Well, a friend knew to give whether it was asked or not. He’d make sure to serve him a sandwich before he left too. “What a pleasant surprise it was for Dot to run into you the other day. I didn’t quite catch the story of how your paths crossed.”
“Oh.” Red chose the chair that would face both where he stood in the kitchen and the sofa. “Thanks to Miss De Wilde. She’d . . . hired me to do a bit of sleuthing for her.”
Drake measured a spoonful of tea into the teapot. “Are you an investigator now?”
“No. Not that I’d be opposed to such work. Or any work. I . . .” He broke off with a stumbling chuckle. “Sorry, old boy, this is blazing awkward. I was actually wondering—that is, I know the war hit your shipping company hard, but if you’ve any positions . . .”
Drake’s heart sank. “Not here in England, I’m afraid. I sent the few ships we had left to join my grandfather’s fleet in Spain until the war is over. Those blasted U-boats, you see.” He poured some steaming tea into a cup. “Wish I had better news for you. But with all our crewmen either down with the ships or joining the navy, there wasn’t much choice. Didn’t make sense to keep the offices open either. Once the war’s over, Abuelo and I plan to relocate half of everything back to London, but in the meantime . . .”
In the meantime, he had no job to offer Redvers Holmes. Would that he had. But there would be something he could do to help. There was always something. He had only to ask the right question.
Red sighed. “Assumed as much, but I thought I’d ask. Work’s rather hard to find when a chap only knows physical labor and can’t do it anymore.”
“You have some education though, don’t you? I know you and Nelson were chums—from school, I’d assumed.” With the shortage of men in London right now, he ought to be able to find a job in an office somewhere.
Red’s cheeks flushed to match his name. “I was never much good with letters and figures. They tend to, well, jump around on me. But I’ve a good memory. And my hands aren’t impaired, and I’ve always been good with them, much to the dismay of my father, who always claimed the Holmeses were better than that.” He snorted. “Glad he can’t see what’s become of us now.”
The question had yielded an answer, anyway. Education might lend a bit of pedigree, but it didn’t guarantee a position if one couldn’t put it to use. Something else, then. Drake picked up the cup and saucer and made his slow way toward the sitting area. “I’d offer you sugar, but Dot has forbidden me on pain of death from touching her stash before the dinner party this weekend.”
“I never take any, regardless.” His smile flashed bright. Then faded. Red took the cup when Drake eventually reached him with it.
Drake sat with a whoosh of breath and a wince. “I’ll be happy to put out some inquiries for you, Red. As you can see, the war has indeed hit us hard.” He waved to the small flat—a far cry from the house the Eltons had once called home. “But some of Father’s old friends have fared better. One of them may be in need of a trustworthy worker—I can certainly vouch for you.”
“I would appreciate that. Thank you.” Red stared into the cup. “Sorry, Drake, I hate to have to ask. But every door I’ve knocked on has been shut in my face when they see me limping on this blasted foot.” He scowled at the tea, then seemed to realize it would better serve a different purpose and sipped at it. “I’ve half a mind to remake the thing. Would if I could get any parts. If I can eliminate the limp—”
“Well now. That’s something I can probably help you with.” He motioned to the small table between them, which Dot had stocked with what she thought he might need to work, including paper and pens. “Write down anything you might need. And you’re welcome to do the work here, if you’d like. I believe there’s a set of tools.”
His friend’s eyes lit. Then faded, like his smile had. “Thank you. Of course, I can’t impose on your hospitality for the length of time it would require to—”
“Nonsense. I’d be grateful for the company. Much as I love my sister, we do bore each other after a while.” He smiled. “Seriously, Red. You could come by every day, and I’d be nothing but grateful for the change of pace. I don’t do well with convalescence, it seems.”
Red took another sip of his tea. “If you’re certain . . .”
“Very certain. All my other friends are deployed, as you can imagine.” Or facing court-martial. Or gone forever, like Nelson.
