“Hammer?” Rose inquired.
The man’s gasps became harsher, and Rose struggled to hear his next words. They sounded like a woman’s name. Tamsin? Tammy? With a last name of ... Morris? Norris?
“Tamsin Morris?” Rose asked, but once again the man did not seem to register her question. His last reserves appeared to be channeled into guiding Rose’s hand to his neck. His fingers trembled as he pressed her palm against something cool and metal. A key?
“Unlocks. Notes. Give ...” The man’s voice stuttered, and he made a visible effort to swallow, the air seeming to jangle inside his chest, leaking from places where it shouldn’t be escaping. “Him.”
“This is the key to where you’ve locked up your records on the spies?” Rose spoke rapidly, trying to make sure she understood the instruction before it was too late. “And you want me to give him the key?”
“Aye.” Again, that tease of a brogue.
“Who?” she asked urgently.
The man’s fingers began to loosen around hers, but she kept her hand pressed against the key, sensing it would give him comfort.
“Who?” she repeated, desperate now.
His exhale shook his body, his next words sounding like the rustle of wind through dry leaves.
“Tell. Him. I’m. Sorry.”
Then he was gone like so many others before. And she was left with the emptiness and the hopelessness of another soul destroyed before their time. But his words ... they haunted Rose.
“Rose, dear heart, Rose?”
She blinked at the sound of Myrtle’s voice, quiet and concerned.
With a jolt, the present returned, like a painted stage backdrop had been unfurled. Gasping a bit, Rose swiveled her head, finding herselfin a secluded corner of the veranda. The rest of the partygoers clung to the railing, their wonder-filled faces lifted toward the fireworks display.
“Do you need help over there?” Mrs.Phillips asked in a booming voice. “I can get Dr.Stevens. He’s here with his wife.”
“No, we’re fine.” Myrtle waved cheerily to the woman. “It was just too much air for Rose out by the balustrade.”
“Of course.” Mrs.Phillips nodded, sending her white cartoonish mobcap bobbing. “Poor lamb.”
Rose—whose heart was still knocking like an engine with a misaligned distributor—twisted her face at the epithet. But she did not protest. If she did, Mrs.Phillips might see past Myrtle’s fib. The woman had a keen eye and an even keener tongue for gossip. Rose did not need it blabbed about that she was subject to feminine attacks of nerves—even if shehadbeen jumpy ever since her return.
Thankfully, the fireworks display distracted the kindhearted but nosy busybody. As soon as Mrs.Phillips’s back was turned, Rose sank against the coquina concrete walls of her parents’ Spanish Revival mansion. The coolness of the facade sank into her, and her legs stopped tingling. Taking another breath to calm her pumping blood, Rose realized she was clutching the key around her neck—Viscount Barbury’s key.
She’d had to call upon her famous father’s connections to learn the identity of the man who’d died that night in her ambulance. He’d been a lieutenant in the British Army and the heir apparent to an earldom. No one could, or at leastwould, explain why he had been in No Man’s Land in a French rather than British sector.
Rose had just learned his name when she’d fallen ill herself. She still had no idea who the mysterious “he” was, what “hammer” meant, how Tamsin Morris was connected, or whether the wounded noble had been delusional.
But now the war itself was over and, with it, the urgency to complete Viscount Barbury’s mission. Rose had, it appeared, broken her second promise to him after all.
Releasing Barbury’s key, Rose tried to regulate her breath. This was not the first time that she’d found herself palpably reliving the shelling, and she very much feared it would not be the last.
“Thank you,” she murmured to Myrtle, knowing that her friend had dragged her into the shadows to protect her from wagging tongues. Myrtle was one of the few who knew about Rose’s particular ailment. Some of her parents’ staff had witnessed her retreat into the past, of course. Rose was certain they had not told her mother. If they had, Verity Van Etten would have fluttered into Rose’s sickroom, all dramatic tears and protestations of how her own nerves could not handle her only child’s illness. Everyone but Mother needed to be the strong one, the healthy one, the steady one.
Rose supposed the servants would have confided in her father. He abided no secret keeping from his employees. Rose had also noted that the number of nurses attending her had multiplied, and more specialists had arrived with increasingly impressive degrees. Yet her father himself had not visited her more than a handful of times. There were charities to oversee, hotels to run, and investments to monitor.
But Myrtle had been there, taking a sabbatical from her position as a professor of archaeology to push and prod Rose into fighting back against the illness racking her body. Her old college chum had also helped Rose break through those moments when the war seemed to drag her back to the pitted roadways of the Western Front.
“I need to take the Stutz out,” Rose rasped. Fast driving used to be her favorite escape. Before the war, she’d enjoyed whiskey, cigarettes, and handsome men, but she’dlovedracing. Even when everything else had felt meaningless in her gilded life, she could always feel a spark of somethingmoreas she sped along, the wind buffeting her.
Myrtle peered at her in concern. “Are you certain that is a good idea tonight?”
Rose allowed very few people to question her readiness to take the wheel, but luckily for Myrtle’s sake, she was one of them. Instead of awithering retort, Rose just rolled her shoulders and opened and closed her hands to chase away the last of the tingling remnants of sensation.
