Colonel Hadrian Russell, before the War, had four sons: George, Andrew, David, and Patrick. Four sons named for patron saints of the British Isles, four sons martyred for those same isles, four sons gone with four daughters-in-law in their place. The Russell widows were a familiar sight at the Britannia, meeting here as they did for lunch every Friday.

Descending the grand staircase, Colonel Russell pointed out two boys standing before the Roster of the Fallen. The elder looked to be about fifteen; the younger, perhaps eleven or twelve. They were searching the immortalised names with pointing fingers, and Eric guessed them to be the Colonel’s grandsons, home from school for the Christmas break and looking for their father and uncles among the other fallen members of the club.

“Matthew and Mark,” the Colonel rumbled. “George, my eldest, had the good sense to cement his legacy before getting himself blown to pieces in Flanders. Pity he couldn’t have left a Luke and a John to finish the Gospel quartet, but you can’t have everything.”

Eric chuckled as he was expected to, but he understood that such callous jokes usually hid a deeper pain.

The boys were joined a moment later by a tall, handsome matron of forty in a black dress and a matching wide-brimmed hat, nearly a decade behind the fashions but with an undeniable gravitas. This was their mother: Lady Alice, third daughter of the Earl of Colford, widow of the late George Russell, and de facto matriarch of the Russell clan after her mother-in-law, the Colonel’s wife, was laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery. But Eric remembered her as Sister Russell, a nurse at a casualty clearing station not far from the front.

The nurse was tall, straight-backed, and grim, stalking between the beds like Nemesis on a mission. Temperatures were taken, medication dispensed, shots administered, all with a ruthless efficiency. The wounded survived for fear of incurring her wrath.

“Sister Russell is a lovely lady, usually,” another nurse told Eric. “But her husband was killed last week in a failed offensive near Aveluy Wood, and we must make allowances for her if she won’t make allowances for herself.”

It wasn’t until he ran into her again, here at the Britannia two years after the end of the War, that Eric saw what that other nurse meant. Lady Alice was a lady in every sense of the word. Her smile was gracious, and her stride was swift and purposeful, its time precisely marked by an ebony cane that was more swagger stick than walking stick. She bore down on them like a grand galleon in full sail, and the crowds parted like sea foam before her.

The elder of the boys, Matthew, came with her; but Mark, the younger, suddenly broke away to run back to the vestibule.

“Aunt Lucy!”

The girl who met him at the entrance seemed not much older than the boy himself. She caught him as he barrelled into her, swung him around, and then the two were laughing and running across the staid marble floor to join the group gathering on the stairs. Light gleamed on the butterfly-shaped buckle on her cloche hat, and under the weight of her winter coat, the pleated skirt of her sailor dress flared like a memory of some long-forgotten, pre-War summer holiday by the sea.

Lucy Russell had been married to the Colonel’s youngest son, Patrick, and it took Eric a moment to remember that she was, in fact, a woman his own age—not a girl ten years younger.

A pale, dark-haired girl sat motionless in the Britannia Club dining room, staring into her untouched plate. She hadn’t moved since Eric, back in London on leave, sat down at the next table; but her dining companion was Colonel Hadrian Russell, a popular figure at the Britannia, and Eric couldn’t help but overhear their conversation.

“Lucy, my dear, won’t you eat something, at least? I thought a change of scenery—”

“Patrick’s birthday is next week,” the pale girl—Lucy—said without moving. “He would have been twenty-one. It isn’t fair.”

“Lucy, my dear,” Lady Alice said with more indulgence than ire as she ruffled her son’s hair. “You really mustn’t encourage this little scamp, or he’s never going to grow up.”

“It’ll be my resolution for the new year,” Lucy replied with a wink at her nephews. Mark grinned back, while Matthew tried unsuccessfully to appear aloof and unamused. Then she turned to Colonel Russell and said, “Hadrian, you’ve gone and left your keys at home again. Honestly, you’ll forget your own head one of these days.”

Colonel Russell reddened slightly as he accepted the proffered keys, but covered over his discomfiture with a bark of laughter. “Word of advice, Peterkin: have at least one daughter, in-law or otherwise. She’ll take better care of you than any son.”

But the near-simultaneous arrivals of Mrs. George and Mrs. Patrick seemed to have ignited a low, electric buzz in the other gentlemen of the club. After all, Colonel Hadrian Russell had four daughters-in-law, and if two of them were here now . . .

Click-click-click.

Madam Eliot—Miranda, widow of Colonel Russell’s second son, Andrew—was small and exquisite in a sharply tailored jacket of rich burgundy tweed, auburn hair expensively bobbed and finger-curled, movements quick and precise as her heels rattled out a rapid staccato rhythm, click-click-click like a ticker-tape machine, on the marble floor. Rubies glittered at her throat and ears, and a wristwatch flashed gold. Eric almost thought he heard her very bones click as she extended a hand to him on being introduced.

