The Secret Life of Violet Grant

by Beatriz Williams

  I removed my red leather gloves and tucked them into my palm. “In that case, there’s no problem at all.”

  Now. It was almost worth the trouble of being kidnapped by the various loving arms of Her Majesty’s snoopy government to walk through the double doors of the Imperial suite and see, foremost, a foil-topped champagne neck poking through a bucket of ice in the center of a mahogany table, and, hindmost, Buckingham Palace flirting wickedly through the bare gray trees. My luggage had been unpacked and put away in the closet. A room-service menu lay open next to the champagne. In the bedroom, a vase of pink-and-white stargazer lilies perfumed the air, newly spread, about as subtle as a banana dipped in honey. A note lay inside: With gratitude. James. How I loved a man of three words.

  I opened the champagne with an expert whisper of a pop and ordered myself a breakfast of imperial proportions, even though it was one o’clock in the afternoon. It arrived a quarter hour later in silver domes. I tossed the waiter a few bob. Hoped I wouldn’t need them later.

  I ate every crumb of my imperial breakfast, including the parsley, and drank half the champagne, and then I fell face first on the imperial bed and didn’t wake up until the sky was black.

  • • •

  TRUE TO HIS BOND, James was waiting for me in the hotel bar. Two drinks sat in front of him: not martinis, either shaken or stirred, but good old-fashioned whiskey. He pushed one glass in my direction. “I thought about ordering you a champagne cocktail, but reconsidered at the last minute.”

  “Good man.” I sipped. “You have the suitcase?”

  He patted the lump next to him. “Right here. Everything’s inside, exactly as it was. Except the papers in the lining, of course. I hope you don’t mind if we keep those.”

  “All right. Now suppose you start from the beginning, like a clever boy.”

  He smiled, all thin-lipped and masculine. “Has anyone ever told you you’re the most extraordinary woman to cross an interrogation room since the Mata Hari? I don’t suppose you’re in need of employment.”

  “Now, James. Don’t try to change the subject.”

  He gave my glass a little clink and drank his whiskey. “All right. I’ll jump right in. The document you were carrying in your aunt Violet’s suitcase, this document which has apparently been sitting in a godforsaken Zurich government warehouse for the past half century, is one of the most significant finds in the history of military intelligence. That document, if delivered to the British consulate in Switzerland as intended, might conceivably have prevented the outbreak of the First World War.”

  I might conceivably have coughed up a drop or two of whiskey. James might have been forced to pat my back.

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “One piece of paper? There was no way to prevent the war. The . . . the dominoes . . .”

  “There’s no way to know for certain, of course. But that was the idea. That was why Lionel Richardson fled Berlin at the end of July 1914. He was trying to reach Switzerland before war was irrevocably declared.”

  “Lionel Richardson was a spy.” I said it flatly, as a fact. Because I’d had several hours now to accustom myself to that conclusion, the only possible conclusion from the moment that envelope had been extracted from Violet’s suitcase.

  Unless Violet herself was the spy.

  James nodded. “One of our best operatives in those years. He’d gone to Germany that summer to investigate Dr. Grant, who was supposed to be gathering information for us, but who we believed—correctly, as it turned out—was actually working for the Germans.”

  “Oh, stop. Walter was a double agent?”

  “Yes.”

  I lifted my glass, but it was empty. James signaled the bartender.

  When I didn’t speak, he went on himself. “We’d heard that the marriage was an unhappy one, that Dr. Grant was . . . well . . .”

  “A philandering pig.”

  “As you say. So Lionel was sent to . . . well, to work his way into the confidence of Dr. Grant’s wife, to engage her trust.”

  “That’s not true. He was in love with her.”

  James gave me an exquisite look. “Miss Schuyler, I’m sure your aunt was a lovely woman, but Richardson was a professional. He was extremely good at this sort of activity; he’d pulled it off countless times before. Naturally, he would have made quite certain she felt he was in love with her, that was part of engaging her trust . . .”

