The Legend of Nimway Hall_1940_Josie Read online

  If he couldn’t, he would just have to apply to the SOE for a new posting, a new partner. She damn well wasn’t going to resign just to soothe the man’s brittle pride.

  She loved him, would have proudly served their country along side him, gladly spent the rest of her life with him. But, if all that happiness was the sacrifice she must make to help win the war, then so be it.

  Her heart broken and aching for what she was about to do, Josie packed up her first aid gear and removed it to the sitting room. By the time she returned, Gideon had rolled onto his back, one arm crooked over his head on the pillow, the other resting at his side, fingers flexed and relaxed.

  Never in the realm of tradecraft had there been a more perfect example of a live drop than Arcturus delivering the message into the closed fist of Agent Invictus while he slept.

  Her next moment would set in motion a cascade of consequences which would cloud the rest of her days and prove to the orb once and for all that she and Gideon were not compatible and would never be.

  She drew the capsule from her pocket, still warm from its hiding place. Overcome by an aching heart, she pressed it to her lips then easily slipped it into the cradle of his palm, his fingers still relaxed and curled, as though he’d picked up the dead drop, only to be bewitched by a spell that had sent him to sleep before he could read it. And perhaps he had been.

  But he would read the message in the morning, would realize in an instant that she was Arcturus and come looking for her.

  And just in case their paths didn’t cross during the day, as so often had happened, she’d added a note to the back of the Aux Unit list, instructing him to meet Arcturus tomorrow night in the cider mill.

  Then Heaven help them both.

  She carefully settled a blanket over him, her dear, handsome, intractable Gideon. He slept on in his dreams, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm she would have loved matching with her own in some fairy tale future, drifting to sleep every night to the sound of his steady breathing, waking every morning wrapped in his arms.

  That kind of peace between them was not meant to be. The morning would bring the end of all things. And she hardly slept a wink.

  But it was clear to Josie the next morning as she was standing at the workbench in her office sorting seeds for next winter, that Gideon had slept hard and awakened late, as furious as a hungry grizzly. She assumed all this about him when she heard his door slam above her, the rush of his footsteps down the backstairs, his sharp knock on her door—then the man himself was standing at the doorway, shirtless, shoeless, in a clean pair of uniform trousers, his vest and a pair of leather braces.

  “Josie!” He was breathing like a steam engine.

  Here it comes—in a blaze of anger and accusations. How could she possibly have predicted that the end would begin with Gideon looking so wickedly handsome?

  “Yes?” Let him make the first strike.

  “Did you—” He stopped and shut the door, came to stand next to her, gently turned her chin with the tip of his finger and looked deeply into her eyes. “Did anyone come into my room last night after you left?”

  “I’m sorry?” She couldn’t parse his question, or place the emotion in the fierceness of his gaze. “What do you mean?”

  His smile was lop-sided. “I quite remember your—” he made a sultry sound in his throat, lifted the hair away from her ear and whispered “—your touch, Josie. The fleeting pain of your healing hands, the pleasure you lavished upon my aching flesh.”

  “Oh, my—” He brushed his warm lips against her nape, slipped his fingers along the ridge of her collar.

  “You see, I remember that much.”

  “As I do.” Would never forget that moment. Or this.

  Or that the puzzling man might be setting her up for a shattering fall. She stepped away to the tray of seed cups on the table. “Now, what is it you were asking, Gideon?”

  “Yes, of course.” He seemed to gather his senses, leaned back against the workbench and folded his arms across his chest. “I wanted to confirm that you were the last to leave my room last night.”

  She was ready for his accusation, would answer his questions without equivocation. “As far as I know, Gideon. You were fast asleep when I left. I turned out the lights in your room and the sitting room, closed both doors. Were you expecting anyone?”

  “Not exactly.” He rubbed his stubbled chin with his thumb and forefinger. “Not then. Certainly not in my bedroom.”

