A Kiss Across Time

by Louise Allen

  The carriage lurched, rocked, then hit something. There was a nasty crack and the whole thing slumped to the side, fortunately towards the pavement, not towards the direction the shots had come from. ‘Stay down, lie still. I think an axle has broken.’

  Silence. They were probably reloading. Where is Garrick? I scrambled up and tugged desperately at one of the seats. As I’d hoped, it came up as a piece, revealing the frame beneath. I lifted it and jammed it against the broken window as another shot cracked out. The upended seat bucked in my hands, but nothing came through.

  Lady Radcliffe sat up, pushed off her bonnet and rummaged in the empty space revealed beneath the seat. ‘I thought so.’ She held up two heavy pistols. ‘Can you use these?’

  ‘Are they loaded?’ I countered. I’d had no firearms training – Special Constables didn’t – and even if I had, those things looked like something Dick Turpin would have been at home with. Could I shoot someone? I supposed I could if they were threatening to kill me. It looked as though I was going to find out.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They aren’t cocked.’

  What the devil was the coachman doing? I thought as I became aware of screaming and shouting outside. What the devil was Garrick doing, come to that? Please let him be OK. No-one was shooting now.

  How many shots had there been initially? More than three, I was sure, but with the answering shots from the grooms, the keeper and, I hoped, Garrick, it was hard to tell. I dragged back the hammer on one of the pistols, almost dislocating my thumb in the process and swore. There was a tsk of disapproval from the floor.

  ‘If you don’t want me to swear, then don’t kidnap me and drag me along to places where I get shot at,’ I snapped.

  Luc’s mother laughed. For a horrible moment I thought I was dealing with hysterics on top of everything else, but it was a genuine snort of amusement. I was beginning to like this woman. ‘Here, hold this.’ I shoved the cocked pistol at her as she huddled on the tilting floor, feet wedged against the door, and grabbed the other one. This time I had the knack of it and the trigger clicked back at the first pull.

  Then the undamaged door opened, almost precipitating us both out, and a man ducked in. I raised the pistol in both hands. ‘Don’t move, this is loaded.’

  ‘So I should hope, Mademoiselle Lawrence.’ It was the Comte de Hautmont. ‘Lady Radcliffe, are you unharmed? There is blood.’

  We were both bleeding from flying glass, I realised. ‘Stop right there,’ I warned, with no idea if I was capable of pulling the trigger or not. Then I realised that his presence had to be a coincidence. No-one could have known that Lady Radcliffe would encounter me or that she would turn around and take me back to her house instead of continuing on with her calls. We had been followed on horseback or in a carriage and the Count had been on foot.

  I shifted the muzzle away from him. ‘Have they gone?’

  ‘I believe so. Your coachman has been shot in the arm, Lady Radcliffe, but not seriously.’

  ‘Garrick – he was driving the carriage behind us.’

  ‘Miss Lawrence.’ I could hear him behind the Count. ‘Are you unhurt?’

  ‘Just small glass cuts,’ I called. ‘Is it safe to come out?’ I almost threw up, the relief of hearing his voice was so great.

  ‘Aye. Stay together.’

  The Count moved aside and Lady Radcliffe and I stumbled out onto the pavement, shielded by Lady Radcliffe’s gamekeeper on one side and Garrick and the Count on the other.

  ‘The horses, my driver – ’

  ‘I’ve left the grooms with them,’ Garrick said. He pushed us into a shop where startled-looking male assistants were standing around clutching armfuls of waistcoats. ‘Back door,’ he snapped and one of them hurried us through to where a door opened onto an alleyway.

  I’d no idea there was such a warren of little streets and mews in the area. We hurried along and finally Garrick opened a high gate in a wall opening onto a garden. He pushed us all in, then took a heavy bar and dropped it across to secure the entrance.

  ‘Grandmama!’ Two small boys came running across the small patch of grass sending hoops and balls flying. They stopped, mouths open, when they saw the blood.

  ‘Darlings.’ Lady Radcliffe swooped forward and hugged them. ‘Such excitement – the carriage broke an axle in Jermyn Street and then the window broke and we’ve lots of tiny little cuts from the glass. You must kiss them better for me in a minute.’ She had exactly the right tone and my admiration went up another notch.

