask McCormack there how far you’d get, trying to take down our Charlotte.”

McCormack, cocooned up to the tip of his long nose in his sleeping bag, had snorted loudly at that. “She’d have your guts for garters, Weasel lad. No joy there. Not for eating or anything else.”

Charlotte smiled fondly at the memory of her first mock combat skirmish with McCormack. He’d underestimated her. He’d learned never to do so again. Later that night he’d propositioned her outside the mess hall, and he’d learned never to do
that
again either. After that they got along quite well.

“Not for garters,” she corrected McCormack in her most ladylike voice. “For supper. And not the guts, I’d start with the organ meat. Probably the heart, as it’s the most nutritious. Even Weasel’s.”

She had meant every word of it.

She’d finished her field training well over a year ago. Weasel was a field agent now, last she’d heard. Beatrice and McCormack were both dead, along with another member of their squad, all killed in an exercise a few months after that chilly bivouac. An improperly placed piton had given way, three would-be agents whom Charlotte considered friends had plummeted to their icy deaths at the base of the cliff they’d been scaling, and Charlotte had learned why her father warned her not to view field training as a social occasion. Detachment in training was good practice for the job, he’d told her, because nobody ever knew in the morning who might be gone by evening.

It was a dangerous profession. Reginald’s death was hardly an exception. If anything it was closer to the rule, though she hadn’t known that when she’d married him. She’d been young enough to assume that he would live because he was hers, because she was not the sort of woman to whom terrible things like losing a husband happened.

Dexter, whose “training” consisted of a few extended briefings and a long weekend or two at a local armory, was meant to work primarily in the submerged station once in France, which should mean he was relatively safe. Otherwise, he would be even less likely than Reginald to make it back to New York in one piece.

He felt far too solid and alive next to her for Charlotte to believe for one minute he could die. His hands were warm on hers, his pulse steady and reassuringly strong where her fingertip rested lightly on his wrist.

“What are you thinking?” Dexter asked, his voice as soft and warm as the air in the conservatory.

That I’d like you to kiss me right now, and that I shouldn’t be thinking it
.

Charlotte cleared her throat. “I was thinking it’s growing late.”

She pulled her fingers free and stood more abruptly than she meant to. She was flustered, out of sorts, her body’s lascivious impulses at war with both her heart and her head. Her heart said Dexter was dangerous because she was growing too fond of him, and it reminded her of Reginald. It wanted her to feel unfaithful, and reprimanded her when she didn’t. Her head said she needed to focus on the job, not on the doomed dilettante who was only along to fiddle with equipment and be her cover story.

Everything from her belly down to the crux of her legs, sadly, remained attuned to the big makesmith’s every move, like a compass to magnetic north. When he stood, she made herself take a step back. There was an awkward moment, her pulling away just as he offered his arm. Charlotte covered it poorly by pretending to cough into her gloved fist, then walking briskly toward the door as though she hadn’t noticed his gesture.

That night, back in the enormous house Reginald had left her, Charlotte sat at her dressing table contemplating a photograph of herself and Reginald at their wedding. He was seated, while Charlotte stood at his shoulder, resting one arm there. Just before the photographer told them to freeze, Reginald had lifted his hand to clasp hers. The moment was captured, as were the warmth in Reginald’s eyes and the hint of dimples by Charlotte’s mouth as she suppressed a laugh at something her new husband had just said.

She couldn’t remember anymore what it was he’d said to her, and the loss of that memory was like a physical pain to Charlotte. Like another little piece of herself slipping away. In her darker moods, she admitted to herself that she kept the photograph there to remind her what her husband had looked like, because if she was being absolutely honest with herself, his face was slipping from her memory. She hadn’t thought tonight was going to be one of those darker times, but apparently it was. She found herself deliberately trying to recall Reginald, his voice and face and touch, when she knew quite well it would do her no good.

Charlotte ran her fingers over the glass as she did every evening before bed. But this night, instead of pressing her fingers to her lips and then to the picture as usual, she pried the gilded frame open and slipped the photograph out to look at it more closely. It was warmer than glass, and softer to her touch, she found . . . but it was still just a face on paper. When she closed her eyes, she could see the photograph, but the man was gone.