  So that was his conclusion? Damn the man! Of all the narrow-minded, unimaginative, dim-witted pillocks! She had just admitted to being the last person in his room the night before. The message from Arcturus was probably tucked into his trouser pockets at this very moment, written in her own hand. And still he couldn’t possibly fathom that it was she who’d made the drop while he was sleeping.

  What a bloody pleasure to be reeling out just enough rope for the lout to hang himself. “So, Gideon, I take it you were expecting someone. Just not in your room. When was the meeting supposed to happen, then? Where?”

  He shook his head, still mulling over the answer that was standing right beside him. “Can’t get into that, I’m afraid—”

  “Official Secrets Act, of course.”

  “It’s just that I found something I wasn’t expecting to find.”

  “In your room? What did you find? Where was it?”

  He looked down at the palm of his hand, clenched his fist. “Can’t discuss that either.”

  Exasperated beyond her ability to remain polite, Josie turned to him and plastered on a smile. “How can I help you, Gideon?”

  He made a sound in his throat then pushed away from the workbench. “Frankly, you can’t help me, Josie. Not any more than you have already, than you did for me last night with your tender care.” He turned toward her with a smile that melted her heart, then cupped her face between his large, capable hands and kissed her again, deeply, fully.

  She closed her eyes and kissed him back, slipped her fingers through his dark hair, tugged him closer, relishing this final moment of intimacy with the man she loved with all her heart.

  He laughed softly against her mouth, and set her away. “I’ve much to do today, Josie. And I see that I’ve interrupted your—” he gestured to the workbench.

  Josie took a steadying breath. “Seed sorting—”

  “I’ll be sure to know that next time. Now I must return to my room and finish dressing.”

  “Other plans for the day?” She couldn’t help asking because she knew exactly how his day would end.

  “Nothing of note. Though I do hope you and I can meet tonight in the library. I’ve missed our time together.”

  “So have I.”

  “Half-ten, then,” he said with a smile and so charming it took all her restraint not to toss a trowel at his head on his way out the door.

  In any case, the die was cast. Arcturus and Invictus would meet this evening in the cider mill, come hell, high water, or an air raid.

  Gideon raked his fingers through his hair as he tromped up the stairs to his room, trying to make his way through the herb-scented fog of his memories of last night and yesterday. No matter which path he followed, each ended with Josie. Her hands kneading his aching muscles, soothing his aching flesh, working his tendons until she had molded his pain into a pleasure so fathomless he could hardly keep his eyes open, despite his yearning to enfold her in his arms and make love with her through the night.

  He’d heard nothing after that, and had slept like a stone until nearly eleven, had awakened flat on his back in his knickers, his knee much improved. It wasn’t until he had sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed that he realized he was clutching a dead drop capsule in his hand.

  He’d assumed at first he must have gotten out of bed after Josie left, encrypted a message to Arcturus for the morning, prepped the capsule with his reply, then had somehow returned to bed with it and fallen back to sleep. Why else would he have awakened holding a dr
op capsule?

  It was only after he’d unscrewed the cap and read the message, that he knew the capsule wasn’t his. Couldn’t be. The rolled slip of paper was the list of Aux Unit recruits Arcturus was supposed to deliver during the live drop.

  Yesterday. At the fete.

  How the hell had it gotten here in his room? Who had put it into his hand? Arcturus? Had the man entered his room in the dead of night, come close enough to slip the capsule into his hand and not wake him?

  A head full of questions had sent him, half-dressed, downstairs to Josie’s office. Just the sight of her standing at her workbench had thrown him off balance again, set his pulse racing. Her uncommon beauty, the rose of her mouth, the fragrance of sage and apples that wreathed her hair. She’d become everything in his life, his respite from the war, his reason to feel hopeful.

  Not wanting to spook her, he’d hesitated to bring up last night’s egregious security breach, the significance of an agent—enemy or friendly—gaining access to Nimway Hall, let alone to his bedroom, undetected. After all of his early blustering about her laxness, one of his own men had failed to protect them!

