‘Mowers?’ I repeated, craning to peer through the rapidly narrowing slice of door as he prudently closed it behind him. ‘Lawn mowers?’
‘Scythes, too,’ said Colin, fiddling with the lock. ‘Rusty and bent out of shape. The odd strimmer. There’s even an old Victorian harvester back there. That’s the big beast in the back.’
Victorian harvester, indeed! I wanted to scoff at it. But that lump on the side had looked awfully like a lawn mower, hadn’t it?
‘That’s what that was? Garden equipment?’
‘Among other rubbish.’ Colin’s attention was absorbed by the lock, in that classic man-with-tool way. He jiggled the curved bit in and out of the hole, trying to get the clasp to catch. ‘There’s a graveyard of old bicycles in the far corner where the garderobe used to be. We Selwicks never throw anything out. Ha!’
Colin tugged at the lock with a satisfied air. The fiddly bit had given up the fight and decided to hold, securing the ancient stronghold of the Selwicks for another day.
‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ I asked, thinking of that damning bit of paper beneath his desk. ‘Not throwing things away?’
‘I should think you would be pleased,’ he said, trying the door one last time to satisfy himself that it had really closed. When I looked blank, he specified, ‘Your research.’
‘True,’ I admitted. Without the Selwick pack-rat tendencies, I would have only the legend of the Pink Carnation to go on, with perhaps a frill of family stories to bolster the tale. But if the Selwicks held on to bits of paper, what else might they be holding on to? People did tend to follow in their parents’ professions, for the simple reason that familiarity bred comfort – and connections. There was a reason my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been lawyers. And that sort of tradition would be all the more important in a profession where there were no organised academies, no professional course of study.
Amy and Richard Selwick had started a spy school at this very same Selwick Hall. The spy school had initially been conceived of as a way of training outsiders, but it would have been just as natural for Amy and Richard to raise their children to play the same great game in the pursuit of which they had met. Goodness only knew, the middle and later nineteenth century hadn’t lacked for opportunities for espionage.
What if it had continued on, on to this very day?
I looked at Colin as we walked in companionable silence away from the Tower, his hands stuck comfortably in the pockets of his Barbour jacket, his dark blond hair damped with wet, his Wellies comfortably smeared with mud and dead leaves. He looked every inch the English country gentleman, straight out of an issue of Country Life – or Joan’s magazine, Manderley. The thought of Joan brought to mind, with renewed clarity, her enigmatic words in the ladies’ room of the Heavy Hart.
‘Why do you not like to talk about what you do?’ I asked, all in a rush. Blunt – but maybe blunt was what was needed.
Colin looked down at me in surprise. He maintained his casual pose, hands in the pockets, shoulders slightly forwards to accommodate my lesser height, but I didn’t miss the glaze of wariness that settled over him.
‘What d’you mean?’ he asked, with studied ease.
‘I found the piece of paper under your desk. About the gold souk – and the guns.’
Colin’s eyes closed in an ‘Oh, shit’ expression. ‘So you know.’
‘Well, between the paper and all your books, I put two and two together. I heard Joan saying something in the ladies’ room the other night,’ I added, by way of explanation.
Colin’s hazel eyes shifted sideways, towards me. ‘I gather she wasn’t complimentary.’
‘No,’ I said apologetically. ‘But Sally defended you.’
Colin scuffed his already scuffed Wellies through the withered winter grass. ‘I should have mentioned it to you before, but I don’t usually like to talk to people about it.’
That was much better than ‘Now that you’ve found out, I’ll have to kill you,’ or whatever the British equivalent of the witness protection program was. I didn’t even know if the British had an equivalent of the witness protection program. I tried to envision myself trying to blend into Nowheresville-on-Thames under an assumed name and failed miserably.
‘I can see why you don’t like to tell people,’ I said understandingly. ‘That would kind of jeopardise your position, wouldn’t it? If people knew.’
‘Jeopardise my position?’
‘You know,’ I said, waving my hands in the air. ‘Give the game away. I mean, I always wondered how James Bond did his job when everyone knew who he was.’