Red must have heard the unspoken additions. His nod was the sort of slow that came with the burden of too many brothers lost. “It seems the blokes still in the city aren’t the ones I’d ever run with. Even when I could run.”
Drake nodded and glanced at the clock. The doctor would be coming any minute, and he was likely to scare Red off. “You can certainly run better than I can just now. I say, I don’t suppose you’d feel up to a few errands for me? Just around the corner? If it’s too much, please don’t hesitate to—”
“It would be my pleasure. Walking is no trouble for me at all anymore, I assure you. After six months on this thing, I like to think I’ve mastered it.” He sat up straighter. “Do you have a list?”
“I’ll make one while you finish your tea. My physician will likely stop by while you’re out, but then we can have lunch, if you agree. I do hate eating alone day after day.”
“That would be lovely.”
“Wonderful. I’m in your debt.” He smiled and reached for a piece of paper, hoping that Red wouldn’t call him on the bluff. Or partial bluff, anyway. Heaven knew Drake couldn’t manage a trip to the shops in his condition, and he hated to keep asking Dot to make stops for him, knowing how eager she always was to get home. But this could work well. It wouldn’t feel like a handout to Red, not if he was doing something for Drake in return for the meal.
If he played it right, he could assure himself that Red was getting at least one solid meal a day. It would do, at least until he could help him find a permanent position.
He would make a list of all his father’s friends whose businesses were still in operation. Perhaps even get the admiral’s opinion—though he’d already asked Hall for one favor for an old friend today. Much as he liked his superior, he didn’t want to push his luck. Someone would know of something though.
The phone jangled. Drake jerked at the unexpected noise and then hissed at the pain that coursed up his side in protest.
Red jumped to his feet. “Shall I answer for you? Or bring it to you?”
“I don’t think it’ll stretch this far, but if you would?” By the time he got to it, it would probably have stopped ringing.
Red picked it up after the third one, though, answering with a chipper “Good morning, Elton residence. Holmes speaking.” He listened for a moment, brows scrunched together. “Hello? Anyone there?” After another moment of listening, he shrugged and hung up. “No one.”
Innocent, surely. A dropped line. It happened often enough. But Drake couldn’t convince his fingers to loosen around his pen. “I imagine whoever it was will call back.” It was the same thing he’d said to Dot on Tuesday night, when she had answered to an empty line. No one had called back, though. Not until now.
Drake sucked in a breath and forced himself to get back to his list. He wouldn’t worry over wasted telephone calls. He’d focus instead on helping his friend. Tracking down anything he could on the anthrax question for Margot. And convincing Hall in whatever way he could that he was still useful, even when he couldn’t answer his own blighted phone.
That was certainly worry enough for one day.
17
He was looking at her. Margot slid another bite of food into her mouth and did not look over at him. Despite the all-too-knowing grin that Willa shot her from across the table, proving that Margot wasn’t the only one aware of how Drake’s eyes kept drifting her way when he had absolutely no reason to let them.
Infuriating man. She’d been happy enough to consider him as a likely friend, until he had to go and ruin it all with that flirtation nonsense. Sh
e’d hoped he would have let such ridiculousness go by now, but apparently not. Did it never occur to him that she’d like to eat her dinner without someone staring at her and making her too conscious of every bite she took?
Smile, Margot, Maman said in her head. A long look is a compliment, and how do we respond to compliments?
She shot a glare at Willa, since she didn’t want to encourage Drake with even that much attention. Her sister-in-law just chuckled into her water glass, which thankfully went unnoticed by anyone else, since Dot and Holmes and Lukas were all laughing down at their end of the table. She hadn’t caught what had inspired the amusement because she’d been so busy ignoring him, seated to her right, at the head of the table, that she’d apparently ignored everything else too.
She forked her last bite of chicken and lifted it to her lips. Counted her chews. Swallowed.
And why wasn’t Willa helping her? She, of all people, could commiserate with Margot’s discomfort over having anyone linger so long over her looks.
