A Pretty Deceit Read online

  The captain walked lightly beside me, his hand gripping my elbow, completely oblivious to the turmoil inside me. I wanted to tell him to let me lie down in the shelter created by the fallen branches of a shelled tree to our right and leave me to my fate. When we veered in that direction, I began to wonder if I’d actually spoken those words aloud. But then he yanked me behind a smaller structure, shielding us from the road, and slammed me against the rough wooden boards.

  “What are you doing here?” he snarled at me, inches from my face. “What did you give the general?” When I didn’t answer quickly enough, he grasped my upper arms, slamming me back against the wall a second time, this time knocking my head against the planks. “Why are you here?”

  I closed my eyes, my head whirling from the impact, and tried to gather my scattered thoughts. “You saw . . .” I stammered, endeavoring to force my sluggish mind into action even as the back of my skull pounded. “I delivered . . .”

  He shook me. “Tell me!”

  The look in his eyes when I opened them told me he would not spare me in finding out what he wanted to know. I’d seen the same expression on the face of a member of the German Secret Police ruthlessly interrogating an old Belgian man at a checkpoint before he’d broken his arm. My nerves tightened in awareness, recognizing I needed to get away—that this might be the very man we’d been warning Bishop about—but my mind was still struggling to catch up, my vision blurry.

  Had Bishop known who the spy in his camp was? Had he deliberately sent him away with me? But if so, why hadn’t he warned me? Or had he, and in my grief-stricken haze I hadn’t noticed?

  I tried to remember my training, to recall which limb I should strike out with, or whether I should slump against his grip and allow the dead weight of my body to pull him off balance. Before I could decide, the choice was made for me, as suddenly the whole world was upended.

  A terrific explosion ripped through my ear drums even as I was being tossed through the air, landing with a painful thud against the earth. For a moment, it was all I could do but to lie there utterly stunned. Struggling to draw breath, I worried my lungs had been punctured, but then I realized the wind had simply been knocked out of me. Something pressed against my back, holding me down. I shifted my knees up beneath me, trying to leverage it off of me, but it wouldn’t budge.

  I must have cried out, for hands were soon pulling me out of the rubble. Soldiers from the road had rushed to my aid. I blinked against the brightness of the sudden inferno before me. The entire temporary headquarters had gone up in flames. No doubt killing everyone inside, including the brigadier general I had journeyed all this way to deliver that message to. Of all the rotten misbegotten luck, for his HQ to suffer a direct hit from a shell when everyone knew the artillery’s aim was rubbish. Sometimes they couldn’t target an entire bloody town, let alone a single house, though the Germans were admittedly far more accurate than we were. A few minutes earlier and I would have been killed, as well.

  Such a realization made my knees feel soft, particularly given my morose ponderings as I’d left that shelter.

  A face loomed before me. My ears still ringing from the impact, I couldn’t hear the words the man was saying, even though he was screaming them directly into my face. Finally, he just grabbed hold of my arm and began pulling me away from the debris. As another shell landed some several hundred yards away, sending dirt and debris in a plume up into the air, I grasped what he was trying to communicate. Take cover!

  We ran in the direction of the wrecked rail line, pausing only long enough for him to grab the helmet from a fallen soldier, his vacant eyes staring up at the night sky as one by one the stars began to wink into existence. To our left, I noted the man being attended to by another pair of soldiers. It was the captain who had attacked me. We’d been thrown apart, and apparently he’d suffered greater wounds than I had, for his head was bloodied, his eyes closed in unconsciousness.

  I had only a moment to spare a thought for what to do about him before the soldier and I were running again and then diving into a makeshift trench that had been dug to the west of the road. The soldier crammed the scavenged helmet onto my head, and I slumped down beside him, cowering as the shells continued to fall and the world quaked and trembled around us.

  CHAPTER 1

  October 1919

  Wiltshire, England

  There are few things more wonderful than seeing the face of someone you love lit with pure joy. Particularly someone who has faced so much darkness, so much horror and grief. It makes your breath catch in your throat, and turns your heart inside out and then right-side out again at the realization you would do anything to preserve that happiness, that delight.

  Anything but die, that is.

  “Darling, I’m glad you’re enjoying your new roadster,” I called, raising my voice to be heard over the roar of the engine and the cool rush of the wind past my cheeks. “But if it’s all the same to you, I would like to make it to my aunt’s house in one piece.”

  Sidney’s eyes gleamed with exhilaration. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he exclaimed, his hands caressing the driving wheel much as he had caressed me the night before.

  “She is,” I agreed, and I meant it. Though not as zealous a motorist as my husband, I could certainly appreciate the fine craftsmanship and performance of a magnificent motorcar. Just as I could appreciate his enthusiasm. After all, his previous Pierce-Arrow had been destroyed during a dangerous investigation we’d undertaken in war-ravaged Belgium, and Sidney had waited three long months for this replacement to arrive from America. Even I had felt a surge of elation at my first sight of her, all sleek lines and glossy deep carmine-red paint. Which only made my desire not to collide with a tree, or worse, another motorcar, even greater—for the roadster’s sake and mine.

