CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Sabrina
Gladstone Manor (Ty Gladstone)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
Lady Judith Rowe began leaking information seven minutes after the second cup of tea. Sabrina had expected fifteen. She considered it one of the nicer surprises of the week.
Gladstone’s morning room was doing all the work for her.
Rain at the windows. The room warmed by the lamp and a small coal fire.
Good cake. Sympathy arranged at the correct angle.
Judith had arrived, saying she had “the most wretched head” from Tuesday’s conversation, which in women of her sort often meant conscience had finally overcome amusement and found both distasteful.
Sabrina poured the tea herself. Rooms like this had always been easiest. Silver, lamp light, good china, men vain enough to think wit was intimacy.
She could rule such rooms half asleep. The trick, perfected over the years, was to make herself indispensable without ever becoming legible.
Men liked her because she laughed correctly and gave nothing away.
Women liked her because she saw more than she said.
Very few people, in any room, knew how lonely such expertise could become.
Performance was not company. Elegance was not freedom.
She had made an art of survival so polished that most people mistook it for ease.
“My dear,” she said, “That is the trouble with letting men discuss the nation indoors. Surrounded by silver and lamp light, they begin to think even foolishness has breeding.”
Judith laughed despite the evident desire not to.
“That is vicious.”
“It is accurate.”
Judith accepted the cup.
Sabrina waited.
Patience was the better instrument with women like Judith. Push too hard, and they stiffened into propriety. Give them just enough room to feel clever and morally burdened, and they opened like flowers in the heat.
Rooms were easy. Rooms asked only for style, timing, and nerve. It was what came after rooms that proved lonely, the return home with all one’s masks polished and no one waiting who had earned the right to see the face beneath them. At last, Judith said, “I did not care for Mr. Greene.”
There he was.
Sabrina stirred her own tea once and looked mildly interested. “No.”
“Too eager. Too pleased with severity.” Judith lowered her voice. “And Matthias, charming as he is, seems to have a way of making the most appalling things sound like administrative necessity.”
Sabrina made a soft sound of agreement and let the silence get to work.
Judith leaned in.
“Hart says Greene has been helping organize local patriotic committees. Funding, speakers, lists of men who might be relied upon if the country enters a period of unrest.”
Sabrina kept her hand steady on the porcelain handle.
“Lists?” Sabrina cocked her head to the side, the picture of pure innocence.
“Yes.”
“Of whom?”
Judith hesitated for only a second.
“Editors. Solicitors. Some military men. Young Conservatives with more zeal than judgment. Hart thinks it all frightfully useful. He says Mosley’s people have a better understanding of national morale than the parties do.”
Sabrina smiled very faintly.
“Hart has always had an unfortunate attraction to divisive nonsense.”
Judith laughed, then sobered again.
“The awful thing is that one can see how it seduces people. Everything feels so uncertain. Germany. Czechoslovakia. Munich. The government. One begins to understand why some men long to be told what to think by someone with a strong jaw.”
Sabrina set down her cup.
“And some men,” she said, “long to tell everyone else.”
Judith met her eyes and understood, perhaps for the first time, that they were no longer discussing social irritation.
“Hart also said,” Judith said, “that Voss may have an opportunity to introduce Greene to someone at the Courier. Something about a series of patriotic essays. Anonymous, perhaps. To prepare public feeling.”
Sabrina smiled then, but Judith, to her credit, did not mistake the expression for friendliness.
“Thank you,” Sabrina said.
Judith stared. “Oh, dear.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to do something alarming.”
“Possibly.”
“Sabrina.”
“My dear, a fascist in decent tailoring is still a fascist.”
Judith shut her eyes. “I knew you would say something awful and correct.”
“That has always been the risk of knowing me.”
By the time Judith left, Sabrina had Hart’s careless admiration for Greene, the shape of the proposed press campaign, and the names of two men who handled the committee subscriptions. It was more than enough to make the afternoon useful.
She sent a note to Archie at once. Another to Duncan. A third to Ceci, who would be in the library and likely happier there than almost anywhere else in Christendom. Then she went to change.
If men wished to drag Britain toward authoritarian ruin through luncheon and opinion pieces, she thought, they could at least have the courtesy to face a well-dressed woman while doing it. That evening, she arrived at Hawarden with the notes in her bag and found the library door half open.
Voices inside.
Warm tones.
She paused only a second before entering, partly because she was not a voyeur and mostly because she disliked being excluded from developments she had every intention of shaping. The scene that met her was, in its own way, gratifying.
Archie stood at the table, one hip against the edge, reading over a copied page in Ceci’s hand.
Duncan was behind her chair, leaning over her shoulder as he pointed to a line in Vale’s correspondence.
Ceci looked up at him when he spoke. Archie looked at both of them with an expression far too fond to be mistaken.
And under the whole thing ran a current of awareness so alive Sabrina could have warmed her hands at it.
At last, she thought. Adults. She shut the door with more force than necessary. All three of them looked up.
“You took your time,” Archie said. Sabrina removed her gloves. “Unlike some people, I have been at work.”
She laid Judith’s information on the table.
The atmosphere changed immediately.
Ceci reached first. Duncan read fastest. Archie swore most eloquently. By the time Sabrina had repeated Judith’s account in full, the pleasant warmth had gone from the room, replaced by that harder thing she preferred in crises, clear purpose.
“They are building public sympathy in advance,” Ceci said. “So, when war comes, the papers are already primed to print discipline and emergency and national authority as though democracy itself were the luxury.”
Duncan nodded. “And Greene’s lists mean they’ve moved beyond sentiment.”
“Naturally,” Sabrina said. “One cannot seduce a government on charm alone. Though men do so hate learning that.”
Archie looked up from the names.
“We have two committee treasurers, one editor, and Hart serving as the sort of idiot bridge without whom these men would all have to meet in uglier rooms.”
Sabrina took the seat nearest to the fire.
“And?”
Duncan looked at her.
“And,” he said, “if we can prove Greene is placing copy or money through Voss, Hart’s respectability becomes a liability rather than an asset.”
Ceci had already reached for fresh paper.
“I can map the chain,” she said. “Committees first, to make it respectable. Essays in the Courier, to give it reach. Subscriptions and donors, to show who is feeding it.” She looked down at the papers. “They are dressing BUF politics as patriotic concern.”
Archie smiled at her over the table, all warmth and admiration.
“Well. That is appallingly useful of you.”
Sabrina looked between the three of them. Something in the room had steadied. Desire had not vanished. She doubted it would vanish now. It had only been forced into alignment with purpose, which in her experience made people more dangerous in the best possible way.
Good.
She preferred her allies lit from within.