“Mr. Peterkin! How lovely to make your acquaintance. I’ve seen you about, of course—you do rather stand out—and of course I’d heard from Hadrian before that you’re to take Mr. Bradshaw’s place as club secretary. Will that be for good, or is it only in the interim? I know Hadrian’s only acting president, of course, until elections can be held at the annual general meeting in April, but I’m given to understand that the role of club secretary is so much more involved that it seems a shame to show one man the ropes only to let him go after a few months.”

Madam Eliot talked the same way she walked: like a machine gun, and Eric was very nearly forced to take cover. This woman, he thought, must have murdered a few thousand tongue twisters as a girl.

“You mustn’t overwhelm the poor man, Miranda,” Lady Alice said, then turned to Eric. “I must apologise for my sister-in-law. Not content with running her own business—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If Carrington-Clarke & Associates were indeed ‘my own business,’ it would be Eliot & Associates.” She was signing contracts for the firm, though, hence the need for a name that wouldn’t change with remarriage. “I get things done. That’s all.”

“I will not have my husband denied his honours,” the woman in the smart black jacket was saying to Bradshaw in the club vestibule. Eric, finally free now the War was over, passed them on his way through to the lobby, but paused on the threshold, curious.

“The roster lists men who fell in battle or from wounds sustained on the battlefield,” Bradshaw replied. “Andrew Russell died in a Parisian hotel room.”

“He was assassinated while on the trail of German spies, and if that’s not giving his life for king and country, I don’t know what is.” Something passed from her hands to his. A cheque? “Just get it done.”

Eric’s gaze stole over to the Roster of the Fallen. Bradshaw, like Madam Eliot, certainly got things done—and Eric had large shoes to fill.

As the Russell widows chattered among themselves, Eric sought out their husbands, the Russell brothers, on the roster. George Russell, the eldest son, the loving father, the devoted spouse; Patrick Russell, not much more than a boy, his young bride widowed before she’d even turned twenty; heroic Andrew Russell, nearly left out over a technicality . . . But first among these and first to fall was David Russell, Colonel Russell’s third son—poet, scholar, athlete—and it was for his widow that the gentlemen of the club now waited, behind raised newspapers and feigned conversations, with bated breath.

Flora Grace. She’d gone back to her maiden name after the War. Her story was quite well-known around the club: David Russell married her on the eve of his departure for Flanders, and when he was severely burned by mustard gas, she defied all advice to the contrary, bullied the necessary papers out of his father’s War Office contacts, and braved travel in wartime to be at his side. They were going to ship him back to England for medical treatment, but he expired the night before—in her arms, according to some rumours, or the moment her back was turned, said others. Eric could only imagine Miss Flora Grace, the former Mrs. David Russell, returning home without her husband—shattered, silent, alone, the grey waters of the Channel churning restlessly around her . . .

There she was.

Miss Flora Grace stopped just inside the lobby, surveying the room over the circular rims of her sun spectacles. Her fur-lined winter coat slid off her shoulders into the hands of an attentive attendant, revealing a cream-coloured silk blouse and . . . trousers? It was a fashion choice that seemed, by the conservative metrics of the Britannia Club, calculated to obfuscate her femininity, yet somehow managed the opposite. Dramatically reddened lips curved into a knowing smile as she fitted a cigarette into a cigarette holder, and another attendant scurried over to provide her with a light.

Was she beautiful? Yes. So were a great many other women. Flora Grace did not hold a monopoly on clear skin or golden blond bobs or emerald-green eyes rimmed with long, darkened lashes. It was confidence more than cosmetics that made the society beauty. If Lady Alice was a majestic galleon, then Miss Grace was a racing yacht—sleek, elegant, arresting. And she knew it.

No one said a word as she sailed across the lobby floor to join the rest of the Russells at the foot of the grand staircase.

“I do hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she drawled. “I had an afternoon guest who simply would not leave. Such a bore! I doubt I’ll be seeing much more of him in the new year.”

Colonel Russell ploughed quickly over this business of an afternoon guest. “Here’s Mr. Peterkin, Flora. He’ll be taking over Bradshaw’s duties as club secretary from here on.”

“Will you, now?” Miss Grace’s gaze was open and frank, with a touch of amusement that Eric found himself eager to reciprocate. “And here I thought Jacob Bradshaw of the Britannia Club would be the one true constant in our rapidly changing world. Now, if you could only see your way to accepting Alice here as a member. Heaven knows she’s seen more of Flanders than some soldiers I could mention.”

“Flora!” Lady Alice barked in mild approbation, but Miss Grace only smirked and retreated behind the smoke of her cigarette.

“You mustn’t mind Flora,” Lucy told Eric. “She spends entirely too much time listening to the speakers in Hyde Park, and they give her the oddest ideas.”

