He stood tall and straight beside me, his hat in his hand. “I would very much like to know,” he said, “how much Alex has told you.”
“Is that why you came here today and performed this silly subterfuge?” I strolled to the next wall of paintings. My anger was steady, like a small jet of water leaking from a massive dam. “To ask me that?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then why?” I turned to face him, though even as I did it I knew that to ask him anything was futile. He would tell me only what he wanted me to hear, for reasons I would never know. “Why come at all, even at first, to meet me? Why sit with Mrs. Forsyth, pretending to be interested in her paintings and observing me? Why agree to meet me and go through the entire fiction of my husband’s War Office file? Why do any of it?”
Colonel Mabry turned away from me and strolled slowly along the gallery wall. “Very well,” he said. “I came because I wanted to see you for myself, Mrs. Manders. I wanted to see what kind of woman you are. In short, I was curious.”
“About me?” I followed him, my clicking heels echoing on the empty tile floor. “That’s ridiculous. You already knew everything there is to know about me—and anything you didn’t know, you had the power to find out. You knew I believed him dead. You knew where I lived. You knew I was working as Mrs. Forsyth’s paid companion.” He stopped walking and stood again, looking at the paintings, and I wanted to shake him. “Alex came home to finish your assignment. I don’t know what that has to do with me.”
He looked at me for the first time, the expression in his eyes almost recognizable as surprise. “You don’t think he came home for you?”
“I think he came home for several reasons, only some of which had to do with me.”
He regarded me for another long moment, then looked back at the paintings with an audible sigh. “Mrs. Manders,” he said, his voice calm, businesslike. “Perhaps I should explain something to you. You have been, quite honestly, the bane of my existence since 1914.”
I stared at him, openmouthed. “I beg your pardon?”
“If I know Alex at all,” Colonel Mabry said, “he’s told you everything, even though he isn’t supposed to. So I’m going to assume that it won’t shock you when I say I have dealt with a great many undercover agents in my career, Mrs. Manders. What you likely don’t understand is that most of them are incompetent.”
“I’m not following.”
He sighed again in disappointment. “They are clumsy, to be frank. They don’t go where they’re told to go. They ignore pertinent details and give us irrelevant information. They leave their suitcases on the train and lose vital documents. They write things down in letters to their sweethearts. They ask for raises. They drink too much and begin to brag. They leak things to the enemy. They disappear.” He shook his head. “It is most difficult to recruit anyone remotely trustworthy. I waste a great deal of time. But not with your husband, Mrs. Manders. Despite his failure here in 1917, Alex is the best recruit I’ve ever had.” He glanced at me again. “Do you understand? I deal with incompetence every day, but Alex worked for me for years with only a single unfinished mission. He remembers every instruction by rote in his brain. He solves problems. His instincts are unmatched. He blames himself for not finding the traitor, but your husband lived with the enemy, side by side, for three years without a single slip. Do you begin to see how extraordinary that is?”
I was beginning to. “And now he’s resigned, and you blame me for it.”
“I blame you because you are the reason. He has been kicking at his traces because he’s been miserable. He came to me in 1914 and quit because he wanted to marry you. We were on the verge of war, but still he walked away. Then he enlisted in the RAF—a guarantee he’d end up as butcher’s meat—instead of working for me, because he wanted to impress you.”
“He did not want to impress me,” I argued.
“Oh, yes, he did. He wanted to serve honorably, he said. He managed to survive for two years before I convinced him to save his own life and get out.”
“You could have saved him!” I was heated now, all pretense at politeness gone. My voice rang off the high walls of the gallery. “He tried to come back to England to be an instructor, but you stopped it!”
“Because it isn’t enough to survive the war,” Mabry explained. The flush high on his aristocratic cheekbones was his only display of emotion. “You have to win it. I couldn’t let my best operative train more men for certain death while the enemy won. That was unacceptable to my superiors, and it was unacceptable to me.”
“Fine,” I said. “You got your way. He worked for you. But the war has been over for three years. We did win. Let him come home. There is nothing left for him to do.”