City of Jasmine

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  His mouth tightened a little on the last sentence, and I began to understand where the trouble lay.

  “Who did you work for? The same Arab Bureau in Cairo that directed Colonel Lawrence?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No. My orders came directly from London.”

  “London? But there are field offices in Cairo and Baghdad—” I broke off. “You weren’t part of a regular mission, were you?”

  He sighed and helped himself to a date. “My orders came from a place in London known only to a handful of rather important people.”

  “What place is that?”

  “It has no official name, and even if it did, no one who knew of it would dare say it aloud. Those of us who work there refer to it as the Vespiary.”

  “The wasp nest?”

  His smile was tortured. “An apt description. It’s a hive of activity with no one in this part knowing much about that part. Only a very few people know all that happens there.”

  “Prime Minister being one of them?”

  A brief smile flickered over his mouth. “He might know my name.”

  “And this Vespiary oversaw your activities here?”

  “And other places,” he said carefully.

  I stared at him, openmouthed. “China. You were working in China, weren’t you? The whole of that trip you were so odd, always dodging off at strange times to meet with people I didn’t know. The peculiar messages, the disappearances. You were working even then.”

  “That was when I realised what a bloody great mistake I’d made,” he said brutally.

  “In marrying me?”

  “In marrying anyone. I was a fool to think I could combine the work with a wife. They warned us when we signed on it was a wretched idea, but I wasn’t really thinking of that when I met you,” he finished, his smile rueful. “I danced with you once and all thoughts of little grey men in little grey buildings went right out of my head. I swear to you, it didn’t even occur to me what I’d done until we were already back in London after the elopement and I was supposed to report.”

  “I suppose they weren’t pleased,” I managed to say.

  “With the possibility of war looming, they thought it best to send me out on a sort of fact-finding mission. I was ostensibly going to China to do some climbing in the Tian Shan, but really I was there to assess the likelihood of the Chinese coming in on our side if the Germans pushed us into a war. I thought I could prove to the power-that-be that I could still do my job perfectly well with a wife in tow. Instead, I mucked it up with rare talent.”

  I held him even closer, horrified at all he had endured without my ever knowing. “And I picked a fight with you about the fact that you wouldn’t enlist with Kitchener,” I remembered. “I said terrible things to you, awful things. I called you a coward.”

  “Yes, I remember,” he said dryly. “Of course, I knew I wasn’t, but it did sting a little that you should think so. I wanted to tell you so badly.”

  “I don’t imagine your superiors would have approved of that.”

  “No, in fact, it was the one thing they insisted I must never do. They pointed out, quite rightly, that I had endangered you terribly by marrying you at all. And I had compounded the risk by bringing you along on the mission. I thought I’d been so bloody clever, that no one would ever think a spy would haul his wife around the world on a mission, but apparently it did occur to the Germans in Shanghai. As it was, I barely got you out of there with your skin intact. An informant told me the Germans there were getting suspicious and were forming a plan to take both of us. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “What would they have done to us?”

  “I was junior enough in the Vespiary they wouldn’t get much information out of me, but they’d have a bloody good time asking. And I had no idea what they might do to you. It was a chance I couldn’t take. My superior at the Vespiary ordered me to put you on the first steamer out of Shanghai and get myself out the best I could.”

  “Tell me how you managed the Lusitania. Surely your superior didn’t sink a passenger liner just to fake your death.”

  He managed a smile. “No. Even Tarquin wouldn’t go quite that far.”

  “Tarquin? Tarquin March? He is your superior?”

  “Was,” he corrected. “I severed ties with the Vespiary at the end of the war.”

  I shook my head. “But Tarquin March! He’s a friend of yours—and the dullest man I know. How on earth did the pair of you end up working for this place?”

  The smiled turned nostalgic. “Poor old Tarquin. I don’t think he’d appreciate being described in those terms. Actually, it’s an image he’s worked hard to cultivate. He might just thank you.”

  “I can’t make sense of this,” I told him.

  “You can if you realise that Tarquin is merely carrying on the family business. The Vespiary was actually begun by his uncle by marriage nearly thirty years ago. It was right when Germany started building up their navy and Lord Salisbury felt it was his responsibility as prime minister to keep a closer eye upon things. He was worried about espionage at home and abroad, and he permitted one of his aides to create the Vespiary with the help of a private enquiry agent. The pair of them built the place into a small but select and highly specialised group. They had a habit of recruiting from within their own families and friends, but always with the tightest secrecy. I had no idea Tarquin was involved until he recruited me.”

  “When was that?”

  “The autumn of 1914 I had just completed field training when we met at Delilah’s New Year’s Eve party.”

  “Field training? What sorts of things did they teach you? How to break a man’s neck with your bare hands?” I asked softly.