Finally, at long last, Willa seemed to have had her fill of smirking and leaned forward. She’d say something biting and clever to him, no doubt. Willa was an expert at biting and clever. Or perhaps she’d just deflect his attention. Strike up a conversation that would force him to pay attention to her rather than to Margot.
So why did she turn her head toward the opposite table end? “Dot, this chicken is divine. May I get the recipe from you? Lucy would love to make it, I know. She considers it her own special challenge to make sure no one in the family notices the shortages.”
Some help she was.
Dot, face aglow, launched into a discourse about how pleasurable it had been to learn to cook when she and her aunt got this flat. Had she actually launched into the recipe, Margot might have paid attention—recipes were just mathematics, after all. But they were mathematics she usually happily left to theory.
Other than when she’d come here or gone to Lukas’s, she’d had nothing to eat that required more cooking than porridge since Maman . . .
It wasn’t lack of ability. It was lack of incentive. Cooking for one just seemed pointless.
“Did you have a happy birthday, Miss De Wilde?” Drake’s question was low, quiet, as if he’d asked a more sensitive question that he wanted no one else to hear.
She gripped her fork. If she didn’t look over at him now, it would be not only rude but telling. Proving she was deliberately ignoring him, and hence paying him attention through her inattention. She blinked and glanced his way. “As happy as could be expected this year. Thank you for asking.”
He smiled. Scientifically, she noted that his color was better this evening and the shadows under his eyes not so deep. According to Dot, he was making great strides of progress.
Good. The sooner he healed, the sooner he’d leave.
He picked up his own water glass but didn’t drink from it. “And how old are you now? My sister didn’t know.”
A question she’d grown tired of answering when she was six. “Two hundred sixty-three.”
“Really?” He drank now, chuckling as he did so, then set the glass down with a grin. “And here I wouldn’t have pegged you as a day over two hundred sixty-one.”
A bit of her irritation slipped off her shoulders, blast him. He was the sort of person she liked, if he’d just keep his interest relegated to the confines of friendship. “It is my skin-care regimen, you see. I’m militant about it. It’s all I can ever think about.”
He laughed, splaying a hand over his side as he did so. “Exactly the impression I had of you. Why, it’s certainly all you’ve ever talked about in our previous conversations.”
Her lips pulled up, and her shoulders relaxed a bit. Perhaps she could simply ignore his too-long glances. Pretend his interest was no different from any of the men in Room 40. She’d hate to deprive herself of a friend, after all. “May I ask you a question, since you’re so fond of them?”
His brows lifted. “Of course.”
She nodded in the general vicinity of his face. “How did you break your nose?”
“Ah.” Leaning back in his chair, he seemed to lift his hand experimentally from his injured side. Apparently it passed the test, as he reached for his fork again. He’d eaten only half his food, and everyone else was finishing off their last bites. Perhaps he wasn’t quite as well as he pretended. “Got in a bit of a tussle with some older boys when I was a lad, that’s all.”
“Over what?” Dot, possibly. He seemed the type of brother who wouldn’t mind a few fisticuffs if it meant defending his sister from bullies.
But he didn’t look at his sister. He looked upward, and to the right. “My mother. Or her faith, more precisely. The neighbor lads thought it their Christian duty to throw a few literal stones at her for being Catholic.”
Margot’s blood went hot. In Belgium, everyone belonged to the Catholic church—that was simply the way it was. But when the Germans had invaded, they’d made it clear that part of their hatred was rooted in what they called their different faiths—as if the same Christ had not bled and died for all. “I hope you broke their noses too.”
That wasn’t the attitude God would want her to have about it, she knew. No false equations flashed through her mind now to tell her so, but they had often enough before when she’d had such thoughts.
Drake’s grin looked better suited to the lad he had been than the man of twenty-four she knew him to be. “I may have knocked out a few teeth—baby ones, lucky for them. And got in a bit of trouble for it too.”
“I can imagine. Their mothers?”
“No. Mine.”
