by Julia Kelly
“Have you ever considered that it could simply be that Mr. Wark is generous with his friends?” As much as she hated to defend Wark, the thought of him stockpiling weapons for nefarious means was absurd.
“That is the most benign scenario, and we hope it’s true. But we won’t know until you find out more,” he said.
“And how do you suggest I procure this information?”
Andrew’s ocean-blue eyes locked with hers. “Use your influence and maneuver closer to him.”
“You mean use sex to my advantage?” she shot back. Andrew jerked away. “Oh come now. We’re both adults. We should call it what it is.”
His face fell into a neutral expression of disinterest, and he shrugged. “If you must. Some of a more delicate demeanor might call them your feminine wiles.”
His nonchalance cracked something open in her, and she surged forward and jabbed him in the chest with her finger. “Andrew Colter, I don’t know what I would even do with a wile if I had it—feminine or otherwise. Do you think my days are filled with long, lazy hours where I sit on my divan and dream up ways to seduce my thronging court of gentleman callers?”
“What?”
Jab. “I don’t even know when I’d find the time.” Jab. “I have two seamstresses and a shopgirl working under me, and I still spend fourteen hours a day draping, cutting, and sewing dresses.” Jab. “And when my girls are done and they go home, I’m still here.” Jab. “That’s when I handle the account books and inventory and orders. I deal with suppliers who for ten years have asked me every single month when I’ll be bringing on a man to help me with the books. Or better yet”—jab—“why doesn’t Mrs. Parkem marry again! That will solve everything!” Jab. “So tell me”—jab—“when”—jab—“I could possibly”—jab—“find”—jab—“the”—jab—“time?”
Her voice was high-pitched and angry now, and it was a wonder that Anika didn’t come racing in. Yet it was still just her and Andrew standing in a glorified closet, all the air rushing out to be replaced by her roaring rage.
“We can make arrangements to help you,” he said.
“Are you going to jump in and learn how to whipstitch?”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “We can get someone in.”
She threw her hands up. “Don’t bother. I’m not the woman you need doing this.”
She wrenched open the storeroom door just as he called out, “I never thought I’d see the day that Lavinia Malcolm ran away from a challenge.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not Lavinia Malcolm anymore. You’d do well to remember that.”
The meeting had been exactly what Andrew had expected. An utter disaster.
He’d warned Sir Newton and all the rest of them at Home that he was the last man Lavinia Malcolm—Parkem—would trust. Never mind that she was a civilian—there were no militaristic rules governing her participation. The truth was that the War Office needed her willing participation, or it would get no participation at all.
He swiped at the hair that had fallen out of place as he walked away from the little shop on Victoria Street. He might as well head to the address Sir Newton’s dossier had given him for his fabricated business and tell this Gibson fellow that his services as a liaison wouldn’t be needed. Without Lavinia there would be no operation.
The few minutes it took to walk from Lavinia’s shop to Blair Street didn’t do anything to improve his mood. If anything, they darkened it. What else could he expect now that he had nothing but uninterrupted time to ponder his encounter with the woman he’d once expected would become his wife?
Her face had lost some of the softness it had possessed when she’d been newly twenty—the last time he’d seen her. There was a leanness about her now, as though the world had chiseled away the innocence of youth and left her face sharper, more angular. The rich brown hair he’d loved to feel slip between his fingers was shot through with strands of gray at her temples that gave her an elegant quality, and the fine lines around her eyes belied many hours spent stitching by gaslight.
He raised a hand, touching a finger to the web at the corner of his own eyes, the result of months at a time spent squinting out over the bow of a ship at the sun-reflecting water. They’d both aged, but where he felt like a man old before his time, she had the carriage of a queen. Eleanor of Aquitaine couldn’t have looked down her nose at him with such disdain, judging him to be nothing more than a peasant polluting her kingdom with his mere presence.
Yes, her haughtiness stirred something inside him. When he’d left her, she’d been a sweet, mischievous girl. Now she was undeniably a woman. Worldly and confident, she was exactly what he hadn’t expected, yet the thought of this new Lavinia intrigued him. And the worst part was, it made him want her even more powerfully than he had when he’d seen her through the shopwindow, scissors raised menacingly in conversation with Wark.
He shook his head as he turned onto Blair Street and stopped in front of No. 14. It was a small shop with a plate-glass window that stretched almost its entire width. Inside, he could see cabinets fitted with tiny drawers, no doubt holding all of the buttons that he was supposed to be selling. He wondered how long ago Home had purchased this storefront and whether it had served as the cover for any other operations.
The door was locked, but there was a key for a doorbell next to a brass plaque that read, Colter’s Fine Notions. He turned the key, feeling a little ridiculous that he had to ask permission to enter his own “shop.” The bell rang through the three-story building, and after a moment, the tumblers clicked and the door was flung open. Standing on the threshold looking up at him through narrow eyes was a slip of a girl hardly more than eighteen wearing a bold tartan dress with a tight lace collar that looked like it was trying to strangle her.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked politely.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Gibson,” he said, forcing himself to blink or risk being blinded by the appalling clash of blue, yellow, green, and red that was her dress.
