My recognition of this only served to make me more uneasy, and so I sought to push it away. At least, for the moment.
I let my head tip to the side, resting it on Sidney’s shoulder and nestled it into the crook of his neck. His skin was warm against my own, and as I inhaled the scent of his skin, I felt something inside me begin to loosen. That is, until he spoke.
“Loath as I am to bring him up, have you given any consideration as to what Ardmore might do with the information that you have a German relative staying with you?”
I lifted my head as alarm tightened my muscles. “Are you upset she’s here?”
“No. No, of course not. I’m just . . . considering the ramifications.”
I searched his face, wondering if that sounded as if he doth protest too much, and felt my defenses rise. “She’s my seventy-nine-year-old great-aunt. I can hardly turn her away. Where else would she go?”
He gripped my upper arms, speaking in his I’m-trying-to-be-reasonable-but-you-are-making-it-difficult voice that I loathed. “Verity, I never said anything about turning her away.”
“But are you thinking it?”
“What? No. Verity, stop this. I have no problem with your great-aunt being here.” His hands lifted to cup my face. “I’m not so hard-hearted as to hate all Germans. I never did.” He sighed. “Truth be told, if anything, I pitied the poor blighters.”
“What do you mean?”
He lowered his hands, turning his head to the side as a pained expression flickered over his features. “Well, the Jerries weren’t happy to sit in their mudholes and cesspits any more than we were. We were both just cogs caught up in the higher-ups’ wheels of madness. In another time, given half a choice, we might have shared a joke and a pint, and gone back to our lives. I had no more reason to wish him dead than he did me.” His jaw tightened. “Except the fact that the only way out, the only way to end it, was to outlast him.”
At the Secret Service, I’d seen the satires printed in the various so-called trench publications produced by soldiers during the war. One had featured a poem describing an aged Tommy with a hoary, snow-white beard, still fighting in the trenches; while another had written up the details of a divisional entertainment sketch titled The Trenches, 1950. I had winced upon seeing them the first time, but my colleagues who had been invalided home from the front and then reassigned to the Secret Service had laughed uproariously, though the sound had also held a hollow note. One that I could imagine had been amplified in the laughter of the men who were still stuck in the trenches. Men like Sidney.
“Sidney,” I whispered brokenly. I pressed my hand to his arm, hoping to draw him back from his dark thoughts.
He seemed to internally shake himself, for when he turned to look at me, the despair that had clung to him had all but vanished from his features. “But regardless of Ardmore’s feelings on the matter, which are unclear, he must recognize that a large portion of the population here in Britain despise Germans. And he could seek to use your great-aunt’s presence here against you.”
I struggled to dismiss the anguish he’d exhibited just moments before as swiftly as he had, wanting to press him on the matter. But I knew from experience that my husband could not be forced to discuss that which he didn’t want to. So I squeezed my eyes shut as I reshuffled my thoughts. “Yes, you’re undoubtedly right. Ardmore is nothing if not astute, and surely keen to use whatever weapon he has in his arsenal against me. But what is there to be done? I can hardly hide her. And I’m certainly not going to send her away.”
“No, but we should be on guard against it.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And I wouldn’t recommend letting your great-aunt leave the flat unaccompanied. At least, not at first,” he amended, seeing the fury flash in my eyes.
I was not going to make Tante Ilse a prisoner. But I also had to admit he had a point.
I nibbled on my bottom lip, considering another option, even loath as I was to do it. “Perhaps we should move up our plans to visit my family.”
Sidney’s eyebrows arched high in surprise.
“Well, we promised to spend the holidays with them anyway. Will it really make much of a difference if we arrive a fortnight earlier?”
The answer was yes. Yes, it would make a difference. For I would have two weeks less to prepare. And two more weeks of listening to my mother harangue me for the fact that I hadn’t visited in over four years. Not since my brother Rob died. The fact that there had been a war going on for much of that time made no difference. My mother wasn’t allowed to know what I’d really been doing with my time, how I’d truly done my part for the war effort, and so I was a cruel, inconsiderate hoyden of a daughter.
But what was a fortnight in the grand scheme of things? If the last four years hadn’t prepared me to face my childhood home without Rob, then what did I expect to happen in the space of two more weeks?
Sidney’s hand trailed over my shoulder to the back of my neck. “Are you certain?”
“No,” I replied with brutal honesty. “But it will get Tante Ilse out of London faster. And out of Ardmore’s sight.”
“You do know that you don’t have to face this alone.” His fingers played in the hairs at the nape of my neck. “I’ll be with you.”
I knew he was speaking of Rob. Of facing his absence and accepting his death. But I didn’t want to talk about that. Not now. Not ever, really. The very thought of it lodged a lump in my throat so tight I couldn’t breathe.
So I offered him a tight, placating smile before leaning forward to push to my feet. But Sidney wouldn’t let me retreat. Not entirely. With his hand still gripping my neck, he turned my head so that his mouth could capture mine. After a moment of initial surprise, I readily capitulated, melting into his arms.
