The Moonless Night Read Free Page A

committee, dashing about from one illustrious home to another spouting off his ideas, having his name in the papers—it would have the parish board beat all hollow for distinction. They’d write it up in London. He thought of his racked constitution, hardly kept on his pegs by the ministrations of his sister, and wondered if he were up to it. But standing in the sweltering sun talking to a foreigner he was not up to, and soon was taking his leave.
    “Do you have many guests at Bolt Hall?” Madame repeated, just before he got away.
    “We are not set up for company at the Hall,” he answered.
    She blinked her big blue eyes to hear a huge mansion, a castle really in all but name, with close to forty bedchambers and as many servants, was incapable of taking a single guest.
    “Is no one at all with you?” she asked, stunned.
    “No, no one. Good day, Madame,” Sir Henry said, bowed formally, and left. David cast one last suspicious glance at Madame, torn by the conflicting desires of keeping the spy out in the cold and getting her to Bolt Hall, where he could keep a sharper eye on her, and possibly be compelled, in the line of duty of course, to make love to her.
    “You see what she’s up to,” he said to his father. “She wants to get into Bolt Hall to interfere with our preparations. I don’t doubt she’s in league with the set that plans to free Boney.”
    Marie had mixed emotions. Madame was vulgar of course, and she had not the least desire to acquire her for a stepmother, but men followed in Madame’s wake in shoals. With this French fleur in the saloon, it would not long be empty of men. She placed little reliance on the story that Madame was in on the scheme, if there even was one.
    There was no doubt allowed in the matter of the scheme’s existence so far as the men were concerned. The preparations at the Hall, the assembled yachts, the painting of the keel, the new telescope—all were founded on this hypothesis, and it was long established as fact. No man could call himself Sir Henry’s friend at such a time if he did not subscribe to the theory, and by talking it over with the converted it had gone beyond dispute that there was such a plot, but of so secretive and insidious a nature that they had not yet discovered anything about it.
     

Chapter 2
     
    In a small, out-of-the-way corner within the labyrinth that is Whitehall, there is one office whose door bears no brass plaque, whose inhabitants, and they are only two, are not officially listed in the records of the Admiralty, to which department they are assigned. It would be easy to imagine the elderly gentleman who presides over his one employee there as a king’s pensioner, given a corner to grow old in in payment for some minor service to his country in times gone by. His nearest neighbor within the building, a very junior liaison man for the naval supplies department, smiles on him with great condescension and pity, and thanks his stars that he has an uncle who is married to a lady who is connected with Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, or he too might end up in such obscurity. The young liaison officer is not personally acquainted with his tenuous connection: Lord Melville, does not, in fact, recognize him when he sees him several times a month, come into this backwater of the building.
    Had he been at his door any time during the past four days he might, however, have recognized the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, for he had been presented to him at a ball once, and he would have recognized the Lord Chancellor of England, Lord Eldon, as every public servant knew him and his nasty temper. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Vansittart, went in unrecognized, along with sundry less exalted personages attached to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The Prime Minister had not been to call, but it was not unknown for that elderly gentleman to meet with him in cabinet at Downing Street.
    The traffic to and from the little office