“If we’re all here,” said Madam Eliot, “we really ought to move on to dinner and stop blocking the stairs. Hadrian, if you would be so kind as to lead the way?”

“Of course, of course.”

The gracious widow, the glittering professional, the glamorous vamp, the girlish ingénue, . . . and of course, the magnanimous patriarch. Eric had to suppress a twinge of envy: his only family these days was his sister, Penny, who’d elected to see the new year in with her own horse-mad friends in the country; and Eric’s other option, his best friend Avery, preferred to eschew the thundering warhorses of the Britannia Club in favour of his own circle of queer Bohemians. For the briefest of moments, the classical walnut-and-brass opulence of the Britannia Club felt hollow—then he found Lady Alice’s black-gloved hand on his arm, and the Colonel, beaming with familial pride, pressed him into the party: “Seems to me, sir, that you’re as far from home now as our friend Artorius Castus.”

#

5 March 1925

“Peterkin? I say, Peterkin!”

Eric stirred. The hand on his arm was too large for Lady Alice’s, and lacked the rasp of black lace. The glare from the electric light dazzled him, like the flash of Madam Eliot’s jewels; he fancied he could still smell the smoky warmth of Miss Grace’s perfume, and in his ears were the fading echoes of Lucy Russell’s laughter . . .

“Sleeping on the job, are we? Some secretary you turned out to be!”

The words were jocular rather than critical, and the man speaking was Colonel Hadrian Russell, acting president of the Britannia Club until the elections in April. Eric stretched, yawned, and tried to regain his bearings. Wallpaper, window, desk, untidy stacks of club correspondence, a telephone, cabinets filled with files and ledgers. New Year’s Eve was long gone. The month was March, and this was the office Eric now occupied as club secretary.

Occupied! It had been two months, and Bradshaw’s beloved porcelain tortoises were gone, but that sense of being an interloper in Bradshaw’s domain remained. Eric’s pictures—of himself with the cricket team, with his regiment, with his parents and sister in India—failed to cover the unfaded patches of wallpaper left by Bradshaw’s. The only thing of Bradshaw’s left, for reasons best known to Bradshaw himself, was a framed watercolour print from some children’s book, of a tortoise wobbling along a country lane on a bicycle. It hung over the desk, and in its reptilian gaze, Eric could only ever read smug contempt.

“What time is it?” Eric asked, rubbing the crick out of his neck. The office window, normally a panoramic view of the adjacent service court’s dirty brick walls, was a nearly solid black. When was the last time he’d enjoyed the comforts of his Usual Armchair, stretching his feet out towards a crackling fire? Winter was all but over, spring was in the air—and here was Eric Peterkin, shut away behind a desk. Eric sometimes wondered if his nomination for club secretary had, in fact, been malicious.

“Past ten o’clock,” Colonel Russell replied. “And you’ve been busy, I see?”

Eric followed the Colonel’s gaze to his blotter, and the images doodled on it: a house plan, a candlestick, a spanner, a coil of rope . . . He blushed. “Something out of the last manuscript I was reading. Fellow has a talent for description.”

“Fascinating, but I’ve got other fish to fry.”

“Oh?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow for my annual fishing trip to Scotland, and should be gone until the sixteenth. Just in time to miss the season for trout, but I’d much rather have salmon. These things are meticulously planned, don’t you know! Just think, Peterkin: ten days on the banks of a loch or a burn, nothing but you, your rod, and the open skies . . . and maybe a flask of a good single malt. The ladies will continue with their Friday luncheons, of course.”

The next one was tomorrow, wasn’t it? Eric recalled again the memory of dining with the Colonel and his four daughters-in-law on New Year’s Eve. He could practically still taste the roast goose.

“Oh!” Colonel Russell cut short his exaltation of the Scottish waterways. “You mustn’t think I woke you up just to rub your nose in it. That’s not it at all. Look, this showed up in my mail today, but it’s really more your bailiwick, isn’t it?”

The letter was from a Captain Gregory Ward, announcing his return to England and requesting reinstatement of the club membership he’d allowed to lapse three years ago. Standard club business.

“His father was old General William Ward,” Colonel Russell said, “who died just before the War. I remember young Gregory marching into the War Office with his father’s service revolver the day war was declared, demanding to be let in. Not quite how volunteering works, but he got through the War with flying colours, only to come down with consumption the year after and be shipped off to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. He’d trained with both Andrew and David, you know, and was especially friendly with Andrew. He was actually there when . . .”

“When?”

Colonel Russell laughed and brushed it off. “You’ll give our friend Ward a hero’s welcome when he shows up, won’t you? I don’t believe he’s met the ladies—not even Miranda and Flora, for all he was so friendly with Andrew and David. You’ll have to do the honours of introducing them all.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Three: Ulysses