Fall from Trace

by Rebecca Connolly

  He’d only spoken a handful of words to her since their conversation the night before, and he never met her gaze, so it seemed perfectly natural for him to exclude himself from the potential of any further conversation for a while by removing himself to the roof.

  If he fell from the precarious surface and injured himself again or took ill from being in the rain too long, he would never hear the end of it from her.

  Stanton was on strict duty to watch over him and make sure Alex didn’t kill himself.

  Poppy had other things to do.

  She’d had a devil of a time going back to sleep last night after what Alex said. She’d considered her words long and hard before saying them, truly thinking Alex would finally open up once he understood her perspective on the situation. But his refusal, his statement that he could not, had stumped her.

  She could not force him to say what he could not, but she was still without answers, and she needed them. It became the chief subject of her thoughts, and she would not be able to rest until she understood in some way what his life had been, if she could not know what he had endured.

  Luckily for her, there were other alternatives to Alex himself, and the rain would not keep her from pursuing them.

  Nor would he know what she was about to do.

  The doors to Branbury were large and old, and in desperate need of upkeep or replacement, but they had the effect of being an imposing entrance to an already intimidating edifice. If she hadn’t known the men within, or felt so strongly about her purpose, the image of such a place on a stormy day would have sent her running back home.

  Luckily, she was made of sterner stuff than that today.

  She knocked a handful of times, flinging back the hood of her plain but sturdy cloak, choosing to venture without a bonnet despite the rain. She only had the one, and in weather like today, it would hardly help her. She turned with a sigh, looking out over the grounds, currently being pummeled by the rain, and felt grateful to have had the harvest in already. Everything would have been ruined if they’d still had work to do.

  An almost bellowing creak from the door turned her back around, and Gabe stood there, surprise evident in his features.

  “Miss Edgewood,” he greeted, thick brows near his hairline. “Did you come by foot?”

  Poppy nodded once, looking down at her skirts and laughing at herself. “Clearly, yes.”

  “In this weather?” he pressed with a step forward to get a better look at the skies.

  “Well, it was gorgeously sunny and bright up until I arrived…” she told him dryly, shaking out her skirt with a bit of an obvious motion.

  Gabe shook himself and smiled sheepishly. “Please come in, forgive me for my rudeness.” He stepped back and gestured for her to enter.

  She returned his smile and crossed the threshold, untying her cloak deftly. “I’ve been led to believe that’s to be expected from you, Gabe. Everybody says you’re irascible and the like.”

  “I am,” he grunted and took her cloak, shaking it and hanging it over a rack near the door. “I’m quite rude on regular occasions, but in this case, I really didn’t mean to be. Besides, you seemed to handle it well enough.”

  Poppy wiped at the wet tendrils of hair near her temples, chuckling to herself. “I’ve been used to the freedom of speaking my mind no matter who the recipient is. One of the benefits of being given independence, I expect.”

  Gabe grinned at that. “I expect you’re right. I think Fritz has a fire going in the drawing room, would you like to sit before it? Might dry you out a little and warm you up.”

  “Please,” Poppy replied, rubbing her hands together.

  He led the way and took her down the surprisingly open corridor, then into the comfortably situated drawing room where Fritz was already seated with a book.

  “Fritz, we have a guest,” Gabe informed him, a wry note in his tone.

  Fritz’s dark head lifted, and he grinned warmly when he saw Poppy, rising quickly. “Poppy! Lovely, I was just thinking I could use some fine company.”

  Poppy snorted and curtseyed quickly. “I’m not sure I qualify.”

  “His other option is me,” Gabe reminded her. “You do qualify, trust me.”

  She dimpled a smile at him, then moved over to the fire, holding her hands out to warm them.

  “Sit here, Poppy,” Fritz said, gesturing to the chair he’d just vacated. “I insist.”

  Well, she wasn’t about to argue with such an offer when she was wet and cold, particularly given what she was about to ask them.

  “Only if you both sit, as well,” she told them with severe looks, then smiled to offset it.

  They did so, glancing at each other in what was undoubtedly supposed to be a surreptitious way.

  Poppy had to smile at that. They didn’t have to be spies of any kind to figure out that Poppy had a purpose for being here. Why else would she call on them when the person who tied them all together was back at the cottage?

  Pretenses are sometimes incredibly unnecessary.

  “What brings you to see us this cold, rainy, and rather unpleasant day?” Fritz asked, giving her a would-be innocent smile.

  Poppy sat up and clasped her hands before her. “Alex.”

  “Ah ha,” Fritz murmured, sitting back against the settee. “I thought it might be something like that.”

  Gabe nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on Poppy with unnerving steadiness. “I assumed you’d have questions eventually. It’s only natural.”

  “I wouldn’t have come to you,” Poppy said quickly, the impropriety of the situation suddenly occurring to her. “Only Alex isn’t talking about anything. I know there are things that cannot be discussed, and I don’t want to invade the privacy and security of what you lot do…”

  “We wouldn’t let you,” Gabe overrode with a quick grin. “We’re quite accustomed to keeping the secret things secret.”

  Poppy nodded, smiling in return, then letting the smile recede.

