“And that’s another thing,” I said, on a roll now. “Who on earth is this woman? Why’s she so important? Dedlock won’t tell me.”
A grim smile on the old lady’s lips. “Mr. Dedlock has always relished his secrets. He hoards them as a miser keeps banknotes under his mattress.”
“Please…”
“Very well.” The old woman cleared her throat. “Estella was one of us.”
“You mean she worked for the Directorate?”
“She was the best agent we’d ever had. Passionate, elegant, deadly. Beautiful death in a trench coat. But she’s been lost to us for many years.”
“Granddad knew where she was. That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
Miss Morning nodded. “It was he who hid her from us.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he wanted to keep her safe. Because some things were more important to him even than the war.”
I sensed that Miss Morning was growing impatient and perhaps I shouldn’t have pushed her any further, but I had to know. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
The old woman spoke softly so as not to be heard by those satellites which she imagined to have turned their lidless gaze upon us, but I could tell that, if she felt that she was able, she would have screamed her answer at me. “I think he loved her,” she said. “Loved her with a burning devotion that most of the time you only ever read about in poetry.”
I thought of my grandma, whose sullen face I knew only from old photographs and a few half-remembered family stories, and wondered, not for the first time, if I’d actually known Granddad at all. Another betrayal, I suppose. A defection of the heart.
“The hospital is nearby,” said Miss Morning. “I think I should like to see him now.”
It took us a quarter of an hour to get there. Miss Morning, fatigued from our walk in the park, suddenly seemed much older than before and I wondered how much of her usual appearance was simply a facade shored up by will power and tenacity. I led her to the Machen Ward, and when she saw the old bastard laid out like he was waiting for the undertaker, she staggered into my arms as though she was winded. I found us some chairs, we sat beside him and she took his hand in hers.
The scene reminded me of another time when I’d been in the hospital. Years ago, as a child, when I’d been ill and had those operations, I’d been in Granddad’s place and he’d been in mine watching fondly from a distance as Mum grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight.
Miss Morning gazed at my grandfather, her face blank and unreadable. “You foolish old man,” she murmured. She inclined her head toward me but did not lift her eyes from the bed. “Will you see the Prefects again?”
“Tonight. I don’t seem to have been given a choice.”
“Watch your step, Henry. The Domino Men are without morality or compunction. Stop your ears against their lies and their wicked distortions of the truth. Give away nothing of yourself. But keep asking your questions. Be relentless. They will almost certainly offer you a deal but the price they ask is never one you can afford.” She put my granddad’s arm, followed by its forlornly trailing plastic tube, back on his chest. “As I think he discovered in the end.”
I realized she was crying.
At my most haplessly maladroit, faced with raw emotion, I placed a hand on her shoulder and cast around for the platitudes which people usually say at times like these. “Please,” I murmured. “He wouldn’t want you to cry.”
“I’m not crying for him,” she said as the tears poured unchecked down her cheeks. “I’m crying for you.” She sniffled, dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I’m crying because of what’s going to happen to you.”
Enough feckless rambling from Henry Lamb. By the by, we should point out that most of the material in the Chinese restaurant is a fiction — the wretched girl simply wished to get rid of an undesirable suitor and was trying to find a means of letting the sap down gently. Trust poor Henry to be so hopelessly enraptured by the yielding outline of her figure that he failed to see until it was far too late that the young lady never cared a damn for him at all.
Exhausted from the alarums and excursions of the previous night, the Prince of Wales had retired early to bed. Like the idiot Lamb, after his first encounter with Dedlock, he had tried his best to dismiss the episode as a lucid dream or a particularly unfunny practical joke, only for an incident at luncheon to smack the reality of the situation back to the forefront of his attention with distressing force. His mother had replied to his request for information in the shape of a small white square of card, a quarter of which was taken up with a gilt stamp of the royal crest and a listing of her every rank and title. Underneath, written in wavery, doddering capitals, were the following four words:
STREATER IS THE FUTURE
It was a perplexed and weary Arthur Windsor, then, who, shortly after nine o’clock, swaddled in Silverman-ironed pajamas and clutching his anthology of Rider Haggard, said good night to the muscle-bound servant who stood guard outside his room, folded himself into bed and snuggled up to a pillow.
He fully expected to be sleeping alone. Laetitia had let it be known via Silverman that she wished to spend the night in her private quarters — an increasingly regular occurrence which seemed to Arthur symptomatic of the ebbing away of her desire.
A chapter and a half from the end of She, the prince folded down the corner of the page, placed the book on the cabinet by his bed, switched off the light and, minutes later, fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes again, he was aware that there was someone in the room with him and that it had been her entrance which had woken him. It was not quite pitch black and there was light enough to glimpse a familiar silhouette.
“Laetitia?” he said, suddenly hopeful and aroused. “Did you change your mind?”
As the figure moved closer, he heard the silken music of her most flagrantly erotic nightgown, smelt the barest hint of that perfume which she had worn in the earliest days of their courtship, and closed his eyes in delicious anticipation of what was to follow, praying for her smooth tongue on his face, for her soft hands to rove southwards down his body.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“Darling?” he whispered. “Its’ been too long. Don’t tease me.”
Still nothing. Even the scent of her had vanished.
Arthur sat upright, clicked on the lamp by his bed, threw off the bedsheets, got to his feet, wrapped himself in his capacious dressing gown and opened the door.
The guard was waiting. “Evening, sir.”
The prince blinked, frantically fishing for a name. “Tom, isn’t it?”
“That’s correct, sir, yes.”
“Have you let anyone into my room tonight, Tom?”
The man seemed affronted by the suggestion. “Course not, sir.”
“You haven’t let my wife in, by any chance?”
“It was my understanding that the Princess of Wales was spending the night… elsewhere, sir.”
Was that a smirk? Was this man laughing at him? Good God, how widely was it known that his wife no longer wanted him?”
“That’s true,” the prince said stiffly. “But you’ll let me know, won’t’ you, Tom? If anyone calls for me.”
“Naturally, sir.”
Arthur was on the verge of beating a retreat back inside and was giving serious thought to polishing off the last chapter and a half of She when he heard Laetitia’s laugh.