Margot chuckled. “Our mothers were much alike, I think.” She darted a glance to Lukas, who was smiling across the table at Red Holmes, saying something clever and witty, no doubt. No one would ever know, to look at how the two bantered, that they’d only met the other night, when Lukas happily handed over a suit of clothes that he claimed didn’t fit his current tastes anyway. Rosemary had made a few quick alterations, and the result . . . Well, the result was that Dot had been looking at Holmes even when conversation didn’t call for it.
Margot sighed. Whether to him or someone else, Dot would no doubt marry within a year or two. She’d move off into the world of housewives and mothers. Margot would shift into academia. Would they still be friends, when Dot was set on multiplying and Margot on limits? Simple arithmetic and calculus may have had a bit in common, but the one didn’t necessarily understand the other.
Drake leaned closer. Not by much, just an inch and a half, but it brought her gaze back to his face. It was serious now, the blue-grey eyes he shared with Dot absent the spark of jesting that tended to be there whenever he spoke. “I’m sorry, Miss De Wilde. For making you think of sad things tonight, when you ought to be celebrating.”
Smile, Maman said in her mind. Reassure him. But she couldn’t. She could only press her lips together and tilt the corners up a stingy few degrees. “It isn’t your fault. And really, I’ve never understood the need to celebrate another year going by. Age is a pointless measure of who we are, anyway.”
“Oh, here we go.” Willa rolled her eyes, stood—Dot had stood too—and reached for Margot’s empty plate. But despite her words, she was grinning. “You’ve got her started on age. I’m evacuating the table before she makes me feel alternately like an old biddy and like a child.”
“It’s a valid complaint!” One she could fall back on easily now, rather than lapsing into a silent contemplation of how much she missed Maman. How empty her flat was every single day. How tired she was growing of sandwiches and toast, and the fact that there was no one to share anything more interesting with. “Our number of years is completely irrelevant when it comes to our life experiences and our mental age. An eight-year-old who has lived on the street for years already, for instance, is hardly the same age as a pampered child of a lord on a manor in the country.”
The point she had made to Willa, who had found herself on the streets when she wa
s six.
“True enough.” Drake rested his arm on the table in a way that would have made Maman scold her had Margot done it. But then, she had a feeling Drake did it to try to alleviate the discomfort in his side. Maman likely would have let that one pass. “But your early life was not the sort to demand you grow up quickly, was it?”
She arched a brow. “Perhaps not in terms of loss and hardship. But I was attending my father’s university when I was twelve. I could out-think and out-reason adults old enough to be my parents and grandparents. Yet they dismissed me solely because I was still in short dresses. It was infuriating.”
No one else at the table was paying her a bit of attention—they were all helping to clear the dishes away, laughing about something else.
Drake didn’t seem inclined to move yet though. He studied her. Not like he’d been doing before, but for an actual purpose this time. Or so it seemed to her. “I imagine it would have been.”
She leaned back in her chair. “I spent my last years in Belgium wishing I were older simply so that people would stop treating me like a child—I didn’t feel like a child.” Other than a few rather childish reactions to the Germans, of course. But plenty of adults fell prey to those as well. She summoned up another fraction of a smile. “And then my first years here needing to pretend to be older so that I could work in Room 40. So age really doesn’t mean much to me. I feel as though I’ve been eighteen for years already.”
“Eighteen, is it?” His grin smacked of victory. And the teasing light returned to his eyes. “I would have guessed older. Not a thing I’d usually dare say to a female, but in light of our current conversation . . .”
Margot grinned back. “You can say you thought me forty, and I’d only thank you.”
He chuckled—bracing his side again as he did so. He was probably tiring after sitting so long on that hard chair. But he was an adult. If he was tired, he could move. “We’ll stick with eighteen. Solely because I’m rather fond of the number.” His gaze flicked to the others, none of whom were paying them a bit of attention. Still, he dropped his voice down as if in conspiracy when he said, “It was my number, you see. In Spain. Agent Eighteen.”
The Number of Love Page 19