She felt a sudden warmth towards him that really was that: a flush of loving excitement that tingled through her whole body. And a brief loathing for that brother of his, so intense she wanted to rip open his grave and stamp on his remains – only then I’d never have met Matt, she thought, and closed the grave again.
“Why don’t you come and sit over here?” she said quietly.
Ranklin lay drifting in that luxurious space between sleep and waking, knowing he could choose either, reliving gently the sensations of Corinna’s soft vigorous body that now slept beside him. Should I sleep or wake, remember or dream? The ceiling was dark above; there was no moon, only a slash of faint starlight on the part-opened curtains.
I suppose, looked at objectively, he thought, I have been seduced. He had been seduced once before, but that had been when he was a twenty-year-old subaltern, and by a senior officer’s wife. A messy, clumsy business, he recalled, and best forgotten. But remembering it had woken him up and he slid carefully out of bed, found his dressing-gown, and lit a cigarette. Then stood by the half-open window to breathe smoke outside.
Not that that would fool the hotel staff; they’d know. The servants always knew.
“Are you planning to make a romantic escape through the window?” Corinna asked sleepily. “And break your stupid neck? Come back to bed.”
“When I’ve finished my cigarette.”
She rolled over and stared at the ceiling, the sheet spilling away from her left breast. “If we’re confessing things, d’you want to hear one of mine?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I’ve never been married.”
“Good God.” Ranklin really was startled, and began hastily to re-examine his behaviour. And the re-examination told him only one thing: “Look, do you want …” This had gone from being perhaps his happiest hour to his most awkward; “… I mean, I’d be honoured if …”
“I’d marry you? Is this a proposal? Oh, poor Matt!” She began to laugh, choked, and had to sit up coughing herself breathless. Ranklin just stared, thinking: that was my first proposal, and … well, at least I know what being shot at dawn will be like: easy.
“My dear, dear boy,” she gurgled at last. “I guess when I find a real gentleman, I get the full menu. No, I’m not trying to trap you.” She flopped back again, now naked to the waist and giggling at the ceiling. “It’s just. I found out early that, in Europe, it’s the married women and widows who have all the fun. So, I invented Mr Finn and a marriage in San Francisco. The great thing about the fire is that it burned up all the public records like marriages. So I can be Mrs Finn or the widow Finn, whatever fits the occasion.”
“Good God,” Ranklin said again, but not for the original reason.
“Con-men use it, too. If you get in a deal with anybody who says he was born in ’Frisco, be suspicious. Now forget about my honour and think about more interesting parts of me. Come back to bed.
“Mind,” she added, “if you tell anyone about Mr Finn, I’ll kill you.”
Ranklin pitched his cigarette end through the window. “You’ve got a few secrets of mine I’m rather hoping you’ll keep.”
“That’s right, I have, haven’t I? I’ve got you in my power, Captain Ranklin. Come back to bed.”
46
Breakfast, again out in the sun, was a busy time. Lucy, perhaps suspecting her father’s beaming expression wasn’t solely due to the success of the lawyers’ dinner, was trying to get him alone. The Baroness was stopping that by sticking to Hornbeam like a leech. Dr Klapka also wanted to get Hornbeam alone for once, while Corinna was trying to arrange an urgent consultation with Klapka. And the waiters were run ragged trying to rematch the coffee cups to the breakfasters as they moved from seat to seat.
It was like the second act of a spy farce, and the spies stayed well clear of it. “Romania’s turning the screws on Bulgaria,” Ranklin translated loosely from a German-language newspaper. “Says she’ll start the war again if there’s no agreement on the new frontier … And Vienna’s still hinting at intervention – Ah: they’ve approved an increase in Austro-Hungarian artillery, one new battery per regiment. But that’ll take a while.”
O’Gilroy took a spoonful of egg. “What guns?”
“Their own, they make ’em at the Skoda works in Pilsen. Good stuff, I believe; we bought some 75s to experiment with …”
Corinna flopped into a chair opposite, quickly followed by her faithful native bearer of coffee. She grinned at Ranklin, but then she grinned at O’Gilroy, too. “I finally pinned the little shyster down. In half an hour in my sitting-room. You can drop in ten minutes later, when I’ve broken the news to him. You’d probably like it to seem you’ve been dragged in unwillingly, wouldn’t you?”
“Very thoughtful,” Ranklin acknowledged.
O’Gilroy asked: “F’why are ye saying yer doing this?”
“I don’t think I can improve on the truth,” Corinna confessed. “That, as an American citizen, I’m worried that another one is getting imbrogled into a purely Austro-Hungarian matter – with international consequences.” She glanced back at Hornbeam, who was still beaming. “If that’s what the old fool’s doing with his head in the clouds and his slippers under the wrong bed. So, your cue is forty minutes from now.”
“What’s everybody else doing?”
“The Baroness is meeting somebody coming in from Vienna, Hornbeam may or may not go along, Lucy may or may not have a touch of the vapours.” She clearly felt she could handle only one Hornbeam problem at a time.
“If the Baroness is mixed in this,” O’Gilroy said, “would we be wanting to know who she’s meeting?”
Ranklin wished he’d thought of that. Corinna said: “How?”
“Yer car’ll be along, will it? Then offer it to take her down while yer sending me on some errand. I’ll be no help with talk on the law.”
Corinna liked the thought, but: “Suppose she sees you hanging around?”
“She won’t see him,” Ranklin promised.
As the breakfast party broke up and the waiters began clearing the tables, Ranklin lit his pipe and stayed where he was. In the background, Corinna’s car rolled up, she and O’Gilroy did some stage business with papers – and probably more impromptu inventions about local High Finance – then the Baroness and O’Gilroy got in and were driven off. Seizing her opportunity, Lucy was taking Hornbeam for a purposeful-looking stroll, perhaps to talk of rumours of his behaviour last night, or perhaps to discuss her dress allowance, unless the two subjects happened to coincide. Left standing alone, Corinna’s shoulders sagged momentarily, then she braced for the meeting with Klapka and walked up into the hotel.
Already it was almost too hot, and small puffs of cloud were forming out of nowhere. Ranklin knew nothing of the local weather, but was prepared to bet on thunderstorms before teatime, and did a mental search for his umbrella. But mostly he just sat and enjoyed the warmth, and the inner glow of last night. Were they just lovers who passed in the night? Part of him yearned for it to be more than that, but another part knew how widely separated their worlds were. So much so that their bond was that they were strangers to everybody else, nobody had quite been them before. But that being so, anything was possible.
O’Gilroy had learnt to identify different types of women by their clothes in the streets of Cork and Dublin. This could not really be called a sense of fashion. However, he had gone from there virtually direct to the boulevards of Paris, where women’s clothes and the messages they were supposed to be sending were a good deal more varied and subtle. And with his talent for observation and a desire to intercept whatever messages were going, he had begun to understand the code.