Chapter 7 #2
“Just a moment. You raided my home, roughly handled my wife and dragged her away.” His voice rose in ferocity with each statement. “Held her captive for four days, keeping her locked up in, God only knows, what sort of conditions.”
“The guardroom, a cell in the basement of the Ship Street Barracks, and then a much more adequate guest bedroom here at the Castle,” I supplied.
Sidney persisted without missing a beat.
“And then tortured her, trying to force her to betray her oaths to your own country! You know all of this was unwarranted and unjust. You’ve admitted it.
And yet you expect her to sit here and answer your questions before you’ll then release her?
Have you lost your minds?!” I didn’t think I’d ever seen my husband in such a fury and it was glorious.
“Mr. Kent,” Anderson attempted to placate him. “I understand your frustration …”
“No, you don’t,” he told him flatly, pushing to his feet. “I am taking my wife home.”
“Mr. Kent, we really must insist.”
He reached for my hand to draw me up while glaring at Anderson. “Would you stand for your wife being treated in such a manner?” He turned to Sturgis. “Would you?”
But I was watching Anderson, whose expression had chilled. He had recently lost his wife, and I’d suspected it was more the reason for his dour humorlessness than it being part of his general personality.
“My wife was not an intelligence operative,” he replied tersely. He glared at Sidney down his long beak-like nose. “And she did not possess potentially sensitive information about the republican dissidents we are attempting to apprehend.”
Sidney had paused, realizing he’d misstepped.
“Now, I understand your frustration, but we cannot allow either of you to leave until we know what you know.”
These words chilled me, for they were exactly the outcome I’d feared. However, Sidney was not cowed.
“You’d really risk such a scandal?”
Anderson inhaled a long breath, tilting his head back while still keeping his gaze locked with Sidney’s. “Let’s not find out.”
My husband turned to me, asking my opinion. I could see it in his eyes that he would continue to attempt to defy them if I wished. That he would risk being detained, too. But that would be playing directly into Ardmore’s hands.
“I-I need to sit,” I told him in a wobbly voice, both because I genuinely felt woozy and because I needed to bargain for time. I pressed a hand to my abdomen, feeling a twinge of pain as Sidney helped me sit. He hovered near me as I struggled to breathe.
“Here,” I heard Sturgis say, and then blinked open my eyes to see Sidney holding a glass of water out to me. My hand shook slightly as I took it from him and drank. He lifted a hand to my forehead, brushing a strand of my auburn bobbed hair aside as his anxious eyes searched mine for reassurance.
“I’m all right now,” I assured him, though I wasn’t. Not entirely.
Beyond him, I could see O’s mouth pursed skeptically.
Sidney scoured my features a moment longer before turning to Anderson. “Before we proceed, I’d like to know what sort of story the government is going to concoct to explain my wife’s detainment and release.” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “I mean, I assume it’s not going to be the truth.”
Anderson shared glances with his colleagues.
“Well, it can’t be denied she was outside Mountjoy Jail,” O said as he removed a handkerchief from his pocket and began to polish his eye monocle. “She was recognized moving through the crowd and … interacting with the soldiers.”
This was an interesting choice of verb, for Sidney and I had both been yelling at them, trying to make them see reason.
Only when I’d realized that a commotion had broken out behind us—started, no doubt, by men employed by Ardmore—and that the troops were readying to deploy the phosgene canisters disguised as tear gas to quell any unrest, had I taken the extreme measure of darting through the line of soldiers in order to appeal to their commanding officer.
When even that had not worked, and I was in the process of being detained, I’d had no choice but to lash out and dart up onto the lorry bed to scrape away some of the paint masking the white star symbol and the letters “pho.” Only then, had the officer believed me and ordered the canisters quarantined.
O replaced his monocle. “Of course, the public cannot know that our troops were nearly duped into deploying a poisonous gas on the crowd of people holding vigil before an IRA operative’s execution.”
“Of course,” Sidney replied, not entirely able to mask his cynicism.
O ignored him. “So, Mrs. Kent, being a tenderhearted female, was merely overcome by the sight of all the mourners and the realization that such a bright young man of promise had allowed himself to be so led astray that he now must face the direst of consequences. So overcome was she that she momentarily lost her sense of reason and tried to plead with the soldiers, leading to the mistaken belief that she was attempting to impede them and was involved with the rebels.”
There was silence for several moments following O’s recitation of this ridiculous story. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d ever heard anything more foolish and melodramatic.
“You seriously intend to blame the incident and subsequent arrest on my being hysterical?” I retorted in disbelief, struggling to keep my voice even so I wouldn’t be accused of it now. “No,” I stated flatly. “Absolutely not.”
O cast me a look which communicated I was being unreasonable.
“Mrs. Kent, need I remind you that you are on thin ice. You were seen in the company of known enemy combatants, and it has been proven you deliberately withheld information regarding these rebels. You are in no state to dictate terms to us.”
I had no illusions about how thin the ice was, or that O and his colleagues weren’t still looking for any excuse to discredit and detain me.
But this was no longer the war, and I had played dumb for long enough.
It was time I exploited every bit of that intelligence I’d gathered on friend and foe alike.
“Colonel Winter,” I began after taking a long drink of water and setting the glass on the table beside the sofa.
“Need I remind you that I saved this administration! Had those phosgene cylinders been deployed on that crowd of civilians, hundreds, perhaps thousands, would have died, and it would have irreparably tarnished our reputation across the world. Forget these debates over reprisals and the government’s policy of frightfulness damaging our standing.
The murder of innocent men, women, and children via poisonous gas—whether it was believed to be in error or not—would destroy our credibility and any moral high ground we might ever have been able to possess. ”
O opened his mouth to protest, but I wouldn’t let him.
“Your intelligence officers were aware of the missing phosgene cylinders. Which means, you were aware of them. Or don’t your officers report what they know to you?
” I arched my eyebrows to punctuate my point.
“Sidney even joined them in making several raids based on tips your officers received regarding the location of the missing phosgene. And when Sidney and I finally located it, we turned first to those officers—Captain Bennett and Lieutenant Ames—to ask for their assistance in confiscating it. They were perfectly aware of the urgency of the matter, and their dawdling delayed the unit of Auxiliaries already at the ready from performing the raid in a timely manner. When we arrived too late, discovering the cylinders had been moved, not only did they do nothing to ascertain where they might have been taken, they actually accused us of wasting their time and resources.”
“Is that when you turned to the rebels?” Anderson asked.
I was not deluded for one moment by his nonchalant demeanor. “We didn’t turn to the rebels. We turned to a friend.” This was perhaps splitting hairs, but it was also the truth.