  I shook my head. “No. He loved her. They were in love.”

  The bartender returned with fresh drinks. I snatched mine and downed it deep. James pulled a cigarette case out of his jacket pocket and offered the contents silently.

  “The note,” I said, after he had lit me up. “The note he wrote her. With the rose petals.”

  “As I said, he was very good at what he did. They say he was better than Olivier, he could make you believe anything. And of course he was the right sort, bad and dangerous, the sort the ladies love to ruin themselves over, God knows why.” James lit his own cigarette and gazed across the room. “I’d give anything to have seen him in action.”

  “You’re sick. All of you. I know he loved her.”

  “You have proof of this, Miss Schuyler?”

  I touched my chest with my palm. “I know. Don’t give me that smug smile, young man.”

  “I’m not smiling. In any case, the two of them had an affair, Richardson and Mrs. Grant, I think we can agree on that, and Richardson was able to get the information we needed to neutralize the husband. We planted some false information with him, which did a little good. But this was the real coup: there was a guest in Wittenberg, at the Grants’ country house, a German government official who was ambivalent about the prospect of war. Thought Germany would ultimately suffer, that it would bring down Europe, that sort of thing. A real Cassandra. So Richardson made contact with him, and together they worked out an alternative scenario, by which Richardson proposed a British-led guarantee of autonomy for Alsace—”

  “Alsace?”

  “A French province, lost to Germany a generation earlier in the Prussian War. The prospect of wresting it away from German control would coax France to remain neutral, at least for the critical period. Meanwhile the German chap, Richardson’s contact, constructed an alternative deployment for his country’s troops that would send all resources east instead. The idea being, you see, that Russia would refrain from mobilizing because it could not count on French support, and then Germany would have no imminent threat to mobilize against. The chain of dominoes would be stopped in its tracks.”

  “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” I whispered. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. Audacious, wasn’t it? Richardson went to Berlin—”

  “With Violet.”

  “With Mrs. Grant. She was apparently leaving her husband. He went to the British ambassador with the document, but there was nothing Goschen could do, he couldn’t vouch for the integrity of the cables or the diplomatic pouches at that point, so Richardson decided to get it out of the country himself. That was his last communication from Germany, a coded cable he sent on the evening of July twenty-sixth, that he was on his way to the consulate in Zurich.”

  “That was the night Dr. Grant was murdered.”

  “Yes. So he fled with Mrs. Grant—”

  “You see? He loved her. He would have left her behind at that point, if he didn’t love her.”

  “He was using her, Miss Schuyler. He was using her as a courier, in case he was stopped, in case he was found out as a British national. That’s what we discovered today. These documents, which had gone missing from history, he had sewn them into the lining of Mrs. Grant’s suitcase.”

  “But why? If she didn’t know they were there, if he was using her as you say, how would she know what to do with them?”

  “I expect he gave her some sort of instruction. And he had another plan, a backu
p, as I believe you Americans call it, if he were in fact separated from Mrs. Grant.”

  “And what was that?” I stubbed out my exhausted cigarette.

  James jiggled his ice and noticed my predicament. He took out another smoke from his case, lit it against the glowing end of his own, and handed it to me. A long scar ran across the back of his right hand, which I hadn’t noticed before, thin and vicious. His fingers lingered against mine. Another hand appeared in my head, smooth and unscarred, with a surgeon’s adept fingers and close-clipped nails. It lay atop my naked breast to count the strikes of my heart, gathump gathump. A bit elevated, I think, Miss Schuyler. A bit overstimulated. Whatever shall we do to relax you.

  “Are you quite certain you want to hear all this, Miss Schuyler? All this ancient history. Because, to be perfectly honest, I’m finding the present moment decidedly more interesting.”

  I drew my hand away from his to lift the cigarette to my lips. “How interesting that you find it interesting, James. Still, I’d like to finish what we started, before we plot ourselves any brand-new shenanigans. I’m just orderly that way.”

