Lost Among the Living (20 page)

He looked at me for another long moment, simply looking, and then he spoke. “I'll start at the beginning,” he said.

“Please do,” I snapped, the tension getting to me.

He seemed to think it over, choosing his words. “I lived here for a time. You know that, right?” He saw my expression and nodded. “I know I never told you. My favorite hobby was to sit on a spot near the cliffs of the shoreline and watch the boats. The Ministry of Fisheries is just down the coast. Have you seen it?”

I nodded. He leaned back, and his gaze traveled up the wall, looking into the past as he continued to speak. “I suppose I dreamed of being a brave sea captain, as boys do. But I spent so much time in my observation spot that I began to notice something among the boats. A pattern. There were vessels coming and going regularly—simple boats manned by researchers, mapmakers, other civilians. And then one day a boat entered the harbor that had guns.”

“Guns?”

Alex nodded. “This was 1907, remember. We were not at war. The Ministry of Fisheries isn't a Royal Navy installation. But gunboats began to enter the Ministry's harbor, stay a few days, and leave again. In a regular pattern.” He thought back again, lost in memory. “I was fifteen and impetuous, and I thought gunboats were romantic. So one
day I made the three-mile trek to the Ministry itself, intent on seeing one of them up close.

“The Ministry is gated and guarded. I walked right up the drive to the gate, but before I could say anything to the guard, a motorcar pulled up. I was dazzled, because a motorcar was a wonderful thing in those days. A man leaned out and asked me my business. I told him I wanted to know what the gunboats were for. He looked at me for a long moment, and then he told me to come with him. Then he told me his name.”

My mind had already worked ahead. “Colonel Mabry,” I said.

Alex paused, surprised. “You were always quick, Jo,” he said. “Yes, that's who it was, though he wasn't a colonel then. I take it you've met him. He isn't supposed to be here, but I suppose he's decided to continue as the curse of my bloody life.”

I blinked at the hostility in his voice. My own anger at Colonel Mabry paled next to that chilled fury.

“Mabry told me nothing, of course,” Alex continued. “He didn't take me to see the boats, which disappointed me. Instead, he sat me down in an office and questioned me extensively. I told him everything I had seen, the patterns of the gunboats' movements, their shapes and sizes, the days and times I had seen them come and go. He asked if I had made notes of what I'd seen, which of course I hadn't. He questioned me about my family and my background. I was bursting with my own questions, but he was as forthcoming as a marble slab. He finally told me that I was an intelligent, observant boy, and that when I got older he'd likely have a job for me.”

I blinked. “A job?” I said.

Alex nodded. “I didn't know what he meant at the time—it only became clear to me later. He meant a job in intelligence. Specifically, military intelligence.”

“In 1907?” I asked, incredulous. “The war was seven years away.”

“In certain circles of government, Jo, the war was a long time
coming. For some of them, the question wasn't whether we'd have a war, but when. To this day, Mabry hasn't told me exactly what was going on at the Ministry during those months, but I now believe they were using the harbor as part of a program to test gunboats in the open sea. The Kaiser was already of interest to our government, you see, as was his armament campaign, but Germany was not yet a dangerous concern. Yet Mabry was filing me away for future use, which is what he does.”

“You were fifteen.”

“I was fifteen, of good family, fluent in German, painfully observant, and keen. Men like Mabry rise to be colonels by using whoever they find, however and whenever they can use them. All he did that day was tell me to write him if I wanted work when I finished my education, and he'd find me a position. Off I went, an orphan boy very proud of myself, thinking I'd assured my own future.”

I dropped my arms from my knees and straightened my legs out on the bed, stretching them. “And had you?”

His eyes followed my legs, his gaze resting on them for a long moment. I went still. The hem of my dress covered my knees, but still he stared at my calves, my stockinged feet.

“Alex,” I said.

He did not raise his gaze. “You are quite certain about your earlier resolution?”

