A Special Relationship

**********

Sergeant Turner was putting his four charges through close combat drills. It was apparent that Michel had done this before and really only needed some practice to get the rust off. Akinele had strength and agility, but he had been a thief, not a brawler. Doris had the instincts of someone who had restrained her share of unruly and uncooperative patients. These three took to Turner's instructions without much problem, but Jane was out of her depth. It was unlikely that she would ever have to use these skills, yet they should be there in reserve.

Turner had sacked the Marquess of Queensberry. In his system, there were no rules. This was not a place for gentlemen or gentlewomen. If an agent was backed into a fight, it was to the death, so eyes, throat, knees, and testicles were primary targets.

Jane gave herself away within five seconds of sparring. A young woman who had really survived living rough out in the crowd would have learned to knee or punch a man in his balls. Jane initially clawed and flailed. Sergeant Turner had no problem controlling her and throwing her to the ground. I watched for a few more minutes before returning to my unending paperwork.

After tea, there was a break before evening instructions. I was walking up the path that led past the barracks to the old house when I turned my head and saw a red dot in the shadows.

"Good evening," she said.

I tipped my cap. "Jane. How are you?"

"Sore. Sergeant Turner can be rather forceful." She stepped out into the light. It was Indian summer here on this island where they had no Indians, and she had shed her tunic so that only a flimsy white jersey covered her breasts. They were high and firm, not too large, not too small. Goldilocks tits with hard nipples just barely dark under the cotton....

She caught me evaluating her qualifications and smiled knowingly.

"Any tips you can give me?"

I hoped she meant about unarmed combat.

"Well.... One basic thing to remember comes way before the hand-to-hand part. If you see someone you wish to avoid before they see you, turn and run. Get the hell out of the area. But if you get caught, don't look like you want to flee. Walk right up to them and ask directions or something...."

She flicked her cigarette away, walked right up to me, put her arms around my neck, pressed those rock-hard nipples into my chest. And kissed me.

"Or something?"

I had to will my hands not to seek out her ass. I could tell, even through the thick britches, that it would be perfect.

"Or something," I said hurriedly. "That might work."

**********

We didn't touch again during the next eleven weeks, though I observed her training with great interest, and she observed me observing. She was not outstanding in any of the topics, but then again she was not bad at any either. She even managed to put Turner on his ass a couple of times with instep pressure and a knee to the balls.

What she did have was intelligence, wit, looks, charm, and a feminine sensuality that she could turn incandescent as needed. These - especially the last - could not be taught.

The class was not the best we had ever had but it was up there. I met with my contacts in Whitehall several times discussing where these graduates might be placed, the last time just a week before they were to be turned out and shipped off to their postings.

I was brooding on this as I drove back to the camp. I was in a foul mood. The Germans were on the march in Russia. The Japanese were firmly in control of southeast Asia. Rumors of Nazi secret weapons flitted about the halls of Parliament.

Against these we sent three-month wonders. Armed with not much more than an inconceivable amount of courage.

I stopped in front of our offices and felt a tingling of trouble. Sergeant Turner, who was nominally in charge in my absence, stood rigid in front of the door. I saw no other faces about. The camp seemed quiet and deserted as I braked the Hillman and stepped out.

I closed the door and looked at Turner, who seemed to be chagrined. I had never seen that look on him.

"Sorry, sir," he said in his Liverpool accent, his vowels floating above the consonants. "They just came and took her."

My instinct was to tell him to stand at ease, but I still wasn't sure if I had rank anymore or even whose service I was under.

"Her?"

"Jane, sir. Only they asked for Lady Anne. Lady Anne Jennings."

I balked. "Lady--? Didn't you warn them off? This is a restricted camp. How did they get past the guards?"

Turner stood even straighter. I bit back my impulse to tell him to stop. It was his way of coping with this mixed-up world he had fallen into.

"One of them was a General."

"Fucking gobshites," I snapped. "They have no business...."

I stopped. "Jane? Lady Anne?"

Turner nodded unhappily. I looked at my watch. The drive back to London would take an hour and more. Longer if I ran into sheep, carts, broken down lorries. The sun was very low, and driving in the dark with slit headlights was slow and dangerous.

