The More Deceived

by David Roberts

  The MORE

  DECEIVED

  By the same author

  Sweet Poison

  Bones of the Buried

  Hollow Crown

  Dangerous Sea

  The MORE

  DECEIVED

  DAVID ROBERTS

  Constable • London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2004

  Copyright © David Roberts 2004

  The right of David Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1-84119-753-X

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-765-4

  Printed and bound in the EU

  For Sophie

  I am grateful to the staff of the Brooklands Museum, Weybridge, for their help and advice

  Ophelia: I was the more deceived.

  _______________

  Hamlet: ’Tis the breathing time of day with me.

  Let the foils be brought . . .

  Shakespeare, Hamlet

  April 1937

  1

  Lord Edward Corinth stood poised on the balls of his feet, prepared to meet the attack which he knew would be fierce and unforgiving. In the few seconds remaining to him, he assessed his stance and was satisfied. His knees were bent, his feet at right angles, the back foot turned slightly forward. His rear arm was raised to balance the épée he grasped in his right hand, arm outstretched breast-high. Beneath his mask, a trickle of sweat rolled off his forehead on to the bridge of his beaky nose causing him to move his head very slightly.

  ‘Hold still! Keep your head perfectly still,’ came the cry as he knew it would. ‘No, don’t look at your blade. Always eye to eye.’

  Edward cursed silently. His knee, injured in a car accident two years earlier, was quite strong again despite his having fallen awkwardly on it while chasing a girl on the Queen Mary just a month ago but, if he did not move in the next few seconds, it might just betray him.

  ‘En garde! Lunge! Keep your back foot flat. Good! Lunge – recover – lunge!’

  Two hectic minutes later Edward felt his épée taken out of his hand as easily as candy from a child. As he heard, rather than saw it clatter across the floor, he stepped back and lifted his mask.

  ‘For God’s sake, what happened? I thought I was just about to flèche.’

  His instructor laughed. ‘It was bad of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist it. You laid yourself right open. First I confused your sense of distance by having my arm more retracted than usual, then I went under your arm aiming at the wrist. Always remember, Lord Edward, the best time to attack is when your opponent steps forward. You are tall – taller than me by nine inches – and I had to prevent you using that advantage. I had to keep you at relatively close quarters and attack your blade. You must try not to signal your intentions to your adversary, though. But you did well.’

  ‘I’m so out of condition, Cavens. I hope you won’t despair of me.’

  Fred Cavens, Edward’s instructor and swordmaster, was a graduate of the Belgian Military Institute. Whenever Douglas Fairbanks embarked on a film such as The Black Pirate or The Iron Mask in which he was called upon to bound across the set, sword in hand, duelling with some evil opponent, Cavens was there instructing him and occasionally stepping in for him when the fight became too acrobatic. He also arranged fights for Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn, both of whom had become close friends.

  Edward had once asked him why Belgians seemed to do all the fight arranging in Hollywood and he said, ‘Les Français sont trop difficiles. We Belgians are . . . more relaxed. You understand?’

  Fenton, Lord Edward’s valet, came forward with a towel and helped him remove his sweat-sodden clothes before proceeding to rub him down. They were in his rooms in Albany. Fenton privately considered the dining-room, even when stripped of its furniture and oriental rugs, an inappropriate place in which to take violent exercise and hinted as much now. Edward was adamant.

  ‘You sound just like my dear departed Aunt Gladys. Of course this is the place to fence in. Do you not realize that these were Byron’s chambers? This was his salle d’armes. He sparred just where we are standing with John “Gentleman” Jackson – “Bruiser” Jackson as he was known in the ring – boxing champion of England during the Regency. And with Henry Angelo he practised with foil and broadsword. It would be ridiculous for any of the other residents to object and they haven’t, have they?’

  ‘No, my lord, but . . .’

  The telephone rang and Fenton excused himself and went out to the hall to answer it.

  ‘Saved by the bell, eh? You know, Cavens, Fenton’s the best valet in London but there are times when he makes me feel like a naughty little boy. I had a nanny just like him when I was a child. I had to get rid of her by putting tadpoles in her jam sandwiches.’

  Cavens laughed. ‘I shall go now. You remember that I leave for Germany on Friday?’

  ‘Yes, I gather fencing is fashionable there at the moment. I know Mussolini has been encouraging it in Italy.’

  ‘In Germany I number Herr Himmler among my students.’

  Edward frowned. ‘That man? I thought fencing was a sport for gentlemen.’

  Cavens looked embarrassed and Edward felt he had been rude. ‘Ah well!’ he said with an effort at humour. ‘Just because Fascists like to fence doesn’t mean we have to give it up. My friend Verity Browne tells me that Karl Marx also liked to fence.’

  Cavens smiled weakly. ‘You know the old joke? The German said to the Frenchman, “After all, when the history of the Great War is written, it will be difficult to decide where the greater measure of blame lies.” “Well, my friend,” the Frenchman says, “the one thing history will not say is that Belgium invaded Germany.”’