“Stop it,” I said. “You haven't told me
anything.
”

Slowly, his eyes came up to mine. He hesitated for a long moment, then said, “You're going to hate me.”

I held his gaze. “Am I?”

He let out a slow breath. “I wrote Mabry during my last year at Oxford. There were rumblings of war by then. He hadn't forgotten. He said he had work for me.”

Oxford—before I met him, then. “What work?”

“Germany was building warships, submarines. Tensions were
rising. There was speculation in intelligence circles that a possible invasion was being planned.”

“An invasion—Germany invading England?”

“Yes. It was believed that the Germans were investigating where an invasion might land. North? South? What route would it take? We suspected they had agents here, pretending to be tourists and businessmen, sending back maps and drawings. We needed to track them and intercept their messages to get an accurate idea of the German network. My job was to locate German contacts in England and report on them—names, addresses, occupations, descriptions. It all went into the files. I collected information, and I passed it on. It paid very well.”

“And these men you—reported on. Were they arrested?”

“Not at all. Most of them weren't agents, so the information gathered dust. A few of them, however, had agreed to send communications back to Germany, in much the same way I had agreed to inform my own government. Those fellows had their letters intercepted, and the local police kept tabs on their movements. An active agent, you see, can lead you to even more active agents, whereas an agent under arrest or executed can lead you to no one. That is the game.” Alex uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. His hair gleamed in the lamplight. “As for me, when I had information I passed it to Colonel Mabry's London representative. A solicitor near Gray's Inn.”

Ice shot up my spine. I sat straighter on the bed. “You can't mean it,” I said. “Casparov?”

“He was acting as an intermediary, yes. He'd take my information and send it along the proper channels.”

My mind spun. Proper channels. “Those letters we typed. All those letters—stacks of them.”

“Some of them were legitimate,” Alex said softly. “Casparov was actually practicing law. But others were most likely code.”

I put a hand to my forehead. Helen and me, typing all those snowdrifts of shorthand.
Your business is the typing only, and the looking respectable.
Day after day in that tiny office. And Alex, walking in from the wet cold, and Casparov telling him,
My thanks.

“Oh, God,” I said. “That was why you were there. I typed all those letters with no clue they were code. I never had any idea, and I worked for him for months. You must have thought me so incredibly stupid.”

“Stupid?” He sounded surprised and a little angry. “You're missing the point.”

“The point?” I dropped my hand and looked at him. “The
point
is that you sat across from me at the dinner table that night and told me absolutely
nothing
about yourself.”

“I told you everything that mattered,” Alex shot back. “What I was doing didn't matter anymore, because I quit.”

“You what?”

“I resigned when I met you,” he said. “I did it the next morning, after we'd been together. You weren't stupid, for God's sake; you were
Jo.
I knew what I wanted from the first minute I saw you, and it wasn't ferreting out Mabry's useless Germans. It was you.”

I took a breath, my cheeks flushing hot.

He continued, his voice gentling a little. “I knew before we'd finished our first glass of wine that night that I had to do it. I was forbidden to speak about what I was doing. If I kept it up, and kept it from you, you would figure it out eventually. You were too sharp. And once
you knew I'd been hiding things from you, you'd walk away without a look back. Of that much, I was sure. So it was easy, really. I had no choice.” His eyes watched me in the dim light. “Mabry argued with me, of course, but it was no use. By the time I met you coming out of Casparov's office the next day, it was over.”

This was going to kill me. If he kept talking he was going to kill me, but still I spoke—still I pushed him on. “But it wasn't over. Was it?”

He didn't answer for a long moment. Around us, the house was still. For the first time I wondered how late it was, what had happened to the party, whether all of the guests had gone to bed. It all seemed so far away.

When Alex spoke, his voice was a rasp. “It was over for a time,” he said. “And then the war came. And it wasn't over anymore.”