  But he’d learned little from Josie’s recollections of the previous night, had stolen kisses from her and made a promise that nothing would stop him from meeting her in the library tonight.

  Gideon returned to his suite more troubled than ever, more outraged, because it was clear to him that someone—Arcturus, at best—had deliberately penetrated an intelligence operation without first signaling his intent. He investigated every inch of his sitting room and bedchamber, the common area in the corridor, looking for evidence of a breach, points of entry, detritus on the carpet, papers moved on his desk, drawers rifled.

  A quarter hour later, he’d found nothing out of place, out of the ordinary, only the mint and lemon scent of Josie’s liniment.

  Having wasted time that he couldn’t afford, he dressed for the day, snagged a late breakfast of buttered toast and jam from the redoubtable Mrs. Lamb then took his tray to his desk.

  He found Crossley and Easton at their drawing boards, Durbridge at the far end of the worktable, bent over the materiel lists for the Operational Base.

  “You’re looking spry this morning, sir,” Easton said with an approving nod. “Shook Miss Stirling to bits when she learned you’d banged up your leg again.”

  “I’m fine, Easton, thank you,” Gideon said, wondering suddenly, impossibly, if one of these three men was Arcturus, hiding in plain sight. Nonsensical in this case, but not unheard of for the SOE to plant two intelligence agents in the same department without them knowing about each other.

  “She caught us when she was coming out of your room last night with her medical bag,” Crossley said, holding his protractor to the light. “Asked if we’d let you sleep in this morning, said it would do your knee a world of good.”

  “It has, Crossley. Thank you.” Of course, his staff was quartered on the same floor as his suite. “By the way, what time was that? When you saw Miss Stirling?”

  “Just before eleven,” Durbridge said as he pulled open a file drawer. “The fellows and I closed the fete at ten, had a quick pint afterward at the Hungry Dragon—”

  “Did any of you hear anything later? See anyone upstairs who shouldn’t be there, that you didn’t know?”

  “Hell, no!” Crossley stood and stretched. “Would have tackled the fellow and alerted you, for certain. Why? Was something stolen?”

  “No. Just curious.” He left the matter where it stood and joined Crossley and Easton at the drawing boards, discussed the interior layout of the OB. The plumbing and electrical risers, the wall of bunks, storage shelves for food and munitions, dining table, chairs, a latrine carved into the limestone–for a cave it was bloody well-appointed. The trapdoor entrance carved into the ceiling was so well camouflaged on the forest floor he wouldn’t have been able to find it, even in the daylight, had he not known it was located immediately above the original collapsed door to the icehouse.

  “Everything to plan, as you see, sir,” Easton said. “We should be at the next Operational Base in Chard in two weeks.”

  “Everything to plan,” Gideon said, heading for his desk, adding under his breath, “except recruiting and training the Aux Unit.”

  He retrieved the list from his trouser pocket and carefully uncurled the slip of paper until it looked like a normal note, rather than a secret, encoded communication from a stealthy, not-to-be trusted fellow agent. With little enough time to contact the candidates and assess their skill sets, Gideon began creating individual evaluations cards for each name on the list.

  He finished in the late afternoon, had already made appointments to meet with three of the twelve men—four, if he counted Edward. Satisfied with his progress, he was about to ball up the slip of paper and toss it into the fire when he noticed a line of uncoded writing on the reverse.

  Cider Mill Cellar-7P

  “Bloody hell!” he said under his breath. “Back in a few minutes, gentlemen.”

  Gideon left the office, crossed the great hall and entered the darkened library, the windows still shuttered, the blackout curtains closed. He went directly to the Speed map of Nimway and flicked on the sconce lights.

  “The Cider Mill?” He hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen it on the map of the grounds they had used to site the OB. He ran his torch across the face of the map, but found nothing.

  The estate must have a cider press somewhere; Nimway Scrumpy had been on sale at the fete. He drank it every day. And who better to point the way than the lady of Nimway Hall.

  Hoping Josie was still in her office, he left the library through the service hall and found her still bent over her collection of seeds.