  Edward smiled wryly. ‘I say, Cavens, it’s very good of you to spare the time to teach me. Are you sure I am not being a bore . . . wasting your time and whatnot?’

  ‘No, indeed. You are a natural athlete, Lord Edward, and if it were not for your knee and your . . .’

  ‘I know! My great age . . .’ Edward was about to be thirty-eight.

  ‘You are not too old. One of my pupils started at sixty. Fencing is like a physical game of chess. It helps to be quick and agile but if you are slower you can fence defensively. If you trained hard enough you could reach Olympic standard.’

  ‘No, no, Cavens old man. It’s true I did fence a bit at Eton but I hardly did anything when I was at Cambridge . . . had other fish to fry . . . so I’m terribly rusty now, as you can see.’

  ‘While I am away, practise, practise, practise and then practise some more. When I am back we shall continue our search for la botte secrète – the perfect thrust, n’est-ce pas?’

  At that moment Fenton re-entered the room. ‘Sir Robert Vansittart is on the telephone, my lord. He wishes to speak to you.’

  ‘His secretary, you mean?’

  ‘No, my lord, Sir Robert himself.’

  ‘Good heavens! What can I have done to deserve this?’

  Vansittart was Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs – the Foreign
Office’s effective chief. Not a politician but, nevertheless, highly political, he wielded immense power and could promote or vitiate the policy of his political masters. If he supported the Foreign Secretary – at this time Anthony Eden – he could be a most able servant but also a dangerous enemy. What this great man could have to say to him, Edward could not imagine. Wrapped in a towel, he hurried to the telephone half expecting to find one of his friends was playing a joke on him.

  ‘Sir Robert, I apologize for keeping you waiting. I was just . . .’

  ‘Ah! Lord Edward. I am delighted to have caught you. Something has come up which I thought might interest you. Can’t say anything about it on the telephone but I wondered if you were free this afternoon? Forgive the short notice but . . .’

  ‘Of course, Sir Robert. I have no engagement I cannot break. Shall I come to your office about three?’

  ‘Could we say four? I have a luncheon which may drag on. The Italian ambassador . . . need I say more?’

  Edward’s elder brother, the Duke of Mersham, had once reprimanded him for dressing sloppily with the comment, ‘If you cannot dress like a gentleman, you should at least dress like a Conservative.’ Another piece of advice the Duke was fond of repeating was ‘Gentlemen shop at gentlemen’s shops’ and Edward always had. His suits were made in Savile Row by Leslie and Roberts, his boots by Lobb and his hats by Lock in St James’s Street. Thus it was that, when Edward set out for the Foreign Office, he was impeccably dressed in his most sober tie and black pinstripe suit. Fenton had urged him to wear spats but he had declined on the grounds that they were beginning to look old-fashioned. Fenton had pursed his lips and begun to protest but Edward had cut him short.

  ‘I want to look reliable and . . . respectable and so forth but I don’t want to look a complete fossil.’

  The truth was that Edward wanted to be taken seriously. Over the past two years he had done several jobs – unofficial ones – for the Foreign Office or at the behest of Major Ferguson of Special Branch but he had never met Vansittart. With war looming, he was anxious to establish his position with the powers-that-be on a more formal footing. It was not a question of money. He had plenty of that. It was more that he wanted to be useful . . . to have a purpose in life . . . to serve his country and be able to tell himself he wasn’t just a useless coureur de dames. He was easily bored and the idea of office work of any kind filled him with horror. Politics was out of the question. All the hypocrisy, the lies you had to tell and the babies you had to kiss.

  There was always the army but he was really too old to imagine he would be allowed to do any real fighting. No, what he was good at – if he was good at anything – was nosing out the truth and he had a feeling that this was where there was a role for him. Not spying exactly but . . . well, he supposed it was a type of police work. He had been told that Vansittart thought well of him – he had done some useful work preventing a scandal which might have touched the Royal Family – but to be commissioned by him personally . . . that was something else.

  It was a glorious spring day and he decided to walk across St James’s Park rather than take the Lagonda. He had, of course, no idea how he appeared to passers-by as he strode purposefully across the grass, recently mown for the first time that year. Tall, long-legged, with a look on his face which a foolish observer might have mistaken for vacuous, he exuded the confidence – some might say the arrogance – of the upper-class Englishman who had never had reason to doubt his place in the universe. In point of fact he did often doubt himself and, as he scattered the ducks drying their feathers beside the water, he was far from feeling satisfied with his position or rather his reason for existing. He had a good brain. He was, despite his age, still something of an athlete. He had a large circle of friends not just in his own social circle but in neighbourhoods and social classes in which aristocratic young men rarely ventured. He had no wife or child but an amitié – irregular and hard to define – with a young Communist journalist who exhibited an annoying preference for Europe’s battlefields over the joys of Piccadilly.

