Love by the Morning Star (11 page)

“The village fete, I'm sure. She recruits everyone to do the work, and keeps all the credit for herself. When I return for the holidays, then?”

“Of course,” Anna said, trying to find a graceful way to slouch. In her heels she was as tall as Teddy, and she had practiced all of her most appealing expressions looking
up
.

“I have to leave tomorrow, early. I just got word.” His balled fist uncurled, revealing the crumpled slip of paper. Anna, twisting her neck, read:
Qui tacet consentire
.

“What does that mean?” she asked. It was the sort of ignorance she did not have to hide. Even now, women rarely learned Latin, though it was still mandatory for schoolboys.

“‘Silence means consent,'” he said. His grin was still there, but his eyes were focused far away, unsmiling.

She tried it, consenting to everything he might ask of her as silently as she could, but it produced no measurable result.

“We've been silent too long,” Teddy said harshly, still looking beyond her as if he were talking to someone else.

“But I don't have to tell
you
that. Your parents are still there, suffering.”

They are?
Anna almost said. Then she caught herself. Of course, he believed she'd just escaped from Germany, leaving her parents behind. She tried to look suitably sorrowful without making any wrinkles in her perfect skin.

“Never fear,” Teddy said. “I'll search for Mr. and Mrs. Morgan while I'm in Germany. My father mentioned which cabaret they run—they should be easy to find. You must be so desperately worried about them.” Then he turned on his heel and left.

I only have a few weeks to learn enough to fool him
, she thought.
Once we're spending hours alone together, I know he'll fall in love with me. Why, he's halfway there already. Then when we're married, it won't matter what I really am. I'll be Lady Winkfield, and I'll never look back
.

Tomorrow
, Anna told herself,
I make friends with that mouse of a maid
.

T
EDDY WATCHED HIS FATHER METHODICALLY
smooth the wrinkled paper on his library desk.
It is so strange
, he thought,
how a man can be both what he
is
and what he
was
at the same time
. Lord Liripip was a ruin of a man now, plagued by gout and a dozen minor ailments that robbed him of his digestion, his sleep, his breath, his comfort.

But he had been a giant once, one of the great liberal lords, an oratorial power in Parliament. He had been the terror of foxes in three counties, and such a ladies' man that he was officially declared
not safe unchaperoned in carriages
by two generations of debutantes.

Teddy had never known that man, but he heard it in the whispers of the oldest servants, and from his father's brother, the loony who rode in the nude. Thumbing through ancient scrapbooks kept as curios in dowagers' parlors, he had run across clippings of society columns depicting quite a different man from the temperamental, decrepit creature who smacked his gums and looked at him with rheumy, anxious eyes. Exactly when his decline had begun Teddy didn't know, but from gossip and guesses he thought it must be either when Lord Liripip fell in love with one woman when he was fifty-five, or when he married quite a different woman when he was fifty-six. Or perhaps even when that woman died in childbirth not long afterward, and he had married the current Lady Liripip.

Difficult as it was—and difficult as Lord Liripip was—Teddy loved the man his father had become. In his alternating gruff and petulant way he was a kind and generous father. And of course, Teddy was his father's future. Through him, Liripips would go on. Sometimes Teddy caught his father examining him incredulously. He used to think his father was marveling that after all those years he'd managed to produce an heir. Then one day, a bit drunk, his father had said, “Damn my eyes, how a miserable prune like your mother ever managed to squirt out a noble specimen like yourself is beyond me.”

“I can forbid you, you know,” Lord Liripip said now, a trace of his old power and canniness flashing in his pale blue eyes.

“No, sir, you can't. I've reached the age of majority.”

“All the same, I think if I forbid you, you won't go.”

Prevaricating, Teddy said, “I would not like to disobey you, sir.”

