“I think we might dispense with the fiction that we are unacquainted, Morgan,” Brisbane said coolly. “I have informed my wife of the origins of the Spirit Club and that I once had an investigation that took me under its roof.”
Sir Morgan put up his hands. “My dear man, we cannot speak of such things before breakfast. Come and eat with me.”
He ushered us out a pair of French doors and into his pretty little garden. It was cleverly designed with such careful plantings that the views of the surroundings were completely blocked by a tidy riot of flowers and greenery. I was surprised to find there were no exotics here, only a colourful mass of English cottage blooms. A neat path led from the house to the mews door at the back, and in the centre of the garden stood a comfortable arrangement of table and chairs. Dew still spangled the late roses, and it felt rather like an enchanted scene, so picturesque was the setting. We settled ourselves, and in a few minutes Sir Morgan’s turbanned servant had presented us with a delectable breakfast of pastries, cups of chocolate and fruit besides the usual array of English dishes, and pots of tea. Sir Morgan busied himself with the chocolate service and the tea caddy, spooning up more of the delicious green tea and dishes of whipped cream to dollop onto the chocolate.
“So much more civilised than speaking on an empty stomach,” Morgan said.
“I am sorry we troubled you so early,” I said, reaching for a fragrant pastry. “I suppose we are lucky we did not find you still abed.”
“Abed? Good lady, I have not yet been to sleep,” he said, his green eyes twinkling. “I am sorry that Nin cannot come out to greet you, only I never permit her outside. Far too dangerous, you understand.”
Brisbane’s black brows winged upwards. “Nin?”
I darted him a quick glance. “Sir Morgan has the most extraordinary cat. A Siamese, he tells me. A souvenir of his travels abroad.”
Morgan looked at me warmly. “Yes, and she is entirely smitten with Lady Julia. I have never seen her so devoted to anyone other than myself.”
“I can just imagine,” Brisbane said drily.
We fell to eating then, and Morgan and I chatted companionably over breakfast. Only Brisbane remained quiet, offering little to the conversation.
Morgan levelled a glance at him. “Tell me, my dear, do you not find his silences deafening?”
“I would rather have an eternity of his silence than five minutes’ conversation with any other man,” I said truthfully.
Morgan smiled, and when he did, it was touched with melancholy. “You are the most fortunate of men, Nicholas. I would give half the years of my life to hear a woman say the same of me.” He looked to me. “She is an extraordinary individual. You must guard her with your life.”
“I intend to,” Brisbane said softly, and I would not have been at all surprised to see them draw swords and commence to brawling over the breakfast pastries.
“Yes, well,” I said, dusting crumbs from my fingertips, “we have not come to discuss the past but the present, sir. Can you confirm for us that the Spirit Club is being used once more for the purposes of espionage?”
Morgan nearly choked upon his chocolate, and it took him some minutes to regain his composure. When he did, he looked to Brisbane who merely gave him a thin smile and folded his arms over the breadth of his chest.
“My dear lady, you are no wilting wallflower, are you? Straight to the heart of the matter. Very well, I will pay you the compliment of replying in kind. Yes.”
I blinked rapidly. I had not expected this. “Really?”
“Really. The more arcane purposes of the club were revived earlier this year after the French government nearly fell to the Boulangistes. We felt the need to keep a closer eye upon the situation and also believed we had sorted some of the difficulties that once made the Spirit Club an impractical arrangement.”
“And did you? Sort the difficulties?”
“Apparently not, since Madame is dead.”
“Was she a spy?”
“No,” he said slowly, “but she passed messages for us, relaying communications between our own agents and those of our allies. The communications were always coded and she never knew what they contained. She did not even know to whom she was relating the message, for she was only told what to say and to preface it with a key phrase.”
“‘A message from a dark lady,’” I murmured.
“Precisely. In that respect, it worked very well. Since her contacts only knew her and not the other way round, we thought the system quite safe.”
“And it was not?” I guessed.
Morgan’s handsome mouth turned down. “We recently began to suspect that Madame was playing her own game. And unfortunately, that rather muddied the waters for us. We had hoped to use the sessions at the Spirit Club to draw out the agents from other countries, both friendly and otherwise. It is always best to know whom one is dealing with, and our German counterparts have been remarkably bashful about showing their faces. We sent out various ‘messages from a dark lady’ to prod them to action, but the gambit has proven less than successful, I’m afraid.”
“What sort of game was Madame playing if she was not directly involved in espionage?” I ventured.
“We believe she was organising the fall of the Conservative government,” Morgan said coolly.
I choked back a laugh, but I did not feel mirthful. To suspect it myself was one thing, but to hear the words fall from Sir Morgan’s lips was chilling. I forced my voice to lightness. “Come now, sir. You expect us to believe that a medium who worked in travelling shows could topple an entire government?”
“Easier than you think,” he said. “Our Prime Minister is a man of great probity and personal morality. It is that very morality that may prove his undoing. If any member of his inner circle were found to be consorting with the enemy, Lord Salisbury would be overthrown at once and the entire Conservative government would fall.”