  A lesser man would have flinched. “Yes. Or a fountain pen or a shoehorn or a bit of sealing wax.” He picked up the thread of his story. “The Vespiary were recruiting a fresh batch of operatives just then with the start of the war, most of us only right out of university. I was chosen because I fit precisely the profile of the person Tarquin needed. You see, it was he who devised the idea of bringing in an English agent provocateur and using him to rally the various Bedouin tribes together. He knew the Arab Bureau meant to do something similar in the south, but he felt the Turkish border was the place to focus attentions. He drafted a list of qualifications he would require and gave them to his recruitment agent—Quentin Harkness.”

  I goggled at him. “Quentin Harkness? The same Quentin Harkness who married Delilah Drummond after her first husband died?”

  “I hear she’s married to a Russian prince now.” I blinked as he grinned at my surprise. “I do still get all the major periodicals out here, pet. I have to stay informed.”

  “I’m sure you do.” I was still dazed by all he told me, but I knew instinctively it was merely the tip of a particularly mammoth iceberg.

  “So, Tarquin had a list of requirements—for someone to play the Saqr, is that right?”

  “Precisely. He sent the list to Quentin, who told him about me immediately. Within a week I’d been vetted and offered a position in the Vespiary. I couldn’t believe it when they explained what I would eventually be doing. It was like a dream, everything I had ever wanted—adventure, danger, intrigue. I accepted on the spot and they put me into training the same day. I finished with flying colours and was preparing for my briefings on the eastern situation when Delilah threw her party.”

  “And you met me.”

  “And I met you. And my whole world turned upside down. I couldn’t believe my bad luck, really. I had everything I could ever dream of wanting, but I had to choose between them. I chose you.”

  “But not for long,” I reminded him. There was no judgment in my voice, only acknowledgment.

  “Not for long,” he agreed. “I thought, you see, that the Vespiary would come around. Occasi
onally they did. We weren’t supposed to marry or have attachments, but they would make exceptions for agents who were indispensable. It was my own bad luck to be less important than I thought,” he said with a grim smile. “They fired me as soon as I got back to London. But I begged Tarquin to give me a chance, anything. I told him I’d ride a desk in the city and write reports for the whole of the war, whatever he wanted. He sent me to China. Told me to assess the German chances there, and said if I did a good enough job he would consider letting me come to Damascus, after all.”

  He paused and ran a hand through his hair. “I think you can guess what happened next. I botched it—so badly I nearly got us both killed. And I knew then I could never do that to you again. I had vowed to protect you. How could I expose you to that kind of danger out of my own stupidity and arrogance? There was only one way out.”

  He stopped again and it was a long moment before either of us were able to continue. The sacrifice he had made for me was almost greater than I could comprehend. I said as much, but he shook his head angrily.

  “I thought it was a sacrifice, but what if it was just another stupid mistake, Evie? What if I had trusted you and told you the truth of who and what I was that night in Shanghai? What if...”

  “What if? The two most torturous words in the English language, Gabriel. You were twenty-one. And trying desperately to be a man. You made the only choice you thought you could at the time, and there is no point in trying to rewrite history. What’s done is done, and we both have to live with it.”

  He swallowed hard. “I did live with it. Every day out here, I thought about what I did to you.”

  “I’m surprised Tarquin let you come after what you did in China,” I said evenly.

  He pulled a face. “So was I. But he knew how shattered I was by it. And I had proven to him I was willing to do anything to serve, and I had shown my resourcefulness by getting myself off the Lusitania and letting the name Gabriel Starke go down with the ship.”

  “So you were on board.”

  “I was. I made my way to the shore and stole some clothes, then walked until I came to a proper town where I could wire Tarquin. Gabriel Starke’s name was on the list of lost souls by the next morning, and I was in London, being commended for my quick thinking. Tarquin gave me my own group of agents, nine of us, and shipped us off to Damascus to take care of one another.”

  “That sounds cosy.”

  “It wasn’t. We fought like cats and dogs, but we were a family of sorts,” he said, nostalgia lighting his eyes. “We were all young and wild and so convinced we were going to change the world starting right here. We were so different, but we had that in common, that love of danger and that thirst to prove ourselves. Tarquin had his doubts, I think, about setting us loose on our own. I suspect he believed there might be safety in numbers. But we didn’t care. We called ourselves the Lost Boys and we came to Damascus. Tarquin knew I’d already been here as myself a few years before, but I was given a new cover identity—Rowan’s—and a disguise to make me look older than my years. I was told to make contact with Hamid again and when he agreed, to introduce the character of the Saqr. I spent most of the war with them, but from time to time I went to Damascus to rendezvous with one or other of the Lost Boys and exchange information. It was during one of those meetings that one of the Boys shared a collection of mediaeval manuscripts he’d found when he was in the desert. Some of us were good with languages, one was a cartographer, one was a history scholar—among us we realised we were sitting on a treasure trove. When pieced together the documents gave the whereabouts of two extremely valuable finds. One was the Cross. We talked it over and couldn’t agree on what was to be done with them. Our compromise was to cache the manuscripts in a safe place and come to a decision when the war ended. I went back to Hamid and his people and continued to act as the Saqr through the course of the war. When it was done, I expected they would get their own country, as London had promised them. As I had promised them,” he added bitterly.

  “And when they didn’t?”

