Right, let’s say Colin had been an econ major. Everyone needed a hobby. Maybe he just liked the study of languages and their corresponding cultures. Maybe he just had time on his hands after leaving his City job and needed something to do. Maybe.
Feeling a bit like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey pouncing on the Tilneys’ old laundry lists in the hopes that they were mouldering manuscripts, I attacked the drawers of Colin’s desk, yanking them open one by one. If he came in – well, I was just looking for paper and pen to scribble down some dissertation ideas. Ignore the fact that I had paper and pen of my own in my bag in the bedroom.
The top drawer had nothing but the usual office effluvia of stretched-out paper clips, capless pens, boxes of spare staples, eraser-less pencils and pencil-less erasers. The second drawer was more promising. Hands unsteady, I reached for the first of the hanging files. ‘Business Expenses,’ it read. Business expenses for what? What business? The first batch were all estate related, reports of land taxes paid, necessary repairs made, machinery bought. No pigs, I noticed.
Feeling considerably less excited, I eased the file back into the folder and drew out the next one. This really was turning into Catherine Morland with her laundry list, wasn’t it? I was all ready to dismissively tuck away this file as I had the last one, closing the drawer on the files and the whole embarrassing episode, when something made me stay my hand.
Unlike the last file, there were no neatly printed-out spreadsheets of estate accounts. Instead, it was just a bunch of receipts shoved haphazardly into a folder. The one on top had been folded three times and tucked into a blue holder that read ‘Hilton Dubai Jumeirah.’ Jumeirah? On an impulse, I tugged down one of the UAE books from the shelf. And there it was. Jumeirah, one of the outlying areas of rapidly developing Dubai. The guidebook listed the hotel as ‘moderate’ and enthused that it was ‘a bargain for the beachfront.’ Hmm. What was Colin doing going to beachfronts in Dubai? Pre-me, I hoped.
Easing it out of its holder, I unfolded the hotel receipt. It hadn’t been pre-me. In fact, it had been this month. Colin had stayed there for a week, one of the two weeks he had been out of London ‘on business.’ Other receipts in the pile were for various restaurants in Dubai, drinks at Vu’s, lunch at Bastakiah Nights, taxi rides, coffees, bus tickets, the usual petty expenses of travel.
Well, that explained how brown he had got over Christmas. He had spent enough of his youth in the sun that he had one of those perma-tans, a permanent overlay of brown over a naturally fair skin that probably signalled melanomas later in life, so it hadn’t been striking enough to warrant questions; if anything, I had ascribed his heightened colour to the effects of his ski trip with his mother and her husband when he had visited them in Italy over the New Year.
I wondered where he had spent the other week.
If I delved deeper into the folder, I would no doubt find receipts for that week, too, in some other exotic location. Moscow, perhaps, since that seemed to have occasioned the second largest pile of guidebooks, or Bonn, or maybe even Kyrgyzstan. It was all straight out of an old-fashioned thriller. Our Man in … Sussex.
Huh.
Didn’t quite have the right ring to it, did it? Besides, if he really was involved in something top secret, why would he leave all his background materials out where anyone could see them? The dictionaries and guides were right there on the back wall, in plain view from the door – except where they would be obscured by the computer monitor and the back of the chair, but that didn’t really count, since all you had to do was walk around them. Shelves are meant to display, not hide. And then there were the receipts in the drawer. The unlocked drawer. Everything was right out there in the open.
But open to whom? That was the question. We were in West Sussex, isolated at the end of a not-very-well-kept road (my posterior, still bruised from the ride down it earlier, suggested stronger adjectives). The books might be right there on the shelves and the receipts right there in the drawer, but they were all the way up on the second floor in a wing off the main block of the house. All the reception rooms were downstairs. Even if he had people over, they probably wouldn’t go up above the ground floor. And if they did go upstairs, this room was all the way at the end of a wing that contained nothing else but the master bedroom and bath.