This time she pressed her lips to the picture, dampening it with her breath and tears. The moisture made it tug against the glass when she put it back in the frame, but it didn’t matter anymore. She carried it to the bed, where she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand that she’d always thought of as Reginald’s—even though they had never shared this bed—and placed the photo carefully inside.

Closing the drawer hurt less than she’d expected.

* * *

KISSES AT WEDDINGS
were public and fleeting. In Charlotte’s case, the kiss was also dulled by anticipatory champagne, applied in a liberal dose to numb her lips and calm the butterflies in her stomach prior to the event. Her lips weren’t so deadened that she couldn’t feel the heat of Dexter’s breath and the gentle press of his mouth to hers, but she attributed the mild tingling afterward to nerves and alcohol, and not at all to the kiss itself or the whisper of a smile on the groom’s striking face as he pulled away. For a moment they swayed toward each other, almost as though they might kiss again. The moment passed, but Dexter kept hold of Charlotte’s hand, his fingers entwining with hers as he led her down the aisle while their families beamed.

It was a small affair, with only a few dozen friends and relatives, conducted in the village church in the afternoon and followed by a reception and dinner at Darmont Hall. No dancing, no fuss, because she had been a widow, after all, although now she was technically Lady Hardison and a baroness.

The great bear of a smith looked even larger when they were alone in his steam carriage afterward. It was perhaps an hour’s drive to the hotel in the city where they would spend the night prior to embarking on the
Alberta
tomorrow morning. Their wedding had been timed with the Le Havre–bound ship’s departure in mind.

It was a very roomy carriage. It held Charlotte, and all the luggage that wouldn’t fit in the boot, and the huge Baron besides, with room left over. But it was very, very full of Baron by about ten silent minutes into the ride.

A gloomy, thoughtful Baron, Charlotte discovered, took up even more space. She had grown accustomed to his deep, gentle voice and the surprisingly witty banter that had sprung up between them. She had grown accustomed to his attention too, she realized, even though she was scarcely entitled to it. It was petty of her to miss it. Why should he dance attendance on her here, after all? There was nobody else to see them now.

“I think it was a successful event,” she finally ventured when she could tolerate the quiet no longer. Her champagne had long since worn off, and the butterflies had resumed their ominous flapping beneath her ribcage.

“Yes.”

Another few minutes passed, feeling like hours. Charlotte discovered she was wringing her hands, and she stripped her gloves off to give her something to do.

“Have you stayed at the Regent Arms before?” she asked.

Dexter frowned, shook his head and resumed staring out the window.

“I hear it’s lovely.”

“Of course it’s lovely,” he concurred.

“Well. Yes.” Their set—Charlotte’s former set, at least, and the set to which Hardison belonged by birth if not by choice—would not stay at hotels that were not lovely. Charlotte couldn’t help the note of bitterness that crept into her voice when she added, ”The time to rethink your choice would have been sometime before today.”

This time he actually looked at her, as if noticing her in the vehicle for the first time, and Charlotte thought she would rather have held her tongue than bear that scrutiny.

“I’m not having second thoughts. But I admit I’m wondering how this is all going to proceed. The ship, everything. I’ve so little training for this sort of thing. And I’m worried about what will happen to my workshop in my absence. Whether they’ll manage all right without me. I’ve never taken a holiday before.”

His workshop. His life’s work. She forgot so easily how important it was to him, how integral he was to its daily workings. He might be a baron, but he operated like an industrialist who’d learned the business from the ground up. His decision to conduct his affairs that way was as unfamiliar to Charlotte as a poorly run hotel. His anxiety was just as foreign to her.

“Young Mr. Pence seems very competent.”

“He is competent. He’s also very young.”

“Well . . .” She tried, and failed, to think of something comforting to say. “It will only be for a few months at most.”

“I appointed him my heir, you know. In case I don’t return. I thought . . .” His eyes returned to the window, which was lightening as they neared the city, with its eternal gaslights and numerous vehicles.

He was leaving his life’s work behind, while she was traveling toward hers. Or so Charlotte fervently hoped. That there, in France, she would finally know the feeling of accomplishment, that sense of who she was, that had eluded her for so long.