Some moments later, having tumbled me back onto the bed, Sidney lifted his lips a hair’s breadth from mine so that he could speak. “Don’t hide from me, Ver,” he pleaded in his voice grown husky with desire.
“I could say the same to you,” I replied, a reminder of the ongoing push and pull of our relationship. The difficulty of peeling back someone else’s secrets was that too often you also risked your own.
And so we retreated to the one thing we knew we could always rely on—our desire for each other. His mouth sealed over mine even as his hands moved to sweep away every last remaining barrier between our bodies. For then, at least in this one way, we could find our limbs and our breaths intertwined even if our hearts and minds still grappled for cohesion.
CHAPTER 5
It required a degree of finagling, but I managed to contrive a meeting with Captain Henry Landau three days later. At any rate, I’d needed the time between to see my great-aunt settled in our London flat and to make arrangements for our journey to Yorkshire. Nimble, my husband’s valet, had proven to be a great help with both, and Tante Ilse had taken an instant liking to the large, lumbering fellow. He had served as Sidney’s batman during the war, and proved to be more broad-minded than I’d feared.
More broad-minded than Sadie Yarrow, at any rate. Normally quiet and timid, our housekeeper had made her displeasure known with her sullen expressions and the series of loud bangs and thumps that accompanied her movements throughout the flat. She was a war widow, and I knew she’d grieved for her soldier husband greatly, though she’d shared with me almost nothing about him. Not even his regiment. But apparently she placed the blame for his death squarely on the Germans.
When I rang up Landau, he had declared himself delighted to hear from me, and as I’d hoped, reminded me of my promise to dine with him when he was next in London. Never mind that I had been the one who’d had to call in a favor from a friend still with the Secret Service to track him down. We met just before noon at a café near Piccadilly. Should any of Ardmore’s men or any of the chaps from the Service learn of our meeting, it would appear just like two old colleagues enjoying a meal together, for ostensibly that’s all it was. Landau wouldn’t be remaining in Lon
don long anyway, for he’d accepted an appointment from C to open the office in Berlin, so it was unlikely anyone would care about our conferring.
I breezed through the door, inhaling the scent of roasting meat and sautéed vegetables, along with the sharp pine scent of some cleaner. Landau was waiting for me at a small table near the window, and I greeted him with congratulations as he rose from his chair to buss my cheek.
“Yes, well, C tells me it’s one of the best appointments in the postwar restructuring, but I must assume he means in terms of opportunity for advancement rather than good food and good company, for Germany is a right bloody mess at the moment.”
“Still. It speaks well of you,” I replied. And indeed it did. I knew C well enough to know that he wanted someone he could trust implicitly to handle matters in the German capital. Particularly given all of the backdoor wrangling going on at the moment among all of the military intelligence divisions. The relative degree of cooperation that had existed during the war years had all but evaporated as each branch jockeyed for prominence with the newly created Director of Intelligence at the Home Office, Sir Basil Thomson. C’s insistence throughout the war on a uniquely high level of autonomy for the foreign division to be able to operate effectively seemed now an act of remarkable forethought, for it made it more difficult for Thomson to strip it of some of its privileges.
“Tell me, how are you and Kent?” he asked, pouring me a glass of wine from the bottle on the table. “As I understand it, neither of you has exactly enjoyed a peaceful retirement.”
I wondered if he was surmising such from the stories in the newspapers, or if C or another agent had filled him in more thoroughly. “Yes, well, you know well enough that I’ve never been the type to rest on my laurels when there’s something to be done.”
“True enough. Even when perhaps you should.” His arched eyebrows might have hinted at disapproval, but the grin lurking at the corners of his mouth indicated he was jesting.
The waitress approached then, and Landau ordered for us, charming the girl with his easy smile and natural manner. Though his looks weren’t classically handsome—his eyes being too small and his round face being dominated by a rather misshapen nose and a pair of ears that stood out from his head like the handles of a Grecian urn—there was nonetheless something about him that seemed to readily appeal to women. I suspected it was both his confidence and the warm regard in which he held them, no matter their station. Having grown up in the Transvaal of South Africa with a strong, resourceful mother, he seemed not to have developed the condescension that tainted many men’s interactions with the fairer sex. I’d certainly benefitted from his willingness to not only listen to, but at times heed my advice during the years we’d worked together during the war.
And so it was with that mutual respect we’d always held for each other in mind that I decided I needn’t beat around the bush. “My great-aunt arrived here from Germany four days ago,” I told him after the waitress had departed.
“From Monschau?”
I’d known he would remember.
He lifted his glass to take a drink. “How is she?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted, clasping my hands in my lap lest I begin fiddling with the silverware. “The war has certainly worn her down.”
He nodded, his eyes softening with understanding, offering me the opening I needed.
“Why did you send a second deserter to her?” I asked in a carefully even voice, determined not to let my temper get the best of me until I’d heard him out.
His brow furrowed in confusion. “A second deserter?”
“Yes.” I stifled my impatience. “One like Becker.”