  The motorcar soared over a slight rise in the road and then raced downward, fast approaching a sharp curve. My fingers gripped the seat beneath me until I felt Sidney apply the brakes and ease around the turn with precision handling, only for the car to spring forward again, like a young horse pulling against its traces.

  Not that I minded the speed, in general. I relished the thrill of the world whipping past and the raw power of a good engine driving beneath me as much as anyone. But the roads in this part of Berkshire were narrow and lined with tall hedges and dense coppices, making it impossible to see what was around the next bend until you were already upon it. So the use of this new Pierce-Arrow’s extra surge of speed was perhaps a trifle reckless. But reckless always had been Sidney’s driving style.

  He threw me a disarming smile as we approached another curve, and I felt some of my tension ease. After all, four months ago I’d still believed him dead, and here he was, returned to me, to the life he’d lived before that fateful day in August 1914 when war was declared. The last thing I wanted to do was crush his enjoyment. But nonetheless, he seemed to recognize from my clenched fingers and tight jaw that perhaps I wasn’t enjoying myself as much as he was. As he straightened out of the turn, he trod more gently on the accelerator, hurling us forward at a slightly less hell-for-leather pace.

  “Tell me about your aunt,” he urged me as he scraped a hand back through his dark wind-rifled hair. He’d long since discarded his hat in the seat behind us. “She’s your father’s sister?”

  “Yes, or else I doubt my father would have bestirred himself to interrupt my mother.” I turned to gaze through an opening in the hedge line through which I could see the rolling hills of the North Wessex Downs and the winding blue ribbon of the River Kennet.

  I thought back to my mother’s telephone call the day before. It had been at least a fortnight since I’d last heard from her, and she rarely let a period of such length pass without calling to harangue me about one infraction or another, or to complain about my sister or one of my brothers. But the reason for this call had been something of a shock. Even more so when my father had pried the mouthpiece from her fingers to add his voice to her request.

&nb
sp; “What your mother’s trying to say, Ver, is that your aunt’s had a rough time of it since the war,” he had told me in his warm, gravelly voice. “Losing Sir James and Thomas almost one right after the other nearly broke her. And then for Reginald to have come home the way he did, well, she’s done in.”

  “I’m sorry for Aunt Ernestine, I truly am,” I had replied. “But Mother said she needed my help, and I honestly don’t know what I can do. Have they tried one of those specialty hospitals I’ve read about, the ones that are supposed to treat returning soldiers in situations like Reg?”

  “Aye, yes. They’ve tried all that. In fact, he’s just returned from one. But this is nothing to do with your cousin.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Father had exhaled a long, weary breath, letting me know Mother had already talked circles around him on this subject, and all for naught. For once my father made up his mind about something, it would take a force greater than a whirlwind to move him from it. And my mother was very nearly that. “As I understand it, the manor is in shambles thanks to the airmen who billeted there from the neighboring aerodrome during the war. And now your aunt has discovered she hasn’t the coffers to pay for it. Apparently everything is already mortgaged to the hilt, and a number of the estate’s priceless heirlooms have gone missing from storage, so she can’t even sell her most portable property to raise some of the funds.”

  I had felt a pang of empathy for my aunt. And my father. Aunt Ernestine had always been a woman enamored with her own consequence, and never content enough until everyone knew it. This situation must be extremely lowering for her. While my mother must be silently crowing with delight—evidence that the vain and mighty shall fall, and the meek and humble shall flourish. At least, when the vain and mighty were her enemies.

  “But surely this is an issue for the War Office to sort out, if there are damages and theft to be reported?” I had countered.

  “Yes, but your aunt has watched her orderly world crumble around her, and I’m not certain she’s thinking clearly.”

  “You think she’s lying?” I had said in surprise.

  “Not lying. Just . . . confused. To hear her speak, Littlemote House is practically crumbling to pieces around them, and yet I find it difficult to believe the Royal Air Force would ever have allowed it to get to such a state.” My mother’s voice mumbled in the background, and my father turned to speak to her before heaving another aggrieved sigh. “She was also rambling on about a missing servant and a ghost, of all things. Yes, yes, Sarah,” he shushed my mother. “I admit it sounded all a little mad. Certainly unlike Ernestine.”

  “Yes, very odd,” I had acknowledged hesitantly, already conscious of where this was going.

  “Can you and Sidney pay her a visit at Littlemote? Find out exactly what the situation is there? I would ask your cousin Reginald, but he’s in no state to deal with all of this.”

  I wasn’t certain I agreed with his final statement. After all, Reg was the new baronet, and blinded or not, he would have to confront the concerns of his baronetcy at some point.

  But there was another reason I was reluctant to go to Littlemote, though I would never have voiced it aloud. Not to my father, in any case. Moreover, he didn’t give me a chance.

  “Please, Verity. You are the closest, and your husband undoubtedly has the most clout to get something done should your aunt’s claims prove true. After all, they did just pin a Victoria Cross to his chest for valor. We’re dashed proud of him, by the way.”