She only had first to pretend to be a giddy young baroness bride for a few months, keep her dinner down long enough to fly her airship successfully over hostile French territory, determine the nature and extent of a potential plot to rekindle the war with a weapon that could destroy them all . . . and hope that her new husband managed to acquit himself well as a rich dilettante while solving a few unsolvable problems of aquatic engineering in the meantime.

Charlotte looked out the window, wondering whether something out there might calm her down or at least engage her interest, as it seemed to have engaged the Baron’s. She saw the night, the increasing flow of traffic and the frenetic glare of the approaching city. And reflected in the glass, just visible from the corner of her eye, there was the profile of a man she hardly knew, but knew she must not want as she did.

The man with whom she would be sharing a stateroom on the ocean liner
Alberta
for the next two weeks, and a series of French hotel rooms for an as-yet-undetermined number of weeks following that.

Her husband.

Six

LE HAVRE, FRANCE, AND THE OCEAN LINER
ALBERTA
, EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO LE HAVRE

MARTIN’S SHOULDER AND
elbow always ached when it rained. He watched the gathering clouds from the arched window of Dubois’s office, anticipating the drop in barometric pressure that would soon make its presence known as a slow, dense agony in those joints.

At least the new ceramic coating kept the arm from freezing in the winter now. The added weight might be hastening the decay of his beleaguered joints and muscles, but he considered that a small price to pay. He did miss morphine on days like this, though. He was no longer in government service, so he was unlikely to be found out for using it, and Dubois certainly paid him more than enough to afford it. But Martin knew he couldn’t take the risk of becoming dependent on the stuff again.

“You’ll take point,” Dubois said. “Your usual team can deal with the particulars, find out their itinerary and so forth. This may mean it’s time to increase the pressure on Murcheson. We can’t afford his competition in this steamrail bid.”

Glancing at his employer, Martin had to stifle a sneer. The man had once looked like the influential, powerful captain of industry he fancied himself. Now he had let himself go and it was even more apparent he was, at his core, a glutton and a slob. A dab of butter sullied his cravat, and now he was adding to the mess with a bar of chocolate. The meager sunlight glinted off the scalp that showed between his dyed strands of hair.

“What is the man’s name again?” he asked.

“Hardison. The Makesmith Baron, this Dominion rat who makes the steam cars and the, the”—he gestured around his body and then pantomimed firing a weapon—“for the house parties.”

“Fowling harness,” Martin offered in English. Dubois waved an impatient hand at him.

“The honeymoon is a convenient excuse for him to join forces with Murcheson. I’m sure of this. Each can use the other to secure intercontinental trade. Combining resources would make them impossibly strong in the bidding process for the steamrail contract. It cannot be allowed. I
must
win the bid, Martin.”

“
Oui
.”

It was always so with Dubois, always a drama about the dire necessity of quelling this or that competing business interest. Always about the money he wasn’t earning, and rarely about the assets he already held. He had probably engaged in more intrigue in his private business dealings than he ever had during his brief youthful tenure in French intelligence. Even his outdated post-royalist political leanings were based on finding what he considered to be the easiest route to a greater profit margin—rekindling hostilities with the British, so he could resume his wartime practice of milking the French government for lucrative defense manufacturing contracts. He often bemoaned the fact that the French had never developed a doomsday device, something that might have kept the war going indefinitely, just so he could make more money. Dubois was the worst sort of privateer, with no political or moral compass to steer him from greed.

Others in France, of course, had more wide-ranging reasons to desire such a device—at least before the treaty, when it first became clear the British had developed one of their own. That was the weapon Martin had lost the stolen designs for, ensuring that the antitreaty elements in the old French government had no basis to argue against accepting the terms the British offered for ending the war. Fear of that device—lack of any way to counter it—was one of the prime reasons the French had agreed to sign the Treaty of Calais.

Those political motivations had long since ceased to be relevant, of course. These days, the men in power wanted nothing more than peaceful trade with Britain and its Dominions. Martin knew that, and always marveled that Dubois didn’t seem to grasp it. Heaven forbid, Martin thought, the man should simply focus on moving forward, improving the quality of his shoddy merchandise and expanding his product lines. Dubois seemed mired in the past, and determined to find his way back to it and the success he’d once had. The man’s imagination was as stunted as his body was corpulent. Even his greed was small-minded.

