The God's Eye (Lancaster's Luck Book 3)

by Anna Butler

  More than I had ever thought possible.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Without the ability of the big Marconi apparatus to link internationally through a chain of similar machines—in our case, via Gallowglass House to the embassy at the Vatican to the Khedive of Aegypt’s palace in Cairo and at the last on to Hermopolis—my life after I left Ned in Aegypt would have been pitiful indeed.

  Every Sunday evening I crouched over the apparatus in the Marconi room next door to my father’s study, waiting for Ned to finish talking to his family at Gallowglass House and for the Marconi operator there to hand over the call to me.

  This was our fourth call since my return. November had blown itself out, and Advent had begun, with Christmas heaving into view over the horizon. I didn’t like to contemplate a Christmas without Ned. With my father’s health in its precarious state, this would be a miserable, quiet, unfestive season. Of course, I made certain nothing of this came through in my tone. I had a bare half-hour, and none of it could be wasted on pointless resentment about being stuck in London or recriminations about the distance between us. Instead I kept the conversation bright and airy—we talked about the coffeehouse, the vicissitudes of First Heirhood, the fact I would see his father at Marlborough House the next day—and I was cheery and blithe.

  Until, that is, Ned told me of the excavation work.

  “I’ve found something. I wish you were here to see it for yourself. The investigations into Thoth’s temple are intensely exciting, and it’s all been rather marvellous, but I don’t want to say too much over the Marconi. Our find will put me out of Marconi reach for a little while. I’ve hired a six-seater aeroship”—and now amusement shaded his tone—“and since this is the kind of thing to interest you, I’ll tell you now it’s a Bazelgette.”

  “Never flown one. Mind you, Bazelgette designed sewage systems. Aeroships were a sideline.”

  “A comforting reflection. Anyhow, Hugh’s gone to Cairo to collect it. We’re leaving as soon as he returns tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll be able to link through from where we’re going, not using the ordinary sort of Marconi set we’ll have on a hired aeroship. Sam’s fretting about that, as you might expect, but I’ll be back in Hermopolis by Christmas Eve. I have to call Harry and Jack before they go to bed that night, of course, to be sure they’re ready for Father Christmas.”

  Poets talk about hearts taking wing and singing in the breast. The cynic in me would have me more worried about impending apoplexy than the fluttering of love, but then the cynic had been softened by Ned. I knew now what it was to love. This announcement from Ned did provoke a reaction, a sensation, but it wasn’t singing. My heart dug in its heels and resisted taking wing. Instead, weighed down with lead, it left a feeling of vertigo in its wake as it plunged to the boot soles.

  “Oh. So long?” I stopped. Swallowed. “I’m sorry I can’t join your adventure. I’d beg you to take care, but I expect Sam will make sure of it.”

  “It will be an adventure, too. I’ve never been to that part of the continent.” A softer tone of voice: “It’s a shame you can’t be with us.”

  A bloody shame, in fact. So bloody I couldn’t find the words to respond.

  “I’m sorry. It isn’t the same without you here to share it. I wish I could tell you more, but my father told me of the high level of interest in what I’m doing evinced in some European capitals. Speak to him about it when you see him, and he’ll explain. With so many links in the Marconi chain, where our conversation might be intercepted, I must be cautious. You understand.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  I did, indeed. The consideration of listening ears kept us to ciphered messages of the more personal kind. We couldn’t afford to be affectionate.

  We exchanged a few more words about the expedition while the clock set on the wall above the apparatus ticked on and the heart down in my boots tried, and failed, to stir its lead-weighted wings. So little time, too much to say.

  “The link will close down soon,” I said. “Before you go, I must tell you about my cousin’s latest misadventure of the heart! She’s pining after a gentleman she hasn’t seen for some weeks. He’s out of the country, I believe. She’s lost her appetite, doesn’t sleep well, and stays at home, quite forlorn and counting the days until he returns.”

  A minuscule pause while Ned decoded my imaginary cousin’s romantic yearnings. “I’ve been in her gentleman’s position. Please reassure her that he, too, is counting the days and hours. He’s missing her terribly, I’m sure.”

