A Deceptive Devotion

by Iona Whishaw

  Then she nodded as the piece fell into place.

  “You see, I was puzzled about how the British consulate knew I was getting married. The only person in this story who knew that was Orlova. If she was working for the Soviets, it means that when she told Oxley, he told his keepers up the chain. It got from the Soviets to someone in England. That someone, a Russian spy, is in direct contact with the director.” She turned and looked at Aptekar. “I believe the man who betrayed you was Angus Dunn, and I very much wonder why.”

  There was no using the telephone at King’s Cove. It was busy all the time. Lane’s invitation had hit like an explosion of confetti. Gladys had immediately called Eleanor and declared that the only place for the party must be her house, Eleanor claimed the right to arrange the flowers at the church, Angela busied herself looking for dresses in magazines. Kenny eyed the ivy growing uncontrollably along the garden fence and imagined it decorating the wagon he had used to pull the mail up the hill before he got his truck, with himself driving Lane to the church.

  Even Alice Mather saw a benefit in the celebrations, declaring to a group chatting outside the post office, “Well, it will get her out of circulation anyway. I suppose I’ll have to wear a frock.”

  Gwen and Mabel Hughes busied themselves with lists of projected canapés and reached into their dark armoires to pull out tablecloths and napkins to be aired.

  “Mid-October is a bit late,” Gladys complained. “Why not do it when the gardens are perfect?”

  “Quit fussing mother. It’s not like you. You know how lovely the light is in the fall, and with the trees turning it will be absolutely golden.”

  “Provided we don’t get a heavy early snow,” Gladys said. “Remember ’35? We were positively buried in it.”

  “In fairness, Mother, it wasn’t early. That bad snow was in January, not October,” said Gwen. “What do you think of this? We haven’t used it since I can’t remember when.” She held up a cloth with lace edges that had been beautifully pressed when it was first put away, and now was a checkerboard of creases.

  “Oh, yes,” said Mabel happily. “Just the thing for a wedding. Give me that. I’ll get those creases right out.”

  At the post office, Kenny’s curmudgeonly cousin Robin Harris stood holding his quarterly veteran’s cheque and a newspaper under his arm and watched Kenny snipping the hedge at the bottom of his garden.

  “Lot of fuss over nothing, if you ask me.”

  Kenny straightened up and mopped his brow. “We think it’s something, don’t we, Alexandra?” He addressed this to the dog, who was sitting at attention watching the trimming. She wiggled appreciatively at being addressed. “You see? And if you examined your own conscience, you’d see you think so as well. Lane Winslow has had the patience of Job with you.”

  “What if she has that foreigner give her away?” Robin asked, apparently determined to be disgruntled about the whole thing, though he recognized the truth of what Kenny was saying. She had been quite nice to him, what with one thing and another.

  “We don’t know that he will. But apparently he was a friend of her father’s, and since her father died in the war, I think it would be quite nice. She doesn’t have much family, poor thing. Some grandparents in Scotland, but they are getting on a bit for a trip like that.”

  “One of us could have done it,” Robin muttered, nearly under his breath, a remark that astonished Eleanor when she was told of it later, over tea.

  “Well, you amaze me! He said that? I think the old coot must be getting soft.”

  Lane, the subject of all this happy speculation, was in town, looking thoughtfully at some dresses in a window. She had come in to meet with Stanimir Aptekar, for whom rooms had been found, clothing bought, and a shave procured. For now he was being allowed to recoup his energy, and had been given reluctant permission to stay on for the wedding. Hunt, at the British consulate in Vancouver, had been in a tussle with Canadian intelligence officials about the disposition of Aptekar, the Canadians insisting that the British had lost the moral high ground with the betrayal perpetrated by their director.

  Hunt had somehow won the day and conducted the interrogation that revealed the names and positions of Soviet sympathizers in Canada. Hunt handed the list to the dismayed intelligence services in Ottawa. They had just been through an ugly scene two years before with Canadians, some quite prominent, on a list of people trading secrets to the Soviets through the embassy. The new list included Oxley.

