Gossamer Wing (29 page)

“It’s already on its way there, Lady Hardison,” the agent told her, as he set off for the waiting steam car, clearly expecting them to follow. “I sent Jensen with it. Boss’s orders.”

“Oh. I see,” she responded, and shot a guilty glance at Dexter. “I’m already in disgrace, I suppose.”

He took her hand in his. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

* * *

THE AMBULANCE SPED
toward the hospital, steam engine roaring and the stoker working constantly to keep the fuel and water levels steady. Jean-Michel Imbert had just enough consciousness left to wonder why they bothered to hurry. The poison had nearly finished its work inside him, he could tell. He would be surprised to survive the trip.

At least I die as myself
, he thought.
At least Dubois died first
.

He hoped that Hardison would hold to his word and see that his mother got his body. Between the arm and the ear, he was probably carrying close to a pound of gold around inside himself; as the least reactive metal, it was the standard for lining implants, and his were top-of-the-line models.

I always loved you, Simone
. He wondered if he would see her in heaven, some special section set aside for people like them who had done terrible things in the service of a greater good.

“Simone,” he whispered.

“Shh,” the attendant sitting next to him said. “Save your strength, monsieur.”

“For what?” Jean-Michel wondered. He thought he said it aloud, but the medic didn’t respond so perhaps not.

For what, indeed
? When it came to the moment of truth, it seemed, dying was really quite easy. Painful, yes, but it required no action on his part. He could struggle or he could give in, but he would die either way.

Jean-Michel decided he had struggled quite enough; it was finally time to give in.

Twenty-two

HONFLEUR AND LE HAVRE, FRANCE

TO CHARLOTTE’S DISMAY,
once she and Dexter finished their debriefing and returned to Honfleur things seemed to go back to exactly the way they had been.

Dexter slept for half the day then returned to the station, eager to finish the work on his seismograph. Charlotte went to the station as well, where she received an official suspension from duty for her unauthorized use of the submersible and for interfering with the other agents. The paperwork made no mention of her pulling a weapon on them, a small concession to the fact that her argument for not storming the freighter had proven accurate. Murcheson strongly implied she was lucky to get off so lightly, however, and that her interests might best be served by resigning her position as a field agent upon her return to the Dominions.

“I’m better at desk work anyway,” she admitted.

“It was bad luck about the airship,” Murcheson offered, though it was cold comfort. Charlotte missed her dirigible keenly. Martin—Imbert—had admitted to tipping off the press about it. “Perhaps the Agency will be willing to try again in another few years.”

“Will you tell me something?” she asked Murcheson before she left Atlantis Station for the last time. “It’s about Reginald.”

“Anything I can, my dear.”

“When Dexter asked about that night Reginald took the documents, you said something about Reginald going up the
side
of the Opéra. I was just curious what you meant? Was there scaffolding there at the time? If there was, why didn’t Martin—Imbert, I mean—just follow him up? It must have taken much longer to pick the locks and use the stairs inside.”

Murcheson shook his head. “No, Reginald scaled the side, like a monkey. You know how acrobatic he was. The boy left everybody in the dust during training whenever the job was to climb a wall or scramble up a rope.”

“I’m sorry?” Charlotte felt like she’d been caught in the wrong conversation. “I was talking about Reginald. My late husband.”

“Yes. Moncrieffe. Skinny chap, tall, very fit, spectacles, good at maths? Moncrieffe.”

“But . . . but Reginald hated sport. He wasn’t remotely athletic. We used to laugh about that, about how in school he never played for the teams, he always—”

“Oh, dear. No, of course he wouldn’t have, would he? They wouldn’t let him. He was usually a good many years younger than the other boys in his form, as quickly as he went through.”

Charlotte nodded. “That makes sense.” Something still struck her as strange about it, though.

Murcheson reached over and took one of her hands, patting it kindly. “I forget how young you both were. My dear, I have a question for you. Do
you
like sport?”

“No,” Charlotte said immediately. “I enjoy riding but on the whole I’ve never been a fan. Particularly of anything involving teams.”

“Yes, I see. And Reginald knew of this, I suppose?”

She considered it for a moment. Had he known? He must have. She had never held back her opinion on the matter. Far from it, in fact—there might have been a certain amount of open scorn. “I think he must have.”

