Velocity of a Secret Read online

  And you believe that dressing up as George Washington and donning a cheap white wig makes you fit to comment on military strategy? You know little, Mr. Buckley. I went only as far as the poste de secours, the field dressing stations closest to the fighting. I was never in No Man’s Land. And there’s a reason they call it that. It’s no place for anybody—woman or man. Yet soldiers did brave it, but here we are claiming victory in luxury.

  But Rose, the society darling with a reputation for a wicked tongue, had given none of those flippant answers, for she did not wish to cheapen the sacrifices and deaths of so many just to shock those who would never understand.

  She’d thrown this party to forget, but it had instead forced her to remember. Rose had even donned the literal garments of victory as if she could convince herself it was all true and that she had the right to feel a sense of accomplishment. But she was as silly as her own guests, thinking a pantomime had anything to do with patriotism or reality. Her costume just exposed her fraud. She hadn’t even been on the Western Front for the last few months but had watched the end of the hostilities as a faraway observer in Florida.

  Rose sucked on her cig but not enough for the tobacco to fall into her mouth. She hated the taste of it—unlike the bitter smoke. After weeks of an illness that had brought her home from France, she no longer missed the effects of the vice but merely yearned for the physical act. Rose needed the excuse to have something in her hands, something to distract her, something to wave about or to angrily stab. She’d be crushing the butt against the balustrade now if she could.

  “It was a mistake, throwing this party,” Rose said, whether to herself or to Myrtle, she didn’t know.

  Myrtle gave a sympathetic sigh as she turned away from the ocean.

  “Everyone expected it of you,” Myrtle pointed out. “Perhaps even you. It is natural for you to want to return to your old routines, your old life.”

  What kind of frivolous person had Rose been that her old everyday habits involved throwing massive parties on a regular basis?

  “Belle of the Ball, Hostess of Hilarity, Denizen of Drama, Motoriste of Mayhem.” Rose didn’t know why her voice sounded so bitter when she used to love those nicknames.

  After Rose had fulfilled her original time commitment to the French Army, she’d stayed despite the hopelessness. Like they all had. To fight a war, despite no one really, truly understanding why they were there in the first place.

  “You’ve still managed to hold the masquerade of the year despite just leaving your sickbed last week,” Myrtle said. Her blue eyes softened before she spoke again. “We were really afraid we were going to lose you.”

  Rose pulled the cigarette from her mouth. Staring down at the now-floppy butt, she wished she could feel something about her near death from the endless, relentless fever. Yet she did not. Not joy at her recovery nor fear at what could have been.

  Until yesterday, Rose had been planning on returning to France. After all, her parents’ staff were the ones who had arranged for her to be transferred back to the States in the first place when she’d been out of her mind with delirium from fever. If her parents had bothered to ask her, she would have said that she wanted to stay. Yet they hadn’t, just as they hadn’t spent long at her bedside. They’d absently taken care of her needs in the way that they’d seen fit, not realizing that once again they’d set her adrift.

  Rose didn’t want just material comfort, but she didn’t know what she did desire. Returning to her old life wouldn’t grant her peace. And with the cease-fire just declared, she no longer had any plans, no chance at finding direction.

  Again.

  She opened her beaded evening bag and retrieved her cigarette case. After withdrawing another tobacco-filled roll, she’d just started to lift it to her lips when the sky exploded.

  Charged energy shot through Rose’s body as she prepared to dodge shells and to protect the blessés she transported. Her organs seemed to reverberate with the boom, and she swore she could hear pebbles and dirt pinging against her steel helmet. Her hands clutched the wheel of her Tin Lizzie, but the Lucky Strike crumpled against her palm instead, dragging Rose back to reality. Breathing deeply, she watched as red and blue sparks drifted down from the now-dark sky.

  Fireworks. Not German shells. Fireworks.

  Trying to calm the nervous energy charging through her body and turning her limbs into jelly, Rose exhaled as a clamor arose behind her. She turned her head slowly like a sleepwalker and distantly watched through a jittery haze as a parade of Betsy Rosses, Abraham Lincolns, Patrick Henrys, Dolley Madisons, shepherdesses, and swashbucklers invaded her formerly quiet sanctuary. Annoyed, she began to swing her attention back to the inky sea. But just then another boom sounded, and one of the Betsy Rosses let out a shrill cry of excitement.

