by Gavin Lyall
On the other hand, she didn’t feel like sleep yet. The thrill of the midnight burglary and speculating about its results would keep her awake for hours yet unless she soaked herself in laudanum. Brandy was healthier: she held out her glass.
Mock grudgingly, O’Gilroy poured from the big silver flask engraved with unknown initials. “Ye likely can’t find stuff this good in this heathen country, and it hurts terrible to see ye mangling it with water. I’m back to bed.”
A little larceny had never troubled O’Gilroy’s sleep yet.
Then he added: “I’m sure ye can remember which yer own beds are,” and closed the door very quietly.
“Now what d’you think he meant by that?” Corinna asked, enjoying Ranklin’s embarrassment. “But you’ve got this place smelling like a dockside saloon. If you can leave that pipe behind, let’s finish his precious flask in my sitting-room.”
So once again they went through the tiptoe routine, but it was only to her sitting room, Ranklin excused himself, clutching the copies of Hornbeam’s notes to remind himself of business.
“Here,” he offered, “you’d better put these where the maids won’t see them.” And that reminded him: “What happened to your own maid?”
“Kitty? Oh, I sent her back to Paris. She got sick with the eastern cooking.” That wasn’t the whole truth; in fact it was very little of the truth. Corinna had found out that Kitty was also being paid by her father to report on her doings. She hadn’t been shocked by that, hadn’t really resented it; she just damned well wasn’t going to put up with it. “So I’m here just on my poor little ownsome.”
She dropped onto a sofa and flicked through the notes. “A year ago, would you have thought you’d be helping loot bedrooms for secret documents?”
“No-o,” Ranklin agreed cautiously. How did she know he hadn’t been doing just that a year ago?
“But it must be more fun than ordinary Army life.”
“It isn’t what I signed up for.” Privately, Ranklin was thinking that if a spy, like a cat, had only nine lives, it was a pity to risk one trying to keep an American law professor out of trouble. The Habsburg Law wasn’t exactly Plan Three.
“You really don’t like being a spy, do you?”
Ranklin reached for the flask on the table – she had brought it across – and refilled the silver cap he was using. O’Gilroy was right: it was too good to be watered down. “It still wasn’t what I signed up for.”
She persisted: “But that doesn’t mean you disapprove …”
He smiled, holding up his hand to cut off the question. “I know that argument; I’ve had it with myself. I certainly don’t think espionage is taking an unsporting advantage or any nonsense like that. But I can approve of sweeping streets and unblocking drains without wanting to do them, either.”
Hmm, she thought with a wry smile; is that how he sees his work? “What would you be doing in the Army if … if you weren’t doing what you are doing?”
“Now, in August? Looking after the horses and ammunition for a battery on firing practice at Shoeburyness or Okehampton, probably.”
“And you’d really rather be back holding horses and so on instead of all … this?” She flung out an arm, her kimono sleeve flaring in a world-sweeping gesture.
“It wasn’t just horse-holding. It was the life, the friends – ”
“Are they still your friends?” she asked shrewdly.
Ranklin said stubbornly: “It was the life I had chosen.”
“Along with a few thousand others who can probably do it just as well because it’s that sort of job. While you’re in a job they couldn’t do – but you despise it because they would. God Almighty, man, hadn’t you noticed you’re a hell of a smart guy? Because if you hadn’t, Conall sure has: he wouldn’t stick by you two minutes if you weren’t, not in your trade.”
A gentleman really ought to deflect any compliment from a lady, no matter how oddly phrased, with some modest but appreciative remark. However, this is difficult if the gentleman is suddenly wondering if he hasn’t been wallowing in self-pity for the last six months, and also if he’s never been called a hell of a smart guy before. None of the women who had drifted through Ranklin’s life, and certainly not his family or the Army, had ever said such a thing. Not even an English translation of it.
