Murder Most Fair

by Anna Lee Huber

  I took one step forward and then stumbled to a stop, turning to Etta for an explanation as to why Max, the Earl of Ryde, was passed out in her dressing room.

  “He was already three sheets to the wind when I saw him being coaxed into one of the corridors behind the bar by Lilah Turnbull.”

  My eyes flared wide and she nodded. Lilah was vain, cruel, and manipulative. I could guess what lengths she would go to in order to secure an earl, including coaxing him into compromising her in a rather dramatic fashion. Societal rules might be more lax than they used to be, but upstanding gentlemen still did not seduce young ladies in the back corridors of nightclubs, or appear to have, and walk away.

  “I knew he was a great friend of yours, and I couldn’t bear to see such an honorable chap trapped by the likes of that viper of a woman.” The venom in her voice indicated there was more to her animosity toward Lilah than simply anger at her attempt to trap Max into marriage, but now was not the time to pursue it. “I hoped you and Sidney could escort him home.”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “There’s a rear door that leads into the mews. I’ll tell Sidney to meet you there with a cab in, say, ten minutes?”

  I calculated how long I thought it would take me to sober Max up enough to guide him to the door. “Ten minutes should do it.” Though I might have to be a bit ruthless.

  She turned to go, but I stopped her with a touch to her hand. “Thank you.”

  Her lips curled into a resigned smile, and then she swept from the room, closing the door.

  I moved closer to stare down at Max. Though not the most elegant of sprawls, at least he wasn’t drooling or snuffling, though his mouth did gape rather like a fish. His evening attire was decidedly rumpled, and his hands rested in his lap, turned upward and open, as if in supplication.

  I’d been right, then, to be worried about Max’s behavior at the cottage. All told, he’d been delivered several shocking blows about his late father in the past few months. The first being that he’d colluded with Ardmore and Lord Rockham to smuggle opium to Ireland in a foolish but dastardly plot. But while he’d taken that revelation more or less in stride, the discovery that the smuggled item was not opium, as we thought, but rather phosgene—a deadly poisonous gas—seemed to have been too much. I could only imagine the anger and disillusionment he felt toward his father, and the pain caused by such a betrayal to his and Britain’s trust. After all, Max had served at the front. He’d seen the effects of phosgene gas firsthand. Right now his emotions must be in extreme turmoil.

  I’d tried to monitor him, to help as best I could at the cottage. But Tante Ilse’s arrival had distracted me, and I’d given him little thought since then, too absorbed with my own concerns.

  “Max,” I said, pushing against his shoulder. “Max.” I shoved him harder, sending his torso rocking back in the chair before it returned, nearly tipping him out of the seat completely. “Max!” I shouted in his ear several times to no avail. Glancing about me, I spied a glass of water on the vanity table. Ruthless it would have to be, then.

  Picking up the cup, I dumped it over his head.

  He gasped and spluttered, flopping around in the chair like a fish out of water. But at least he was awake.

  Swiping the water from his eyes, he blinked up at me. “Whadja do tha’ for?” he demanded to know, his sentence slurring into one long word. The sight of me clearly confused him, for his brow crinkled. He turned to look around him, evidently trying to recall where he was and how he’d gotten there.

  “You’re in Etta’s dressing room at Grafton Galleries,” I explained. “You passed out in her chair.”

  He slicked his wet hair back from his head and looked down at the seat below him, as if shocked to discover it there. When he lifted his face again, his cheeks had flushed, and I didn’t think it was from the drink.

  Something twisted inside me at the evidence of his embarrassment, and I worried I’d spoken too harshly. And that if I had, it hadn’t simply been residual frustration from my struggle to rouse him. I’d become used to thinking of Max as the steady, dependable one—always there when I . . . we needed him. But Max had his own struggles, his own troubles. It wasn’t fair to think of him as faultless. After all, he was human, too.

  Sinking down on the edge of the low table next to his chair, I reached for his hand, which was still damp from the water, and offered him an empathetic smile. “Is it your father?”