  The two boys went from lip-quivering alarm to wide-eyed excitement in a flash. Then I looked up and there was Luc. He was sheet-white, fists clenched. Garrick went to him, murmured something low-voiced in his ear with a nod towards us. Luc closed his eyes for a moment then said, with a calm I didn’t believe for one second, ‘How very alarming for you, Mama. Perhaps we had better discuss it when your woman has seen to your cuts and found something for you and Miss Lawrence to change into.’

  He gave the under-keeper a significant look and the man came forward, slinging his long gun over his back. ‘Boys, run along with Hodgkins and let Grandmama and Miss Lawrence come inside and shake the glass from their skirts.’ They scampered away, reassured by the adults’ calm, and Luc strode across the grass, kicking toys out of his way, and grabbed hold of both his mother and me in a vast hug. ‘I am going to kill whoever is behind this.’

  It wasn’t until we were inside that he asked, ‘How on earth were you together?’

  ‘Later, dear. Miss Lawrence and I are in no state for an analysis just now. Ah, Wilkins. Send Stratton to my dressing room and have tea brought up.’

  Stratton proved to be a formidably elegant dresser who had us both out of our gowns and petticoats in no time and then checked us over minutely for fragments of glass. Nothing had stuck in anywhere, thank goodness, and the little cuts soon stopped bleeding.

  Really, I felt quite well until I was laced into a borrowed gown, my shoes were returned to me and I sat down with a cup of tea in the little boudoir next to Lady Radcliffe’s bedchamber. Then the shakes hit.

  ‘I want Luc,’ I said. ‘And Garrick.’

  ‘My dear, I expect the men – ’

  I stood up and put down my cup. ‘Where will they be?’

  There was a scratch at the door and Luc came in. I didn’t expect anything from him – this was a time when ladies addressed their husbands by their surname or title, even in the bedchamber, and where for even a married couple to show any affection in public was considered hopelessly gauche. A smile could have done. Instead he took me by the shoulders, jerked me to him and kissed me – hard, fast, possessive. The look on his face when he released me stole my breath.

  He kept hold of me as he looked across to his mother. ‘Mama? You really are both unhurt?’

  ‘When the shooting started your Miss Lawrence threw me to the floor and shielded me with her body,’ Lady Radcliffe said. ‘She then took a seat squab to barricade the window and was prepared to shoot the attackers with the carriage pistols. I was very well guarded.’

  ‘Yes,’ Luc said. His smile was just a bit lopsided. ‘My Miss Lawrence is both courageous and formidable. Do you feel well enough to go to the boys, Mama? We need a council of war and I do not want them suspecting anything is wrong.’

  ‘Of course, dear. I will go along to the nursery now. What on earth is that racket?’

  The racket was James bursting through the front door, demanding to know what the devil was going on. Luc ran downstairs to shut him up before the boys heard him, leaving me to follow more slowly. My Miss Lawrence. It warmed the chilly emptiness inside that I suspected was fear. An attack in broad daylight in a crowded street meant whoever was behind this was either desperate or utterly ruthless. Possibly both.

  James was explaining that he’d been in Boodles’, a club on St James’s Street just around the corner from the attack, when one of the members had come in and told him that his mother’s carriage had been shot at. We ca
lmed him down, stopped him dashing upstairs to check on his mother because of alarming the twins and sat down in a grim-faced circle in the drawing room.

  Garrick was reporting on the coachman – flesh wound only, according to the doctor in attendance – before I realised that there were five of us. James, Luc, Garrick, me – and the Comte de Hautmont.

  ‘Monsieur le Comte,’ I said and realised that I no longer suspected him. He was against Elliott Reece, Lady Radcliffe vouched for him, he had come to help us just now… and I had not the slightest evidence against him.

  ‘Mademoiselle.’ He gave me a half-bow from his seat and I saw that the shoulder of his coat was ripped. The contrast to the rest of his immaculate elegance was shocking.

  ‘You’re wounded?’

