At Her Service

by Susan Johnson

  She didn’t know how to respond. What platitudes could possibly redress such horrors?

  The fire crackled uncommonly loud in the hush.

  She should offer him a brandy, she thought, feeling at a loss. After all, he’d come a long way for nothing. Perhaps a cold collation, she reflected as though playing hostess would overcome the harrowing narrative recently revealed.

  “Look, I have something for you,” Darley said, shattering the silence. His voice was crisp as though driven by a t’were best done quickly impulse that might as swiftly fade. Reaching in his jacket pocket, he pulled out a small red leather box. “Here.” Half rising from his chair, he handed Aurore the box. “My mother thought you’d like it.”

  Her surprise showed.

  “Etienne’s telegram came to the house,” he explained, sitting back down. “My father sent my valet to find me, so they know. And they’re quite content with whatever you decide,” he added. “Or we decide…or”—he blew out a breath—“forgive my clumsiness. I’m making a hash of this marriage proposal.”

  She had opened the box, and whether she was astonished by the size of the diamond ring inside or by Darley’s mention of a marriage proposal, her breath caught in her throat. She stared at him.

  “I know I’m botching the hell out of this. I also know it’s sudden, but”—he smiled—“perhaps not sudden enough for all those who will be counting on their fingers. So say yes and we’ll be married. I’ll try not to be scared out of my wits, you can try to come to terms with me as your husband and we’ll muddle through this one way or another.” If nothing else, he was a man of action.

  “And what of love?” She had her own fears. Muddling through might not be enough for her. She set the box aside.

  “If love is thinking of you every minute of the day, I am so inspired.” He smiled. “You fill all my dreams as well.”

  He didn’t ask her whether she loved him, arrogant man. “Do you wish to know whether I love you?”

  He did a quick double take but recovered almost instantly and said with grace and charm, “I would like very much to know. And if you’re not entirely sure yet, I will do my very best to gain your affection.”

  “Such humility, darling. I’m quite astonished.”

  He liked that she’d called him darling; he particularly liked that her little scowl had disappeared. “You will find me meek as a lamb,” he said, his gaze sportive.

  “Not too meek, I hope.” A sportive reply in return.

  “You have but to define your desires, my sweet,” he murmured. “I am amenable in all things.”

  Her brows rose, her blue eyes twinkled. “You’re even willing to marry me.”

  “Indeed, that too.”

  “And I am to appreciate the great honor, I suppose.”

  “On the contrary, the honor is mine.” The amusement was suddenly stripped from his gaze, his voice took on a deep tenderness. “I am the one to be grateful. You have made me whole again, or at least hopeful of the future. You have given me back my life.”

  “Perhaps we have both found new meaning in our lives,” she said, thinking how large the world and how fateful their meeting.

  “Yes,” he said. A discerning man, he knew better than to argue. But in his heart, he knew whose life had been irrevocably lost and now found. “So then,” he added, affably, “what do you think—your priest or mine?”

  “Not tonight surely.” She gave him a sharp look. “Don’t say you brought one with you.”

  He had, not knowing at the time exactly why. Or more precisely, simply nodding as his father handed him the British ambassador’s name and address in Paris and nodding again when Duff had said he was sending along Whiteside just in case. “I do have a priest in a hotel in town, but yours is perfectly fine if you’d rather.”

  She wrinkled her pretty nose. “I will not abide an authoritarian husband.”

  “You decide where and when, then,” he quickly returned, his worldly prerogatives such that his self-esteem was never at issue. “I have no strong opinion either way, other than a consideration for the child’s future. You know how people will talk. Sooner rather than later would be wise, darling.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I have to at least wait for Etienne and he never comes home ’til morning.”

  “We could find him at his club or wherever.”

  She was reminded of the man she’d known in the Crimea, who lived by his wits, who made life and death decisions with ease. He could very well find Etienne, she decided. “Let’s wait until morning. A few more hours can’t matter.” Her brother wouldn’t appreciate being pulled from some woman’s bed where he surely was at this time of night. “We probably could find something to do until then,” she murmured, playful, tantalized as she always was with him, and admittedly now, deep in love.

  He smiled back. “I might be able to think of one or two things you like,” he said, this man who was known far and wide for his sexual endowments and expertise—who had miraculously found salvation in love. He held out his hand. “Come here and we’ll talk about it…”

  Epilogue

  The Marquis of Darley and Miss Clement were married in the Chinoiserie drawing room the following afternoon, with the British ambassador as witness, along with numerous functionaries he had brought along to provide all the requisite forms for a British subject’s marriage in France.

  Two priests presided—Mr. Whiteside and Monseigneur Sagarin. Darley wished no questions about the legality of the ceremony.

  Etienne was there as well, somewhat shaky after a night of carousing, but smiling broadly and vastly content with all that he had achieved.

  It was a simple ceremony and brief.

  The prerogatives of wealth and fortune.

  The British ambassador said afterward to Darley, “I will telegraph His Grace, the duke, with news of your nuptials.” He did not say he had been under orders to see that they were accomplished one way or another. Grateful it hadn’t come to that, his present to the newlyweds was, as a result, extravagant. A Limoges china service for fifty, the marquis’s and Aurore’s entwined initials to be added at their convenience.

