Page 3 of A Family Of His Own
“Forever forgetting the important things.” Looking rather smug, he smiled into her eyes. “I hid it in the one place where I knew you would find it when you needed to.”
She gave vent to a faintly exasperated huff; when she was young, he had loved to play hide-and-seek with her, and he was diabolically good at devising hiding places that she never found. But this wasn’t any game. “Papa, please. Just tell me where.”
His smile deepened, but then his gaze slid to the side, going past her shoulder.
She turned to look and saw that the door was slightly ajar. She tensed to rise and shut it, but her father’s grip abruptly tightened. She glanced back to see his lids lowering, and he drew in a deeper, harsher breath and held it for a second, then softly, he sang, “Come, let’s go to bed, says sleepy-head. Let’s stay awhile, says slow.”
Tears gathered in her eyes as the near-forgotten lines of the lullaby, reproduced in the voice in which she’d always heard them, rolled over her, taking her back to her childhood, to when the man dying before her had been hale and strong and the center of her life.
Perhaps it was fitting that, as his life ebbed and he prepared to take his final leave of her, those four lines were the ones to which his mind, wandering, cleaved.
As he always had, he sang the single verse twice, his voice fading through the repeat.
Only this time, when he breathed the last word, it was his hand that fell limp in hers.
Tears streamed down her cheeks as she leant closer, touched her lips to his cheek, and murmured, “Papa?”
But she knew there would be no answer. Her father—her dearest papa—had breathed his last.
Slowly, she straightened on the stool, dimly aware that Herschel had reentered the room. He hovered for a moment by the door, then came forward, awkwardly laying a hand on her shoulder, then rounding the bed to check on her father, but the nurse in her knew there was nothing anyone could do.
Her father was gone, and she was alone.
The little girl within wailed as grief surged and rose and crashed down upon her.
CHAPTER1
SEPTEMBER 1, 1863. ENGLISH SECTION OF THE CITY CEMETERY, VIENNA.
In the mild sunshine of the early-autumn morning, comfortable in his guise of a successful businessman, Toby stood at the foot of the grave of the man he’d been sent to escort to England.
The inscription on the marble gravestone stated that Thaddeus Locke’s life had ended nearly three weeks ago.
Toby had to wonder if Locke’s death was due to natural causes or if someone had had a hand in it.
According to Toby’s contacts in the city, a team of two Prussian agents with whom Toby had the ill fortune to be acquainted had arrived within days of the dispatches going missing. It seemed certain the pair were there to retrieve the documents, and that it was Jager and Koch who had been sent was a clear indication of how seriously desperate the Germans were to get their hands on the missing packet.
Toby wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the Prussians had been involved in Locke’s death, yet his contacts had assured him that the Prussian pair were still in the city and had shown no interest in Locke or the surgery in Kleeblattgasse. It therefore seemed that they hadn’t, as yet, traced the packet to Locke.
Presumably, that meant that the dispatches remained wherever Locke had put them.
Toby stared unseeing at the small bouquet of flowers placed at the head of the grave. For an agent of his experience, this should have been a boringly straightforward mission, yet here he was with his principal charge dead and no idea where the critical asset—the unexpectedly intercepted dispatches—might be.
Obviously, his revised goal was to salvage what he could of the mission.
To avoid drawing unwanted attention to Locke and his household, Drake’s minions in the city had been under orders not to make direct contact of any sort, so they had observed only from a distance. Consequently, all Toby’s liaison had known was that Locke hadn’t been seen about town for several weeks; the presumption had been that he was lying low until Toby arrived. However, forever cautious, before approaching Locke’s surgery, Toby had chatted with nearby shopkeepers and, from them, had learned of Locke’s unexpected demise.
Toby still harbored doubts over Locke’s death—he found coincidences of unexpected events hard to swallow—but that was neither here nor there. Locke was dead, so where to now?
He refocused on the flowers. The funeral wreaths were long gone. This bunch was newer, most likely placed there by Locke’s grieving daughter, but the blooms and leaves had started to wilt. Presumably—hopefully—grief was waning.
The apothecary on the corner of Kleeblattgasse had been especially helpful. Not only had he told Toby that Locke’s practice was continuing under his Austrian partner, a Herr Herschel, but that Locke’s daughter was currently staying with an English widower, one Fellows, an academic at the university.
Toby’s contact had mentioned the Fellows household as one at which the daughter had spent a great deal of her time over recent months. The presumed relationship had been the foundation for the suggestion that the daughter might not wish to leave the city.
Now Locke was dead…
If Locke’s daughter wanted to remain in Vienna with Fellows, presumably to marry the man, Toby wouldn’t argue. Her handing him the dispatches and bidding him to leave without her would suit him to the ground; he could travel more quickly alone, and the faster he returned to London and delivered the dispatches, the sooner he could turn his mind to the vexed question of what to do with his life henceforth.
