“You’d better,” I snapped, grabbing the bed to help me rise to my feet. I was not going to hold this conversation while seated on the floor in this unfamiliar bedchamber. I glanced about me, raising my hands in exasperation. “And for that matter, what am I doing here? Is this your doing? Did you send me that letter and leave the book?” I sucked in a harsh breath as another thought occurred to me. “Did you kill Jimmy and Charlie?”
Sidney scowled. “For heaven’s sake, Verity. Do you not know me at all?”
I refused to be chastised. “It seems not. Or else I wouldn’t have been grieving over your sorry hide for the last year and more. What a waste.” I whirled away, moving around to the side of the bed to sit on it.
He slowly followed. “I’m sorry, Ver.”
He began to sit on the bed next to me, but I pointed a furious finger toward the chair in front of the writing desk. He hesitated a moment, but obeyed my unspoken order.
I missed his warmth and scent almost immediately, but I squashed the longing that welled up inside me. After all, I’d been missing them for a year and half. I could do without it for a bit longer.
The truth was, I was worried that if he sat beside me, if he put his arm around me and started to kiss me again, I would never want him to stop. I would forgive him anything, even if it was more horrible than the things I was already imagining.
He reached into the pocket of his worn trousers and extracted a battered, silver cigarette case. The one he’d taken with him to war that I’d had made special for him. I could still see the faint outline of his initials on the cover, and inside I knew it bore the message, Love always, Verity.
“Do you mind?” he asked, already removing one of the Turkish cigarettes he favored. He grimaced. “This is rather a long tale to tell.”
I nodded once.
His hands were steady and his bearing calm. There was nothing to indicate he was at all unnerved by this situation. Though, to be fair, he hadn’t just suffered from a great shock. But I still resented it. That cool confidence that had initially drawn me to him could also be infuriating. Just the tiniest indication that he was in any way flustered would have made me feel a little better.
From this vantage, I could see he wasn’t dressed in the clothing of a gentleman, but more of a laborer. His skin was bronzed from the sun, and his hands rough, the knuckles on one hand scraped.
He exhaled a long stream of smoke, fixing his midnight blue eyes on me. “I truly am sorry, Verity. I never intended for any of this to happen. But once it did, well, there was no turning back. There’s nothing I would have rather done than come home to you, but I assure you, the deception was necessary. For your safety and mine.”
“Quit talking in riddles,” I said, already feeling my heart soften toward him without knowing the barest of facts.
He nodded, reaching behind him to tip a fall of ash into the tray at the corner of the desk. “The first thing you should know is that I was wounded.” He pressed a hand to the left side of his chest. “Just as it was reported. Would have been fatal, too, if it hadn’t been for two things. The shooter’s aim was off. The bullet missed my heart by less than an inch.”
My hands fisted in my skirt as an image of Sidney lying wounded in the red sucking mud of the Somme flashed before my eyes. It wasn’t difficult to imagine, seeing as I’d been staring down at Charlie’s blood-soaked chest only a short time ago. It was all I could do not to leap up and rush over to press my hand over his heart to reassure myself it was still beating.
“But the shot wasn’t taken by a German.” His eyes turned hard. “It was a British soldier from my own battalion. An officer, from the brief glimpse I got of his uniform.”
I forced myself to take a steadying breath, but otherwise didn’t react, having already been presented with this possibility twice that evening. “You don’t know who it was?”
“No, I didn’t see his face.” His eyes lifted from where they had been glaring a hole into the floor. “You don’t sound very surprised.”
“Max and I already figured this much out.”
“Hmm. Max, is it?”
I frowned at the animosity in Sidney’s voice. “Yes, Helen insisted we call each other by our given names,” I retorted in exasperation. “So then what happened? Obviously you weren’t taken to the casualty clearing station or on to the field hospital. Where did you go?”
“Sam helped me retreat from the front.”
My eyebrows rose at this bit of news. “Sam knows you’re alive?”
“Yes.” He paused, but I could tell he had more to say as he lifted his cigarette to take another drag. “As does Mabel.”
I pressed a hand to my forehead, feeling hurt and bewildered. “Anybody else?”
He shook his head. “Only them. And only because they saved my life.”
I supposed I could hardly begrudge them knowing after that. And it was undoubtedly at Sidney’s behest that they’d remained silent on the matter, though I still felt aggravated that they’d helped keep this from me. “Do they know that you’re here?”
“Yes.”
I smothered a sigh. “Go on.”
“We were in retreat, even the casualty clearing stations, so it wasn’t difficult for us to get lost in all the disorder. Sam found a place to hide me and went for help. By that point I had lost so much blood, I was fading in and out of consciousness.” His brow furrowed as if it was painful just to remember. “But when I finally came to a few days later, I realized he’d convinced Mabel to care for my wounds. And between the two of them, they’d given me enough blood to survive.”
“Why didn’t you just go to the field hospital and tell them what happened?” I asked in confusion.
His eyes snapped to mine. “Because I knew whoever shot me would be looking for me there. That I couldn’t even stay conscious, let alone defend myself should the need arise. I simply couldn’t risk it. Not in such chaos. I didn’t know who exactly had tried to kill me, or if I would even be believed.”
