by Anna Lord
“Mycroft is for it too?” checked Damery.
“Yes, but as primus baro he has right of veto on individual applications. Not every American or Irishman who applies will get in. That young colonel you seem to be so fond of, Damery, hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. But don’t worry, by the time your applications are received there won’t be any…What are you doing, Grimsby?”
“Checking the humidor, sir. I thought it might need topping up with fresh cigars, sir.”
“Not now, Grimsby. Close the door on your way out.”
Unable to argue, she did as instructed but before the door closed she heard de Merville say in a lower tone, somewhat conspiratorially. “I just heard something extraordinary, gentlemen. You will be the first, apart from Scotland Yard and our own Machiavelli, to learn they just found the man who set the three bombs.”
She forgot herself and slammed the door harder than necessary.
When she returned to the butler’s pantry Pettigrew was waiting for her and the dark storm cloud hanging over him did not bode well.
“Where have you been, Grimsby?” His voice was a thunderous rumble.
She remembered to adopt a manly refrain. “The Stranger’s Room, sir.”
“What were you doing…Never mind! Mrs Babcock, the cook, is furious. We endeavour to keep Mrs Babcock happy because our members adore her plain English cooking. They do not want a fancy French or Swiss chef. They want food like their nanny used to make, made by someone who reminds them of their nanny. Cook has tipped three cups of perfectly good tea down the plug-hole and her ginger cake has gone cold. Don’t bother explaining yourself. Just get to the kitchen. Grab the tea tray for Major Nash and get it up to his room without fail. And do it without getting side-tracked.”
Right this minute her well-balanced humours were teetering on the edge. Why couldn’t the cook-cum-nanny have allocated someone else to deliver the tea tray? There were a dozen butlers on duty, though half of them seemed to have disappeared.
Desperate to get back to the Stranger’s Room to hear about the bomb man, she resolved to give the tea tray to the first butler she passed on the stairs but as luck would have it there were none. It forced her to personally complete the task. Nonetheless, as soon as she dumped the tray she would grab a box of cigars from the pantry and return to the Stranger’s Room to refill the humidor despite what de Merville said. Hopefully, she would not be too late to overhear something vital.
She didn’t bother knocking but barged straight into Major Nash’s office, ready to dump the tray and rush away, but the room was devoid of life. Tant pis! All she had to do was deliver the nanny tray, not feed him morsels of ginger cake with a silver spoon! Cook might enjoy playing nanny in this lunatic asylum but she wasn’t about to encourage the lunatics.
He had apparently eaten his lunch for the other tray was resting on his desk. The Matryoshka doll was nowhere to be seen. She placed the tea tray on the drum table, ignored the lunch tray, and was about to flee when she heard a familiar voice on the other side of the jib door, once again ajar.
“Bring it in here, Grimsby.”
Here turned out to be a bedroom decorated in masculine tones and Major Nash was sitting up in bed looking masculine. The lower half of his body was thankfully covered with a feather quilt but the rest of him was naked from the waist up.
She dropped her gaze and tried not to drop the tray.
“Put it here on the bedside table, Grimsby, and stir the tea for me.”
She was about to tell him to stir his own tea when she remembered herself and gave the brew a vigorous anti-clockwise spin.
“Hand me my dressing-gown, Grimsby. It’s hanging on a hook on the back of the bathroom door.” He indicated a second door with a cavalier wave of his hand.
She located a shabby dressing-gown with a frayed cord and wondered if he would throw back the quilt and step naked out of the bed to put it on, or ask her to run his bath and soap his back! Upon returning to the bedroom, she braced for the worst, but what happened took her breath away.
Major Nash threw back the quilt with a flourish to reveal he was wearing his trousers and even his socks and shoes. She was feeling unbelievably confused when he moved fast and pinned her up against the wall and she felt four stinging sensations across her face that made her cry out four times in quick succession.
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”
In a flash he had torn off her carefully glued moustache, beard, and eyebrows.