I sighed and got back into the Hillman. I had some ass to chew. Gobshites.

**********

As I drove, I abused the Hillman's transmission, grinding it as hard as I was grinding my teeth. Neither gearbox nor molars were coming out of this encounter in glory.

It explained some of her horseshit history. Streets my arse. She was one of the dabblers, the dilettantes, the hobby spies. And she had slipped by me. Wasted my time, my team's time. Taken up valuable resources.

I was going to find the General. General Wilhite. Turner had at least gotten his name. Then I was going to take a big old bite out of him. If I ran into Jane, or Lady Whoosits, along the way, well then, I would get to know what the local aristocracy tastes like.

It wasn't the first time I had rammed up against the dichotomy that underlaid much of the war effort in this country. It must have been a vestige remaining from the Great War, where command was too often given to those who had done nothing but squirt out of some titled vagina. Who your goddamn grandmother had been counted as much as initiative and capability when command over the lives of thousands of young Britons was dispersed.

Every Army had their stars and their fuckups, and the US did have certain last names which got one a boost up the promotional ladder, but the English had codified the system.

There were at least three organizations - and I have to bite my tongue when I honor them by thinking of them in the same frame as the real professionals - which had been started up by individuals or small cabals descended from the landed gentry and therefore under the misimpression that they were ordained by God and King to found and rule over intelligence operations and treat the competent who were actually getting the job done as serfs.

I am not in any way denigrating the Special Operations Executive, or Naval Intelligence, or the RAF Intelligence Branch, or MI6. These are smart, superior entities. But the English have a blind spot when it comes to allowing the aristocracy's mitts anywhere near a gear lever.

I had the rotten feeling that Wilhite was probably Queen Victoria's great grandnephew or some such and to just decided to play around at sabotage. Like coming onto my pitch and sabotaging my work.

The sky was ebony dark when I pulled up to the nondescript building where dwelt the man who was as much my immediate superior as anyone I had yet identified. He wielded the pen which got me funds, cooperation with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, and anything else I needed.

The lights were on in his office and the blackout blinds were drawn. His secretary let me in, greeting me warmly. Her kindly old face belied the fact that since 1938 she had gone about her daily duties with a .380 Webley strapped under her skirt. Just in case.

Boyce was behind his desk shuffling through a stack of typed papers, unlit pipe in mouth like a baby's pacifier. He didn't look up.

"Why didn't you just shoot him?"

I stopped. Boyce looked like a grey government drone, reader of banal missives, signer of ineffectual documents, but the man knew everyone and everything.

"Because my guards are almost totally blind, and one is shy a leg, but they aren't stupid enough to shoot a General."

He finally looked up at me with what I thought might develop into an actual smile given enough care and feeding. "Could have been some wanker who bought a costume from a shop in the West End."

"Mulligan knew him. Served under him in Ypres."

Boyce nodded. "Next time you have my blessing to fire. Just wing him, mind you."

"Yes, sir." I always addressed Boyce as sir. It seemed polite, plus I had no idea if he held rank or not. Or if I held rank or not. So I defaulted to sir. I refrained from saluting him. If I ever met his wife I would address her as ma'am. Based on his tales of domestic life, I might salute her.

"Is he running his own ops? Poaching my game?" It wasn't beyond the realm that the General did have an operational network going and needed, all of a sudden, a good-looking young French speaker. If so, my security was seriously compromised. We didn't advertise our stock. But Boyce shook his head and put those anxieties down.

"No, he's just a dogsbody with flashy braid on his cap."

"Then why? Who is she?"

Boyce removed the pipe from between his teeth and examined the empty bowl, then scraped at its depths with a fingernail.

"The trainee you had on the rolls as Jane Winston is actually Anne Jennings. Lady Anne Jennings, daughter of the formerly current twenty-second Duke of Suffolk."

Ah, the poor street urchin. "I don't give a damn who she is," I said. "We invested eleven weeks in her. My sergeant says she went under duress. I want her back."

He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. That thing was his muse, I swear to the heavens it was.

