Treacherous Is the Night

by Anna Lee Huber

  Sidney’s brow furrowed. “How did he know who Verity was?”

  “He didn’t. Not at first. And I prayed she was safely in London, her identity protected.” She folded her hands together. “But then you made your return from the dead in such spectacular fashion.”

  Sidney’s eyes closed and his head sank back as he grasped what I already had. “The blasted newspapers.”

  Rose nodded. “Yes. Your photographs were posted in many of the papers in Belgium and France. And I knew it was too much to hope Moilien hadn’t seen it, or that he wouldn’t recognize you. So I asked for Pauline’s help. I was hesitant to contact you directly,” she told me. “Lest I was being followed, or surveilled in some way, and lead him straight to you or vice versa. And I was equally afraid he was aware of Pauline given the fact that I’d urged Adele to flee to London and contact her. She was not supposed to come straight to you, but conceive of a way to happen upon you in a shop or coffeehouse. Somewhere that appeared natural.”

  She reached up a hand to rub her temples. “But as I said, that wasn’t exciting or daring enough for Pauline. She insisted on luring you to that preposterous medium she worked for. I told her you would never come, that the woman I knew would never be taken in by such charlatanry, but she insisted she would find a way to get you there. Even then, she agreed to merely pull you aside and relay my message.” She shook her head. “But that is not what she did. And this is where all control slipped from my fingers.”

  “She told Madame Zozza about me,” I surmised, having already been told by Pauline that she often fed her employer information about her clients that would prove useful. “She thought channeling you would prove more . . . impactful.” That was as diplomatically as I could phrase it.

  “And it likely got the foolish woman killed.” She pressed a hand to her chest where underneath her dress, I knew hung a gold crucifix. “Whatever exactly happened, Pauline contacted me in a panic. She said everything had gone wrong. That the medium had deviated from the plan.”

  I sat taller at those words, for Pauline had also uttered them to me, but I hadn’t known what they meant.

  “That she’d delivered the type of oblique message she often gave clients to milk them for more money, but you had been furious and hadn’t fallen for any bit of it. And then she told me her employer was dead. That she’d seen a strange man leaving the house just after it was set on fire.”

  “Moilien,” Alec declared.

  She nodded once in confirmation. “From everything I knew about Moilien’s previous crimes, I was certain it must be him. Adele must have told him what I said about Pauline and he followed her trail from Macon, for Pauline said she was almost certain he was the same man who had paid a visit to her employer a few weeks prior. Why he decided to kill this medium, I do not know. Maybe he convinced her to alter the plans, maybe she tried to blackmail him. Whatever the case, he killed her. And I told Pauline she was dashed lucky to be alive.”

  “By the skin of her teeth,” Sidney confirmed, for we had seen how quickly that house had gone up in flames.

  “I told her if she valued her life at all, she would go into hiding. That I would contact her again when it was safe.”

  “But I don’t understand,” I interjected, gesturing between me and Sidney. “We talked to her on the street while they were struggling to extinguish the fire. She could have told us then what was going on. She could have relayed your message. Why didn’t she?”

  Rose had fiddled with the handle of her coffee cup while I asked my questions, and now as if realizing it, she pushed it resolutely away. “I asked her the same thing, and I do not have a satisfactory answer for you. In all honesty, I think the girl was in shock and riddled with guilt. She knew her tomfoolery had contributed to her employer’s death, and I think she was too scared to trust you with the blatant truth, especially since you had reacted so hostilely at the séance. And yet, at the same time, she didn’t want you to be unaware there was a dangerous man involved. She said she told you that much, but she wanted to speak with me first before saying more. But by then, I knew it was too late. That Pauline needed to disappear before Moilien caught up with her.”

  I brushed my lank hair back from my forehead, trying to make sense of it all, for it seemed hopelessly muddled. “And so the codes you left me? They were all what? Your contingency strategy?”

