I could feel him behind me, tense as a steel rod, and the hand on my shoulder was gripping it hard.
“I don’t see anything,” I said uneasily. “The street. The houses opposite, the carriages and motorcars and people-”
“There. At the house across the way. There’s a man loitering there. See, the one with the cane.”
The house he spoke of was closed up. The children had been taken to the country for safety from the zeppelin raids, staying with their grandparents for the duration of the war. Mrs. Venton was nursing burn victims at her sister’s country house near Winchester. Her husband was serving in the Navy, the gunnery officer on a cruiser.
I looked again at the man. He was moderately well dressed, but the cane he was carrying caught my eye. “That’s not a cane,” I said, intrigued. “Well, it is, if you like, but I recognize it. My grandfather had one-it’s a sword stick. A twist of the handle, and the blade slides out.”
“Your father has set someone to watch over you. What have you told him?”
“Nothing-truly, I haven’t betrayed you. I wouldn’t. Besides, the general view is that you must be dead.”
Just at that moment, Mrs. Hennessey came out of our house and crossed the street, her market basket on her arm. The man stepped out of the shelter of the Venton porch and tipped his hat to her.
I could see then that he was older than he looked, his head bald save for a ring of graying hair like a laurel wreath worn rather long. He looked more like a hopeful poet than he did a menace. And perhaps that was by design.
Mrs. Hennessey listened to him for a moment, then shook her head. He asked other questions, and she again told him no. After that he let her go, walked in the other direction from the one she took-and just as he was about to pass out of sight, he turned and came back again to the porch across from us.
I moved away from Peregrine and the window. “I’ll collect my coat and walk out. See what he does. Whether he follows me or stays where he is. We need buns for our tea, and the bakery is just in the next street. You’ve been there.”
“What if he stops you, as he stopped Mrs. Hennessey?”
I smiled as I pulled on my gloves and reached for the market basket we kept in the flat. “I’m forewarned, aren’t I?”
Peregrine was uneasy with my going. “I still don’t like this idea.”
“No, I want you to see that I had no part of this watcher, and that we’re both beginning to imagine things.”
Before he could argue, I was out the door and down the stairs.
This house had four floors, three of them let to people like my flatmates and me-in need of a base in London but seldom there to enjoy it.
I went down the stairs and out the door without looking in the direction of the watcher-if that is what he was. Instead, I walked briskly to the corner of our street, turning toward the small shops huddled together on the main road.
When I got to the corner, I risked a glance behind me, and to my surprise, no one was following me-and the watcher had vanished.
“Tsk. I’ve come out into the cold for nothing,” I said to myself. But I had come this far, and I went to the bakery to see what was available. We were all doing without the niceties by this time, and it depended entirely on what the baker had been able to find in the way of sugar and flour and eggs as to what was for sale. He put all his resources into bread, which everyone needed, and what was left over went into the tea cakes and buns and an occasional surprise, like the Sally Lunns on sale last week.
We weren’t as fortunate today. I bought bread and looked at the pathetically thin arrangement of sweets on trays that now dwarfed the selections and that used to be filled to overflowing with good things. There was a little white gingerbread left, and I bought two cakes of that for our tea.
Mr. Johnson, serving me, said, “You aren’t at the Front yet, Miss Crawford, nursing our lads? They must be heartsick without your sunny presence.”
He was a string bean of a man with thick white hair, black brows, and a pleasant disposition. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him in a foul mood.
“Alas, they must wait another week, Mr. Johnson. I’ve no word yet on where I’ll be sent.”
“If you see my grandson, God forbid he should be hurt, but if you do, tell him I send him my love.”
It was his greatest fear, that his grandson would die in the war. A fear that too many people shared.
“I promise,” I told him as he handed me my tidy little square of cakes. And then someone else was holding his attention, and I went out the door.
The man, when I approached the flat, was walking back up the street, toward me. But he stopped to watch a small boy trying to make a toy horse set on wheels crest the uneven cobbles of the street. I went on to our flat and opened the door.
Peregrine was standing there, his face a thundercloud.
“He came into the house,” Peregrine said before I’d even crossed the threshold. “I watched him cross the street, heard him climb the stairs, and he went to each door, listening and then trying the latch. I’d locked your door. But I could hear him fumbling with it.”
“Then he wasn’t sent by my father. My father knows which flat I occupy. He must be looking for someone else.”
“You saw Jonathan in Tonbridge. You saw Timothy in Owlhurst. You called on Lady Parsons, the rector, and the doctor. Someone set a watch on you.”
“No, I was circumspect. Except with the rector and Lady Parsons. I don’t see either of them running to Mrs. Graham, telling tales. I gave your brothers-and Dr. Philips-the impression that I was still concerned about Ted Booker’s unhappy death.”
And then it occurred to me that we had counted Ted Booker among the six dead. Because Lady Parsons had survived.
“Dear God. Peregrine, what if we were right about the killing continuing? And I let it be known I was concerned about the Booker suicide…”
He said nothing, but behind his dark eyes, his mind was racing. I could see it in his face.
“Then I’m still in the clear,” he said finally. “That is, if they still consider me dead as you said. But you are most definitely in danger.”
He tried to persuade me to go home, where my parents could protect me until I left for France. Here, alone in London, I was vulnerable. If, that is, the man watching the flat was indeed here because of me.
And before long, through me, someone would surely discover that Peregrine wasn’t dead in Winchelsea but alive and in London. That would never do.
“Don’t you see?” I said to Peregrine. “The first order of business is to get you safely out of London, and I don’t know where to put you. Not at home-I won’t involve my father or Simon in this business. They’ll do something rash.”
I wouldn’t put it past either of them to kidnap our watcher and make him tell who had hired him, and why. They had served on the Khyber Pass-kidnapping there was something of a local pastime. Not among the British, but the wild tribesmen who lived on either side of the pass had no compunction about treating their foes as they were accustomed to being treated in their turn.
“I can protect myself.”
“With the doctor’s pistol? And this time you will hang. Be sensible.”
He rubbed his face. “I wanted nothing so much as to leave that asylum and get at the truth about that night in London. Afterward-well, if I didn’t like what I learned, there was a way out. And then when I was free of the gates, trudging through the cold night, I was tempted to turn back. Much as I hated the asylum, I was afraid. Of the night, of myself, of what lay ahead. I told myself I might never have another chance, and so I kept walking. It took more courage than I ever knew I had. And I don’t know much more now than I did when I started this search. You’ve done all you can-all anyone can do. But there are more questions than answers still.”