by T E Kinsey
‘She hasn’t mentioned what a handsome man he was,’ I said. ‘They made a striking couple.’
‘It’s true – he was extraordinarily handsome. But, despite his desirability, I stayed up to finish my studies, and that’s when the story really began.’
‘At long last,’ I said.
‘You were the one who insisted on starting your story when you were still in the cradle.’
‘A splendid point and excellently well made, my lady. Please proceed.’
‘Thank you. One spring day in my final year, I’d gone into town with one of my pals. We finished our business at the bookshop and decided to walk along the Backs. We were trying to appear as though we were just two studious young women out for a stroll, but really we were only there so that she could “accidentally” bump into a chap from Trinity whom she was sweet on. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought that part through – I had no idea what I was going to do when we met him, as meet him we surely did. I just sort of ambled away towards the river while they gazed into each other’s eyes and talked gibberish.’
‘“Murmured sweet nothings”?’ I offered.
‘It would be much more romantic to think so,’ she said. ‘But they were both such top-notch idiots – it was mostly gibberish. I watched the mallards and kicked idly at the daisies for a while, and then a be-gowned don huffed towards me from the south. “Miss Featherstonhaugh?” he said. I treated him to my severest quizzical frown. “I do beg your pardon,” he said. “I knew your brother. Henry.”
‘“Harry,” I corrected him reflexively. We always called him Harry. Henry Alfred Percival Featherstonhaugh was such a cumbersome name. I suppose Emily Charlotte Ariadne wasn’t much better, though, eh? Where was I? Oh, yes, the mysterious don. He prattled at me for a while about what a splendid fellow Harry was and how he’d heard about my engagement to Roddy. I thought I should be stuck there forever, enduring endless small talk about the Featherstonhaugh heir, but after a while his prattling became altogether more serious. He was still hesitant and slightly bumbling, but I started to think that the absent-minded-don persona was just a costume he wore. There was a shrewd old man behind the grimy spectacles.
‘He asked me about my studies and my plans after Girton, and then made the most extraordinary proposal. He wondered if I might like to work for Her Majesty’s government. “Not in a conventional sense, you understand. Can’t have women in the civil service. Wouldn’t be seemly. But we . . . ah . . . we need young men and women of your calibre to . . . ah . . . to do certain . . . ah . . . certain discreet jobs for us. A little bit of nosing around. That sort of thing. Nothing too dangerous, you understand, but . . . ah . . . well . . . you see, if you were to marry young Hardcastle . . . well, I know that he’s already considered to be something of a rising star in the Foreign Office and . . . ah . . . yes . . . you’d be well placed to gather certain . . . information . . . from Her Majesty’s friends abroad . . . and her enemies, naturally.”’
‘A spy, like?’ said Skins.
‘Just so,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I made no commitment then, but by the time Roddy and I were married, I had made up my mind. If I were to make a career of being a diplomat’s wife, I might as well put my position to some practical purpose. We made quite the team, Roddy and I. We were young, we were fun, and we threw quite the loveliest parties. We knew all the right people. And we were entirely above suspicion. Who would ever have thought that the Hardcastles were up to no good? Actually, Roddy was genuinely above suspicion – it was yours truly who did all the snooping. Encouraging the great and the good into a little indiscretion here, an overheard conversation there, the tiniest bit of breaking and entering now and again. I loved it. And we made a name for ourselves in the right circles.’
‘Breaking and entering?’ said Barty.
‘Just a little. Here and there. Locks can be picked, windows can be jemmied. I was never especially good with safes, but I knew a chap. So, there we were, the darlings of the corps diplomatique, and, of course, the exotic postings started to come our way. Assorted European capitals, the United States, India – you name it. Roddy was awarded his knighthood and life was grand. Really rather splendid. We were back in London for a while when I engaged young Armstrong here. So it’s over to you, I think, dear.’
I helped myself to a slice of cheddar and a glob of quince cheese. ‘Does anyone know why it’s called quince “cheese”?’ I asked. ‘It’s not exactly cheesy, is it?’