“Hello, Countess,” he grinned triumphantly, backing off.
Her face was stinging and her head was spinning. “When did you guess?”
He located a clean shirt with a winged collar and thrust his arms through the sleeves. “I admit I was slow. I can normally spot a dupe in less than five minutes but I doubted myself. Doubting oneself is deadly in my line of work. There’s no room for second guessing. The disguise was good and the wig is convincing, I’ll admit that.”
“So what gave it away?”
He began to do up the buttons of his shirt. “The way you closed the door.”
“Closed the door?”
“A man steps through a door and then just pulls it after him. It is one action, performed without a break. A lady accustomed all her life to wearing a number of petticoats and swishy skirts steps through a door and then turns back to close it. She cannot risk catching the train of her gown in the door. It is two separate actions.”
“I will bear that in mind for next time.”
“Next time?”
“Next time I go undercover dressed as a man.”
“I presume Mycroft Holmes knows of your charade?”
“Yes, I and I need to speak to him urgently. Is he upstairs in the dome room?”
“How do you know about the dome room?” He slapped the side of his head and gave a mock laugh. “Don’t tell me you’ve been here before?”
“You missed the last button.”
“I never do the last button – stop changing the subject. Have you been inside the Diogenes Club before today?”
“I refuse to answer,” she pouted.
“That means yes. Are you and Mycroft Holmes husband and wife?”
She burst out laughing.
He closed the distance between them in a single breath. One hand clamped the back of her head; the other covered her mouth. “Shut up,” he hissed, aiming a dangerous glance at the bedroom door that opened to the landing. “Are you married to Mycroft?” he repeated, removing his hand from her mouth but still brusquely hanging onto the back of her head.
“No,” she said, feeling anger radiate off his body like a wave of heat. “He’s my…” She was almost going to say ‘uncle’ but remembered herself in the nick of time. “Friend.”
He knew she was going to say something else and few interesting alternatives ran through his mind. “Friend is good because I would hate to kiss Mycroft’s wife.”
“What?”
Sensuously, seditiously, he helped himself to a searing kiss that caught her by surprise.
“Happy New Year,” he whispered breathily when he’d finished.
This was too much! He was running rings around her and if she wasn’t careful the next one would be on her finger. It was time to put a stop to it before she found herself on her honeymoon. She had been kissed desirously for most of her life, the first time when she was just eight years old by the woodcutter’s son in a larch forest. Major Nash was rather better than most but that did not excuse her pathetic acquiescence. Her vow to be scandalously remembered for what she did, rather than who she slept with, would turn into empty rhetoric if she did not meet male expectation head on.
“I presume you have been saving that up since the New Year’s Eve ball?”
“Yes,” he confirmed as he tucked his shirt into the waistband of his trousers, looking more than pleased with himself. “So what are you doing here inside the club?”
She located her eyebrows, beard and moustache where he had carelessly dropped t
hem on the floor by the tallboy. “I’m hoping to learn something about the identity of the man trying to kill Mycroft.”
“You think he’s a club member? Can you see my waistcoat anywhere?”
“Don’t you? Do you mean the navy and green striped one?”
“Yes and yes.”
“It’s hanging on the end of the trouser press in the bathroom.” She disappeared into the bathroom and tossed it to him from the door. “Catch!”
He had excellent reflexes. By the time she had re-glued her hairy caterpillar bits with the aid of the bathroom mirror and returned to the bedroom he was wearing a waistcoat, neck tie and frock coat and was washing his ginger cake down with a cup of cold tea.
They repaired to the adjoining office and that’s when she noticed one of those new telephonic devices. It was a wall-mounted wooden box with a bell crank, large mouthpiece and an earpiece attached to an electric cord. She had not noticed it earlier because it blended into the wooden panelling and was positioned behind the door.
“You were speaking to someone on the telephone just before I delivered your lunch?” she prompted.
“What of it?” he said defensively, moving onto the back foot.