“One or the other of them can be removed, but I doubt even you could get away with eliminating both in such a short span of time. The Baron will be here in a few weeks, perhaps a month at the most, according to the gossip. So we monitor and control Hardison while we focus on neutralizing Murcheson.”

“I’ll need all you have on Hardison,” Martin murmured, gliding over to the desk to view the newspaper column over Dubois’s fat shoulder. The photograph at the top stopped him cold, hitting him like a blow to the gut.

“The woman . . .” he whispered.

“Charlotte, Lady Hardison. Née Moncrieffe. No, no, that was her first husband. Née Darmont. A young widow, it would seem. Hardison has exquisite taste, I must admit.”

Martin agreed. He had seen the lady in person, and knew the photograph scarcely did her justice. Five years hadn’t taken much toll, and she still looked like a porcelain doll. Particularly beside the finely dressed brute who stood next to her in the picture.

“He’s a monster, isn’t he?” Martin remarked, to draw attention away from the bride. “I hope I’m not called upon to subdue him. He’d run me out of tranquilizers in no time at all.”

“Just stay on him. Anticipate his movements, learn everything you can, be prepared for anything.” Dubois’s brow wrinkled. Martin thought he resembled a pug dog trying to work out how to chase its own tail. “Moncrieffe. Does that name sound familiar, Martin?”

The agent turned reluctant industrial spy shrugged, an elegant and quintessentially French motion. “I don’t keep up with the names of the American pseudo-aristocracy, Monsieur Dubois. They are so numerous.”

“True, true. Like the rats they are, eh?”

Dubois’s plump hand had curled into his pocket instinctively when Martin moved toward the desk. He was fingering the button, Martin knew. Always ready to unleash the fabled poison if Martin stepped out of line. Dubois had never come to trust his captive espionage expert, and that was the one piece of intelligence Martin was willing to grant him. He was right not to trust Coeur de Fer.

Making a mental note to acquire his own copy of the newspaper, Martin bowed himself out of the office and slunk from the building. He would do as Dubois ordered, of course. But the presence of Reginald Moncrieffe’s widow in France struck him as too unlikely to be coincidental. If it were, the coincidence must be nothing short of an act of Providence. Martin wasn’t sure yet exactly what opportunity her visit might grant him, but he vowed to be ready for it, whatever it chanced to be.

* * *

IT HAD BEEN
a long few days, and Charlotte was beginning to feel her honeymoon must be some sort of awful penance—for what sins, she wasn’t quite sure. Her ear implants worked brilliantly, except when they failed suddenly and dramatically, which had happened several times already since the trip began. Still, she’d been half expecting that, and at least Dexter had been forewarned. He pretended to ignore the disgusting consequences of the malfunctioning equipment, and dealt with the stewards who came to clean up.

Still, it was not entirely painful, cruising over a clear ocean, surrounded by luxury and waited on hand and foot. As working assignments went, occasional violent nausea notwithstanding, it was certainly a plum. Charlotte had assumed the biggest threat to her peace of mind on board the good ship
Alberta
would be the sleeping arrangements with Dexter. She was half right.

The difficulty was not that she had to share a bunk with a very large not-quite-husband. Dexter was more than obliging, and though he took up an inordinate amount of space in general, he left more than his fair share of bed free and clear for Charlotte by sleeping on his side at the far edge of the bunk, his back plastered to the wall behind. He insisted, moreover, that he was quite comfortable doing so and she shouldn’t trouble herself to worry about him.

He didn’t even snore.

Unfortunately, none of that helped the subtle dread that came over Charlotte when Dexter closed the bed-curtains for the night. She thought she was hiding her anxiety well, until the second evening of the voyage when Dexter sighed in the darkness and scrambled over her to unfasten the heavy protective drape. He crawled out of the berth to turn the lights back on.

“What?”
he asked, clearly exasperated.

“What?”