  “I resigned,” he told her with grim satisfaction. “I’ve never been more ashamed of anything in the whole of my life, Evie. At least what I did to you, I was able to justify that by telling myself it was for your own good. But what had I done to the Bedouin? I had urged them to fight, led them to fight. And for what? A handful of broken promises made by chaps in London who’ve never set foot in the Badiyat ash-Sham. I was disgusted with the lot of it. I couldn’t face myself, what I’d done in my arrogance, believing it was for the best. And that’s when I realised it’s been our greatest failing all along—treating them all, Baghdadi, Damascene, Cairene, Bedouin, every soul from the Bosphorus to the Nile, as if they were children. It’s despicable. We had no right ever to interfere in the first place, and I was furious at myself and at everyone else—London, the Vespiary, even you.”

  “Me?” I was startled out of the spell his words had cast.

  “Yes, you. I thought back to how it was in Shanghai, how it really was, and I saw that at the first sign of trouble, you were ready to bolt. As soon as things were too real, too hard, you were ready to leave me. I know I picked a hell of a fight with you that last night, but you didn’t fight back, you didn’t fight for us. And I started to wonder if I’d imagined it all.”

  “Imagined what?” I asked, my mouth dry.

  “The way you’d looked at me, the way you’d loved me. I began to wonder if I was crazy. I must have taken out that photo of us on our wedding day a thousand times, just staring at it for hours to see if it was really there—the way I thought you’d felt, the girl I thought you’d been.”

  I thought of us, leading parallel lives, never touching, but wondering the same things, feeling the same pain. It was almost more than I could bear.

  “And was I?”

  “God help me, I couldn’t tell. I wondered if everything I’d ever done in the whole of my life had been just a series of extravagant failures. And I thought, if I could just do one thing right, make it up to you—”

  “The Cross,” I whispered.

  “The Cross. After the war, the Lost Boys were scattered. Some were dead, some were back in England. So I went for the manuscripts alone, but when I got there, I realised someone had beaten me to the punch. All the information about the greater treasure had been taken.”

  “There’s something bigger than the Cross?”

  He nodded. “I presume you’ve heard of Lady Hester Stanhope?”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s only Aunt Dove’s idol. I must have heard the story a hundred times—how she left England a century ago to travel through the East and settled in Syria to live out her days in lavish eccentricity.”

  “Quite,” he said. “She also collected manuscripts and antiquities, and she started the first proper archaeological excavation in this land when she dug at Ascalon. She had purchased a particular manuscript, a medieval chronicle that detailed the whereabouts of a hoard of Templar gold stashed at Ascalon since the days of the Crusades. The Turks were resentful of her digging, and to show them she didn’t mean to profit from the excavation, she destroyed the only good thing she turned up—a statue of a goddess. It placated the Turks, and she was left in peace. But she found something else, as well—the Templar gold. She never had the resources to remove it, but she added her notes to the medieval manuscript and bundled it with the one describing the whereabouts of the Cross. Somehow the manuscripts passed out of her possession and eventually came to where we found them. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do with the Cross when I found it, but when I realised one of the other Lost Boys had been there first and had broken trust with the rest of us...” His face darkened, and he seemed to be struggling with strong emotion.

  “In any event, I decided then it was every man for himself. I decided to take the Cross and give it to you.”

  “For atonement.”


  “For atonement,” he echoed. “And I promised Hamid I would stay close should he have need of me.”

  “Why me?” I demanded. “Why give it to me instead of Hamid? You care for him and for his people. You could make a very good argument for it being rightfully theirs. And you owe him atonement, too, yet you wanted me to have it. Why?”

  “What do you think would happen to the Bedouin if I gave them a priceless relic that every Christian European nation could make a claim to?”

  “It would be taken,” I said softly. “By force.”

  “Exactly. Besides, there was another reason it had to be you.”

  He stared at the floor a moment then raised his eyes, those brilliant blue eyes, piercing me with raw, ungilded truth.

  “Because I wanted to see you one last time.”

  The vulnerability on his face was too much. I looked away until he mastered the emotion.

  “So sorry to interrupt,” said a voice from the tent flap. Halliday was standing on the threshold, a small revolver pointed at both of us. “But I’m afraid I simply can’t wait any longer.”

  Gabriel moved to shield me, but Halliday cocked the revolver. “I think not, old man. Stay right where you are. You, too, Mrs. Starke, and no sudden movements, if you please.”

  I crossed my arms slowly over my breasts. “I presume you will allow me to cover up at least?”

  “And take the chance you’ve a weapon hidden under your pillow? No. I promise to be a gentleman and not look if it consoles you.” He turned to Gabriel. “You know what I want.”

  Gabriel rose with as much dignity as a naked man could manage. He held up his robe and Halliday shook his head.

  “Take it out. I want to see it, and I don’t think I ought to put the gun down, do you?”

  Gabriel gave him a bored look and proceeded to retrieve the goatskin bundle.

  Halliday smiled. “Open it, if you please. I’ll keep my gun trained on your wife just to make quite certain you continue to cooperate.”