Corinna had watched his bemused silence nervously, and found herself beginning to babble. “Lord, now I really did insult you, didn’t I? – saying you were in a ‘trade’. Suggesting you cared about that filthy stuff money which the English don’t talk about. How the hell they can pretend that just beats me: you sit down to dinner in England and they never talk anything else – falling land values, agricultural prices, servants’ wages, income tax, their mortgages, they all say they’re broke but you know damn well they’ve never had real trouble like y …
“Oh hell.” She sat up very straight and took a breath. “I guess I haven’t been behaving like a gentleman. Conall told me – I made him – about your brother and how you landed in this job.”
She was surprised to see Ranklin smiling, but he was rather surprised himself at feeling a sense of relief and not indignation. “O’Gilroy knew, then … But of course he would. I ought to stick to keeping secrets that really matter.”
Reassured, she went on: “I got worse than that, I’m afraid. I had one of our London boys do some tracking in the City. He found they’d hauled up the drawbridge once you got into that Deed of Composition – was it your new bosses arranged that? – but he got the trail pretty clear up to there.”
Still smiling, Ranklin hoped he’d remember to get that trail well muddied: if the House of Sherring could follow it, so could the Kundschaftstelle or the Nachrichtendienst.
“Matt,” she said, “for the Lord’s sake, if you – or your family – ever go buying gold shares again, ask me which mines to go for.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t exactly the family’s problem at the moment, but I’ll bear it in mind.”
“And don’t go signing guarantees you don’t understand – please.”
Ranklin nodded automatically. But then he paused and carefully took a big decision. “Did I?” he said.
“How d’you mean?”
“I’m really not so innocent that I don’t know I’m innocent when it comes to City gentlemen and their pieces of paper.”
She looked puzzled. “Just what do …”
“I’ve never told anybody,” he said, almost dreamily. “Nobody else in the world knows this – but how do you tell your family that your brother, who’s just killed himself because he lost pretty well all their – not just his, but their – inheritance, how do you tell them that he was a forger as well?”
She sat stunned. Then gradually the pieces fitted together in her mind. She had been thinking of this man as smart enough in his own world – she hadn’t been flattering him there – but a bit of a fool in hers. And now she saw that he wasn’t a fool but a hell of a nice guy as well as being smart and funny and, probably, brave (though she wasn’t a schoolgirl, to be impressed by mere physical courage). And he hadn’t been behaving according to some gentlemanly code; he’d just saved people he loved from hurt. For that, he’d let himself look a fool and put his career on the line. No, way below the line and in the ashcan.
She felt a sudden warmth towards him that really was that: a flush of loving excitement that tingled through her whole body. And a brief loathing for that brother of his, so intense she wanted to rip open his grave and stamp on his remains – only then I’d never have met Matt, she thought, and closed the grave again.
“Why don’t you come and sit over here?” she said quietly.
Ranklin lay drifting in that luxurious space between sleep and waking, knowing he could choose either, reliving gently the sensations of Corinna’s soft vigorous body that now slept beside him. Should I sleep or wake, remember or dream? The ceiling was dark above; there was no moon, only a slash of faint starlight on the part-opened curtains.
&nb
sp; I suppose, looked at objectively, he thought, I have been seduced. He had been seduced once before, but that had been when he was a twenty-year-old subaltern, and by a senior officer’s wife. A messy, clumsy business, he recalled, and best forgotten. But remembering it had woken him up and he slid carefully out of bed, found his dressing-gown, and lit a cigarette. Then stood by the half-open window to breathe smoke outside.
Not that that would fool the hotel staff; they’d know. The servants always knew.
“Are you planning to make a romantic escape through the window?” Corinna asked sleepily. “And break your stupid neck? Come back to bed.”
“When I’ve finished my cigarette.”
She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, the sheet spilling away from her left breast. “If we’re confessing things, d’you want to hear one of mine?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I’ve never been married.”
“Good God.” Ranklin really was startled, and began hastily to re-examine his behaviour. And the re-examination told him only one thing: “Look, do you want …” This had gone from being perhaps his happiest hour to his most awkward; “… I mean, I’d be honoured if …”
“I’d marry you? Is this a proposal? Oh, poor Matt!” She began to laugh, choked, and had to sit up coughing herself breathless. Ranklin just stared, thinking: that was my first proposal, and … well, at least I know what being shot at dawn will be like: easy.