  I had smiled tightly into the mirror that hung above the bureau where our telephone rested in our London flat, refusing to examine the unsettling jumble of emotions that mention of Sidney’s medal always threatened to dredge up. Instead I focused on my father’s voice, on the evident worry and uncertainty that tainted his normally stoical tones. When, if ever, had my father asked me for anything? It seemed churlish to say no. But still I resisted.

  “I’ll speak with Sidney. If he has no objections, we’ll drive out to Littlemote tomorrow,” I had promised, privately hoping my husband would nix such a plan, though I’d known he wouldn’t. We were bound for Falmouth anyway, and a stop in northeastern Wiltshire was virtually along the way.

  So here we were, slowing to motor through yet another of the tiny villages that dotted the English countryside in counties as fertile as Berkshire and neighboring Wiltshire. “Aunt Ernestine is father’s younger sister,” I explained to Sidney. “He’s always been a bit protective of her, to Mother’s everlasting annoyance.”

  His lips quirked in amusement.

  I lifted my hand to return the excited wave of a little girl perched on her stone house’s front step. “Sadly, her husband, Sir James Popham, died two years ago. A heart attack, from the strain of losing their eldest son, Thomas, the doctor said.”

  “Thomas served during the war?”

  I nodded. “Part of the Irish Guards. Killed at Loos.”

  There was no need to reply. His heavy silence said more than enough. Simply the name of some battles told the entire story in and of themselves, imbued forever with the death and destruction that had happened there. Loos. Verdun. Passchendaele. The Somme.

  I took a deep breath, forcing myself to continue in a light voice as the Pierce-Arrow reached the edge of the village and again began gathering speed. “By comparison, their younger son, Reginald, seemed to live a charmed war. Ostensibly.” For I understood, as Sidney certainly did, that no soldier had survived the horrors of trench warfare without some sort of scars, invisible though they might be to the eye.

  “Until he didn’t,” he surmised.

  “He was blinded at Ypres in 1917.”

  “Poor bloke.”

  “Yes, well, don’t let him hear you say that.” I turned to peer out over the countryside to the north at the sound of the familiar buzzing rumble. “Last I saw him, he was already feeling sorry enough for himself, and he won’t thank you for it.”

  “Noted.” His eyes darted between the road and the same patch of sky I was monitoring.

  When finally the aeroplane soared into sight, passing over the copse of oak trees just beginning to burst into autumn color, and the welcome roundel insignia could be seen painted on the underside of the wings, we both seemed to inhale a breath of relief. I wondered how long it would take before the sound of approaching aircraft no longer filled me with dread. How long until the instinct to duck and cover was no longer my first impulse?

  Sidney’s hands tightened and then relaxed their grip on the driving wheel. “We must be close.”

  “Yes,” was all I could manage, my heart still racing from the instinct of prey. After all, during my time working behind enemy lines in the German-occupied territories of Belgium and northeastern France, that had been very much what I was.

  Sidney rested his hand on my leg and offered me a consoling smile, letting me know that I hadn’t hidden my alarm as well as I’d hoped. But his attention was soon reclaimed by the aeroplane as it wheeled about, returning toward us. I shielded my eyes to gaze up at its metal frame glinting in the crystalline-blue sky. Rather than fly off in the direction of the aerodrome, from which it had come, the light bomber seemed to swerve back and forth over top of us. Something I was none too comfortable with.

  “I’d wager that pilot is a bit of motor enthusiast,” Sidney proclaimed with pride. His eyes glinted with challenge. “Shall we give him a show?”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than the Pierce-Arrow surged forward, its engine revving as it gained speed over a relatively straight stretch of open road. I pressed my Napoleon blue cloche hat down tighter on my head, my stomach fluttering as the wind whipped past my cheeks. However, I wasn’t unmoved by the exhilaration of such speed, and a breathless laugh escaped from my mouth, belying my trepidation.

  The bomber kept pace with us, more or less straightening out his flight path. Though, of course, had the pilot wished, he could have left us in a trail of his fumes.

  “Sidney,” I gasped.
“Tell me you are not trying to race that aeroplane.”

  The widening of his grin was my only answer.

  I shook my head and clutched the seat beneath me, my fingernails biting into the leather even through my kid gloves. “I’m all for a bit of fun,” I shouted over the wind. “But I cannot promise your prized car’s upholstery won’t have claw marks in it when it’s over.”

  He glanced over at me, perhaps recognizing for the first time the uneasiness underlying my banter, and eased up on the accelerator. And not a moment too soon. For the motorcar whipped around a bend and into the outskirts of another village, where a man and woman stood yelling at each other in the middle of the road.

  Sidney stomped on the brakes, fighting to bring the Pierce-Arrow to a safe stop while I braced myself against the dashboard. When the motorcar shuddered to a stop, dust from the road billowing up around us, the couple stood but inches from our front fender.

  The man appeared frozen with shock, while the woman seemed to teeter and then stagger backward a few steps, her face contorted in a grimace as she blinked rapidly. For a moment, I feared we had struck her. But once she’d righted herself, she swayed back toward the man, her head bobbling on her shoulders as she raised her finger to resume whatever tirade she had been delivering. The man ignored her words in favor of scowling at us. And rightfully so. Though what had he expected, standing in the middle of the road, and a rather well-traveled thoroughfare at that?