‘The Spanish call it membrillo, if that’s any help,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘None whatsoever,’ I said.
‘Marmalade used to be made from quinces,’ she said. ‘Portuguese word, I think. Marmelada, or some such. I think a quince is a marmelo.’
‘Fascinating, of course,’ I said. ‘But still no help. We’re no nearer to “cheese”, are we?’
‘Lemon curd?’ she offered. ‘That doesn’t involve curds. Perhaps we just like cheesy names for fruity things.’
‘That’ll have to do,’ I said, and munched on my cheese and biscuit for a bit. ‘Back to the tale, though. The Hardcastles are living in London and I’m making a bit of a hash of being a lady’s maid, but we’re all muddling along.’
‘I can’t get over the fact that you was only seventeen,’ said Skins. ‘All the lady’s maids I’ve ever known was in their thirties at least.’
‘All the ones you’ve ever known?’ said Barty. ‘You’ve know a lot, then?’
‘A fair few. I’ve been around.’
‘No one was more surprised than I,’ I said. ‘But I had plenty of time to puzzle things out – Lady Hardcastle had a tendency to disappear for days on end, leaving me to my own devices. I learned to sew and mend, how to get mysterious stains from lace and silk – all the things a proper lady’s maid needed to know. Some of the stains – mud, blood, and axle grease were among the more common – would have been a good deal less mysterious if I’d known what my new employer was up to when she vanished, but I was too busy trying to follow Mr Otterthwaite’s patient lessons in their removal to give it very much thought.’
‘I came very close to telling you a few times,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I had to weigh the need to keep the government’s secrets against the need to explain why the cuff of my jacket was soaked in someone else’s blood and there was mud splattered up the back of my skirt. I could have said, “I came upon my snitch in an alley with a knife in his belly and had to run for my life before the foreign spies who did for him did for me, too.” Somehow, though, that didn’t seem like the sort of thing I could comfortably say to the bookish little Welsh girl I’d brought into our home as my maid.’
‘For my part, I suspected nothing,’ I said. ‘If I hadn’t seen how much the Hardcastles adored each other, I might have thought her frequent absences meant she was having an affair, but that still wouldn’t have explained the damage to her clothes. Well, it might, but it would have been a very wild affair. So I just got on with it and, though I’m reluctant to admit it in her presence, she was a model employer. We got along splendidly and my first year in the job passed extremely agreeably. Sir Roderick was getting itchy feet, though, I could tell. He had been angling for another posting for a few months, and in the summer of 1895, he got his wish. He was to be posted to Shanghai.’
‘I’ve always wanted to go to China,’ said Barty. ‘I walked out with this Chinese girl in Limehouse once. Lovely, she was. I might have married her, but her family was having none of it.’
‘You?’ said Skins. ‘Marry? Pull the other one. Closest you ever got to marryin’ was that bit in Shoreditch with the wonky eye. And that was only because her brother threatened to do you in if you didn’t.’
‘Hair like silk, she had,’ said Barty obliviously. ‘And the gentlest hands . . . ’
I decided to press on and leave him to his reminiscences. ‘Mr Otterthwaite declined to accompany his master,’ I said, ‘but for reasons I’ll never quite understand, Lady Hardcastle was really rather insistent that
I made the trip.’
‘How could I possibly get by without my semi-competent maid?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘There was certain to be much more mud, blood, and axle grease. Whom else could I entrust with their removal?’
‘When you put it like that . . . ’ I said. ‘So I wrote to my mother and my sister, I packed up my meagre possessions, and I boarded a P&O steamer at the Royal Docks, bound for the mystic East. Three weeks, it took. Three weeks. I’d seen enough atlases and read enough travel memoirs to know that China was a dickens of a long way away . . . but three weeks. I used to think it was a long way from Mamgu’s house to the grocer’s shop.’
‘It’s a long way from our gaff to the grocer’s, an’ all,’ said Skins.
