The Serpent and the Scorpion (34 page)

Ursula attended the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition but missed the companionship of someone as interested in art as Lord Wrotham. She visited Hatchards booksellers regularly, but missed having someone with whom she could discuss her latest acquisitions. Even her work with the WSPU and the regular articles she was now writing for
Lady’s Realm
on current political issues for women were curiously unsatisfying. After weeks of refusing Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith’s invitations, Ursula finally agreed to attend her garden party; though the roses would be waterlogged and the marquees no doubt dripping with rain, Ursula put on her most dainty white lawn dress, straw hat, and gloves and went.

“Ursula, my dear!” Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith welcomed her. “Have you been burying yourself in books all summer? It’ll do you no good, you know. . . . A gal’s got to get out and enjoy life!”

Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith was as tactless as ever.

Her garden party was, however, a sumptuous affair. Despite the inclement weather, there were long tables filled with vases of cut roses, silver ice buckets with champagne, glass bowls filled with sherbet ices, and baskets overflowing with fresh strawberries and tiny pots of clotted cream. As a light rain began to fall and the servants hurried to produce umbrellas to protect both guests and food, Ursula ducked under the large marquee that had been set up for a string quartet that was to play later that afternoon. She was nibbling absently on an asparagus croquette when she caught sight of Christopher Dobbs making his way across the lawn, a pronounced limp in his left leg.

“Topper!” she heard Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith exclaim. “I had no idea you were back from Italy!”

Christopher Dobbs had spent the last month recovering from his injuries at a health spa outside Acqui Terme. Ursula turned away, unable to hide her disgust. Her memories of Chief Inspector Harrison calmly informing her that Christopher Dobbs was to remain free were still too vivid.

Harrison had visited Gray House almost three weeks ago to inform her that in exchange for providing details of all his contacts and their operations in the Middle East and Mediterranean, Dobbs would avoid prosecution.

“So Dobbs gets away, literally, with murder?” Ursula had responded incredulously.

“These are tense times.” Harrison said. “We need to know who is supplying armaments to our enemies. Dobbs can provide a pivotal link in the chain, and we can use him to gain the intelligence we need. He has contacts from the Far East to the Balkans. He has already helped us thwart planned insurgencies in India and the Sudan. Unfortunately, we need men like Dobbs.”

“Do I need to remind you that he nearly put a bullet through my head,” Ursula had demanded, “and nearly killed Lord Wrotham?!”

“I need no such reminder. Believe me, if it were my choice, I would see Dobbs hang for what he has done. But we must be satisfied that the man who actually killed both Katya and Arina—Dobbs’s man Harsha—will hang.”

“I have no doubt that George will also be incarcerated, despite the fact that it was blackmail by Dobbs that made him light the fire.”

“George made his choice. . . .”

“Yes, and so did Alexei, but I see he also managed to escape trial.”

“Believe me, I and most of my colleagues would like nothing more than to put Alexei behind bars. If we had known that Dobbs was arranging to supply armaments to a group within Britain that was targeting employers for assassination, then we would have had him arrested immediately.”

“Alexei all but admitted to me that was why he was in Britain. My guess is that Dobbs was going to provide armaments for all these groups across Europe. It would have been quite a coup for Alexei to have made such a deal. Imagine the chaos that could have been spread through such an assassination campaign.”

“It could have caused a war,” Harrison said bleakly.

“Knowing Alexei, he still can,” came Ursula’s caustic reply.

 
Ursula choked down the remaining bite of her croquette and washed it back with a swig of strong black tea. The memories of that conversation were still too raw for her to ignore. George had stood trial and received a two-year prison sentence, and Harsha was due to be sentenced next month, but here was Christopher Dobbs, the man who arranged everything, mingling with politicians and bankers as if he had not a care in the world.

“Ursula!” Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith waved her hand in the air, signaling her to come over. Ursula was horrified by the prospect of having to speak to Christopher Dobbs, but she responded with a nod and a tight smile. She wasn’t about to show him how discomfited she really was.