  “I appreciate how convoluted all this seems,” Rose replied, obviously sharing in my frustration. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. But I didn’t know who to trust, and this was too important to risk it. I was fearful for your life, Gabby.” She reached her hand out to rest it over mine where it laid on the table, her eyes dipped before rising to meet mine again. “And I knew, of all people, I could trust you.”

  Rose was one of the least demonstrative people I knew, so for her to speak this way, and to touch me while doing so, meant she was being extremely earnest.

  “I had to make those clues difficult, or else anyone could have followed them. And when I laid out the breadcrumbs, I thought the only chance you would be using them was if Pauline failed or something had happened to me.” She released my hand, sinking back in her chair as she sighed heavily. “And now I fear it may have all been too late.”

  I sat taller, glancing at Sidney and Alec. “You’re speaking of the aeroplane in Havay?”

  She nodded. “I stumbled upon it just after the war. Though it all started months earlier. From the papers in that German aviator’s map case, actually.”

  “Zauberer—Buzancy,” I replied, repeating the name and location scrawled on those papers.

  Her gaze sharpened. “You do know then?”

  “Captain Landau helped me fill in some of the blanks,” I confirmed. “Though he didn’t know about the aeroplane in Havay.”

  “Well, after I discovered what Moilien was capable of, I remembered that aviator had been rumored to be one of Adele’s particular friends. She admitted the young ace had been prone to brag, and though she had little interest in aeroplanes and such, her brother did. Given that, I figured he must be aware of Havay.”

  “So you went back to Havay,” Sidney concluded, his hands pressed flat to the table. “And the bombs were gone.”

  I expected Rose to be surprised by this swift bit of deduction, but perhaps the implications were too grim for such considerations. Instead, she replied with a simple, but foreboding, “Yes.”

  None of us spoke for a moment, perhaps all trying to come to grips with the reality that our worst suppositions were true.

  Alec was the first to find his voice. “How can you be certain it was he who took them? Perhaps the army retrieved them as they are doing all the others.”

  “That’s what I’d hoped had happened,” Rose admitted. “But I asked those who lived closest to Havay. No one had come to clear the site. The only visitors in vehicles that ever drove that way were the occasional morbid tourists. And their motorcars weren’t military lorries.”

  Sidney blew a breath out through his lips, pushing back a distance from the table, his voice growing more strident and bewildered with each word. “So, Étienne Moilien intends to use these bombs somehow to get back at the British government because he believes they framed him, and turned him over to the Germans, and then refused to pay him restitution. Why not the Germans? They’re the ones who imprisoned and tortured him after invading his home and harming his sister.”

  No one seemed to have a ready answer for this, for it did seem more logical to blame the Germans for his suffering. But I endeavored to make sense out of it anyway.

  “Perhaps it’s a matter of disillusionment. He obviously saw the British as agents of good, and he tried to ally himself with us, to do his own bit of good. Instead we rejected him, we foiled what he saw as his chance to rebel against an intolerable situation. And then he was captured by the very people he was trying to inflict harm upon and they turned that harm back on him tenfold. Maybe when he visited Landau after the war, it was his last chance to give som
e sort of meaning, of honorability, to everything he and his sister endured.”

  “But he was rejected yet again,” Sidney finished for me. “Yes, I can see that. But why not both the Germans and British? Why is he directing his anger at only the British?”

  “Because, in his mind, we’ve suffered the least,” Alec stated. “At least, if one confines their scope to the Western Front. The Belgians and French were invaded. Portions of their countries were ripped apart by trenches and destroyed by shells. The Germans, while the perpetrators of his torment, are starving to death by the tens of thousands. The country has been picked clean by war.” His expression was grave. “Moilien was imprisoned in Germany. As he made his way home, he would have seen it. They are already suffering for the part they played in the conflict. But the British and the Americans are a different story.”