“My dear, dear boy,” she gurgled at last. “I guess when I find a real gentleman, I get the full menu. No, I’m not trying to trap you.” She flopped back again, now naked to the waist and giggling at the ceiling. “It’s just. I found out early that, in Europe, it’s the married women and widows who have all the fun. So, I invented Mr Finn and a marriage in San Francisco. The great thing about the fire is that it burned up all the public records like marriages. So I can be Mrs Finn or the widow Finn, whatever fits the occasion.”
“Good God,” Ranklin said again, but not for the original reason.
“Con-men use it, too. If you get in a deal with anybody who says he was born in ’Frisco, be suspicious. Now forget about my honour and think about more interesting parts of me. Come back to bed.
“Mind,” she added, “if you tell anyone about Mr Finn, I’ll kill you.”
Ranklin pitched his cigarette end through the window. “You’ve got a few secrets of mine I’m rather hoping you’ll keep.”
“That’s right, I have, haven’t I? I’ve got you in my power, Captain Ranklin. Come back to bed.”
46
Breakfast, again out in the sun, was a busy time. Lucy, perhaps suspecting her father’s beaming expression wasn’t solely due to the success of the lawyers’ dinner, was trying to get him alone. The Baroness was stopping that by sticking to Hornbeam like a leech. Dr Klapka also wanted to get Hornbeam alone for once, while Corinna was trying to arrange an urgent consultation with Klapka. And the waiters were run ragged trying to rematch the coffee cups to the breakfasters as they moved from seat to seat.
It was like the second act of a spy farce, and the spies stayed well clear of it. “Romania’s turning the screws on Bulgaria,” Ranklin translated loosely from a German-language newspaper. “Says she’ll start the war again if there’s no agreement on the new frontier … And Vienna’s still hinting at intervention – Ah: they’ve approved an increase in Austro-Hungarian artillery, one new battery per regiment. But that’ll take a while.”
O’Gilroy took a spoonful of egg. “What guns?”
“Their own, they make ’em at the Skoda works in Pilsen. Good stuff, I believe; we bought some 75s to experiment with …”
Corinna flopped into a chair opposite, quickly followed by her faithful native bearer of coffee. She grinned at Ranklin, but then she grinned at O’Gilroy, too. “I finally pinned the little shyster down. In half an hour in my sitting-room. You can drop in ten minutes later, when I’ve broken the news to him. You’d probably like it to seem you’ve been dragged in unwillingly, wouldn’t you?”
“Very thoughtful,” Ranklin acknowledged.
O’Gilroy asked: “F’why are ye saying yer doing this?”
“I don’t think I can improve on the truth,” Corinna confessed. “That, as an American citizen, I’m worried that another one is getting imbrogled into a purely Austro-Hungarian matter – with international consequences.” She glanced back at Hornbeam, who was still beaming. “If that’s what the old fool’s doing with his head in the clouds and his slippers under the wrong bed. So, your cue is forty minutes from now.”
“What’s everybody else doing?”
“The Baroness is meeting somebody coming in from Vienna, Hornbeam may or may not go along, Lucy may or may not have a touch of the vapours.” She clearly felt she could handle only one Hornbeam problem at a time.
“If the Baroness is mixed in this,” O’Gilroy said, “would we be wanting to know who she’s meeting?”
Ranklin wished he’d thought of that. Corinna said: “How?”
“Yer car’ll be along, will it? Then offer it to take her down while yer sending me on some errand. I’ll be no help with talk on the law.”
Corinna liked the thought, but: “Suppose she sees you hanging around?”
“She won’t see him,” Ranklin promised.
As the breakfast party broke up and the waiters began clearing the tables, Ranklin lit his pipe and stayed where he was. In the background, Corinna’s car rolled up, she and O’Gilroy did some stage business with papers – and probably more impromptu inventions about local High Finance – then the Baroness and O’Gilroy got in and were driven off. Seizing her opportunity, Lucy was taking Hornbeam for a purposeful-looking stroll, perhaps to talk of rumours of his behaviour last night, or perhaps to discuss her dress allowance, unless the two subjects happened to coincide. Left standing alone, Corinna’s shoulders sagged momentarily, then she braced for the meeting with Klapka and walked up into the hotel.
