Princess Elizabeth's Spy

thought, hands clenching, still angry at his not asking about John, at being stood up in Slough. Lied to.

But what was most disturbing was that some material was blacked out, specifically in regard to a certain agent Neil Wright. And who are you, Agent Wright? What kind of relationship did you have with dear old Dad? Why would it be censored?

Sir Owen clasped his hands behind his back and approached Maggie. “May I help you with anything, Miss Hope?” he asked.

Maggie closed the file and put it away in her bag, so that he couldn’t see anything. “No, Sir Owen—thank you. Actually, I believe I have, well, almost everything I need right here.”

The next day, Hugh was waiting in the back room of Boswell’s when Maggie arrived.

“You all right?” Hugh asked, for Maggie was paler than usual and had deep circles under her eyes.

“The King and Queen have planned a sleep-and-dine holiday—they’re calling it A Red, White, and Blue Christmas. Very patriotic.”

“I know,” Hugh said, wrinkling his forehead. “A security nightmare.”

“If Louisa—or anyone—is going to try anything, that would be the time to do it.”

“We know. Everyone’s going to be on sharpest alert. Even I.”

“You?”

“I’ll be there. With Frain.”

“Oh.” Maggie wasn’t sure how she felt about his being at Windsor Castle. “I see.” She shook her head. “Now that we’ve covered that, I’ve read my father’s file. What do you know about Agent Neil Wright and the blacked-out material?”

“The censored material sparked my curiosity, yes. I tried to get Agent Wright’s folder, but it’s gone.”

“Gone?”

Hugh shrugged. “At least it’s not where someone as lowly as I can find it. All there remains are the basics— that he was born in Hampstead Heath in 1885, went to Christ’s Church at Oxford and graduated with honors in history in 1906, was recruited to MI-Five not long after.” Hugh took a breath. “Also, he was MI-Six, not MI- Five.”

“MI-Six?” Maggie was confused. Like the CIA and the FBI, MI-6 dealt with foreign threats and MI-5 with domestic. “MI-Six wouldn’t be involved with my father unless …” Her mind grappled with the answer. “Unless they suspected him of being a double agent.”

“That’s what I came up with too,” Hugh said.

“And at that point in time, we were at war with Germany.… He might have been a German spy!”

“But why would MI-Five keep him on, then? He must have been cleared.”

There must be some way of finding out more.

“I need to find out about Agent Wright.” Maggie, the scholar, knew where she had to start. “I’m going to the library.”

“The library? There’s certainly not going to be anything on him there. Too public.”

“Well, I have to start somewhere. Do something.”

Later that afternoon, Maggie went back to the castle’s library. “Hello, Sir Owen. I’m looking for something today, actually,” she said.

Sir Owen smiled and rubbed his hands together in glee, and Maggie realized he must a little lonely among all the volumes sometimes. “Anything, Miss Hope.”

“Well, I’m looking for information on a man named Neil Wright. He was born in Hampstead Heath in 1885 and graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1906. I’m not sure what there will be, if anything.”

“At least a birth notice,” Sir Owen said, “and marriage and death, if applicable. Let me see what I can do.”

Maggie settled in to wait with a copy of Great Expectations. Sir Owen eventually returned, with two yellowing copies of The Times of London. “If you look here, Miss Hope,” he said, opening the first on the polished wood table, “You’ll find a birth notice—Neil Reginald Wright was born in London, to George Fletcher Wright and Nancy Grace Wright, on March twenty-first, 1870. However,” he said, opening the second, “this is the one you’ll probably be most interested in. I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to pry, but the names—”

Maggie looked up at him, not comprehending.

“Well, you’ll understand when you read it,” he said gently. I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Hope.”

Maggie turned her attention to the second paper. The headline read “Two Dead from Accident on Icy Road, Another Injured.” Maggie smoothed the brown and crumbling edges and began to read.

London, Sunday, May 1—Two people were killed and one seriously injured shortly after midnight Thursday in an automobile accident at the intersection of Grosvenor Road and Vauxhall Bridge Road.

Clara Hope, age twenty-four, was taken to London Bridge Hospital and died from injuries sustained in the crash. Neil Wright, age thirty-two, died on the scene. Professor Hope, a noted economist at the London School of Economics, was taken to London Bridge Hospital and is in stable condition.

“From the look of the accident scene, it appears that Professor and Mrs Hope’s car swerved on Grovesnor Road and hit a lamppost. Mr Wright’s car, following close behind, crashed into theirs,” a spokesman for the Prefecture of Police said.

There, in stark black and white, was a picture of Neil Wright next to a picture of Maggie’s mother and father.

Neil Wright, the agent that was investigating my father, died in the same car accident as my mother, Maggie thought, shocked, saddened, sickened. She read the article again.

Then she sat down to think. Neil Wright was an MI-6 agent, charged with protecting Britain from foreign threats. If he was pursuing my father, he must have believed him of some sort of wrongdoing—given that it was during the Great War, spying for Germany is the most likely offense. Because of this, she realized, feeling nauseated, Wright was chasing my father in a car. My mother was a passenger. The cars crashed, and both Wright and my mother died.

My father, she thought, killed Neil Wright.

Then, realizing, she felt like vomiting. He also killed my mother.

Maggie felt a wave of anger, primal and hot, wash over her. He’s not going to get away with this.

Chapter Twenty

Maggie met with Hugh in London, at Highgate Cemetery, under a threatening sky with low-hanging clouds. They met in front of Maggie’s mother’s gray marble headstone: Clara Beatrice Hope 1892– 1916. She leaned over and traced the letters with her gloved fingers, then set down her bouquet of bittersweet.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I thought my Aunt Edith was my mother. But when I was about eight or so, she told me my parents had died in a car accident in London. In the version she told me, my father and mother were at a stoplight. A man in another car must have fallen asleep. His car drifted over the white line. His car crashed into theirs and they both died.” Maggie took a ragged breath as the wind whispered through the nearly bare tree branches.

“But then, last summer, I found another version of the story. In this one, there was an accident and my mother died—but my father didn’t. But he went insane—which is why my Aunt Edith adopted me and lied to me— told me he was dead.

“Then when I returned to England, I found out my father was not only still alive, but he was also as sane as you or I—he was merely posing as deranged, to try to catch a spy at Bletchley.

“Neil Wright was an MI-Six agent, hunting down a Sektion agent in London—my father. What happened that night was no accident. Wright must have been chasing my father. One of the drivers lost control and the cars crashed. Whatever happened, it circles around to the same conclusion. If my father hadn’t been a Sektion agent, on