Margot gave her a small nod. Approval—support.
The admiral cleared his throat. “If you’ve a moment, Miss Elton, I’m afraid there’s something I must tell you.”
Margot could all but see the thoughts ricocheting through her mind. She wasn’t being sacked—Lady Hambro would be the one to deliver that news, if it were so. The possibility always existed that he’d simply selected her for a small job of some sort—but why would Margot be on hand for that?
“It’s your brother. He’s alive,” he rushed to say, not giving Dot’s eyes time to do more than widen a fraction with dark questions. “Alive but in critical condition, I’m afraid. He’s suffered a gunshot to the abdomen. I have no further information about how it happened or the details of the injury, other than that he will arrive in London on Sunday and be taken directly to Charing Cross Hospital, but I didn’t want you to read this news in a telegram.”
Dot’s hands may have been shaking that morning, after spending two nights in a home not her own, but they didn’t shake now. She gripped her brown paper bag, yes, but anyone would have. Her nostrils flared, but only once. And her voice came out even and sure. “Thank you for being the one to tell me, Admiral. Do you know where I can discover information on what train he’ll be on? I’d like to meet him at Charing Cross as soon as he arrives.”
Hall nodded. “I’ll request such details be sent to you as soon as they’re known.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Another thing everyone appreciated about Hall—he knew when to take command . . . and when to delegate. At this point he stepped to the side, creating a clear and obvious path between Margot and Dot. “Know that your brother will be in my prayers and that, unless you have objections, I’ll ask the others to pray for him as well.”
Dot offered a small but steady smile. “I would appreciate that, Admiral. And I know Drake would as well.”
He left with a nod, and Margot knew he’d go and do exactly as promised. He’d find Montgomery—their own Fighting Padre, as they’d taken to calling him when he exchanged his clerical robes for a uniform over the summer—and alert the reverend to this latest request for prayer.
Margot slid over to her friend. “I’m sorry, Dot.”
“He’s alive.” She proclaimed it with a nod. And then winced and gave Margot an apologetic look.
Drake Elton of the crooked nose and insightful questions was alive. Sophie De Wilde of the incomparable beauty and unfailing smiles was not. But the two had nothing to do with each other. And Margot was certainly not wretch enough to begrudge her friend that thread of hope. She dug deep until she could pull out a smile. “He is. And God willing, he will remain so.”
She paused, tested the words that formed in her mind. No numbers crowded around them, one way or another, to tell her whether they were sound. Just the dull throb of a headache, mixed with the echo of DID’s news. She swallowed and said them. “I’ll go with you. On Sunday. After Mass.”
She couldn’t think of a single person who would greet that proclamation with anything other than an objection. You need to rest or It’s too soon for you to be out like that after . . . They’d all be thinking it was stupid to go and look death in the eye at the hospital when it was still haunting her at home.
But Dot just held her gaze for a moment, and then she nodded. “Thank you. I’d appreciate the company.”
“And you’ll stay at your own flat tonight.” Had she been well enough to think of it, she’d have insisted on it before. “It means the world that you were there for me. But I’m all right now.”
Dot pursed her lips and studied her with the same sort of intensity Margot would have given a particularly tricky equation. “You can stay with me, if you like. As long as you like. I’ve the room, with Aunt Millie not being there.”
Margot moistened her lips and wondered at the tug of temptation.
She’d never been alone. Never. Not one night in all her life to date. There’d always, always been Maman and Papa and Lukas. And then Maman and Papa. And then Maman. Always. Every day, every night.
She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t—and so she had to be, to keep it from controlling her. Right? Especially now. If she went with Lukas or with Dot and stayed with them, she might never have the strength to go home again. To be alone.
Alone.
She’d always thought she was. Isolated, even in a crowd. Different. Unlike the other girls, unlike the other students. Even unlike the others here, to be honest, who laughed their way from the OB in the evenings and went to their dinner parties or concerts or whatever else engaged them in their “real” lives outside the secrets of Room 40.