  A trifling comfort, but all we had. He knew I loved him and missed him, and assured me he felt the same. Which was all that mattered.

  But damn it. Not even a miserable half-hour Marconi call for at least the next three weeks. Christmas couldn’t come soon enough.

  The Gallowglass was an imposing sort of fellow. Not only because of his broad-shouldered height—he was as tall as Ned, who had an inch on me, and bulkier than either of us—but because holding the Imperium’s purse strings in his strong grip had him exuding power and authority. I suspect a House could cross the Venator, say, or the Archiator, and escape bruised but generally hale and hearty. I wouldn’t put such faith in the good health of anything, House or man, who crossed the Gallowglass.

  I liked him a great deal. That might have been because he was accepting of Ned and me, and believe me, he knew about us. Or because, despite all that power, I had never heard of him doing anything underhand or venal. Ruthless? Yes. He was. But also honest and honourable.

  So when we met at the event for the Houses hosted by the Prince of Wales in Marlborough House, the day after my last conversation with Ned, I greeted him with real pleasure. He drew me to one side, and with the forbidding visage of his chief guard, Joe Brennan, keeping other guests at bay, we had a quiet chat.

  After we went through all the niceties about his health, my father’s health, Madame Gallowglass’s health and mine, we turned to the main point of contact between us: Ned.

  The Gallowglass confessed to some disquiet. “Ned hinted he was heading south, but he was close-mouthed regarding his exact destination. I wish he’d been more explicit, though I understand his caution.”

  “A great many people from several nations are interested in Hermopolis.”

  “The German government is involved now. The Huissher told me Berlin has people sniffing about in London and Cairo, seeking to find something to discredit Ned.”

  “I heard about it in Cairo last month. I know what sparked Ned’s interest. They must all have the same idea, but the intensity of the German reaction seems out of scale over something as… well, don’t tell Ned I said this, will you, sir? Something as unimportant as who gets which concession and a few hieroglyphs scrawled on a rusty cogwheel dredged up from the mud at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”

  The Gallowglass’s chuckle had a thin and rather unconvincing quality to it. “I won’t tell. I’ve warned Ned of Berlin’s involvement.”

  “It all seems distressingly melodramatic.”

  “Typical of the Kaiser.” The Gallowglass nodded to the other side of the reception room where Philip Abercrombie, the Huissher, talked with the Venator. “I’ve asked Abercrombie to set our own people to work in Berlin to see if they can nose out why the Stadtschloss is so interested. He’ll do it, of course, for Ned’s sake.”

  Of course he would. The Huissher was Ned’s father-in-law and grandfather to Harry and Jack. But more to the point, the Huissher was in charge of the military establishment for the Imperium and the various agencies involved in espionage—those the Gallowglass called “our people”.

  Spying was not a gentleman’s occupation. In consequence, we Lancasters had at least a peripheral involvement in it. House members were scattered across the world, with fingers in pies most governments didn’t know existed. While our primary focus was on trade, the Huissher’s agents often sought our help. I decided to contact the Stravaigor representatives in Berlin and order them to ask some discreet ques
tions of their own.

  “By chance, the Huissher has one of his men on the ground, close to Hermopolis.” The Gallowglass twisted his mouth into a faint smile. “I had the impression this agent was there on his own account and may have only a casual relationship with the Imperium. Spying is not his profession, although he’s been useful in the past. However, any port in a storm. This man might be useful now, too.”

  God alone knew who the Huissher was talking about. Another archaeologist? A dozen other expeditions had sites within a few miles of Hermopolis. An excursionist wandering up and down the Nile in one of the dahabiyas, the larger river boats, owned by the Thomas Cook company? Any given spot in Aegypt was infested by dozens of them, and a plague and nuisance they were, too. It could be anyone.

  “It’s something to keep in mind, of course. But, no. We’re shying stones at shadows. Ned’s off on some archaeological voyage of discovery, and it’s daft to indulge all these fears and speculations about foreign agents.”