The war. Me sitting on the bench in Victoria Station that last time, sick and feverish and desperate, his kiss on my lips. The pain had been so awful I had thought I would die.

I closed my eyes, which were burning and dry, and steeled myself.

“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me.”

A
lex uncrossed his legs and stood, restless. He paced across the room, his long legs taking it in three strides, and turned. “Mabry contacted me again when the war started,” he said. “He had more work for me. I told him no. My reasons were the same as ever—I would not lie to my wife. I would fight for my country, but I would do it as everyone else did—as a soldier.”

Bitterness rose in my throat.
I would not lie to my wife.
“Go on,” I said.

“Mabry told me I was insane,” Alex said. “The war was in its early days, but he already knew how it was. He told me I'd be bloody mulch in a Belgian battlefield in six weeks, when instead I could be doing actual good for my country. With my skills I could be ferreting out agents, decoding messages, even traveling Germany undercover and reporting. He said I had no right to commit suicide.” Alex glanced at me. “But I was a foolish optimist, like everyone else in 1914. I didn't know any better. I chose the RAF, because it seemed more challenging and more glamorous than ground fighting. I wanted to do something hard.” He shrugged, the gesture almost a flinch of pain. “I got my wish, in that at least.”

“I suppose you gave in,” I said, not wanting to hear him say any more, not wanting to hear another lie come from his lips. “Because you went to Reims, when you told me you trained at Reading. I read your file.”

He stopped pacing. He had turned away from the lamp, and I watched his shadow go still. “Mabry?” he asked, his voice strangled.

“He showed me the file,” I said. “I know that you trained at Reims and that you came here to Wych Elm House on authorized travel without telling me. That you were here the day Frances died. That you went back to Reims when you left me at the train station in 1918.” The words poured out of me, unstoppable. They did not feel good, only burned me and made me sicker. “I know, Alex.”

“That's how you knew,” he said softly. “That's why you didn't believe my story. You've seen the file. Mabry plays a dirty game.”

“Martin saw the file, too.” I tried to keep the bitterness from my voice. “He must know it's a lie, the same way I do.”

But Alex shook his head. “Martin will believe me. He was over there. He knows that what makes it into the War Office file usually has nothing to do with the truth.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“He'll believe me,” Alex said again.

I wanted to argue, but I couldn't. I thought of the rapt expression on Martin's face, the way his gaze had fixed worshipfully on Alex, and I knew that Alex could make Martin believe anything. The thought only made me angrier.

“Are you going to tell me what Reims was about?” I asked. “Or am I not allowed to know?”

Alex rasped a hand slowly over his face. “Reims was training,” he said. “In all my self-important posturing, I'd forgotten one pertinent fact: A man in the army is no longer his own master. I went to Reims because I was sent there, and I didn't tell you because I was instructed not to in case my letters were intercepted. I was furious at first, but once I got there it seemed like a small thing, an overreaction on the part of the army. It
was
RAF training. It was just advanced. We were given access to the newer airplane models, sent to learn and test-fly them. We were given instruction in additional skills, like hand-to-hand
combat and laying telegraph wires. We were given maps that some of the other pilots weren't allowed to see. We were going to do advanced reconnaissance.” He shook his head. “I knew you'd hate me, damn it. I knew it. This is what I was trying to bloody avoid.”

“Fine,” I said. I wanted to get off the bed and stand, but the room was too small and I'd be too close to him. “You trained, and then you fought. Continue.”

“Mabry kept coming to me,” Alex ground out, “offering me assignments. He promised to take me out of active combat and give me other things to do, feeding British intelligence. I kept saying no. I had dug in, and I wouldn't change my mind, even when he contacted me while I was home on leave. With you.”

The memory clicked into place. Alex, home on leave. A package arriving at our door. “The camera,” I said.

“Yes, my perceptive wife. The camera.”

I sat up straighter. “Who is Hans Faber?”

