Except by Jake the chief steward. “Is there anything I can bring you, Mrs Finn?”
“No, thanks, Jake – yes: send up Gorman with a white wine and seltzer. And his own drink if he’s got one.” And that’ll add to the gossip down below, she thought. But when you took on servants, you gave up privacy; she had known no other adult life.
O’Gilroy appeared beside her with both hands full. “Sorry, ma’am, I spilt some of it, not being used to climbing around things that roll about.”
“Rolling?” she said indignantly. “You wouldn’t know you were on a ship.”
O’Gilroy muttered something.
She grinned. “You just don’t like ships. Have you ever done any long voyages?”
“Only to the War. South Africa,” he added, since most foreigners didn’t seem to know where the war had been.
She sipped at her glass, leaning on the rail while he stood stiffly beside her. “Relax. Light a cigarette if you want to. Was Matt – Captain Ranklin – in that war?”
“Where I met him.” Out of deference to her he lit a ready-made cigarette – “tailor-made” as the crew called them – rather than his hand-rolled version. “I was wounded and left behind by my reg’ment – lucky, it turned out, with them most soon dead or captured – and his section picked me up, and when I was mended and without a reg’ment, he recruited me as temp’ry gunner. Shut up in Ladysmith we was by then.”
“Was he a good officer? – honestly?”
O’Gilroy reflected, draped on the rail like an abandoned piece of rope. “He was younger then, o’course, but I’d say yes. Explained something and left ye to get on with it. The Gunners was more like that – and ’twas the first chancst I’d had to work with machinery. Tried to transfer after the war, but I didn’t have the trade qualification.”
“But you do have the qualification to be a secret agent.”
O’Gilroy made a complicated but wordless noise.
“I hadn’t known you’d been down in the Balkans last winter, observing on that war. He was giving Pop – ”
“We wasn’t.”
“Oh?” She was surprised at her own disappointment; her image of Ranklin, pale and disjointed though it was, hadn’t included heroising himself. She had felt an odd sort of bond with him, oblique to the normal planes of friendship, in knowing almost from the start a vital secret of his life, almost before she knew anything of his public self. In fact, the public self seemed mostly to be “James Spencer” facades. But why pretend to her?
“I wasn’t there and he wasn’t observing,” O’Gilroy went on. “He was fighting for the Greek Army, second-in-command of an artillery brigade. Helped capture some city there.”
“Salonika?”
“Sounds like it.”
“And this was all part of your games?”
“No, no, ’twas before he got into all this. He was still in the British Army, only he wasn’t then, if ye get my meaning.”
“If you weren’t Irish I’d say that was very Irish. No, I don’t get you.”
O’Gilroy considered, pitching his cigarette end over the side and then watching it burst in sparks on the hull below.
Corinna said: “And you haven’t the qualifications to be a sailor, either. Throw things over the lee side. What did you mean?”
“He’d resigned the Army. They hauled him back and made him …”, he shrugged, “… a spy”
“Made him? I thought that was one thing you had to volunteer for.”
In the man-made starlight of the harbour she could see only one half of O’Gilroy’s cynical smile at the Army meaning of “volunteer”.
“But it sounds,” she persisted, “well, adventurous, exciting …”
“And work for a gentleman? He’d choose his big guns any day.”
“Then why did he take it on?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing, ma’am, but …” He felt he was being disloyal to Ranklin, yet at the same time defending him. “I can tell ye one thing: he’s broke.”
“Broke? Busted? Bankrupt?”
“Call it what ye like. Just no money, not like he used to have.”
She stared down at the twinkling water, then asked quietly: “Did he tell you this?”
“Him? Never. But can ye look at a man on a horse and say he’s not accustomed to it? I tell ye, the Captain’s never ridden a horse called Stonybroke before. It’s the small things, a man being careful with money that doesn’t know how to be. I’ve been in service before – real service, that is – and I know the signs of it.”
Now she could see why buying the blazer and new shoes hadn’t been the cheerful spree she had planned. She had never thought of Ranklin being rich, not by her own family’s terms, just as one of those English gentlemen whose long-owned land always gave them enough for their own ideas of comfort, their depressingly limited ambitions, their boringly formal pleasures – and the right clothes. She had no quarrel with the Englishman’s sense of dress, nor with Ranklin’s.
“It can only be recent, then,” she mused. “D’you know what happened?”
“No … but there was talk of his older brother doing some fool things with shares and stocks – and then shooting himself cleaning a gun. In a family that would be learning guns in the cradle.”
“Oh Lord, how conventional the English are. Why didn’t he go farm sheep in Australia? I suppose sheep cost more than cartridges. But how did this make Matt a secret agent?”
“Spy. He says we’re spies and be damned to it.”
She grinned. Ranklin was determined to wear his secret crown of thorns with style. “D’you get paid more as a spy, then?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing – but the Army doesn’t like officers to be broke.”
If that meant bankrupt, she could understand it: an officer should be beholden only to his job, not to his creditors. Her father was creditor to too many politicians for her not to know what influence that could give.
“And how did you come to team up with Matt again? By chance, or did he recruit you?”
“That’s right. He recruited me – by chance.”
“Clear as an Irish bog. Why did you let yourself be recruited?”
“The money,” O’Gilroy said too promptly for her to believe him. “And travel. A boat like this …”
“And the inside of Kiel jail.”
“That’s right.” His expression was set and she knew she would learn no more. Men’s motives can be terribly complicated, she thought. Don’t forget they can also be terribly simple.
Ranklin came aboard soon afterwards, greeting them warily as Mrs Finn and Gorman while the crew fussed around. “The Kaiser didn’t show up, so you didn’t miss anything.”
“Who did you find to talk to, then?”
“Oddly enough, a lady who runs a bordello.”
“No kidding? Did she offer you any free samples?”
“Not even of the new dances. She used to work in a circus.”
Corinna caught O’Gilroy’s reaction. “You want to talk privately?”
“It can wait. I was also talking to an old friend of yours – van der Brock.”
Corinna’s mind – and heart – whirled. “But he knows who you are! How are you going to … I can get you on a boat to …”
“Whoa, whoa. It’s all right: we know more about him by now. He doesn’t belong on any one side, he’s a mercenary. Now: is that Norddeutscher-Lloyd director still here?”
“Yes.”
“Then it might be better if he didn’t go back in Kachina’s launch. I’ve been learning a little something about the shipping business.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well, it seems – and I should have thought of this for myself, I suppose, but I’ve had other things on my mind – that if there’s a war, whether it’s long or short, the immediate loser will be the German merchant shipping. The Royal Navy will see to that. So far-sighted German ship-owners like Dr Ballin might be thinking of coming to some sort of arrangement with a powerful neutral country. And it seems there’s already a thing called Immco – ”
“International Mercantile Marine Company.”
“Which is a cartel – ”
She winced.
“I do apologise. A purely social club of owners of North Atlantic shipping lines?”