  The newlyweds stayed in Paris until the birth of their son—a plump, healthy, robust baby. And it wasn’t until afterward that Darley realized how truly terrified he’d been of the delivery. Aurore understood that her husband had stayed by her side throughout her labor out of love. She had not realized he was there through sheer willpower alone. But when their son was first put in her arms and she saw Darley look away, she knew. We can’t replace what you have lost. But we will love you too. “Look, darling,” she said, instead. “I think he’s smiling.”

  And when Darley glanced back, she displayed their rosy-cheeked son who was indeed twitching his little mouth into what could pass as a smile. “Isn’t he clever?” Aurore said, like every doting mother does.

  Darley’s strained expression lightened. “He’s big,” he said softly.

  “Big and strong like you,” she said, smiling at her husband.

  “He has your eyes.” They were ever so slightly tilted at the corners.

  “Do you think so?” She studied the plump little face. “Perhaps he does. Oh dear, I believe he’s about to cry.” She glanced up at Darley and grinned. “Someone better tell us what to do.”

  As the midwife came running over, Darley leaned back in his chair for the first time since Aurore had gone into labor and allowed himself a roseate moment of hope. These moments followed one after another until a fortnight passed and hope turned to certainty at last.

  Mother and child continued to thrive and prosper, enough so that the small family traveled to England for the Christmas season where the Westerlands household one and all greeted their newest members with exuberance and affection.

  After the war, the necessary pardons were obtained—never an issue for those privileged few who lived in the rarified world inhabited by royals. Cousin Bertie talked to cousin Rupert who talked to cousin Sasha and so on and so
on. Before long Aurore and Darley no longer needed to concern themselves with the Third Section. They were given leave to return to Aurore’s Crimean estate.

  So other than the horrendous loss of life, and the fact that the Black Sea was declared neutral, the war had little changed the map of Europe or Asia Minor.

  From that point on the pattern of Darley family life was directed by the seasons. They would often spend summers in the Crimea, traveling to the Caucasus as well. Then in the fall after the grape harvest, home to Paris, followed by the Season in London with occasional holidays at their English country home.

  The marquis’s family led an idyllic existence—there was no other word for it.

  Two more children were born—both healthy to Darley’s great relief—and the rambunctious youngsters grew into adolescence in a world free of major wars. They all heard the stories of their parents’ espionage activities—although the children’s version was an account of adventure rather than perilous danger. And in truth, as the years passed, even the two principals involved recalled hazardous events with a certain equanimity.

  Insulated by happiness and a privileged environment, that their memories were tempered by time was perhaps—inevitable.

  Until one fall night in London as Darley and Aurore were leaving the theatre, the marquis saw a small, peanut of a man ahead of them in the crowd, and suddenly life and death issues came hurtling back with a vengeance. The shape, the height, even the man’s hurried walk occasioned a spiking alarm. “I just saw an old friend the porter at my club tells me has been asking for me,” Darley said. “You take the carriage home, darling, and I’ll have a brandy with Faraday and be back shortly. An hour, no more,” he murmured to allay the curiosity in his wife’s eyes. “Faraday and I went to school together.”

  After escorting Aurore to their carriage, Darley was afraid he’d lost his quarry in the crowd. But, no—thank God—there was the shabby derby hat bobbing away in the distance. If necessary, he would kill the man with his bare hands, the marquis decided, pushing through the throng. But even as he hastened after the figure who might be Kubitovitch, he understood that had the agent wished to dispatch them, he or his cohorts could have made the attempt anytime this decade past. His family lived their lives openly.

  As the crowd thinned and the bright lights of the Strand gave way to the lesser illumination of a neighborhood of small shops, the man looked back from time to time and quickened his pace. Lengthening his stride, Darley stayed with him, more and more sure that the man was Kubitovitch. Older, naturally, and slightly heavier perhaps, but there was something about the hunch of his shoulders that was unmistakable.

  They traversed three blocks, then four, eventually five and six, the pace accelerating until the little man was almost running. They were moving into a less savory quarter where thieves brushed shoulders with men out for a night of pleasure, a place where personal safety was uncertain.

  A fact, apparently, known to the little man. Coming to a stop under a streetlight, he spun around and waited with the resigned air of someone facing his doom.

  “I can’t outrun you,” Kubitovitch said as Darley approached, “so we might as well get this over with.”

  His English was accurate but slightly stilted, like someone who more commonly spoke his native language. A large expatriate Russian community existed in London, Darley knew. What he didn’t understand was why Kubitovitch was part of it considering his past. “I can snap your neck with ease, and am more than willing to do so if you don’t tell me the truth. Do you understand?”

  Kubitovitch cast a nervous glance around.

  “No one will come to your aid,” Darley observed. “As I’m sure you know.” There were people on the streets but all were averse to any involvement for personal reasons having to do with indiscretions or the law or both. “So tell me, are you in or out of the Third Section? And if you’re out, why are you still alive?”

  “I am not alive as far as my former employers know.” Kubitovitch answered with deference, even as he tried to gauge the marquis’s intent.