  He struggled to meet my eyes. “Partly.”

  I nodded, deciding not to press. My fingers smoothed over his larger digits, trying to comfort him, to comfort myself. “Will you let me take you home?”

  I felt him stiffen, and his reaction sent a fiery blush up into my own face as I realized what could be implied from what I’d said. I dropped his hand. “Will you let us take you home? Sidney’s waiting.”

  He cleared his throat, his discomposure exacerbating mine. After all, I had allowed attraction to blossom between us in the days before Sidney reappeared from the dead, and though we’d never acted on them, then or since, those feelings didn’t simply vanish overnight. Even so, I’d thought we’d moved past them. But apparently not entirely.

  “Yes,” he croaked.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Yes.”

  But that was soon proven to be false when after three steps he stumbled into the vanity table, knocking over a vase filled with flowers. I caught the floral arrangement and righted it, before grasping Max’s arm and urging him to drape it over my shoulder.

  “I can do it,” he protested.

  “Maybe. But it will go faster if you let me help.”

  He could hardly argue this point, so we continued on, lurching down the corridor toward the back entrance Etta had indicated. When I managed to maneuver him through the door, it was to find Sidney already waiting for us with the cab. His eyebrows arched subtly at Max’s condition, but he didn’t say anything. I suspected this wasn’t the first time he’d assisted a drunken friend.

  Max said very little on the drive to Ryde House in Mayfair. By the pale, greenish cast to his skin, I suspected there was a reason for that. The cab driver kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror, probably worried he was about to make a mess all over his upholstery. However, we made it to his town house without incident, and saw Max into the care of his butler and valet. From the manner in which he averted his eyes, I suspected he was either very sick indeed, or too ashamed to look at us. Either way, I intended to call on him the following day to check on him. Nothing good came of stewing in mortification. Especially not when there was no call for it. Not with us.

  “Is that why Etta shooed us away?” Sidney asked me as we returned to the London traffic. Even at midnight the streets were filled with cabs and motorcars darting to and fro, carrying passengers to various theaters, nightclubs, restaurants, and parties throughout the West End. Not until two or three in the morning would the headlamps and noises in Berkeley Square below our flat begin to dim and quiet.

  “Later,” I murmured, unwilling to discuss the matter while the driver might be listening.

  All was still when we reached the flat—Sadie having departed for home, as she lived out, and Tante Ilse, Bauer, and Nimble presumably having fallen asleep in their various chambers hours before. I had yet to hire a lady’s maid for myself after I dismissed the previous one, so Bauer currently occupied what would have been her room.

  Sidney locked up before joining me in our bedchamber, neither of us in the mood for a nightcap, despite the fact we hadn’t even had time for one drink at Grafton Galleries. When he entered the room, he found me seated on the edge of the bed rather than before my vanity, with the letter Etta had given me unfolded in my hands.

  “So that was the reason for her secrecy,” Sidney deduced, sinking down beside me. “Who’s it from?”

  “Alec.” Certain of the fact despite the absence of a signature.

  He didn’t react, but I knew the wheels in his head must be turning.


  “He’s been sent to Ireland.” Just as I’d suspected he would be. Now that the war was over, the places where critical intelligence was most urgently needed were in Russia, which was in the midst of a bloody revolution, and in Ireland, where rebels were fighting for varying aims from home rule to complete independence. Alec being one of the best field agents the Secret Service possessed, it was a forgone conclusion he would end up in one of those countries, and from the hints he had revealed to me over the past few months, I had known it would be Ireland.

  The Irish Republican Army, and in particular Michael Collins’s group of men dubbed “The Squad,” had been targeting policemen, soldiers, and political figures not sympathetic to the republican cause and assassinating them. All told, they’d already killed more than 150 men, though the loss was magnified when one considered the people that had been targeted. After Alec and I had seen Collins and two of his men near St. James’s Park in late October, and Alec had dropped some more of those hints, I’d decided I’d better bone up on the matter.