  Suddenly Rose was no longer on the veranda of her parents’ sprawling beach house in Daytona, Florida, but on a shell-blasted road in France.

  The boom of a shell smashed through the endless growl of traffic, followed by the hideous scream of the injured horse. Rose leaned closer to the windshield of her Model T, trying to find a space to squeeze the ambulance through the dark shadows shifting amorphously before her. She needed to find an opening. The French poilu and the British soldier in the back of her Tin Lizzie would not survive much longer without a surgeon. But the road before her was crowded with supply wagons, troops of all nationalities, and French refugees. Even with the snarl of desperate war traffic, she could not risk turning on the headlamps, not this close to the front lines. It would make her and the two patients targets for the Germans.

  Another shell exploded, so close that the concussive force slammed Rose’s faithful Ford to the right. She jerked the wheel left just as more inhuman cries of wounded equines surrounded her. A dark shadow was her only warning before hooves struck the left side of the ambulance. She tried to swerve, but it was too late. The draft horse’s powerful kick slammed the converted vehicle to the side. Helpless to stop the Model T from listing, Rose felt the tires on the left side leave the bumpy excuse for a road.

  Fragments of fear serrated her. Both her patients were near death, and she did not know if they could survive a jarring tumble.

  The Tin Lizzie smashed into a ditch. Rose’s shoulder took most of the impact. She hissed in pain, praying the machine would stop sliding. With another bump, the ambulance came to a rest, still on its side.

  Rose adjusted her metal helmet as she crawled from where she’d been slammed against the passenger door. She heard a low moan coming from the back. Scrambling through the overturned vehicle, she managed to reach her patients. The first man she touched felt cold . . . too cold. The poor blessé had probably died shortly after they’d left the poste de secours. Each loss still had the power to twist around her heart like a relentless, ever-present snake.

  The weak groan came again, and an alien sense of hope shot through Rose. The Englishman was still alive! Rose quickly moved toward the sound, her heart pumping against the constrictive band surrounding the abused muscle.

  In the darkness, a hand grabbed hers. The grip on her fingers was feeble yet unbreakable.

  “Spies. You. Must. Stop. Them. Now.”

  “Spies?” Rose felt like she’d just plunged beneath the surface of a frozen lake. “Is that what your mission was? To stop a plot against the Allies?”

  “Aye.” There was a surprising hint of the Isles in his polished upper-crust accent now. “But. No. Time. To. Explain. All. Written. Down.”

  Her patient’s voice had grown even raspier, as if he were pushing out the words by sheer effort alone, and perhaps he was. Even more concerning, his breathing had devolved into a labored wheezing—a sound Rose recognized all too readily. She did not reassure the man, tell him that he would be fine. She had given him enough false promises already. He would not survive the trip to the hospital as she’d sworn to him.

  This gentleman and she both knew the truth. He was dying.

  “Give. Him. A.
Message. He’ll . . . help.”

  “Who is ‘he’?” Rose asked, hearing this determined fellow’s desperation. Once again, she’d failed to save a patient, and the bloody, pointless war had won.

  The man did not seem to hear her. “Talk. Only. To. Him. Spies. Everywhere. Active everywhere.”

  The chill inside Rose turned into a ferocious windstorm. She’d heard many ravings of the blessés. Many had thought her their wife, their sweetheart, their mother, or even the enemy. She had held the hand of more than one dying man as she’d comforted him in French.

  But this.

  This was different.

  The British soldier was more lucid.

  More urgent.

  More impassioned.

  He had a mission, a purpose. And he was using his last breath to see that someone completed it, even if he himself could not.

  But his death didn’t mean this man’s quest would be snuffed out as well. Rose would see it through. That was a promise she could swear to fulfill.

  “Who are these foreign agents? Is this why you are wearing the uniform of a poilu?” She did not want to waste the man’s precious remaining time, but if he was speaking even a bit of truth, she needed more information.