  “Daft? Yes. That’s what I’ve been telling myself. I can’t tell you how glad I am he has Sam with him, along with George Todd and a couple of guards.” The Gallowglass finished his wine and glanced at me, his whole mien sombre. “I wish you were there, too, Rafe.”

  He couldn’t want that even half as much as I did. There were not words enough to say how much I wished it. Not in the entire dictionary.

  No words to convey how hard it was to fill lonely days with no Ned in them, unassuaged by the hard work needed to manage my House. No words to tell how each night I retired to a desolate, solitary bed with no Ned in it, seeking what comfort I could when sleep evaded me, from reading old favourites—Aeschylus or Euripides or my beloved Herodotus in the original Ionic Greek—until I was too tired to scan the page, the Greek characters merging into blurry incomprehensibility.

  No words for a life with no Ned in it. None at all.

  “You are quite loathsomely dispiriting to be around,” my sister said the next morning, with all the insouciance of the young and untroubled, invading my study—our father’s study, rather—with an impudence she would never show him. Somehow managing to remain elegant and graceful, she dropped into the chair set before the desk.

  “Not foully?”

  “It took me two months to influence my entire set of friends until everyone was using foul. Time to move on to something new. I hope to make them adopt loathsome in six weeks. It’s a sort of wager with myself.”

  “How Stravaigorish of you. I take it you’re working your way through the alphabet?”

  “I am. I may give up on the game soon, though, and try something new. I don’t want to be tedious or predictable.” Nell put her hand on the cigarillo box and raised an eyebrow at me. When I nodded, she spent a couple of minutes selecting a cigarillo, rolling them between her fingers and sniffing them until one met her exacting requirements. I leaned forward to offer her a light, working the large ornate brass lucifer which lived on the desk. The little flame flickered between us.

  “You have the nicest cigarillos.” She sat back, curls of blueish smoke wreathing her dark head. “But why so melancholy? Papa’s not any worse. So what’s giving you the megrims?”

  Weak and bedridden now, but still holding off death and hovering in a kind of limbo, our father had handed over the governance of the House to me when I’d returned from Aegypt. I was Princeps now in all but name. Enough to make any feeling man a touch lugubrious, I can tell you.

  “I spoke to the doctor this morning. He says we won’t see any immediate change.”

  Nell grimaced and pulled on the cigarillo. “But he won’t improve.”

  “No, love. He won’t.”

  She nodded, looking down so I couldn’t see her face. “I don’t know what I think about that. I’ve never been close to him. But still, I should feel it more.”

  My own feelings were as ambivalent. More so.

  Nell’s sigh was dragged up from her boots. “I wish… no. That’s just selfish of me.”

  “You wish this time of tension and waiting were all over?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re right. We’re expected to think only about him, but this is hard on those of us forced to stand and wait. It’s perfectly all right for you to wish for it to be over. You aren’t being selfish.”

  She puffed on the cigarillo. “I think I am. But I can’t feel more than I do, Rafe. He never took much notice of Emmie and me. When I was small, I thought it was because we were girls. We always came second to John. With such a gap between John and us, perhaps they’d thought they’d never have any more children and didn’t know what to do with Emmie and me when they did. But Papa didn’t care for John, either. John could never please him.”

  I said nothing. Indeed, the less said about John, the better. I’d seen for myself he had never met our father’s expectations. That John knew it, sharpened his desperation when he realised I was his rival.

  Nell looked up at last, eyes too bright. “He cares about you, though, doesn’t he?”

  I chose my words with all the judicious caution of a jockey on the approach to the water jump. Discussing this with an unwed girl flouted every rule of propriety. “I think he loved my mother very much, for very many years.”

  “And didn’t love mine. I know. Even now, when he’s—” Nell broke off and grimaced. “Dying. He’s dying, and he still doesn’t often ask to see me. Now and again, but not often. I try sitting with him, but he can’t be bothered. That’s the long and short of it. He’s kind enough, in a distant sort of way, but he doesn’t need me. He manages quite well without me.” Her eyes were wet, and with a half-smothered exclamation of disgust, she batted at them with her handkerchief. “But I’m still trapped here, and I can’t get away, and it’s hard to see my friends. Oh, what a mess this all is!”

