“Tomorrow, hélas! We go one at a time, ever so discret, Delzons last of all. Either he or M. Hutton will remain until you are well enough to travel, and then this house will be closed, and the operation will be over.” She turned away and put her glass on the mantel, her back to me. “You will return to London?”
“Oh, no hurry. Time for a week or two in Paris, then we’ll see.” I stepped close to kiss her on the nape of the neck, and she glanced round.
“Why Paris?” says she lightly.
“Why d’you think?” says I, and slipped my hands round to clasp her breasts. She shivered, and then very gently she removed my hands and turned to face me, smiling still, but a touch wary.
“That might … be difficult,” says she. “I do not think that Charles-Alain would approve. And I am sure his family would not.”
“Charles who?”
“Charles-Alain de la Tour d’Auvergne,” says she, and the smile had an impish twinkle to it. “My husband. I have been Madame de la Tour d’Auvergne for six months now.”
I must have looked like a fish on a slab. “Husband! You – married? My stars above! Well, blow my boots, and you never let on –”
“Blow your boots, you never noticed!” laughs she, holding up her left hand, and there was the gold band, sure enough.
“Eh? What? Well, I never do … I mean, I didn’t see … well, I’ll be damned! Of all things! Here, though, I must kiss the bride!” Which I did, and would have made a meal of it, but she slipped away, squeaking at me to mind my wound, and taking refuge behind the table. I bore up, grinning at her across the board.
“Why, you sly little puss! Le chaton, right enough! Well, well … still, it makes no odds.” She looked startled. “Oh, I’ll still come to Paris, never you fret – he don’t have to know, this de la Thingamabob!”
It was her turn to stare, and then, would you believe it, she went into whoops, and had to sit down in the armchair, helpless with laughter. I asked what was the joke, and when she’d drawn breath and dabbed her eyes, she shook her head at me in despair.
“Oh, but you are the most dreadful, adorable man! No, he would not have to know … but I would know.” She sighed, smiling but solemn. “And I have made my vows.”
“Strewth! You mean … it’s no go – just ’cos you’re married?”
“No go,” says she gently. “Ah, chéri, I am sorry, but … you do understand?”
“Shot if I do!” And I didn’t, for ’twasn’t as though she was some little bourgeois hausfrau – dammit, she was French, and had sported her bum and boobies in the Folies for the entertainment of lewd fellows and rogered with the likes of Shuvalov pour la patrie, and myself and God knew how many others for the fun of it … and her behaviour this evening hadn’t been married-respectable, exactly, dressed to the seductive nines and kissing indecorously.
I remarked on this, and she sighed. “Oh, if you had been well, I would not have come, knowing you would wish to make love … but knowing you were blessé, and unable to …’ She gestured helplessly. “Oh, you know … I thought we might talk and be jolly, as we used to be, but without … oh, ‘hankey-pankey’.” She shrugged in pretty apology, and suddenly her face lit up. “Because those were such happy days in Berlin! Oh, not only making love, but being comfortable and laughing and talking – and I wished to see you once again, and remember those times, and see if you had changed – and, oh, I am so glad to find that you have not!” She rose and put a hand to my face and pecked me on the cheek. “But I have, you see. I am Madame de la Tour d’Auvergne now, ever so respectable.” She pulled a face. “No more la gaie Caprice. I change myself, I change my life … and, hélas, I must change my old friends. So it is better you do not come to Paris … Do you mind very much? You are not angry?”
A number of women have had the poor taste and bad judgment to give me the right about. In my callow youth I resented it damnably, and either thrashed ’em (as with Judy, my guv’nor’s piece), or went for ’em with a sabre (Narreeman, my flower of the Khyber), or ran like hell (Lola of the blazing temper and flying crockery). In later years you learn to assume indifference while studying how to pay them out, supposing you care enough. With Caprice, I’d have been piqued, no more … if I’d believed her laughable excuse, which I did not for a moment. She, a faithful wife? Come up, love! No, the fact was that Flashy five years on (seen at his worst, mind, flat on his back and beat, and now a hapless invalid) no longer aroused her amorous interest. Well, I could take the jolt to my amour-propre the more easily because while she’d been a prime ride and good company, she’d never had the magic that gets beneath your hide, like Yehonala or Lakshmi or Sonsee-array … or Elspeth. She was too young for that … but old enough to know better than to play the saucy minx, teasing me into a frustrated heat and then showing me the door.