  “How is that possible? You look the same.” Although, on closer contemplation, the agent had gained weight, his hair was longer, he’d grown a mustache and wore spectacles. Nonetheless—superficial changes that never would have deceived the Third Section.

  “I may look the same to you.” Kubitovitch smiled ingratiatingly, hoping to survive this encounter. “You still have the eye of a mountain man.” In the Caucasus tribes, one learned early to follow a trail over dry rock with ease, or cull an individual sheep out of a herd by sight alone.

  “Surely, someone in the Russian community here would have been suspicious.” The expatriates were generally political dissidents—people wary by necessity.

  “Russia’s defeat in the war threw everything into chaos. Many in the Third Section did not survive the reorganization by the new, more beneficent tsar.” Alexander II had, among other progressive reforms, freed the serfs in 1861. “My disappearance was incidental to the greater political upheavals.” Kubitovitch was beginning to sense a possible reprieve, the marquis’s expression markedly less ferocious now. “I am a violin instructor,” he went on, a subtle cordiality in his voice. And when Darley shifted his feet so his stance was less confrontational, Nikolay Nikolaevitch casually added, as if they were acquaintances meeting on the corner, “A friend, who plays in the theatre orchestra, gave me free tickets for the performance tonight.” Kubitovitch’s aspirations for the finer things in life remained intact, although they were modified by his circumstances.

  Darley held his gaze for a moment, and Kubitovitch’s blood ran cold at the naked violence in the pale eyes. A brute barbarian in the flesh—despite the fine evening clothes.

  “We were pardoned by the tsar in case you didn’t know.” A mild statement, softly put.

  “I heard,” Kubitovitch said, curtailing his impulse to shiver. And if he had had any hope of outrunning the marquis he would have bolted that instant.

  A small silence descended on the island of gaslight illuminating the two men, large and small, the rest of the world passing them by without notice.

  “If you give me your word you won’t harm my family,” Darley said slowly, as though he wasn’t quite sure he was making the right decision, his expression shuttered and unreadable, “I have no quarrel with you.”

  Kubitovitch had always scoffed at the aristocratic code of honor and yet this man was asking for his word as if they were equals. For a dumbfounded moment Kubitovitch forgot his lifelong loathing for those of noble birth. But his survival mechanism resurfaced a second later and cold reality intruded. His answer was crucial to this man towering over him, even the manner of his reply would be scrutinized. “Let me assure you, my lord, I have no quarrel with you or your family,” he said with utmost courtesy and a deferential bow. “Not now or ever.”

  “Then we are quits. I wish you a pleasant evening.” Darley turned and walked away.

  You had to admire a man of such courage, Kubitovitch grudgingly thought, watching the marquis walk off. Not knowing whether he was armed or not, Darley had turned his back on him without a qualm. Nor had he asked what name he was using or where he lived.

  But the marquis was not so trusting that he dismissed Kubitovitch completely. He had the reinvented violin instructor, Vickers, watched for several years—until such a time as he was assured Kubitovitch was no longer a risk to his family. That appropriate moment arrived after Vickers married one of his violin pupils—a Miss Milbury from Chelsea.

  Over the years, Aurore would look at Darley from time to time and with an affectionate smile, say, “Just think, darling, if not but for the hand of Fate….”

  He’d always agree.

  But at base, Fate aside, the marquis understood that he had found his greatest happiness that cold February day outside Sevastopol. And he lived every minute of his life determined that nothing—whether divinity, destiny or fall of the dice—would threaten the love that he had found.

/>   A Last Word—1914

  On the eve of the Great War, two young men of fine family and fortune were lounging on the terrace of the Royal Yacht Club at Cowles after a preliminary run of the new racing yacht they had designed. They had been friends forever, having grown up on adjoining estates, attended school together at Eton, even spent some years at Cambridge in pursuit of a higher education uncommon in aristocrat circles.

  But they liked astronomy, chemistry, the sciences in general. They not only shared an observatory built on land between their two estates, they had blown up any number of experiments purposefully or not in the laboratory adjacent to the observatory.

  They were, in fact, so much alike that they were called the Wolf Twins both for their dark good looks and their reckless adventures.

  “You’re not leaving?” Neal Milbury looked up as his friend rose to his feet. “Have another drink. It’s early yet. We don’t have to be at Fraser’s dinner until nine.”

  “I told my mother I’d fetch her from my aunt’s.” The two families were vacationing at their summer homes on the Isle of Wight. “Don’t drink too much or Isabella will pout the entire evening,” Lucien D’Abernon warned, waving as he walked away. “And she’ll make us all miserable.”

  The two young men were both betrothed, having given into societal and family pressures at the age of thirty. But in their capitulation, they had not completely jettisoned their former ways. Not that young ladies of good family actually expected their fiancés or husbands to offer them complete devotion. It simply was not done.

  Apropos that lack of devotion, rather than walk in the direction of his aunt’s house, Luc turned left as he exited the Royal Yacht Club and made for a section of town close by the ferry dock.

  Ten minutes later, he entered a narrow street of simple cottages and proceeding to the last one near the shore, walked up the path to the door and knocked.