Serpent in the Heather

by Kay Kenyon

  “But is that true? You don’t care?”

  “Maybe I don’t. He’s not the only one who has to sort things out.” She shrugged. “The world is . . .”

  “Bigger now,” Kim finished.

  Alice nodded and looked around the scattered tables on the veranda—mostly empty, except for a few policemen. She frowned that no servers could be found.

  It was time for a wee dram, Kim thought. “Shall we retire to the pub across the street?”

  “Oh God, let’s.”

  41

  HYDE PARK, LONDON

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15. Julian had been walking through Hyde Park for the better part of an hour when he finally decided to take the short walk to Olivia’s house in Bayswater. It was late, but he thought he might risk dropping by unannounced.

  He had to talk to her. Could he persuade her to stay with him? He knew what that would take. To continue openly, one of them must leave the service.

  Perhaps he was going to be cashiered. At Sulcliffe he’d dropped his cover with Kim, and that might have consequences. But he couldn’t hang on forever. At his age, he hadn’t that long before he would be expected to retire. So, for the sake of four or five more years, for the sake of the importance of the work, he was staying on, despite the damage to his personal life. On the one hand; on the other. It was a jumble for him tonight.

  He walked up Queensway, knowing he should have called. But Olivia might have said she couldn’t see him, so he would rather knock on her door and take a chance she would answer. He turned onto her tree-lined street, still not settled upon what he would say to her. Olivia, my dear. No, too officious. Olivia, I know you are engaged, and I feel awkward to . . . No, no apologies. Olivia. Is it too late for us? If one of us must give up the service, and if you love it so much, then I will be the one to go. And God, would he? If you’ll have me, Olivia. If you can forgive me for not knowing sooner that I love you with all my heart and am not afraid to prove it.

  A gentleman would not say this to an engaged woman. She wore Guy Ascher’s ring. It was official. But, by God, they weren’t married yet.

  The life of the service had crept up on him over the years. At first, something to do, a nice clubby enterprise, and Richard Galbraith asking it of him as a favor. Make the rounds of the hunts, move in the right circles, see what you can turn up. From there he had been inducted officially, began to run agents, took a flat in Albemarle Street, let Wrenfell go to seed, leaving it to the Babbages for upkeep. Julian had become a Londoner. Like a fallen tree that had gradually exchanged wood for stone, he had become something other than what he had been: husband, father. His wife gone; his son. What else was he to be?

  Perhaps a husband again.

  He was sixty-two. It seemed likely that Olivia was his last chance at a companion in his life. Gradually, he had come to see that this mattered. He saw it now, at any rate. Damn convenient, he knew, at a time when his career might be in jeopardy.

  He had stubbornly held on to the service, blind to the fact that he was too old for the game. He wasn’t tough enough to let his daughter hazard herself in the same way as Julian had risked himself countless times. To be done with it, at last; how odd a thought. He felt a stranger there on this familiar street, as though he had been carrying his world with him, inside his mind, and now walked down the busy street, seeing it as it really was.

  He stood across the street from her flat housed in a brick Georgian with stairs leading to the front door. The house was dark. She must have retired. It would not do to stand here and watch, as though keeping the place under surveillance.

  Hadn’t he had his chance, that night she had come to him, after the party in Mayfair? She had forbidden him to speak. They would be together that evening without having to define themselves. He had taken her version of it, glad to be excused from turmoil.

  A cab moved down the street. Instinctively, he faded back against the wall of the building opposite. The cab stopped and Olivia got out with someone.

  Julian waited for her companion to say goodbye, to get in the taxi. But Guy Ascher went up the stairs with Olivia, and the cab departed. She had her keys out and worked the lock. They went in together.

  He wondered what she was doing staying out so late on a Tuesday night, but wasn’t that how lovers were, needing to see each other every night? She was engaged, committed to Ascher, perhaps even in love. It was something that he hadn’t wanted to believe.

  But he believed it now. The impulse to bare his soul, to ask for forgiveness, died away. And all it had taken was the thought of them together tonight in her flat. So much for courage. Affairs of the heart, a beastly game, and one that he had lost. He watched the building as a light went on in one of the windows. She had chosen. And so had he.

  A light rain had begun to fall. Julian pulled his collar up and turned back down the street toward Queensway.

  The next morning he asked E to meet him in St. James’s Park.

  What he wanted to say was that things had to change.

  He’d made an error in judgment about extracting Kim from Sulcliffe himself. It was possible that he had let his relationship with his daughter unduly influence his decision to go himself rather than assigning another agent to pose at the door with a summons home.

  But wasn’t it better that he and Kim could communicate directly?

  E listened without interrupting.