Oh, some of the old affection lingered, no doubt, hence the fatuous tale of marital fidelity, to let me down lightly. I could have swallowed it if she’d come right out with it first thing, but she hadn’t been able to resist her wanton instinct to set me panting – even now there was a glint of mockery in the ever-so-contrite smile that told me she was enjoying feeling sorry for the randy old fool, well pleased with her beauty’s power … and doubtless convincing herself that she felt a touch of sentimental remorse, the little hypocrite. Even the best of them like to make you squirm. I had a sudden memory of the salt-mine and that cold steel being driven ruthlessly home … and call it sour grapes if you like, but I found myself warming to the thought of Princess Kralta.
“Angry, little one? Not a bit of it!” cries I, beaming like anything, and pecked her back. “I’m sorry, o’ course – but jolly glad for you! He’s a lucky chap, your Charlie – what is he, a dashing hussar, eh?”
“Oh, no … but he is a soldier … that is, he is a professor of l’histoire militaire, at St Cyr.”
“I say! He must be a bright spark! Blackboard-wallahs are pretty senior as a rule.”
She confessed that he was older than she (nearly twice her age, in fact) and from an old service family – the usual decayed Frog nobility by the sound of the name,22 but she wasn’t forthcoming at all, and I guessed that the mere thought of the raffish Flashy being presented to dear Charles’ parents, as an old acquaintance even, filled her with dismay. I found myself wondering how much they knew about her … and whether the arrival on Papa d’Auvergne’s breakfast table of that splendid photograph of his daughter-in-law, bare-titted among the potted palms and nigger stallions, mightn’t enliven his petit déjeuner. A passing thought, and cheered me up no end.
“But what do Charles’ people think about your working for the secret department? Hardly the thing for a staid married lady, what?”
“They did not approve, of course. But that is past now. We agreed, Charles and I, that I must resign before our marriage –”
“But here you are!”
“Only because this was une crise, an emergency, and Delzons was in despair to recruit agents for the occasion. The département, like your own in England, must make do with little … and I could not refuse Delzons. I owe him too much.”
“And Charles didn’t mind? Well, he’s a sportsman! Of course, it was an important affair, international crisis, and all that.”
She hesitated. “He did not know. I am at this moment visiting a school friend in Switzerland.”
Better and better. Not the kind of thing to confide to a lover who’s just been handed his travel warrant, mind.
“Well, God bless Charles, anyway! I’d like to meet him one o’ these days.” She didn’t clap her hands, so I took them gently in mine and gave her my best wistful sigh, like a ruptured uncle. “And bless you, too, my dear. And since you don’t want to talk about t’other thing, in that beastly cave –”
“Non, non –”
“Well, then, I shan’t, so there. I’ll only say that I’m monstrous glad that you visited your school chum in Switzerland, what? And that you came to see me this evening. Quite like old times, e
h … well, almost.” I winked and slid my hands round her rump, kneading away to show there were no hard feelings – and blowed if the sentimental little tart didn’t start piping her eye.
“Oh, you are the best man alive! So kind, so généreux!” She clung to me, bedewing my shirt, and raised her face to mine. “And … and never shall I forget Berlin!” She threw her arms round my neck and kissed me – none of your pecks this time, but the full lascivious munch, wet and wonderful, and if you don’t breathe through your nose you die of suffocation. I had to press my stitches hard until she came loose at last, lips quivering, dabbing at her eyes.
“My goodness, what would Charles say?” I wondered, playful-like. “I can’t believe professors of l’histoire militaire approve o’ that sort of thing.”
She looked uncertain, and decided to be airy. “Oh, chacun a son goût, you know.”
“Well, you mustn’t shock him. Can’t think when I was last kissed thataway. Not since the Orient Express, anyway.”
“Que’est-ce que c’est?” A moment’s perplexity, and then the penny dropped, and she went pink and took a step back. “Oh! La princesse … I … I did not …”
“Ah, you’ve met her, then?”
“I have seen her, with Delzons. When we were at the police commissariat.” She was confused, but recovered, smiling brightly. “But of course, she and that other brought you from Germany. She is … very beautiful.”