“Do you have an appointment, sir?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
When she continued to stare at him, he cleared his throat, and said, “Up in the morning’s no for me, up in the morning early.”
“When a’ the hills are cover’d wi’ snaw, I’m sure it’s winter fairly,” she replied, finishing the verse and then stepping back to let him pass. “Do come in.”
“Isn’t Robert Burns a little on the nose?” he asked.
“I can assure you, the code was Home’s choice and not my own. I can’t stand the man,” she said, lifting her skirts an inch. “This way.”
“Isn’t Burns a national treasure?” he asked.
She shot him a sour look over her shoulder. “Just because he wrote a lot of barely comprehensible rubbish doesn’t mean that all Scotsmen and -women wish for it to be shoved down their throats at every turn.”
“Perhaps you should suggest Walter Scott then,” he said.
“Stevenson, Lang, Montgomery, and all he wants is Scott. No imagination,” she muttered with a huff.
His poetry critic guide pushed through a door off the landing to the private rooms of the shop. There was a reception area that was set up to resemble a sitting room, and beyond it an office. When the young woman let him in, he expected Mr. Gibson to be seated behind the plain oak desk. Instead, she rounded it and dropped unceremoniously into the chair before crossing her hands on the table and fixing him with a look.
“Gillie Gibson, at your service,” she said.
“You’re Gibson?” he asked, taken aback.
She wiggled her fingers in the air. “Surprise.”
“You’re a woman,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be wearing a corset if I wasn’t,” she said.
“But Home doesn’t employ women to run field offices.”
“You may not have encountered one in your time, but I can assure you Home most certainly does.”
“But you’re so young,” he said,
still grappling with the idea that Home had intended for this tiny woman who looked barely old enough to wear long dresses to run his operation.
“And you’re rather craggy-looking, if we’re stating truths.”
He gave a snort, and she leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “Captain Colter—or, I suppose, Mr. Colter, since you’re supposed to be a shopkeeper—I don’t want to argue with you about my ability to run this operation. I find the entire thing tiring and rarely worth my time.”
Although she was at least a good ten years younger than he, he recognized the weariness about her words because he’d felt it himself.
“Then I suspect I’m not the first man who’s been surprised at your youth and sex,” he said.
“Hardly. I’ve been working for Home since I was fourteen. I’m trained and tested in the field, but I have a particular talent for making connections, gathering information, and greasing the wheels behind the scenes. That is, if I choose to help an agent. I sometimes find myself disinclined, especially when a man is being an ass.”
There was something formidable and steely about this pint-size woman, and Andrew couldn’t help but like her for it.
“Please forgive my surprise. I shouldn’t have presumed to know your sex, Miss Gibson,” he said, bowing his head but unable to suppress a grin. Gillie Gibson was a little prickly, disarmingly matter-of-fact, and startlingly efficient. He liked her already.
“Gillie will do just fine.”
“Not just Gibson?” he asked.
Her expression morphed into a sweet smile. “Not if you enjoy the use of both of your hands. Besides, I’m supposed to be playing the role of your sister.”
“Andrew,” he said, sticking out his hand to the exuberantly dressed woman, who shook it with a firm grip. “I never had a sister.”
“No time like the present to acquire one then.”
Gillie pulled a key that hung on a chain out of the neckline of her dress. Unlocking a drawer, she removed a dossier. He was beginning to feel that, more than ever, his life was ruled by dossiers. His retirement couldn’t come fast enough.
“Did you make contact with Mrs. Parkem?” Gillie asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. There’s hope for you yet then.”
“Don’t be so certain.”
“What did she say?” Gillie asked.
“I believe it was an unequivocal no.”
“No?” She was back to looking unimpressed.
“No. Although I did meet Wark, and a woman called Sullivan,” he said.
Gillie’s brows rose. “Moira Sullivan?”
“She appears to be a client of Mrs. Parkem’s,” he said.
“She’s more than that. She’s assisted us in the past. The woman is extraordinarily well connected and has a network of informants that Home would be desperate to get its hands on.”
“And yet she’s not a spy.”
“No, she’s something better. She’s a matchmaker.”
He sat back to process that little bit of information.
“What happens now?” Gillie asked.
“I’ll be writing to Home and recommending that the current plan be abandoned.”
Gillie flipped shut the dossier with disgust. “When they told me they were sending a sailor who’d captained his own ship, I thought, ‘Finally, someone with a little backbone rather than all these run-of-the-mill agents I keep getting.’ They’re all soft hands and sneaking manners. I thought you’d be one to get things done.”
“It’s out of my control.”
“How?” she asked.
“The asset doesn’t want anything to do with me,” he said, his voice dropping low. He didn’t know what annoyed him more: the look of unwelcome shock in Lavinia’s eyes when he’d entered her shop, or the fact that Gillie so clearly felt he’d failed.
