Cummings had settled his arse into the carved oak chair that belonged to the Head of Service. It was black with age, worn smooth by the behinds of twenty-nine men who’d been Head of the British Intelligence Service. It dated back to the time of Good Queen Bess. To Walsingham, who’d founded the Service.
It’s mine now.
Cummings didn’t do anything by accident. He wanted anger. Now, why did Cummings want him angry? Dealing with Military Intelligence just drove the humdrum out of the morning.
Reams stood to the side of the office, a thick-bodied, red-faced bulldog of a man. His hands were gripped together behind his back and he sneered at the map on the wall. He wore scarlet regimentals, as usual, though he didn’t have any particular right to a Guards uniform. One of Military Intelligence’s little fictions. No battlefields for the colonel.
Reams looked particularly self-satisfied this morning. Possibly he felt he’d done something clever. He was probably wrong.
The map held a hundred numbered and colored pins, set from Dublin to Dubrovnik and points east, as far as India. His agents. Austrian, Russian, and French agents. Trouble spots. Nothing Military Intelligence would make head nor tail of.
“The lumpy yellow shape off to the right is Austria,” he said helpfully. “The square blue one is France.” He jostled the colonel off balance as he strolled past.
“Watch it, you—” A glance from Cummings, and Reams swallowed the rest of his comment.
Cummings took his time folding the newspaper. He tossed it on the desk, toppling a pile of unopened letters into a stack of reports, making a point, doling out his second nicely graded insult of the morning. He’d got them in before they exchanged a word. “Good. You’re here.”
“A pleasure to see you, Cummings. As always.”
“You haven’t answered my messages.”
“How careless of me.” There’d be notes from Military Intelligence somewhere in that pile on his desk. How wise of everyone to ignore them. “The press of work . . .”
“I don’t have time to wait on your convenience.” Cummings tapped his fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair. The hand rests were carved wolf heads, snarling.
British Service wolves. Not Military Intelligence. He knew just how they felt. He wouldn’t mind snarling himself.
“Always so awkward to settle upon another man’s convenience. And you’ve come all the way across town to do it.” He skirted around the desk and sat on the edge of it, chummily next to Cummings, his boot heel hooked on to a drawer pull. He showed his teeth, copying the wolf heads.
Cummings slid back in the chair, harrumphing. “I mean to say . . .”
Let us loom over the man. I get so few opportunities to loom. “Why don’t you tell me what we can do for Military Intelligence today.”
In Cummings’s world, men in authority sat at desks and gave orders. Inferiors stood at attention. Sitting down meant you had power.
In the rookeries of East London, men in authority kicked you in the guts to drive home the salient points of their discourse. Sitting down just put you closer to somebody’s boot.
In his office, the rules of Whitechapel applied.
Cummings had propped his cane against the wall. He reached out and put it between them, the ivory head clutched in his hand. “I say . . .”
“Yes?” For two days he’d lived on coffee and anger and watched Owl fight for her life. When he looked down at Cummings, he let some of that show in his eyes.
Cummings cleared his throat. “Mean to say . . . you should speak to that girl of yours, Hawkhurst. Damned if you shouldn’t. She left me standing on the steps ten minutes before she opened. She was blasted impertinent. Wouldn’t leave the room when I ordered her to.”
You do like to order my people around, don’t you?
“She talked back to me.” Cummings sucked his lip in and out, deploring the situation.
“We all have that problem.”
“I suppose you keep her around because she’s a toothsome little thing. You have a reputation for liking the ladies, Hawkhurst. You have that reputation.”
“Do I?”
The cane jiggled nervously in Cummings’s hold. There was a blade hidden inside. Anyone would know that from the way Cummings carried it, even without the wide gold rim that circled the head. Hardware like that meant a cane dagger.
A rich man’s trinket. A short dagger, with no hilt but that little hexagonal rim. Good for one sneaky, unexpected strike. Useless in a fight.
Cummings fingered it as if it were a favored piece of his anatomy. “I envy you Service Johnnies sometimes. Pretty petticoats stashed away at headquarters. Drinking coffee on the Via Whatever-o in Rome. Jaunting off to the opera in Vienna. No real work for you, now that the war is over. Nothing to do but write up reports and shoot them off to the Prime Minister.”
“We keep busy in our own modest way.”
It wasn’t the British Service out of work. It was Military Intelligence. When the last of the occupation army pulled out of France, Military Intelligence went with them. Cummings was reduced to spying on Englishmen, playing informer and agent provocateur to discontented Yorkshire weavers. Intercepting the mail of liberal politicians, hoping to find something treasonous. Harassing purveyors of naughty etchings in Soho.
Military Intelligence was being whipped through the newspapers as the “secret police” of England. It wasn’t just the radical press that said it was time to close them down.
His lordship liked to see himself as the spider in the center of a vast web of international intrigue. Now the only agents in the field in Europe were British Service. Cummings spied on the British Service, fishing for minnows to carry back to the Prime Minister, Liverpool. Always gratifying to be the object of interest.
“But you haven’t told me what brings you to Meeks Street.” He hitched himself more at ease on the desk and let his boot swing right next to his lordship’s immaculate, buff-colored trousers. Cummings couldn’t get to his feet without scrambling like a crab, losing dignity. “Not that we aren’t delighted to—”
Doyle came in, with no sound to announce him. Silent as the grave, Doyle, when he wanted to be. He said, “Cummings,” being blunt to the point of rudeness. Then he gave a respectful, “Sir,” in Hawker’s direction.
That was Doyle propping up the fiction that Adrian ran the place. Listen to Doyle, and anybody’d think Adrian Hawkhurst was somebody important. Somebody an earl’s son deferred to as a matter of course.
“Join us. Cummings is about to reveal why he’s graced me with his presence today. I’m . . . what’s the word I want?”
“Intrigued.”
“Exactly. I knew you would have the mot juste in your pocket. I am intrigued.”
The wide chair pulled up on the other side of the desk was Doyle’s. It was big enough to hold him. In the years Doyle had been reporting to Heads of Section—five of them now—the chair had taken on his shape and something of his character. It was not unknown for new Heads of Section to sit at the desk and hold conferences with the empty chair, asking themselves what Doyle would advise in a particularly sticky situation.
Doyle sat down, playing Lord Markham to the hilt, showing off the Eton and Cambridge and the estate in Oxfordshire. He’d changed into a suit of gentleman’s clothes. Nothing fancy, because you didn’t decorate a man like Doyle. Understated. It wasn’t what he wore that made him look like Lord Markham. It was the hundred subtle little gestures and flickers of expression that did it. Right now he was applying a nicely graded aristocratic disdain when his eyes landed on Reams.
Doyle had unassailable credentials. Adrian Hawkhurt’s were more . . . imaginative. One popular theory was that Tsar Paul got him on an English noblewoman. Then there was the rumor he was a Hapsburg, exiled for doing something too disgraceful for even the Austrian nobility.