Murder Most Fair

by Anna Lee Huber

  “An ideal candidate for gathering intelligence within Germany,” Sidney remarked as he unfastened his cuff links.

  I was glad he understood the implication. “Indeed. And when Landau approached him about that very thing, and offered him a fair amount of money, he agreed. Even though there was no minimizing how dangerous the mission would be.” I rose to my feet, moving toward one of the tall windows to peer out into the night. The gardens were thick with shadows save a thin stream of light spilling through a gap in the parlor curtains.

  “Landau supplied Becker with the documents he would need to prove himself unfit for military service, as well as a pass which would permit him to travel on the German railways. All courtesy of the Service’s excellent engraver.” I paused for barely a second, but I was certain Sidney heard the hesitation in my voice nonetheless. “However, there was still the trouble of getting him past the frontier into Germany. After all, the man he was meant to portray would have no legitimate reason to be outside of the country.”

  “Verity,” Sidney said in a low voice just behind me. I tensed, not having heard him move, and turned to face him. “Why do I have a sinking suspicion that I know where this is going?”

  I arched a single eyebrow before answering pertly. “Because you’re too smart for your own good?”

  The displeasure did not ease from his face, but he did reach out to tuck the auburn strands of hair that had fallen forward to shield part of my face behind my ear. The better to see me, I supposed. “Go on.”

  My gaze shifted back toward the window. “Landau knew I had relatives from the North Eifel Hills in Germany.” I frowned, recalling our conversations. “That information must have been in my file, for he’d asked me before about Tante Ilse. He knew her home lay just outside Montjoie. Or Monschau, as they now call it, since the kaiser officially changed its name last year,” I remarked dryly, for Montjoie had been much too French. Though we British hardly had a right to our cynicism. After all, the royal family had changed their name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor because the former was too German.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, preparing for my husband’s reaction. “Because his first objective lay just southeast of there, Landau decided that was the ideal place for him to cross over. And that I should be the one to lead him.”

  “Into Germany?” Sidney clarified, the muscle in his jaw ticking. “Our enemy. In the midst of the bloodiest conflict the world has ever known.” He cursed, turning away from me as he struggled to rein in his temper. “And here I thought Landau was the sensible one, and Xavier the reckless SOB,” he groused, naming another of my former colleagues with whom I had a complicated history. He scraped a hand back through his hair before rounding on me. “You could have been killed! Or captured!”

  “I could have been killed or captured on any of my missions,” I pointed out calmly. “Just as you could have been.”

  “Yes,” he bit out between clenched teeth. “But I . . .”

  “You were in the trenches,” I interrupted. “While I was supposed to be safe at home. Yes, we’ve already established this. Months ago. And in any case, all of this is over and done with.” I swept my hands from my shoulders to the ground. “I’m standing here before you now, all of one piece. So shall I continue? Or would you like to rehash the same argument yet again?”

  He stepped closer, forcing me to lift my chin to continue looking him in the eye. When his hands lifted to grasp my upper arms, I could feel the heat of them through the silk of my dress. “You can’t be surprised I’m upset by this news,” he uttered coolly. “You’ve been bracing for it practically since I entered the room.” He loomed. “It’s also why you haven’t told me this tale before.”

  My insides squirmed in acknowledgment of this truth even if I wasn’t about to admit it. “There are a lot of missions I haven’t told you about. And if you hadn’t found out the truth about my war service, and wormed your way into C’s good graces, you wouldn’t know about any of them.”

  When I had joined the Secret Service, I’d been forced to sign the Official Secrets Act, which had prevented me from disclosing the true nature of my work to anyone without authorization. But Sidney had managed to inveigle the information from one of my indiscreet colleagues—a man whom he would not name, even to this day. After we’d unmasked a nest of traitors some months past, my former—and covertly ongoing—boss at the Secret Service, C, the chief, had unofficially sanctioned our working together and my disclosing those secrets my husband needed to know.

  “And imagine where we would be then,” he challenged.

  My heart clutched in recognition of the fact that when he had returned from war and his feigned death, it had been even odds whether we would remain together or eventually join the thousands of other couples lining up to get a divorce after four and a half years of war had torn their lives apart. Had we been forced to continue to keep all of our secrets from each other, I was fairly certain we wouldn’t have made it. Even now there were times when the divide between us still seemed unbridgeable. I couldn’t imagine how wide that chasm would be if I were forced to continue the pretense that I’d merely worked as a clerk at an import-export company.

  Sidney’s anger faded as abruptly as mine. He pulled me toward him, tucking my head against his chest below his chin and wrapping his arms around me. I inhaled the scent of bay rum from his aftershave, which clung to his shirt, and pressed my ear over the reassuring beat of his heart. A heart that had almost been stopped forever by a traitor’s bullet just twenty months earlier.

  Some moments later when I lifted my head, we were both calmer.

  “Go on.” His lips curled remorsefully. “I promise to keep my tongue in check.”

  I nodded, trying to gather back together the strands of the story.

  “You were ordered to lead Becker to Monschau,” he prompted.

