Drake sped to the corner, glancing first straight ahead toward Margot’s retreating back and then down the intersecting street, where the man’s grey coat flapped behind him.
If he’d still doubted that the man had something to do with Jaeger, that made it certain. If he were just an innocent neighbor, he wouldn’t run from him like that. And why did he now? He must have spotted Drake that day he’d come down and known he would recognize him. He must have.
He could follow now. He wasn’t at his fastest, but the man didn’t seem to be moving at that impressive a clip either. He might be able to catch up.
And then what? Tackle him? Smack him with Margot’s handbag? The man must know he was injured. And a well-placed brolly to the side could undo all the weeks of healing.
Moreover, he didn’t matter. Not compared to Margot.
The debate had only taken a second. And he didn’t regret his decision for a moment as he ran after her. He only hoped that no Good Samaritan would think he was chasing her for cruel reasons and would decide to intervene. Though he could always claim he’d seen her drop her handbag and was just trying to return it.
He didn’t call out again—the less attention the better—and she still didn’t look over her shoulder. Maybe she thought he wouldn’t follow. Or didn’t really mind that he did. Either way, her pace slowed as she made the turn that would take her home, and he closed the distance between them.
Which was a good thing, or he might have lost her when she made the unexpected detour into the little park they’d walked in after Mass for the last few Sundays.
“Margot.” He dared to call to her again only once he’d entered the park, too, and followed the winding brick path to where the table and chairs were set up by the bench. She was there, of course, collapsed onto one of the hard chairs by the table with the Go board. Gasping for breath. Or crying. Or perhaps both. “Mi alma?”
She shook her head, shoulders heaving. “Don’t call me that. I’m not your soul.”
She knew the phrase? Always surprising him, this one. He eased down beside her chair and slid her handbag into her hands. “Why does it scare you so?”
Her hair was a ruin under her hat, those carefully measured waves flying every which way—and looking all the more charming for their disarray. He gave in to the urge to smooth them down and was rewarded by her meeting his gaze.
“I’m not scared.”
Part of him wanted to smirk, to call her on the obvious lie—point out, perhaps, that she didn’t deliver it with her usual mathematical precision. But what would that achieve? Instead he took a moment to think. To try to see down to the depths of her heart through those depthless eyes. “Sometimes running away does speak to courage instead of fear. To wisdom. Sometimes running away is necessary. Though I certainly hope not in this case.”
She gasped again and dashed a sleeve across her eyes with the look of someone who detested the tears she wiped away. “I don’t know.”
There was meaning there beyond the words. “What don’t you know?”
“What to do. What’s right. What’s wise. I don’t know whether to turn this way or that, whether to go or stay, whether to . . . to kiss you or to run away.”
“Do I get a vote?”
She sent him an exasperated look. But it eased her. Just a bit. “Drake.”
He caught her fingers in his. “You don’t have to know.”
“Don’t I?” She shook her head. “You want to change things. But I don’t know what changes are good and what are bad right now. I can’t . . . I can’t tell the right way to go.”
“Then don’t go anywhere.” He gave her fingers a squeeze and her eyes a small smile. “I’m not changing anything, mi alma. All I did was say the words I’d already been thinking. Kiss you like I’d been dreaming of doing. It was already there. Latent energy or whatever it’s called. Already factored into the equation.”
She almost, maybe smiled. Then turned her face away. “But it’s not just you. I’m not certain about anything anymore. He’s gone silent.”
“Who has? The Lord?”
She nodded, sniffed. But didn’t look at him again. “I could always hear Him. Ever since I was a child.”
He shifted a bit, settled in. “Like when He asked you to pray for me?”
She lifted a shoulder, tilted her head. “Like that, but not just that. Numbers would appear. Directing me. Beautiful proofs for encouragement, unsolvable equations to dissuade. But He’s gone silent.”
“Has He?”
Her gaze dropped to their hands. “Or I’ve gone deaf. Either way, it’s . . . too quiet. Lonely. How am I to know what to do? Whether I’m making a wreck of everything?”
He let the night wrap its arms around them for a minute, content to study her in the moonlight. It was cold, and he’d not grabbed his coat as he chased her from the flat. But he could warm up later. “The way the rest of us do, I suppose. You choose what seems best and trust.”
“But that’s stupid.” Now she looked at him, eyes ablaze. “Life isn’t just guesswork.”
“And faith isn’t just feeling. We have to know He’s still there, unchanged, even when we can’t feel Him. When the grief’s too loud to let us hear His voice.”
Her scowl was fierce and quick. “It was never feeling.”
“Of course it was.” He countered her scowl with a grin. “It’s just that you feel in numbers.”
“I . . .” She halted, pursed her lips.
Which of course made him want to kiss her again, but he didn’t need a lightning bolt from heaven to tell that now wasn’t the time. So he settled for a chuckle. “Are you going to argue with me?”
Her answer was a sigh that had her gaze sinking again.
“Margot.” He lifted her hand and chafed her fingers between his equally cold ones. “God understands how you’re feeling—that you’re mourning, that you’re angry, that you can’t accept the way this has happened. But He’s still there. His hand is still sheltering you. He’ll wait for you.”
