“Aster,” Alexander said. “He’d hear about it before long.”
Saffron finished his thought. “And sack me for working in another lab.”
The room fell silent. She didn’t want to dance along to Nick’s tune and jump at the chance to go to the lab, but it did make sense for her to go. She knew lab work, and her name would give her clout that an assumed identity wouldn’t have. And, truth be told, she wanted to see what she could learn about her father and what he might have done there.
She blew out a heavy breath. “Would your … office be willing to explain to Aster what I was doing in the lab when it is all over?”
Nick considered it. “If and when Petrov’s and Wells’s deaths are adequately dealt with, and if you provided assistance, I think that would be possible.”
“Aster would have done the government a favor,” Saffron said, “by allowing me to work in the lab temporarily.”
“We could phrase it that way.”
A slight shiver went through her at the way he said it, with the cool authority of the mysterious “we.”
“And it would only be for a few weeks, at the most, wouldn’t it?” Nick nodded. “Then I think it’s a good idea.”
A glance at Alexander told her that he didnotthink it was a good idea, but he said nothing.
“I’ll just make a telephone call, then.” Nick rose from his seat and left the room.
Saffron stood and began to collect the champagne glasses. Alexander silently assisted.
Elizabeth was in the kitchen, elbows-deep in soapy water. From the aggressive way she washed the dishes, Saffron guessed that she didnot agree with Nick’s positive assessment of the evening. She left her to her scrubbing.
Nick hung up the telephone when she emerged from the kitchen. “Looks like we’re all set. I’ll let you know the plan tomorrow, Saffron.”
He left. Alexander departed soon after with a kiss and an enigmatic smile, and Saffron was left to wonder if she’d made a mistake in offering to go to the lab, while at once confident that she’d had no other choice.
CHAPTER24
Though the day was as bright and cheerful as a November morning in central England could be, Saffron was uneasy exiting the railway station in Harpenden. There was a fair amount of traffic on the street and the pavement, but it eddied away as she walked from the town’s center. Nick had given her directions to the laboratory, and Milton Road was just across the train tracks, in the same direction as Jeffery Wells’s house.
The train ride had given her plenty of time to second-guess herself and to ruminate on the part of the evening she’d willfully forgotten about in the excitement over news of Wells’s cause of death and the plan to infiltrate the lab. The way the unexpected visit from her grandfather had ended was awful. He’d told her to choose, and she’d chosen her life in London. She didn’t know where that left her with him or the rest of her family.
Her cousin, John, and his little family would always accept her. The brief time she’d spent with them in France, where they lived, had affirmed that. John was a barrister, stubbornly refusing to return to England after the war despite the fact that Lord Easting thought he ought to be at Ellington, learning all he needed to know about being the heir to the viscounty. John disagreed, uninterested in forcing his French wife to abandon life in their charming town. Saffron couldn’t relate more, though she doubted their grandfather would go all the way to France to harass John about returning home.
Her mother, too, would never abandon her, though Saffron didn’t know what it meant for the future of their relationship if Saffron wasn’t permitted to go to Ellington. Her mother did not leave the house, and she wasn’t sure the inducement of seeing her daughter would be enough to enable her to overcome her fear of the outside world.
As much as her grandparents frustrated her, she loved them. They were terse and distant but loving in their own overbearing way. They had provided for her and permitted her to go to university, even if they’d preferred she hadn’t. She didn’t want them to disown her, though she was afraid that might have already happened.
It took Saffron only a few minutes to walk from the train station to Milton Road, but another five to ascertain she was in the right place, lost in thought as she was. The street was residential, and the homes were more or less the same, two- and three-story red brick buildings with white trim and trees and gardens. They were spread out enough to have privacy but not so far apart that the homes might have been considered estates. Everything one might expect in a nice suburban neighborhood—but nothing like one might expect of a government laboratory.
It wasn’t until she noticed the small brass plaque on one of the houses that she realized she’d already walked past the building twice. She passed through the gate into the low-walled garden and approached the door, next to which the plaque read, “Harpenden Phytopathological Service, No. 28 Milton Street.”
She let out a nervous breath and rang the bell.
A young man with an eyepatch over his left eye opened the door. Scars peppered the left side of his face and over where an ear used to be. “Yes?”
Saffron gave him a perfunctory smile that he did not return. “I’m Saffron Everleigh, and I have an appointment with Dr. Calderbrook.”
He stepped back so she could enter.
The entryway was shabbily gentile, with an unpolished wood floor covered in rugs of decent quality and questionable cleanliness. The pattern of the wallpaper was barely decipherable beneath rowafter row of scientific art: illustrations, paintings, and photographs of plants, birds, insects, and fungi. An empty sitting room with mismatched furniture and an empty hearth despite the chill outside was to her right, and a library packed with books and journals stood to the left.
They went up squeaking stairs lined with more framed prints and paintings. A window provided a view of the bare front garden, contrasting with the flourishing ferns on the sill and ivy dripping from a pedestal in the corner.
At the top of the stairs was a row of closed doors, and the young man tapped on the first.