Lord Liripip laughed, which he had not done in a long while. “But you would, wouldn't you, and what am I supposed to do about it, eh? Disown you? Couldn't even if I wanted to, and wouldn't even if I could. What, give Starkers kit and caboodle to that yahoo up in Edinburgh? Har!” If Teddy had not been born—or if he should die—the entire estate and title would pass to a distant relative no one had ever met.

“But think about it, boy. You'll be leaving Oxford . . .”

“Not at all! This is officially part of a study program. I'll be there under school auspices.”

“But not doing schoolwork. Teddy, you don't have the makings of a proper spy. You're too friendly by half. I've seen you, making the housemaids smile and chatting with Caroline's girl.” He winced. “Don't care for that one, even if she is Caroline's get. Looking about with those big cow eyes of hers as if she'd like to eat the place up. Her father must be a piece of work. Bah!”

He was prone to inarticulate exclamations, and went on in that vein for a while—
pah!
and
humph!
mingled with his hacking cough—before remembering the matter at hand.

“People
like
you, Teddy, which is well enough for skullduggery, but you like them back, which is fatal. You're not hard and calculating and cold.”

“The world is hard and cold enough, sir. I think I can change it by being something else.”

“And get yourself shot, no doubt.”

“Did you get shot in Mafeking, or the Great War?”

“Only shot
at
, but that is neither here nor there.” Lord Liripip slapped the paper on his desk. “Does Burroughs think you'll do for this kind of work just because I did? These are different times.”

“Yes, sir—worse times, and that's why all good men have to act. Now, before it escalates. War is coming. Any fool can see that. There's an entire continent at risk right across a ribbon of water.”

“That's their business.”

“It's our business to keep this world peaceful,” Teddy said. “And it's an awfully skinny ribbon.”

“I still say Burroughs has some nerve recruiting my son and heir for spy work.”

“I'll just be a student, making friends, learning the territory while it's still easy to get into Germany. I won't be doing anything dangerous.”

“ . . . Yet,” Lord Liripip said darkly. “They don't take you into the fold if they don't mean to put you to use.”

“Look on the bright side, sir. Maybe we can put things right enough so that Germany gets a new regime and everything gets better. Maybe it won't come to war after all. Then I can go back to reading poetry and rowing crew.”

“Wipe that cocksure grin off your face, Teddy. There's a man over there with a puny heart and weak brain and dreams as big as Alexander or Napoleon. You won't get rid of him so easily. Do you know what they do to spies in wartime? You'll be tossed into some black pit of sadists and set to work upon, and when they've milked you of all the things you've sworn you'd never tell, when they've cut off bits of you that you never thought you could live without, they'll shoot you in the head and dump you in an unmarked grave. Then won't that Edinburgh blighter laugh his head off?”

Unflappable Teddy said only, “I'll be back by Christmas. I told you, sir, I'm there as a student.”

“Where you'll get lost, or set yourself up with a false identity, or marry a Communist farm girl for cover.”

Teddy threw back his head and let loose his free and beautiful laugh. Then he kissed his father on the brow. The old man tried to brush him away . . . but he didn't try very hard.

“Just be sure you come home safely,” Lord Liripip said with growling affection. “I don't like to think what your mother would say if I told her we needed to produce another heir. On the other hand, the shock might kill her.” He seemed to perk up, then: “No, wouldn't be worth the unpleasantness I'd have to go through doing my marital duty. Har!”

Teddy, who wasn't any fonder of his mother than he absolutely had to be for the sake of propriety, took this in stride.

“It's near dawn,” he said, drifting to the window. “I'll have to leave soon.”

“Dawn, hell! It's the middle of the night still. Look at you, already skulking like a proper spy.” He looked oddly proud, and not for the first time did Teddy wonder exactly what his father might have done in his youth to serve his country. Neither he nor Burroughs, his father's old friend and now Teddy's professor of German literature and secret handler, would say, though they hinted broadly at great deeds and derring-do. For all Teddy knew, it might have been anything from fetching coffee at an embassy to political assassination.