  Lane glanced at her watch. She had twenty minutes before she had to meet Aptekar at Lorenzo’s. Could she decide in that time? She knew Angela was wild to be involved in the dress decision, but she was wary of what that might mean. She really didn’t want anything fussy. Angela wouldn’t be able to argue if Lane came back to King’s Cove that afternoon, dress in hand. With a sigh, she pushed open the door of the shop.

  “How can I help you, miss?” a woman with a grey cardigan draped over her shoulders asked.

  “I need something to get married in,” Lane said, a little hesitantly.

  “Oh! Lovely! Now over here, and these have just come in, are two of this season’s most gorgeous wedding dresses.”

  Lane was led to the dresses and regarded them for a moment. She shook her head. “I think what I want is a very smart cocktail dress,” she declared.

  Later, bag in hand, she found Aptekar waiting outside the restaurant. He removed his hat and opened the door for her.

  “This time you will allow me to treat you,” Lane said, smiling as she saw Lorenzo approaching. “I owe you after Berlin.”

  “My dear Miss Winslow!” Lorenzo cried, seizing her hand. “And with a bag from our most expensive dress shop. May I guess?”

  “You guess right, Signor Lorenzo,” Lane said, smiling. “May I introduce you to an old friend of my father’s, Mr. Stanimir Aptekar. Mr. Aptekar, Signor Lorenzo. This would be the finest restaurant in any town no matter where it was.”

  “You are very kind, Miss Winslow. The missus is thinking of nothing but wedding cakes, but I am sure we have something good, eh?”

  “I don’t know how it is, but no matter when we come here, the best table seems to be magically available,” Lane said a few minutes later when they were seated.

  “I believe you have that kind of magic, Miss Winslow. Look, you have tamed a grizzled old Russian spy.”

  “Never grizzled, Mr. Aptekar, and I’m sure never tamed! In fact, you look remarkably like your old self. It is very kind of you to stay on to see me married, especially after what you have endured here.”

  “I do it in part for my old friend, Stanton Winslow, of course, but mostly for his remarkable daughter. It is an honour I had never imagined.”

  “Tell me about the countess. What was she like when you first met her?”

  Lorenzo appeared at the table with a bottle of champagne and made a great show of opening it.

  “Goodness! What’s this in aid of?” asked Lane.

  Lorenzo only winked at Aptekar and poured.

  Aptekar lifted his glass. “A wedding, an unexpected meeting, an unexpected reprieve from death. What is there not to drink to?” He smiled sadly and shook his head. “She was beautiful and ferocious. And engaged. She claimed she was drawn to me because I was not vapid. I was, you know. Poor thing was the only daughter of a count and a charming mother who was alert to class distinction like no one I’ve ever met. If we had stayed together, she would have learned the truth, that I was as vapid and empty-headed as all the other aristocratic young men. They had engaged her to Orlov by the time she was seventeen. But they didn’t know that she had her eyes on the future. She dreamed of a world of justice and equality, a world that would eliminate forever the very roots she came from. I was only her first rebellion. Maybe not even. She told me she was barely seventeen when she heard a young Lenin speak in a hall.”

&nb
sp; “Did she . . . ?”

  “You are going to ask about the child, yes? She told me twenty years ago, in quite a bloodless manner. These great political movements spare no one, do they? I had a daughter I never met, but so many daughters and sons died. They will never be able to count the millions who have disappeared forever. I learned from another man in my division that Tatiana was a particularly skilled assassin. Would she have gone down that road if her . . . if our child had lived? I don’t know. But let us speak of happier things.”

  When the food arrived, a gnocchi dish Lane had had and loved before, she asked, “What will you do?”

  “I am no longer in possession of secrets. These have been removed by your Mr. Hunt, so I am no longer radioactive. I think I will proceed to a farm in Sussex as I had originally intended. Provided your old boss does not forbid it.”

