“What evidence?” I held up a program for a piano concert at Carnegie Hall, April of 1952. “That he liked music? He was a fan of the cricket? He got his book ideas in the middle of cocktail parties?”
“Well, we know he fell in love with my great-grandmother on board, so there’s your evidence for amorous frolics, Sherlock.” He squinted at the program. “Carnegie Hall, eh? That’s a long way to travel for a piano concert.”
“It was Mary Talmadge,” I said. “One of the greats.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Philistine.”
“If she’d rowed the eight at the Olympics, on the other hand . . .”
“She couldn’t have. Women didn’t start rowing in the Olympics until the 1970s.”
He cocked his head at me. “Really? Where did you learn that?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” My cheeks went hot. “I must have heard it around somewhere.”
“You’re not doing research on the side, are you? Interest piqued just a little, perhaps?”
I tried to throw the Carnegie Hall program at him, but it caught the air and fluttered to the ground instead. “Everyone needs a break now and again. This is pretty tedious work. Plenty of material for a ‘Robert Langford, spy novelist’ biography, but it’s like he’s blocked out his entire life up until 1920. He never spoke about Lusitania, never wrote about it, not even in letters. You wouldn’t even know he was on that ship unless you’d seen the passenger manifests and the newspaper accounts.”
“And even the newspapers hardly mentioned him.” John thumbed through a few papers. “I suppose, if he did commit treason, it’s possible he destroyed all the evidence. Even likely.”
“And left the codebook behind in an oilskin pouch? Why? As a souvenir?”
John made a grunt that might have meant anything. Agreement or frustration. He sat back in the chair and said, “Speaking of. Any more ideas on that code?”
“No. Every time I try to match the message on my great-grandfather’s envelope with one of the ciphers in Robert’s codebook, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s still just letters and numbers. Like a code layered on top of the code.”
“Then maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the codes don’t match at all. Maybe Robert and Patrick were running different rackets. Working for different people, I mean.”
“That would be one pretty big coincidence.”
He shrugged his big shoulders. “Stranger things. Like I said before, I don’t know much about spycraft—”
“Despite the fact that your ancestors seem to have been knee-deep in it.”
“But I do know that the intelligence agencies weren’t very well organized back then. There were rivalries and conflicts. They were stepping on each other’s toes all the time, and sometimes on purpose. So—”
“So maybe they were actually rivals? Double-crossing each other?” I frowned. “But that doesn’t make sense, either. They were obviously . . . well, not friends. But they seem to have worked together. I mean, the watch Robert gave Patrick? That was a nice watch.”
“Maybe a case of keeping your enemies close? Don’t forget, the Irish sided with the Germans in the Great War, if only to spit in the eye of the English. Not even Robert might have known for sure where Patrick’s loyalties really lay.” John ran a hand through his hair, which was in need of a good cut. The weather had turned gray, and he wore a dark green cashmere sweater that might conceivably have been handed down from Robert himself, judging by the variety of moth holes. Or maybe not, unless Robert was a very tall, very broad man. Which, according to the evidence, he wasn’t. Maybe Mrs. Finch had forgotten to put the sweater away in a cedar closet. Maybe Mrs. Finch had forgotten there was a cedar closet. Still, it suited John. He had the kind of face that went well with worn, moth-eaten cashmere sweaters. The color brought out the green in his hazel eyes. He looked so much softer-edged, so much kinder than he had in that Costa Coffee shop eight days ago. I liked the familiar angle at which his shoulders slanted from his neck, the way his eyes widened when he sipped his tea. The look of happy concentration on his face right now, as he considered the complicated problem of Patrick and Robert. Our two ancestors, skulking about a ship together, exchanging messages, plotting to do—what?
“You know something?” I said. “I think you’re enjoying yourself.”
“Of course I’m enjoying myself. This is a thousand times more enjoyable than dodging photographers in the capital and waiting for the next half-truth to turn up in the Daily Mail Online.”
“Even if you have to keep company with money-grubbing Americans?”