  “Is that all he says?” Sidney asked, able to tell from my expression it was not.

  “He doesn’t spell it out specifically, but from past comments I can read much between the lines,” I explained. “At this juncture, Basil Thomson as Director of Intelligence is in charge of British Intelligence efforts in Ireland, but Alec, as well as C clearly, believe he’s flubbing it. Thomson thinks the Irish are stupid and rudimentary, but Alec told me he and C have long suspected their organization and intelligence gathering to be far more sophisticated. That they have their own spies within the Dublin Metropolitan Police and other government offices.”

  I gestured with the letter. “Alec says Thomson has assigned one of his favorite agents to infiltrate the IRA and Collins’s organization. That he’s already been posing as a Marxist sympathizer.” I scowled. “Except neither Alec nor I have much respect for this particular agent’s methods.” In short, John Charles Byrnes was a brute who would stoop to just about anything to obtain results, even falsifying evidence. “And he’s strongly expressed his opinion that the Irish are stupid.” I shook my head. “He’s never going to fool them. Not for long. And it’s going to get him killed.”

  Sidney loosened the knot of his tie. “Is Xavier supposed to work with this fellow?”

  “No, he’s being sent there separately by C, in all likelihood without Thomson’s knowledge. At least, that’s what I’ve inferred.” I inhaled past the tightness in my chest. “I suspect Alec’s been given the same task. And while I trust he’ll do it in a more . . . subtle way, I still can’t help but be concerned. Alec is undoubtedly brave.” I laughed humorlessly. “He has to be to have danced amidst the ranks of the German Army for six years without detection.” My fingers folded and then refolded the missive. “But he’s also reckless. And I worry this time he might be in over his head.”

  Despite the complicated history between all of us, due to the fact I’d slept with Alec one fraught night after I’d helped him escape from Belgium when his covert identity was exposed and I’d still believed Sidney to be dead, I knew my husband understood. I’d seen the worry and care he still showed for the men he’d commanded during the war, as well as his fellow officers. He grasped the fact that the comradery that sprang up between cohorts during such a conflict didn’t simply evaporate once it had ended.

  He draped his arm around me. “It makes sense that you’re worried. Xavier has, indeed, demonstrated he can be rash and a little too careless.” He squeezed my shoulders. “But let’s also give him his due. He’s no green soldier. Far from it. Let’s not count him out yet.”

  I nodded, for he was right. Alec was an excellent agent. One of the ablest I’d ever worked with. If anyone could pull off what he’d been asked to do, it was him.

  Nonetheless, the dread didn’t leave me completely. For there had been something in his eyes when I’d last seen him, something unmoored. It was that look that had made me concerned he wouldn’t take the care he had in the past.

  “Besides, we’ve been saying we need to send someone to Ireland to look into Ardmore and the possible location of those missing canisters of phosgene,” Sidney prodded, as if I needed to be reminded, when Ardmore and whatever nefarious intentions he held for that poisonous gas were forever at the back of my thoughts.

  “True, and he promises to ‘look into that other matter,’ ” I quoted from the letter. Though how much time he would have to do so was unclear. Just as it was unclear how he was going to keep this side mission from jeopardizing his main objective. Every experienced intelligence agent knew that the more operations you pursued, the more vulnerable you became to detection. How many intelligence-gathering networks within the German-occupied areas had been compromised by their members’ intersections with other resistance efforts, such as the printing and distribution of banned newspapers like La Libre Belgique? They were often the gateway to discovery, exposing other intersecting networks.

  Despite the risk, we needed that intelligence from inside Ireland. C was doing everything he could through his connections and commissioned agents to find out what he could here in England, including uncovering where and when and precisely how many canisters had gone missing. But that information wouldn’t tell us where they were now or where they were headed. Nor, sadly, could we trust the number of missing canisters reported to be accurate. Not with Ardmore working behind the scenes, possibly interfering.

  Just as he would likely interfere in Ireland. The difference was that there Alec would be on his own, without our assistance to help him evade whatever Ardmore might throw at him.