‘That’s a good point, I suppose,’ he said, in that way people have when you’ve just said something that’s so off the mark, it might as well be in Sanskrit, but they like you, so they want to make something positive out of it so they can give you the credit you both know you don’t deserve. ‘And it would certainly be an interesting twist on the theme. But I think the reader should know who the main character is, even if the villains don’t.’
Now it was my turn to look at him as though he were speaking Sanskrit. ‘The reader?’
Colin shrugged self-deprecatingly. ‘Potential readers, then. I’d like to think I’ll have them eventually.’
Was he talking about his memoirs? ‘I thought you didn’t want to publicise what you do,’ I said, in what I thought was a reasonable tone.
Colin smiled down at me, looking disconcertingly boyish for an international man of mystery. ‘Well, I’ll have to publicise it eventually, won’t I? At least, if it all goes well.’
‘Your mission, you mean?’ I ventured.
Colin looked at me in confusion. ‘My novel,’ he said, as though that were self-evident. ‘I suppose you could call it a mission, but I think of it more as a vocation.’
‘Your novel?’ The word tasted like a foreign object on my lips. ‘But what about – oh! Then all those books – the travel guides …’
‘All research. For my spy novel. But if you didn’t know about the novel, then …’ His face was a mirror of my own, bearing an identical expression of horrified comprehension as each of us realised just what the other had been talking about all this while.
I could feel my cheeks go a deep, painful red.
Colin rubbed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, as though trying to clear his head. ‘So when you saw the books and the travel guides, you thought … you didn’t really think’ – he seemed to have trouble getting the words out – ‘that I was a spy?’
‘Only for about five minutes,’ I muttered.
A snorting noise erupted from Colin’s nostrils. It sounded like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be laughter when it grew up.
‘What was I supposed to think, with strange men getting murdered in the gold souk?’ I demanded spiritedly. ‘And there was Joan making cryptic comments in the ladies’ room and you not wanting me to get too close to the family archives. You have to admit that it makes a certain amount of sense.’
‘What did you think, that we had a spy empire?’ choked Colin.
‘Not an empire,’ I said sulkily. It wasn’t that ridiculous. OK, maybe it was. But it was his fault for being all strange and cagey about the family history. ‘Maybe just a very small spy dukedom.’
The amusement faded from Colin’s face as the implications sank in. ‘You really believed it, didn’t you? I hope you didn’t think you were dating the Purple Gentian,’ he said sharply.
‘I don’t see you in any knee breeches,’ I retorted.
‘I’m not my ancestors,’ he warned me. ‘I’m not some sort of – Errol Flynn on a rope.’
‘You really didn’t like that movie, did you?’ I mumbled inconsequentially. ‘I know that. I wouldn’t want you to be one of your ancestors. If you were, you’d be dead.’
That one caught him up short for a moment. Folding his arms across his chest, he asked challengingly, ‘Are you disappointed that I’m not the spy you thought I was?’
I scowled at him. ‘Honestly?’ Really, men could be such babies. ‘I’m relieved. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with a spy. I was completely freaked out by the whole idea. Do you know the hours of sleep I lost because of that damn piece of paper under your desk?’
‘Is that so?’ He was still standing in the classic male pose of aggression, arms crossed, legs spread like Errol Flynn on the deck of a pirate ship, but I could see his elbows begin to relax, like cookie dough going soft at the edges in the oven.
Seeing my chance, I sailed into the offensive. ‘And what’s the deal with people calling you from Dubai at three in the morning?’
‘Dubai? Oh.’ Understanding dawned. He must have found just the missed calls when he woke up that morning, without having realised there had been predawn alarums. ‘Did that wake you up?’
‘What do you think, Sherlock?’
Looking harassed, Colin ran a hand roughly through his hair. ‘That was a friend from university. He works in Dubai now. Great crunching numbers, but has some difficulties calculating time zones. I just visited him there,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘On a research trip. For the book,’ he emphasised.
OK, I got it, I got it. As far as I was concerned, though, Mr Selwick still had some explaining to do.
‘Why didn’t you just tell me about the book?’ I demanded. ‘Instead of being all cloak and dagger about it?’
