The man at the office door was tall and distinguished, with honey-brown hair gone white at the temples, a face lined with a history of laughter and sun, and a long, thin scar curving across his left cheek. His eyes, bright blue and merry, met Eric’s with one quizzically raised eyebrow.

“Hullo,” he said. “You’re not Jacob Bradshaw, or is my memory that far gone?”

“Bradshaw’s gone on to better things, I’m afraid. I’m Peterkin; Eric Peterkin. And you must be Captain Gregory Ward.”

“Yes, I wrote about getting my membership reinstated.”

Laugh lines deepened around Captain Ward’s eyes as he slid into the proffered chair. Eric would have put his age at about fifty, though his paperwork put him at thirty-eight. Noting his interest in the cavalry sabre mounted over one cabinet, Eric said, “That was my great-uncle Charlie’s. He was in the Crimea, and a bit of a rogue if half the stories are true. Do you fence? I’m always on the lookout for another sparring partner.”

Ward tore his eyes from the sabre with a flicker of embarrassment and a laugh. “Oh no. I wouldn’t know one end of a sword from the other, I’m afraid. Besides, my health isn’t what it used to be. Consumption is a nasty thing to have.”

His health? Ward appeared to be brimming with health, his apparent age no more than skin-deep—hardly the image of a recently recovered consumptive. Eric wondered if, perhaps, the ailment in question was something else entirely.

“I swear,” Ward went on, “I lost more years than I actually spent in that old sanatorium. Lovely view of the mountains, of course, and the freshest air outside of Eden; but by God it was dull. And all those doctors poking and prodding at you in the most indecent fashion . . . I wouldn’t recommend it, Peterkin. Sometimes I listen to the words coming out of my mouth and wonder if my time there hasn’t turned me Swiss German.”

“The bar in the lounge does have some German schnapps in stock, if you want to complete the transformation.”

“Better not. If I’m honest, Peterkin, the War’s done something to my memory, and my time away hasn’t helped. I barely remember this place at all.”

“Something to his memory,” indeed. Eric suspected now that what ailed Ward was not consumption at all, but something nobody at the Britannia liked to admit. That the poor fellow was even alluding to any issues with his memory was an act of courage.

Eric dove into the papers overflowing his desk and finally extracted the paperwork for Ward’s reinstatement as a member in good standing. “We’re happy to jog your memory as much as you like,” he said. Then, noting Ward’s hesitation over the space for his home address, he added, “If you’ve yet to get your lodgings sorted out, the guest rooms are available.”

“Yes! That would be helpful. I seem to recall an excellent dining room, too.”

“There’s a new head chef since you left. I’d venture to say he’s even better than the last.”

“I also remember a piano?”

“In the lounge, upstairs. Along with a billiard room and a reading room if you get bored with guzzling German schnapps.”

“No one gets bored on schnapps,” Ward declared, handing back the completed forms.

“Maybe not.” Eric put his signature on the last of this business, then stood and held out his hand. “But welcome back.”

Ward took Eric’s hand with a firm grip, his grin nearly melding into his scar. “It’s good to be back.”

“There’s just one more thing.”

“Oh?”

Eric pulled out a five-year-old ledger and opened it to the relevant page. “It seems you took out a box in the club vault before you left for Switzerland and never gave it up again.”

“So I did.” Ward dug a small steel key out of one pocket and held it up. “I’d forgotten all about it until I found this again while packing for my return. Does this mean I’ve technically been availing myself of club services all through the past five years, and therefore owe you my club dues for that time?”

“For something so petty? Not at all. But don’t think I’m not going to hold this over you when it’s convenient.”

Ward laughed—a hearty, honest laugh that shook the dust from the shabby cabinets. “Very good! We’d better go take a look, then.”

#

The vault and its anteroom were down a narrow staircase across from Eric’s office and isolated from the rest of the basement. Eric hated that cold, windowless place. Its decorative mosaic floor spoke of a nobler intention subverted to a more pragmatic use, like a bombed-out church appropriated for the storage of Army rations; and of late, there also seemed to be an unpleasant smell clinging to it. The vault was where poor Albert Benson had met his untimely end, and Eric, perhaps fancifully, wondered if there might be a connection—Benson’s ghost stalking the darkness, the odour of death in his footsteps, a grisly harbinger of guilt . . .

