“He owes me one.” He turned to Margot. “I’ll get you the codebook.”
She gripped the logbook until her knuckles went white. “No. Let the others do it. We can wait.”
But they couldn’t. “You know well we can’t. He attacked you and Dot tonight. He lost his flat to the authorities. He’ll be on the move, and if we don’t act now . . . I have to.”
She must be clenching her teeth, given the tic in her jaw. “I’m sure there’s someone else who can do it.”
Drake lifted his brows. “Perhaps. But this is at least in part because of me, linked to Jaeger. I need to see it through. And Camden will know what we’re looking for. It’s the perfect, quickest solution, Margot.”
Hall’s footsteps sounded, padding away. “I’ll see to that plane.”
Drake turned to face her. He pried the logbook from her hands and set it aside so he could take those hands in one of his. “I’ll be all right.”
“You don’t know that. The number of planes shot down—”
“Is irrelevant.” He used his free hand to brush her hair from her cheek. “Camden is the best pilot we have. He can get me there and back safely.”
“You can’t even be sure there’s a codebook to be found. It could have burned up in the wreckage.”
“Maybe. But I have to try. You know how you hear numbers? I get urges. Impressions. Feelings, maybe, though I know you consider that a curse word.” He grinned, but it only earned him a shake of her head. “This is right.”
A bigger shake of her head. “It doesn’t feel right to me. It feels wrong. Really wrong.”
He tilted his head, let that settle. Was it only his pride that made him want to seek out these answers himself? To get back into the thick of things? No. If it were that, he’d rather scour the streets of London, hunting down this man who didn’t have his grey overcoat anymore. He’d want to stay close to her, to Dot, where he could protect them. Because it made him antsy to think of leaving them here alone when that bloke was still at large and obviously dangerous.
But still that urgency thrummed in his chest. “Can you trust me, Margot? Can you trust that I’m certain? That this is the Lord leading me?”
She made a noise he couldn’t quite classify—a squeak of protest? A whimper?—and gripped his wrist. “I don’t want to lose you. I can’t. I can’t lose anyone else right now.”
He could promise to come home, but she wouldn’t believe him. She would have numbers to prove how many promised it and failed to deliver. And she had a point. There were never any guarantees. Even being sure God wanted him to do this didn’t mean he’d come home safely. Sometimes God’s will meant bullets searing flesh. Death coming too soon. Sometimes God’s will was to let man taste the consequences of his folly and his hatred and his supposed self-sufficiency.
Sometimes God let people die. Let His children break. And then pieced them back together into something new. Something that He could use for His glory instead of theirs.
He nudged her chin up, bent his head down. Caught her lips with his. They tasted as sweet as they had the first time. Were as hesitant and yet as welcoming. He savored each second, lingered one more. And then pulled away. “I need to go and talk with Camden. Why don’t you come and stay with Dot? You shouldn’t go home alone.”
She shook her head. “I’ll stay here. I need to work.”
He sighed, knowing well there’d be no talking her out of it. And it was quite possibly the safest place she could be, so he wouldn’t argue. With a brush of his fingers down her neck, he stepped away. “All right. I’ll let you know before I leave, if there’s time. I don’t know if we’ll have to wait for daylight to take off or not.”
She folded her arms across her middle, the red cardigan hugging her tight. “Drake.”
He paused a step away, lifted his brows.
She couldn’t seem to wrap her lips around whatever it was she wanted to say. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. Dragged in a breath. Met his gaze. “Eighteen.” It had the sound of a word pulled by force from her mouth. Strenuous. Weighty.
The word that had bidden her to pray for him. The word that had echoed in her mind on that day so fateful to them both. The number that meant him in her mind.
He smiled and took a step backward. “I love you too.”
And she smiled.
None of the words Das Gespenst knew in any of his five languages was strong enough. He’d managed to grab only his lightweight blue jacket for his shimmy out the window, and it wasn’t nearly enough against the chill. He’d been hunkered down in this alley all blasted night, careful to shrink his frame with a hunch in his back. A cough threatened to attack his lungs after the hours spent in the cold damp.
Blast it all. Who was that girl? She was from a genteel family—she shouldn’t have known such moves.
It had been so simple a plan. Give Dorothea Elton a slash across the shoulder to prove himself serious, then grab her and hold the knife to her throat. Demand Margot De Wilde fetch him the codebook the High Command wanted. And then, while she was fetching that—only then, once his assignment was being completed—a sweet taste of revenge.
Elton.
It had seemed so beautifully simple. So perfect, that they were all connected—the universe handing him not only the summation to one of the tasks he’d been sent here to achieve, but revenge as well. A bit of recompense for all this war had taken from him.
He leaned his head back against the brick wall behind him and kept his eyes trained on Dorothea Elton as she made her way inside the Old Building, accompanied by an armed guard. In, no doubt, to be with her friend. Connected. Together. But they couldn’t stay in there forever. They’d emerge, those young women, either together or separately.
He wasn’t out of moves yet. He would get the High Command their blasted codes. He would deliver them a fine target for their bombs.
And he would have his revenge.