“I think it’s possible he wasn’t so much averse to athletics, then, as keen to share
your
aversion. He did like to impress you, you know. But when you weren’t looking, he was a demon on the cricket pitch for the interagency team. And the lad could scale a sheer wall like a lemur on cocaine.”

She smiled at the image, even as her heart ached to learn this new thing about Reginald, too late for it to do any good.

“He should have just told me,” she sighed. “It’s not as though I would have minded. Why would he be so dishonest?”

Murcheson patted her hand again, seeming to cast about for the right words. “He was young and in love,” he finally said, “and desperate to marry you. He was hardly the first man to lose his head under those circumstances and do stupid things in an effort to present himself in the best possible light. You shouldn’t think ill of him for it.”

Charlotte nodded, but her mind was already elsewhere. On Dexter, his calm and steady voice in the bowels of the rusty freighter, saving his own life simply by being himself.

She might have discussed this with Dexter, but he had sent her a terse message to the effect that he would be remaining at the station for the duration of his work there. Charlotte took to walking the quaint streets of Honfleur and second-guessing all her own choices of the past several years until she thought she’d go mad with the knowledge that she had let a vital moment pass her by. She’d been too overwhelmed by the events of that night on the dock to simply state her mind to Dexter, and having failed to do it at once she had lost her nerve and her opportunity.

The newspapers were diverting for a time, as they were full of the scintillating tale of the heroic agent who sacrificed everything to reveal a traitor to France. True to the promise he’d made the dying man, Dexter had convinced Murcheson and the somewhat bewildered head of French intelligence that Martin’s death could be a public relations opportunity for them both. The official story was that Coeur de Fer, really Jean-Michel Imbert, had spent seven years in deep cover to expose Dubois. He had done it, the papers claimed, for the love of France and the love of Simone Vernier, the notorious femme fatale who had died in pursuit of the truth about Dubois and his involvement in an attempt to prolong the war.

Charlotte liked the story. Enough of it was true that she forgave the French government their hyperbole in reclaiming Coeur de Fer’s achievement for their own. Whitehall too had conspired in the story to cast Dubois in the worst possible light. He became the violent extremist they had always suspected him of being, seeking the steamrail contract only as a stepping stone to effect greater, unspecified evils against the state. Imbert had stopped him just in time to avert calamity. There were strong hints that Dubois had been seeking out mad engineers to build him a doomsday device of his own; this was treated as de facto proof of his desire for world domination and general malfeasance. Of Gendreau, the papers said nothing. The man himself had returned to St. Helena, his exile reinstated.

Charlotte knew this whole approach was more about political convenience than anything else; the current powers wanted to discredit not only Dubois but the politicians and old government officials he’d been aligned with—the faction that had fallen from power shortly before the treaty was signed. Still, that version of events lent a romanticism to Imbert’s deeds, and perhaps because of the propaganda she found herself able to forgive him just a little for his actions toward her, Dexter and Murcheson.

More cold comfort. Charlotte was tired of France. She no longer hated the French, but she longed to be back home, hearing the comfortably familiar accents of the Dominions. The prospect of Reginald’s big, empty house was less alluring. It had never felt like home to her. She had felt more at home with Dexter, even those last few fraught days before his abduction, than she had ever been in the house her late husband had left to her.

She and Reginald had never shared that house, never even stood in it together. Their first time there would have been when they returned from their honeymoon, ready to start their married life together. That day had never come, and Charlotte thought she’d been suspended ever since, unable to move forward. But the only one holding her back was herself.

I just want to go home. But how?

* * *

IT WAS FINISHED.
The last cable had been laid and tested, the technicians thoroughly trained and vetted. They had even been favored with a live test in the form of a slight tremor from the fault along the chalk lithosome to the east, and the system had worked beautifully. The switch was triggered, the silent beam of light shot from the remote sensor back along the glass cable to the station, and the alarm had gone up, just as Dexter had envisioned. The station crew had evacuated safely, and Dexter had been hailed by one and by all.

The next day, as Dexter made his final adjustments, Murcheson handed him a pair of tickets for a fast clipper ship departing Le Havre for New York in the morning.