  “Read. My. Notes. Find. Him. Go. To. Hamar . . .” The patient’s voice trailed off at the end.

  “Hammer?” Rose inquired.

  The man’s gasps became harsher, and Rose struggled to hear his next words. They sounded like a woman’s name. Tamsin? Tammy? With a last name of . . . Morris? Norris?

  “Tamsin Morris?” Rose asked, but once again the man did not seem to register her question. His last reserves appeared to be channeled into guiding Rose’s hand to his neck. His fingers trembled as he pressed her palm against something cool and metal. A key?

  “Unlocks. Notes. Give . . .” The man’s voice stuttered, and he made a visible effort to swallow, the air seeming to jangle inside his chest, leaking from places where it shouldn’t be escaping. “Him.”

  “This is the key to where you’ve locked up your records on the spies?” Rose spoke rapidly, trying to make sure she understood the instruction before it was too late. “And you want me to give him the key?”

  “Aye.” Again, that tease of a brogue.

  “Who?” she asked urgently.

  The man’s fingers began to loosen around hers, but she kept her hand pressed against the key, sensing it would give him comfort.

  “Who?” she repeated, desperate now.

  His exhale shook his body, his next words sounding like the rustle of wind through dry leaves.

  “Tell. Him. I’m. Sorry.”

  Then he was gone like so many others before. And she was left with the emptiness and the hopelessness of another soul destroyed before their time. But his words . . . they haunted Rose.

  “Rose, dear heart, Rose?”

  She blinked at the sound of Myrtle’s voice, quiet and concerned.

  With a jolt, the present returned, like a painted stage backdrop had been unfurled. Gasping a bit, Rose swiveled her head, finding herself in a secluded corner of the veranda. The rest of the partygoers clung to the railing, their wonder-filled faces lifted toward the fireworks display.

  “Do you need help over there?” Mrs. Phillips asked in a booming voice. “I can get Dr. Stevens. He’s here with his wife.”

  “No, we’re fine.” Myrtle waved cheerily to the woman. “It was just too much air for Rose out by the balustrade.”

  “Of course.” Mrs. Phillips nodded, sending her white cartoonish mobcap bobbing. “Poor lamb.”

  Rose—whose heart was still knocking like an engine with a misaligned distributor—twisted her face at the epithet. But she did not protest. If she did, Mrs. Phillips might see past Myrtle’s fib. The woman had a keen eye and an even keener tongue for gossip. Rose did not need it blabbed about that she was subject to feminine attacks of nerves—even if she had been jumpy ever since her return.

  Thankfully, the fireworks display distracted the kindhearted but nosy busybody. As soon as Mrs. Phillips’s back was turned, Rose sank against the coquina concrete walls of her parents’ Spanish Revival mansion. The coolness of the facade sank into her, and her legs stopped tingling. Taking another breath to calm her pumping blood, Rose realized she was clutching the key around her neck—Viscount Barbury’s key.

  She’d had to call upon her famous father’s connections to learn the identity of the man who’d died that night in her ambulance. He’d been a lieutenant in the British Army and the heir apparent to an earldom. No one could, or at least would, explain why he had been in No Man’s Land in a French rather than British sector.

  Rose had just learned his name when she’d fallen ill herself. She still had no idea who the mysterious “he” was, what “hammer” meant, how Tamsin Morris was connected, or whether the wounded noble had been delusional.

  But now the war itself was over and, with it, the urgency to complete Viscount Barbury’s mission. Rose had, it appeared, broken her second promise to him after all.

  Releasing Barbury’s key, Rose tried to regulate her breath. This was not the first time that she’d found herself palpably reliving the shelling, and she very much feared it would not be the last.

  “Thank you,” she murmured to Myrtle, knowing that her friend had dragged her into the shadows to protect her from wagging tongues. Myrtle was one of the few who knew about Rose’s particular ailment. Some of her parents’ staff had witnessed her retreat into the past, of course. Rose was certain they had not told her mother. If they had, Verity Van Etten would have fluttered into Rose’s sickroom, all dramatic tears and protestations of how her own nerves could not handle her only child’s illness. Everyone but Mother needed to be the strong one, the healthy one, the steady one.