She hadn’t been alone, though. Not really. Not before. There’d always been Maman.
Now there was only Margot.
She cleared her throat and met Dot’s eye. “Thanks. And I might take you up on that at some point. But not yet. I need to . . .” Prove herself. To Lukas and to Dot. To Admiral Hall and Lady Hambro.
And to herself. Mostly to herself.
Dot nodded. Stood. Gripped the little paper bag. “The offer stands.”
“I know.” She fell in beside Dot. They stopped in Room 40 long enough for Margot to fetch the tea and crackers she’d brought for lunch—her stomach still objected at the thought of anything more—and they joined the crowds of laughing, chattering magpies known as secretaries who surged toward the roof and the rare autumn sunshine.
For the first time in her life, Margot left an encoded sentence half-decrypted.
For the first time in her life, she really didn’t care.
Der Vampir clattered onto the table. It gleamed in the lights, clean and straight and sure. But Das Gespenst’s hands were red. They might always be red.
Poor Yūrei. He’d found Der Vampir and already had it in his stomach before Das Gespenst could stop him. A gruesome way to go—not the way he would have chosen for a friend, and not solely because it meant blood to clean up. He’d had no choice but to finish him off quickly.
For days Yūrei had been begging Das Gespenst to end it for him. He should have done it before now. Quietly, easily. A pillow over his mouth, robbing him of what little breath he could manage to pull into his lungs. That would have been the better way. A way more deserving of a friend—a friend who would never know the favor he’d done him with his death.
He sagged onto one of the hard, simple wooden chairs and stared at the flat around him. Stared at the framed photograph on the wall, at the face of Yamagata Aritomo, the former Japanese prime minister.
A telegram lay on the table before him. It gave him orders, as they always did. Orders that didn’t care if his cough was better or worse, if he had pneumonia or didn’t, if he killed or was killed. They cared only that he was back in England again. Where they’d told him to be.
Get the codebook, it said. Just as the last had said Assist in Spain. He squeezed his eyes shut. He’d never before minded the way they had him travel—he’d welcomed it. England, France, Spain, Africa. He’d been sent everywhere because of his linguistic talent.
But why couldn’t they have sent someone else back to England this time? Why that same command he’d been working on for months already? The codebooks, always the codebooks. He pried his eyelids open again, seeing the Old Admiralty Building rather than the flat. He’d tried the direct approach. He’d managed to get inside once, with a fabricated letter inviting him, but it had gotten him no farther than the lobby. Enough to see that security was tight.
Enough to see that young women were there in droves. Pushing tea carts, carrying mops and brooms, acting as secretaries. They would be the weak link. They always were—may his mother forgive him for saying so.
Before this last trip to the Continent, he’d not been certain which of them he should target. But now he knew. Those two from the park—they would be his focus.
He ran his thumb lightly along the blade of Der Vampir. For centuries, it had thirsted. Tasting a bit of human blood here and there as
skirmishes and wars charged through Bavaria. But now it drowned in red. Would it be satiated or crave more?
Which would he?
Exhaustion tickled his lungs, brought the dreaded cough back. The telegram on the table taunted him. Because one task was not enough for them anymore. Perhaps because he had yet to succeed at it. Perhaps because they wanted to keep him busy. Perhaps because they assumed that with this, at least, he could succeed, even if he was useless elsewhere.
Identify targets.
Targets. His nostrils flared. He could still smell it. Blood, every time he drew in a breath. They would expect him, require him to obey. To distance himself from everything that happened elsewhere. As a ghost should do naturally. Das Gespenst, that was all he could be. All he could afford to be.
But when he closed his eyes, the waters that drowned the Boynton rushed over him again. His lungs ached. His hands were red. It wasn’t as simple as obedience. Obedience had made him a ghost. And if he were dead already . . . why obey only them? Why not obey his own thirsts too? They could do nothing worse than kill him again.
He struggled back to the surface, back to the blade dulled by red and the smiling Japanese face in the photograph and the game board sitting in its position of honor on the side table. Good strategy could harbor two goals at once. An attack here and a parry there.