“Topper here was just telling us about Italy,” Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith said, and then turned back to Dobbs. “Such bad luck you taking that fall off a horse just before you left.”

“Is that what happened?” Ursula asked with a deadpan expression. Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith failed to pick up the edge to her tone, but Dobbs eyed her warily.

“Yes, that’s right. I was at Shrewsbury Grange trying my hand at a spot of hunting when it happened.”

“Must be contagious,” Ursula responded dryly. “I hear Lord Wrotham took a similar fall.”

“Indeed? I guess we’d both better be more careful in the future.”

Ursula was barely able to contain her fury. “
You
certainly need to be,” she spat out before she managed to restrain herself. Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith looked suitably shocked but made no comment. Christopher Dobbs gave a calculated smile. “Never fear, Miss Marlow, I’m like a cat—I always land on my feet.”

“Is that what creature you are, Mr. Dobbs?” Ursula asked coldly. “And here I was thinking you were the snake.”

 
Ursula returned to Chester Square from Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith’s garden party and retreated into her father’s study. She curled up in his armchair and tried reading the latest installment of
The Lost World
in the
Strand Magazine,
but she couldn’t concentrate. Her anger at Christopher Dobbs’s ability to walk away from his invidious crimes gnawed away at her insides. She had thrown down the magazine and was pacing the room when Biggs knocked and entered the study.

“The mail arrived, Miss. There is one letter for you.”

“From Bromley Hall?” Ursula asked quickly, misinterpreting Biggs’s hesitation.

“No, Miss, from Mr. Anderson, I believe,” Biggs replied.

Ursula’s face fell. “Thank you,” she said, “just place it on the desk.”

Biggs complied and then calmly asked, “Would you like me to post anything for you, Miss?”

Ursula sat back down in the armchair. “No,” she responded quietly. And then, as if to herself, “What would be the point?”

Ursula had sent at least four letters to Lord Wrotham, all of which had been returned unopened. She needed to accept, she told herself sternly, that things were truly over between them.

As twilight descended, Ursula stared at the coal fire and continued to reflect on the injustice of all that had happened. Beneath her feet lay a wooden box, one of the many she had shipped out from Egypt, and given all that had happened, one of the many that remained unopened. Using her father’s ivory-handled letter opener, Ursula pried open the lid. Inside, packed in shavings, were some books she had bought, a brass serving tray, a box of perfume jars, and a stone tablet she had bought from a so-called dealer in antiquities. The tablet was inscribed with hieroglyphics, and as Ursula lifted it from the box, she reflected on the irony of having yet another indecipherable message in her house. She propped the stone tablet up on one of the bookshelves, opened the top drawer of the mahogany desk, and pulled out the paper that outlined the letter fragments found at Arina’s house.

She looked over the Cyrillic script and sighed. The contents of the letter probably didn’t even matter anymore, but still, their failure to decipher it gnawed at her. In the last couple of months she had finally had a chance to read the reference books Lady Winterton had supplied. Ursula tapped her chin with her fingers. She was remembering how Peter Vilensky had said that Arina and Katya always corresponded in English, and how Nellie Ackroyd and Len had mentioned that Arina rarely even spoke Russian—she had been in England so long. Strange, Ursula ruminated, that the letter should then be in Russian.

With a glance at the stone tablet, a thought suddenly hit her. What if the Cyrillic letters used in the letter were really nothing more than hieroglyphics—a representation rather like a picture used as a substitution not for a Cyrillic letter but rather a letter from the English alphabet? Neither Winifred nor Ursula had even considered the possibility that the decoded message was in English, not Russian.

Ursula jumped to her feet and scanned the bookshelf for the dictionary Lady Winterton had left. She opened the front page and copied the Cyrillic alphabet across the top of one of the pages of her notebook. She knew from her early research on frequency analysis that “e” was the most commonly used letter in English, so Ursula assumed the most frequently used Cyrillic letter represented this. Soon she was drawing up tables of various alternative transpositions. After two hours and much trial and error, she stumbled upon the key. As she deciphered the words, her face contorted. There were only seven words—but that was all she needed to know the truth.