  Julian said that he wanted to run Kim as an agent from now on. It was no different from being an army officer and commanding one’s own son in battlefield conditions.

  E measured Julian with a long gaze. Perhaps he knew that there was only one way to keep two of his best people in the fold.

  When they split up on Horse Guards Road, Julian had his way. It was the first time he’d bucked Richard and argued hard for something the man was solidly opposed to. He hadn’t been sure he’d come out of it with his job intact, but he had known without doubt that he was going to fight for what he wanted. It was never too late to learn the wisdom of that.

  Working for the Office was a life he’d loved. He still had that life. All right, Kim, he thought. Let’s see how this is all going to work out.

  He walked the distance back to his flat.

  Within a few days the engagement announcement appeared in the Times.

  MONKTON HALL, NORTH YORK MOORS

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23. Kim sat in Owen Cherwell’s office, holding the Bloom Book in her lap.

  “They’re always a few steps ahead of us,” she said, noting where aura sight would be catalogued: under Mentation, taking its place beside hypercognition, precognition, object reading, and site view.

  Owen leaned against the side of his desk, trying to establish a more relaxed tone to their first discussion since she had learned that her father worked for the Office.

  He glanced at the Bloom Book. “Yes, deucedly annoying. What I wouldn’t give to have been able to hook Dries Verhoeven up to the dynograph. Shame they killed him.”

  “Yes, too bad.” It was the only part of the story that Owen was not to know.

  “Aura sight.” He brushed his fingers through his hair to no effect. “What exactly was the man seeing?”

  “ ‘Some people shine more brightly’ was how Powell Coslett put it. He said that Verhoeven couldn’t determine what any particular Talent was, but he had a sense of its strength.”

  “Intriguing. Perhaps we’ll find another of those.” He smiled at Kim. “English this time.”

  She rather hoped they wouldn’t, but that was entirely selfish.

  “And the man’s motive,” Owen said. “The awful British shelling of the school during the war.” He shook his head. “Of course, that’s another aspect the public will never hear about.” The Foreign Office was quietly burying that piece of the story.

  And the Crown, in their decision not to prosecute Dorothea Coslett, had set the stage for the whitewashing of both the Cosletts. Nothing would be made public about a criminal involvement that would not be prosec
uted. Julian had warned them it might fall out this way, and Kim had tried very hard to be reconciled to it.

  She had given testimony to the prosecutor behind closed doors. Introduced as Agent A, and with several other people present who were not introduced but whom Julian had implied were “the higher-ups,” Kim had told her side of it. It had taken a good part of a day. And she had revealed all, setting aside that she shot Verhoeven point-blank in the head as the tide swept in over his sandy prison.

  The newspaper on Owen’s desk drew her attention. DUTCH AUTHORITIES DISAVOW YOUTH KILLER. She had read the article this morning, how Verhoeven had been a troubled individual; a German sympathizer; acting alone, etc., conveniently similar to what His Majesty’s Government had said or implied in its own statements.

  Owen noted her gaze. “People are so easy to fool.”

  “There are at least five families,” Kim said, “who are still asking questions.” Including George Merkin’s. The boy would recover, but his life might never be the same. “They want to know who the second man was. The one seen at the Merkin attack.”

  Owen raised a finger. “And the answer is?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Exactly. Let them assume it was another foreign national.”

  “German, is what people think,” Kim said. People in Uxley had been talking about little else for three weeks.

  “An assumption the Foreign Office is all too happy to allow people to make, while officially saying there is no evidence of German participation.”

  Kim was mightily sick of hearing no evidence.

  “If it’s any consolation, Dorothea Coslett is now confined to her bed. She has taken a turn for the worse, and we hear it’s ugly.”

  He stood up and walked to the bow window, overlooking the derelict garden. “Even if we couldn’t convict the old woman, it was a stunning success for the secret service. Needed it, I think, with budget restrictions being bandied about.” He turned to her. “Well done, Miss Tavistock.”

  Kim handed him back the Bloom Book. “What will happen, I wonder, to Idelle Coslett once the dowager dies?”

  “I can’t imagine she’ll stay at the castle,” Owen said. “I understand her voice has come back, though.”

  “Yes. Everyone assumed her silence was a vow she made after Bowen Coslett’s death in the war. But I don’t think it was. It was because of Flory Soames. The shock of witnessing the murder, dumping the body . . . It must have been quite traumatic.”

  “Perhaps that’s why she helped you. She didn’t want another murder on her conscience.”

  Kim had often thought about Idelle Coslett, and how she’d had to bear the awful knowledge, at least that last day at the castle, that her nephew had been involved in murder. It was something she must have heard at the door when he confessed, unless she’d known even before.