  “I suspect my old boss is in quite a bit of trouble. According to Hunt, he fooled everyone. He was trying to stay in power in a postwar world where all the rules were changing, so he traded you for a few names of British would-be Soviet sympathizers so that he could look like he was on the job and flushing out British traitors. Like all vain men, he thought he was getting the better of the deal. He thought you were a washed-up spy and of no use to anyone. He had no idea of the value of the information you were bringing over.”

  “Now,” said Aptekar holding up his glass, “I am happier than I can say to be nothing more than a washed-up spy. I am already planning the layout of my garden. I will develop a new rose and call it by my daughter’s name, Kira.”

  In London, the fall had descended into days of drizzle. The leaves in Hyde Park, on the verge of putting on a golden autumn show, instead cascaded in wet piles to the ground. Angus Dunn sat with his hands folded on his desk, struggling with a feeling he had never experienced before; in fact, so unfamiliar was it that he could scarcely give it a name. Disintegration came to his mind. He became conscious of how tightly he was clasping his hands, as if holding himself together. He had never known failure; he did not allow for it and could not summon the resources needed to deal with the feelings it engendered. He glanced at the clock on the shelf, and then pushed himself to his feet, pulling his double-breasted jacket down firmly and standing very erect. He was due at the Home Office.

  Did his secretary have a look of sympathy as he handed him his umbrella? Was his driver a little distant? He felt a bubble of panic that he could not tell any more, could not read the faces of those around him.

  “Well, Dunn. Here we are.”

  Dunn wanted to say “Where, sir?” He adjusted himself in the chair opposite the home secretary so that he was leaning back nonchalantly, his leg crossed, but now this position felt foreign and he could find no comfort in it.

  “Sir.”

  “You’ve had a good innings. Changing times, what? Let some of these young chappies into the game, I think.”

  “Sir, if I could explain.” Dunn hated hearing himself ingratiating, bargaining.

  The home secretary leaned forward, his hands flat on a thin file; then he lifted them and brought them down with the gentlest and most final slap.

  “Cock up all the way around, I think you’ll agree. Not your first, I understand. That business in the summer nearly put us all into a bind when you lost control of that little German agent. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? Every dog has his day. You’ve had yours. Time to enjoy the gardens up at that place of yours. We’ll want your office end of day tomorrow.”

  “I’ll need time to sort through the files, the confidential material, the—”

  “No need.” The home secretary stood and pressed a buzzer on his desk. “All done, while you were here. You just have to pack up the personal paraphernalia. That will be all.”

  Cassie Brodie stood with a cup of coffee looking out the kitchen window, her lips clamped and turned down. She was feeling—she couldn’t quite place it, because she had never felt anything like it before—hardened, she supposed came closest. She wondered what her life would have been like if she had been more tough like this when she had been married to Brodie. Would she have been able to stop his cruelties? Leave him? But no. She had been like a child, trusting a man would look after her, and being crushed when she learned the truth. You earn your hardness, she thought.

  She knew her neighbours, at first sympathetic and then standoffish, must have heard the gossip about her affair with Taylor. But perhaps they knew all along and felt sorry for her, as if she was owed a little happiness the way her husband carried on. Maybe she had made them standoffish with the way she had refused their initial kindnesses, had said she just wanted to be left alone.

  She heard the car bumping down the road. This was it, she thought. She would have to decide. She had told herself that she could never love Taylor the same way, knowing he’d actually planned to kill her husband. She had been sure, in the long sleepless hours at night, that she would tell him they were through, that that was the right thing to do. But in the morning, she knew that her cousin Arlene had been right.

  “Don’t be a fool. How will you support yourself on your own? So what if he was going to kill him? He didn’t, and he loves you. And don’t you worry about me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to him.”

  Cassie watched him get out of the car, saw the look of anxiety on his face, put down her coffee and smoothed her apron. For starters she would tell him they would be moving. He could fix boats anywhere.