"You don't read the papers? Her father died Tuesday last. Thus formerly current. She was fetched to the funeral."

I shook my head. "Then why did she not want to go?"

"I have no idea," he said slowly.

**********

The late Duke of Suffolk's family home was Monsith House just north of Salisbury. I pulled out of London at daybreak and arrived at the estate in five hours. The place was a huge stone and brick square with virtually none of the quirky flourishes and additions I had seen on other such places. Monsith looked like the government had constructed it and then abandoned the project. There were neglected gardens in the front. The drive needed regraveling and grading. The lawns were uneven and browned in large spots. The surrounding grounds were equally as needy. It drove home to me what happened to the order of a place when the young and vital were pulled away by war.

An elderly man opened the door before I could raise the knocker. He tottered for a moment, looking me over to see if I was a threat to the house and its occupants - as if he could have done anything about it - then asked me what my business was.

"I need to see Jane Winston."

His face was blank.

"Lady Anne Jennings."

He showed a flicker of reaction, then closed the door in my face.

I hoped that meant to wait, because I was not leaving. In a surprisingly short time, the door reopened. The ancient functionary motioned for me to follow.

The mistress of the house received me in a library. She was seated in front of a fire, looking so calm that I knew she had been expecting me. If not today, then eventually. She did not rise or offer me her hand.

She had Jane's features, more mature. Her hair was still a dark black with no grey. She should not have been a widow.

"Your Grace," I said. "David Voight."

She motioned me to sit in an empty chair opposite her. As I did, my escort brought in a tray. Teapot and cups. As he poured, we regarded one another.

"You have come about Anne."

I nodded.

She gave a quiet sigh and shook her head. "I suppose you are her... what? Commanding officer?" She pointedly surveyed my civilian clothes.

"Something like that."

I saw in her body -- but never in her impassive face -- that she was not used to deflection. It annoyed her. Too bad I had only a huge helping of it to offer. Her last name did not buy access to my secrets.

"You didn't know about her service?" I asked.

"Service? I knew nothing about it, and she has not been so kind as to tell me what she has been up to these last months. As far as I knew...." She took a sip of tea, the implication that she had been played the fool. "As far as I was informed, she was on an extended visit to New Zealand."

Well done, Jane, I thought. Doable and plausible.

The Duchess continued -- or was she something else now that the titular head was deceased and the title passed to the eldest son? Dowager Duchess? It was the kind of patrician arcana I hated. "It was her father, God rest him, who gave her license to participate in your little troop."

"With all respect, ma'am, your daughter is training to fill a role that is vital to the war effort."

"That's as may be," she said, "But I am rescinding her permission. She is needed here."

I glanced about the room in reflexive response to her statement, and she noticed. I could feel her thoughts. Here was a hundred years of history and family continuity and responsibility to the bloodline. The temporary upsets of the world beyond did not compare.

But needed here? What, to dust these shelves of long unread books?

"Anne has two suitors. One is a Captain in the Royan Navy, commanding a ship currently in the Med. The other has just been made a Colonel in the Coldstream Guards. He is in Africa. As time permits, they will come on leave and press their case. She will be married to one or the other by next Christmas."

She paused. "They are both peers."

I nodded. What the hell else would they be, to woo the daughter of a Duke? And I would lay frightening odds, given the state of Monsith House and its grounds, that the two potential grooms came from families which had managed to retain their wealth.

Come down to it, Jane was just another item for sale in the aristocracy shop. A whore to be bought rather than rented. A mare to be bred for heirs. I knew that she knew. Had it been a desire to be somebody rather than something that had pushed her to volunteer for duty with a high mortality rate?

The Duchess and I exchanged niceties of no substance for a while as she tried tangentially to retrieve information from me. As much as she put up a front of not caring, she really did want to know where Jane had been instead of New Zealand and what training I thought so important. I gave nothing away.

I heard the front door open and a woman called out. It was so obviously Jane that I had a moment where some connection clicked deep in my brain. How long had I known this person that the tone of her voice had become so familiar? It made me oddly uneasy.