‘What would you think of a grown man quitting his job to write a novel? It’s a bloody cliché.’ There was no mistaking the cri de coeur; the man was so full of angst, he resonated like a tuning fork.
My irritation washed away, subsumed in a tidal wave of intense protectiveness. I wanted to yell at all the other children in the play yard and make them play nicely with him. I could feel myself beginning to ooze sympathy like an underdone soufflé. ‘It could have been worse,’ I said bracingly. ‘It could have been pig farming.’
‘Pig farming?’
Oh, right. Colin hadn’t been there for that spies/sties discussion. At least now I knew I hadn’t been going crazy. Joan had said spies. She had simply meant fictional ones.
‘At least writing is a nice, clean job,’ I said, warming to my theme. ‘And so nicely portable, too.’
‘You don’t think I’m crazy?’ he asked guardedly.
‘Only in a good way,’ I assured him. ‘Anything creative is probably a little crazy. But that’s what makes it interesting. And if you have the wherewithal to do it, more power to you.’
‘Thanks,’ he muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets. ‘I think.’
‘No, really,’ I said, more earnestly this time. ‘I think it’s splendid. And I want to hear all about it. But why didn’t you tell me?’ Rather than letting me jump to insane conclusions, I added silently. Fortunately, he chose not to bring up that bit.
Colin shrugged. ‘It just seemed a stupid thing to do, leaving a good job to have a go at a novel. A pipe dream.’
‘But it’s your pipe dream. And if you actually do it, then it’s not a pipe dream anymore, it’s a career. Writing a spy thriller certainly makes as much sense as what I do,’ I said encouragingly. ‘It will probably sell a lot better.’
‘If it sells at all,’ he said.
‘What made you decide to do it?’ I asked curiously. ‘That had to be a hard decision to make.’
‘I’d always wanted to. It seemed so irresponsible, though. But then Dad died, and everything seemed’ – he held out both hands palms up – ‘different,’ he finished flatly. ‘Everything was different.’
I nodded furiously, keeping my mouth shut, trying to channel sympathy and understanding and encouragement without saying anything, even though, when it came down to it, I knew I couldn’t really understand. I could only guess at what it must be like to lose a parent, and to lose a parent relatively young, in a lingering and unpleasant way. I’d never dealt with cancer close up, but it didn’t seem a friendly way to go. At least not for the children and loved ones who were left behind.
‘We used to watch James Bond movies together,’ Colin said, in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible. ‘He read everything. Follett, Fleming, le Carré, Forsyth, Deighton.’ Some of the names were unfamiliar to me, but I recognised enough of them to guess that we were mostly talking spy thrillers. ‘It was only at the end that he told me—’
I cocked my head, indicating interest.
Colin smiled wryly. ‘– that he had been in intelligence himself, while he was in the service.’
‘Service?’ I asked in a very small voice.
‘The army,’ he translated for my American ears, specifying, ‘Twenty-first Lancers.’ I could hear the small boy’s pride in his voice. ‘So there’s your spy for you. He was stationed in Germany, Hong Kong, Northern Ireland. And those are only the places he told me about.’
I didn’t know what to say. Something about his tone suggested that he wouldn’t welcome questions about his father. The entire topic was too, too fraught. I felt like I was playing ‘red light, green light, one, two, three,’ that child’s game where you can only advance by increments when the other person’s back is turned. Revelation had to sneak up on him; I couldn’t force it. He would tell me what he wanted me to know in his own way, in his own time.
And then there was all that had been said by being unsaid. It made my heart wrench to think of what Colin must have gone through, seeing the centre wrenched out of his world. His change of career seemed in part a reaction to his own mortality, in part a tribute to his father. Either way, it went far deeper than mere fiction.
‘I’d love to read what you’ve written,’ I said finally, for lack of anything better to say.
It seemed to be the right thing. ‘Thanks,’ he said. The hint of a smile played around his lips. ‘You know, I did think of writing about the Pink Carnation initially …’
‘You didn’t!’ I made noises of exaggerated indignation. ‘So that’s why you wanted to be rid of me!’