He blinked at me for several seconds, and then leaned forward, shaking his head. “Verity, I never sent her a second deserter.”
Alarm trickled through me, at first holding me immobile. “You didn’t?”
“No. I would never . . .” His eyes flashed as he broke off, seeming to rein in his outrage at the very suggestion he would have done such a thing. But it had been a war. All of us had done things we’d never believed ourselves capable of. “No one but you knew where in Monschau your great-aunt lived,” he continued tightly. “And I certainly wouldn’t have sent someone stumbling about the village, asking for her in order to find her home.”
“Becker knew,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but he didn’t report that to us.”
“So he did report to you?”
He sighed and turned to gaze out the window at the traffic passing by outside, all but admitting I’d made him reveal something that in all likelihood he was not permitted to. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw a woman pushing a pram hurry by on the pavement as a lumbering red bus pulled away from the curb, a cloud of fumes marking its passing. But all the while I kept my gaze trained on Landau, who eventually nodded.
“He returned a little over three weeks later with the information we’d requested on the training camps and the new regiments they were forming, as well as details about the Sturmtruppen.” The special storm troops, who had been so effective during the Germans’ big push in March 1918—the offensive that had pushed Sidney and his battalion back from the front, creating chaos with the speed of their assault. A chaos that one of Sidney’s fellow officers and oldest friends had used to shoot him and leave him for dead in order to silence Sidney before he could reveal his treasonous activities.
“Had he visited his family?” I asked, having known how anxious he was to protect them, and uncertain whether approaching them in person while he was gathering intelligence for us—the enemy—would only place them in danger.
“That, I don’t know.” His gaze traveled discreetly over the occupants of the café beyond my shoulder, much as mine did from time to time, searching for anything out of place. It was a practice that had become so ingrained in me—in all intelligence agents—during the war, that it was now an almost unconscious act I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to stop. “But he did provide us further information about the economic conditions within Germany, bringing us back samples of the coupon cards each citizen used to obtain food, much like our ration cards. But their allotment was much less than those in Britain, and in many cases the government had resorted to producing unappetizing ersatz products to substitute for the real thing. It simply confirmed for us what we already knew.” His gaze was solemn. “That starvation conditions were rapidly developing. However, the German people had not yet lost heart and still hoped for victory.”
I took a drink of my wine, trying to shut out the dark emotions that always crowded close when I thought about the last year and a half of the war. My gaze lifted to find Landau’s own face shuttered, his eyes trained on the tablecloth between us. “You must have sent Becker on another assignment.”
He cleared his throat. “Yes. And it was a difficult one. Establishing train-watching posts along the line out of Trier.”
My eyebrows arched almost imperceptibly, my only reaction to this statement, but more than enough to convey to Landau that I understood the gravity of it. Although British Intelligence had been receiving the German troop movements along the Aachen-Herbesthal-Liège line for some time, the other main artery out of Germany was all but unwatched. Landau had already tried and failed multiple times to achieve this. For one, it meant establishing a post within Germany itself. For another, the line traveled through Luxembourg, which had historically allied with Germany. Luxembourg was occupied by the Germans, but to a lesser degree, and its inhabitants were far more complacent with their circumstances. The monitoring of this line would require couriers to travel into and out of Germany as well as across Luxembourg, and at this task all candidates had balked.
Though apparently not Becker.
“He had serious reservations about the possibility of such an endeavor’s success, but he agreed to try and we sent him back to Germany via a different route.” He sat back in his chair. “That was the last I saw of him.”
“Do you think he was captured
?”
“I don’t know. I do know he was afraid. I had given him an enormous, and perhaps impossible, feat to accomplish, as well as a rather substantial sum of money for him to establish the organization he would need. Maybe the temptation of that money proved too great, particularly given the unlikeliness of his success, and knowing the forgeries we’d given him had already passed muster, he decided to return to his family. Or maybe he was caught and executed. I suspect we may never know.”
A clear image of Becker sprang to my mind. One of him seated beneath a pine tree somewhere in the wilderness between the High Fens and Monschau. A light snow had begun to fall while we paused for a few minutes to rest. When I’d looked up from the task of scraping mud from the cracks of my worn boots with a stick, I’d been arrested by the brilliance of the smile that flashed across his beard-shadowed face. He’d begun to tell me then how he’d proposed to his wife under just such circumstances. How they’d been walking in the Grünewald while he worked up his courage, when snow had begun to fall, and seeing how beautiful she’d looked with the flakes dusting her hair—just like a snow fairy—his nerves had suddenly melted away.
Though perhaps it was disloyal and unpatriotic, I found myself hoping he had taken the money and returned to Berlin—to his snow-fairy wife and his children. After all, he had made very clear that his chief responsibility and consideration was for them. If he’d been willing to desert the German Army in order to find work to send money to them, abandoning his allegiance to the kaiser, how could Britain expect any different?
“But Verity, this second deserter . . .” He shook his head as I shifted my attention back to him. “I didn’t send him.”
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