  Fritz raised a brow at her. “We might be spies, Poppy, but we’re not mind readers. What is troubling you specifically?”

  She exhaled shortly and wrung her hands a little. “His scars. His wounds. Who he is.”

  “He’s not telling you any of that?” Fritz asked sympathetically.

  Poppy shook her head. “I’m probably plaguing him with asking, but… He’s having nightmares. Brutal, terrifying nightmares, and I can hear every cry he makes. I’m worried, and he won’t talk about it.”

  Gabe and Fritz made the same sort of knowing, noncommittal sound, but said nothing.

  “What?” Poppy queried, looking at them both. “What is it?”

  “Well,” Gabe sighed, rubbing his hands together, “we’re not particularly accustomed to talking about ourselves or our work, let alone what we endure in the line of it, and Alex has more secrets than the rest of us.” He smiled very faintly. “Yet another example of our family similarities.”

  Fritz snorted to himself. “That and your bad tempers.”

  “I feel as though I don’t truly know him,” Poppy whispered, ignoring their light banter, “that perhaps I never did.”

  “No,” Fritz said at once, sobering and leaning towards her. “No, that’s not it at all.”

  Poppy looked at him with no small measure of derision. “How would you know?”

  “Because we are never so completely different in our personal lives,” Gabe told her firmly. “That’s who we have been all along. The fact that we have secrets and cannot always say where we are going or what we are doing does not take away from who we are. If you doubt me, there are quite a few wives I could have you speak with who would confirm it.”

  Fritz was nodding at the response and Poppy looked back at him. “So, Alex is…?”

  “The same as he always was to you,” Fritz assured her, “only with more secrets and abilities, none of which alter that fact.”

  “But I don’t know that part of him,” Poppy insisted, almost pleading for them to understand
now. “I always thought I knew him so well, and now I find there is another part of him. One that he refuses to talk about. I want to help him through whatever he is suffering, but…” She sighed and sat back in her chair. “Will you tell me what he will not?”

  Gabe snorted softly. “There is nothing I’d love better than to talk about the sort of man Alex is, particularly when he’s not here to refute it. But you must understand, Poppy… I don’t know, and nor does Fritz, what Alex endured on that ship. Not really.”

  She nodded slowly, letting that admission sink in. Then she smiled slightly, almost apologetically. “Tell me whatever you can.”

  Both men returned her smile, and Gabe rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Excellent. I have been wanting to talk about him for years.”

  “Far be it from me to prevent you,” Poppy muttered, still smiling.

  “Alex,” Gabe began with a sigh, “was the best of us, and I don’t say that lightly. He was brilliant in his strategy and methods, made connections that no one else would comprehend, and his instincts were always right on point. He could find clues where everyone else saw dust, could think five steps ahead of anyone else, and never once showed hesitation in his actions. He was absolutely fearless in every respect. You could ask him to take on a roomful of armed mercenaries, and he would grin and ask you when.”

  Poppy’s smile became less forced and more genuine. “That sounds like him. He’s always been reckless.”

  Fritz grunted an odd laugh. “Reckless. Yes, he is, but never needlessly so. Everything he did was careful and precise, exactly what was required for his task or investigation. I’d never seen anything quite like him in all the years I’d been working covert operations. It was as though he was designed for strategy and built for intrigue. It would have been a crime against humanity to have him go into any other profession.” He smiled faintly. “And he was never close to compromise, ever. He could get in and out of a place of danger without any trace of it. That was why we dubbed him Trace, as it were.”

  Gabe’s brow furrowed as he looked at Fritz. “How many plots did he foil? Or did we because of his information?”

  “Let’s see,” Fritz mused. “There was Bonaparte’s circle, and saving Prinny… Then the Italian ambassador and his family…”

  “And the uprising in ’18,” Gabe pointed out.

  “What uprising?” Poppy interjected, completely caught up in their tales now.

  “Exactly,” they said together in the same satisfied tone.

  She laughed and put a hand to her brow. “So many?”

  Gabe chuckled at her antics. “We’re not done yet, but you get the idea.”

  She did get the idea, and that was the most bewildering part. Alex had been gifted in this realm, somehow more than a man and less than an immortal. Confident, proud, and determined, just as he had always been with her, and she could see the Alex she had known in the world they had described.

  “So, what happened?” she asked, looking between them.

  Gabe winced and looked away while Fritz exhaled slowly. “Alex had been investigating a particularly dangerous group,” Fritz told her, his expression somber. “This wasn’t unusual for him, and he told nobody either the details or the key players. Again, this was his way. He reported regularly with appropriate information, but unless he required help or approval or insight, he kept the specifics to himself.”

  “I used to mock him for it,” Gabe broke in bitterly. “Teased him for not trusting any of us, but it turned out he was right all along.” He swallowed and looked up at Poppy, pale eyes glinting in the firelight. “He asked for our help one night, said he was in over his head and hadn’t known it. We all went down to the East London docks with the all the information he could provide us, which was limited, given the urgency of the situation.” He shook his head slowly, lost in the memories of that night.