When I had stayed last time, as guest, my bedroom had been in the main block, the library all the way over in the other wing. I had had no idea that this wing – or this room – was even here. Why would I have? And if I had ventured this way, I would probably have spotted Colin’s bedroom, realised I was trespassing, and gone no farther.
It was all more than a little perplexing.
Tucking the folder back into the drawer, I nudged it shut with one knee and reached for the bottom drawer. It didn’t budge. I tried again, getting a better grip on the brass handle. It rattled a bit, but wouldn’t move. So this one was locked. I knelt down beside the desk to get a better look, my nightgown spreading out along the carpet around me, the bright green flannel with its splashy pink flowers incongruous against the faded and stained Persian carpet. Closing one eye and putting the other against the keyhole, I thought I could make out something in there – but I couldn’t tell what. Probably just the rest of the keyhole.
Settling back on my heels, disgruntled, I spotted something I had missed. There was a fragment of paper on the carpet beneath the desk, right near the edge of my nightgown. It really was just a fragment, with ragged corners, roughly the quarter of the size of a standard piece of paper, as though a document had been torn in two and then torn again. It read:
‘—llowed them as far as the gold souk where—’
‘—back alley behind a vendor selling fake hand—’ (I really hoped the next missing word there was ‘bags.’)
‘—crawled beneath a display of gold chains into—’
‘—nversation between them in the back room—’
‘—elves safe, made little effort to keep their voices—’
‘—Dublin, in four days, and then from there to—’
‘—this gun, a Jericho 941 F double action semiauto—’
‘—idn’t stand a chance at point-blank range. After—’
And there it ended, infuriating, inconclusive, all but unintelligible.
What in the hell?
I held the piece of paper under the bulb of the desk lamp, as though more light would somehow illuminate the contents or make the missing words reappear. Even if they did, how was this to be explained? It was Colin’s handwriting; I knew it by now, every awkward, angular scratch of the pen. But the contents …
No, I thought. No. This was supposed to be Northanger Abbey, not The Spy Who Loved Me. I might imagine these things, but I was never supposed to actually find corroboration. I rubbed one cold palm against my nightgown: flannel, warm, safe, and mundane. Spies didn’t exist in worlds with flowered flannel nightgowns and coffee-stained carpets. Those things were normal; they were real. Spies were for television, for movie screens, for the old Ian Fleming paperbacks in the library. All fiction, all imaginary. Except some of them weren’t imaginary.
I looked at the piece of paper trembling in my other hand, in the glare of the bulb of the desk light. It looked pretty real, too. So had all those receipts in the drawer. And then there was that two-week period when Colin was out of London, leaving ‘Miss you!’ messages on my voice mail at odd hours, but never there when I called back. I thought back to Sally’s and Joan’s odd comments in the ladies’ room; Colin’s caginess when asked about his occupation; that pink flower icon guarding the files on his computer.
I let the scrap of paper drop to the floor where I had found it, among the biscuit crumbs and spiky bits on the carpet where coffee had spilt and dried. It lay there looking perfectly innocent, like any other fragment of paper accidentally torn and dropped.
Only I knew better.
Why hadn’t anyone told me that I was dating 007?
Chapter Twenty
??
?We can try again tomorrow,’ Henrietta said soothingly. Muslin brushed against velvet as Charlotte sank down into a chair beside her best friend in the Dorringtons’ box at Drury Lane. The opulence of the gold embroidery on the hem of her white muslin dress and the rich sheen of the velvet upholstery stood in stark contrast to her distinctly muddy mood.
‘But what if tomorrow is too late?’ she protested, dropping her fan so that it dangled limply from her wrist.
‘How could it be too late?’ Henrietta asked sensibly.
As Henrietta had pointed out earlier that day, it wasn’t as if the king was going anywhere. Nor, unfortunately, was the false Dr Simmons. With the queen’s connivance, Charlotte had spent the whole of the afternoon lying in wait for him, but no matter how Charlotte haunted the library, Dr Simmons hadn’t put a single broken-buckled shoe out of the king’s chambers.
Charlotte shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t even know.’
