Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  I heard him kneel in front of me. “Look at me,” he said softly.

  But I kept my eyes closed. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” I confessed. “Any of it. I could have begged Dottie to store it, but the truth is I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I kept the camera, but everything else, I—even my lavender wool dress. I couldn’t look at it anymore. And I’m so sorry.”

  His hands came over mine, lifted them gently from my face. I blinked at him, his face fragmenting as I still fought my tears. He did not speak. Instead, he put his hands gently on my neck, his fingers pressing up into my hair, his thumbs along my jawline. He leaned in, and for a moment I felt his breath on the skin of my neck, just below my ear. Then he kissed me there.

  My reaction was so immediate, and so overwhelming, that I gasped. I could not move. He held me still, and he pressed kisses down the side of my neck, slowly, savoring me. Everything in me burned—the blood in my veins, the tears in my eyes, the breath in my lungs, the surface of my skin. Everything burned for him, and when he kissed my lips at last, I stopped thinking.

  He pressed me back on the bed, his weight on me, warm and familiar. I arched beneath him as he bit me gently on the tender flesh where my neck met my collarbone and his hands pushed up the hem of my skirt. Then his fingers were tracing my inner thighs, deft and clever, and my hands fisted in the folds of his shirt as I moaned against his neck.

  It took only minutes. When I was finished, I helped him undo his trousers, push down my underthings, and then he took his turn. We did not speak. I wrapped my legs around him and arched again, and he met me wave for wave, one hand hard on my hip through the cloth of my skirt, his breath harsh in my ear. It was not slow or graceful, perhaps, but it was us, every languorous rainy afternoon or adventurous night or sleepy morning we’d ever had. Afterward he lay on top of me as both of us caught our breath on the rumpled coverlet.

  He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked down at me. “Was there anyone else?” he asked.

  I blinked at him, stunned. “Is that a serious question?”

  “Yes,” said Alex. “It bloody well is.”

  I pressed my hands against his chest and pushed him off me. Then I stood and walked to the washstand against the wall.

  “It’s a question that’s kept me awake at night for three years,” Alex said to my back. “Colonel Mabry said you didn’t seem to have anyone else, but—”

  “Colonel Mabry?” I was holding the pitcher of water, and I paused in outrage before I poured water into the basin. “You had Colonel Mabry watching me for you?”

  “Not precisely,” Alex replied. “He gave me updates, but they were very vague. And I never know when Mabry is lying.”

  I remembered what he’d said when he’d suggested we marry in Crete. It isn’t anyone’s damned business what I do. I had thought he wanted to escape Dottie’s prying, but now I knew better. It was Colonel Mabry’s observation he’d wanted to escape. I wrung out the cloth and dabbed the insides of my thighs quickly, my back to him. I was too enraged to speak.

  “Don’t you wonder the same thing?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said, the word coming out sharply. I could not bear to think about pretty blond German girls following Alex around like puppies. He would have had to fight them off. “I don’t want to know.” I rinsed the cloth and wrung it out again. My hands were shaking.

  I heard him get off the bed, right his clothes. “Damn it, Jo. I can’t seem to say the right thing to you anymore.”

  I let my skirt drop, picked up my underthings from the floor. “We shouldn’t do this again.”

  “I very much disagree.”

  “I could have a child.”

  He paused, and I knew I’d wounded him. “You used to want a child,” he said.

  “I did.” I straightened and finally faced him again. “I do. But not here. Not in this place.” The thought of a baby in Wych Elm House was flatly horrifying.

  “Then we’ll leave.” Alex strode toward me. “I have money now, Jo. They gave me plenty for the work I did. We don’t have to stay here. We can go anywhere.”

  “We can’t leave,” I protested. “Not now. Martin is deathly sick, and Dottie and Robert’s marriage is a disaster, and someone murdered your cousin. We can’t walk away.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Very well. But I’m going to Torbram tomorrow to see this Alice Sanders woman. Are you coming with me?”

  I paused. Dottie was expecting me to work for her tomorrow, promptly at eight o’clock as usual. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll come. And there’s a woman in the village we should visit as well. A servant who worked here until Frances died.” I searched my memory of my encounter with the Bainses at the post office. “Petra Jennings is her name. The postmistress mentioned her to me. She says the girl was dismissed after Franny died, and she never speaks about it. She thinks the family threatened her with something.”

  “We’ll talk to her, too, then,” Alex said. “Torbram is several hours’ drive, and the weather tomorrow will not be good. We’ll have to stay overnight.” He watched me, his expression under control now, impassive.

  It would mean yet another day off from my duties. “I’ll come.”

  That night, I showed him the sketchbook. He leafed through it, taking careful note of the pages torn from the spine. I showed him the photographs, the handwriting on them, the shadow in the sketchbook that matched the shadow in the picture of Martin and Frances. He looked all of it over, missing nothing, and told me gently that anyone could have taken the picture from my trunk and written the notes to scare me. He thought the shadow in the window was a trick of the light.

  I made him sleep on top of the covers again. And I dreamed of a door in a thick, overgrown wall, the lock black with mold. I tried to pry the lock open, my fingers slipping on the metal, my knuckles beginning to bleed. I’ve changed my mind, Alex said from behind me. Give me the gun. I’ve changed my mind. Then the door was gone and I stood on the top turret of Wych Elm House, watching dead leaves swirling before me, the wind cold on my face. And when the hands pushed me and the cobblestones rushed up to meet me, I did not have time to scream.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I meant to ask Dottie for leave the next morning, but when I came downstairs she was not in the morning room as usual. Instead, I found her in the large parlor, sitting with Colonel Mabry.

  I stopped in the doorway. My horror may have shown in my expression, but Dottie did not notice. She wore one of her supremely sour looks, which said that something had displeased her.

  “Manders,” she said, “Colonel Mabry has come to see you.”

  I forced myself to look at him. He sat upright in his place on the sofa, his hat on his lap, his bright, relentless eyes on me.

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  Dottie’s tone was almost disgusted. “He wishes to tour the works in the upstairs gallery, and he has asked for you to be his guide. Please take him and show him the pieces he is interested in.”

  Again I looked at the colonel. He knew that Alex had come home. Yet here he was, asking to see me, not my husband. I set my shoulders. Perhaps the colonel wouldn’t like everything I had to say.

  “Certainly,” I managed to get out between gritted teeth. “Colonel, please follow me.”

  “Mrs. Manders,” he said softly as we ascended the stairs, “please excuse my intrusion. The small deception was necessary. I wish to speak to you most urgently about a certain matter.”

  “Is that so?” I asked, my hand on the railing and my gaze trained at the top of the stairs. “I can’t imagine what that might be.”

  “Actually, I believe you know very well.”

  One of the maids passed us, and we were quiet until I led him into the gallery. The staff had been busy yesterday, tearing down the decorations from the engagement party, and the gallery was restored to rights, the s
trings of lights and the raised dais gone. Dottie’s art lined the high walls. I could not quite believe that the engagement party had been a mere two nights ago.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” I told the colonel as we stood unseeing before the paintings on the first wall. “You lied to me, Colonel. Repeatedly. Did you think I would just forget about it?”

  He was not in the least disturbed. “Some mistruths are essential, Mrs. Manders.”

  “Pretending you never knew my husband? Showing me his file as if you didn’t know he was alive?”

  He stood tall and straight beside me, his hat in his hand. “I would very much like to know,” he said, “how much Alex has told you.”

  “Is that why you came here today and performed this silly subterfuge?” I strolled to the next wall of paintings. My anger was steady, like a small jet of water leaking from a massive dam. “To ask me that?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then why?” I turned to face him, though even as I did it I knew that to ask him anything was futile. He would tell me only what he wanted me to hear, for reasons I would never know. “Why come at all, even at first, to meet me? Why sit with Mrs. Forsyth, pretending to be interested in her paintings and observing me? Why agree to meet me and go through the entire fiction of my husband’s War Office file? Why do any of it?”

  Colonel Mabry turned away from me and strolled slowly along the gallery wall. “Very well,” he said. “I came because I wanted to see you for myself, Mrs. Manders. I wanted to see what kind of woman you are. In short, I was curious.”

  “About me?” I followed him, my clicking heels echoing on the empty tile floor. “That’s ridiculous. You already knew everything there is to know about me—and anything you didn’t know, you had the power to find out. You knew I believed him dead. You knew where I lived. You knew I was working as Mrs. Forsyth’s paid companion.” He stopped walking and stood again, looking at the paintings, and I wanted to shake him. “Alex came home to finish your assignment. I don’t know what that has to do with me.”

  He looked at me for the first time, the expression in his eyes almost recognizable as surprise. “You don’t think he came home for you?”

  “I think he came home for several reasons, only some of which had to do with me.”

  He regarded me for another long moment, then looked back at the paintings with an audible sigh. “Mrs. Manders,” he said, his voice calm, businesslike. “Perhaps I should explain something to you. You have been, quite honestly, the bane of my existence since 1914.”

  I stared at him, openmouthed. “I beg your pardon?”

  “If I know Alex at all,” Colonel Mabry said, “he’s told you everything, even though he isn’t supposed to. So I’m going to assume that it won’t shock you when I say I have dealt with a great many undercover agents in my career, Mrs. Manders. What you likely don’t understand is that most of them are incompetent.”

  “I’m not following.”

  He sighed again in disappointment. “They are clumsy, to be frank. They don’t go where they’re told to go. They ignore pertinent details and give us irrelevant information. They leave their suitcases on the train and lose vital documents. They write things down in letters to their sweethearts. They ask for raises. They drink too much and begin to brag. They leak things to the enemy. They disappear.” He shook his head. “It is most difficult to recruit anyone remotely trustworthy. I waste a great deal of time. But not with your husband, Mrs. Manders. Despite his failure here in 1917, Alex is the best recruit I’ve ever had.” He glanced at me again. “Do you understand? I deal with incompetence every day, but Alex worked for me for years with only a single unfinished mission. He remembers every instruction by rote in his brain. He solves problems. His instincts are unmatched. He blames himself for not finding the traitor, but your husband lived with the enemy, side by side, for three years without a single slip. Do you begin to see how extraordinary that is?”