  “We were ambushed. Somehow, we had failed to make the necessary connections on our ends to ensure that this problematic situation within Alex’s investigation could be contained. So, like a powder keg, it exploded. We fought with everything we had, but more and more of them continued to come from a ship, each one of them like the pirates of old, everything you would think of when you imagine pirates. I’d been stabbed in the leg and shoulder and was losing blood fast, Gent had a pair of black eyes and a dislocated shoulder, Cap was mostly unscratched but had broken ribs, and Eagle had broken a wrist and was bleeding from a cut on his face. We were outnumbered and going to die there.”

  The scene he described unfolded before Poppy as though illustrated, and her heart raced with the danger and adventure, the thrill of the action, and then her stomach clenched in apprehension.

  “And Alex?” she asked, her stomach dropping.

  Gabe cleared his throat, shaking his head. “Alex was cut in several places and wheezing badly, but he saw the situation and made a decision. A stupid, reckless, foolhardy decision. He bolted down the dock with many of our attackers following him. He boarded the ship the smugglers had been on, wrenching the gangplank away, and dumping one or two smugglers there. Then he cut the ropes of the ship in the dock and surrendered himself to them.”

  “No,” Poppy breathed.

  “I arrived about this time,” Fritz told her, his voice slightly clogged with emotion. “The ship had drifted just far enough away from the dock that we had no hope of getting to her in our condition. We fired weapons, but no one returned fire. Then we heard the unmistakable sound of someone being stabbed, a strident, harsh noise that gives the listener a pained sensation as though they are the one injured, and a cry of agony from its victim. The roar of the crew aboard told us what we already knew.”

  Poppy hiccupped softly on a wash of tears. “It was Alex.”

  They both nodded.

  “We searched for years,” Fritz went on. “Desperate to find out if he truly was dead, and to honor him if he were, or to save him if he was not. We found nothing. Not a thing to indicate he had ever existed, and no trace of those that had killed him. We wanted justice for him, vengeance for our friend, and we couldn’t get it. We set men to watch over you in his honor, knowing he would have done so were he able. We didn’t know what else to do.”

  “And then you had word,” she murmured, “when he came to Cheshire and was found at my door…”

  “We had to come,” Gabe said firmly. “We had to.”

  Poppy nodded repeatedly now, understanding in some small portion their loyalty and desperation, their drive for answers.

  She’d felt the same thing, only she hadn’t the resources to pursue it.

  “He sacrificed himself for us,” Gabe continued. “That’s the sort of man he is, and the sort of spy he was. And he may never be able to tell us the full extent of what he suffered at the hands of his captors, but I can tell you that he was tortured and interrogated and forced to work and live in demeaning circumstances. He knew the sort of men he was giving himself up to, and still he did so, though I doubt any of this is what he anticipated.”

  “So, if he isn’t talking about any of this…” Poppy prodded gingerly.

  Fritz heaved a sad sigh but smiled at her. “There can be only two explanations. Either he is protecting you, or he cannot bear the recollection of the horrors he endured.”

  Poppy swallowed with difficulty, her fingers feeling numb as they sat entangled together. “Which do you think it is?”

  Gabe grunted softly, sitting back in his seat, and looked at Poppy with a gentle fondness she would not have expected from him.

  “Knowing Alex? Both.”

  Poppy had been in and out of the cottage all day, and Alex was grateful to have her gone for a bit. Everything got so muddled when she was around, and he needed to think clearly. He needed to be parted from the warmth of her presence in order to process appropriately.

  He’d spent the early part of the day fixing her abysmal excuse for a roof, and the rain had added to the pitiful picture he had undoubtedly presented. But it had given him ample mo
tivation to complete the task and avoid conversing with anyone, which is all he had wanted.

  He couldn’t say that he’d actually mended a roof in his life, but that wasn’t about to stop him from spending as long as he needed to work away at it. Finally, it had stopped leaking, so he supposed he had done his job well.

  Or well enough, at any rate.

  He saw Poppy return from her errand, and it hadn’t taken much to understand that she’d gone to Branbury, for whatever reason. He’d taken care to force his curiosity far, far away, determined to distance himself from her and from the situation. There was far too much for him to do, and she couldn’t have anything to do with any of it.

  After the cottage roof, he’d moved on to the barn, shoveling it out, even though Stanton had informed him it was unnecessary. He’d long been trained to work when he needed an escape, or whenever he was able, and sometimes even when he wasn’t able. There was comfort in the monotony of hard labor, of letting his mind wander where it would without much by way of direction. He became less burdened, less congested by emotions and thought.

  Work was what he needed. Work. Purpose. Drive.

  Reason.

  As he sat before the fire attempting to dry out now, Alex smirked to himself. He needed reason, and he wasn’t sure where he was going to find it. Nothing he had done since his escape had been reasonable or been anything close to resembling it. All he had done was survive.

  For years.

  “You’re shaking, Alex.”

  Alex looked up at Gabe, sitting near the fire with him, watching him with amusement.

  “That’s because it’s cold,” Alex told him, barely able to keep his teeth from chattering.

  Gabe chuckled. “It’s not, actually, but we’ll go with that. I’d say something about the wisdom of working out in the rain all day, but when you’re miserable tomorrow, you’ll understand it all too well.”