His voice was bitter now. “You've figured it out this far, Jo. Puzzle it out a little further.” He turned to look at me, his face still shrouded in shadow. “Hans Faber is me. He was to be my German identity when I was sent there by my own government as a spy.” He came forward and sank into his chair again. “Hans Faber has been me for three years.”

The room was silent. I ached everywhere, my legs and my back and behind my eyes. My head throbbed. Three years. I'd thought him dead for three years, had nearly been driven mad by it, and he'd been living as Hans Faber, a letter or a telegram away.

“Jo,” he said.

“I think you should leave now.” My eyes burned with unshed tears.

“Jo.”

“I'd like you to leave.”

He reached out and put a hand lightly on my foot, running his
thumb along the bottom of the arch, looking inexpressibly sad. I felt his touch like a bolt of lightning. “Your stockings are torn,” he said.

I jerked my foot away. “Alex.”

“I don't want to talk about myself anymore,” he said. “I'm sick of myself.”

I swallowed. “And they're finished with you now? After all this time? That's why you're here?”

“Not quite.” His hand reached across the bed again, almost as if he couldn't stop it, and touched my foot. This time I did not pull away. “I'm here because I quit again. At first they wouldn't let me go, but I persisted and they finally gave in.” His thumb traced the arch of my foot again. “Mabry is angry over it. He doesn't like to lose.”

“He came here pretending to be interested in buying art from Dottie.”

“That doesn't surprise me.” His gaze was fixed on my foot, and his hand slid up my ankle. “He knew I'd come to you as soon as I was able.”

“Alex,” I said.

“Hush,” he replied. “I heard you. I just want to take your stockings off.”

I squirmed. “You agreed.”

“Nothing will happen,” he said, and I went still, believing him. Always, always, my body believed him, even after three years of devastation and lies. My body quieted as he pulled closer to the edge of the bed and his hands moved up my leg, beneath the hem of my peacock skirt.

Heat roared through me in a terrifying wave. “You shouldn't have told me any of this,” I said, trying desperately to hold on to logic. “If it's all so secret, you shouldn't have told me.”

“I don't want to talk about it.” His voice was a soft, bitter rasp, a tone I didn't recognize. His hands reached halfway up my thigh, his clever fingers finding the top of my stocking and unclasping it from
my garter. “I'm sick to death of all of it. I want to talk about you. Tell me, Jo. Tell me everything.”

“There's nothing to say,” I said helplessly as he undid the second clasp on my garter. “I floated for a while, and then I ran out of money. Dottie offered me a job as her companion, and I took it.”

His hands had begun to roll my stocking down my leg, but they stopped, his fingers cradling the back of my thigh. “You ran out of money?” he asked, his voice sharpening.

I felt my own anger answering, taking it as an accusation. “What did you expect?” I shot at him, looking into his blue eyes. “There wasn't much there in the first place, and there was no pension because, according to the War Office, I wasn't a widow.”

He was still for a long moment as heat pounded through me from the back of my thigh. When he spoke, his voice was low and dangerous. “They told me you would be taken care of,” he said with icy anger I had never heard from him before. “Someone is going to pay very, very dearly for that.”

His darkness was frightening me, so I plunged onward. “Yes, well. Dottie has actually been rather nice to me, in her queer way. She pays me—sporadically, I admit—and I have room and board. Though I shouldn't have bought this dress.” I looked down at the peacock feathers, which now seemed purchased by some other long-ago woman. “I'll be working for her until I'm sixty to pay it off.”

Slowly, his hands began unrolling the stocking again. “I'm going to make things right, Jo,” he said.

I nearly laughed as I shook my head. “You can't. Dottie and Robert hate each other. Martin is sick. He's marrying a girl he hardly knows because Dottie wants an heir and he thinks he won't live long. I don't think he'll even make it to the wedding.”

“The girl in the parlor?” Alex asked. The torn stocking was rolled down to my ankle now, and he pulled it off my foot. “She seemed polite enough, if not very bright. I think I scared her.”