“There’s really no reason to stay any longer,” Murcheson told him. “Your work is done here, and Lady Hardison will need to report to the Agency offices in New York soon to discuss reassignment. This won’t be as comfortable as a luxury liner but it’ll get you home in half the time.”

“What will happen to her?” Dexter still thought Murcheson might have turned a blind eye to Charlotte’s escapades if he’d wanted to. None of his arguments on her behalf seemed to carry any weight, however. Dexter suspected Lord Darmont’s hand in having her sent down from field work.

“I think they have some decoding for her to do,” Murcheson replied. “The same sort of thing she was doing before. She’s quite good at it.”

Dexter nodded. “I’m sure she is.”

I just don’t know that she ever liked it much
, he thought. It had been an interest she shared with Reginald. They had often worked together, she’d mentioned, but she’d begun pressing for field work shortly after his death. She liked to
do
things. Fly dirigibles and test her nerve in subs and dance around lampposts while wearing trousers. Charlotte strode around Paris and cased opera houses, braved wild cows and shopped like a demon even in provincial French villages.

It broke his heart to think of her withering away in a dusty office, nose pressed to a stack of encrypted pages. Never flying again.

Dexter knew he should be racing for the hotel to let Charlotte know about the tickets so she could pack. He wasn’t sure why he was dragging his feet.

Letdown, probably. He wanted to be home again—his head was full of ideas for when he got back to his workshop—but he felt like he still had things left to do in France.

The marriage ends when the mission ends
. Dexter put his tools away in their cases and the cases into the trunks, his hands moving automatically as his mind poked and prodded at the dilemma.

She’d sent him a message at the station, asking after his health, reminding him that he was welcome at the hotel if he needed to sleep. Dexter had stayed away, even as he’d cursed himself for doing it. He avoided her because he didn’t want to discuss the end of things, didn’t want to do or say something and realize, “this is the last time.”

The same wish for avoidance spurred Dexter’s irritation when he opened the door to his berth on the fast clipper only to discover the tiny space crowded with Charlotte’s trunks in addition to his own. Unlike the cruise ship, the clipper featured Spartan accommodations even in first class. With all the luggage, there was barely enough room to walk from the hatch to the bunk.

Blast
.

He wondered if he’d be able to find a steward and sort out the mess before the ship embarked. The citrusy scent of Charlotte’s perfume already wafted about the cabin, and Dexter was damned if he’d spend the next several days steeping in that fragrance. It was already hard enough to forget their last time together—the night of the steam car explosion in Paris—without having a constant olfactory reminder of the woman to whom he would shortly no longer be married.

Damn
.
Damn!

“Damn!” he repeated aloud.

“Language, sweetiekins.”

* * *

DEXTER SIGHED AS
he turned around to face her. “Your bags were put in my berth by mistake. I was just going to find a steward to move them. Which cabin are you in?”

Charlotte steadied herself against the force of his glare. She saw this flash of honest irritation as an improvement over not seeing him at all. Avoiding her hadn’t seemed like him at all. Anything was better than Dexter not being himself.

“I’m in this one.”

“You’re in—no, this is mine. Oh, never mind. Let’s both go. The bursar can sort it out.”

“No. There’s nothing to sort out. We’re
both
in this one.”

“Bloody hell.”

She pressed forward, forcing him to back up, and closed the hatch behind her. “You’ve been avoiding me for days. This will give us a chance to talk.”

With no room to maneuver, Dexter gave up and sat on the bunk. “You arranged this? On
purpose
?”

“You sound horrified. That’s not entirely flattering.” She threw her hat atop the nearest trunk and pulled her gloves off in relief. It was another unusually warm day in Le Havre, and Charlotte was eager for the ship to cast off so she could enjoy the cool ocean breeze.

Her reticule still hung on her wrist, and before she set it aside she pulled Murcheson’s curio box from it, presenting it to Dexter atop her palm. He took it and turned it around in his fingers, not saying anything.

Charlotte swallowed nervously, unsure how to proceed.

Best to just jump in, start talking and something will come to me
, she decided at last. “I’m no good at those things, and you are. Will you show me how to open it?”

Dexter raised his eyebrows. “Just like that? You’re through trying?”

“It’s not my strength,” she shrugged. “I don’t really care about how it’s done, I just like the result. Show me, please?”