is still frail and confined to bed; when Harry went up to see her half an hour ago, she was half-asleep over The Thousand and One Nights, her toast-and-water barely touched on its tray. She jolted when her father put his head around the door. He knows his smile has a ghastly, painted quality these days.
The spy is out there on Eccleston Square. Not that Harry's seen him; the fellow wouldn't be much of a spy if he were visible, after all. (Enquiry agent is the term the Watsons prefer.) He's been posted there for four days now, according to Mrs. Watson. These things take time, Admiral.
Harry bites the edge of his thumb, then stops himself: it's a filthy, schoolboy habit. He consults his notes, and stabs his pen into the inkwell.
In order to protect from enslavement the beleaguered inhabitants of the Greek provinces and islands, who were at that point resorting for nourishment to boiled herbage, Sir Edward found it his duty to destroy the Turko-Egyptian Fleet at Navarino on October 20, 1827. This victory over the Ottoman Porte is so justly celebrated, it is sufficient to record here that the Allied Fleet, amounting altogether to eleven sail of the line, nine frigates, and four brigs, suffered a loss of just 172 men killed and 481 wounded, among which the present writer (Sir Edward's third son, a midshipman at the time) counted himself honoured to count himself.
Irritated when he spots the repetition, he scores it out.
... judged himself honoured to be counted.
Automatically Harry's fingers move to a hand-span above his right knee: through the cloth he can find the ragged scar. (Nan and Nell used to clamour to do this, like little Doubting Thomases.) Just as well he'd got blooded at nineteen. Heaven knows, Harry has enough gumption in him to shed any amount of blood for his Queen—if only an occasion for bloodshed would present itself. But in these peaceful times he's been obliged to loiter in private life (as the euphemism has it) for four years in his twenties, another five in his thirties, another five in his forties. Now he waits for another posting, or even a pen-pusher's job at the Admiralty, to fill a few years. At the ready, at all times, he waits.
His wife's upstairs in her boudoir (newly papered with birds of paradise, at inordinate expense), trimming an old bonnet, or at least that's what she announced at lunchtime that she'd be doing. Harry realizes now that he has no idea what trimming involves. To readjust the bonnet for use somehow, as in trimming a sail? To make it smaller, as one trims a beard? And does Helen really have the skill to do any of these things, given that she needs the maid to undo her buttons at the end of the day? Helen's a sort of engine of idleness: all she does is consume. Like the unseen spy outside, Harry's been keeping his wife in his sights: covertly focusing on her an intense observation that reminds him, strangely, of the days of their courtship. (The sight of Helen Smith's young wrist emerging from her glove once distracted him so much from his task of defending Florence from hypothetical mobs, it's a wonder the Grand Duchy didn't fall.)
What happens if the spy finds something to report? It's still unreal to Harry. His wife is upstairs doing something to a bonnet. How could she be having carnal relations with a stranger? And what stranger? Harry quite agrees with Mrs. Watson that it's imperative he should know the truth—but they haven't yet spoken of what he'll do with that knowledge. What if the spy manages to come up with proof, hard and indisputable proof, that Helen has ... Harry's mind reels from the various phrases. Dishonoured him?Betrayed him? That she's fallen, ruined, lost?
Or, of course, the spy may discover nothing at all. Perhaps his wife really did linger over syllabub with the Reverend and Mrs. Faithfull, five nights ago: perhaps she's a slapdash mother, nothing worse. Will Harry be relieved to have her guiltlessness proved, even if he's had to hire a spy to do it? (How very modern, he thinks scathingly; what a model of a husband, in the mode of 1864.) What then? Will he be able to meet his own eyes in the mirror every morning?
He stares at the page under his hand, and forces out another sentence.
Although loaded with laurels in immediate consequence by his own Sovereign and those of