Wanted, an English Girl

by Moore, Dorothea

  Captain Cartaret had spoken almost casually; but somehow that suggestion made Gill realise, as nothing else had done yet, how very serious a game it was to play the spy.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Rather Rapid

  Gill went in front, down the ladder-like stairs, on her stockinged feet. Rupert-George came only just behind, as light-footed as herself just then, in spite of the full six feet of him, and with a hand upon something that he had transferred from the pocket of the German uniform to Bèrnard’s clothes. It was a wonderful comfort to Gill to realise that if the Baron should be seized with a desire to come up his secret staircase at this inconvenient moment, it wouldn’t be necessary for her to do anything, for Rupert-George was there.

  The Baron’s study was dark; that they could discover through the chink of the queer narrow door that led into it. After a minute or so of silent listening Cartaret’s hand came over Gill’s shoulder and opened the door, very softly.

  “The writing-table, where I found the papers before, is near the window,” Gillian whispered, and Cartaret struck a match, shading it carefully with his hand.

  “There is electric light,” Gill told him.

  “Yes, but the curtains aren’t drawn; it won’t do to show a light. Take my matches and try for the papers. I’m going to look after the door. Keep your back to the window whenever you strike a light, and have out anything in the nature of a pass.”

  He tip-toed to the door that led on to the landing, while Gill opened that well-remembered blotting-book and went through its contents methodically, with a comfortable conviction that no one could come in to catch her at the task. But the blotting-book held nothing in the nature of a pass, and the writing-table drawers all seemed to be securely locked. She whispered this dismaying information.

  “Locked? Oh well, I’ll tackle the job then,” Cartaret said. He came across the room with long noiseless strides. “We must leave the door, for I must get you to give me a light of kinds while I pick locks. I wish we dared to leave the door ajar, though; it’s so frightfully difficult to hear anybody coming up the stairs on a noisy night like this, without listening specially.”

  Something in his tone made Gill uneasy. He was not quite ready for the matches; she left him on his knees at the writing-table, and went quickly to the door that he had left, opening it a chink to listen. And then her heart seemed literally to stand still for an instant, and she was almost too paralysed with fright even to shut the door. She turned round, and was surprised to hear her own voice speaking in quite an ordinary tone.

  “Someone coming upstairs.”

  Cartaret blew out the match, by which he was examining the lock of the middle drawer. “More than one?” he asked.

  “Yes, there was talking.”

  He looked round quickly. “Of course they may draw the curtains.”

  “There’s a cupboard. Here!” She caught his hand, guiding him to the cupboard through which she had come when she checkmated the Baron’s plans. They slipped noiselessly into it about three seconds before a light shone through the chink of the study door and two men came in.

  Rupert-George had put Gill at the back, and stood in front of her. She could, of course, see nothing, but she could hear, and they were both familiar voices that she heard.

  The Baron—she recognised his tones, though she had not caught what he said—would seem to have been asking some question, as he and his companion came into the room, but it was lost to her by the opening and shutting of the door. The words that she first caught distinctly were in answer, and the voice that spoke them was the voice of Prince Waldemar’s aide-de-camp, Captain Fritz von Posen.

  “Yes, make the order out for three; I don’t suppose the Grand-Duchess would come without the English girl. She’s discreet.”

  “What are you going to do with her—the English girl—afterwards?” the Baron inquired, in his expressionless voice. “I have a particular interest in Miss Gillian Courtney, you will remember, and only permitted her to go to the palace for purposes of business.”

  “Do what you like with her as far as our Imperial Waldemar is concerned, after to-night,” Captain von Posen told him carelessly. “We have had our use out of her. You were quite right in your surmise; she has brought Cartaret.”

  “What! Cartaret isn’t here already? Himmel! that’s quick work.”

  “He is in love, or fancies himself so”—Gillian was sure that Captain von Posen was grinning. “In love, and an Englishman, therefore twice a fool.”

  “You have him?”

