“I am curious.” It was a crow’s squawk. “I am curious to see what you will do with me now that I am made nothing in this way. In one hour, you have destroyed me. I have been a traitor all my life. All my life, everything I did…It was for nothing. Nothing.”
Grey slid a plate across the table toward her. “Annique, eat something.”
She did not move.
“If nothing matters,” he said, “it doesn’t matter if you eat.”
It was coffee and rolls. He was right, of course. None of it mattered. She put her elbows on the table to steady herself and drank coffee and then ate most of a roll so her capitulation would be complete. When she was finished, she put her head into her hands.
The floor creaked as Galba moved. “Annique…” He had to repeat it before she looked up. “Annique, I am in some part the author of this injustice. I did not intervene. I am profoundly sorry.”
Which was English too complicated for her. “I am the offspring of a mermaid and a sea cod. And they were married. I had no idea. Why did my mother lie to me?”
“At first you were too young to burden with this secret. Later…” Galba spread his hands. “There is no excuse. Later, she chose to keep it from you. The last time I saw her, you were twelve. We argued about this, fiercely. She told me you were a child of single heart and she would not tear you in half. I don’t think she expected either of you to survive this war. Grey, she’s not even hearing me.”
“Leave her here with me. She needs time.”
“Do not talk about me as if I am not here.” But she had become insubstantial as smoke. If she was not French, she could not imagine what she might be. Maybe nothing.
“I apologize.” Galba sighed. “Annique, you are not the offspring of a halibut and a mythical sea creature. Your parents were two of the finest people I have ever known. Your mother had great respect for you. She knew someday we might sit in this house and face this moment.”
He waited for something.
“She doesn’t know.” Grey took her face between his hands, so she had to look at him, and spoke slowly. “We have to tell her. Galba’s name is Anson Griffith. If you were more familiar with the Service, you’d know that.” He waited. “He was Lucille Griffith’s father. Your mother’s father.”
Her mind was flat and barren as a tidal beach. None of the words made any sense. Maybe she had forgotten how to speak English.
Galba grunted. “When she can think again, bring her downstairs. She shouldn’t be alone.”
Grey stroked her hair, slipping it through his fingers. “She’ll be fine in a few minutes.”
“I will never be fine again.”
“Yes, you will, my little halibut. You’re incredibly tough, did you know that?”
Thirty-two
SHE COULD NOT GUESS HOW MUCH TIME PASSED. She did not hear Galba go out. When she looked up again, she was alone with Grey.
He stood by the window, lifting the curtain with the back of his fingers to stare into the street. She made some sound or changed her breathing, and he turned toward her. She saw then what was in his eyes. He would have rolled England up by the corners and moved it to Greenland, if that would have helped. He would have done that for her.
She had become pitiable. She had never been the clever Fox Cub. She had been the dog to fetch secrets to Maman. She had felt so smug in her cleverness all those years, but she had always been the dupe. All her life, the dupe.
Blood beat like drums within her ears. The world pulsed red at the edges. “Lies.” The chair scraped behind her and toppled and crashed as she pushed it aside. She pounded her fists down. “Lies and lies and lies!”
Her mother’s file lay on the table. She took it with both hands and threw it across the room. Papers disgorged in midair and flapped and scattered. “Nothing but lies!” She swept her father’s file from the table with the back of her hand. It spread out in a long, smooth line across the rug—pages and pages of his upright, precise writing.
That left her file. She ripped the cover in half. Everything emptied out across the table. Reports that should have gone to Paris. Her letters. The letters she had written Maman. Dieu. The silly, loving, trusting words she had written…all her little secrets. Everyone here had read them.
Dozens and dozens and dozens of letters, written in little minutes on the edge of battlefields, creased from being carried next to her skin. Paper dirty because she had scavenged it from the garbage, paper stolen from the officers’ tents, paper bought when she had no money for food. All those letters filled with the careful, rounded script of an obedient child.
She grabbed them and tore again and again and again till they fell out of her hands, between her fingers, small, small pieces that fluttered like leaves. Scraps fell with lines of writing turned in every direction. And she knew every word. That was the pain of it. She knew them all. With each falling scrap, in a little flash, she remembered where she had been when she wrote it.
…moved the gun emplacements to Liège. Twelve eighteen-pounders and thirty of the lesser kind, the sixand four-pounders. They are short of ammunition for the greater guns. I counted…
I am lonely here, Chère Maman, and hope for one small visit, if you…
The Chasseurs have been released toward Santo Spirito, leaving under cover of the snow flurries with…
…so I have shoes again. There was a brief encounter with the dogs that eat the dead upon the battlefield, but…
…for the 157 horses held by heavy cavalry and light horse artillery. The commissary strength is 59 pack mules in theory, but of these, at least a third will founder if we are forced to retreat as seems…
I am feeding one of the cats that lives in the ruins of the innyard. It has white patches…
Paper curled in her fists. Her hands shook.
Grey said nothing and did not try to stop her. She could destroy every file in this room, and Grey would not stop her. None of it, none of it, made the least difference.
The fools had left cup, plate, saucer upon the table. They exploded, one after the other one, when she threw them upon the floor. They were not so smart, these English.
“I hope they were expensive dishes.” She looked at the pieces and the crumbs and the spots of coffee all across the rug and the spoon lying on its side. Her head ached horribly.
“Very expensive. Crown Derby.”
“I would feel better if I killed someone. I am almost sure of it. You are stupid to leave knives all over this room.” She had held her hand back from murder for her whole life, but it was never too late to start. “After I finished stabbing you, I could burn this house down. It would not be so hard. I could burn all your thousands of files you love so passionately.”
“Start with these.” He pointed at the limp, desolate heaps of paper on the floor. “I’ll help.”
She would not cry again. Probably she would never cry again in all her life. She wanted to hold Grey and fall to pieces in his arms like a weakling, but assuredly, she also wished to kill him.
The hearthrug had a hundred little holes in it where sparks had fallen for many years. “My father was a great man.”
“A very great man,” Grey said. “We argued about him at Harrow, in the common room at night. What he wrote. What he and the others did in Lyon. I was halfway a Revolutionary from reading him.”
Beside her was one of those strong, heavy chairs in which the room abounded. It was old and worn from spies sitting upon it. For Grey and the others, this was their refuge, their place to talk and read and forget their work. The heart of the house. These wise and terrible men had brought her here so she would be enclosed in their concern, in their most sheltered place, while they destroyed her.
She swallowed. “It is hard to believe my father was an English.”
“Welsh.”
“Do not nitpick at me. It is a difference only an English would notice, as trout are enthralled by the difference between a trout and a pickerel.”