Лорен Уиллиг - The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

“That’s what that was? Garden equipment?”

“Among other rubbish.” Colin’s attention was absorbed by the lock, in that classic man-with-tool way. He jiggled the curved bit in and out of the hole, trying to get the clasp to catch. “There’s a graveyard of old bicycles in the far corner where the garderobe used to be. We Selwicks never throw anything out. Ha!”

Colin tugged at the lock with a satisfied air. The fiddly bit had given up the fight and decided to hold, securing the ancient stronghold of the Selwicks for another day.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, thinking of that damning bit of paper beneath his desk. “Not throwing things away?”

“I should think you would be pleased,” he said, trying the door one last time to satisfy himself that it had really closed. When I looked blank, he specified, “Your research.”

“True,” I admitted. Without the Selwick pack-rat tendencies, I would have only the legend of the Pink Carnation to go on, with perhaps a frill of family stories to bolster the tale. But if the Selwicks held on to bits of paper, what else might they be holding on to? People did tend to follow in their parents’ professions, for the simple reason that familiarity bred comfort — and connections. There was a reason my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been lawyers. And that sort of tradition would be all the more important in a profession where there were no organized academies, no professional course of study.

Amy and Richard Selwick had started a spy school at this very same Selwick Hall. The spy school had initially been conceived of as a way of training outsiders, but it would have been just as natural for Amy and Richard to raise their children to play the same great game in the pursuit of which they had met. Goodness only knew, the middle and later nineteenth century hadn’t lacked for opportunities for espionage.

What if it had continued on, on to this very day?

I looked at Colin as we walked in companionable silence away from the Tower, his hands stuck comfortably in the pockets of his Barbour jacket, his dark blond hair damped with wet, his Wellies comfortably smeared with mud and dead leaves. He looked every inch the English country gentleman, straight out of an issue of Country Life — or Joan’s magazine, Manderley . The thought of Joan brought to mind, with renewed clarity, her enigmatic words in the ladies’ room of the Heavy Hart.

“Why do you not like to talk about what you do?” I asked, all in a rush. Blunt — but maybe blunt was what was needed.

Colin looked down at me in surprise. He maintained his casual pose, hands in the pockets, shoulders slightly forwards to accommodate my lesser height, but I didn’t miss the glaze of wariness that settled over him.

“What d’you mean?” he asked, with studied ease.

“I found the piece of paper under your desk. About the gold souk — and the guns.”

Colin’s eyes closed in an “Oh, shit” expression. “So you know.”

“Well, between the paper and all your books, I put two and two together. I heard Joan saying something in the ladies’ room the other night,” I added, by way of explanation.

Colin’s hazel eyes shifted sideways, towards me. “I gather she wasn’t complimentary.”

“No,” I said apologetically. “But Sally defended you.”

Colin scuffed his already scuffed Wellies through the withered winter grass. “I should have mentioned it to you before, but I don’t usually like to talk to people about it.”

That was much better than “Now that you’ve found out, I’ll have to kill you,” or whatever the British equivalent of the witness protection program was. I didn’t even know if the British had an equivalent of the witness protection program. I tried to envision myself trying to blend into Nowheresville-on-Thames under an assumed name and failed miserably.

“I can see why you don’t like to tell people,” I said understandingly. “That would kind of jeopardize your position, wouldn’t it? If people knew.”

“Jeopardize my position?”

“You know,” I said, waving my hands in the air. “Give the game away. I mean, I always wondered how James Bond did his job when everyone knew who he was.”

“That’s a good point, I suppose,” he said, in that way people have when you’ve just said something that’s so off the mark, it might as well be in Sanskrit, but they like you, so they want to make something positive out of it so they can give you the credit you both know you don’t deserve. “And it would certainly be an interesting twist on the theme. But I think the reader should know who the main character is, even if the villains don’t.”

Now it was my turn to look at him as though he were speaking Sanskrit. “The reader?”

Colin shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Potential readers, then. I’d like to think I’ll have them eventually.”

Was he talking about his memoirs? “I thought you didn’t want to publicize what you do,” I said, in what I thought was a reasonable tone.

Colin smiled down at me, looking disconcertingly boyish for an international man of mystery. “Well, I’ll have to publicize it eventually, won’t I? At least, if it all goes well.”

“Your mission, you mean?” I ventured.

Colin looked at me in confusion. “My novel,” he said, as though that were self-evident. “I suppose you could call it a mission, but I think of it more as a vocation.”

“Your novel ?” The word tasted like a foreign object on my lips. “But what about — oh! Then all those books — the travel guides . . .”

“All research. For my spy novel. But if you didn’t know about the novel, then . . .” His face was a mirror of my own, bearing an identical expression of horrified comprehension as each of us realized just what the other had been talking about all this while.

I could feel my cheeks go a deep, painful red.

Colin rubbed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, as though trying to clear his head. “So when you saw the books and the travel guides, you thought . . . you didn’t really think” — he seemed to have trouble getting the words out — “that I was a spy ?”

“Only for about five minutes,” I muttered.

A snorting noise erupted from Colin’s nostrils. It sounded like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be laughter when it grew up.

“What was I supposed to think, with strange men getting murdered in the gold souk?” I demanded spiritedly. “And there was Joan making cryptic comments in the ladies’ room and you not wanting me to get too close to the family archives. You have to admit that it makes a certain amount of sense.”

“What did you think, that we had a spy empire?” choked Colin.

“Not an empire,” I said sulkily. It wasn’t that ridiculous. Okay, maybe it was. But it was his fault for being all strange and cagey about the family history. “Maybe just a very small spy dukedom.”

The amusement faded from Colin’s face as the implications sank in. “You really believed it, didn’t you? I hope you didn’t think you were dating the Purple Gentian,” he said sharply.

“I don’t see you in any knee breeches,” I retorted.

“I’m not my ancestors,” he warned me. “I’m not some sort of — Errol Flynn on a rope.”

“You really didn’t like that movie, did you?” I mumbled inconsequentially. “I know that. I wouldn’t want you to be one of your ancestors. If you were, you’d be dead.”

That one caught him up short for a moment. Folding his arms across his chest, he asked challengingly, “Are you disappointed that I’m not the spy you thought I was?”

I scowled at him. “Honestly?” Really, men could be such babies. “I’m relieved. I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with a spy. I was completely freaked out by the whole idea. Do you know the hours of sleep I lost because of that damn piece of paper under your desk?”