She sighed heavily and sat down. She scooted her chair behind her desk. She hovered the pen over a blank piece of parchment.
“Where do you wish to go?” She looked up with faux professional interest.
“Iceland,” he said.
Her professionalism and detachment dissolved. Isobel blinked. She squeezed the pen. A single drop of ink dripped to the sheet.
“I beg your pardon?” she said to the drop.
“Iceland?” he repeated. “Nordic island? Recently ceded to Denmark? Covered with volcanoes and, one would assume, ice?”
Isobel felt the blood drain from her face in the same moment her cheeks caught fire.
“Why?” she rasped.
“I’ve business on the island,” he said simply.
“And your business is . . . shepherding?” she asked, her voice strange and high and breathy. “Goat shepherding? The only work to be had in Iceland at the moment is goat farming and agronomy.”
“No,” he said carefully, “I’m on assignment for the Foreign Office. As I’ve said.”
She closed her eyes.Thisagain. “And why hasn’t theForeign Officebooked this Foreign Office–related travel on your behalf? Surely if the Crown dispatches you to... foreign shores, they manage the details of the journey.”
“My officecouldarrange it,” he said, “but it would take time I do not have, and the nature of the mission is particularly delicate. More secret than most. I’ve come to you because myfile—that is, the background information on this mission—pointed me in the direction of a woman called Isobel Tinker in a travel agency in Lumley Street. It’s been suggested to me that you might know a devil of a lot about Iceland, more than anyone on the travel desk at the Foreign Office. And so here I am.”
“You’re joking,” she said, dropping the pen. She’d never had a conversation that sounded so patently false but also so terrifyingly possible.
If hewassome sort of governmental agent, and hedidhave access to information (“files”?) on private citizens, was it possible his officeknewsomething? Abouther? Isobel Tinker? After years of being so very good and so very stationary and so very... so very—
Isobel closed her eyes. Was it possible that her uncle had left a trail of documents when he’d extricated her?
Could this strange man possibly know anything about the time she spent inIceland?
“It isnota joke,” he said easily. “And by the look on your face, I’d say you’re not entirely surprised that I’ve sought you out.”
“I am wholly surprised,” she whispered. “I am in shock.” The truth.
“Why?”
“Because Iceland is an obscure island that is impossible to reach seven months out of any year and difficult to reach the rest. The least traveled destination in all of Scandinavia, to be sure.” This was also true, but only a fraction of why she was surprised.
She managed to add, “It’s sparsely populated by common laborers and a handful of landowning families. There are no trees. To say that it isremoteis an understatement.”
She scooped up the pen and jabbed it back into the inkpot. She shoved back from her desk. “That is really all I have time to say on the matter, Mr.—”
“It’s ‘North.’ The Duke of Northumberland.”
“Please stop saying that.”
“It’s my name.”
“You arenota duke... you donotwork for the king... you are not standing in my travel shop asking to book passage to an island that I—”
She couldn’t say it.
“You don’t sell holidays to Iceland?” he asked. He looked so very confused.
“No.”
