“Lordie, no. But he’ll be used to clients telling lies.”
O’Gilroy took a thoughtful drag at his cigarette. “And are we thinking this is the whole reason of his being here – what ye was talking about on the train? To take a look at this Law?”
Ranklin looked at Corinna; neither of them had been thinking of the wider implications. Catching up with O’Gilroy, he said: “If it is, it goes far beyond the Baroness. Barons are just errand boys in court circles. So who recruited the Baroness?”
“Who’d know how to get hold of the Law?” O’Gilroy asked.
“And,” Corinna added, her face serious now, “what sort of people would want a legal opinion of it? It wouldn’t be the guy who sweeps the street crossings, that’s for damn sure.”
She shivered and glanced at the window curtains, but they hung still, there was no draught. Maybe she was just feeling suddenly far from home: it was a rare feeling for a Sherring.
On the other hand, she didn’t feel like sleep yet. The thrill of the midnight burglary and speculating about its results would keep her awake for hours yet unless she soaked herself in laudanum. Brandy was healthier: she held out her glass.
Mock grudgingly, O’Gilroy poured from the big silver flask engraved with unknown initials. “Ye likely can’t find stuff this good in this heathen country, and it hurts terrible to see ye mangling it with water. I’m back to bed.”
A little larceny had never troubled O’Gilroy’s sleep yet.
Then he added: “I’m sure ye can remember which yer own beds are,” and closed the door very quietly.
“Now what d’you think he meant by that?” Corinna asked, enjoying Ranklin’s embarrassment. “But you’ve got this place smelling like a dockside saloon. If you can leave that pipe behind, let’s finish his precious flask in my sitting-room.”
So once again they went through the tiptoe routine, but it was only to her sitting room, Ranklin excused himself, clutching the copies of Hornbeam’s notes to remind himself of business.
“Here,” he offered, “you’d better put these where the maids won’t see them.” And that reminded him: “What happened to your own maid?”
“Kitty? Oh, I sent her back to Paris. She got sick with the eastern cooking.” That wasn’t the whole truth; in fact it was very little of the truth. Corinna had found out that Kitty was also being paid by her father to report on her doings. She hadn’t been shocked by that, hadn’t really resented it; she just damned well wasn’t going to put up with it. “So I’m here just on my poor little ownsome.”
She dropped onto a sofa and flicked through the notes. “A year ago, would you have thought you’d be helping loot bedrooms for secret documents?”
“No-o,” Ranklin agreed cautiously. How did she know he hadn’t been doing just that a year ago?
“But it must be more fun than ordinary Army life.”
“It isn’t what I signed up for.” Privately, Ranklin was thinking that if a spy, like a cat, had only nine lives, it was a pity to risk one trying to keep an American law professor out of trouble. The Habsburg Law wasn’t exactly Plan Three.
“You really don’t like being a spy, do you?”
Ranklin reached for the flask on the table – she had brought it across – and refilled the silver cap he was using. O’Gilroy was right: it was too good to be watered down. “It still wasn’t what I signed up for.”
She persisted: “But that doesn’t mean you disapprove …”
He smiled, holding up his hand to cut off the question. “I know that argument; I’ve had it with myself. I certainly don’t think espionage is taking an unsporting advantage or any nonsense like that. But I can approve of sweeping streets and unblocking drains without wanting to do them, either.”
Hmm, she thought with a wry smile; is that how he sees his work? “What would you be doing in the Army if … if you weren’t doing what you are doing?”
“Now, in August? Looking after the horses and ammunition for a battery on firing practice at Shoeburyness or Okehampton, probably.”
“And you’d really rather be back holding horses and so on instead of all … this?” She flung out an arm, her kimono sleeve flaring in a world-sweeping gesture.
“It wasn’t just horse-holding. It was the life, the friends – ”
“Are they still your friends?” she asked shrewdly.
Ranklin said stubbornly: “It was the life I had chosen.”
“Along with a few thousand others who can probably do it just as well because it’s that sort of job. While you’re in a job they couldn’t do – but you despise it because they would. God Almighty, man, hadn’t you noticed you’re a hell of a smart guy? Because if you hadn’t, Conall sure has: he wouldn’t stick by you two minutes if you weren’t, not in your trade.”
A gentleman really ought to deflect any compliment from a lady, no matter how oddly phrased, with some modest but appreciative remark. However, this is difficult if the gentleman is suddenly wondering if he hasn’t been wallowing in self-pity for the last six months, and also if he’s never been called a hell of a smart guy before. None of the women who had drifted through Ranklin’s life, and certainly not his family or the Army, had ever said such a thing. Not even an English translation of it.
Corinna had watched his bemused silence nervously, and found herself beginning to babble. “Lord, now I really did insult you, didn’t I? – saying you were in a ‘trade’. Suggesting you cared about that filthy stuff money which the English don’t talk about. How the hell they can pretend that just beats me: you sit down to dinner in England and they never talk anything else – falling land values, agricultural prices, servants’ wages, income tax, their mortgages, they all say they’re broke but you know damn well they’ve never had real trouble like y …
“Oh hell.” She sat up very straight and took a breath. “I guess I haven’t been behaving like a gentleman. Conall told me – I made him – about your brother and how you landed in this job.”
She was surprised to see Ranklin smiling, but he was rather surprised himself at feeling a sense of relief and not indignation. “O’Gilroy knew, then … But of course he would. I ought to stick to keeping secrets that really matter.”
Reassured, she went on: “I got worse than that, I’m afraid. I had one of our London boys do some tracking in the City. He found they’d hauled up the drawbridge once you got into that Deed of Composition – was it your new bosses arranged that? – but he got the trail pretty clear up to there.”
Still smiling, Ranklin hoped he’d remember to get that trail well muddied: if the House of Sherring could follow it, so could the Kundschaftstelle or the Nachrichtendienst.
“Matt,” she said, “for the Lord’s sake, if you – or your family – ever go buying gold shares again, ask me which mines to go for.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t exactly the family’s problem at the moment, but I’ll bear it in mind.”
“And don’t go signing guarantees you don’t understand – please.”
Ranklin nodded automatically. But then he paused and carefully took a big decision. “Did I?” he said.
“How d’you mean?”
“I’m really not so innocent that I don’t know I’m innocent when it comes to City gentlemen and their pieces of paper.”
She looked puzzled. “Just what do …”
“I’ve never told anybody,” he said, almost dreamily. “Nobody else in the world knows this – but how do you tell your family that your brother, who’s just killed himself because he lost pretty well all their – not just his, but their – inheritance, how do you tell them that he was a forger as well?”
She sat stunned. Then gradually the pieces fitted together in her mind. She had been thinking of this man as smart enough in his own world – she hadn’t been flattering him there – but a bit of a fool in hers. And now she saw that he wasn’t a fool but a hell of a nice guy as well as being smart and funny and, probably, brave (though she wasn’t a schoolgirl, to be impressed by mere physical courage). And he hadn’t been behaving according to some gentlemanly code; he’d just saved people he loved from hurt. For that, he’d let himself look a fool and put his career on the line. No, way below the line and in the ashcan.