  “Yes, thanks to the Von Dimme. Flat feet, damnably flat, and one would as soon embrace a sausage—but she has brains, that woman. It is on her advice that we have not taken him yet—tausend teufels! but I shall have something to say to him when we do—by her plan, Waldemar has the pretty Carina, without leaving her the smallest opening for appealing to the Powers.”

  “If Waldemar can contrive a plan which makes that certain, he is more brilliant than I thought him,” said the Baron quietly. He sat down at his writing-table and took a bunch of keys from his pocket. “A pass for three, you say? On foot or by car?”

  “By car—Waldemar’s own car.”

  Gill had discovered that, by craning her neck round at a most uncomfortable angle, she could just see the writing-table and the Baron sitting at it. She saw him open a drawer and take out a paper of some kind. “A pass for three through the gates of Chardille, and how far beyond?” he asked.

  Captain von Posen laughed coarsely. “You had better leave the Prince to fill that in.”

  “Does he contemplate carrying her out of Chardille by main force?” the Baron inquired, filling in the paper carefully. “His Imperial Highness is a hopeful person.”

  “You don’t appear overburdened with brains to-night, Baron,” Von Posen remarked, with the aggressive candour which the Prussian officer conceives himself entitled to use towards anybody on God’s earth, excepting always his superior officer. “But the Prince is no fool. The Grand-Duchess will come quite willingly—at any rate till we are well out of Chardille.”

  The Baron deliberately blotted what he had written, without making any comment on Von Posen’s statement, and Gillian was seized with an absurdly vivid recollection of a scene from Sheridan’s Critic, which her form had been getting up last winter at the “High.” It was the scene where Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Christopher Hatton are conversing at Tilbury Fort, and Sir Walter obligingly supplies his companion with a large quantity of information, already well known to Sir Christopher. The critic inquires why Sir Walter goes on telling him all this when he knows it already? To which the author replies that the audience don’t know!

  Gill had never imagined that you could think of anything belonging to your everyday life when desperate adventures were engaged in happening. And this was so very desperate an adventure that it was only the sight of Rupert-George in front of her, his whole figure tense with listening, that made her feel sure that it was not a nightmare dream. Rupert-George made it real, and she was horribly afraid lest the Baron’s evident lack of faith in Waldemar’s schemes should so offend Von Posen that the audience in the cupboard would be denied the consideration shown to the audience in The Critic.

  She need not have been afraid. Von Posen was bursting with the desire to detail a scheme which he evidently felt to reach a really high artistic standard.

  “The fair Carina indulged herself with an interview with Cartaret in the chapel to-night,” he announced triumphantly. “Decidedly indiscreet on all grounds, wasn’t it? but very convenient for us! The Von Dimme had a watch on her and the English girl all the evening, and though she was unable to overhear their conversation, she saw that there was something up, and the English girl had been long absent in the evening and had come from the Round Library, that has a door into the chapel. When the Von Dimme informed us of this, it was naturally clear to myself and His Imperial Highness that the spy who had escaped was either Cartaret himself, come more quickly than we had belie
ved it possible, or some messenger from him. In either case the English girl was the go-between, and we at first thought of having her arrested and examined.” (Gill shivered.) “But the Von Dimme was strongly urgent that we should allow the Grand-Duchess thoroughly to entangle herself before we took the threads into our hands.”

  The Baron had signed and folded the permit while the Captain was talking. He now opened another drawer to find an envelope that would fit it.

  “You convey this to the Prince by hand, I conclude?” he asked.

  “Yes, and I must not delay, or Himmel! there will be trouble,” Von Posen assured him, as he took the packet, but delayed none the less. “The Prince will be all impatience for my part in the proceedings—an important one—to commence. You will understand, Baron, that, whilst I am here with you, Waldemar, with Stutgarten and an escort, has entered the chapel, where the three birds are safely trapped, and has arrested Cartaret. The Prince’s dismay and anger at the compromising situation of Carina is of course immense—colossal—but, with extraordinary generosity he does not visit it on Cartaret, but merely sends him in Stutgarten’s charge to be confined, pending his trial before the spy commissioner.”