  He frowned. “The Americans are too far away for him to contemplate, but the British are not. And while we have endured our own share of suffering in the loss of life, we aren’t starving, and save for the Zeppelin bombers, our country largely avoided any direct devastation. Think about it. All he sees are the British officials, and the well-nourished, well-dressed tourists flocking over the channel—to gawk at the destruction, shed a few tears, and then return to their land of plenty. Tourists like those women at the café outside of Brussels.”

  Sidney scowled at the reminder and turned to Rose. “Is that why we’re here? Because of the tourists?”

  “One of the last things Adele told me was that her brother had been spending a great deal of time somewhere near Lille, France, so that’s why I’m here. Why you’re here,” she added glancing around at us.

  “Have you been able to locate him? To uncover what he plans?” I asked anxiously.

  She lifted her hands in frustration. “I do not know. One of my men located him in Lille some weeks ago, but then lost him again. Before the war, it would have been easy to locate a man with such facial scarring, but now there are so many with such injuries. And just as many who wear masks to hide them. It is all too easy to pass by unnoticed. Just another faceless, nameless suffering soldier.

  “I suspect he means to harm the tourists in some way,” Rose added. “But where? And when? They are crawling all over this area of France and along this sector of the front. New ones arrive every day. Especially in these warm summer months.”

  “So we have nothing else to go on?”

  She shook her head. “I am sorry, ma rouge-gorge. In this, I have failed.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Maybe not,” Alec interjected into our uneasy silence. “For I also have some information to share.”

  I could read from his expression that he’d only just decided to part with it, and that he was still hesitant to do so. I felt my temper spark, though I tamped it down, for it seemed almost inevitable that he should be keeping something from us. He always had held everything but the bare essentials close to his vest.

  “About six weeks ago, the War Office received a threat from ‘an anonymous Belgian.’ That’s what he called himself. The letter was filled with a lot of angry rambling, and it was unclear whether it should be taken seriously. So, I was tasked to find out who the sender was and assess the significance of his intentions.” He glanced between Sidney and me, at least having the grace to appear a little remorseful that he’d been deceiving us. “Because in the midst of his incoherent tirade, he’d sworn that ‘the silence of the battlefield would be broken by one last cry of vengeance, that the peaceful would be shaken from their repose, and that the travelers’ displays of false grief would be transformed into cries of anguish.’”

  “And you just now decided to tell us this?” Sidney snapped. His eyes blazed with fury.

  “The information was classified,” Alec replied. “You served in the army. You know how it works. I shouldn’t even be sharing it with you now.”

  Sidney turned away, muttering a curse.

  “Now that you’re being so forthcoming,” I drawled sarcastically, equally as frustrated even if I accepted the reasons for his withholding what he knew, “can you tell us if you discovered that sender was Moilien?”

  “Until you arrived, I’d had little luck in the matter,” Alec admitted. “Truthfully, it had not been made a priority. I was to pursue it in the midst of my other duties. But then Lord Ryde stopped to ask me those questions on your behalf.” He nodded to me. “And I began to wonder if whatever you were pursuing might be related. You always did have a nose for sniffing out trouble.”

  I arched a single eyebrow, not certain I liked having it phrased precisely like that.

  His lips quirked, obviously enjoying having irritated me. “So I hung back in Brussels longer than was strictly necessary, hoping to bump into you.”

  I glanced at Sidney, whose anger seemed to have devolved into resignation. His eyes gleamed at me as if to say, “didn’t I tell you so?”

  Ignoring him, I resumed questioning Alec. “When did you realize we were pursuing the same man?”

  “Not until later. I wondered at first if that aviator whose map case you’d stolen could be our man, but when I discovered he was dead, I started to look into those around him. Especially when the town of Havay appeared in his records.”

  I’m not sure why I was surprised he’d gotten access to German Army records so quickly, but I was. “And you already knew about the wireless-controlled aeroplane there.”

  He nodded.

  “But what about that bit about Landau?” I charged, recalling how he’d seemed to point us in his direction.

  “All true. I was suspicious of him. But I’m glad you were able to clear up the fact that he’s not involved.”

