“That’s not true. He was in love with her.”
James gave me an exquisite look. “Miss Schuyler, I’m sure your aunt was a lovely woman, but Richardson was a professional. He was extremely good at this sort of activity; he’d pulled it off countless times before. Naturally, he would have made quite certain she felt he was in love with her, that was part of engaging her trust . . .”
I shook my head. “No. He loved her. They were in love.”
The bartender returned with fresh drinks. I snatched mine and downed it deep. James pulled a cigarette case out of his jacket pocket and offered the contents silently.
“The note,” I said, after he had lit me up. “The note he wrote her. With the rose petals.”
“As I said, he was very good at what he did. They say he was better than Olivier, he could make you believe anything. And of course he was the right sort, bad and dangerous, the sort the ladies love to ruin themselves over, God knows why.” James lit his own cigarette and gazed across the room. “I’d give anything to have seen him in action.”
“You’re sick. All of you. I know he loved her.”
“You have proof of this, Miss Schuyler?”
I touched my chest with my palm. “I know. Don’t give me that smug smile, young man.”
“I’m not smiling. In any case, the two of them had an affair, Richardson and Mrs. Grant, I think we can agree on that, and Richardson was able to get the information we needed to neutralize the husband. We planted some false information with him, which did a little good. But this was the real coup: there was a guest in Wittenberg, at the Grants’ country house, a German government official who was ambivalent about the prospect of war. Thought Germany would ultimately suffer, that it would bring down Europe, that sort of thing. A real Cassandra. So Richardson made contact with him, and together they worked out an alternative scenario, by which Richardson proposed a British-led guarantee of autonomy for Alsace—”
“Alsace?”
“A French province, lost to Germany a generation earlier in the Prussian War. The prospect of wresting it away from German control would coax France to remain neutral, at least for the critical period. Meanwhile the German chap, Richardson’s contact, constructed an alternative deployment for his country’s troops that would send all resources east instead. The idea being, you see, that Russia would refrain from mobilizing because it could not count on French support, and then Germany would have no imminent threat to mobilize against. The chain of dominoes would be stopped in its tracks.”
“Peter, Paul, and Mary,” I whispered. “Are you kidding me?”
“No. Audacious, wasn’t it? Richardson went to Berlin—”
“With Violet.”
“With Mrs. Grant. She was apparently leaving her husband. He went to the British ambassador with the document, but there was nothing Goschen could do, he couldn’t vouch for the integrity of the cables or the diplomatic pouches at that point, so Richardson decided to get it out of the country himself. That was his last communication from Germany, a coded cable he sent on the evening of July twenty-sixth, that he was on his way to the consulate in Zurich.”
“That was the night Dr. Grant was murdered.”
“Yes. So he fled with Mrs. Grant—”
“You see? He loved her. He would have left her behind at that point, if he didn’t love her.”
“He was using her, Miss Schuyler. He was using her as a courier, in case he was stopped, in case he was found out as a British national. That’s what we discovered today. These documents, which had gone missing from history, he had sewn them into the lining of Mrs. Grant’s suitcase.”
“But why? If she didn’t know they were there, if he was using her as you say, how would she know what to do with them?”
“I expect he gave her some sort of instruction. And he had another plan, a backup, as I believe you Americans call it, if he were in fact separated from Mrs. Grant.”
“And what was that?” I stubbed out my exhausted cigarette.
James jiggled his ice and noticed my predicament. He took out another smoke from his case, lit it against the glowing end of his own, and handed it to me. A long scar ran across the back of his right hand, which I hadn’t noticed before, thin and vicious. His fingers lingered against mine. Another hand appeared in my head, smooth and unscarred, with a surgeon’s adept fingers and close-clipped nails. It lay atop my naked breast to count the strikes of my heart, gathump gathump. A bit elevated, I think, Miss Schuyler. A bit overstimulated. Whatever shall we do to relax you.
“Are you quite certain you want to hear all this, Miss Schuyler? All this ancient history. Because, to be perfectly honest, I’m finding the present moment decidedly more interesting.”