  “Is that all he wrote to tell you?” Disbelief clung to the edges of his voice as Sidney removed his arm from around me to shrug out of his coat. He knew well that Alec would never have taken the effort to inform me of the rest if there hadn’t been something more important to communicate.

  “He says he managed to locate the man who pulled me from the rubble after that bomb went off outside Bailleul.”

  Sidney’s head snapped up from the cuff link he’d been working free. “The bomb that killed Brigadier General Bishop and his staff?”

  I nodded.

  During the general chaos of retreat during the Germans’ big push in the spring of 1918, I’d been given the risky task of delivering a message straight to Bishop amidst the disorder of the withdrawing front lines. There was a traitor among his staff, one we feared had a connection to Military Intelligence, or else they would have been tasked with the assignment. However, moments after I’d left the shed that constituted his makeshift headquarters, it had exploded, killing everyone inside.

  Until a month prior I had believed the explosion was caused by a German shell, for I had been dazed and injured, and a shell attack had commenced soon after. However, we’d recently discovered the blast had been caused by a bomb, not a shell. A bomb that we now believed the traitor had detonated after I delivered the letter from C to Bishop. What had happened to the traitor, we didn’t know, but I strongly suspected he had escaped. Hence the reason I was searching for answers. And speaking to the soldier who had pulled me from the debris and then hunkered in a ditch with me during the subsequent shelling was a start.

  “He says the man lives near Kendal, and he’s given me his address.”

  “Kendal,” Sidney repeated. “That’s not far from you parents’ home, isn’t it?”

  “It isn’t,” I confirmed. Though how Alec had known we would be headed to Yorkshire when I hadn’t told him, I didn’t know, but I was certain he’d somehow become aware of it. It was just like him.

  “Then I suppose we should pay him a visit.”

  “Yes,” I replied softly, wondering just what I would say to the man. There was no way I could question him without arousing his suspicion about why I had really been there. At the time I had posed as a French refugee fleeing the Germans’ renewed advance. But a refugee wouldn’t be asking questions about a bomb.

  “He may already realize who you are,” S
idney murmured.

  I smiled in recognition of his having read my mind. “Are my thoughts so transparent?”

  “Only to me.” His eyes crinkled affectionately at the corners as he lifted his hands to begin unbuttoning his shirt. “He’s likely seen your picture in one of the newspapers.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “But I was hardly dressed like a society darling when he met me, and I’m afraid I looked rather worse for wear.” That was the politest way I could describe my appearance given the fact I’d been coated in dirt and blood.

  But Sidney could read between the lines, and the warmth that filled his eyes slowly faded at this reminder of the near catastrophe I’d faced. “Yes, well, all the same, I wouldn’t worry. Either he’s realized it or he hasn’t. We’ll confront that when we need to. As we always do.”

  I took comfort in that “we,” and in his willingness not to dwell on the danger I’d been in, no matter how much he might have disliked it.

  CHAPTER 7

  The following day was filled with a flurry of activity in anticipation of our departure from London. Since we would be gone until after the New Year, there were a number of matters to attend to, including the purchasing of Christmas gifts, as well as a few unique errands pertaining to my great-aunt, and a handful of requests issued by my mother over the telephone just the day before. As such, I spent the entire morning dashing to and fro, ordering the purchases be delivered to our flat by midafternoon.

  Sidney had his own matters to take care of, so when I arrived at Ryde House shortly after midday, I was surprised to find him already seated with Max in his parlor. Both men rose to their feet as I entered and bussed them each on the cheek in turn. It seemed in bad form to remark on the fact that my husband and I might have made this call together, but I did arch my eyebrows in mild query when my back was turned to Max.

  “Kent tells me you’re off to Yorkshire tomorrow,” Max said as we all sat before the fireplace tiled with Italian marble. The fire burned low despite the chill in the air, I suspected because of our host’s hungover state. The dark circles around his eyes and his pale countenance communicated he was not fully recovered.