  Nell wasn’t as insouciant as she had seemed. I let her cry for a moment while I dashed around from my side of the desk and dragged a chair up beside hers. Only then was I able to pull her into a brotherly hug. She turned in my arms and pressed her face against my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry to be such a watering pot, but I think I’m a little melancholy too.” Her voice was muffled by my jacket. “I don’t miss John. Maman wasn’t happy and never hid it. She won’t be back. Emmie’s rarely here, and she isn’t any help when she is. You’re here, though.” A loud, unladylike sniff, and she clutched me so hard I thought she’d cut off my air supply. “Don’t you think it’s silly that of all the family, the one I’ve known the shortest time is the only one I care about?”

  “Not too loathsome?”

  She gave out a funny, hiccupping , watery chuckle. “No. You aren’t.”

  I tightened my grip on her to convey a return of the sentiment. She wasn’t too loathsome, either. I stared over her head at the wintery garden visible through the French doors to the terrace. The sleet splatted onto the windowpanes, distorting my view of the bare-branched trees edging the lawn. Snow was forecast before the week’s end. It would be a white Christmas. Only three weeks to go. If I were to do this, it had to be now.

  “You speak to your mother quite often, don’t you?”

  “Every week on the Marconi.” Another deep sniff. Nell pulled back and blew her nose with more defiance than delicacy. “We aren’t terribly close. I love her, of course, but I don’t think we understand each other very well. She always says I’m too like Papa, so it stands to reason we don’t have a lot in common. I do miss her sometimes. I haven’t seen her since John died. She won’t come home, and Papa won’t let me go to her.”

  “Leave me to deal with him. Would you like to go and see her for Christmas?”

  She sat up, her expression lightening, only to slump again a moment later. “I shouldn’t. Not when he might die.”

  “It could be weeks. Months. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t fly to Paris tomorrow for a month or six weeks. I’m sure he will be here when you get back, but if anything happens, I’ll send for you. You’ll take your maid and
two House guards with you. I’ll talk to the finance officer about booking your tickets on a commercial aeroship. Tatlock can arrange your escort. Go and tell your mother you’re on your way. They’ll fire up the House Marconi for you—tell ’em I said so.” I gave her a little shake. “And you are not to feel guilty about it. Go and enjoy yourself.”

  She didn’t take a great deal more persuading. After making what we both knew were token protests, she brisked up, and now the gleam in her eyes was anticipation rather than tears. She sat by while I returned to the imposing, I’m-in-charge side of the desk, and hauled in the people we needed to arrange her trip. The finance officer tottered out with the back of one dramatic hand laid on his brow at being ordered to arrange her travel tout de suite, while Tatlock left the room rubbing his hands together with obvious glee.

  “Pleased you’ve given him the time of day, I expect,” Nell observed, when the door closed behind him. “He’s always complaining you don’t take him seriously on security. He’s an odd sort of cove, isn’t he?”

  “One way to describe him, I suppose. Although I don’t expect my sister to use such vulgar cant terms.”

  That made her laugh, anyway. She sat with her legs pulled up under her, regarding me with her head tilted to one side in a fashion rather more birdlike than ladylike. She was all glossy bright colours again. “You’ve cured my ills, thank you. But what about your own?”

  Damn. I’d hoped I’d distracted her.

  “Don’t scowl. It’s not that I want to pry, but you used to laugh more. Is it living here?”

  “Oh.” I stopped and blew out a breath. It wouldn’t hurt to let her share in some of my woes, I supposed. “In part. I never anticipated all this, you know.” I waved a hand around the room. “I didn’t even know he was my father until John tried to remove me from the scene. I didn’t want any of this. Damn it, Nell, I don’t like the Houses! I wasn’t brought up to be anything important, and I’m floundering. I’m having to find my way in the dark.”