Serious eyes looked up again. Accepting. Challenging. “He will. I know.” But what about you?
She might as well have shouted the question, it came through so clearly. Because it wasn’t just that her dreams hadn’t accounted for this. It was that her heart was still broken from the loss of her mother.
Drake lifted her fingers a few inches more and pressed a kiss to her ink-stained fingertips. “As long as it takes, mi alma. I’ll wait on you.”
She didn’t believe him. He read it in the pull of her fingers and the flicker of her eyes. “You’re not a man who can sit and do nothing, Drake.”
“Who said waiting was inactive?” He stood. And held out the hand she’d just pulled her fingers free of.
He’d chosen his words carefully, so that he’d remember his own intentions. He wasn’t waiting for her. He was waiting on her. That kind of waiting wasn’t impatient, didn’t sit there tapping its foot. That kind of waiting was service. Selfless. Unflagging.
She sat still for a long moment, searching his eyes. Probably trying to find the tell of a lie or guess at how patient he really meant to be. Then, with a deep breath and a slow move, she put her fingers in his.
With every gasping, painful breath Das Gespenst cursed this wretched island. The coughing fit finally subsided, but still the chill wracked him. And yet perspiration trickled down his back from the unexpected dash down the street. Hot and cold. Feverish, probably.
It had slowed him. He knew it had. He was lucky Elton had decided to chase Margot De Wilde instead of him, or this night would have ended far differently. He wouldn’t be hunkered in some random alleyway trying to quell a coughing fit. He’d have been caught, forced to draw his thirsty dagger without a careful plan—dangerous in itself. And then they just would have had to see whose weakened state inhibited him the least. Elton, with his bullet wound. Das Gespenst, with what he had to think was pneumonia.
After he’d managed to breathe without a new coughing fit for a few
minutes, he pushed himself off the cold stones and stepped out on the street to get his bearings. He’d grown fairly well acquainted with the whole neighborhood that the Eltons and De Wildes both claimed as home. It took him only a few glances to realize that he’d ended up not far from the entrance to the park opposite the one the girl favored.
His chest ached as he walked, begging him to turn toward his flat instead of the Go board. But he didn’t want to leave it out all night. And he wasn’t altogether certain he’d be able to drag himself down here again tomorrow. He’d barely managed to convince himself to search her flat while she spent the previous night at the Old Building.
What he’d found had been interesting. What sort of secretary played at codebreaking? It was rudimentary, the code Elton wrote to her in, but still. His instincts must have been right—she must work near codes. She would be his way in, as soon as he had strength enough.
He approached the park carefully, moving from one tree’s shadow to the next until he could be certain they weren’t here. The wrought-iron table beckoned him forward. She couldn’t have been in any state to make a move, not given how upset she’d been when she flew so unexpectedly out of the Eltons’ building—she had never been there for less than an hour before.
But she had made a play. And a clever one at that. He nodded his approval and made a note of what she’d done before reaching for the slip of paper anchored under the board.
Heinrich would have loved this touch—the perfect irony to the ghost story, when the liar told the truth. Confessing his weakness knowing she wouldn’t know whose weakness it was or believe it if she did know. Using it to his own advantage.
She’d written something on the back. He flipped it over. Paused.
She was praying for him. He’d asked for it simply because it seemed the thing to say—not because he expected her to respond to that. Get well was more what he’d thought she’d say.
His breath still burned when he drew it into his lungs. His muscles still ached. Maybe she wasn’t really going to do it. And it surely wouldn’t matter if she did. There may well be a God up in heaven, but if so, He surely didn’t concern Himself with a ghost roaming the earth. If He’d favored anyone, it was Heinrich. And look how that had ended.
Even so. It meant something that she would pray for him. Meant something about her. He folded the paper into a precise square and slid it into his pocket.
His gaze traveled through the darkness to where the Old Building stood out of sight, proud and stiff. He’d known from the start that Margot De Wilde wasn’t his enemy. But she was proving herself the best sort of opponent.
The kind he could admire.
He gathered the stones yet again, slipped their pouches into his pockets, and tucked the board under his arm.
He wouldn’t hurt her, if it could be helped. Not directly. Despite the company she’d been keeping—what a strangely small world was this sphere of intelligence—she was a worthy opponent. He would respect that. He would do what he must to get into the Old Building or get her to go in on his behalf, but Der Vampir wouldn’t taste her life’s blood.
Heinrich wasn’t the only one with a streak of honor after all.
26
Margot’s lips twitched up at the string of curses echoing down the corridor—colorful enough to make her glance over at Camden, who wasn’t paying any mind to the diatribe underway. She could only imagine how Drake would chide the men out there if he heard them. There were ladies in earshot, after all.
But the reason for the cursing was far more interesting to her than the words themselves. She pushed away from her desk and peeked into the corridor.
“What is the point of it all if they don’t listen?” Commander James stood in his office door, facing both Hall and Knox.
“There are at least fifty-five a month! Fifty-five U-boats slipping through those blasted antisubmarine nets, and the Admiralty is doing nothing!” Knox hadn’t said blasted, of course.