  Rose supposed the servants would have confided in her father. He abided no secret keeping from his employees. Rose had also noted that the number of nurses attending her had multiplied, and more specialists had arrived with increasingly impressive degrees. Yet her father himself had not visited her more than a handful of times. There were charities to oversee, hotels to run, and investments to monitor.

  But Myrtle had been there, taking a sabbatical from her position as a professor of archaeology to push and prod Rose into fighting back against the illness racking her body. Her old college chum had also helped Rose break through those moments when the war seemed to drag her back to the pitted roadways of the Western Front.

  “I need to take the Stutz out,” Rose rasped. Fast driving used to be her favorite escape. Before the war, she’d enjoyed whiskey, cigarettes, and handsome men, but she’d loved racing. Even when everything else had felt meaningless in her gilded life, she could always feel a spark of something more as she sped along, the wind buffeting her.

  Myrtle peered at her in concern. “Are you certain that is a good idea tonight?”

  Rose allowed very few people to question her readiness to take the wheel, but luckily for Myrtle’s sake, she was one of them. Instead of a withering retort, Rose just rolled her shoulders and opened and closed her hands to chase away the last of the tingling remnants of sensation.

  “It is what I need, M,” Rose said softly. But would a fast drive provide even a modicum of relief? Or would a race to nowhere prove as aimless as it ultimately was?

  She sorely hoped not, as it was her only escape left.

  The Stutz Bearcat zipped across the wide stretch of beach. The pale silvery light reflected off the white sands, and Rose felt like she was driving on a moonbeam. Her headlamps provided more illumination as she sallied forth through the blankness. With the wind stirred up by her charging sports car, she couldn’t hear the ocean. If she looked to the left, she could see the faint sparkle of the waves. If she glanced to the right, she might catch the faintest outline of towering cabbage palms.

  But Rose maintained her focus on the white-gray-and-black nothingness unraveling before her. This stretch of beach was private, and she risked no one but herself
in this mad midnight dash. She attempted a half-hearted battle cry. Hoping a second would turn into a real one, she forced more sound from her lungs. Although she did not experience the halcyon rush of her old racing days, some of the cobwebs growing inside her soul seemed to sway, as if preparing to blow away. Rose had always felt the most alive when hurtling at breakneck speeds.

  Finally her heart began to pound, not from rootless fear but from excitement. In the blankness, Rose found a modicum of solace—not peace but a temporary balm. Trying out a third manufactured whoop, she spun the wheel and made a broad turn, heading back in the direction she’d come.

  The muscles in Rose’s back had just begun to loosen when the headlamps revealed a stack of beach chairs. Her tendons immediately retightened. It made no sense for the furniture to be in the center of the sand. She’d whizzed through this stretch of shoreline only minutes before. Swerving to avoid the collision, she stomped on the brake pedal.

  But nothing happened.

  Desperately, Rose yanked back on the hand brake lever.

  Still nothing.

  Neither the skill of the Bearcat’s designers nor her own agility as a driver was a match for the physics of loose sand. The tires on the right side of the Stutz dug in, and the left lifted into the air. Rose’s body shot skyward.

  Fear lacerated Rose, but the raw panic slid into an instinct to survive, just like on the Front. She tucked her body, protecting her head from impact. Although she attempted to roll when she hit the sand, her back slammed into the ground with such a terrific force the displaced grit landed on her stomach. The air was expelled from her body in a painful whoosh.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d been launched from an auto, but nothing could prepare a person for having the wind so efficiently knocked from them. The helplessness was worse than the pain. She was truly trapped now—both internally and externally. And she was damned tired of being immobilized.

  “Bloody hell!”

  Rose wanted to turn her head at the words spoken with a British accent, but she couldn’t manage it. She didn’t want anyone to see her sprawled on the ground, especially one of her guests. Frantically, she tried to force air into her body even as her lungs protested. The low-key tension that had seemed to simmer inside her since the war burst into full-scale panic.