He had not spoken Bellmont’s name, and I held my breath as he went on, his voice gentle. “And Madame had already accomplished the first part of her scheme. She had created an attachment between herself and one of Salisbury’s most trusted advisers. I think you know whom.” He paused and I said nothing. “Another cup of chocolate, my dear?” He rose and went inside the house a moment, returning with a bottle. “You need warming, I think.” He added a tiny measure of something fervently alcoholic to the cup and stirred. “Drink that up. It will make this easier to bear.”
I sipped and found the warmth of it shot clean to my belly. “You know?”
“I know, and I further know that you believed her goal was simply blackmail, to use her lover’s letters against him as an insurance policy of sorts. The result might well have ruined him in society, but that was not her aim. She meant to bring down Salisbury, as well, and for that, she must demonstrate not that Lord Bellmont—” I winced at the name “—was an unfaithful husband, but that he was an unfaithful Englishman, a traitor.”
“Impossible!” I cried. “No one loves England more than Bellmont. She could never have proved such a monstrous thing.”
“She could have, if at the same time she gave her favours to Bellmont, she was intimately connected to a German,” Morgan said simply.
I put my head in my hands and groaned aloud.
“Have you a specific German agent in mind?” Brisbane put in quietly. I dropped my hands and peered closely at Sir Morgan.
Sir Morgan shrugged. “Any one of a dozen. I’m afraid Herr Bismarck has been exceedingly busy. We have not as yet been able to identify the specific agent who might have shared Madame’s confidence.”
I cleared my throat. “We do know that Madame had formed an attachment that she expected to be quite lucrative. In fact, she seemed to think her connection with this person would secure her future—hers and that of her sister.”
I said nothing of where I had heard that bit of information, nor anything about the button that indicated the attachment was to a member of the kaiser’s circle. If Morg
an had not discovered it for himself, I was in no mood to give such information away freely, and a quick glance at Brisbane confirmed it. He was regarding me with cool approbation, and I knew he approved of my discretion. It had been a terrible shock to have my worst fears about the entire matter confirmed by Sir Morgan. It was as if I had awakened from a nightmare to find that the goblins I had fled had followed me to wakefulness.
Morgan steepled his fingers together, fitting the point just below his chin.
“That would make sense,” he mused. “Madame would need to get right out of England, preferably before the scandal broke. She would need a means of escape.”
“Would she have been in danger of prosecution?” I wondered.
Morgan’s lips thinned to an unpleasant smile. “Madame would have been in danger of quite a few things if she had attempted her coup. But she was only an instrument. Her German contact would have been directing matters and would have arranged for passage to the Continent under the protection of Bismarck.”
I shuddered, thinking of that meddlesome, dangerous old man in Berlin.
“I still cannot believe Bismarck would stoop to such machinations to topple Lord Salisbury,” I remarked.
“Lord Salisbury has been remarkably effective at putting the fear of God into the Germans,” Sir Morgan replied. “The Naval Defence Act was the last straw. More than twenty million pounds will be spent on building warships. England’s navy will be invincible again, and Bismarck cannot risk that. As much as he despises Liberalism in his own country, he must have a Liberal government in power in England for Germany’s protection. Otherwise he must spend millions to match our expenditures in armament.”
“And if he does not?”
“Annihilation,” Morgan said softly, and there was a hard note of satisfaction in his voice. I realised then that the effete and urbane character he put on in society was just that—a part he played to deflect suspicion. The real man beneath the façade was every bit as ruthless as Brisbane. Perhaps even more so.
I considered him carefully. “I wonder which of the faces you show to the world is the real one?”
His smile was genuine then, for the corners of his eyes crinkled in a peculiar way I had not seen before, and the years seemed to fall away, if only for a moment. “As little as I can possibly manage,” he told me. “But I am your cousin. That much is true.”
“I believe it. And I think your mother, for all her inconstant affections, must have loved Uncle Benvolio after her fashion.”
He cocked his head, fixing me with his bright gaze. “How can you know that?”
“Because she gave you a Shakespearean name.”
His roar of laughter was as charming as it was unexpected. “No one else has ever made the connection to Cymbeline. By God, I wish I had met you a dozen years ago,” he said.
“Tread carefully, Morgan,” Brisbane commented softly.
Their eyes locked, and something shifted then. The tentatively companionable mood of breakfast was broken, and in its place was something quite inexplicable. I only knew that these men were not enemies, but neither were they friends, and I realised then that they must have endured rather more during Brisbane’s interrogation than either of them let on.
Sir Morgan spoke, his voice touched faintly with malice. “Tell me, Brisbane, have you ever told Lady Julia how you came to meet Sir Edward Grey?”
At the mention of my first husband, my ears pricked. I looked from one to the other. Morgan’s manner was vaguely taunting, but if he meant to bait Brisbane, my husband did not rise to it. He merely spread his hands in a gesture of casual contempt.
Morgan turned to me. “You see, my dear, I knew Edward. Rather well. I made a point of befriending him because of some rather questionable dealings with a French wine merchant I suspected of misbehaving in service to his country.”
I stared at Morgan in disbelief. “You thought Edward was a spy?” The notion was impossible, and Morgan merely smiled.