  He hadn’t gotten two steps into the office when she turned and smiled and asked, “What can I do for you, Gideon? You look lost.”

  “Do I? I guess I am.” In more ways than she could ever know. But how to ask about the mill without sounding suspicious? “The Speed map in the library. I was looking for something—can’t seem to find on the map and frankly had never heard about—the cider mill?”

  “Ah.” She swept him with her gaze, as calm as he was on edge. “Are you in need of a pint of Nimway Scrumpy, Gideon? Because Mrs. Lamb keeps a keg on hand in the kitchen.”

  “It’s not that. Just curious about the mill. Do you mind showing me, please?”

  “Not at all.” He followed her into the library and stopped along side her. “Trouble is, Gideon, the cider mill doesn’t fit on the map.”

  “Where then?”

  “I was about to say that if it were on the map it would be out here on the western edge of the orchard, at the end of this lane. There’s a road beyond that we use for deliveries to Balesborough and beyond.” She smiled, slipped her hand inside his, taking his breath away. “Do you want me to take you there?”

  “Ah, no, Josie. But thank you. I just—Crossley is cataloging the remaining undocumented structures on the estate grounds and we all realized that we’d never seen the cider mill that produces such delicious scrumpy.” He could not have sounded more implausible if he tried.

  “Thank you for the compliment. I’ll pass it along to our cider master. This is his busiest season, of course. I’m sure the press will be working overtime.”

  “Tonight?”

  “From five in the morning until the crew finishes up about five this evening.” She slipped her hand out of his and straightened his tie. “Now, Gideon, I’d like nothing more than to spend the rest of the day with you in the library, but that will have to wait until tonight.”

  Yes, tonight, my dear Josie. After tangling with Arcturus and setting the man straight about boundaries and honor and professional lines that should never be crossed.

  Gideon spent the remainder of the afternoon attending to his everyday duties: approving Durbridge’s equipment lists for the OB, signing purchase orders, organizing the training schedule for the Aux Unit recruits, finally composing that week’s re
port for Capt. Fenwick at Operational Section headquarters in Bridgwater, a constructive week that showed his men and their abilities in the best possible light, and made him proud.

  By six o’clock he had determined that none of his three officers could possibly be Arcturus, and dismissed them for the night with his permission to trounce their rivals from yesterday’s tug-of-war in a game of darts at the Hungry Dragon, scheduled, significantly, for seven. He took dinner at his desk and a half-hour later it was time to leave.

  Gideon gathered up his rucksack and slipped out of the Hall, unnoticed by anyone but Winnie, who caught up with him as he stepped into the garden, and trotted along side.

  “Then come along, girl,” he said, charmed by her canine smile and the energetic wagging of her tail as they started down the hill toward the lake.

  Having no idea from which direction Arcturus expected him to approach the cider mill, he cut short around the lake, with Winnie in the lead as though she knew where he was bound. They followed a deer track north through a stand of timber until it crossed the commercial road, which eventually ended in the well-traveled lane that led up through the thickening twilight into the cobbled mill yard and its tidy complex of buildings.

  A warehouse, a brew house, three wagon loads of apples waiting in line to be pressed. And at the center, what looked to be the oldest of the buildings, the two-story stone cider mill, perched on a slope that fell away into the shadows behind the building.

  Winnie sniffed her way through the deserted compound, the cider makers gone for the night as Josie had predicted. He felt no sense of danger, of being watched. He was ten minutes early, perhaps Arcturus hadn’t yet arrived.

  Feeling entirely at ease, Gideon went up the stairs of the cider house, told Winnie to stay outside, then opened the door and entered the main room, its air rich with centuries of pressed apples and fermented cider. In the shadows, he could see three hulking presses of varying sizes and ages in three separate alcoves, the ceiling crisscrossed with timbers and pipes, pulleys and ropes. A maze of unfamiliar equipment, silent as a stone, the works appearing to have been cleaned and abandoned not ten minutes before.