“Then figure out a way to show her that this has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the safety of this country,” said Gillie.
He shook his head. “She won’t listen. Our history is rather complicated . . .”
“You were engaged to be married. She married another man when you were thought to be lost at sea. You found out two days after her wedding when your homecoming became a confrontation. We’re in the spy game, Andrew. It’s always complicated. But there are always solutions.”
She probably knew every order he’d ever given on his ship and that he liked his toast buttered straight to the edge of the crust.
He sighed. He had a duty, so long as they hadn’t exhausted all avenues of inquiry, to keep barreling along the path Home had set him on.
“What do you suggest we do?” he asked.
Gillie’s smile spread and her eyes twinkled. “Go see the matchmaker.”
Chapter Four
LAVINIA TOSSED AND turned the entire night as sleep eluded her, her mind jammed full of measurements and orders. It was enough to keep any businesswoman awake at night.
And then there was the matter of Andrew.
After walking out on him, she’d gone straight into her shop and thrown herself into her work. The busy pace of the rest of the day had made it easy to ignore him and his proposal, and she’d sewn long after she’d dismissed Siobhan and Kelsie for the day, stopping only for a late bite of supper before resuming her tasks.
All of that activity had kept her mind occupied, and it hadn’t been hard to shove away the memory of Andrew walking into her shop. When she’d retired to bed, however, her thoughts had been free to wander, calling up dangerous memories of times she’d shared with him. Good memories.
Over the course of the night, she’d traversed their entire shared history. She recalled their first meeting, when her brother had hauled his new friend into the vicarage’s kitchen to steal bannocks from Cook and she’d followed them out to play in the kitchen garden. The innocence of childhood interactions had given way to blushing awkwardness when her brother had been sent away to school in Edinburgh but Andrew had continued to return between voyages. Then, at the Hogmanay festivities to mark the New Year, when the streets of Eyemouth had been merry with people celebrating, he’d pulled her behind the vicarage and kissed her. Any awkwardness regarding their youth and their awareness of one another had melted away like butter left on a hearth, and they’d been inseparable ever since.
Her parents had been convinced that his career would separate them and that young love would fade for lack of proximity, but the absences had only strengthened their bond. The night he’d proposed to her had been the happiest of her life. She’d believed with absolute certainty that he was the man she’d spend the rest of her life with. Until she’d thought she’d lost him.
And now he’d reappeared, a ghost from her past, to remind her of what her life could’ve been if only she’d been strong enough to choose her own path. But, like all ghosts who haunt dreams, he’d be gone by morning. This was her life: dressmaker, seamstress, widow. Her choices had brought her to this spot, and she’d do well to remember that no matter how handsome she still found him. No matter how much her body ached for him.
A banging at her front door broke the silence of her quiet house, rattling her nerves.
“Livy!”
Oh Lord, it was Caleb, and by the sound of it he was so deep in his cups he couldn’t see out.
“Livy!”
She leapt out of bed, pulling her dressing gown on as she swept down the two flights of stairs to the street. Caleb was still pounding away, and when she pulled the door open he nearly toppled over onto her.
“Livy, you’re here,” he slurred.
“Where else would I be, you numpty?” she asked, looping an arm around him and hauling him through the front room into the back kitchen.
“You cook the best breakfast, so I thought, ‘Why not come to Livy’s because it’s breakfast time?’ ”
“It decidedly is not breakfast time,” she said, dumping him into one of the wooden chairs that surrounded her table.
It was then that she realized
Caleb wasn’t just drunk, he was covered in blood.
“Caleb, you’re hurt!” she cried, dropping to her knees next to him.
He lifted his chin and revealed that his nose had been punched. The blood had mostly dried, and bruises were beginning to form under his eyes.
“Have you been in a fight?” she asked.
He smiled at her dopily. “Hmmm . . . ?”
“Caleb, what happened?”
He frowned, the humor draining from his features. “Lost.”
Lavinia’s heart sank. “You lost at cards again. How much this time?”
He crossed his arms and stuck his lip out in the same sort of pout he’d used as a child when Cook refused him a treat. “Need more whiskey.”
“You can have coffee and bread and cheese, but no more spirits,” said Lavinia.
She set about raking the coals and putting on water to boil, well aware that Caleb was watching her. Sure enough, as she pulled the cheese out of the larder, he said, “Funny you doing all that. Mother would never have acted like a servant.”
“Mother didn’t marry a wastrel who lied about his income,” she said. “And I don’t mind doing my own cooking.”
That was a fib. She was exhausted at the end of every day, and the last thing she wanted to be bothered with was putting food on the table. Fiona helped a little in exchange for luncheon and tea, but the bulk of the work fell to Lavinia.
“You could’ve married again,” said Caleb. Then he laughed sharply. “But all you want is this pokey little shop.”
“Say another ill word about Mrs. Parkem’s and I’ll toss you out on your drunken backside,” she threatened, just as she always did when they reached this point in one of her brother’s drunken evenings. It was the cruel, petty side of him, and she hated it.