I thought I understood. The safeguards that normally would have been in place in such a situation would have been ineffectual at best, if not completely broken down. He couldn’t rely on the nurses to be able to watch over him, and Sam couldn’t remain at his side. He would have been expected to report to his battalion directly, taking over Sidney’s command.
“Walter reported you had been killed,” I told him.
His mouth tightened into a thin line. “I know. And that definitely makes him a suspect. But the fact of the matter is, my shooter and I weren’t the last men in the trench. There were others about. So Walter might have seen me lying there after the fact, but not pulled the trigger.”
“But you were still breathing?” I argued.
“Yes, but he would have been able to see where my wound was, that I would almost surely be dead in a matter of minutes.” His gaze turned stark. “Sometimes as officers we had to make the tough call about who was worth trying to save and who was beyond assistance. If that was the case, I don’t hold that against him.”
I wasn’t certain I viewed it the same way he did, but I wasn’t about to disagree. Not when it was evident he was also living with the guilt of having made those sorts of choices.
“Then what about after?” I said, kicking off my shoes and sliding back on the bed to fold my knees up beside me. “Why didn’t you return once your wounds were healed enough and report what had happened? Surely they wouldn’t have held that against you.”
His face was doubtful. “Maybe. But Sam and Mabel would have faced some serious consequences for assisting me the way they did, and I couldn’t allow that to happen. Not after everything they’d done.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the dish a trifle harder than necessary. “In any case, I could hardly accuse an officer in my regiment of attempting to kill me without knowing who shot at me, or having proof of their intentions.”
“Then what did you do? Don’t tell me you’ve been laying low in France all this time.”
�
�No, I went in search of evidence to prove what I suspected got me targeted for death.” His gaze sharpened. “That one of the officers in my battalion was committing treason.”
I stiffened in shock, not having suspected this, and he nodded.
“I figured out that the two men in our battalion who had been tried and executed for desertion had been framed. That in actuality they had been delivering messages for one of the officers to a nearby town.”
“Just like Sam’s brother, Ben, thought.”
“Yes, Ben was the one who brought the matter to my attention. He’d discovered that on more than one occasion, these men had delivered messages, which were supposedly love letters, to the French mistress of one of the officers in a nearby town.”
“But they weren’t love letters?”
His eyes brightened in approval. “No, they were coded missives to a German informant. And when that informant was arrested by the French on suspicion of aiding the enemy, the traitor, whoever he is, realized he needed to silence his messengers before they talked.”
“But why weren’t these messages disguised as love letters ever mentioned at the court-martial?” I protested, recalling what Max had said about their not being transcribed in the trial notes he’d seen. “Or if they were, why wasn’t a bigger deal made of them? Surely the soldiers on trial would have used them in their defense.”
Sidney shook his head. “I don’t know. Except . . . I have to believe the officer who gave them such an assignment had promised he would safeguard them. That’s how it was supposed to work, you know. As officers, we were supposed to look after our men, to protect them as best we could and deal with them fairly. That was our charge, our duty. And in exchange, our men gave us their loyalty and devotion.”
“Noblesse oblige,” I said, referring to the concept that nobility, at its best, was supposed to encapsulate. That those born with entitlements and privileges also had the responsibility to care for those less fortunate, be it their servants, tenants, subjects, or, in this case, the soldiers under their command. It was a matter of honor.
“At its heart, yes.”
“And yet this officer did no such thing. Effectively, he let them take the fall for him.”
His jaw was tight with anger. “Yes, which is also why I suspect he contrived to stay away from the trial. He wouldn’t have wanted to testify, to face these men or risk their turning on him once they realized he wasn’t going to help them. He would have tried to barter for their silence until it was much too late for them to do anything about it.”
I was aghast. It was the worst sort of betrayal. No wonder Ben and later Sidney had become so invested in uncovering the truth. And then for Sidney to stumble upon the fact it all came down to treason.
I frowned. “But Sam didn’t know anything about the treason or the German informant posing as a French mistress.” I thought of how discouraged he’d seemed earlier when speaking with me and Max. “Between him, and Max, and me, we were able to piece together much of the rest. And Charlie mentioned something about a letter. But not the treason or the informant.”
Sidney’s brow creased. “Getting cozy, were the three of you?”
I glowered.
His gaze dropped to the arm of his chair, where his fingers plucked at the leather edge. “Yes, well, I figured it was better if Sam didn’t know all the details I uncovered later, lest he slip up.”
“So he doesn’t know the real reason they killed his brother? To keep him from uncovering the treason?”
He looked up at me through his lashes. “No.”
I looked away from him, having trouble reconciling this cold, unkempt man with the gentleman who was my husband. “May I presume you found this informant, then? Is that where you went on your last leave when you didn’t come home?”
When he didn’t answer, I turned to find him studying me, though infuriatingly I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I reached a hand up self-consciously to try to smooth out the wild kinks in my hair.