‘Don’t know what?’ asked Miles, tromping happily up behind them.
It had been Miles’s suggestion that they go to the theatre, and Charlotte couldn’t think of a reasonable reason to refuse. If she were Penelope, or even Henrietta, she might, she thought, have claimed a headache and doubled back to Buckingham House to lurk in the shadows until the false doctor emerged from his lair. But, being herself, she couldn’t imagine creeping out after dark without a chaperone. It just seemed like poor sense. And more than a little bit daunting. Lurking in the library was just about the extent of her daring.
Her grandmother was right. She didn’t have any gumption.
‘Anything,’ said Charlotte glumly.
‘Cheer up, old thing.’ A large hand descended on her head in a casual gesture of friendship that broke her egret feather and drove two pins into her scalp. Happily oblivious, Miles continued, ‘Dovedale told me he’ll be here tonight.’
That was supposed to improve her mood?
Egret feather wagging drunkenly, Charlotte narrowed her eyes at her best friend’s husband. ‘You spoke to Robert?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
The more appropriate question was why would he. They did not exactly move within the same circles.
Charlotte looked to Henrietta, but Henrietta only widened her eyes in a silent protestation of innocence.
Charlotte was not convinced. ‘You didn’t invite him, did you?’ Charlotte asked suspiciously.
‘No.’ Miles seemed genuinely surprised by the question. But, then, Miles always seemed vaguely surprised. By everything. ‘He’s making one of Medmenham’s party.’
Medmenham. Always Medmenham. Charlotte was sick unto death of Sir Francis Medmenham, whose fingers were far too busy in any number of pies, attaching himself to Robert, recommending new doctors for the king. In fact, when she searched for the base of all the sources of confusion in her life, it always seemed to come back to Medmenham.
Despite herself, Charlotte found herself turning towards Medmenham’s box, peering myopically at the confusion of gentlemen who were sorting themselves out among the small gilt chairs. One box over, she could see the blur of Penelope’s red head, in company with her soon-to-be husband, her mother, who was positively moulting feathers, and her father, who was only visible as a long pair of legs and a tilted program covering his face. Staines leant over the partition to speak to someone in Medmenham’s box and the configuration shifted, revealing Robert at the very back. Even blurry, he looked somewhat grim. Or maybe that was just the effect of his stark black-and-white evening clothes.
‘I wonder why Dovedale didn’t use the Dovedale box,’ Henrietta was saying to Miles over Charlotte’s head.
‘I expect he didn’t know he had it,’ said Miles matter-offactly.
Charlotte cocked her head at him. ‘What do you mean?’
Miles shrugged awkwardly. ‘Well, it’s not exactly as though the dowager is relinquishing anything, is it? I put him up for my club, but he refused,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘Said he didn’t have the blunt to pay the fees.’
‘But—’ Charlotte began, and broke off.
Miles looked at her quizzically, but Charlotte just shook her head, the words she had been about to say all jumbled in a lump at the back of her throat.
But of course he has the funds, she had been about to say. It was all his. The opera box, the houses, the horses, Girdings, everything, down to the very honey in the beehives. Only it wasn’t, was it? Not while her grandmother held the keys. By law, it had been all Robert’s for over a decade, but he hadn’t had any use of it, of any of it.
‘He isn’t even living at Dovedale House, is he?’ Henrietta asked curiously, as if it were a matter of purely academic interest.
Charlotte knew the answer to that one. ‘Bachelor lodgings,’ she croaked. She wasn’t quite sure why her throat had suddenly gone so dry. ‘He told me he took bachelor lodgings in the Albany.’
As if he didn’t intend to stay. Or, she realised, with a sinking feeling, as if he never felt like he could stay in the first place.
Charlotte looked across the way, at the bustling box where Medmenham’s cronies were amusing themselves with ribald jokes and scurrilous stories. Medmenham presided with quizzing glass in hand, entirely at home among the velvet and gilt. Robert, in contrast, kept to the back of the box, to the shadows, as though primed for a quick retreat. As he had retreated from Girdings all those years ago?