“Fine figure of a woman,” says I, looking her up and down. “More to the point, she has no conscience where her husband’s concerned.” I grinned and repeated her own words. “D’you mind very much? You’re not angry?”
Just for a moment her eyes flashed, and then she laughed – and riposted neatly by repeating mine.
“Angry? Not a bit of it; I am jolly glad for you. She is perhaps …” she made a little fluttering gesture “… how do you say … more your style?”
“More my age, you mean.”
“No such thing!” cries she merrily. “Now, you will take care of your wound, and not make too much exertion –”
“Oh, beef tea and bedsocks, that’s my ticket! Don’t you over-exert yourself either, or you’ll scandalise Charles.”
We smiled amiably on each other, and when I’d helped her put on her cape she held out her hand, not her lips.
“Adieu, then,” says she.
I bowed to kiss her hand. “Au’voir, Caprice … oh, pardon –Madame. Bonne chance.”
She went, and as I listened to her heels clicking on the stairs I was wondering where the devil I’d put that photograph. Saving Flashy’s life is all very well, but don’t ever play fast and loose with his affections. He’s a sensitive soul.
* * *
a Steiger, the foreman in a salt-mine
Chapter 10
The older you get, the longer you take to heal. The hole in my gut was as neat and handy as a wound can hope to be, and thirty years earlier would have been right in a fortnight, but now it turned angry, no doubt from the strain imposed by my frustrating half-dalliance with Madame de la Tour d’Auvergne, damn her wanton ways. The stitches had come adrift, and had to be replaced by my little medico, I developed a fever which returned me to bed for more than a week, and after that I was no better than walking wounded, for I was weak as a rat and common sense demanded that I should go canny, as Elspeth would say.
She was much in my mind at that time, but then she always is when I’ve passed through the furnace and am looking for consolation. The thought of that loving smile, the child-like innocence of the forget-me-not eyes, the soft sweet voice, and the matronly charms bursting out of her corset, made me downright homesick, and with Caprice turning me off, the stupid little trollop, I’d have been tempted to set my sights on London if it hadn’t been for the prospect of rattling Kralta all over Vienna. I couldn’t forego that, in all conscience; our railway idyll had given me an appetite, and after it was satisfied would be time enough to cry off with the new love and on with the old.
So I bore my captivity into November, glad to be alive, and passing the time pondering on the mysteries of those few short days of strange adventure – barely a week, from the time when I’d been sitting in Berkeley Square gloating over Kralta’s picture, to the awful moment when I’d pegged out in that hellish mine, with Caprice clucking over me like an anxious hen and Starnberg’s corpse floating in the limpid brine. Reviewing it all … I knew what had happened, but not why; in all the confusion of lies and deceits and voltes-face, there were mysteries, as I say, which I didn’t understand, and still don’t.
On the face of it, Bismarck had concocted a lunatic but logical scheme to save the Austrian Emperor from assassination, and it had succeeded in a way he could never have foreseen, with his trusted henchman proving traitor but being foiled by old Flashy’s blundering. Well, lucky old Otto – and lucky Franz-Josef and lucky Europe. (And when we’d gone, no one would ever believe it.) Knowing my opinion of Bismarck, you may wonder that I don’t suspect him of some gigantic Machiavellian double-deal whereby he’d invented the tale of a Holnup plot (to hoax simpletons like me and Kralta) so that Starnberg could murder Franz-Josef with Bismarck’s blessing, and start another war – he’d done it before, God knows, twice at least, and wouldn’t have scrupled to do it again if it had suited his book. But it didn’t, you see; he’d built Germany into a European Power, by blood and skulduggery, and had nothing to gain by another explosion. He could rest on his laurels and let nature take its usual disastrous course – as it is doing, if only imbeciles like Asquith would notice. Well, I’m past caring.
At a lesser remove, I couldn’t figure Starnberg’s behaviour in the mine. Why, having done his level damnedest to kill me, had he saved me from going down that awful chasm into the bowels of the earth? ’Cos he’d wanted to put me away with his own steel? To prolong my agony? Or from some mad, quixotic impulse which he mightn’t have understood himself? Search me. Folk like the Starnbergs, father and son, don’t play by ordinary rules. I only hope there ain’t a grandson loose about the place.