“Not then, though I did try,” he replied, making no apology for his actions, or for the pain it had caused me to find out about this leave from someone else. “But after I had recovered from my gunshot wound, after I was able to travel about the country disguised as a lame peddler, then I was able to track down the woman. Though it wasn’t easy. She’d done quite a thorough job of covering her trail once she was released from custody.”
He swiveled his chair so that while he still faced me, he could also fiddle with the items on my desk—shifting papers and picking up books to examine the titles. “Fortunately, she was more than forthcoming with what she knew.” He flicked a glance at me. “She was still rather irate at him that she’d been left to fend for herself when she was detained by the French. She insisted she’d never known his name, or not his real one, in any case, and that she’d only met him twice briefly. But she was able to describe him as being tall and dark haired, handsome, but not très ravissant.”
“But that could describe half the men at this house party,” I pointed out.
“So I noticed. Though perhaps even more frustrating is that she told me it was obvious to her that the man was only a messenger himself. A lackey. That he received the information from someone else to pass along.”
“So there’s another traitor? One higher up the food chain, so to speak?”
“From everything else I’ve learned, I would have to agree with her.”
He opened one of the desk drawers and began to rustle through its contents. I started to protest, but his next comments explained what he was looking for.
“However, she did hold in her possession one last coded missive she was never able to deliver before she was detained. Apparently, she’d hidden it well from the French authorities—a precaution against future trouble. But she agreed to give it to me.”
I arched a single eyebrow in disdain. “And I suppose that’s the coded missive you left tucked inside your copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress for me to find. The one you implied was proof of the treason you alleged that you had committed in the anonymous letter you wrote to me in order to drag me here.”
He looked up at me, pausing for a moment to note my scorn before carrying on without the slightest hint of remorse. “Yes. Where is it?”
I pressed my lips together, holding in all of the invectives I wanted to hurl at him. “Did you honestly think I would be stupid enough to leave it in plain sight?”
He sank back in his chair staring at me, and after a moment I realized he wasn’t forming a reply, but still waiting for me to answer. Well, I wasn’t about to give him one without his answering my questions first.
“Why did you send it to me? Was this some sort of sick game? A test?”
“I need your help to break it.”
“Why? Didn’t your informant provide you with the key to the cipher?” I sneered.
His jaw hardened as if he was grinding his teeth together. “No, she swore she never knew it. That it was safer that way.”
Plainly her partners had been right, as she’d sung like a canary under Sidney’s questioning. But that still didn’t explain why he believed I could break the code for him.
Sitting up straighter, I glanced at the window, where I could still hear the rain pounding against the glass, and then back to Sidney, finally daring to voice my next question. “How did you know I worked for the Secret Service?”
It was Sidney’s turn to look uncomfortable, the first real sign of uneasiness I’d witnessed in him all night. “Calvin Applegate told me he saw you outside Ypres. Said it was from a distance and he didn’t talk to you, but that he swore it was you, regardless.”
I struggled not to stiffen, searching my brain for the date in question. I’d been near Ypres several times during the war. And though I’d always known it was a danger someone at the front—a soldier or a nurse or a volunteer—would recognize me, I’d believed I’d managed to dodge that particular land mine. Apparently not.
“I told him he was hallucina
ting. That the gas must have affected his eyesight more than he realized. But then”—his brow furrowed—“I began to wonder. After all, there was that time I arrived in London for leave and you weren’t there. When you returned the next day, you said you’d just gone to visit a friend in Cornwall, but, Verity, you’d looked exhausted.”
I looked down at my lap, not wanting to confront the concern tightening his features.
“And . . . there was this look in your eyes. It was an expression I’d never seen in a civilian, but confronted every day at the front. A wide-eyed mien those of us who had seen the truth couldn’t hide. So I followed you.”
I lifted my head in surprise.
“The next time you reported to your job, I followed you. To Whitehall. Not Vauxhall Bridge Road, where you said you worked.” He pulled his cigarette case from his pocket again. “And I had the rather great fortune to see an old acquaintance of mine from Oxford exiting the building. I knew then there was no way you worked at a shipping company. A few pints of ale got me most of the rest of my answers.”
I frowned, angry that one of my colleagues had so easily been coerced into sharing classified information. “Who was this acquaintance?”
He flicked a glance at me over the fag he was lighting. “Does it matter? I know for a fact he doesn’t work there now any more than you do.”
I pursed my lips in irritation, but let that one slide. “And you’ve decided this means I know how to break your code?”
“It seemed a safe bet.” He exhaled a plume of smoke. “You always have been dashed clever, Ver.” His head tilted to the side. “Are you telling me you can’t?”
I studied the medallion pattern of the carpet. “I honestly don’t know. Codebreaking was never my expertise.” It felt odd admitting all of this to him when I’d kept it hidden for so long. The words felt wrong on my lips. “But what I do know was taught to me by the best.” I caught myself before I glanced at the wardrobe, giving away the location of the book and the encrypted missive. “However, this code is not anything I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t follow any of the standard ciphers.” I looked up at him. “But I suspect you already know that.”
This Side of Murder Page 18