by Megan Mulry
When they got up to the suite of rooms and Letitia was settled in a lovely, pale yellow silk-upholstered fauteuil chair, Cendrine was pouring tea, and Jacques was in his room taking a short nap, Sarah breathed a deep sigh of appreciation that they had all came to her aid.
Letitia spoke with abrupt authority into the silence: “I want to meet the mother.”
“What?” Sarah blinked.
“I want to meet the mother of the earl. I presume she lives in Mayfair and I may send a calling card to her?”
“Letitia. This is not… I mean… I’m not sure that is the best way to go about it.”
“Do you love this man or not, Sarah? And don’t give me any impertinence about Internets or counterfeit shoes.”
Sarah looked out the window. She and Devon had gone so deep, so fast. Maybe this antiquated, convoluted form of imposed grandmotherly meddling was something to consider. If the combined forces of Letitia Fournier and the Dowager Duchess of Northrop could not set things to right, nothing could.
“Yes.” Her voice was barely audible.
“Congratulations.” Letitia gave her granddaughter the tiniest hint of a smile and took a sip of tea. “At least we have that established. Cendrine, please bring me my stationery.”
A few minutes later, Cendrine returned with an antique wooden lap desk. It was a finely hewn wood that gleamed from many decades of use. The top was inset with hand-tooled, dark green Italian leather, beautifully worn in one place where Letitia’s hand always rested while she wrote. Cendrine set it down on a delicate writing table that was placed in front of French windows overlooking Davies Street.
Letitia got up from her seat, walked across the room, and sat down to her task. She lifted the lid, removed a silver fountain pen and a few sheets of pale blue stationery with her initials scrolled in an engraved navy-blue design at the top, and looked out the window in a brief moment of contemplation. Then, the scratch of the pen nib against the thick cotton grain of the paper filled the room without interruption for many minutes.
Sarah felt like a wisp of a girl, watching her future play out in the ink and purpose of her grandmother’s motions across the paper. She caught the final flourish of Letitia’s hand as she drew her signature across the bottom of the second page.
“May I read it?”
“Of course not! All of my correspondence is private. Including what I write to you, so you should be grateful.”
“But, Letitia, what if—”
“What if what, Sarah?” The older woman looked at her over one shoulder, waving the sheet of paper to ensure the ink dried before she folded it and put it in the envelope. “Cendrine, please call a porter or go down to the lobby and ask for someone to deliver this.” She folded it quickly, put it into the stiff envelope, and wrote “The Dowager Duchess of Northrop” across the middle of the front, then, in a smaller script at the lower left, “By Hand,” then handed it to Cendrine.
Letitia turned her attention back to Sarah. “What if what? What if you are embarrassed? What if the Dowager Duchess of Northrop thinks you a fool? Or, maybe, what if you get everything you ever wanted? What then?”
Sarah’s heart lurched. Her very cool grandmother was very warm indeed.
“You think because I am this old”—she gestured absently at herself from head to toe—“that I forget passion? Just one look at you and I can see how you yearn for him… and what has it been since you’ve seen him, a week?”
Sarah tried to hold her grandmother’s gaze but faltered and blinked at the truth of her words. “Eight nights,” she answered sheepishly, since Letitia seemed to be waiting for an answer to what Sarah had originally hoped was merely a rhetorical question.
“And how many hours?” Letitia asked, almost cruelly, but as Sarah started to answer, her grandmother held up a hand. “Don’t answer that! I’m only making a point. Let the cunning old ladies take care of it, Sarah. You go back to work or at least go sit there and pretend you are working, and I will let you know when I hear from the duchess.”
“It’s already late afternoon. I only have a few more hours of work to do. Shall I return later and we can go out for dinner tonight?”
“I’m a bit fatiguée from the journey, dear. Let’s meet for lunch tomorrow. Pick me up at one o’clock.”
“Very well.” Sarah stood and crossed the room, gave her grandmother a warm hug, and left.
She walked down the hotel corridor, pale yellow walls and door after door passing through her peripheral vision. Ever since she had left Devon standing in the shadows of his apartment, she had felt as though she were in some sort of half-world of surreal moments strung together. She missed him in a way that she had never missed anyone or anything. Even her mother. She felt hollowed out.
The past week at work had been chaotic and heartbreaking. After she explained that at least one of the stealth visitors to the website was a friend (she used the term loosely), Stephen Pell was able to tease out the rest of the incursions and trace them directly back to Carrie Schmidt in the Chicago office and someone within the Danieli-Fauchard organization. Sarah knew unequivocally it was not Eliot, but she had put off calling him to give him the bad news, fearing he would blame her for the wrongdoing.
She and Eliot had spoken every couple of weeks since the house party at Wolf’s christening. Sarah suspected he had developed a slight tendre for Abby Heyworth and hoped that he wouldn’t be too disappointed to learn she had no interest in men, much less strapping, American capitalists like Eliot. The information about Carrie and an unknown accomplice at Danieli-Fauchard was not something Sarah was eager to relate.