Her grandmother certainly hadn’t done anything to make him welcome.
And she was just as bad. Charlotte could feel her cheeks burn with two bright flags of colour. What had she done to make him feel at home in his own home? She had never stopped to think of how strange it might be for him, any of it, of how big and daunting Girdings might seem, or how utterly alien the code of behaviour that governed the small world of the ton. She hadn’t thought about him at all; she had simply used him for her own purposes, first as playmate and then as a repository for her romantic fancies.
Old anger wrestled with new guilt in a writhing mass of undigestible emotion. To have kissed her and then fled wasn’t the act of a gentleman – but what had her part been in that?
He had tried to tell her. Charlotte’s restless hands crushed the lace edge of her fan as she remembered their conversation in the dining room on Twelfth Night, and how she had brushed away his tentative admissions about his own inadequacies as duke, too preoccupied with wondering what he thought of her, only concerned with how whatever he said related to her. In retrospect, her own behaviour struck her as embarrassingly childish and more than a little selfish.
‘I wonder if it is all very strange for him,’ she said tentatively, half hoping that Miles would say no. ‘Coming back to all this, I mean.’
‘I can’t think how it wouldn’t be,’ said Miles, casually heaping coals of fire on her head. ‘And your grandmother has been known to make grown men jump out of drawing room windows.’
‘It was a ballroom window,’ said Charlotte defensively. ‘And I don’t think Percy Ponsonby really counts as a grown man.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Miles equably. ‘But you can’t deny that the dowager tends to inspire the urge to emigrate. I used to think I wanted to run away and join the army,’ he added reminiscently.
‘You also thought you wanted to be a woodcutter,’ reminded Henrietta caustically.
‘I like chopping things down,’ said Miles cheerfully.
‘He chopped down Mother’s favourite rosebush,’ said Henrietta to Charlotte.
‘It wasn’t her favourite,’ Miles protested. ‘And it grew back.’
Their familiar bickering faded into a blur in the background. Charlotte feigned interest in the stage, but she did not see the brightly costumed actors any more than she heard Miles and Henrietta’s banter. Instead, she was busily realigning the past few weeks within her head, worrying at them, turning bits and pieces upside down to create an entirely new picture of events. Maybe Robert wasn’t a Lovelace, or an Orville, either, but something entirely different. For once, Charlo
tte could think of no literary counterpart into which she could slot Robert’s behaviour.
Girdings and the town house were both his. He would have been well within his rights to dispossess both her and her grandmother. Her grandmother had her dower property and a comfortable allowance of her own. Nobody would have condemned him for it, or even thought anything of it. It was the way the world worked.
Instead, he had behaved as though he were the interloper, rather than they, attending the house party at Girdings more as guest than host, never indicating by word or deed that he minded the usurpation of his rightful place. The only liberty he had taken was in kissing her. And as for that … Charlotte’s hands tightened on her fan as it all began to make a very unpleasant sort of sense. After he had been made to feel like the rankest of interlopers, it must have been terribly tempting to find himself the object of adoration of the not-entirely-ill-favoured daughter of the house. Add a windswept parapet, a sky full of stars, and a good deal of wine at dinner, and she didn’t wonder that he had kissed her.
Or that he had thought better of it afterwards. She knew her own limitations.
Charlotte was jarred out of that unpleasant line of thought as Henrietta’s chair bumped against hers as its occupant scrambled to stand.
‘Penelope!’ Henrietta exclaimed, leaping from her seat and hurrying to the back of the box.
Dropping her mangled fan, Charlotte saw that they had visitors. Penelope pushed into the box, tugging her fiancé along behind her like a dog on a leash. Inevitably as the night follows the day, Medmenham, Innes, and Frobisher followed along behind him, although Charlotte noticed that Frobisher had the good sense to stay to the back of the group, well away from Henrietta and Miles. Was Robert there, too? In the confusion of coats and cravats, gleaming quizzing glasses and frothing linen, it was difficult to tell.