“Throw open the window, would you?” Lord Liripip said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. It was painful to walk, and nearly as painful to sit all day and half the night. “I want to feel the night air. I've half a mind to make you push me around the grounds in my bath chair.”

“Another ploy to keep me home?” Teddy unlatched the window and swung it open, leaning out into the starlit darkness.
Can I be nostalgic for something I haven't lost yet?
he wondered, affected more than he realized by his father's grim warning about the fate of spies. The night was cold, clean, with delicious earth smells rising from the landscaped and wooded grounds. In full light the land had the melancholy grays and browns of the decaying season, but when it was blanketed in night, only the best of the turning year remained. The autumnal world was drowsy and bittersweet, like a child's tucking-in after a long day of play.

Only
, Teddy thought,
a child is always sure there'll be a tomorrow just as crisp and bright
.

Behind him, Lord Liripip closed his eyes, lost, as he was so often lately, in a memory. There had been another night such as this, chill, starlit, just before the dew had risen on the crisping leaves. There had been a girl, singing . . .

And then, there she was, or her voice, in any case. It was a different voice, but he was familiar with the ways of those reminiscences that were half dream. Details were different, merged and oddly juxtaposed, but he could always tell when something was meant to be a sign of the woman he had loved and lost. She had been a singer, untrained but with the purest voice, as light and flirting as birdsong. And like a bird she would lead him on a chase through the forest, singing her siren melody, luring him deeper into the trees and, at last, into her arms.

This singer, though—her voice was much lower than the one he remembered. Where hers had been a bell, a flute, this one was an oboe, a bassoon, but somehow still feminine. A voice deep with emotion, with secrets and longing, singing a low, caressing whisper loudly enough for all the world to hear.

She was singing in German.

That makes sense
, Lord Liripip thought, believing he must have slipped into a dream after all.
She fled from me, from my proposal and my title, and went to Germany
. Back then the language had been English, her spoken voice showing her aristocratic blood, her singing voice shifting delightfully from sweet pastorals to “Cockles and Mussels” fishwife songs to bawdy ballads that even he had blushed to hear. She had always been so free, so unashamed.
There must have been something of that in me, too, that came out in my son
, he thought.
Why didn't I show it to her? She might have stayed
.

“It's she,” Teddy said in wonder, leaning as far out the window as he dared. “Have you ever heard such a voice, sir?”

Lord Liripip's half-mast eyelids sprang open. “You hear it too? It's not a dream?” He was still drowsy, confused.
It's she, Teddy had said. Can it be
my
she?

“It's my step-cousin-in-law-thingumie. Anna.” Teddy grinned into the silvered darkness, searching for her. Her blond hair must positively gleam in the starlight. But though the voice was quite obviously coming from near the gargantuan Liripip Yew, he couldn't see so much as a golden glint through its thick evergreen needles. “It must be. Mum said she's a singer, though from the way she said it I fancied she stood on tables in her scanties and sang ‘A Guy What Takes His Time' in a Mae West impersonation. I never dreamed she sang like this.”

“What is she singing?” Lord Liripip demanded, struggling to his feet and crossing to the window in an undignified, agonizing hop. He had learned a bit of German in school, but it, along with his French, had largely deserted him. (The Latin had been beaten into him so severely by various headmasters that it stuck.)

“It's Brahms's Alto Rhapsody,” Teddy said. “The lyrics are by Goethe.”

“How on earth do you know that?” Lord Liripip snapped, almost resenting his son's erudition. “When I was your age we didn't have to know so much, and someone punched us in the nose if we let on we did. What are the words? Tell me!” Would there be some balm in them to ease his heart? A visitation—not from beyond the grave, because Caroline was alive—but from across the years?

Teddy closed his eyes, listening intently to the low, reverberating words that seemed to echo off every dying leaf. “‘Who is that apart?'” he quoted, then paraphrased. “It is about a man, a misanthrope, walking through the wild. The foliage all closes behind him, leaving no sign he's been there.”

To his utter astonishment, Lord Liripip felt a tear course down his cheek.