Sarah stewed for a few more days after she’d left Devon’s house. She’d reached for the phone so many times to call him and was simultaneously angry and grateful that he hadn’t called her. She’d told him not to call so she couldn’t very well get mad at him for not calling. Ridiculous stalemate.
By the end of that week, Stephen Pell confirmed that Devon’s online presence had evaporated—so at least there was that—and Pell spent the rest of the week hard at work setting a trap that would catch Carrie Schmidt in the act of corporate espionage and also reveal the identity of her accomplice. He tucked a piece of false information about some tensile steel stiletto composites into an email and let greed take its course.
Enough days had passed. Enough evidence had accrued. She had to call Eliot. Sarah returned to her office and picked up the secure phone line she’d had installed the previous week.
The absurdity of expensive spy-level security measures to protect a bunch of shoe designs would have made Sarah laugh if she wasn’t so angry and, she had to admit, hurt about it. The lost sales revenue was bad enough, but Carrie Schmidt’s deception was the worst part of all.
She dialed Eliot’s cell number with dread.
“Hey, Sarah!” he answered. More dread: he sounded like his normal, jovial self.
“Hi, Eliot. I know this sounds ridiculous, but is your cell phone a secure line?”
“No. And it’s not ridiculous. I will call you back from another line.” His voice had changed completely. Humorless.
Thirty seconds later, the phone on her desk rang and she answered, “Sarah James.”
“Hey, Sarah, it’s Eliot.” His voice was tight and impatient. “What the hell is going on over there?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to call me about what’s going on with someone from your company trying to sabotage—”
“Someone from my company? Eliot—”
“Look, I know it’s not you, of course—”
“How magnanimous of you!”
“Sarah, stop.”
“No, Eliot, you stop. Yes, there has been some sort of breach and I have figured out who it is on my end. I only have twenty-four employees, and the security clearance required to create this sort of malfeasance was necessarily limited to very few people. Can you say the same?”
“What are you talking about?”
�
�Are you feigning ignorance?”
“I am not feigning anything. We’ve seen incursions all over our corporate accounting files and design documents that have originated—”
“Eliot, please. I know. I’m horrified. But the reality is that they are working together. I’ve had a retired FBI investigator named Stephen Pell on retainer for months. He has been circling in on the guilty employee here at Sarah James. We know who it is and we’ve created a situation that should tempt her into exposing herself. She’s working with someone at Danieli-Fauchard, Eliot. Did you really think someone could penetrate your security without help from the inside? And why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Point taken.”
“Sarah, I need to talk to my security team and take a new look at this. We’ve been completely fixated on the idea of an outsider, and we are going to need to move very carefully to make sure we don’t drive someone back into hiding. Do you trust this Stephen Pell unequivocally?”
“No question. He’s part of a forensic accounting team that has worked for my father for years. Do you have someone there with whom he could be in touch?”
“Yes. My head of security is Giovanni Fortunato. I’ll put them in contact with one another.”
“All right, here’s Pell’s phone number.” She scrolled through her address book and read off the number. “I’ll give him a call and let him know you are going to call him. Give me ten minutes and then he’s all yours. I’m sorry, Eliot. For everything.”
“I’m so sorry, Sarah. I thought I might be able to get to the bottom of it and protect you from the chaos.”
“What is it about me that makes everyone think I need to be protected?!” Devon. Eliot. All of them were driving her mad.
“What are you talking about? Who else is trying to protect you? And from what?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“All right, I’ll ignore that. I should have known that business and pleasure never mix. I was trying to be a gentleman in the midst of all this corporate turmoil.” Sarah could hear the smile come through his voice as he continued. “It won’t happen again; I will always treat you with fierce disdain in all future business dealings.”
“I look forward to it.” Sarah smiled back through her reply.
“All right, then. Let me get on this. And say hi to your Devon for me. You two cut a wide swath, Sar. I can barely get through the papers anymore without tripping over you. Let me know when you set a date.”
Click.
Well, at least she had revealed most of the truth. If Devon had really ceased his eavesdropping, there was no reason to let Eliot know that her Devon had probably been muddying the waters of corporate security at Danieli-Fauchard as well.
***
As the days passed, Devon become more and more strung out.
How did everything get so conflated?
As soon as Sarah had gone, he’d turned back into his small home office like a zombie. He spent the rest of the day backing up all of his personal and work projects on a separate, stand-alone hard drive, then wiped his entire computer, stripping it of any evidence or reminder of his idiocy. He stared at the supposedly erased laptop and suspected it was still possible to extract a ghost of evidence, and so, in a fit of pique, Devon took a hammer to the entire expensive device. He splintered it into a satisfying pile of jagged plastic shards, then put the parts, one at a time, down the rubbish chute of his building.