“She was a better choice than I would have been, for certain.”

“You?”

“Dottie wasn't about to let me go to waste. She had the idea to marry me to Martin, but we didn't want to do it. Besides, there was a mix-up somewhere in the War Office, and I had no widow's papers. I wasn't free.”

Alex started on my other leg. He slid his hands beneath my skirt in one motion, to the top of my stocking, and unsnapped a garter, his features hard. “Dottie shouldn't have meddled. You were most certainly not free.”

I stared at him. “You knew,” I said softly, watching his face. “You knew about my papers. There was no mix-up at all, was there? You
knew.
”

“Jo, be logical,” he said. “What were they to do, let you be free to marry? Then you'd be legally married to two different men.”

I gripped his hand through my skirt and stilled it. “This isn't about that at all,” I said. “It has nothing to do with legalities. It's about the fact that even though I believed you dead, you wouldn't let me go.”

“Are you mad?” Alex's voice rose as his gaze pierced me. “I married you. I would rather die than let you go.”

“And what about me?” I cried. “It's all very well for you. Without a husband or a widowhood, I'm nothing. I've been invisible for three years. I'm not even a proper figure of pity. I'm just a woman a man
might consider a few tosses with, that's all.”
You could do better, even as a mistress,
Robert Forsyth had said.

Alex's hand flinched hard on my leg. His face blanched as the words hit him. Then he fought for control, and his eyes searched mine. As always, he saw everything inside me. His hand softened against my skin. “They were supposed to come up with something,” he said. “Make up an interim payment of some kind that you were entitled to. Whatever it was, if it came directly from the War Office, you wouldn't question it. That way you wouldn't have to struggle until I was free to come home. They promised me, and they lied.” His voice cracked just a little—I had never known Alex's voice to crack. “I am asking you, Jo, to consider what my options were. If I contacted you, I'd blow the entire operation, as well as getting myself executed for treason. Or I could go back to the Front and be killed. I did the only thing I could think of—paid the only price I could—so that I had a chance of coming home.”

A chance of coming home.
And there it was again, after three years. I wanted him—so badly it was an ache pressing through every part of me. I wanted my husband, his body that I knew almost as well as my own. I had dulled and suppressed it in my grief, but I had
missed
him. Yet at the same time I wondered whether Frances had known he was a spy, whether Alex had had to silence her. Whether there had been other women in those years, women he had kissed and put his hands on and taken to bed. I flinched beneath him again.

His gaze shuttered. He pressed my leg casually still and began to unroll my stocking again. I couldn't breathe.
I could kick him from this position,
I thought wildly.
I could kick him hard in the chest.
I nearly did it. “Alex,” I said.

“What is it?”

“You need to leave.”

He pulled the stocking from my foot. We were silent for a long moment. I could hear the soft sound of his breathing.

“You mean it, don't you?” he said in a whisper.

“I'm sorry,” I said, trying not to notice that my hands were cold with fear. “I'm exhausted. I can't even think straight.”

Still he sat looking at me, his fingers curled around the back of my bare ankle. He did not take his eyes from my face. He had such a gift for stillness, my husband did, such utter control of every nerve and muscle. He watched me for a long moment, his expression impossible to read. It was this stillness, I saw now, this ability to be silent and the endless patience to wait, that had made him such a good spy.

Without a word, he set my foot down on the coverlet and rose from his chair.

“Get some sleep,” he said. A moment later, the door clicked softly shut behind him.

I was trembling. The skin of my legs still burned where he'd touched me. I reached out and switched off the lamp, then lay on top of the coverlet, still in my dress. I wondered briefly if the maids had made up another room for him. If they'd talk of us the way they talked of Dottie and Robert belowstairs.
They sleep separate.

But he had only told me to get some sleep. He had not said
good night.
And Alex never said anything without meaning.

I curled into a ball and closed my eyes.