“Because the vice-admiral won’t believe it.” Hall bit off a choice word of his own. “Jellicoe has to take a stand and make a point of it. Force their hand, prove us right. Turn a few floodlights on, I think. That’s all it will take to force the U-boats to dive into the nets instead of skimming over them as they’ve been doing.”
Margot turned back into the room. She’d decrypted countless telegrams about this over the last few weeks—messages from one German U-boat to another, giving advice on how to avoid the explosive nets—but there were still those high up in the Admiralty’s chain of command who couldn’t be convinced that their intelligence was worthwhile. Hall’s eternal headache.
“What’s going on out there?” Camden had finally looked up from his work. He’d only just been moved out of the storage room, now that the others had gotten used to his insults. Or learned to ignore them, anyway. More or less.
Margot took her seat again. They’d take their lunch break in a few more minutes, but she had time to finish her current decrypt first. “They’re yelling.”
Camden gave her the same look Lukas always did when she answered the question he’d asked rather than the one he’d meant. “Brilliant. About what?”
“The usual. A vice admiral failing to heed the warnings we send them. This time about the U-boats still bypassing the nets.” She picked up her pencil.
“What’s the blasted point of all this if people are just going to ignore it?” He, of course, didn’t say blasted either.
Margot rolled her eyes. “The question of the hour, it seems. You ought to step into the corridor and share your very new outrage on the subject that no one else has ever once expressed before.”
Camden grunted. But he also smiled. “You’re a sarcastic little thing, did you know that?”
“I was unaware.”
“There you go again.”
“It wasn’t going again. I hadn’t stopped.”
He snorted a laugh. He must have finished whatever he’d been working on since he stood, stretched, and meandered over to the window. And given that he didn’t make a point of bumping into anyone’s chair, he must have been rather pleased with how that one had gone.
She turned back to her own, ignoring the continued debate in the corridor and the mutters from Culbreth and Adcock about a line that was giving one of them trouble. The words in front of her took her six weeks back in time. Wolfram. Erri Barro. It only took her a few more minutes to finish up.
Which was good, since Camden said from the window, “Elton and his nursemaid are coming this way. I take it we’re having another cozy lunch for four?”
“Unless you’ve decided to be our spare wheel today.” She offered a cheeky grin, knowing well he wouldn’t even consent to being in the same room as Holmes, though she still wasn’t certain why. She’d asked, but he’d only made a snide comment about some people having no sense of humor.
Holmes couldn’t always manage to get away from the factory for a lunch hour, but when he did, he’d taken to swinging by the flat for Drake on his way to meet Dot.
She’d be glowing afterward. And Margot didn’t exactly mind the company either, but she could be fairly certain her face didn’t shine over it—if so, the chaps would never let her live it down.
Margot pulled her lunch sack from under her desk and looked over to the station by the door, occupied now by a thirty-year-old secretary who’d been with them for two years. Margot pressed her lips together. Six weeks wasn’t enough to obliterate a habit of three years, apparently. Maybe eventually she’d stop looking for Maman there. Maybe eventually the ache would subside at least a little. Maybe eventually she’d be able to accept that all her theories, all her leads, all her mathematics had led her nowhere in the question of what really happened.
She ought to be glad there was no evidence that anthrax had been smuggled into the country. It meant no one else was in danger of being infected with it.
As long as it didn’t instead mean that they’d just missed something.
“Ask the nurse
what I ought to do about—”
“Shut up, Camden.” She fell in behind Culbreth, who was making his way to the corridor with his lunch. Camden’s chuckle followed them out.
Culbreth sent her a look over his shoulder. “You’re a brave soul, talking to him like that.”
“He isn’t so bad. He just does a good job of hiding that fact.” She wasn’t quite sure who he was behind the wall of pain that stood behind the towers of rudeness, but she knew that once a week he went to play chess with Drake during his lunch. And he came back quieter and less surly. Evidence that, under it all, he appreciated his friend.
“Miss De Wilde, your lieutenant is here.” One of the secretaries strode by with a grin, her arms full of files she must have been bringing up from a lower level.
“He isn’t my . . .” She cut herself off with a huff when the young woman laughed and passed her. The other girls never listened when she insisted they weren’t a couple.
And they had a point, if she were being honest. How long could she really maintain that one plus one just equaled one plus one and not grant that it was two?
But he’d been true to his word this past week, since the night he’d kissed her. Nothing had overtly changed. He hadn’t kissed her again, didn’t hold her hand, never made mention of that L-word again. His encoded letters continued to arrive day after day.
But the irony of that didn’t escape her either. This was his love for her. Respecting her needs. Letting her work through the fears she’d tried to deny were fears.
I dream of a thousand tomorrows, he’d written to her in last night’s letter. Each one a jewel to be cherished at your side.
She paused at Dot’s door and glanced in to catch her friend’s eye.
“Coming,” Dot sang out with a smile, her fingers not slowing on the typewriter keys. “Did Drake and Red make it today?”
“They did. Though they’ve not come up yet.”
The Number of Love Page 28