It took three tries to get the combination right. The vault door swung open, and a harsh glare flickered on to illuminate the steel boxes lining the far wall of the little white room within. Eric found himself looking for signs of blood, but the floor, of course, had been scrubbed clean countless times over. Benson really was gone.

“Here we go, Ward. I’m afraid I’ve yet to get used to . . . Ward?”

Ward seemed to have lost track of his surroundings. He was staring at a pile of old posters mounted on cardboard, all shoved into a corner and forgotten. “Once a German, always a German!” they proclaimed over illustrations of barbaric atrocities ascribed to the German forces. And if these imagined wrongs weren’t enough, there was the grave of Edith Cavell pictured near the bottom.

Sister Cavell was a British nurse in Belgium when the War broke out, and was there any British soul not outraged at her execution by a German firing squad? Ward’s good humour had drained from his face, leaving it grey and bitter.

Eric laid a gentle hand on Ward’s shoulder and tried to turn him away. “We’ve had a visit from the British Empire Union, and as you can see, they’ve left their posters. We should have thrown these out right away.”

Ward stirred and stretched out a finger to trace the words printed on either side of Sister Cavell’s grave: “1914 to 1918” on one, “Never again!” on the other. This poster was not a relic of the War itself, but something composed well into the aftermath.

“The War ended seven years ago this November,” he murmured. “I wonder how long we must continue to live in its shadow.”

“I know.” The Britannia was full of men still overshadowed by the War.

Ward’s finger stopped on the image of the grave itself: a simple cross on a mound of dirt, the name Edith Cavell on the crosspiece. “I was there, you know. In Brussels.”

“When she was killed?”

He nodded. “She was a remarkable woman. She knew the price she’d have to pay for smuggling all those soldiers out of Belgium to safety, and she paid it with better courage than most men could muster. Before she died, she told her priest, ‘I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’ So I wonder what she would have made of this.”

“Best thing we can do for her now is to live well; and we’ve been through enough,” Eric said, drawing Ward away from the posters and towards the light of the open vault. The point, Eric knew, was not that a British nurse had been executed ten years ago on charges of espionage, but that her memory was now being invoked to keep the War alive. And the damage was done: a sullen shadow had descended upon Ward, dispelling all his previous joie de vivre.

Ward’s box came out of the bank with an echoing rasp, like a casket out of a crypt, and Eric set it on the lone wooden table in the middle of the vault. Ward, his brow still clouded, drew closer only as Eric opened up the box itself.

They were immediately assailed by a strong odour of gun oil. The only thing in the box was a revolver wrapped in oilcloth: a Webley, with the distinctively curved “bird’s head” grip of an older model. Was it a Mark IV from the Boer War, or a Mark V from the beginning of the Great War? Eric twitched aside a flap of the oilcloth for a closer inspection—

“Hands off,” Ward snapped, slapping his hand away.

Eric held his hands up, palms open, then laid them flat on the table. He knew better than to pick a fight with a soldier in such a mood. But he peered at the Webley where it lay in the box, nonetheless, angling his head to not block the light. Ward had no objection to that, at least.

Scratched into the Webley’s grip was a small rectangle divided into triangular quarters by an inscribed X.

“Your mark, Ward?”

Ward pulled the oilcloth back over the gun. “It no longer matters.”

“You’ll want to get that thing cleaned and properly serviced. After five years locked away in here, untouched and without maintenance, it’s bound to be very nearly choked with rust.”

“I’d sooner sell it.”

Eric understood. He’d sold off his Webley, too.

Ward dropped a thick envelope into the box, on top of the Webley, with a violent gesture that made Eric jump. The name of Ward’s sanatorium was stamped into one corner, and the envelope itself looked as though it might contain a written manuscript—was Gregory Ward an aspiring writer? Ward snapped the box shut again and pushed it back in Eric’s direction, saying with a curtness bordering on rudeness, “I’ll keep this box a while longer. Put it back.”