“Not at all. But the merchant was suspected of passing information along to English contacts, and it was my duty to investigate them. In a moment of weakness, Sir Edward poured out his troubles to me, stories of threatening notes that he had begun to receive. I put him onto Brisbane as just the fellow who could help him sort the business.”
“You introduced them?”
“Poor Edward needed a champion, and by then I knew Brisbane was thoroughly reliable. I thought it might make for an interesting situation. So you see, my dear,” he finished, looking from Brisbane to me with a fond glance, “I consider myself rather responsible for your current happiness.”
I felt a sudden sharp prick of distaste for him. He reminded me of a marionette’s master, twitching the strings to watch his creations dance, and it left me oddly unsettled to think that Morgan had known so much about my affairs whilst I had not even known he existed.
“Then I ought to make you a present of a nice bottle of port,” I commented blandly. “I am only sorry we did not save you a piece of wedding cake.”
He laughed again, and the image of a puppeteer working his magic disappeared. He was once more the charming and gracious fellow I had come to like, so much so that I could almost believe I had imagined the faint air of menace a moment before.
“My lady, you are a woman in a thousand. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Frequently.”
By the time Brisbane and I left Morgan’s house, I was in a perfectly foul mood and I warned Brisbane so as we started for home.
“Yes, he occasionally has the same effect upon me,” Brisbane observed.
“He is such a contradiction,” I raged. “One minute he is a dilettante writer with a penchant for other men’s wives. Then he is my illegitimate though charming cousin, then he is a spymaster who throws work your way!”
Brisbane said nothing, but I could tell from the curl of his lip that he did not think much of my last remark.
I went on. “I cannot credit that he knew Edward and that Edward confided in him. I thought I knew all of Edward’s friends.”
“There were many things you thought you knew about Edward,” Brisbane reminded me.
“Yes, well, the least said about that the better. But I am deeply surprised to find that Morgan is the reason you and I met in the first place. And I do not think I want to give him the credit for our marriage,” I went on hotly. “I like to think we would have found our way to one another no matter what. Even if Edward had not hired you to investigate those notes, you would have had to have come into my life somehow. I cannot believe in a life without you,” I said. A sudden chill crept over me.
Brisbane noticed and put an arm around me, holding me close to his chest. “It is nothing,” I assured him. “A goose walked over my grave.” I nestled close and deliberately changed the subject.
“Do you believe what he said about Madame? That she and a German agent were conspiring to overthrow Salisbury?”
Brisbane nodded. “It fits—exceedingly well. And Morgan is seldom wrong. I am surprised he has not been able to trace the German yet, but Bismarck has learned a few tricks in the past years, I imagine.”
“And we beat Morgan to the mark,” I reminded him. “We have the button.”
“A button that indicates Madame was involved in some intimate capacity with someone very close to the kaiser,” Brisbane acknowledged. “I suspect Morgan would rather like to get his hands on that bit of evidence.”
“Do you mean to give it him?”
“I do not. Morgan is still hiding one or two things from us, I will wager, and if those are the rules, we shall play by them.”
I glowed a little at his use of the word us, then sat up, my brow furrowed.
“What else do we know that Morgan does not?”
“Nothing yet, but I mean to find out,” Brisbane told me, his expression grim. “He has not yet found the German operative, and that must be our first priority. Those letters of Bellmont’s are still at large, and so long as they are out there
, they remain a source of potential danger. To all of us.”
I shook my head. “It seems so impossible, that Bellmont’s stupid love letters could bring down an entire government.”
“Governments have toppled over less,” Brisbane reminded me. “Do not forget Sir Robert Peel.”
The scandal had broke well before either of us had been born, but it was one of the most infamous moments of Queen Victoria’s reign. Determined to retain her Liberal ladies-in-waiting, she had refused to appoint a single Peelite lady to her court. The resulting lack of confidence in Peel had undermined his ability to form a government and Lord Melbourne had been restored to power. It had been a shocking development at the time and the queen had been reviled for it, but it did serve as an excellent illustration of how a battle might be lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.
“Bellmont was astonishingly stupid to put anything in writing,” I said. “One would have thought him too smart for that at least.”
“One would have thought him smart enough to keep his vows to his wife,” Brisbane returned, and the sentiment warmed me thoroughly. I was deeply gratified that Brisbane’s own sense of morality dictated fidelity. I knew I maddened him, but I also knew that there could be no other possible woman for him, just as there could be no other man for me.
As if intuiting my thoughts, Brisbane spoke, his voice decidedly casual. “By the way, you might want to be on your guard with Morgan. He is rather too enchanted with you.”
“Brisbane! What a curious notion.”
“You do not deny it, and you are blushing,” he observed.
“I am blushing because it is ridiculous and I most certainly do deny it,” I returned.
“Then you are not half as observant as I credited you. I do not suggest his fondness is returned,” he said evenly, “but Morgan is a slippery devil. His ulterior motives have ulterior motives. Be watchful.”
“You are absurd. And you sound jealous, which does not become you at all.”
The Dark Enquiry (A Lady Julia Grey Novel) Page 26