Later that afternoon, he’d showered, brushed his teeth, dragged a comb through his hair, put on a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt, then went into Russell + Partners to clear out his desk.
Narinda stared at him in astonishment. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m quitting.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re good at your job and need something to fill your days so you don’t turn into some idiotic fop who spends his time at Henley and Ascot staying just this side of drunk and making inappropriate passes at married women of a certain age?”
Devon swiveled his chair to look right at Narinda: glowing copper skin, smooth elegant hair, obsidian black eyes that missed nothing. “You are annoying.”
“Well, there’s no one else around to let you know what’s what, is there? Your brother is living his very organized life against a backdrop of ducal ease—as long as you don’t disrupt him unduly, he’ll leave you quite alone; your mother would defend you if you set the city aflame; your sister Abby thinks you are a humorous, harmless rake. And from your slouching, broody sulk, I presume that Sarah James has had the audacity to question your perfection?” She swiveled her chair back and forth, arms crossed, her eyes set on him like a cobra being charmed from a basket in the suq. “Well?”
He started to put his things back into his desk. “You’re right. I was an ass; I know it. She knows it. And now what? I suffer? For how long? What’s enough? I’d much rather quit showing up for my life and spend a few months in Tuscany.”
“Okay. Now you do sound like an ass. Quit being such a coward. I have no idea what you are suffering, specifically, but in general, I’d say very little would be more than enough for Sarah. Could you just attempt to be normal?”
“You sound just like her. Obviously, I have no grasp of this normalcy about which you all speak.”
“So, you just thought you’d quit your job, close up your flat, and run away.”
“Am I so transparent? It seemed like a plan of sorts.”
“If you can’t be normal, you can at least practice patience. You never come into work this much anyway. Just keep doing nothing for a few days or weeks. Give her a little time to come around. Go invent something and pretend you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say I read about another anonymous posting on the shareware for a new metallurgical compound.” She smiled, winked, and swung her chair around to answer her phone, effectively dismissing him.
He finished putting his desk back in order (which didn’t require much effort since he despised any show of people’s personal lives at work; no family photos or vacation postcards, thank you very much). He put the few contents back into the neat drawers and gave Narinda a squeeze on the shoulder to let her know he was leaving while she was in the midst of arguing with the engineer on the Athens project. She gave him a brief smile along with a quick, dismissive wave.
He let the receptionist know he would be reachable on his cell phone for the next few weeks if anyone needed him.
Devon walked along the south bank of the river, enjoying the midmorning summer sunshine as much as he could through his fug of disappointment and self-flagellation. He had never been a masochist, but ever since meeting Sarah James, he seemed to be in a perpetual state of self-doubt. Before he realized where his strides were taking him, he was standing in front of the mathematics department at the London School of Economics. He tapped Perry Millhaus’s office phone number into his cell phone and listened to the call go through.
“This is Millhaus.”
“Hey, Perry, it’s Devon. I need something to distract me for… a while”—or forever, he thought to himself. “What have you been working on?”
“A couple of different things. I’m still thinking about the aerated steel a bit, but I’ve been preoccupied with a parallel equation that I came across a couple of weeks ago. Where are you?”
“I am standing in front of your building.”
“Come on in.”
Devon spent the next two weeks working on equations, running experiments, and being blessedly relieved of the obsessive need to think about Sarah James. He let his phone run out of juice and never recharged it. He went home to sleep and shower, then returned each day to work in Millhaus’s office and adjacent lab. Occasionally, Devon checked his phone messages remotely from Millhaus’s desk phone, returning only the most pressing calls from work and Max. Whenever possible, he returned messages at odd hours so as not to have to actually speak to anyone.
He ignored completely his mother’s frequent messages of ever-escalating urgency. Max would let her know he was alive if nothing else.
By the beginning of the third week, he felt, if not happily, at least thankfully removed from everyone. He had attained mathematical oblivion, his mind popping and clicking within the comfortable—engaging but emotionless—universe of numbers.
He looked a wreck.
Near midnight on a particularly warm Friday in August, he finally called it a night. He walked home in an absentminded stupor and collapsed in bed with his T-shirt and jeans still on. (He remembered to change clothes most days.) He reread a draft of the latest paper he and Perry were working on and finally turned out the lights at three o’clock Saturday morning.
Devon was woken up four hours later by the sound of his building’s internal telephone intercom buzzing incessantly. He dragged himself out of bed and picked up the phone near his front door.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Heyworth?”
“Yes?”
“There is a messenger here with a letter.” His doorman sounded irritated. “He has been instructed to deliver it to you in person. I have advised him that it is well within the parameters of my responsibilities to deliver a single envelope, but it seems he is unwilling to part with the item.”
“Is he immaculately turned out? Graying hair slicked back, and peevish?”