  He twitched his nose and sighed. A child in a perambulator looked at him pityingly and the child’s nanny – a woman the size of a small sofa and of indeterminate age – pushed her charge out of danger with a snort of indignation. Five minutes later he found himself outside George Gilbert Scott’s undeniably impressive building, the epitome of Empire. The Foreign Office, as Scott had planned it, was designed to impress and it certainly did make a statement. Scott seemed to be saying that even the grandest potentate, the richest maharaja, the most self-regarding president was, in the presence of the Queen Empress, of little account. That was the 1870s. Sixty-five years later Queen Victoria was dead and the British Empire had been undermined by a great war which had bled it of its best young men and reduced it to near bankruptcy but the illusion of power lingered on.

  Edward wondered if this magnificent building would survive the next war. Stanley Baldwin had said the bomber would always get through, seeming to imply that there was no defence against the new air force of militant Germany. It was a grim thought. As he had a few minutes to spare, he walked round to stand in front of Lutyens’ Cenotaph. With head bared and bowed, he stood for a minute or two remembering his older brother who, had he not been killed in France in 1914, would have been Duke of Mersham. He prayed fervently but without real conviction that Britain would not again be called upon to sacrifice its young men and thought particularly of his nephew Frank, now in America but soon to return home.

  At last he entered the great quadrangle and made his presence known to a uniformed porter. After a muffled colloquy on an antiquated telephone, he was led by a frock-coated flunkey beneath the gilded dome, up the grand staircase and along a gallery. They arrived at an impressive door upon which the flunkey knocked. Edward entered a large room in which two female secretaries were clattering away on typewriters. A pleasant-faced young man rose from behind a desk and took Edward’s coat and hat. He then knocked on an inner door and there was a brisk shout of ‘Enter.’

  The room was cavernous but Edward’s eye was immediately drawn to Sir Robert’s desk which was stacked with scarlet-and-gold despatch boxes as though he was the Foreign Secretary. A huge vase of flowers stood in the fireplace on either side of which were glass-fronted bookcases full of leather-bound tomes. For a moment he had the impression he was in one of those libraries in great country houses where the books are purely decorative and have never been removed from their shelves. There was a portrait over the fireplace of one of Sir Robert’s distinguished predecessors and two or three other portraits of men in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century dress hung elsewhere around the room. The views from the windows were of St James’s Park.

  The man behind the huge desk rose and came round the side of it, his hand outstretched. ‘Lord Edward, how very good of you to come and at such short notice, too.’

  Sir Robert ushered him to a small sofa at one side of the room and sat himself down opposite. He was a handsome man, six foot one, strong-jawed with a twinkle in his eye. As Edward shook his hand his first impression was of a man alert and straightforward in a profession tending to the devious. As he knew, Sir Robert was not only a diplomat but a poet, playwright and novelist. His plays had been put on in the West End with some success and a play he had written in French performed to acclaim in Paris. He was a close friend of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and had been his principal private secretary. He had become head of the Foreign Office in 1930 at the age of forty-nine and now, seven years later, was at his peak – assured, patrician, some would say arrogant. He had an abiding hatred of Germany – a country he knew well and whose language he spoke fluently – and a great love of France though he despaired of its politicians. As early as 1930 – before Hitler had become a menace to world peace – he had forecast that Germany would demand to become a great power with an army at least the size of Poland’s and would seek union with Austria.

  ‘My younger brother Nick was a friend of
your brother’s at Eton,’ he was saying. ‘I remember meeting him. It was a tragedy – one of so many – his dying like that in the first weeks of the war. It was a great pain to me that I was kept from the battlefield by diplomatic work. Those of us who survived the carnage must do whatever we can to prevent a second bout but it will be a miracle if we can bring it off.’

  Edward said nothing but smiled and then, fearing he might seem inane, frowned and muttered, ‘Indeed, indeed.’

  Fortunately, the great man appeared not to expect an answer and went on talking. ‘I have heard a great deal about you, Lord Edward, and I was particularly struck by the way you handled that unpleasant business of Mrs Simpson’s stolen letters. Of course, I should call her the Duchess of Windsor now, though I must say it rather sticks in the craw. The point I’m driving at is that it appears you have a talent for discreet investigation and that’s just what I need now . . . a discreet investigator. You come highly recommended by Major Ferguson of Special Branch.’

  Edward had come across Ferguson when he had been trying to retrieve Mrs Simpson’s letters and had then been commissioned by him to protect Lord Benyon on his recent trip to the United States.

  ‘You want something investigated? A crime?’

  ‘Not quite that. Have a cigarette? No? Well, you won’t mind if I do.’ Vansittart took a cigarette from a box on his desk and subsided once again into his chair. He was obviously finding it difficult to know where to start.

  ‘No crime has been committed, or at least none that I am aware of, but there has been a . . . a lapse in security.’

  ‘A foreign agent?’ Edward hazarded.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Vansittart said hurriedly. ‘Oh dear! I had better be explicit. I need hardly say that anything I tell you is confidential.’