One Thing Leads to a Lover (Love and Let Spy #2) - Susanna Craig Page 0,69
in her chest, in the vicinity of her heart. “He has always been a worrier,” she said. “But why hadn’t Lord Dulsworthy returned it?”
“That I cannot say.” Langley turned the book in his hand once before tucking it back into its hiding place against his chest. “But I intend to find out.”
“Surely you don’t think he—?” She couldn’t even finish the thought. The very notion of George mixed up in the affair of the codebook was more than she could make herself imagine.
And of late, she’d been imagining a great many impossible things.
He turned his attention to the window, so she did too, though everything beyond it was unfamiliar and had been since they’d left St. James’s behind. They must be near Whitehall, she thought, which meant…
“This is the Horse Guards.” He nodded toward a Palladian-style building of white stone as the carriage crossed the nearly empty parade ground and paused beside an arched doorway for them to disembark. “Which among many other things houses the headquarters for several divisions of the British military.” Now she observed the greater than usual number of red-coated officers about, and when she glanced up at the driver of their coach, she noted that he was sitting on his perch with a considerably straighter spine than any cabby she had ever seen. Almost like a soldier.
“This isn’t an ordinary hackney, is it?”
“Of course not.” Langley had been speaking to another officer in a low voice, but turned now toward her and held out an arm.
She hesitated before taking it. “And why have you brought me here?”
His expression was impassive. “Just following orders, your ladyship.”
“Whose orders?”
“The only man whose orders I’m obligated to follow.” And with that, he began to walk away, evidently having grown impatient of waiting. “We mustn’t keep General Scott waiting.”
General Scott. The gentleman who’d rescued Langley from the street some thirty years ago. She had not considered that when Langley had spoken of being “returned” to the general when he’d joined the army, he had meant the connection quite so literally.
She hurried to keep up with Langley’s brisk clip down endless miles of corridors, deeper and deeper into the warren of offices, into the heart of military intelligence.
Or, when speaking of intelligence, would it be a more accurate metaphor to describe General Scott as the brain…?
“Here.” Langley rapped his knuckles on the surprisingly plain oak door before which they had stopped and did not wait for a reply before opening it. The room into which it led was smallish and practically empty, containing little more than a desk from which a uniformed soldier was rising as they crossed the threshold. Langley nodded. “Captain Collins.”
The officer dipped his head in acknowledgment. “He’s expecting you, Major Stanhope.”
Langley led her across the room to an unobtrusive door, and reached out a hand to open it, this time without knocking at all.
The door swung inward before he touched it. “Ah, Magpie. Good, good. And you are Lady Kingston, of course,” said the older uniformed man behind it with a surprisingly showy bow for her.
Amanda hadn’t really had time to form any expectation about the office of the head—heart?—of British military intelligence. But if pressed, she almost certainly would have used words like spacious and orderly.
General Scott’s office was neither of those things.
Dark blue curtains had been looped back haphazardly to one side of a large, open window, inviting in the light along with a soft breeze that swirled through a cloud of pipe smoke and ruffled the papers on the man’s desk. Disorder reigned across its top: slipping and sliding piles of letters, maps, documents with important-looking seals, those stacks interspersed with books and ledgers, small and large, open and closed. If Langley handed over the codebook, she felt certain that in short order, it would be lost amid the clutter, never to be found.
Then again, perhaps that was the general’s strategy for safekeeping?
Nor was the man himself quite whom she would have envisioned in such a role. Langley towered head and shoulders above General Scott’s slight form, which moved with a peculiarly childlike rapidity as he gestured them to chairs. Someone evidently saw to it that his uniform was pressed and his linen crisp at the start of the day, but the mother in Amanda recognized the futility of the effort. The ash of pipe tobacco speckled his white breeches, and ink smeared both cuffs of his coat sleeves. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles,