Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

I turned away from the house but wished, as well, to distance myself from the music. I walked north, toward the cliff edge along the gate, passing the marquee next to the service wing. The black-and-white-liveried kitchen staff was laying out food on a long row of folding tables. At the end of it, three men in blue serge were setting up another row at a right angle. Two of these boys were heading toward a stack of collapsed tables a few yards outside the tent while the third was unfolding the legs of the next table in the new line.

I realized these guys were dressed not only like each other but also like the baggage handler who met us at the station. These were indeed de facto uniforms. The blue suits were the privates in Stockman’s army. I thought all this and slowed a step or two as I did and it all happened quickly: as I was about to turn my attention again toward the cliff, the man in the tent popped the last leg of the table into place and looked up.

I stopped.

He turned his face to me.

It was the stage-door lug from the Duke of York’s.

Of course he was Stockman’s man.

I broke off our look and kept on toward the cliff.

Stockman had been keeping a watchful eye on this woman he was interested in.

The first flash in me was that this guy was an immediate danger. He knew who I was.

I neared the stone fence at the cliff’s edge.

I stopped a few yards short, expecting he might be following me. I didn’t want to put the cliff in play if there was a struggle.

I turned.

No one was near.

I looked to the tent. He was blocked from my sight by his two colleagues depositing the next table in front of him. Here were two able-bodied boys carrying one table at a time from a pile fifty feet away. Stockman’s privates lacked a certain sharpness and motivation. Which threw an odd light on the lug. This same guy setting up folding tables had been entrusted to slip in quietly backstage, armed, and keep an eye on Isabel Cobb. Had he fallen out of favor?

And it occurred to me: my special fear of him now was based on my having been at the theater in my own persona. But he didn’t know that. He didn’t know Cobb from Hunter from some other guy who just happened to see a play and give him some dirty looks. Maybe this would be okay.

The other two Blue Suits headed back to the pile of tables. My man was unfolding legs and not looking my way.

Okay.

I turned and moved to the stone fence.

The cliffs separated here at the shore and curved inland, the beach running into a narrow valley. Along the path to my right, out in front of the east wing of the house, the cliffs were high and sheer, heading down to Ramsgate.

I looked over my shoulder. The lug was standing behind a table he’d just set up. He was leaning there, looking out at me.

I turned fully around to him. I thought to take out a cigarette and light it, but the wind had brisked up a bit and I was afraid I’d have trouble with the match, which would, of course, ruin the effect. So I just leaned and stared back. And then I took a page out of Sir Martin the Gray Suit’s book of etiquette. I gave the guy a nod.

He returned it.

I had no idea what it all meant.

But I figured I was free to stroll along, which I did, casually, like a house guest out sightseeing, following the curve of the fence and watching the waves on the Strait of Dover. What a swell day. What a swell castle. What a swell host. What a swell guest I was. I wanted to see if there’d likely be any problem sneaking in tonight through the window I’d unlatched.

I looked back. I was out of sight of everyone in the tents. I looked at the castle. This eastern wall held three massive bay windows. The library was behind the central one, directly before me. No doors anywhere on this side the house. No need for a Gray Suit to stand guard. All very reassuring. The flag flapped and drew my eyes up to it high on the tower to my left.

I turned and looked out east toward Belgium, seventy miles away beyond the horizon. Occupied Belgium. Ravaged and brutalized Belgium. Stockman’s true countrymen — I was thinking of him definitively this way, guilty now until proven innocent — Stockman’s boys in feldgrau , were in control over there. If he was working importantly on their behalf, how did they communicate?

The last German agent I’d dealt with, in my recent adventure on the Lusitania and beyond, relied on telegrams. That and his Nuttall handy one-volume encyclopedia.

The wind gusted up and the flag whopped behind and above me.

I turned one more time and looked at St. George’s Cross laid over St. Andrew’s Cross in our own red, white, and blue. And I looked at its pole lifting the flag to a point as high above the sea as a Chicago skyscraper. And I looked at those guy wires. And I realized what they’d been reminding me of without it reaching my conscious mind, the kind of thing that would have come to me only if I’d been in the white, metaphorizing heat of writing a story about this place. The guy wires held the flagpole steady on the tower of Stockman House as if it were the telegraph mast on a great ship .

Between antenna wires in the guys and wires in the pole, at this height, Stockman had plenty of telegraphic juice to make it to Brussels, if not all the way to Cologne and beyond.

The Union Jack thrashed at me. I knew I was looking at Sir Albert’s wireless to Germany.

His office — his real office — had to be below, in the tower.

Now all I had to do was wait until the night came and my mother began to sing.

At twilight Stockman fed the throngs. By then upwards of five hundred people had been drifting around and lolling around or gathered around listening to the salon orchestra and, in the adjacent tent, to a dialect comic, after watching jugglers and a magician. A two-ring music hall. At the call to high tea they’d all queued into the lug’s tent and emerged with substantial enough food on paper plates to make a working-class last meal of the day, which they took to the chairs or the picnic blankets or to the grass or the stone fence. I suspected the area east of the house, before the library, was now populated. I counted on my mother drawing them away when the time came.

As for the house guests — Isabel Cobb and Joseph W. Hunter included — we were gathered and brought to the courtyard and we took our high tea alfresco at temporary tables covered in linen behind a barricade of half a dozen Gray Suits. Pickled salmon and soused mackerel and sliced beef. Boiled eggs and cucumber sandwiches and radishes. Scones and marmalade and sponge cake.

Al and Isabel were side by side at the head of the table nearest the house. I was down the way, at a separate table, surrounded by a London banker, an Edinburgh banker, a Zurich banker, and their wives, who had much to say to each other, not knowing what to make of an American journalist. Which was fine with me. As the daylight waned I waited for a chance to have a few moments with the subject of my story.

I forced the issue as the dozen guests were in the midst of their sponge cake. I knew my mother would not be taking sponge cake. Particularly before performing. I rose, notebook drawn, and I crept toward her table. She was listening to one of the three Brits I’d passed in the Great Hall. He was bloviating about the French trying to run the show on the Western Front. She listened with her elbow on the table, her chin on her fist, declining to play the absolute lady, even in her role as Stockman’s hostess. She knew her business. Stockman must have liked her this way. Stockman was also focused on the man, and I crept some more, letting my notebook show in my hand.