Obedience could pair with revenge. Revenge on the ones who had done this to him. Who had made him a ghost.
A game. It was just a game. It didn’t matter if he was alone, if there was no Heinrich to tell him stories or Yūrei to meet for tea. A ghost didn’t need brothers and friends. He only had to win.
10
They’d said that whatever drug they’d slipped into his veins would make the journey comfortable. They’d said that he wouldn’t even be aware of the trip, that he’d wake up in London and be on the mend. They’d said that rest was all he needed.
They’d lied.
Drake dug his fingers into the miserable cot under him and stared up at the ceiling of the ward in Charing Cross Hospital. It was white. Like all the walls. Like every ceiling and every wall in every hospital in the world, no doubt. All the more plain and stark because he well knew he’d be staring at it for days and weeks to come.
It didn’t hurt. Not until he moved. Or breathed too heavily. Or, heaven forbid, laughed at something another of the patients said to one of the nurses. Then he was keenly aware of the way that blasted German bullet had ripped through his insides.
He’d been lucky, the doctors had said. Through and through. No vital organs hit. No internal bleeding.
He knew he’d been lucky—knew it the moment he pressed his hands to that hot, sticky mess that was his back and stomach on the railcar. But luck didn’t make the ceilings any less boring or the pain any less acute when he tried to do something actually human.
He would be a shell for the next weeks or months, that was all. An artificial man, delegated to the barest physical duties. Eat. Sleep. Take his medicine. Try to pretend it wasn’t embarrassing to have a nurse in her grey uniform hand him a bedpan. Try not to think about Thoroton and the other chaps still in Spain, still working and fighting and discovering and doing while he lay here like a . . . like a . . .
His fingers twisted in the sheet as a moan sounded from the next cot over. He was better off than many of the blokes here, and he knew it. He’d had nothing amputated. He hadn’t lost any brothers in a mad rush up some hill, into the face of exploding ordnance. He’d not encountered any of that nightmarish mustard gas that the Germans had started using over the summer.
He’d gain his feet again, assuming infection didn’t set in.
But he wanted to do something. Idleness wasn’t, apparently, in his nature. It’s just that he’d never realized it until now, when it was his only option.
“Mary,” the bloke on the other side of him groaned. “Mary. Mary.”
“Mary will be to see you later today, Private.” The nurse’s voice was cheerful, but not gratingly so. Drake turned his head just enough to see her. She was uncommonly tall, clad in the same boring grey uniform and white apron every other nurse wore, the white kerchief tied over her nearly black hair. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she looked pleasant. And she turned to Drake with a bright smile. “There’s our newcomer, alert and ready for a meal, no doubt. How are you feeling, Lieutenant Elton?”
It would be a long time before the idea of food did anything but inspire pain, he suspected. But he conjured up a grin. “Like I’ve been shot.”
“Astounding.” She poured him a cup of water and helped him hold his head up so he could sip it. As if he were an infant. “I’m Nurse Arabelle Denler. I imagine we’ll be seeing a good bit of each other until we’ve got you back on your feet.”
“How do you do?” He nearly choked on a chip of ice, garbling the question.
“How polite you are. But as I am far better than you, please don’t feel you must engage in such niceties for my sake.” When she smiled, a single dimple appeared in her left cheek. The unevenness brought interest to her otherwise plain face. “Where are you from, Lieutenant?”
He had to cough to clear his throat of the vicious ice chip. And of course the coughing lit his entire torso on fire. Which should at least melt the ice. He made no objections to being settled back onto his pillow, knowing well his face had contorted with pain. “Here,” he managed from between clenched teeth. “London. And Spain.” After he had spent the last seven years of his life in a place, he could claim it as his own, couldn’t he?
“Oh, how interesting! When you’re well enough, you can tell me all about your foreign travels.” She tucked the sheet up around him, precise and efficient, and gave him the single-dimpled smile again. “Have a few minutes’ rest, Lieutenant. We’ll be bringing your dinner round shortly.”