“I think General de Merville might have been listening on the other side of the jib door.”
He looked alarmed. “Are you sure?”
“Not really, it’s an educated guess. I deposited the lunch tray on the drum table and when I reached the top of the stairs he was hurrying down and had almost reached the hall but he hadn’t previously been on the landing and there are no other doors except the door from your office and bedroom.”
He rubbed his chiselled jaw and looked genuinely worried. “Do you know if he signed himself out after he reached the hall?”
“He didn’t sign himself out. He went to the Stanger’s Room. Sir James Damery and Mr Blague joined him. I served them some Scotch – by the way if anyone accuses Colchester of pilfering the most expensive bottle of Scotch from the bar he is innocent; I’ll happily replace it – anyway I heard de Merville talking about the amendment. He was saying it would go through, that Mycroft was in favour, and that the membership applications of both Damery and Blague would be approved. He said Mycroft had right of veto but it was not a problem. Blague is donating a hundred horses to the war effort to win favour with the committee Are you on the committee?”
“No, it is made up of the six founding members, one of whom has recently died.”
“Admiral Quantock?”
“I won’t bother asking how you knew that. I might not want to know the answer,” he jibed, still thinking about the pilfered Scotch he didn’t want to know about either.
“Is de Merville a founding member?”
“Yes, but if you want to know any other names you can ask your friend, Mycroft.”
She ignored the cynical intonation. “Who votes for a new committee member to join the group of six?”
“The remaining five.”
“Any member can be voted in no matter how new?”
“Yes.”
“It would not be too difficult to stack the committee with cronies,” she observed.
“It has never been attempted in the past.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Are you suggesting de Merville is plotting some sort of coup d’etat?”
“He missed out on being primus baro by one vote – that would rankle. And the deciding vote was yours.”
“How the hell do you – ! Forget I said that! I don’t want to know that either! Are you sure you’re not married to Mycroft Holmes?”
“Quite sure – the last time I checked I was still a desperate widow.”
He smiled wryly. Desperate is not a word that sprang to mind. Even dressed as a butler, with her breasts flattened beneath a sexless jacket, the rich chestnut hair tucked under a plain wig, bushy eyebrows, moustache and beard he found her exasperatingly desirable. It had taken every ounce of willpower he possessed to resist throwing her onto his bed and giving her a proper foretaste of things to come.
“Is it Dr Watson?” he said.
“Is it Dr Watson what?”
“Are you married to Dr Watson?”
The question this time concerning her marital status did not surprise her; she had been expecting it to crop up sooner or later. A widow and a widower travelling together for months on end were bound to attract speculation. She refused to warrant her relationship to Dr Watson with an explanation. “You need to concentrate. Is Mycroft upstairs in the dome?”
He noticed how she didn’t deny it. In his experience a lack of denial was an affirmation. No accounting for taste, but a woman who didn’t need to marry for money often made the oddest choices. One of his sister’s rich girlfriends married a mediocre Welsh poet with bandy legs and Lady Brocklseby-Brown married a penniless farmer from Cumbria after being widowed. A middle-aged Scottish doctor who was not the sharpest tool in the box was probably a prize compared to the above.
“No, something came up suddenly and Mr Holmes went out after lunch.”
“After your phone call?”
He tried not to show surprise; her guesses were uncanny. “Yes.”
“Was it something to do with the bomb man? Is that what you were discussing on the phone just before I delivered your lunch?”
Uncanny was an understatement. He had to get to the bottom of how she could possibly know either of those two things. Mounting the telephonic device on the wall by the door that gave onto the landing was a grave mistake. He believed it should have been mounted between the two windows, furthest from the door and yet within reach of his desk. “Did you overhear the telephone conversation from the landing?”
“No, I told you I thought de Merville might have listened through the jib door. When I was leaving the Stranger’s Room I heard de Merville say to Damery and Blague that he had just learned something extraordinary that only Scotland Yard and Machiavelli knew – that the bomb man had been found.”