  ‘A graze.’ He shrugged, as though to show it was trivial.

  ‘The Count ran to the carriage through the gunfire,’ Garrick said. ‘It would have been impossible to do what he did with the slightest certainty he wouldn’t be hit.’ In other words, it could not have been a put-up job.

  He hadn’t bothered to try and make it tactful and the Count grimaced. ‘I am not your enemy, Lord Radcliffe. And I owe your mother a great deal – without her I would probably have starved when I came to this country. I saw her lozenge on the carriage door before a bullet splintered it and… Shall we say that I would like to be in line when you confront whoever did this?’

  ‘My mother vouches for you, Garrick vouches for you and my instincts tell me to trust you,’ Luc said, with a glance at me.

  ‘Aha. Mademoiselle Lawrence is still suspicious.’

  ‘When – er, where, I come from we call spies put in place years, even decades, before they are activated, sleepers. I wondered whether you were such a sleeper, Monsieur.’

  The faintest flicker of an eyelash revealed that he had noticed that little slip and had stowed it away. ‘You think I am a spy? I am of course. I am an agent of intelligence, but for the British. But do you trust me?’

  ‘Now I think I trust you.’ I smiled and he smiled back, an intelligent, wary, dangerous man.

  ‘I believe we should take the Count into our confidence and share our investigations with him,’ Luc said. Garrick nodded and after a moment, so did I. James frowned, but got a reassuring nod from his brother. ‘Garrick has been and fetched the boards.’ He gestured to a corner where they were lined up on a sideboard, still draped in sheets.

  I tried frantically to recall what there might be on them that could betray James’s sexuality, then relaxed as I realised we had been instinctively careful about that.

  ‘Are you skilled with codes?’ I asked the Count, suddenly hopeful we could deal with the Doctor’s ledgers in cypher.

  He shook his head. ‘I have not the mathematical brain for inventing them or decoding them. I can apply them when I have to and decode with a key, but anyone can do that.’

  ‘You work for Thomas Salmond and his office,’ James said. ‘I thought that intelligence work was the province of Sir Thomas Reece’s group.’

  ‘It is,’ de Hautmont agreed. ‘But sometimes checks and balances are necessary.

  ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?’ I said, suddenly dredging the phrase up from somewhere. ‘Who guards the guards?’

  ‘You know your Juvenal.’ Luc sounded impressed. I tried not to look smug and to recall who Juvenal was.

  ‘Exactly,’ the Count said. ‘So, will you tell me what you are doing that leads to armed ambushes in the heart of St James’s?’

  Chapter Eighteen

  It took almost an hour to work right through everything. There was no getting away from telling the Count that Talbot and Coates had been lovers, but we stuck to the story of first learning that from the valet Bromley and added that letters found in their rooms had confirmed it. I’d given those to James to destroy.

  James said that he had been making enquiries into their hidden lives through a friend of a friend and de Hautmont seemed to accept that. Otherwise we told him everything.

  ‘I can confirm that you are correct about one thing. Herr Dettmer is an agent in the pay of the Prussians.’

  I gave a crow of triumph. Luc looked decidedly sour. His enquiry agent was going to be hearing about this, I was sure.

  The Count smiled. ‘We know all about him. He is very discreet, makes a lot of notes about industrial processes and economic matters and we leave him be. If we make an issue of it then there will be repercussions for our own agents in Prussia. If he goes near a dockyard or barracks, then that is a different matter.’

  ‘There, I knew I was right.’ I couldn’t resist a smirk.

  James rolled up some paper and threw it at me. ‘But does it implicate him in this affair? I don’t think so.’ Neither did anyone else, even me.

  ‘How do they connect, these two deaths? The men were lovers, that we accept. But there is always coincidence.’ The Count frowned at the boards, then lifted a hand when Luc started to speak. ‘But my instinct tells me that they are linked.’ He pulled at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger. ‘Whatever this is, it has its root in the Home Office, I am sure of it. But the murdered man had nothing to do with the place – I am sure he never set foot there. If Coates had been murdered and then Talbot had hanged himself then that might be easier to understand.’

