“In 1907?” I asked, incredulous. “The war was seven years away.”
“In certain circles of government, Jo, the war was a long time coming. For some of them, the question wasn’t whether we’d have a war, but when. To this day, Mabry hasn’t told me exactly what was going on at the Ministry during those months, but I now believe they were using the harbor as part of a program to test gunboats in the open sea. The Kaiser was already of interest to our government, you see, as was his armament campaign, but Germany was not yet a dangerous concern. Yet Mabry was filing me away for future use, which is what he does.”
“You were fifteen.”
“I was fifteen, of good family, fluent in German, painfully observant, and keen. Men like Mabry rise to be colonels by using whoever they find, however and whenever they can use them. All he did that day was tell me to write him if I wanted work when I finished my education, and he’d find me a position. Off I went, an orphan boy very proud of myself, thinking I’d assured my own future.”
I dropped my arms from my knees and straightened my legs out on the bed, stretching them. “And had you?”
His eyes followed my legs, his gaze resting on them for a long moment. I went still. The hem of my dress covered my knees, but still he stared at my calves, my stockinged feet.
“Alex,” I said.
He did not raise his gaze. “You are quite certain about your earlier resolution?”
“Stop it,” I said. “You haven’t told me anything.”
Slowly, his eyes came up to mine. He hesitated for a long moment, then said, “You’re going to hate me.”
I held his gaze. “Am I?”
He let out a slow breath. “I wrote Mabry during my last year at Oxford. There were rumblings of war by then. He hadn’t forgotten. He said he had work for me.”
Oxford—before I met him, then. “What work?”
“Germany was building warships, submarines. Tensions were rising. There was speculation in intelligence circles that a possible invasion was being planned.”
“An invasion—Germany invading England?”
“Yes. It was believed that the Germans were investigating where an invasion might land. North? South? What route would it take? We suspected they had agents here, pretending to be tourists and businessmen, sending back maps and drawings. We needed to track them and intercept their messages to get an accurate idea of the German network. My job was to locate German contacts in England and report on them—names, addresses, occupations, descriptions. It all went into the files. I collected information, and I passed it on. It paid very well.”
“And these men you—reported on. Were they arrested?”
“Not at all. Most of them weren’t agents, so the information gathered dust. A few of them, however, had agreed to send communications back to Germany, in much the same way I had agreed to inform my own government. Those fellows had their letters intercepted, and the local police kept tabs on their movements. An active agent, you see, can lead you to even more active agents, whereas an agent under arrest or executed can lead you to no one. That is the game.” Alex uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. His hair gleamed in the lamplight. “As for me, when I had information I passed it to Colonel Mabry’s London representative. A solicitor near Gray’s Inn.”
Ice shot up my spine. I sat straighter on the bed. “You can’t mean it,” I said. “Casparov?”
“He was acting as an intermediary, yes. He’d take my information and send it along the proper channels.”
My mind spun. Proper channels. “Those letters we typed. All those letters—stacks of them.”
“Some of them were legitimate,” Alex said softly. “Casparov was actually practicing law. But others were most likely code.”
I put a hand to my forehead. Helen and me, typing all those snowdrifts of shorthand. Your business is the typing only, and the looking respectable. Day after day in that tiny office. And Alex, walking in from the wet cold, and Casparov telling him, My thanks.
“Oh, God,” I said. “That was why you were there. I typed all those letters with no clue they were code. I never had any idea, and I worked for him for months. You must have thought me so incredibly stupid.”
“Stupid?” He sounded surprised and a little angry. “You’re missing the point.”
“The point?” I dropped my hand and looked at him. “The point is that you sat across from me at the dinner table that night and told me absolutely nothing about yourself.”
“I told you everything that mattered,” Alex shot back. “What I was doing didn’t matter anymore, because I quit.”
“You what?”
“I resigned when I met you,” he said. “I did it the next morning, after we’d been together. You weren’t stupid, for God’s sake; you were Jo. I knew what I wanted from the first minute I saw you, and it wasn’t ferreting out Mabry’s useless Germans. It was you.”