There was no disguising his shock. “Did he actually use the word Machiavelli or is that one of your embellishments?”
“He said our own Machiavelli.”
“I see.”
“Judging by the look on your face, Major Nash, de Merville heard every word you said. Who were you speaking to?”
There was no point lying. She knew too much already and there was nothing to be gained by keeping the rest from her. “Inspector Lestrade.”
“He arrested the bomb man? The roaming photographer?”
“No he fished him out of the lake in Battersea Park.”
“Oh, excellent ! Excellent!’ she trilled, and it reminded him of someone he knew but he couldn’t think who.
11
Machiavelli
“Are they the invitations to Longchamps?”
The Countess was about to go back down to the butler’s pantry before Pettigrew became suspicious of her long absence when she spotted a stack of envelopes on the desk.
“Yes,” said Major Nash. “And you can take three of them down to the Stranger’s Room right away.” He sifted through them to find the ones for Damery, de Merville and Blague. “I was going to hand deliver them this evening and you will save me quite a bit of time. If they ask, just say they’re from Mr Holmes but I instructed you to deliver them. They will think I spotted their names in the sign-in book. Don’t enter into any conversation, especially about where Mr Holmes has gone.”
She hurried out and left the two trays behind so that she would have an excuse to return to his office later. On her way to the Stranger’s Room she snatched a box of cigars from the pantry, telling Colchester that de Merville instructed her to restock the humidor.
She was about to knock when she thought better of it and just walked in. The three men had polished off most of the whiskey and were slumped in their seats. Damery was facing the door and noticed her before the others, despite his droopy eyelids.
“Fresh cigars,” he slurred. “Good job.”
She stepped forward briskly and put all of the invitations into his hand. “Major Nash instructed me to deliver these, sir, on behalf of Mr Holmes.”
With her back to the three men but her ears pealed, she restocked the humidor as slowly as possible. She removed all the old cigars one at a time and lined them up on the sideboard, then put them back one at a time. She did the same with the new batch.
“What the devil is Machiavelli playing at now?” grumbled de Merville when he ran his bloodshot eyeballs over his invitation. “Longchamps? Kent? This weekend! I’m going to a regimental dinner at Horse Guards! And I know where I’d rather be!”
“Well, I will be going,” asserted Mr Blague. “I promised to go to the opera with Batty and Dolly Vanderlinden. I cannot stand all that goddam caterwauling. Any excuse to get out of it will be welcome. My invitation includes my daughter, but I cannot see Mona going to Kent for some blasted conference to thrash out that New Year’s Eve bash and the threat to the Prince Regent. She wasn’t even there. She’ll be bored to tears and we’ve had enough of them lately. She can take my place at the opera.”
“I’m going to accept too,” decided Damery. “It will look as if I don’t give two hoots for the Prince Regent if I decline. And look who else is going. Mycroft has provided a list of invitees. Prince Sergei is invited. It will be bad form to turn it down.”
“Trust you to play the diplomat, Damery. Don’t you ever give it a rest? The prince has been invited but that doesn’t mean he’ll turn up. I heard he was going down to Scotland to do a spot of grouse shooting. I doubt he’ll change his plans at the last moment to go to Kent.”
“Look at the names again,” suggested Damery, putting the insult of his old friend down to too much single-malt. “Isadora has been invited. And the Countess too. I think that will sway things in favour of Kent. The prince fancies himself as a ladies’ man. And Violet’s name is there too. Didn’t you say she got on well with the Countess? I think she’ll relish a weekend away from the smog of London.”
“But look at the name of the house,” lamented de Merville. “Longchamps is the tumbledown hovel belonging to Mycroft’s aide de camp. The last baronet shot himself after running up gambling debts and the place has been allowed to run to wrack and ruin. Privacy and discretion! My arse! We might as well stay in an igloo on the frozen tundra! I will forbid Violet going. She will catch her death. Kent is one big marsh. There’s more miasma in Kent than in the whole of London.”