He grinned. “I’ve found they start to grow on one, after a while. Once you get accustomed to their strange habits and penchant for frankness.”
I rose to my knees and gathered his gaze into mine. “Can I be frank right now, John?”
His smile faded slightly, replaced by an expression of wary interest. His hands curled around the knobs of the armrests. “Certainly, Sarah. Speak your mind. God knows I expect nothing less of you.”
I leaned forward and caught the edge of the desk with my fingers. His eyelashes, I thought, were remarkably thick. I said, in a husky whisper, “I’m so hungry right now, I could eat a swan.”
“Ah, that’s the proper spirit.” He rose from his seat and walked around the corner of the desk, holding out his hand to me. “Let’s find ourselves some dinner, shall we? But there’s one rule.”
I took his hand and swung to my feet. “What’s that?”
“We can’t talk about my great-grandfather, or your great-grandfather, or any aspect of the history of the Langford and Houlihan families. For just one bloody hour, I want to talk about something else.”
“What else is there?”
He kept hold of my hand. “I’m sure we can think of something,” he said.
When was the last time I’d held a boy’s hand? I couldn’t remember. When you attend an all-girl Catholic high school, you graduate with a fine, well-rounded education in pretty much everything except holding hands with boys. Or anything else with boys, really. Then you go to college, and you’re so damned shy around the male of the species, he might as well be another species. Eventually, around sophomore year, you find a boy as shy as you are, such that your shynesses cancel each other out—he might explain this to you as a math equation, to which you nod earnestly because you’ve maybe had a few beers and a boy is actually holding your hand for the first time in your life—and he’s smart and kind of cute, and you’re not in love but you’re close enough, and at last you get to learn the great mystery of life. Then you graduate, and he goes to grad school on the West Coast, and you go to grad school on the East Coast, and anyway you’re sick of him by then. It’s only later that you realize nobody really holds hands anymore. That nobody holds these quaint, old-fashioned rituals quite as dear as you do.
Or is it just me?
Anyway. There was this other guy, a guy I met at grad school, working on my history PhD, before that fateful semester in Ireland. I’d gone to this mixer at somebody’s stinkhole apartment on West End Avenue, and I’d felt somebody’s gaze on my cheek, my neck, my hair, except every time I turned around, nobody looked back. But I did catch sight of this boy, sleek brown hair and sharp eyes, medium height, holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I hated cigarettes, so I don’t know why the boy kept claiming my attention. He just did. But I couldn’t catch his eye, and even when I almost did, I chickened out at the last instant. Too intimate, too exposed, to catch a stranger’s gaze. I got my coat and left. He caught up with me in the stairwell and apologized. For what, I asked. For not introducing myself, he said. I’m Jared Holm. Journalism school, second year. And he held out his hand.
Probably that wasn’t the last time I held a boy’s hand. Probably Jared and I held hands a few times, during the lazy course of those four or five months before Ireland, half-baked friends with some benefits, the kind of itch-scratching relationship that serves its purpose when there’s nobody
to entrance you. Maybe I’d even held hands with that Wall Street guy, although I don’t think so. He wasn’t the hand-holding type, at least not in the traditional sense. But certainly not since then. Once Mom got sick, I had no room in my life for anything else. No space in my emotions for everything that came along with putting your hand in his hand, palms touching, fingers touching, skin against vulnerable skin.
And I still didn’t have that space, did I? I was still booked on that nonrefundable flight back to New York in three days. Mom was still sick. Her fate stuck to my mind and my thoughts like some kind of black substance, like wax, shutting out light, impossible to ignore, even under the welcome distraction—the temporary relief, the lightening—of England and my Langford research. To make matters worse, the hand in question belonged to a completely unsuitable, unattainable man, a man who’d just separated from his wife, in painful circumstances that he still refused to discuss in anything other than general terms. The last thing he needed was to jump straight into a new relationship. The last thing I needed was to be somebody’s rebound fling.