29
Margot blinked awake slowly, not quite sure where she was or why there was such a babble around her. Something soft was under her back, something warm tucked around her. But it took an entire six and a half seconds to realize that she was in DID’s office, on the leather sofa he kept against the wall. And the corridors were alive with the thrum of many voices going about their daily tasks.
She sat up, eyes searching for a clock. The last she’d known, Drake and Camden were in a Sopwith, flying across the Channel with the first hint of dawn. And so she’d come in here, sat down, thought to breathe for a minute. She’d tried to pray.
She’d managed only to clench her fingers together and say, “Please. Please.” Would God count that as a prayer? One of the mutterings of the soul that the Spirit made sense of before the Father?
Instead of a clock, she became aware of a different type of face. One pinched, shadowed, and pale. Dot’s hands were clenched too. And still shaking. “Morning.”
Margot shoved her hair out of her face, wincing at the snarls in it. It felt strange, like it wasn’t at the right angles. She tried to force it flat with her fingers. “Morning. What time is it? Are they there yet? Do you know?”
“They made it to the airfield an hour ago.” Dot swallowed and moved her hands just a bit, enough to reveal the rosary beads clutched within them. “I’m handing in my resignation today.”
“What?” Margot swung her legs, tangled in a blanket, off the couch. “Dot, no.”
“I can’t do it anymore, Margot. I had to stop twice on the way here—I couldn’t breathe, my vision was spotty. . . . I can’t be here now. I need to go home. It’s time to go home.”
“Dot.” She scooted forward, toward the chair where her friend sat. “You’re shaken. Last night was horrible. But the fear will pass. Just stick it out—”
“I don’t want to stick it out!” Dot sprang to her feet, chest heaving. Breath rasping. “And I don’t have to. Red and I are going to get married. Soon. I don’t have to work here anymore. I don’t have to go out every day and
—”
“You can’t just resign your position and marry him!” Margot tried to stand, too, though the blanket sent her back to the cushions. She pulled it off, tossed it to the end of the couch, and tried again. “Yesterday you were wondering if he even meant to propose and saying how quickly it had all happened—and resigning? You’ve worked hard to learn the job, and you’re good at it.”
Dot backed up a step. “I’m not like you, Margot. I don’t want to work. I just want to get married, have a family. Maybe that makes me stupid in your mind, but—”
“I have never thought that of you. Never.” She held out a hand, wondering why it seemed to repulse her friend like the wrong side of a magnet and send her another step toward the door. “I know you want to get married. I’m not saying you shouldn’t—”
“Just that I shouldn’t give up my position? Is that it? Will I be less in your eyes if I decide to stay at home and take care of my husband?” With a shaky laugh, she slashed a hand through the air, her rosary beads whipping around her wrist. “Will I be wasting my life, is that what you think? Because heaven knows you seem to think you’ll be wasting yours if you dare to let my brother be a part of it.”
Maybe it was the sleep still clouding her mind, but that did not seem like the next logical step in the argument. “Why are we talking about Drake?”
Dot stared at her. Glared at her. “Honestly? You ask that? Don’t you know how he feels about you, or are you too wrapped up in your own little world of numbers to even care?”
Margot gripped the edge of the admiral’s desk. “Of course I know how he feels.”
“It means nothing to you, then? Because it doesn’t fit into the plans you had mapped out for your life?” Dot shook her head. “Go back to sleep, Margot. Get up and solve your puzzles, write out your numbers. I’m going to go home and plan my wedding. Don’t feel obligated to drop in, it would only bore you.”
Margot opened her mouth, but she didn’t know which thing to rebut first. The spoken accusations, or the unspoken one? Dot had obviously never entertained the notion that Margot did love Drake. That was apparently unfathomable. Oblivion or scoffing, those seemed to be the options her best friend had considered for her.
Dot had her hand on the doorknob, and enough panicked energy probably fired her veins to carry her out and home without a moment’s thought.
And Margot didn’t know what to say. None of the answers she could give would mean a thing to her friend just now.
But maybe a question would. “Dot.”
She paused with the door open, glaring over her shoulder. Furious. Hurting. Scared.
Drake had been right. Having courage didn’t mean the fear wasn’t always there, ready to pounce. She swallowed. “Will you want to marry him any less tomorrow? Must you make a decision today?”
The door slammed behind her.
Margot sighed and sank back onto the couch. Wrong question, apparently. She buried her fingers in her already-mussed hair and knotted them there. Why was she so miserable at this? She hadn’t had such troubles with Claudette when they were girls. She got on fine with Willa and her sisters. She’d thought she and Dot had established a solid friendship too. The kind that could stand a few tests and trials. The kind that would be there through the storms. The kind that tried to understand, not to judge.
“It means nothing to you.” She drew a breath in, let it out. He knew. Drake knew it meant something. He’d understood last night that the tangle of feelings inside her couldn’t be put into regular language. He’d known what she meant. That Eighteen was I love you.
Why couldn’t Dot understand it too? Had Margot been such a bad friend, shown so little of herself? She thought she’d been honest. Showed her who she really was and been accepted. Maybe she’d been wrong.
Eighteen.
Memory? A fresh command? She rose and moved to DID’s window, where she could look out across the parade grounds. Folding her arms across her middle, clasping her opposite elbows, she tried. She tried.