  I was beginning to. “And now he’s resigned, and you blame me for it.”

  “I blame you because you are the reason. He has been kicking at his traces because he’s been miserable. He came to me in 1914 and quit because he wanted to marry you. We were on the verge of war, but still he walked away. Then he enlisted in the RAF—a guarantee he’d end up as butcher’s meat—instead of working for me, because he wanted to impress you.”

  “He did not want to impress me,” I argued.

  “Oh, yes, he did. He wanted to serve honorably, he said. He managed to survive for two years before I convinced him to save his own life and get out.”

  “You could have saved him!” I was heated now, all pretense at politeness gone. My voice rang off the high walls of the gallery. “He tried to come back to England to be an instructor, but you stopped it!”

  “Because it isn’t enough to survive the war,” Mabry explained. The flush high on his aristocratic cheekbones was his only display of emotion. “You have to win it. I couldn’t let my best operative train more men for certain death while the enemy won. That was unacceptable to my superiors, and it was unacceptable to me.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You got your way. He worked for you. But the war has been over for three years. We did win. Let him come home. There is nothing left for him to do.”

  “There is,” he said coldly, as if I were a child, “plenty left for him to do, as you put it. There is always work needed to keep England safe. You may think the world has become a garden party now that the war is over, but you would be entirely wrong.”

  “I don’t think that,” I snapped. “But Germany is quiet. And Germany is where Alex’s expertise lies. You can’t use him in Moscow or Japan.”

  “Where I wish to assign my operative is government business, Mrs. Manders, not yours.” He turned to me. “And so we come down to the meat of it. I am asking you to give him back to me. Give him back to his country.”

  “No,” I said instantly. “I won’t.”

  “There is great need in the fight against communism. In Russia. Spain.”

  “England can fight communism without him,” I shot back. “Recruit someone else and train him. If you want a Russian, use Casparov. He wasn’t doing much business as a solicitor, anyway.”

  There was the briefest beat of surprise, and then Mabry said, “I see Alex has indeed told you more than he should have. Casparov was one of the clumsy ones, Mrs. Manders. And in any case, I can’t use him because Casparov is dead. We found him shot at his desk in 1918.”

  I swallowed my shock. “And you’d like my husband to replace him?” I said. “No. He’s tired, Colonel.” I knew it was true—it came through in Alex’s new bitterness, the dreary anger that sometimes crept into his voice. “He’s exhausted. He’s come to this house to finish the assignment you gave him, to put his cousin’s death to rest, and that is all.”

  “Do you think he’s going to be happy?” I could hear exasperation in Colonel Mabry’s voice, another unprecedented show of emotion. “Do you think a man like that will be content reading the news and listening to the wireless at night with his children for the next forty years?”

  “If he wants to be,” I said. “You’ve just implied that my husband can do almost anything he sets his mind to. If he sets his mind to listening to the wireless with his children, then I’m sure he can do it. If he’d be happier working for you, then Alex will tell me. Until that happens, you’re to leave us alone.”

  They were bold words, but as the colonel took his leave and we descended the stairs, I was unsteady. Outside, the weak late-autumn sun was vanishing behind an ominous bank of clouds as Colonel Mabry walked with a swift, formal gait toward his motorcar, putting his hat briskly back on his head.

  Dottie was not in the large parlor, so I walked on watery legs to the morning room, where I found Alex reading the newspaper. He was half sitting on the table, one long leg hitched up, his tall body framed against the Fren
ch doors behind him. “There you are,” he said. “Have you spoken to Aunt Dottie? Pack an overnight bag. We should get going.” He glanced up. “Something’s upset you. What is it?”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak. I paced to the French doors and looked out at the terrace, pressing my palms together, trying to make my hands stop shaking. I took a breath.

  Behind me, I heard a rustle as Alex put the paper down and stood. “Jo?”

  I turned and came toward him. I put my hands on the back of his neck and he let me pull him down and kiss him, but it had a hard, desperate edge to it, and when we parted, his gaze was dark and wary.

  “Care to explain?” he asked.

  I dropped my hands. “Thank you for coming home,” I said.

  “I told you I would.”

  “I know you did.” My gaze dropped to the newspaper. Do you think he’ll be happy reading the newspaper and listening to the wireless with his children for the next forty years? If we didn’t have children, he wouldn’t even have that. I had not wished to discuss my lack of conception over the years with Colonel Mabry.

  The sound of Dottie’s oxfords clunking toward us down the hall interrupted the depressing turn of my thoughts. She stood in the doorway and stared at us, her eyes narrowing.

  “Alex,” she said, “stop looking at your wife like that. I prefer decorum in this house. Manders, pay attention.”

  “Yes, Dottie,” I said.

  “A servant tells me that Colonel Mabry has abruptly taken his leave. I am left to assume he did not purchase a painting.”

  I felt Alex startle in surprise beside me, but I said, “No, he didn’t. I’m sorry.”