‘Well, quite,’ I said with a frown. ‘Sir Rodney was posted to the British Consulate in Shanghai, and we were billeted in a little house in the British Settlement. It was like living in London, only warmer, if I’m honest. The place had been carved up by the European powers and you’d have to look closely to tell the difference between there and Kensington. Herself was still prone to disappearing at odd hours, more so than in London, I’d say, but I still suspected nothing.’
‘So you saw nothing of proper China?’ said Barty with some disappointment. ‘Shu-chun was going to show me wonders, she said.’
‘I showed her wonders,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I engaged a local woman as a housemaid and she taught us Mandarin and Shanghainese. And then she took us into the Chinese area of the city, where we would shop and eat and meet the locals. I bought us some clothes, too, didn’t I?’
‘You certainly did. I wish I still had that dress.’
‘Me too. We should go back one day. I’m afraid I rather scandalized the genteel ladies of the consulate, though – they thought I was “going native”. Not the done thing at all.’
‘They’d have been even more scandalized if they knew what you were really up to. I was quite shocked myself the night I found out.’
The musicians were both listening attentively now.
‘It was just after dawn, actually,’ I said. ‘I heard the front door closing and I thought it must be Sir Roderick coming back from one of his all-night card games. But then I remembered that he’d arrived home shortly before I retired for the night. So, obviously, I had to go and look.’
‘Well, you can look after yourself,’ said Skins. ‘We know that. I remember what you did to old Haddock.’
‘Not then, I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘I was just a frightened eighteen-year-old girl with less sense than the Good Lord gave a cabbage. But look I did. And there, in the hall, with his back to me, was a plump Chinese man. I must have gasped in surprise because he turned round and revealed himself to be none other than Emily, Lady Hardcastle, wearing several layers of padding and a Chinese tunic.’
‘Of course, the cat was out of the bag then, so I had to tell her everything,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘It was that or make up some story about overnight rehearsals with the consulate ladies for a production of The Mikado.’
‘I might have believed that, actually,’ I said. ‘I was still only eighteen. Or perhaps I was nineteen by then, I can’t quite place the date of it – I’m certain it was early ’96, but I don’t recall precisely when. Anyway, I was young, and although I might have seemed worldly, what with growing up in the circus and all, I still knew little of the lives of the rich and powerful. For all I knew, everyone rehearsed Gilbert and Sullivan in the small hours.’
‘Oh, we do,’ she said. ‘But never The Mikado. Ghastly load of patronizing old nonsense. We much prefer The Pirates of Penzance. I always wanted to play Major-General Stanley. It happens that I actually am the very model of a modern Major-General, you know. I’m reasonably certain I did once write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform—’
I coughed. ‘Finished, my lady?’
‘Quite finished, thank you, dear,’ she said, and took another sip of her brandy.
‘While I drew her a bath, she told me everything I’ve just told you, and more,’ I said. ‘The Cambridge don, the spying, the days away from home, the murdered informers . . . everything. I thought I had been astonished enough for one evening, but there was just one more astonishing thing to come. She offered me another job.’
‘I was so tired,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘It’s not easy being a beagle at the best of times, but a woman spy has it doubly hard. It’s the corsets, you know. Roddy couldn’t help – either with the spying or the corsets – our modus operandi really rather depended upon his being the highly visible man about town while I got on with the skulduggery unnoticed and unsuspected. I needed an assistant, a trusted ally. Someone bright and energetic. Someone who could do as she was told and still think for herself. Someone who could pass unnoticed in the world of servants and working people. Someone, in short, exactly like Florence Armstrong.’
‘Any port in a storm,’ I said.
