had been difficult. Imagining what was happening in Albion and having to deal with the very real prospect of von Stralick’s dying, while suffering considerable deprivation himself, had almost used up his resources. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said softly.
Caroline adjusted her hat, a loose, practical item, perfectly suited to general farm work. ‘It’s good that von Stralick came along when he did. It saved a great deal of trouble.’
‘Getting out of Fisherberg?’
She fixed him with an inscrutable look, one that he’d be quite happy to spend hours unscruting. ‘Aubrey, if he hadn’t have come along I would have had to find you by myself, and I had no idea where you were.’
Aubrey repeated Caroline’s words in his mind and finally accepted that she’d said what he thought she’d said. No matter how he tried to doubt or misunderstand them, he couldn’t. ‘Thank you,’ he said eventually, smiling a little. ‘I’m over… over…’
‘Overjoyed? Overcome? Overthrown?’
‘Overwhelmed. Quite, quite overwhelmed. I hadn’t dared to hope.’
‘Hope what?’
‘Hope all sorts of things.’
Caroline’s lips twitched at this. Then she shuffled across and sat next to him for a moment, looking at him closely. Aubrey’s heart forgot how to beat for a moment and when it started it lurched along in fits and starts, mostly at the gallop. The air in the back of the lorry seemed thinner. Or thicker. Or something. And had time started playing up as well?
Caroline rose. She studied him for a moment before sitting on his knee.
He wasn’t quite sure exactly how it happened. If pressed, he would have asked for three or four hundred pages to write a description of the series of impossibly graceful bendings and movements that ended up with her perched there with one hand on his shoulder. He didn’t understand – and he was sure that it defied physics – how Caroline could be so light on that tiny patch of his leg, and yet so weighty in the way her presence affected him. Her gaze, for instance, probably clocked in at about fifty or sixty tons, to judge from the effect it was having on him.
He never wanted to move. Never, ever, ever. Let the heat death of the universe come along and he’d be quite happy to still have Caroline Hepworth sitting just like that, on his knee, looking at him without speaking. The tiny light of the shaded lantern was irrelevant. He saw everything, every infinitesimal detail, as if it were the brightest of bright middays.
It was so perfect, so hoped for, that Aubrey knew that it couldn’t last. He glanced around.
‘What are you doing?’ Caroline asked very, very softly.
‘Looking for whoever is going to interrupt us.’
‘That’s a pessimistic outlook.’
‘Wars, especially, have a habit of ignoring the lives of people.’
‘If you follow that through, it suggests living for the moment is best.’
‘Live without planning? Without dreams? That sounds rather limited.’
‘And that sounds rather like Aubrey.’
A light touch on the back of his hand and strong fingers intertwined with his. He swallowed as a ball of heat ignited in his chest.
I do believe things might work out well.
‘I have a plan,’ he croaked.
‘I’m sure you do. But let me tell you about what Sophie and I have been up to, first.’
17
Aubrey heard the whole explanation. In fact, he’d never heard anything so well. Afterwards, he could have recounted it word for word, backward, so intently did he listen. He could have described every detail of the interior of the rear of the lorry. He could have itemised every night-time sound that came from the woods outside. He could have listed scents, sensations, impressions, every one of them apprehended with all his being, for at the time he knew that he’d remember it forever.
Caroline wasn’t sure how much of the idea of the mission came from Lady Rose, but after Caroline and Sophie were briefed by Craddock and Tallis, they were handed over to her. She introduced them to the leaders of the Albion Suffragist Movement, women who Lady Rose knew well. These formidable women provided names and addresses of suffragist women in Holmland for Caroline and Sophie to memorise.
Aubrey made a valiant stab at keeping his incredulity under control, but he had fears it may have shown on his face. ‘You were sent to promote a suffragist uprising in Holmland?’
She shrugged and the effect was so delightful that Aubrey spent some time thinking of a way to get her to do it again before he realised she’d answered. ‘I beg your pardon?’
No-one could make a moue like Caroline, and she made an exquisite one that stunned Aubrey into immobility before she continued. ‘It may have begun like that, in the office of whoever plans ridiculous schemes, but Lady Rose, Sophie and I had our own way of looking at it.’
‘A far more sensible way than a female insurrection, one would hope.’
‘Indeed. We decided that limiting ourselves to Holmland showed singular lack of imagination.’
Aubrey adjusted the arm he had around Caroline’s waist – the luckiest arm in the world. ‘I think I see where this is heading. You thought that the middle of a continental war would be a good time to advance the cause of votes for women across the world?’
‘Aubrey, enfranchising women has been far too long coming.’
‘Granted, but is this the time?’
‘That’s the argument that’s always used to keep people in their place. I’m sure that before the abolition of slavery there were many well-meaning people shaking their heads and asking the same thing. There’s never a perfect time for massive social upheaval, so we may as well do it now.’
Aubrey had to agree. ‘It would send a good message.’
‘We’ve been exhorted to help our country, but we haven’t been trusted with the vote. It was time to put an end to that, so we negotiated with your father.’
‘He’s an advocate of votes for women. He’s had the devil of trouble getting his party on side, though.’
‘Which is why he was very interested when we put this to him. He used it in a party meeting, insisting that tabling a bill for female enfranchisement was actually a vital part of Albion’s war strategy.’
‘No-one would come out and argue against a vital war strategy.’
‘Of course not.’ Caroline touched him on the chest, just over the spot where the Beccaria Cage had left its mark. ‘Aubrey, at last! Votes for women!’
‘Splendid. There’s just a little matter of a war to get out of the way first.’
‘Quite right. Once the Albion Suffragist Movement was assured of your father’s commitment, all sorts of possibilities opened up. Our mission was revised to include a visit to Lutetia to encourage the Gallian Women’s Rights Association to follow our route, before Sophie and I went to Fisherberg to find Count Brandt’s sister.’
‘No doubt you were authorised to give certain undertakings? Money? Access to intelligence?’
‘Aubrey, we didn’t have to promise anything. Ilse Brandt was already organising her own resistance to Chancellor Neumann’s regime, and since most Holmlandish men were connected with the war in one way or another, she’d been using her female friends and acquaintances. Our assistance will make her organisation stronger, but it was on the way before we arrived.’
‘A remarkable woman, just as her brother was a remarkable man.’
‘She’s nearly twenty years younger than he was. She told me how Count Brandt had left home before she really came to know him.’
‘That’s sad.’
‘When she was older, in her teens, he’d visit and tell of his studies and his travels. When he came, he always brought her a present from wherever he’d been lately. He spoke to her, she said, very formally, in a way that she found both hilarious and endearing. That was when she came to love him in a way that she couldn’t before.’