  Our knees touched, stool to stool. James leaned his elbow intimately on the bar. His eyes were no longer flat and reptilian, but full of whiskey warmth.

  “Orderly, are you?”

  “Like a nurse with her favorite patient.”

  James plucked a chip of ice from his drink and drew it along the back of my hand. “All right, then. Richardson was working with another pair of agents that summer. An American woman and her son. A woman called the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré, except that the young fellow with her wasn’t really her son. He was another agent of ours, an extraordinarily precocious young American chap, who was pretending to be a student of Grant’s for the summer.”

  Violet

  The carriage is as still as moonlight. Violet rises and sinks on Lionel’s chest, listening to the motionless air.

  A distant shout. A faint bang, like a carriage door.

  Lionel slides out of the bed and pulls Violet with him. “Get dressed. No, not the pajamas. Your clothes. That’s it.”

  She struggles to cover her guilt: her damp belly, her flushed chest. Lionel fastens her stays with calm fingers and hands her her stockings. He tugs on his drawers, his shirt, his trousers. He fastens his braces and slings them over his enormous shoulders. From the valise he takes a dark object and slides it into his waistband. Violet’s breath sticks in her lungs.

  Lionel slides on his jacket and snaps the valise shut. “Ready?”

  “For what?”

  He cracks open the compartment door and glances down the corridor. Violet hears another bang, louder this time, and voices hurrying in urgent German. “Christ,” mutters Lionel. He draws her into the corridor and taps on the compartment next door.

  It opens to reveal Henry’s dark head. “Sir?”

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Leaving?”

  Jane’s voice. “The third rendezvous?”

  “Yes.”

  The door closes. Lionel tugs Violet to the rear end of the wagon-lit just as the steward appears at the opposite end. “Sir? Herr Brown?” he calls.

  “Just taking Mrs. Brown for a bit of air!” Lionel calls gaily.

  “Sir! You can’t! There is a police matter . . .”

  Lionel forces open the door, tosses down the valise, and leaps to the ground. He turns and holds out his arms. “Now, Violet!”

  She jumps into his chest, into the warm and shadowed night. Without a pause, he takes her hand and picks up the valise and runs to the edge of a dark-rimmed wood.

  • • •

  VIOLET STUMBLES between the trees, clutching Lionel’s steady hand. “But the steward!” she pants. “Won’t he raise the alarm?”

  “Jane will take care of him.”

  Ahead, the trees open up into a clearing. The moon has vanished, but the faint light of the rising dawn illuminates the shapes around them. Lionel stops at the edge, takes out his watch, and makes a slow rotation, taking in every shadowy detail of the landscape around them.

  Violet sinks atop a fallen log and draws in as much air as she can. They must have run a mile, at least. “Where are we?” she asks.

  “Judging by the time and the mountains off to the south, I’d say we’re about fifty miles from the border.”

  “Fifty miles!”

  He turns and looks at her. “Are you all right?”

  “It’s nothing. Just . . . my stays, I suppose . . .”

  “Oh, damn. Of course. I’m sorry.” He unbuttons her blouse and pulls it apart, over her shoulders. His fingers find the tapes at the sides of her stays and loosens them. “Better?”

  “I won’t ask where you acquired your familiarity with ladies’ underthings.”

  “And I won’t ask why the devil you persist in wearing such wretchedly uncomfortable garments.”

  “Walter . . .” She stops. Walter likes my waist small and my breasts high. Or rather, Walter liked. What had begun as an effort to please her lover’s exacting taste had become a habit, a vanity she could not quite shake, like the gradual lengthening of her hair. Her small waist and her high breasts had become as essential to her sense of herself, of Violet Schuyler, as her intellect.

  Lionel buttons her blouse again. “When we’re in Paris, Violet, replacing your lost wardrobe, you’ll start fresh, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll buy whatever suits you. Because I don’t happen to give a damn what you wear during the day.” He winks a hungry eye and leaves the night unaccounted for.