  Chapter Thirty-TWO

  The day of the wedding, with the bloody-mindedness often attributed to weather, dawned cloudy and damp from an overnight rain. Lane woke feeling groggy and was, for a moment, convinced that her guest was still sleeping in the next room—then remembered what the day was. She felt a strange mixture of regret and horror at the thought of the silent, empty room where Madam Orlova had slept and from which she had left some weeks prior to murder a man who had stumbled on her transmitting equipment during the course of his annual hunt. That state of war had never left Orlova, Lane thought. A peaceful part of Canada, to be sure, but in the countess’s head, it was a war she carried with her always, ready to be fought wherever she perceived an enemy. That was the danger of war. For some people it never ended.

  “Pull yourself together,” she said out loud. She put on her dressing gown and padded to the kitchen to decide, on this of all days, whether she should say goodbye to her old life with coffee or tea. She knew, as she stood gazing out at the clouds and the long grasses at the edge of her lawn, now bent with the rain, that she was indulging in gloomy thoughts because she was nervous. Deciding on the gentle support of tea, she put the kettle on and went to the spare room. Madam Orlova’s bag of paints and the pile of pictures she had done in King’s Cove were on the bed, now stripped of everything but the bedspread and a pillow. Her suitcase and the transmitter had been taken by the police, and from there passed on to the Canadian RCMP intelligence branch, as was any further investigation into the murder of the hunter, Brodie.

  Lane remembered that morning when Orlova had been shot by the lake. After the police had sorted everything out, had handcuffed Oxley and Aptekar and driven up the hill, Darling had stayed behind. He’d been leaning on the car Oxley had rented and which he was to drive back to town. Lane had stood beside him. He had held her hand as if he would never let it go.

  “I thought she would kill you,” he had whispered, as if he couldn’t bear to say it out loud. She had turned toward him, and they had stood in an embrace, the quiet of the now deserted beach enveloping them.

  She picked up the paintings and went through them: her house, her garden, the lake, the Hugheses’ lupines, the stand of trees near the outcrop where she had apparently been transmitting messages to Oxley—where that unfortunate hunter had bled into the ground, a victim of a war he could not have begun to imagine. She was a wonderful painter, Lane thought, and she wondered if it was odd that she shoul
d want to frame and hang the pictures Madam Orlova had personally given her, knowing what she now knew about her.

  Gladys might like the paintings of her flowerbeds. She wouldn’t mind if Orlova was an assassin and a spy, in fact she’d relish it. But the rest of the pictures ought to go to Aptekar. He could put them on the walls of his cottage in Sussex. Her kettle whistled, and she went back to the kitchen and poured the water over the tea leaves. She would drink her last cup of tea as a single woman in the perfect peace and silence of her beautiful house, looking out at the myriad of greys that reflected on mountain and lake on rainy days like this, relishing the green scent that trees exude after a rain.

  Darling had called her the night before. They had been silent together on the line after the initial greeting.

  “Are you sure you want to go through with this?” he’d asked her finally, his voice soft.

  “Are you?”

  “That’s not an answer. You’re making me nervous.”

  “Neither is that,” Lane had pointed out, smiling with sheer happiness. “I’m terribly happy. Does that count?”

  “It will have to, I suppose,” Darling had answered. “As it happens, I’m even happier than you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m getting you, but you’re only getting me.”

  “You say that now,” Lane had said, “but you’ll be tired of me in no time.”

  “I can tell you with absolute certainty that I will never, ever be tired of you. Though I confess I am already tired of you nearly getting shot. Could we go a few weeks without that sort of thing, do you think?”

  There was another silence after this, and then Lane had said, “See you tomorrow, then?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  The weather was not going to match Lane’s thoughtful mood. As she watched, her throat catching at the memory of the phone call, the clouds lifted and the rising sun sent golden rays shooting across the lake. She nearly laughed at how it lifted her spirits. Angela would be by in a couple of hours, ready to fuss over her hair and decide on shoes, and ask again if she was sorry she’d not opted for the traditional white satin wedding dress Angela had so wanted her to wear. Lane smiled, and taking her tea, went to the closet and pulled out her dress and hung it on the door. She would never be sorry she had bought this dress. She had felt quite extravagant buying a deep blue taffeta dress with a generous skirt. It had a draped upper bodice and sleeves, and pulled in tight at the waist. The skirt was wide, but not voluminous. Just right, she thought.