  “And the Grand-Duchess is to be captivated by the Prince’s moderation?” There was a dash of sarcasm about the Baron’s tone.

  “The Grand-Duchess retires to her apartments,” Von Posen announced triumphantly, “but is aroused in about an hour by the English girl, who has been informed, and will, with the folly of English girlhood, believe entirely that Cartaret attempted to escape, got out of Chardille, but was shot at the village of Sainte Marie, and lies in a cottage there, too dangerously wounded to be moved, and entreating the Grand-Duchess to come to him before he dies. The girl is fool enough for that—Waldemar and I are convinced of it, whatever the Von Dimme, who is after all only a woman, may say. …”

  “Is she? I wonder?” The Baron’s voice was slow and meditative. But Von Posen did not heed him, and hurried on.

  “The girl, having been the go-between all along, will be readily believed. … Baron, perhaps you can for yourself picture the rest? … Waldemar, continuing his course of generosity, offers a pass—this pass—and his own car to convey her with all speed to the dying man, against whom his noble soul has now ceased to feel the smallest animosity, it is understood.”

  He chuckled in a manner which brought the word “devilish” instinctively to Gill’s mind.

  “But the Prince’s chauffeur is myself, you understand, Baron; and it is not exactly a dying lover that our romantic little Grand-Duchess will find, when we halt, at the lonely house agreed upon between myself and Waldemar, who joins us there.”

  Captain von Posen paused to laugh, a horrid sneering laugh, that made Gill feel desperately angry, even though she had not really taken in the full significance of his words. She saw Rupert-George’s hand—the hand next to her—clench, and that gave her a sense that more was meant than she could see just then; for Rupert-George was not at all given to gesticulation. She was so much taken up with watching that unusual gesture on his part that she missed the Baron’s comment on the scheme laid bare before him. She only knew that it was approving, and that he concluded with the question:

  “And the Englishman Cartaret?”

  Von Posen laughed again. “Oh, we shall return to deal with his cursed carcase when we’ve finished taking his name in vain. Good night to you, Baron, and you really may congratulate yourself upon the foresight which made you bring the English girl to Insterburg.”

  Gill had a notion that the Baron bowed in slightly ironic acknowledgment of the Captain’s patronising compliment. Then Von Posen passed the cupboard and went out of the door with a clank of spurs, his host accompanying him downstairs, after first switching off the light.

  Rupert-George did not draw a long breath of relief, nor even mutter “The scoundrels!” He opened the cupboard door, very quickly and quietly, and just said: “Now then—look slippy!” in a voice that was quite ordinary, only pitched very low.

  Gill followed him unquestioningly—across the room, through the narrow door, up the ladder-like stairs to the niche by the window, where their boots had been left.

  “On with yours! Quick!” he ordered.

  “But … the pass?” Gill asked. It was difficult to turn her plan of action right round all at once.

  “We don’t want that yet. Hurry, please,” said Rupert-George. He was not melodramatic even now, and his “Hurry!” only sounded as though he had a train to catch. But the light reflected upward from a street lamp caught his face as he opened the window, and Gill gave a little gasp as she saw his eyes. For those nice eyes, which she was used to see with such a pleasant twinkle in them, were hard as steel to-night. Gillian had never realised that Rupert-George could look like that.

  They hurried down the iron steps. It gave Gill an extraordinary shock when the same clock they had heard before struck the half-hour. They could have been inside the Baron’s house little more than a quarter of an hour—and it seemed as though it had been a lifetime.

  It seemed probable that despite the fact that he was on the Prince’s business, Captain von Posen had not been able to resist turning into the dining-room for a drink, before facing the storm and wet again, for the rain-washed street was empty excepting for an orderly, who stood, with shoulders hunched against the bitter wind, holding two horses. His back was to the passage between the houses; his mind very evidently on his own discomfort. Truly the stars in their courses were fighting for Carina of Insterburg to-night! A breathless minute saw them past the danger-zone and in the back street that ran parallel with the Rue St. Denise.