  “The Ancient Light group has been named in the baron’s will,” Owen said. “They will manage the estate, with an eye to opening the castle for tours as well as allowing the public to view the standing stones on the beach . . . What did you call it?”

  “A sea henge.”

  “Yes. I’d like to see that myself.”

  “It’s a dangerous beach.”

  At Owen’s raised eyebrow, she said, “And not just because the Germans descended on it to grab their assassin. It has . . . sinkholes.”

  “Does it. Well, I’m sure they’ll take precautions. View it from the cliff, that sort of thing.”

  They gazed at each other for a few moments as the subject they’d been avoiding hung in the air between them. “I couldn’t tell you about Julian, you know,” Owen said.

  “I know.” She sighed. “Next, I’m going to learn that Mrs. Babbage is with the Foreign Office.”

  “I can’t comment on that,” Owen said mischievously.

  Kim smiled. But it was very difficult to get over having been so deceived. It had caused no end of discomfort, thinking her father a fascist and, at times, suspecting him of treason. They were just finding their bearings with each other again.

  “No one has the full picture,” Owen went on, no doubt satisfied that he knew quite a bit of the picture.

  She thought of the one piece he didn’t know. How it had all ended on the coast of Wales. She hoped it wouldn’t haunt her, making worse the brutal knowledge of how her brother had died at Ypres. That was the strange essence of her dilemma, that she didn’t regret killing Verhoeven because of taking a life, but because she had given him mercy for Robert’s sake.

  It was all so twisted.

  A sudden longing to be home overtook her. To have a quiet supper with her father and then curl up on the sofa with the London and North Eastern Railway timetable.

  She had a new copy.

  POSTSCRIPT

  THE BLOOM BOOK

  ADDENDUM.

  (GROUP 2: MENTATION)

  Aura sight. The visual perception of individuals with meta-abilities, presenting as an apparent luminosity. The ability manifests only within normal visual distances, regardless of light levels. Practitioners are not thought to be able to distinguish classes of Talents. However, a general impression of strength of the perceived Talent appears to the practitioner as greater or lesser brightness. A manifestation of the darkening Talent does not disrupt the ability. Underlying ability. Rare. No case studies; field observation reports only.

  Ref: Ley line murders. MADM 4749.55.

  Historical Archives and Records Centre (HARC), Monkton Hall, September, 1936.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  They say that a writer’s craft is a solitary one, and at some level this is true, but it would be a harsh vocation without friends and associates who care about so humble a thing as one’s current novel. My profound thanks to my husband and first reader, Thomas Overcast, for his support and faith in this series and this book. I have, in addition, been fortunate to have friends and teachers who have advised, critiqued, and helped me hone my craft. My thanks to Steven Barnes, Larry Brooks, Andy Dappen, Dan Gemeinhart, Louise Marley, Theresa Monsey, Pat Rutledge, Ben Seims and Sharon Shinn. To Veronica Rood, for our enduring friendship and for help with all things Polish. My gratitude to my agent Ethan Ellenberg for believing in my story and finding the perfect home for it. Special thanks to my editor Navah Wolfe who brought this story into the light of day with exacting care and inspired insights.

  This is a work of fiction, although readers will recognize some historical figures. Though some of the towns—and the castle in Wales—are of my own devising, I strove to create a realistic setting and an accurate 1930s historical context. In this I received generous advice and assistance, but in the end, any errors are entirely my own.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KAY KENYON is the author of fourteen science fiction and fantasy novels, including the first of the Dark Talent novels, At the Table of Wolves. Her work has been shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Endeavour Award and was twice selected to be on the American Library Association Reading List. Her series The Entire and the Rose was hailed by the Washington Post as “a splendid fantasy quest as compelling as anything by Stephen R. Donaldson, Philip José Farmer or, yes, J. R. R. Tolkien.” Her novels include Bright of the Sky, A World Too Near, City Without End, Prince of Storms, Maximum Ice (a 2002 Philip K. Dick Award nominee), and The Braided World Bright of the Sky was among Publishers Weekly’s top 150 books of 2007. She is a founding member of the Write on the River conference in Wenatchee, Washington, where she lives with her husband. Visit her at kaykenyon.com.

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  ALSO BY KAY KENYON

  At the Table of Wolves

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Kay Kenyon

  Jacket illustrations copyright © 2018 by Mike Heath

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  Interior design by Brad Mead; jacket design by Greg Stadnyk

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kenyon, Kay, 1956– author. Title: Serpent in the heather / Kay Kenyon.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Saga Press, [2018] | Series: A dark talents novel ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017016199 | ISBN 9781481487849 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481487863 (eBook)