  “Yes, well, it wasn’t an order,” I admitted. “But it might as well have been one. So I agreed. We set out for Sittard, where one of our agents belonged to a group of smugglers, and he helped us to cross over into Belgium, and then I guided us the short distance into the Hohes Venn. Or Hautes Fagnes, depending on what language you’re speaking in. The High Fens. They’re notoriously difficult to cross. Especially in the dark. So we knew that stretch of the border would be the least guarded and easiest to penetrate.”

  My words faltered as I recalled that harrowing night. Then, the frontier between Belgium and Germany stretched across the most remote part of the moors. Though that wasn’t the case now, as Germany had been required to cede land in the Wallonia region to Belgium as part of the peace treaty, shifting the frontier some miles east, almost to the doorstep of Monschau. But on the night of our trek, part of the border rested in a nearly undefended patch of desolate bog. Not only would the traditional fences and wires have sunk in the morass, but few people dared venture that way, making their installment unnecessary. The fen itself served as the border’s own best defense. Though we had learned it was not the sole obstacle.

  “But such things often aren’t as simple as they appear to be,” Sidney commiserated, correctly interpreting my silence.

  I lifted my hands to his shirt, feeling the heat of his skin through the fine lawn, and fiddled with the placket of shiny white buttons marching down the front, the top one of which he’d already unfastened. “I’d been instructed how to find a little-known path that would lead us safely across the fens, through an area between the Helle and Hoëgne Rivers, so that we wouldn’t have to attempt to wade across. However, we did have to contend with navigating a rather precarious bog. Particularly when the weather closed in, covering the landscape with fog.”

  I risked a glance up at his face to find him watching me steadily. “With the area being so remote, and our sources having told us it was rarely patrolled, we decided to risk the use of an electric torch. We didn’t have much of a choice if we were to have any hope of finding our way across in the gloom.” The hairs on the back of my neck prickled in
remembrance of that journey, ever terrified that one wrong turn, one false step could spell disaster.

  I took a steadying breath, almost able to smell the peat and silt. “Unfortunately, our sources hadn’t been altogether correct. Or we’d simply had rotten luck. For not five minutes later we heard a German sentry call out to us.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Sidney inhaled sharply, the only sign of his alarm on our behalf.

  “We doused the light and stood still, hoping he would believe we’d moved on,” I hastened to explain as my words came faster. “But we soon heard the sound of him moving toward us. So we ran, as swiftly as we dared, praying we could outdistance him or lose him in the marshy terrain.” I elected not to mention the gunshots. How every time the sentry fired his gun, we flinched, fearful his bullets would strike us. “Then we heard a sort of dim splash and the sound of cursing. We realized the soldier had stumbled into the bog when moments later he began calling to us, begging for our help.”

  “Tell me you didn’t go back to help him,” Sidney demanded, recalling me to the present. I realized I’d been staring unseeing at his chest as it rose and fell rapidly, echoing my own distress.

  I blinked up at him, at the lines of strain marring his face. “No, I . . . I thought about it,” I admitted, my voice but a thin thread of sound. “But there was no way to know if it was a trick, or if he would shoot us anyway.” By the time we were able to see him, he would be able to see us. Or at least note the direction in which to point his gun. “So, we left him there.”

  I recoiled from the starkness of those words. For weeks afterward, the German sentry’s desperate pleas echoing across the fens had haunted my dreams, and accusatory fingers had pointed at me through the fog. My conscience had not been easy with what I’d been forced to do. It still wasn’t.

  As if sensing this, Sidney grasped my chin gently, forcing me to meet his gaze. “Ver, you had no other choice.”

  “I know.”

  But that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  The corners of his mouth lifted in a sympathetic smile, almost as if I’d spoken the thought aloud. I would likely never know what had happened to the German soldier, whether he died there from drowning or exposure, or eventually escaped. I often wondered if knowing would make it easier or harder to accept what I’d done. Or rather, hadn’t done. I supposed it depended on the outcome.

  “Then you and Becker made it through the High Fens,” Sidney prompted.

  “Yes, and on to Monschau, where Tante Ilse received us with good grace.” I frowned. “Though I’d placed her in an untenable situation.” I was still asking myself why I’d allowed Landau to convince me to take Becker there, especially now that I knew it had opened the door to his sending her another deserter. It was true, I’d also been tasked with another matter dealing with some of our agents in Vielsalm, near the northern border of Luxembourg. But I could have seen Becker to the frontier with Germany and turned south. I could have refused to enter Germany and lead him to Monschau.

  Except I had been anxious for him to succeed. Not only for the Allies’ cause, but also for the sake of his family, whom he’d talked about almost nonstop during our journey. I knew he had two headstrong daughters and a sturdy son. That his wife loved the rain, and that she made the tenderest sauerbraten, but her spätzle was always too doughy, though she insisted it was supposed to be prepared that way. The manner in which he’d smiled when he said it had made me suspect it was a personal joke between them—the kind of cozy jest often shared between husbands and wives.