“You haven’t slept for two days, Charlotte. Not that I can tell, anyway. And you’ve been seasick as hell all day, so I’m sure you must need to rest. I’m doing my best not to keep you awake, but would you like me to try sleeping in the sitting room instead? Or perhaps I can ask the bursar if there’s an empty stateroom.”

“That would defeat the purpose of—”

“So would having you keel over from exhaustion.” He put his hands on his hips, which drew Charlotte’s attention to areas she’d been scrupulously trying to avoid noticing. He wore perfectly sensible, conservative, striped cotton pajamas, and Charlotte chided herself for imagining what he’d look like without them. “What is it? What do you need me to do?”

She bit her lip. She was weary to the bone, but it wasn’t fair to Dexter to let him think it was his doing. “It isn’t you. It’s stupid, really. Only . . . I’m a little . . .”

Her eyes flicked to the thick, stiffened curtain, still half closed along the rail that hung from the ceiling. Dexter followed her gaze. “A little . . . afraid of damask? A bit terrified of slightly gaudy brocade? Constitutionally averse to the color oxblood?
Tell
me.”

“Claustrophobic,” she blurted, even as she smiled at his comic guesses. Saying it out loud felt surprisingly liberating. “I’m claustrophobic. There, are you happy? When that curtain is closed, I feel like I can’t even breathe, much less sleep.”

“Is that all? Why didn’t you say something sooner?” He flicked off the light before he returned to the bed and tapped her legs, waiting for her to shift them out of the way before climbing back into his place by the wall. “Is this a recent development?”

“No, no. Ever since I was a little girl. It had improved for a while, then . . . then it got worse again. But the steward said we should close the curtains at night in case of swells, and loose objects flying, so—”

“I’m a light sleeper,” he said breezily. “At least I normally am, when I haven’t lain awake most of the previous night wondering why the hell the person in bed with me is
still
awake. I’ll probably sleep like the dead tonight. But the weather’s clear, so don’t be concerned. Tomorrow we can go about securing loose objects. Henceforward, if any rough weather starts I’ll be up in a flash and close the drape. In the meanwhile, leave the damn thing open and let’s get some rest.”

He was lying on top of the sheet and blanket, as he had the past few nights, while Charlotte snuggled beneath them. When he flicked the counterpane over both of them, she thought sleepily that she should probably offer to find him an extra blanket.

Dexter sat up, rousing her from the drowsiness that had already started to weigh down her eyes. “Move over.”

She slid out of his way once more, but he didn’t vacate the bed this time, only leaned over her to push the curtain fully open on its track.

“Thank you,” Charlotte whispered as Dexter flopped back down to the bunk and covered himself again.

“You’re welcome.”

After a few minutes of silence, time enough for Charlotte to grow drowsy again, Dexter murmured, “Please tell me Lord and Lady Darmont didn’t lock you in a cupboard when you were naughty, or anything like that.”

She snickered. “No, and neither did my nanny or governess. I’ve just always hated tight spaces. It improved for a time. For years I was able to talk myself out of it, but then . . .”

After a few moments of waiting, he prompted her. “Then?”

The sleepy humor was gone from her voice. “It all came back one day.”

“I see.” After another few moments, he added, “When I was a boy, I was afraid of dogs. Terrified, actually.”

“Really? But you have dogs now, don’t you? You’ve mentioned hunting with them.”

“Oh yes,” he confirmed, “I even have a few house dogs. I get along famously with them now. Big, small, doesn’t matter. They seem to like me too.”

“Hmm. What changed?”

He moved a bit, maneuvering onto his back and flexing his shoulders before lacing his fingers behind his neck. Charlotte could barely make out his profile in the gloom. Drowsiness was overtaking her again, and her eyes drooped despite her efforts to keep them open. She liked the sound of Dexter’s friendly baritone in the darkened room. Charlotte wondered why it made a difference whether the curtain was open or closed when she could barely see her hand in front of her own face, but the air in the berth seemed clearer somehow with the drapes out of the way. She imagined she could feel a faint breeze across her face.

“When I was seven or eight, my mother brought home a dog one day. A half-grown homeless pup she’d found on her way back from visiting one of the villagers who was ill. The dog was a little terrier bitch, no higher than my knee. Fluffy little thing, once she was bathed and the knots combed out of her coat.”