God . . .
Her chest hurt. And her hair felt wrong. And the windowpane, when she rested her forehead against it, was so very cold.
Father . . .
Drake was out there, somewhere in France, searching through burned-out rubble for a codebook. Who knew which side of enemy lines it was on, or how safe he’d be. Whether he’d come back.
Lord . . .
What if he didn’t come back? What if the Sopwith was shot down, or enemy soldiers were guarding the wreck? What if he died and he never came home and Dot refused to speak to her again? What if that man who wasn’t Williams followed him or was lying in wait when he got back or planted a bomb in the plane?
What if he, too, looked at her one day like his sister had just done and decided she couldn’t possibly love him?
“Eighteen.” She whispered it to the glass and watched her breath make a patch of fog that expanded, halted, and contracted again so slowly. “Eighteen.” She lifted a finger and pressed it to the glass. To the fog. Drew a one. Then an eight.
It vanished, of course, as the fog receded. But her finger had left its oils on the glass. It would come back if she breathed on it again. Faintly, but visible. It was there. A prayer. A declaration.
She pushed away from the window and trudged toward the door. The admiral would need his office. And she had work to do.
“Why did I let you talk me into this?” Camden pushed aside another pine bough and ducked under it, holding it out of the way for Drake too.
He checked his compass again and smiled. “Because you were tired of sitting in an office all day.”
“There’s that. But if we were going to steal an airplane, we could have gone somewhere more pleasant.” Hands on his hips, Camden surveyed the forest around them as if the mere power of his scowl could make any zeppelin debris rise from the undergrowth.
“We didn’t steal the airplane.” Drake angled back to the northeast and slid the compass back into his pocket. They’d gotten a bit off course when they had to bypass that stream. “We’ll be within the five-mile radius of the crash site in another minute or two, I should think.”
Margot would know it by the second. She could probably chart it all out in her head and keep them on course without even looking at the landscape around her. A compass, a watch, a gauge of their speed.
He glanced around. “You’re sure there are no enemy soldiers about?”
“Our reconnaissance said the area is clear.” Camden brushed a stray pine needle from his jodhpurs and struck out. “And the RNAS didn’t know I was the one flying it. If they had, they wouldn’t have let Hall requisition it. Ergo, I flew it without permission, which is, if I’m not mistaken, stealing.” Half his mouth tilted up in his usual mischievous smile. “Look at that. Another offense for which they can court-martial me.”
“You’re welcome.” Drake kept pace with ease. And paused to thank the Lord for it. His side didn’t hurt anymore, and he really wasn’t any slower now than he’d been before. Or if so, not by much. All that training on the stairs had paid off.
They both came to a halt when there was a break in the trees, a winter-brown meadow stretching out ahead of them.
“This must be it,” Camden said. “The place the pilots spotted on their descent.”
Drake nodded and looked at the treetops on the opposite side of the meadow for any sign of debris. “Assuming they told the truth.”
“They didn’t seem in a state of mind to lie well.” Camden turned in a circle, his neck craned up as well. “I’ve never seen anything like their disorientation.”
Drake squinted at something glinting across the way, in a branch halfway down one of the tall pines. He couldn’t make out what it was, but something man-made, surely, to shine like that. He pointed at it. “I didn’t realize zeppelins could fly high enough to produce altitude sickness.”
“They shouldn’t.” Camden squinted, too, at where he indicated and nodded. They started off across the meadow. “They must
have gotten caught in an updraft. From what I could glean, it was their panic from the sickness that caused the crash, not the weather itself.”
They’d survived though and were now in Allied custody. Drake prayed with every step that it would work out to their benefit. That they’d find the codebook, the one they needed. That somewhere in those slips of yellow in the book about Go, there would be answers.
“Will you stop that?”
Drake angled a look at his friend. “Stop what?”
“Praying. I can tell you are, and it’s blighted annoying. Reminds me of my brother.”
Drake chuckled and looked forward again. Camden had always adored his younger brother—not that he’d ever admit it aloud, but woe to anyone who harassed the younger Camden at school. “I’ll stop praying when you stop trying to pick a fight with everyone you see.”
Camden pursed his lips. “It’s an embarrassment, having to claim a clergyman for a brother. I don’t need a pious friend too.”
“Apparently you do. Because so far as I’ve seen, you don’t have many others just now.”
“Fine by me. I’m not interested—”
“In making friends. Yes, I’ve heard your new mantra. How fortunate for us both that I didn’t need to be made.” He craned his head back again as they drew near the tree. Though of course, from this angle he couldn’t see anything flashing. “This is the one, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Here, hold this.” Camden whipped off his hat, shoved it at Drake’s chest, and clapped his hands together. Then leapt up to the nearest branch.
“You don’t have to be the one to climb. I’m perfectly capable—”
“You were shot recently, Elton. Last thing we need is you pulling something open halfway up a tree. I don’t much fancy carrying you back to the airstrip.” He pulled himself up to a standing position on that branch and jumped for another. “Besides, it takes me back to our school days. I passed many a happy hour in those trees.”
The Number of Love Page 31