 
Ursula felt sick.

 
Winifred arrived later that evening and read the translation somberly.

“I guess this confirms that it was Alexei who lured Arina to the factory that night,”

As Winifred spoke, Ursula started to wonder. If she had been Arina and had received Katya’s letter, what would she have done? Would she not have turned to a man like Alexei—an old lover who had once been so trusted—and told him the terrible secret Katya had entrusted her with, and sought his advice? Was that what had happened? And in return had he betrayed that trust in the worst possible way, blinded by his own needs—had he not only betrayed her to Christopher Dobbs but in doing so condemned Arina to death?

“Sully!!” Winifred cried out in exasperation.

Ursula looked at her startled.

“Don’t waste any more time thinking about him!” Winifred admonished. “Alexei must have known what was going to happen to Arina that night. And there was only one possible reason Dobbs wanted you, and that was to kill you.”

Ursula placed her head in her hands. “I know,” she whispered. The full extent of Alexei’s betrayal was evident. She just hadn’t admitted it to herself until now.

Twenty-five

Oldham
AUGUST 1912

 
Two weeks later, Ursula returned to Gray House. London was all but deserted, with most of “society” heading off to their country homes or to their yachts off the Isle of Wight. Ursula now had energy to refocus on business once more. She busied herself overseeing the rebuilding of the Oldham factory and renegotiating key contracts with unions at all her mills and factories across the North, thereby securing earnings as well as ensuring that wages kept pace with inflation. The cotton industry was booming, but there was still considerable unemployment outside the textile towns. Ursula still found the state of much of the housing deplorable and was working with some of the local councils to build workers’ cottages away from the grime and dust of the factories.

Inspired by this, she decided to visit Oldham’s Garden Suburb one afternoon. It represented in many ways an idyllic housing estate, which Ursula was keen to support. As she pulled on her gloves and tied her scarf around her hat tightly, Ursula reflected that it might provide some measure of closure to walk the same streets Arina once had, and perhaps find some degree of comfort in this.

Ursula instructed Samuels to drop her at the tramway depot, and from there she decided to walk. It was the end of August, and though the summer had been wet and miserable up until now, the sun was now shining and it looked like being a glorious late-summer afternoon.

The houses of Garden Suburb were all mock Tudor in design, with fences and gardens, sidewalks, and even a common green in the center of the subdivision—a throwback to a quaint English village green from a bygone era. Women in clean tailored day dresses, straw hats, and parasols were coming out of O’Malley’s butchers, or partaking in afternoon tea at Ye Olde Tea Shop on the corner opposite the green. Ursula made her way down Green Lane past the hedgerows and rosebushes, white gates and black-painted doors with brass knockers, each semidetached house identical to the next.

Ursula entered Ye Olde Tea Shop just before four o’clock, sat down at a table near the window, and ordered a small Montserrat lime juice and soda from the young girl in a frilly white cap. There was only one other customer, a lady in her middle years, in the tea shop. She was bent over the table studiously reading a Baedeker’s guide to Palestine and Syria. It made Ursula wistful.

Sipping from her glass, Ursula gazed out of the window. Across the street was a small travel office, one of the new ones springing up all over the country, catering to the boom in demand for vacations and tours. In the window was a poster of Egypt depicting boats on the Nile at sunset. “Spend This Winter in Egypt Where a Perfect Climate Is to Be Obtained,” the poster read. Next to it was another poster that urged, “Visit Palestine!”

Ursula sighed, for these served only to remind her of Katya. She wished she had asked Katya more about her sister, and more about their shared dreams. Her picture of Arina was incomplete—according to Peter Vilensky, she was nothing more that a leech, always demanding money. According to Nellie she was a quiet, gentle soul. Then there was the Arina of Alexei’s world—full of idealism for a Bolshevik revolution. None of these images seemed to fit together.

Ursula dropped her coins upon the table and walked out of the tea shop and across the road. Aside from the posters, the shop window had a wonderfully kitsch display complete with leather suitcases, a globe, and a wooden motorcar and airplane. A banner above this read, “The Future of Travel . . .”