"Mother, whose car is in the--"

She stopped suddenly, one step into the room. She showed shock, then a bit of fear, then she rushed to me. I stood and embraced her.

She whispered into my ear, so softly that no other person in the room heard her.

"Thank you."

The other person in the room stood just inside the doorway for a moment, then strode into the room like he was the Master of the House. He extended his hand as Jane let go of me.

"James Griffiths-White," he said. "So glad to meet you at last. Anne has been quite passionate in her praise of you."

I shook his hand and managed to give Jane a glance that conveyed my displeasure that she had discussed me at all with her friend.

"Anyway, old chap, if you ever need another willing body, give me a shout. It all sounds quite exciting."

This time I gave her a full glare of disapproval. She looked away, her milky white cheeks coloring.

James the eager volunteer was a pudgy man with a round face and thinning blonde hair. I pondered the dangers of inbreeding as I looked him over. He struck me as someone who had never had to break a sweat. The last willing body I would have chosen.

Her Grace's keen social instincts kicked in. Polite hospitality or perhaps the sense in the air that I was two sentences away from punching James in the head. She rose regally and informed us that dinner would be served directly.

"We shall not dress for dinner tonight," she intoned. "James, would you do me the honor of picking a bottle or two? Something worthy of the event?"

He bowed, and they left the library together.

"Event?" I said.

Jane's eyes were still on the empty doorway. "His engagement."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Not to me, David." I felt that... vertigo of unwarranted familiarity was the closest way I could describe it. She knew what I was thinking and asking from a simple gesture.

But her tone said that she would not have been upset if it had been to her.

She looked at me, and I knew that she felt our unspoken channel of communication.

"He's fourteenth in line for the throne, David. I.... She's a princess. Of the Netherlands."

A Princess in exile still beat the daughter of an English Duke. Jane, as Lady Anne Jennings, could not compete with actual royalty.

In London, I had been casual pint-downing buddies with a Hungarian who claimed to be - and actually was - the Prince of Szabolcs. It did not matter that his little kingdom was a flyspeck of ignored real estate and that his father, the King, was in a German prison. It didn't even matter that he himself was just an average-looking fellow with barely enough funds in pocket to buy his own pints, let alone stand anyone else. He claimed, and I did witness enough of these to attest to their truth, that when an Englishwoman found out that he was royalty, their knickers were doomed to drowning.

"It's a goddamned aphrodisiac," he would say. "These English girls. Getting their fanny filled by a royal Johnson is their dream come true."

I put my hand on Jane's shoulder and turned her gently to face me. "When the funeral is over?"

She looked down and shook her head. "I can't come back."

"Say no more," I said, and gave my arm to lead her to the dining room. Our organization required no enlistment, no signature, no promises. One cannot have agents who are in place with anything less than total dedication. If Anne chose not to be Jane, there was no way I could or would convince her to return.

At dinner, Her Grace drew manners with the straightest of edges, careful to include all in the conversation and give equal attention to each of her guests. She still managed somehow to defer to James as first among equals.

Anne engaged me as a guest and a former employer. Her eyes went to James, however, with a longing she just could not hide. No matter how good a liar I had seen her to be, it was clear they were old and very, very good friends.

Was Jane spooning her cream of potato soup dreaming of fucking the man fourteenth in line to be the Royal Johnson? How far down the queue did the stimulant effect stretch?

When the meal was done, I was spent. It had been a long day physically and mentally. I was foggy from fatigue and had not done my brain any good by participating in numerous toasts to James and his new bride and the longevity of England and to the good people of the Netherlands, etc.

Overnight accommodation was offered and accepted. I was in no shape to drive on dark roads with blackout headlights.

I made my excuses, and the Duchess bade me good night. She directed the old servant to show me to my room, which he did after I retrieved my bag from the Hillman.

**********

An assassin with any capability would not hold a candle in front of their eyes when entering a dark room, so I was not especially worried when the door cracked open. The Colt in my lap gave me another reason to feel secure.

She came in and held the flame toward my chair until I was illuminated to her satisfaction. I saw her eyes note my weapon. She smiled and padded to the bed, shed her robe, and slipped clothed only in God's threads under the covers. Under my covers.