And he worried about the swarms of workmen prettying up Victoria, and especially the routes along which the King-Emperor would travel. “Damn it, Sam,” he burst out as he and Stanley combed through papers seized under search warrant, “how the devil are we supposed to keep an eye on all of them?
Some of them have to be Sons. They could be planting bombs behind the bunting, they could be picking the manhole cover from which a rifleman will pop out, they could be doing - anything.”
“That’s true,” his adjutant said, and then paused for the ritual of lighting a cigar. “And do you know what you can do about it?” he went on once he’d puffed out a good cloud of aromatic smoke. “Nothing, near enough, not by yourself. They’ve got plenty of other RAMs to worry about things like that, Chief. You can’t carry the whole world on your shoulders.”
“No, eh?” Bushell said with a wry grin. “When did they go and change the rules again?” After that, though, he buckled down and attacked the papers once more. But, for all he gleaned from them, they might as well have been written in Hindustani.
That evening’s reception was at the Austrian embassy. The Hapsburgs’ ambassador to the NAU, Graf Friedrich-Maria von Hotzendorf, was a short, thin, weary-looking man with impressive mustachios, a stiff brush of iron-gray hair, and eyes even more sorrowful than those of Sir Horace Bragg.
“I wish you good fortune, Colonel, in your quest to recover your missing imperial treasure,” he told Bushell in fluent but gutturally accented French as the RAM went through the reception line. “In your large realm here, the miscreants who absconded with it have all too many places in which to keep it concealed.”
“As I know all too well,” Bushell replied.
Only after he’d passed on to bow over the hand of the ambassador’s wife did he fully appreciate the longing Hotzendorf had packed into large realm. Austria was a European power but, because of its position on the map, would never be a world power. It intrigued against the Holy Alliance in the Italian states, and against the Franco-Spaniards, the Prussians, and the Russians in the Germanies, but its only real avenue for expansion, toward the southeast, was blocked by the British protectorate over the Ottoman Empire. When Hotzendorf contemplated a nation that stretched from Atlantic to Pacific and was but a part of a larger empire, he had to contrast that with the straitened horizons of his own homeland. No wonder he looked sad.
Duke Alexei Orlov and Comte Philippe Bonaparte had gone into the Austrian embassy by the time Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery arrived. Envoys from the minor German states danced attendance on the two powerful envoys; the Bavarian minister, for instance, hung a pace and a half to the left and rear of Bonaparte, as if he were a wife following her husband in some backward part of India or China.
As they had at the Russian embassy, diplomats gave Bushell their sympathies and good wishes. All the same, he got the feeling that here they thought more about their ancient, almost ballet-like maneuverings against one another than they did of the affairs of a latecomer to the game like the NAU. Kathleen Flannery saw the same thing. “We won’t learn anything here tonight,” she said.
“Not from the ambassadors, anyhow,” Bushell agreed. “You never can tell what our own people might give away, though.”
He was watching Sir David Clarke being charming to the wife - the young, pretty wife - of the chargé d’affaires from some minor German principality. As people sometimes will, Sir David sensed that eyes were on him. He kept glancing around till he spotted Bushell. He smiled: a wide, political smile made to conceal whatever was going on behind it. Bushell’s answering upturn of lips should have displayed a hunting tiger’s fangs, not merely human teeth.
Sir Horace Bragg came up, a glass of white wine in his hand. “By God, Tom,” he said, “I shouldn’t want to be on the other end of that look.”
Sir David evidently did not like it, either. He gulped down his drink and purposefully headed toward Bushell. “You see,” Bushell murmured to Kathleen.
Then he nodded to Clarke, affably enough now, waiting to learn whether the governor-general’s chief of staff was far enough gone to create a scandal in front of most of Victoria’s diplomatic corps. If he wasn’t, Bushell intended to give him a helping hand.
Clarke thrust out a forefinger, saying, “Have you discovered anything entitling you to stare at me in that fashion, Colonel?”
The question was too much to the point. Bushell hadn’t - nothing, at least, pertaining to The Two Georges. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Irene come back into the room, perhaps wondering what had detained Sir David. Spotting him with Bushell, she hurried in their direction, alarm on her face. Before Bushell could say anything, Sir Horace spoke in his place: “A man who has covered his tracks may look innocent, but that doesn’t prove he is.”
Sir David’s eyes widened slightly. “ Et tu, Brute?” he said to Bragg. “I thought you shied away from slander yourself.” He turned to Bushell. “As long as I’m flinging Latin about, here’s a tag you ought to remember: quis custodiet ipsos custodies!”
Sir Horace understood the thrust of that as well as Bushell did. His sallow cheeks went red. “ ‘Who will watch the watchmen’?” he growled. “I’ll watch you, you son of a -“ He took a step toward Clarke. Bushell got between them in a hurry - this wasn’t the scandal he’d had in mind starting. Irene reached them just then. Bushell thought of how the scene had to look through her eyes: her ex-husband keeping her former lover from hauling off and punching her husband. The absurdity of it hit him harder than Sir Horace had wanted to hit Sir David. In spite of himself, he started to laugh. Bragg and Clarke both stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses.
“We’re all letting this rot our brains,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and try to remember we’re supposed to be on the same side.”
Sir Horace Bragg calmed himself at once. “You’re right, Tom,” he said sheepishly. “The strain is telling on everyone, me included.”
“It must be,” Sir David Clarke said. “Without it, I can’t imagine Colonel Bushell inviting me to have a drink with him.” His eyes flicked to Bushell. “If I sound surprised, Colonel, it’s only because I am.”
Thinking about it, Bushell was surprised, too. He shrugged. “I said it, Sir David,” he answered. “I’m not going to back away from my word.” He raised an eyebrow and raised his voice: “Unlike certain politicos I could mention.” He’d said things like that before, commonly with intent to wound. Now he was joking, and made that plain.
Irene was not only surprised but also, by the look on her face, greatly relieved. “What has come over you, Tom?” she asked.
He set a light hand on Kathleen Flannery’s arm. “Must be love,” he answered, not joking at all. Kathleen stiffened. She couldn’t have been easy about being used as a weapon against his ex-wife. Bushell realized he’d also told Sir Horace Bragg what he’d asked a couple of days before. The RAM commandant’s shaggy eyebrows flew upward.
Irene saved the moment, saying, “I hope you’ll be happy together,” sincerely enough that, if it happened not to be the complete truth, no one could call her on it. Then she had another inspiration: “What about that drink?”
Bushell hadn’t said anything about drinking with her. Having agreed to drink with Sir David, though, he could hardly get up on his high horse now. “Onward!” he said, as if leading a cavalry charge on the Northwest Frontier, and headed off in a soon-successful search for the bar. None of the gossip he soaked up along with several drinks over the course of the rest of the evening amounted to much. With detached amusement, he watched Sir David start another conversation with that German chargé’s attractive young wife, and watched Irene draw him away from the woman with an ease that bespoke considerable practice.