  “So this is real,” Sidney stated in summary. “Moilien means to use those bombs to harm British tourists somewhere near the front.” His face was pale. “But we don’t know precisely where or when.”

  “Now you understand what my predicament has been,” Rose told him. “All I can think is that he means to target one of these tours.” She shrugged. “But which one?”

  “I heard there are casualties almost daily from unexploded shells,” I said.

  Rose nodded.

  “Perhaps that’s how he hopes to get away with it. Maybe he already has,” I suggested, knowing even as I said so that couldn’t be right.

  “No, he will want the credit,” Alec stated definitively.

  How else would the British know? How else would they learn to regret not accepting him?

  I exhaled in resignation, spreading my hands flat on the table. “Well, let’s think about this logically. Most of the tours in this area begin in Lille, do they not?”

  Sidney suddenly jolted forward in his chair. “A cemetery.” His eyes were wide as he looked at all of us in turn. “He means to hit a cemetery while a group of tourists is there.”

  “But how . . .” Alec began, but he cut him off.

  “ ‘The peaceful will be shaken from their repose.’ Is that not what the letter said?” He stabbed the table with his finger. “It’s a cemetery. It has to be.”

  I reached over to grab his hand. “I think you’re right.” A sick swirling began in my stomach as a new horror began to dawn inside me. “And I think I might know which one.” I pressed a hand to my forehead as the full implication of it slammed into me, and I had to struggle to force my thoughts back into order.

  “At the séance, Lord Ryde’s aunt, Lady Swaffham kept asking about a cemetery at Boeschèpe outside Poperinghe. I take it her son is buried there.” I swallowed, meeting Sidney’s eyes. “Moilien’s henchman was at the séance. He heard her mention she planned to visit it. What if he told Moilien?”

  Sidney quickly grasped what I was trying to say. “And what better way to draw attention to your grievance than by killing not only British tourists, but also an earl and a lady.”

  “That sounds like exactly the type of thing he would go in for,” Alec declared, though neither of us paid him much heed.

  The thought of Max
being in such danger, and completely oblivious to it, made my chest seize up in panic. He was my friend. Someone who had been there for me when I needed someone most. And yet our relationship was somewhat delicate because of the troubles that had been in my and Sidney’s marriage. I squeezed Sidney’s hand, imploring him with my eyes to understand.

  He nodded, squeezing back. “Do you recall Ryde and his aunt’s itinerary? When were they going to be on the tour?”

  I pushed the fright away, knowing it would do no good to give it any sway. “Let’s see.” I thought back to what Max had told us. “They departed the same day we did, the eleventh. Three days in Calais and then a day to reach Lille. So the tour would have begun . . .” My eyes widened. “Today!” I pushed to my feet, glancing around me. “We need a guidebook. All the tour companies essentially follow the same route.”

  “I do not have one,” Rose replied.

  I shook my head. “Of course not.” Then I sprang toward the door, retracing our steps to the stairs.

  “I do not know if the bookshops will have one either,” she called after me as I clattered down the stairs.

  “I don’t need a bookshop. Just a tourist.”

  I burst out through the alley door, no longer caring about stealth. I turned my feet toward the spire of the Church of St. Christopher, anxious to discover whether we were already too late. The sound of footsteps hastening after me alerted me to Sidney’s presence before he reached my side. He didn’t check my stride, but he did reach over to clasp my hand. “I hope we’re wrong. I hope he isn’t going after Ryde.”

  I glanced up at him, surprised and yet heartened by his sincere words. I pulled him to a stop, arching up on my toes to press a kiss to his mouth. “I hope so, too,” I whispered.

  Then I turned to hurry us onward.

  Fortunately, there was a large cluster of people milling about before the cathedral. Several of them clutched books before them, and I directed Sidney to speak to the man in a pin-striped suit while I approached a pair of younger women.

  “Pardon me, are you by chance from England?” I asked, as my gaze dipped to scan the pages of the book the woman in the broad-brim hat was holding.