I still wondered, too, why Caprice had cut him down in cold blood, and why she wouldn’t talk of it, even. Vanity would have tempted me to take Hutton’s judgment that she was dead spoony on me and had done him in for that reason, if she had not since handed me my marching orders. (And on the pretext of fidelity to some muffin of a military historian! I still couldn’t get over that. Aye, well, the silly bint would rue her lost opportunities when next Professor Charles-Alain clambered aboard her – in the dark, probably, and wearing a nightcap with a tassel, the daring dog.) My own view, for what it was worth, was that she’d murdered Starnberg because it struck her (being female) as the fitting and tidy thing to do – and gave her the last word, so there. Delzons, her chief, who knew her better than anyone, had a different explanation which he gave me the day before we left Ischl, and you must make of it what you will.
Hutton had gone back to London by then, after assuring me that Government was satisfied; no official approval, of course, but no censure either; my assistance had been noted, and would be recorded in the secret papers. Aye, I’m still waiting for my peerage.
Delzons had stayed on to close the Ischl house as soon as I was fit to take the open air. Paris was no keener on maintaining bolt-holes out of secret funds than London, and the pair of us transferred to the Golden Ship, myself to complete my convalescence and Delzons to enjoy a holiday – or so he said, but I suspect he was keeping an eye on me to see that I didn’t get into mischief. I was glad enough of his company, for he was the best kind of Frog, shrewd and tough as teak, but jolly and with no foolish airs.
It would be late November, when I was healed and feeling barely a twinge, that we walked across the Ischl bridges and up the hill to the royal lodge. The trees were bare, there was a little snow lying, and the river was grey and sullen with icy patches under the banks. The lodge itself was silent under a leaden sky, with only a servant in sight, sweeping leaves and snow from the big porch; it would b
e months before Franz-Josef returned to add to the collection of heads in that dark panelled chamber where his aides had crawled about, giggling in drink, and I’d had conniptions as I stared at the doctored cartridges.
We circled the place, and Delzons pointed out the spot where he’d lain doggo and Caprice had slipped away to shadow the Holnups. I studied the open ground, dotted with trees and bushes, between where we stood and the lodge, and remarked that a night-stalk would have been ticklish even for my old Apache chums, Quick Killer and Yawner.
“But not for la petite,” smiles Delzons. “She has no equal. Is it not remarkable, one so delicately feminine, so pretty and vivace, so much a child almost, but of a skill and courage and … and firm purpose beyond any agent I have seen?” He nodded thoughtfully. “We have a word, colonel, that I think has no equivalent in English, which I apply to nothing and no one but her. Formidable.”
“She’s all o’ that.” Plainly he was as smitten with her as Hutton had been, but with Delzons it was fond, almost paternal. “Where did she learn to stalk and … so on?”
“In the Breton woods as a child, with her three elder brothers.” He chuckled. “She was une luronne – a tomboy, no? Oui, un garçon manqué. Six years younger than they, but their match in all sport, running, climbing, shooting … oh, and daring! And they were no poules mouillées, no milksops, those three lads. Yet when she was only twelve she was their master with foil and pistol. Some brothers would have been jealous, but Valéry and Claude and Jacques were her adoring slaves – ah, they were close, those four!”
“You knew ’em well, then,” says I, as we strolled back.
“Their father was my copain in Crimea, before I joined the intelligence. I was to them as an uncle when they were small, and grew to love them, Caprice above all … well, a lonely bachelor engrossed in his work must have something to love, non?” He paused, musing a moment, then went on. “But then I was posted abroad for several years, and lost touch with the family until the terrible news reached me that the father and three sons had all fallen in the war of ’70 – he was by then chef de brigade, and the three boys had but lately passed through St Cyr. I was desolate, above all for Caprice, so cruelly deprived at a stroke of all those she loved. I wrote to her, of my grief and condolence, assuring her of my support in any way possible. Thus it was, two years later, when I came home to command the European section of the département secret, that she came to see me – asking for employment. Mon dieu!” He heaved in emotion, and at once became apologetic. “Oh, forgive me … perhaps I weary you? No? Then let us sit a moment.”
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