He blinked by way of answer, afraid to loosen his jaw enough for more words lest a moan escape—and the ward was already full enough of those. His fingers dug trenches in the mattress again, though at some point the remnant of drugs in his system must have stolen him away. He jerked to alertness when a clatter sounded at his side, hot words wanting to blister his tongue at the new pain inspired by the abrupt motion.
He would never take movement for granted again. Never.
It was a different nurse this time, this one a bobbed blonde who was beautiful, where the first nurse had been plain. Her sharp green eyes seemed to size him up in a heartbeat too. “May I help you sit up, Lieutenant?”
Risky . . . but no more so than the risk of choking on every sip of broth if he didn’t. “Yes, please. Nurse . . . ?”
“Stafford.” She slid an arm behind his back and levered him up a bit, fitting another pillow behind him with her other arm in a slick move that proved she did this many times a day.
The chap in the cot across from him laughed. “Call her ‘Nurse Stafford’ and you’ll get a lecture from the ward matron. It’s Her Grace.”
A duchess? Of Stafford. That made something try to click into place in his head, though he couldn’t quite be sure what. “What’s a duchess doing here?”
Her Grace finished fluffing his pillow and gave him a small smile a second before sending an exaggerated glare to the fellow across the aisle. “My bit, that’s what. And you, Corporal Henderson—I warned you about outing me to the new arrivals. Just see if I bring you an extra biscuit today.”
The Duchess of Stafford. He knew the name, though he’d certainly never met her. But from where? Ah. He had it. “Did you ever get your Renault?”
Her hands stilled, and her brows lifted as she looked down at him again. “Are we acquainted, Lieutenant? Forgive me, if so—I don’t recall how or when.”
“No.” He shook his head but then regretted it. Though how a simple action like moving his neck could make pain light up in his stomach he just didn’t know. Still, he forced a smile. “Visited friends in the Cotswolds a few years ago. Had a meal with one of your drivers.”
“Ah.” Her smile r
eappeared, and she positioned a tray over his legs. “A new car seemed a waste in times like these. But I broke the new stallion. And when this dratted war’s over, I’m going to make my ace of a husband teach me to fly a plane.”
The duke was a pilot? Somehow that was just as shocking as learning that his wife was a nurse. “In the RNAS?” It had to be either the Royal Naval Air Service or the Royal Flying Corp.
“The RFC—he was one of the first to sign up, fool man, and no one could talk him out of it.” Pride saturated her voice though, not irritation. “Stationed at Northolt, though, not on the front—which is why the boys and I are in London. We still get to see him several times a week. We’re lucky.” She moved a bowl of not-steaming broth onto his tray. “Shall I?”
For the first time since he’d arrived here this morning, he actually looked around the ward. There were two rows of cots on each of the walls, facing each other. Almost all were filled with soldiers. White bandages everywhere, stumps where limbs should have been, some chaps with faces as pale as the sheets they lay on.
He swallowed and ignored the throbbing that hadn’t yet ebbed from the effort of sitting up. Or waking up. Or just being, perhaps. “I can manage, I think. Thank you, Your Grace.”
She sighed. “Another hopelessly proper patient, I see. Very well then, Lieutenant. Your sidearm.” She handed him a spoon. “And your bayonet.” A knife, presumably to butter the bread she also slid onto his tray. “Use them wisely, or I shall strip you of them and submit you to the humiliation of being fed by a woman.”
It was all he could do to force his lips into a smile and keep his face clear of the wince that wanted to overtake him when he lifted his arm.
This was going to be fun.
He waited until she bustled to the next bed, the next patient, before he tried lifting his arm again. Never before had he been aware of all the muscles required to complete such a simple act. Dip the spoon. Raise it again. Aim it at his own mouth.
He managed the first spoonful all right. On the second, his arm shook. By the third, he’d worn it rather than eating it—good thing it hadn’t been more than warm.
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