There was a sudden knocking at the street door, so loud it could not be ignored and conversation around the room fluttered to a halt. A door in the hall opened and closed and a voice, cracked and raised, bounced its way along the corridor and into the room.
“I don’t give a damn if he’s at dinner. I need him now and I’ll have him!”
Lady Susan leaped excitedly to her feet. “It’s Molloy!” she said, and ran to the double doors at the bottom of the table and threw them open. The party turned to see the man himself in the doorway, tall and slightly stooped in his greasy hat, occupied in knocking the hand of one of the footmen off his sleeve. Beside him stood a woman of middle age and comfortable stature. She wore a skirt made from a patchwork of many pieces of colored material; blues and green mostly. There was something of the Gypsy about her, though her coloring indicated an Englishwoman. As they stared, from behind her emerged a little boy of about Susan’s age, holding a grizzled terrier in his arms.
“Mr. Molloy! How do you do?” said Susan happily. “And you have brought friends with you.”
Molloy touched the brim of his hat to her and, letting his eyes trace the faces in the room, said to Susan, out of the corner of his mouth, “How do, Your Ladyness.” Susan giggled. “Now can you tell me, sunbeam, which of these gentlewomen is a Mrs. Westerman. I have some business touching on her.”
Harriet stood up, her wrap settled in the crook of her arms. “I am Mrs. Westerman.”
Molloy nodded to her. “I am Molloy, and though Graves there will tell you gladly I’m not normally allied with respectable company, he’ll also tell you I have a useful bone or two in my frame.”
Harriet looked over at Graves. He folded his napkin and gave her a slight nod, saying, “It was Molloy here who gave us a warning when it was most needful last year. He has made no attempt to capitalize on the help he gave as yet.”
Molloy’s face crumpled with a frown. “Don’t think I won’t yet, son. I save my favors and maybe add to them, is all.” He turned his attention back to Harriet and, perhaps a little belatedly, took off his hat. “This Mrs. Bligh here,” he jerked his thumb behind him at the woman in the patchwork skirt, “has heard a man wish danger on a sailor called Westerman. Might that be your husband, ma’am? Some matter of treachery and information. Mention of the French with whom we are all at odds.”
Harriet felt very cold; she sensed the eyes of her friends on her. Crowther looked shocked and the muscles in his jaws clenched. Graves and Clode were intelligent men; she could almost feel them shaking up the incidents of the last days and weeks and seeing them settle into some pattern that chilled them. “It might.”
Jocasta stepped forward and the patchwork on her skirt rippled as if the individual fragments of cloth remembered when they had been in elegant rooms like this by wax candlelight, and were inclined to dance again. “I was where I shouldn’t have been, ma’am, for reasons there’s no need to waste air on the telling of. He’s a serious fella, this man-he said his boss wanted Westerman quieting, had heard he might know something he shouldn’t. Thin. Was wearing brown each time we’ve seen him, and I think he’s done for two little friends of this boy in my care and through my fault. Voice like a dove being throttled. Works by night. It’s dark now, and he don’t seem a man who delays. Is your man here?” She was looking into the faces of the men around the table. None of them looked simple, or like a sailor to her eyes. “Can you guard him?”
Harriet steadied herself on the table. “Johannes. James. Highgate.”
There was a moment of silence, then Graves was suddenly on his feet and hallooing the household together.
“Don’t bother with the carriage! Mounts for four! At once.” The footman stood back from Molloy and hurried off. “Mrs. Westerman, go and change your dress. Miss Trench, help her. Clode! There are a pair of pistols in the study. Susan, go look to the children. Mrs. Martin?” The housekeeper appeared swiftly in the doorway. “Would you take Mr. Molloy and his friends to the kitchen, please, and see they are fed.” Graves then turned to Crowther. “Sir. I presume you will ride with us?” Crowther nodded, then as the party dispersed, calling for cloaks, boots and horses, Crowther turned to Mrs. Service.
“Might I trouble you to spend a few moments with me in the library, madam? I have some information I should like you to pass on to a friend.”
Harriet had flung herself into her riding clothes and was coming back down the stairs before a very few minutes were over. The street door was open, and already the horses were saddled and waiting. They seemed to have caught the urgency in the air and were stamping on the ground and shaking their great heads. Graves and Clode stood in the entrance hall, checking their pistols and then sheathing them under their coats. Crowther emerged from the library and took the riding cloak that was offered to him without comment. Harriet’s last image of the house, fleetingly caught as she was lifted up into the saddle and took the reins, was of the dinner table still laid. The candles and crystal, the food, and silverware all fine and shining.
9
Mr. Palmer hesitated as the library door closed behind him some little time later. Instead of Mrs. Westerman or Mr. Crowther he saw sitting in front of the fire a thin, elderly woman with steel-rimmed spectacles and a workbasket on her knee.
“My apologies, madam. I believe I have been shown into the wrong chamber,” he said, and began to retreat.
The lady put down her work. “No, Mr. Palmer. I have news from Mrs. Westerman and Mr. Crowther. Manzerotti, the castrato at His Majesty’s, seems to be the lead of the French intelligence activities in London. Lord Carmichael is the conduit through which the information travels to France, and Johannes is his pet killer and fixer. Oh, and I am Mrs. Service.”
Mr. Palmer was at a loss for words.
“Perhaps you should sit down, sir, and I shall elaborate,” Mrs. Service said with an encouraging smile, and touched a bell at her side. Mrs. Martin appeared in the doorway. “Port for myself and Mr. Palmer, if you please, Mrs. Martin. The gentleman has had a shock. And if our friends downstairs have finished eating, perhaps you might invite them to join us.”
Some months later, Rachel asked her sister what her thoughts had been during the ride to Highgate. Harriet lied, saying that she remembered little of it beyond her growing physical exhaustion and her continual calculations of how many hours of darkness would have elapsed before they could reach Dr. Trevelyan’s house and James. In truth, though, she had awareness of both of these, it seemed that during her ride through the darkness she had seen a steady progression of images, a storybook of her husband since their first meeting. She felt that each view was being held up before her eyes like the pictures Mrs. Spitter had shown Gladys. She would have said it seemed like the pages of her life being turned in front of her. She could not stay with the images she loved, or avoid those she did not. Their progress was inevitable: with each thundering phrase of her horse’s hooves they changed and demanded she see and acknowledge.
There was his face, the first time they had met, her impressions of the line of his throat, the light in his eyes when he talked of the sea, then strange, but exciting, later a trick of movement on his face that would become so familiar; the sight of him in shirtsleeves at the chart table in his cabin, dividers in hand, his smile when he saw her enter. His gray pallor, the stubble on his chin and throat as he supported her by the grave of their first child who lived but a few days under a foreign sun, the expression of hope and belief when he put the key to Caveley in her gloved hand. Even as her fingers gripped the leather of the reins, she felt its weight. She thought of him with Stephen in his arms, looking at the baby as if he were some miracle. You would have thought to see him smile that no man had ever had a healthy son before. Some images were soaked in sea air, some drenched in some taste, sensation. His first kiss came back to her, joyous, clumsy and full of a new and unnameable longing; she bit her lip.