  I didn’t point out that we’d been there, thought that. The Count was absorbing a lot of information with impressive speed and he needed to process it.

  ‘The attacks seem reckless to me,’ I said, thinking out loud. ‘I don’t know what it is normally like in London, but are residents of Albany frequently attacked on their doorsteps and are there drive-by shootings often in the West End?’

  All three men went quiet, digesting drive-by shootings. I had become so used to saying what I liked with three of them that I had forgotten that the Count didn’t know when I came from. ‘Er… That’s what it was, wasn’t it? They drove by and shot at us?’

  ‘They overtook us in a small closed cart, the kind market traders coming in from the country use,’ said Garrick. ‘They started to shoot from it, then stopped when we ceased firing to reload and escaped in the commotion. I doubt the cart will tell us anything, but I am having it checked.’

  I didn’t ask who was doing the checking. Garrick seemed to have a small battalion of relatives and friends I became only aware of when something slightly underhand needed doing.

  ‘And no, such things are not common,’ James said. ‘An attack within Albany is reckless and shootings like this on the streets in this part of Town are unheard of. In fact I don’t think I’ve heard of anything quite like it anywhere.’

  ‘They were reckless but they were professional,’ Luc said. ‘I was hit by a cosh, not a stick or a stone. The shooting took place in a spot that was well-judged to stop the carriage, especially when you consider that they could not plan ahead.’

  ‘But the attack on Talbot was not professional,’ I pointed out. ‘That was a weapon that just came to hand and far more violence was used than was needed.’

  ‘True. Let’s leave Talbot aside for a moment. Who, connected with the Home Office, has the resources to employ professional criminals and yet the lack of discipline for reckless attacks?’

  ‘The Reeces?’ I ventured. ‘We found other men connected with the Home Office who may have been in Albany that day, but they don’t crop up anywhere else. Elliott, would be my guess.’

  ‘Not his uncle?’ James challenged. ‘He’s got more power, more money.’

  ‘But he’s cold, practical, efficient. Look at the way he humiliated Elliott over the challenge to fight the Count. He stopped the danger to his nephew cold, in the most direct way. He taught Elliott a lesson, cut the ground out from under the Count’s feet, restored order in the department swiftly.’ I shivered. ‘I think if he wanted us dead, we’d be dead.’

  ‘So why would Elliott Reece want to attack us? It has to be because of Coates and Talbot – we’d hardly crossed his path before, had we?’ James
looked at his brother.

  ‘No. I knew him by sight, that’s all.’

  ‘He isn’t – ’ I began.

  ‘I have my – ’ de Hautmont cut across me. ‘I am sorry, please, Miss Lawrence.’

  ‘Thank you. His name did not come up when you were investigating the private lives of Coates and Talbot, did it?’ I asked James.

  ‘You think he was secretly attracted to men and that perhaps they found out and he silenced them? But why should Coates hang himself? And the murderer of Talbot, we agreed, was probably not the same as the person attacking us. And no, I have heard nothing to suggest he had the same… interests. I will ask though.’

  ‘He might have been blackmailing Coates,’ I suggested.

  ‘I would say that someone was,’ de Hautmont said. ‘That note suggests to me one of two possibilities. He had betrayed his lover with another man, and you have found no indication of that. Or he had been forced by blackmail to do something he could not live with and the only way to escape was by killing himself. I knew him. he was a serious and honourable young man and he was not skilled at lying. He spoke to me about intelligence work and I wonder now whether he was trying to find out whether I was involved in that, and, if I was, what I knew.’

  ‘Interesting. I imagine he was somewhat out of his depth with you,’ Luc said, smiling.

  The Count inclined his head in acknowledgment of the compliment. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Luc said. ‘Who in the department knew that you were more than an interpreter?’

  ‘A good question. Officially Salmond, and he alone. He wanted to keep an eye on what the intelligence section upstairs was up to as well as to analyse our office’s work for anything that might have security implications. I have the feeling he does not quite trust Sir Thomas.’ The twist of his lips made me suspect that was an understatement.

  ‘So, if Coates was questioning you about intelligence then either he was asking people more or less at random or he knew or suspected your role.’