  Cartaret stopped. “Gillian, have you the nerve to risk falling into that brute Waldemar’s hands yourself, and to betray Carina when I’m ready?”

  Gill said, “What? ” Then she remembered that there was no time for questions, and that she trusted him. “I’ll do what you want.”

  “You’re a sportsman! Then first, we have to get to the Palace before Von Posen, and he’ll keep to the main streets, which are longer, and can’t ride much beyond a foot’s pace on a night like this.”

  They were off, before Rupert-George had finished even that amount of explanation, Gill hurrying as valiantly as though the night’s adventures were only just beginning.

  Even if she had left herself much breath for talk it wouldn’t have been safe, with troop patrols everywhere on the look out for the English spy disguised as a German Red Cross orderly. Twice during their hurried journey they were stopped by soldiers, for all Captain Cartaret’s precautions, but on each occasion they were dismissed with a coarse jest. It was no uncommon thing for Insterburgers to be engaged in night work in the present poverty-stricken condition of the town. And so at last they came in sight of the Palace, visible in the surrounding darkness by lights still in its lower windows. Then, as they cut across a secluded part of the grounds, suggested by Gillian, who knew where to avoid the few sentries required even by the most unassuming of royalties, Rupert-George spoke again.

  “Do you realise that this devil’s scheme gives us a far better chance than I dared to hope for? Only it means some big risks, and the worst fall on you. Thank Heaven, you’re an English girl!”

  “What am I to do, please?” Gill asked, trying not to feel too blatantly proud.

  “Isn’t that the carriage drive in front of us? I thought so. Then those are the head lights of a stationary car in it, so we’re probably in a line with the big entrance, and that’s the car Von Posen spoke of.”

  They were pushing their way through wet undergrowth and bushes in the darkness.

  “What are you going to do?” Gillian asked breathlessly.

  “Act chauffeur in Von Posen’s get-up and with his pass.”

  “Oh … oh!” Gillian said.

  “And I want you to cut along inside and let someone see you—the German cats will do. You understand their game and you understand mine, and the sooner you get Carina out to me the bet
ter our chance of carrying this through successfully. Say what you like—betray anything about me except my job as chauffeur; only get Carina and yourself to the car.”

  “If they find out that you’re not Von Posen first—before I can?” Gill questioned.

  Rupert-George’s voice was a little grim, though very quiet still. “Don’t worry. If it comes to that, I shall see that Prince Waldemar isn’t able to carry out his programme, either.”

  “When am I to go inside?” Gill asked, trying to speak coolly and confidently.

  “Now, I think. Come along, but keep behind me.”

  He led the way cautiously from the shelter of the great wet clumps of rhododendrons and out into the wide carriage drive.

  A chauffeur was walking up and down beside the car, a long coat hung over his arm. He was probably feeling the cold a good deal without it, for he was stamping as he walked, and altogether making so much noise himself as to make it most unlikely that he would hear their footsteps.

  Cartaret crossed the drive behind the car—well out of the radius of its tail lamp, but not so far away that he and Gill could not hear the man curse Von Posen’s delay. They had almost reached the other side, and Gill was wondering whether Rupert-George meant to creep up close under the walls until he had landed her at the steps, before putting into force his daring scheme, when another sound broke through the chauffeur’s stamping, the sound of horse’s hoofs advancing at a reckless pace along the drive. Von Posen was coming, and coming in a desperate hurry, as though he had suddenly realised that he had spent overlong at the Baron’s house for someone engaged on urgent business.

  Gill’s heart stood still. Three of them—Von Posen, his orderly, and the chauffeur. What would Captain Cartaret do?

  He did nothing for the moment but pull her back flat against the wall of the Palace and stand beside her, very still.

  Von Posen called something in a very ill-humoured voice, and the unfortunate chauffeur flung the coat into the car and hurried to meet the horsemen, explaining something, it seemed, in a tone of apology.