  “Yes.” She smiles. They stand in the middle of an unknown woods, having leapt off a train in the night, pursued by German police, and Lionel is discussing her wardrobe. Making saucy remarks, as if nothing’s the matter, as if everything is well in hand. As if the shops of Paris are only a mile or two away.

  He does it on purpose, of course. To keep her calm, to keep her from panicking. We can’t have the lady panicking now, can we?

  Lionel picks up the valise. “Off we go, then. Thank God you’ve got sensible shoes, at least.”

  “One never knows when one’s going to be tramping through the countryside at sunrise, after all.” Violet takes his hand.

  “One never knows.”

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, they’re riding bicycles, which Lionel has found in a shed. The shed was in the village of Gomaringen, which they reached just as the sun crowned the rooftops and turned the distant glaciers a delicate shade of pink.

  Lionel whistles as he pedals. The valise is strapped to the back of his bicycle with a length of weathered rope, also from the shed. Violet insisted on leaving a few deutschemarks behind. “You’re not cut out for this work, are you?” he said, shaking his head.

  “No, thank God. I prefer my laboratory.”

  “And you shall have it, my love. By God, you shall have the finest laboratory in Europe, if I have to lay each brick with my own hands.”

  Violet flattens her eyebrows at his radiant mood, his happy whistling. Both bicycles are made for men, and she has gathered her skirts like harem trousers about her legs. She keeps her gaze pinned to Lionel’s gray wool back as they pedal through the hot valley. She doesn’t want to see the spectacular scenery, the triumphant surrounding mountains. After all, the landscape will exist forever.

  She only wants to see Lionel.

  • • •

  IN THE AFTERNOON, as the sun burns through Violet’s blouse and the perspiration rolls down her skin, Lionel stops by a river. “It’s damned hot,” he says, dismounting the bicycle. “Let’s cool off.”

  Violet balances her feet on the pedals and glances about. There’s nobody near, only the grass and trees, the broad cool river flashing white in the sun. Lionel is already pulling down his braces, unbuttoning his shirt. He looks at h
er and grins. “Come on, then.”

  “What, without any clothes?”

  “Of course, without any clothes.” He toes off his shoes and shucks his trousers from his thick legs.

  “Here, in the open?”

  “There’s nobody here but us.” The afternoon light covers his burly body in gold. Without waiting, he jumps into the water. A splash explodes in the quiet air. “Ah, marvelous. Come in, Violet. Swim with me.”

  Swim with me. Violet shakes her head and glances at the horizon. Her muscles ache, her skin throbs with heat, while yards away, the cool river beckons. Lionel beckons, with his long brown fingers and his cheerfully wicked smile.

  Violet swings her leg over the bicycle, props it against a tree, and finds the fastening of her skirt.

  When she looks over the bank of the river, Lionel is paddling on his back, gazing up at the pale sky as if he’s not running for his life, hurrying to the border as fast as he can. “I thought we were in a rush,” she says, covering her naked parts awkwardly with her hands.

  Lionel’s gaze finds her. He scrambles upright. “God, look at you.”

  “Aren’t we in a rush?”

  He holds out his arms. “You were about to topple off your bicycle. You need a rest. An hour won’t make any difference.”

  Gingerly, Violet steps down the bank and into the water. “Oh, it’s freezing.”

  “Come on, then. You do know how to swim, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Violet draws in her breath and pushes herself forward through the mountain-fed current, toward the radiant Lionel, whose arms are still stretched toward her.

  Later, as they scramble dripping on the riverbank, Lionel drags her face against his. “You do believe me, Violet? You trust me, don’t you?”

  She can’t answer. How can she answer, when his body is against hers, when they are soldered together like this?

  He holds himself still and hot against her skin. “Violet, tell me you trust me.”

  She takes his face between her palms and kisses him.

  “Violet cannot let a lie,” he says, in his softest voice.