Already it was almost too hot, and small puffs of cloud were forming out of nowhere. Ranklin knew nothing of the local weather, but was prepared to bet on thunderstorms before teatime, and did a mental search for his umbrella. But mostly he just sat and enjoyed the warmth, and the inner glow of last night. Were they just lovers who passed in the night? Part of him yearned for it to be more than that, but another part knew how widely separated their worlds were. So much so that their bond was that they were strangers to everybody else, nobody had quite been them before. But that being so, anything was possible.
O’Gilroy had learnt to identify different types of women by their clothes in the streets of Cork and Dublin. This could not really be called a sense of fashion. However, he had gone from there virtually direct to the boulevards of Paris, where women’s clothes and the messages they were supposed to be sending were a good deal more varied and subtle. And with his talent for observation and a desire to intercept whatever messages were going, he had begun to understand the code.
The Baroness, he reckoned, was dressed about three years behind the Paris times: her hem was barely off the ground and still slightly flared, her hat very wide and decorated with silk flowers. But the newness and craftsmanship showed this was deliberate: the message was quality, good taste, value for money, not fashionableness. And Hornbeam had liked the message, so who was he to criticise?
She sat rigidly upright in the back seat of the Benz, full-breasted – not just quality but a decent helping of it – hands resting on her furled sunshade and gazing out of the window. She totally ignored O’Gilroy until he asked politely: “And which station are ye wanting, m’lady?”
“The Westbahnhof.” She didn’t look at him.
“Mebbe I’ll look up some trains meself. We should be seeing more of the country than jest Budapest.”
“There is nothing to see in Hungary. Only some castles.”
“I was thinking about trade, m’lady.”
This time she did look at him. “I believe trade in Hungary is d
one by Jews.”
“Is it so?” It was clear that he wasn’t going to learn anything from cosy chat; on the other hand, it was just as clear that she wasn’t interested in – or suspicious of – himself. So he chose to spend the rest of the drive reinforcing his pose as a business bore. “Did ye know that two-thirds of the machinery built in Hungary is for transport? – motor-cars, tram-cars, ships, trains and the like. Now that’s a remarkable amount, when ye consider …”
At the Westbahnhof, a simple elegant iron-and-glass structure designed by Eiffel, of the Paris tower, they both got out. “When I’ve looked up the trains, I’ll be walking to the bank,” O’Gilroy said. “So ye keep the motor-car, m’lady.”
She just managed to squeeze out a Thank you, told the driver to wait, and stalked into the station. O’Gilroy had never planned to keep the car and try to trail the Baroness in it: the sleek, high Benz was far too obvious in Budapest’s mainly horse-drawn traffic. Better to let her drive in a landmark, and if he lost her, Corinna could demand of the driver where he had gone without seeming suspicious.
“Hello, Mr Ranklin, sit down. I’ve explained what I told you to Dr Klapka – and he’s rather worried.”
Indeed, Klapka was bubbling like a fondue, fingers drumming, feet shuffling, mouth opening and closing. “It is not believable,” he burst out, waving the notes they had copied last night. “That somebody should ask … Dr Hornbeam is a great lawyer, yes, but he is not … not of our courts!”
“Oh, sure,” Corinna soothed.
“To be asked for an opinion – on the Habsburg Law – Unbelievable!”
“The Law’s secret, isn’t it?” Corinna asked.
“Yes, but lawyers know it. It is not our concern, that is all.”
Ranklin asked: “What do you think Hornbeam’s trying to do to the Law, then?” He tried to sound businesslike and detached.
“To break it! To break the new amendment! To make it so the Archduke’s wife can be Empress!” His arms waved with the enormity of it; his jacket moved reluctantly and differently, dissociating itself from the opinions of the arms.