It was normally the member himself who handled the boxes once they were in the vault. Properly speaking, Eric’s place was out in the anteroom, both to afford Ward some privacy with his personal belongings and to open the vault door again should some accident send it slamming shut. But Eric complied, nonetheless. There’d be time enough to remind Ward of how this worked later, when he wasn’t caught in the grip of some dark memory.

And this, of course, was the moment something behind the walls went off like an exploding shell, causing just enough of a tremor that the vault door swung shut before either man could scramble around the table to stop it. The electric light above, linked as it was to the vault door, blinked out, and the room was plunged into a pitch-black darkness.

Darkness. Blind blackness, something acrid in the air, and unyielding earth all around. Lieutenant Peterkin’s ears still rang from the shell that had all but obliterated their position, but he imagined he could hear the more fortunate soldiers of his company scrabbling through the rubble for survivors. He felt around, pushing away as much of the collapsed dugout as he could without bringing anything worse down on his head. His fingers found fabric . . . a sleeve. Not his own sleeve. This was one of his men. Private Dent.

Just, as it turned out later, not all of Private Dent . . .

Stiff upper lip, man. You’re an officer, and an officer does not lose his head in front of his men. He sets an example of absolute, perfect sangfroid. Stiff upper lip . . .

Eric swallowed the horror rising in his throat and forced himself into the present. Stiff upper lip! The last thing a shell-shock case like Ward needed was another panicked soldier trapped with him. But—

“Peterkin? Are you there?”

“Here.”

Ward’s voice was tight. Controlled. Too even to be anything but a brave front. Eric groped through the darkness towards it, finally encountering the fabric of Ward’s jacket.

Private Dent’s sleeve.

The smell of rot was overpowering. That had to be only his imagination, surely? Eric put his arm around Ward’s shoulders, and felt Ward do the same for him. They were each keeping a stiff upper lip for the sake of the other man.

What was that? Footsteps?

“Hullo!” Eric called out. “Cully, is that you?”

“Lieutenant Peterkin, sir! I think we’ve had a burst pipe!”

Eric heard the combination wheel spin. A moment later, the door swung open, and the electric light flooded the room with a blinding glare. Thank God.

Ward, shrugging out of Eric’s grip, launched himself out of the vault and was gone before anyone could stop him.

#

“Don’t give me that,” Madam Eliot said into the telephone mouthpiece, so crisply she might as well have snapped. “The Sandalford Estate can wait. This can’t. Yes, I know it’s Friday. Why do you think I’m asking you to rush?”

Light flashed on the jewelled face of her gold wristwatch as she set the telephone down again with a sharp click. It had been Cully’s idea to approach the former Mrs. Andrew Russell for help, as she was here with the other Russell widows for their usual Friday lunch. After managing all the builders and trades employed by Carrington-Clarke & Associates, she had to know what must be done for a burst pipe, and all the right people to do it. And so she did. Once unleashed, the woman was a virago.

“There. That’s the water mains shut off, and a crew arranged to clean up the mess. That should give us all some breathing room. But the real trouble is that your burst pipe is buried behind a solid concrete wall, and judging by the smell, you’ve probably had a leak back there all through the winter. We’ll have to break down the wall before we can get anything done, and that, of course, means time and work and money. Assuming, of course, you want us for the job.”

Eric’s nerves were still on edge from the vault, seeking an enemy that his brain understood to not be there. All he could see, really, was Bradshaw’s damned tortoise-on-a-bicycle print framed over the desk. “Of course,” he said, keeping his posture upright and his expression neutral. “It should go without saying that Carrington-Clarke will be the company for us. We’re in your debt —”

“Only until our invoices are paid, I assure you.”

“I’ll leave this in your capable hands, then.”

“Splendid.” Madam Eliot slid off the edge of the desk, where she’d been perched while ringing up all the necessary people, and her heels hit the floor with a sharp ka-click. “In the meantime, you’ll have to shut down the kitchen as there’ll be no running water. That means no lunch. The others will be disappointed, but Flora should know of a good alternative.”

“I’d better go and offer them my apologies.”