So we’d stayed squarely in the friend zone, this past week. Of course we had. Every night, John walked me back to the Dower House, and though we sometimes shared a glass of wine or sherry or whatever was burning a hole in the Langford liquor cabinet, chatted and laughed together like friends do, he always signed off with a smile and a little salute and disappeared out the garden door.
Except once. Once he kissed my cheek, the night before last. I felt like a teenager, when you lie in bed and review the scene over and over in your head, and you can’t stop smiling, and your nerves sort of heat and buzz like an electrical circuit, and you feel the kiss on your skin for hours afterward and don’t want to wash it off, ever, even though it was just an ordinary, meaningless mwaa on the cheek like you give to people, even strangers at a dinner party, when you say goodbye.
Nothing more than that. A reflex, almost.
Still. His lips had touched my skin.
And now, two days later, here we stood. Here he stood, keeping my fingers hooked loosely in his, looking down from his six and a half feet to my five and a half feet, expecting me to speak. Some reply to I’m sure we can think of something, which, by itself, wasn’t especially suggestive, at least compared to some of the lines we’d volleyed back and forth over the course of the past week. It was the way he said it. The lowering of his eyelashes. The wry little smile in the right-hand corner of his mouth. The way his hand kept mine, and the way mine didn’t pull free.
Until the smile fell away, and the hand released me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”
“No! I mean—”
“We can talk about whatever you want. If you’d rather stick to Langford—”
“I don’t—I mean, if you want to stick to Langford—”
“Only if you do.”
“Are you asking me what I want?”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I am.” He stuck his hands behind his back and frowned at the top of my head, a few inches away from actual eye contact. “Tell me what you want, Sarah.”
I took a deep breath, because this was important. This wasn’t Jared Holm or the Wall Street guy. This was John. I couldn’t screw it up.
“Okay. I want to—”
A rapid clicking noise interrupted me. We jumped and turned to the door, which we’d left open to allow the fragrant May air into the room, and where a sleek, winsome, mottled-brown whippet now galloped across the threshold.
“Walnut!”
John stepped forward and threw open his arms, just in time to receive a missile of canine ecstasy. In the next instant, they were rolling on the rug, John on his back while Walnut licked his face like it was coated in liver pâté. “Easy, boy! Easy!” John said, laughing. “Hold on. All right, all right. Enough. Get off, you bloody mongrel. I’ve got someone for you to meet. You’re going to like her, I promise.”
I knelt on the rug and held out my hand. “Even if I am a vulgar Irish American who refrigerates eggs.”
Walnut lifted his head and turned a pair of melting brown eyes toward me.
“Her name is Sarah,” John said, “and I’ll bet you a tennis ball she likes dogs.”
“Hello, Walnut.” I let the dog sniff my fingers. He must have liked what he smelled, because he licked them, too, and though his tail was already wagging furiously it now seemed as if it might launch him into space. I laughed and rubbed his head, and he turned back to John, who sat up and grinned with such genuine, unchecked, unprecedented joy, I nearly cried. Nearly. Instead I blinked, looked down, and patted Walnut’s backside as it shimmied back and forth, propelling that tail.
“You’re a good boy, Walnut. You missed your daddy, didn’t you?”
“Of course he did,” said a tragic voice from the door.
I fell back on my bottom and craned my neck to take in the visitor. She wasn’t hard to find. She stood just inside the doorway, six feet tall and about a hundred and three pounds, wearing a pair of indigo skinny jeans under a black lace top and quilted black Chanel flats on her long, slender feet. Her hair tumbled about her shoulders with the artless flaxen streaks of a six-year-old girl just back from a beach holiday. She took off a pair of aviator sunglasses and said, “I’m so sorry, John. I meant to bring him back sooner, but I just—I needed—you know what my therapist said—and all those fucking photographers! It was so awful.”
John rose carefully to his feet. His smile faded. Beside him, Walnut whimpered. The tail slowed, stopped, and fell, as if it had run unexpectedly out of gas. Or petrol. Whatever whippets fueled up with here in the United Kingdom.