The sound of my own voice made me wince. I was too loud, too strident, hamming it up to drum away the ghosts that seemed to be walking with us through the mist-ridden grounds, like natives clanging cymbals around a campfire to scare away the spirits.
‘One of the reasons. There was Serena, too,’ he said, and I knew he meant Serena’s relationship with a man who had been dating her in hopes of access to their family archives. ‘But I did initially think of writing a sort of quasi-history, starting with the Purple Gentian and ending with Dad.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ I said teasingly, sliding my arm through his. ‘I’d hate to think of us being in competition. Not to mention that novels sell much better than histories.’
‘Tell that to Joan,’ he said dryly, but his arm tightened around mine.
‘Why did you even bother to tell her?’ I asked. Stupid of me, I know, but it bothered me that she had known before I had. She might be annoying, but she was quite attractive in her own way. And she had known Colin far longer. She had known his sister and his parents and the boy he had been before his father’s death. It all made me feel a little bit insecure.
‘I had hoped she might put me in touch with her agent,’ he admitted. ‘She wasn’t too chuffed at the notion.’
‘Won’t she feel like an idiot when you’re a best seller!’ I declared loyally. Too loyally. I was like a one-woman brass band.
‘Eloise?’ I tilted my head up to find Colin looking at me understandingly. ‘It’s OK.’
He didn’t have to explain what he meant. It was a little bit of everything: his father, the book, my silly assumptions, Joan. And it really was OK. We had, without my even realising it, overleaped an indefinable hurdle and landed safely on the other side. I was still getting used to the notion of Colin as novelist, but I found that I liked it. I certainly liked it better than the notion of Colin as spy. Of course, if I were a spy, trying to hide my secret identity from my girlfriend, isn’t that just the sort of cover story I would come up with?
Oh, no. I wasn’t l
etting myself go down that road again. Even if it might be a rather interesting road.
‘I know,’ I said. And then, rather nonsensically, ‘I like you.’
Colin’s eyes crinkled at the corners in that way I already knew so well. Funny how you can come to know someone’s gestures, their mannerisms, so well, while knowing so little else about them at all. But I was learning.
‘I like you, too,’ he said. And then he grinned. ‘But no more Errol Flynn.’
Everyone always does tell me that relationships require compromise. And if I wanted this to be a real one …
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tonight we’ll watch Bond. Just for you. But tomorrow I get The Scarlet Pimpernel.’
‘It’s a deal,’ said Colin.
Historical Note
In February of 1804, George III went mad. It wasn’t the first time. The king had famously gone round the bend in 1788, precipitating both a crisis of government and the movie The Madness of King George. The formerly model monarch gave way to wild fits of lust, making lewd suggestions to ladies of the court, developing a fixation with the queen’s ageing ladyin-waiting, Lady Pembroke, and, according to her own report, forcing his daughter-in-law Princess Caroline to leap over the back of a sofa to escape from his amorous advances (given Princess Caroline’s relationship with the royal family and her level of personal hygiene, one has to take that claim with more than a few grains of salt).
I took many of the details of the king’s illness in 1804 straight from the historical record. Like his other illnesses in 1788 and 1801, this one was heralded by rapid speech, agitation, and stomach pain. The king dismissed all of his pages and sundry Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. The Willis brothers, who had tended the king in his two previous illnesses, were flatly refused entrance, and a new doctor, Dr Simmons of St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, was summoned. Upon Dr Simmons’s arrival, he clapped the king into a straitjacket. The king was blistered, purged, and bled. An account of the king’s treatments can be found in Christopher Hibbert’s George III: A Personal History. For those who wish to know more about treatment of the mentally ill in Georgian Britain generally, I recommend Jonathan Andrews’ Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. For the behaviour of the queen and princesses during the king’s crises, I relied heavily upon Flora Fraser’s Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III. Fanny Burney, Charlotte’s favourite author, kept a journal during the king’s first illness, providing invaluable details about the king’s appearance and behaviour. Charlotte’s colloquy with the king in the library is heavily based upon Burney’s accounts of her own conversations with the mad king.