‘Well, there’s that, too, but it turns out that I made a splendid choice. She agreed, as you might have guessed, and I began to teach her what few tricks I’d managed to learn from the arcane and poorly recorded world of the modern spy. Most of the work simply involves keeping one’s ears open, though, to be perfectly honest. That was why Roddy and I cultivated our reputation as party-givers and merry young things. We tried our damnedest to be quite the utterest utter. Anyone who was anyone wanted to be seen at our little gatherings and there was never a shortage of vain young men in the foreign diplomatic missions. They couldn’t resist showing off to the dizzy wife of one of their rivals about how powerful and influential they were, about how many little secrets they knew. And the ones who managed to keep their gobs shut around me could always be relied upon to try to impress the clerk’s wives and the businessmen’s wives – that was where Flo came in handy. I could just shove a tray of drinks in her dainty paws and send her off round the room, where she could earwig on anyone’s conversation without arousing even the slightest suspicion.’
‘There was a certain amount of burglary, too. And one or two clandestine meetings in the dead of night,’ I said. I’m ashamed to admit that I was slightly miffed at my part in the success of the Shanghai mission being reduced to that of champagne-carrying earwigger.
‘There was,’ she said. ‘And that, I’m afraid, proved to be our undoing. And is what has possibly placed you two lovely gentlemen in danger.’
‘At long last,’ I said. ‘More cheese, anyone?’
‘Crumpets,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘And the same to you,’ I said.
‘No, we need crumpets. And something warming to drink. This last part requires a comfortable seat by the fire and something comfortingly warm in our bellies.’
‘Hot chocolate?’ I said.
‘With a tot of brandy in it,’ she agreed.
‘I’ll be back presently.’ I went back to the kitchen.
By the time I returned to the drawing room, our four armchairs had been arranged around the freshly logged fire. They’d placed a low table in the middle of the arc of chairs and I set the tray on it. I poured the hot chocolate, Lady Hardcastle poured the brandy, and Barty speared a crumpet with the toasting fork before holding it near the flames.
‘Three years passed,’ I said as I sat down. ‘By 1899 I was twenty-two. I had learned more and more of Lady Hardcastle’s skulduggerous methods, we had both learned a good deal more Mandarin and Shanghainese, and Her Majesty’s government had learned a great many things to its political, strategic, and commercial advantage. We were the Foreign Office’s first choice when it came to snooping, prying, and generally minding other people’s business.’
‘Perhaps I should mention,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘that the previous year had been something of an important year in China. Treaties and whatnot. The British had control of Hong Kong, the Germans had Tsingtao. The whole of the coast was being grabbed by the Europeans. And by ’99, as you probably know, Imperial Germany was starting to get a tiny bit bellicose. Muscles were being flexed. Sabres
rattled. And so, of course, the other Great Powers wanted to know at all times what the blighters were up to. Which meant that Roddy and I, with Flo in attendance, were sent north to Tsingtao. The story was that we were there as Her Britannic Majesty’s representatives to wish our German friends continuing good fortune with their new port, but, naturally, we were really there to have a good old nose round.’
‘It was going to be a good opportunity to practise our Mandarin, if nothing else,’ I said.
‘I sometimes wish that was all we’d done,’ said Lady Hardcastle wistfully. ‘But it wasn’t. Word reached us that the Imperial German Navy was testing a new vessel in the Pacific, imagining themselves to be well away from prying eyes. So we set our eyes to prying. We used a plan we’d used before: Roddy got himself invited to a card game, a billiards evening, or some other men-only activity and then, pleading a headache or similarly non-specific malady, I would regretfully decline the corresponding ladies-only event and take to my bed. Once the evening was well under way, Flo and I would slip out and see what we could see.’
‘Must have been difficult,’ said Barty. ‘Two English ladies would stick out like a couple of sore thumbs over there. Especially you, Lady H – you must be a foot taller than some of the Chinese women.’
‘It wasn’t so hard,’ I said. ‘In our Chinese garb, and with a little stage makeup, we could pass casual scrutiny. At night. In the shadows. From a distance. As long as nobody was actually looking at us.’
‘But you’re right, Barty,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘we had to be circumspect. Fortune smiled on us, though. The German dockyard was a busy place, but everyone had work to do so they had no time for looking into the shadows. Over the course of the night we managed to worm our way close enough to the secret pens to see what the Kaiser’s navy was up to.’