  He had been about to betray his country and undertake a mission fraught with danger to gather intelligence for us. And all because he loved his family and couldn’t bear to see them suffer further deprivation. I had felt the least I could do was arrange the best possible start, and that meant sending him off from my great-aunt’s home with pressed, clean clothes and a well-groomed appearance, so that he could stride confidently into the train station to travel deeper into Germany.

  “And someone saw you? Or Becker,” Sidney guessed, reminding me that the entire reason I had been telling him this story was so that I could explain the threats that had been made to my great-aunt.

  “Actually, Tante Ilse believes they may have seen the second deserter.”

  His head reared back. “Second deserter?”

  “Yes, I was just coming to that.” My voice hardened. “Unbeknownst to me, apparently Landau sent another deserter to her a few months later.”

  Sidney’s brow lowered. “That’s a steep risk to take. Your great-aunt wasn’t one of his agents, after all. What if she’d turned him away, or worse, turned him in.”

  “I assume he thought her loyalty to me would buy her silence. And his gamble appears to have paid off, but at what cost?” To Tante Ilse, that is. Landau’s mission didn’t appear to have suffered.

  Gathering intelligence during wartime was all a matter of calculated risk. I didn’t begrudge Landau for having to utilize the tools before him—be they people or resources—to achieve results. But Tante Ilse had not been his tool to use.

  “I take it you’re going to confront him.”

  “Of course I am,” I replied, returning to the bed, where I perched on the edge to remove my T-strap pumps. “I know he’s in London, at least briefly. And he owes me some answers.” I tossed my shoes toward the bench near the bottom of the bed so I wouldn’t trip on them.

  “Whatever happened to Becker?” Sidney yanked the plum-colored drapes across the window before turning to face me. “Did he succeed?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Once he strolled away from Tante Ilse’s home, he was no longer my concern. And Landau never saw fit to confide in me about the matter further. Not that there was ever much time for such chitchat.”

  Most of the time my meetings with the captain had been at random safe houses spaced throughout Rotterdam and the surrounding area, which I was either going to, after an assignment behind enemy lines, or leaving from, on my way to Belgium. In the latter case, Landau normally briefed me in as few words as possible on what needed to be done, and then I was absorbed in planning my route and strategy before setting off for the frontier where I would rendezvous with one of our passeurs, who would help me slip across the border. In the former, I was usually exhausted and anxious to write in my reports as many of the details I had committed to memory as I could before I collapsed with fatigue. Either way, there was little call for idle chatter.

  “I hope for his family’s sake he made it,” I mused, consigning the query to the list of questions about the war I might never have satisfactory answers to.

  Sidney sank down on the bed beside me. He was quiet for a moment, perhaps contemplating his own list of unanswered concerns. “Then we’re still returning to London tomorrow?”

  Lifting the hem of my gown, I unfastened the clasps securing one of my stockings before rolling it down my leg. “As long as Tante Ilse feels well enough to make the journey. In any case, she’ll undoubtedly be more comfortable in the rear seat of your Pierce-Arrow than transferring from train to train.” I glanced sideways at him before adding wryly, “Though, for her sake, you might ease off the speed this one time.”

  Far from chastened, he nudged me with his shoulder. “If she’s anything like you, she might enjoy it.”

  I wrinkled my nose at his razzing before unfastening the garter on my other leg. “Under normal circumstances, I might agree with you. But Tante Ilse did not look like herself tonight.” I paused, my worried gaze searching the swirled fabric of the rug for answers. “She looked old, and tired, and drained.”

  Sidney did not try to make light of the fact that she was, in fact, old, and that that usually led to a person tiring more easily. And I was grateful for that. He merely pressed his hand reassuringly to the small of my back as I sorted through my apprehensions for my great-aunt.

  I turned to look into his eyes. “The fact is, I don’t know if all of that is due to the five long years of war and ha
rdship, or something else. And I think I’m a little afraid to find out.”

  “She means a great deal to you.”

  I shrugged. “She always has.”

  Though I wasn’t certain I could put into words how to explain it. For all that I loved my mother, she had never understood me. And I supposed I had never understood her either. It was just easier with Tante Ilse. She never expected me to be anything other than I was, and that was something I had always taken comfort in. With my mother, there had been nearly constant battles and bickering. Much of it well-intentioned. I was mature enough to understand that now. But I had felt harried and henpecked all the same. With my great-aunt, there had been amity.

  “Her maid mentioned her medication, but of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “But you think it does.” His deep voice didn’t question, but stated this as if it was a valid fact, which encouraged me to admit the truth.

  “I do.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  “Yes, but she claimed she was simply getting old.”

  His mouth flattened into a humorless smile. “As you would if you wished to deflect from the truth.”

  “And I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something, several somethings,” I amended, “she wasn’t telling me.”

  “Maybe she was wary of telling you everything tonight. Maybe she’ll be more forthcoming tomorrow.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded, though I wasn’t convinced. My aunt had never been secretive in the past, but perhaps that was my naïveté showing. After all, I was barely twenty-three years old, and besides the single night I had stayed with her during the war after leading Becker into Germany, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in over five years. As a child and adolescent, what had I truly known about her life? What had I even understood?