“Callie,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
She glanced at me with red, swollen eyes. “Obviously. Can we talk for a minute? Or am I interrupting something?”
John looked at me. “Sarah?”
“No, of course not,” I said brightly. “You’re not interrupting anything. I’ll just—I’ll just go for a walk or something.”
There was a small, brittle silence. Walnut, sitting next to John’s feet, wagged his tail against the floor, as if to whisk away the tension. Callie blinked her eyes and put her sunglasses back on.
“I’m going back to the house,” she said. “You know where to find me, John. Walnut? Come on, boy.”
Walnut cast John an apologetic look and bounded after her. John turned to me with the same expression, only somewhat more human and heavy-hearted.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
* * *
In John’s absence, the folly took on an uncanny silence. He’d never left me alone there for more than a few minutes, and I couldn’t get used to the stillness, the vacuum he left behind. Everywhere I looked, I saw a hole where he should have been. The desk. The sofa. The rug where he lay yesterday evening during a break, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling as he told me about the Boat Race his last year at Cambridge. How the weather was so blustery there were actual whitecaps on the Thames. So we’re sitting there in our seats at Putney Bridge, waiting to launch, and I’m staring at the cox, first-rate chap, and his face is white as a ghost, and all I can think is, bloody hell, I reckon we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of capsizing. . . .
I turned my face away from that empty rug and stared at the piles of Langford flotsam instead. In addition to Miscellaneous, there were piles for Literary Correspondence, General Correspondence, Literary Research, Drafts and Manuscripts, Receipts, Catalogs, Financial Affairs, Photographs, and Press. None of it had anything to do with the Lusitania. None of it had much to do with Robert’s life before and during the First World War at all, in fact. It was as if he’d emerged from the Irish Sea as a new man, without a past. It was like the dark side of the moon—you knew it was there, but you had no light to shine on it, no means of examining the surface.
Except the oilskin pouch. He’d kept that. Why?
I had half a drawerful of papers and notebooks to finish sorting. They lay there in
a mess on the rug, next to the sofa where John slept, and they weren’t going to sort themselves, were they? But I knew what they contained. Plenty of material for that “Robert Langford, spy novelist” biography somebody was going to write someday. What I wanted was something else. And maybe that thing, that clue did indeed lie hidden somewhere on the floor, like a tiny diamond waiting to be unearthed in a great, big mine. Maybe I should just get back to work and keep myself busy while John did whatever he did with his ex-wife in the house across the lawn. After all, I only had three more days. Three more days to figure out Robert Langford. I couldn’t stay away from my mother any longer, could not hide away from the imminent financial collapse back home. I had to finish sorting these papers.
Instead I went to the desk and opened the drawer on the lower right, where John kept Robert’s codebook and Patrick’s telegram envelope and the notebook we were using to work out the ciphered message. I sat down in the padded leather chair, which was still a little warm from John’s body. In less than two minutes, everything had changed. The door was still open, and the wind came from the Channel, from the mouth of the river Dart, where John went rowing in the morning before I came down from the Dower House. I could smell the faint marine whiff of the sea, of the green things growing on the banks, and it made me think of John. Throughout this magical week, I’d meant to wake up early enough to watch him row. It hadn’t happened. The boathouse stood down a path at the bottom of the cliff overlooking the river. It had a primitive shower, so John washed there before he came up, and the scent sort of imprinted itself on him, hung about him in a cloud as he whooshed into the kitchen, brilliant with exercise, and took over the buttering of the toast.
I picked up a pencil and opened the notebook.
There were twelve separate ciphers in the codebook, and we had no way of knowing which one had been used to transcribe the message on the envelope. No way of knowing who, in fact, had written it down in the first place, although my instincts screamed that it was Robert himself. In the first place, it was his telegram envelope. In the second place, I’d come to know Robert’s handwriting intimately in the past seven days, and there was something about the brushstroke, something about the weight of the pen on the envelope’s paper, that told me this was the same hand holding that pen.