Tsar

vestryman’s wardrobe!

Quel horreur!

Island gossip is so different from big-city gossip, she thought, pausing at the pantry door. Even the juiciest bon-bons (frequently with a nut or even a fruit at the center!) have a predictably evanescent arc. The tittle-tattle flares up suddenly and self-extinguishes, far more rapidly than elsewhere, poor things, for on a small island like Bermuda, the sly whispers simply have nowhere left to go. Even the hottest rumor burns itself out with a hiss at the shoreline.

She found herself in the empty pantry, pouring warm white wine from a large economy-sized jug into her water glass. These hot afternoons made one thirsty. And she was feeling most disagreeable, to be brutally honest. Put out with Ambrose for some reason she couldn’t put her finger on. Poor dear. Every time he opened his mouth, she snapped at him. She loathed the hurt look in his innocent-baby eyes, but she couldn’t stop herself.

Where is that damn ring? she thought, stamping her foot in a rare display of anger, realizing she’d just put her quite ringless finger right on the problem at last. She knew he had the ring. She’d heard it rattling around in his can of shaving cream when she was straightening up his bathroom one morning. So, why on earth hadn’t he given it to her?

Wandering with her wineglass through the house, a warren of rooms, she finally found Ambrose in a small, low-ceilinged sitting room, a kind of den, she supposed, nautical regalia all round. Ambrose was seated in one corner, deep in conversation with Sir David Trulove, predictably, as the two of them had been conspiring all afternoon. Talking about some top-secret project, the details of which Ambrose would not even share with her. This wrinkle, fairly new in their relationship, was troublesome. But she had decided not to let it bother her. He could have his secrets. She could have hers. Tra-la-la.

It wasn’t as if he and she were formally engaged, after all. They’d been in Bermuda for weeks, and not once had the subject even come up. The question remained unpopped after almost a month. Why, she’d no sooner-

“Diana!” Ambrose said, leaping to his feet as she entered the otherwise empty room. “There you are, darling! We were just speaking of you.” Steadying himself with his cane, he crossed the room to kiss her cheek.

“I very much doubt that,” she said, smiling at him. “Here in this…den of spies, I rather doubt I’m topic A. Oh, hullo, David. I didn’t realize you were here.”

“Diana,” C said, getting to his feet. “Sorry to keep the old boy from you all this time. Terribly rude, I’m afraid.”

“Not at all,” Diana said. “I’ve been having a splendid time wandering about by myself. I adore garden parties. Doesn’t everyone?”

Ambrose could see she was peeved and said, “You were bored. I’m terribly sorry, darling.”

“I could murder a gin and tonic right now. Lot of heavy furniture out on the lawn, darling,” she said, sipping her wine, “not that you’d have noticed, mind.”

“What’s that you said, dear?” C asked. Collapsing back into his deep chair, he pulled a pencil-thin cheroot from his gun-metal cigar case and lit it with a match. He let the smoke dribble out between his lips and inhaled the thick stream up his nostrils. “Something about heavy furniture?”

“Diana’s code name for boring people,” Congreve said.

C smiled. “You know Harold Nicolson’s comment about boring people? ‘Only one person in a thousand is a bore, and he is interesting because he’s one in a thousand.’”

“Marvelous!” Diana giggled. “But, idiocy all the same.”

“Listen, Diana,” Ambrose said, looking around the room in a conspiratorial fashion. “Sir David and I are planning a little clandestine excursion this evening. We thought you might like to join us.”

“Where to?” she said. At the moment, her idea of an excursion was climbing up into bed, popping a baby-blue Ambien, and getting a good night’s sleep.

“We’re going to take the boat for a moonlit sail around Nonsuch Island. Not that there’s any moonlight tonight, thank heavens.”

“Nonsuch? That dismal rock? Whatever for, dear?” she said.

“Surveillance. On that island, according to Alex Hawke, resides a well-entrenched Rastafarian criminal gang. Call themselves the Disciples of Judah. A Jamaican drug lord named King Coale runs the operation. He’s been sending his chaps around, bothering Alex. Sir David and I want to find out why. And put an early end to the practice.”

“Yes,” C said, a serious expression furrowing his high brow. “For obvious reasons, I’m not at all comfortable having Alex Hawke’s current movements a subject of interest to a criminal enterprise. Ambrose and I are going to snoop around a bit tonight and see what we can learn. It’s been a while since I’ve been out in the field, as it were.”

Diana saw the excitement at the prospect of adventure in his eyes. Who could blame him, trapped behind that desk at MI-6 year after year?

Diana plopped down into a soft tomato-red sofa and sipped her wine. “Which boat are you taking? Rumrunner? She’s by far the fastest thing in the boathouse.”

“No, no, dearest. It’s stealth we’re after tonight, not speed. We want to sail around the island, unobserved. We thought we’d take Swagman.”

The white yawl, a Hinckley Bermuda 40, was Diana’s own, a cherished gift bequeathed to her by her late father. She’d spent many childhood summers racing Swagman in Bermuda Harbour and round-the-island races. Not a few trophies at the RBYC bore her name.

“Ambrose, there’s a lot of shoal around that island, ‘skinny water,’ as Papa used to call the shallows. Are you two sure you can navigate safely at night?”

C spoke up. “That was why we hoped you’d consider joining us, Diana. No one knows those waters as well as you do. If things get interesting, we may need you at the helm to get us out of there in a hurry.”

Suddenly, seeing herself in this heroic role, it seemed to her the most marvelous idea she’d ever heard of. She leaped to her feet, splashing a bit of wine onto the tiled floor.

“What are we waiting for, then, lads?” she said with a gay laugh. “The tide’s right, and the wind’s up. Let us away, hearties!”

25

An hour later, Swagman and her jolly crew of three were ghosting along across the wide mouth to Castle Harbour. The light breeze out of the west was on their port beam, and Swagman was heeling slightly, making a good seven knots through calm seas. Diana was at the helm, nursing a mug of hot coffee, her third. She needed a clear head about her. It would be up to her to get the big yawl somehow safely inside the submerged and treacherous coral reefs that guarded any approach to Nonsuch Island.

For many years, Nonsuch had been a strictly protected nature preserve. Many, many years before that, Diana and her older brothers had sailed to the island for picnics and exploration. Forts had been built, flags raised. They’d nicknamed it Mucky-Gucky Island. As they grew older, the children and their friends spent many happy hours out there, chasing pirates, cannibals, and all manner of imagined evildoers through the jungly interior.

Tiring of that, they’d whiled away the hours diving the many wrecks littering the bottom offshore.

Nonsuch, still nothing more than a squat, rocky hump on the horizon, was just one of many small islets that formed the visible tips of the Bermuda seamount. But, because it was surrounded by razor-sharp reefs, this area made for particularly dicey going. Congreve assumed it was the reason the Disciples of Judah had chosen the forbidding locale as their base of operations. It was hardly a welcoming sight.

Bermuda was, after all, the location that had given the infamous Bermuda Triangle its name. Below Swagman’s passing keel lay the wrecks of countless sailing ships and Spanish treasure fleets. Not to mention the silent hulks of freighters, rotting on the bottom, their hulls over the decades turned a putrid shade of green. Coral teeth had ripped great slashes in their sides. All had been dispatched to the bottom by the reefs, the sudden squalls, or the carnage of war.

The Jamaicans who inhabited the island now were squatters. It was clearly posted as a nature preserve. It was