Lost Among the Living(68)

Something twisted inside me, hard, but I mirrored him and kept still. I did not speak.

He looked at me for another long moment, simply looking, and then he spoke. “I’ll start at the beginning,” he said.

“Please do,” I snapped, the tension getting to me.

He seemed to think it over, choosing his words. “I lived here for a time. You know that, right?” He saw my expression and nodded. “I know I never told you. My favorite hobby was to sit on a spot near the cliffs of the shoreline and watch the boats. The Ministry of Fisheries is just down the coast. Have you seen it?”

I nodded. He leaned back, and his gaze traveled up the wall, looking into the past as he continued to speak. “I suppose I dreamed of being a brave sea captain, as boys do. But I spent so much time in my observation spot that I began to notice something among the boats. A pattern. There were vessels coming and going regularly—simple boats manned by researchers, mapmakers, other civilians. And then one day a boat entered the harbor that had guns.”

“Guns?”

Alex nodded. “This was 1907, remember. We were not at war. The Ministry of Fisheries isn’t a Royal Navy installation. But gunboats began to enter the Ministry’s harbor, stay a few days, and leave again. In a regular pattern.” He thought back again, lost in memory. “I was fifteen and impetuous, and I thought gunboats were romantic. So one day I made the three-mile trek to the Ministry itself, intent on seeing one of them up close.

“The Ministry is gated and guarded. I walked right up the drive to the gate, but before I could say anything to the guard, a motorcar pulled up. I was dazzled, because a motorcar was a wonderful thing in those days. A man leaned out and asked me my business. I told him I wanted to know what the gunboats were for. He looked at me for a long moment, and then he told me to come with him. Then he told me his name.”

My mind had already worked ahead. “Colonel Mabry,” I said.

Alex paused, surprised. “You were always quick, Jo,” he said. “Yes, that’s who it was, though he wasn’t a colonel then. I take it you’ve met him. He isn’t supposed to be here, but I suppose he’s decided to continue as the curse of my bloody life.”

I blinked at the hostility in his voice. My own anger at Colonel Mabry paled next to that chilled fury.

“Mabry told me nothing, of course,” Alex continued. “He didn’t take me to see the boats, which disappointed me. Instead, he sat me down in an office and questioned me extensively. I told him everything I had seen, the patterns of the gunboats’ movements, their shapes and sizes, the days and times I had seen them come and go. He asked if I had made notes of what I’d seen, which of course I hadn’t. He questioned me about my family and my background. I was bursting with my own questions, but he was as forthcoming as a marble slab. He finally told me that I was an intelligent, observant boy, and that when I got older he’d likely have a job for me.”

I blinked. “A job?” I said.

Alex nodded. “I didn’t know what he meant at the time—it only became clear to me later. He meant a job in intelligence. Specifically, military intelligence.”

“In 1907?” I asked, incredulous. “The war was seven years away.”

“In certain circles of government, Jo, the war was a long time coming. For some of them, the question wasn’t whether we’d have a war, but when. To this day, Mabry hasn’t told me exactly what was going on at the Ministry during those months, but I now believe they were using the harbor as part of a program to test gunboats in the open sea. The Kaiser was already of interest to our government, you see, as was his armament campaign, but Germany was not yet a dangerous concern. Yet Mabry was filing me away for future use, which is what he does.”

“You were fifteen.”

“I was fifteen, of good family, fluent in German, painfully observant, and keen. Men like Mabry rise to be colonels by using whoever they find, however and whenever they can use them. All he did that day was tell me to write him if I wanted work when I finished my education, and he’d find me a position. Off I went, an orphan boy very proud of myself, thinking I’d assured my own future.”

I dropped my arms from my knees and straightened my legs out on the bed, stretching them. “And had you?”

His eyes followed my legs, his gaze resting on them for a long moment. I went still. The hem of my dress covered my knees, but still he stared at my calves, my stockinged feet.

“Alex,” I said.

He did not raise his gaze. “You are quite certain about your earlier resolution?”

“Stop it,” I said. “You haven’t told me anything.”

Slowly, his eyes came up to mine. He hesitated for a long moment, then said, “You’re going to hate me.”

I held his gaze. “Am I?”

He let out a slow breath. “I wrote Mabry during my last year at Oxford. There were rumblings of war by then. He hadn’t forgotten. He said he had work for me.”

Oxford—before I met him, then. “What work?”

“Germany was building warships, submarines. Tensions were rising. There was speculation in intelligence circles that a possible invasion was being planned.”

“An invasion—Germany invading England?”

“Yes. It was believed that the Germans were investigating where an invasion might land. North? South? What route would it take? We suspected they had agents here, pretending to be tourists and businessmen, sending back maps and drawings. We needed to track them and intercept their messages to get an accurate idea of the German network. My job was to locate German contacts in England and report on them—names, addresses, occupations, descriptions. It all went into the files. I collected information, and I passed it on. It paid very well.”