the maps. I can’t see them failing to take the bait. Like the rest of us, they’re desperate for diamonds.’
Anthony was surprised by the word desperate. He wouldn’t say no to a few diamonds himself but he’d never been desperate for them. Greenwood was about to speak but thought better of it, so Anthony was forced to display his ignorance. ‘Why? Does the Kaiser want a new necklace or something?’
Sir Charles swapped a long-suffering look with Rycroft. ‘It’s industry, man. The Germans don’t want diamonds for jewellery, they need them for industry.’
Now Anthony was really puzzled. ‘Industry?’ Admittedly, what he knew about diamonds could have been comfortably written on a stamp, but he associated them with expensively dressed women, not smoky factories.
‘Industry. Drilling, engraving, making scales and meters, turning metal and so on, to say nothing of wire making.’
‘We’re using a fair bit of wire in France,’ put in Greenwood.
‘As you say.’ Sir Charles interlocked his fingers and braced his hands in a satisfied way. ‘Yes, that all hangs together. Mr Greenwood, I’ve arranged a false identity for you. Mr Rycroft has kindly offered to take you on as his nephew, so I want you to rid yourself of your uniform and reappear as Martin Rycroft. Once that’s taken care of, you need to book into a hotel. The St George’s in Cheshire Place will suit our purposes very well.’
‘Right-ho, sir.’
‘As well as the maps, you’ll have various documents to support your story of a find, but the principal prop is your cache of diamonds.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I think that’s all I need to say at this stage. Thank you very much for your help, Mr Rycroft. Brooke and I will leave you in peace to give a few pointers to Mr Greenwood.’
That evening Anthony dined with Michael Greenwood who, enthusiastically throwing himself into the part of Martin Rycroft, seemed to have picked up an extraordinary amount of miner’s slang in his session with ‘Uncle John’.
The following afternoon he departed with Sir Charles and his valet, Sedgley, for Starhanger.
The train, as was commonplace in the war, was delayed, re-routed and shunted into sidings on what seemed to Anthony to be nothing more than a whim. They had the compartment to themselves, Sir Charles’s valet travelling in another part of the train.
Sir Charles hoped to get the ball rolling that evening. Bertram Farlow and another assistant, Peter Warren, were in a room in the St George’s, across the corridor from Greenwood, with instructions that one of them should be on watch all the time. Greenwood, for his part, was to leave his room locked but empty for reasonable periods of time.
Farlow and Warren had instructions not to interfere. What Sir Charles wanted wasn’t some wretched agent of the Weasel variety but confirmation that the gentleman was at Starhanger. Naturally enough, Farlow and Warren were ignorant of what lay behind their assignment; all they had to do was watch.
As they dawdled through Kent, the conversation lapsed. Sir Charles buried himself in the Morning Post and Anthony, an unread newspaper on his knee, sat in the corner of the carriage, sightlessly looking at the rain-sheened patchwork of fleeting woods and fields, savouring his thoughts. Every rumble, every bump, brought him closer to Tara O’Bryan, the woman in blue.
It was crazy, he thought. He was a doctor. He knew that hearts didn’t really stop – not without grave consequences, at any rate – but in those seconds outside Swan and Edgars, with those wretched white feather women clutching at his coat, he could have sworn his had.
Why on earth the sight of her face should have had such an affect, he’d didn’t know. She wasn’t the first pretty girl he’d ever seen or the first he’d ever been attracted to. Pretty? That was the wrong word. She was beautiful, the sort of beauty that took your breath away, like dawn behind the mountains or a silver path of moonlight over a shifting sea. In those few seconds his life had changed beyond all calculation. What the future held he didn’t know. For the moment he was content it held her.
They were met at the tiny station of Swayling Halt by Sherston’s head groom, Kindred, driving a pony and trap. Their luggage was loaded onto the back. The rain had stopped, the clouds cleared away and they clip-clopped through the lengthening evening shadows through the village towards Starhanger.
As the trap turned into the drive, the bulk of Starhanger appeared in the distance.