They walked out together, but stopped at the entrance to the lobby, where golden sunlight poured straight down onto a gleaming marble floor from the skylight above. After the darkness of the subterranean bunker that was the vault and its anteroom, this sunlit world felt like an illusion; and there, washed in the sun, stood Captain Gregory Algernon Ward in earnest conversation with Lucy, widow of Colonel Russell’s youngest. In her white-and-navy sailor dress . . . Yes, it was spring now, wasn’t it? The world was in bloom, with bursts of colour overwriting the grey of winter, and the brisk March wind was infused with the scent of new growth. Ward, smiling, looked for once like his actual thirty-eight.

“They make a darling pair, don’t they?” Leaning against a column with trousered legs elegantly crossed, Miss Flora Grace looked as though she might have descended from the cover of a fashion magazine. A blue-grey trail of smoke from her cigarette in its holder floated up into the shadows like incense. “They ran into each other ten minutes ago—him out of the dark, her in from the light—locked eyes and have yet to look away. I’d be more concerned if he hadn’t looked so pathetic, or if I hadn’t recognised his name when he introduced himself. He is the same Gregory Ward who trained with my David, I assume?”

“He is,” Eric said, and marvelled. Half an hour ago, even before being trapped in the vault, Ward had been sunk into the darkest of moods. “And this is love at first sight?”

“There’s no such thing. He’s quite taken by her, I’ll give you that much. But that’s the work of a moment, and I’ve seen the effects come and go a hundred times before. Whether this momentary infatuation actually turns into love on both sides depends entirely on how well they impress each other going forward.”

Eric found himself suddenly wondering how well he’d managed to impress the lovely Miss Grace so far.

“Well, she’s young,” said another voice: Lady Alice, her habitual black mourning blending into the shadows beyond that sunlit meeting of lovers. “Far too young to be settling into a life of keeping house for Hadrian. She’s been in a dark hole since Patrick died, though she won’t admit it, and she really could do with someone to get her out of the darkness.”

Miss Grace, the bright to Lady Alice’s black, drew on her cigarette and nodded in agreement.

#

March really was the most difficult month, Eric reflected as he firmly shut his office window on the grey skies and plummeting temperatures of what he hoped was the last gasp of winter. Thank God, Madam Eliot’s workmen had resolved the worst of the pipe issue, and they could reopen the kitchen tomorrow. Had it really only been five days since it happened? Yes, and it would be another five days before Colonel Russell’s return.

Emerging into the lobby, Eric heard whistling from the vestibule: an improvised series of joyful cadenzas dancing on the marble and tripping out into the lobby like exultant birdsong. Someone, at least, was enjoying himself—and Eric knew who.

“Hullo, Ward. You’re coming back from your dinner later and later every day.”

“Am I?” Ward ceased his whistling to check his watch. “I’ve had good company.”

“Lucy Russell? Or Madam Eliot?”

Ward had made it a point to take Madam Eliot out to dinner once, but that was merely a courtesy to her as the widow of his old friend Andrew Russell. Every evening since had been spent in the company of the former Mrs. Patrick Russell instead, and the club gossips were taking bets on Colonel Russell’s reaction to this rather intense courtship once he got back from his fishing excursion.

“Dear Lucy.” Ward’s smile grew unbearably sweet. “Do you know she’s reading Guy de Maupassant in the original French? She says you can never truly appreciate a translation, and I’m inclined to agree.”

“If you’re out any later, you’ll have to trouble the night attendant to let you in. But the club dining room should be reopened tomorrow, so there’s that—unless you’d like to proceed from there to some nightclub or other.”

“Lucy doesn’t care for nightclubs. She’s . . . old-fashioned. Unspoilt. A wonderful girl.”

Ward wandered on, up the stairs and past the Knights on the landing. There was a boyish spring to his step, and one almost wondered how he could ever have been mistaken for an old man of fifty. Eric watched and waited until the whistling died into the distance before turning to let himself out. March was regressing into a sullen wintry chill, and London might see one last snowfall before spring truly set in; but Gregory Ward, warmed by the sun of Lucy Russell’s growing affection, likely felt none of it.