Archive of Our Own ^beta

When they had walked far enough from the folly to be out of earshot, Fen asked, “Was that all for Mr. Curtis’s benefit, or did Daniel actually upset you?”

“Both,” Pat answered. “Mr. Curtis isn’t here just as a guest, and Daniel figured out why the rooms are so queer: they’ve got people and probably cameras behind the mirrors.”

“What?” Fen cried. “Ugh.”

“Exactly. And we’re as good as dead if we let on that we know. But how I’m to last even one more night in there without firing at the fucking peepers…”

“Ugh,” Fen repeated. She started to reach for Pat’s hand—and then thought better of it, given what they’d learned. There was no one in sight, but that didn’t mean anything, in light of what Daniel had just confirmed about their hosts.

Nodding at the demonstration of caution, Pat kicked at a rock with extra vehemence.

“What does Mr. Curtis have to do with this?” Fen asked.

“Daniel doesn’t know yet.”

Fen made a face. “He seemed like the nicest man here.”

“Low bar to clear. And he did get on awfully well with Mr. Holt.”

“That could just be them having boxing in common.” Fen tilted her head. “He’s better at acting than Lewis Waller, if he’s faking being that bad at flirting.”

“Daniel does enough for them both,” Pat said, unexpectedly grinning. “Just as you do for me.”

Fen dimpled. “Poor Mr. Curtis. He doesn’t know the fun he’s missing out on.”

“It isn’t fun for him, and that’s rather the point. Though I do wonder…” Their eyes met.

“You saw it too?” Since Rodington Court, they’d both become well versed at recognising men who preferred men.

“God help him if Daniel decides to flirt with him in earnest.”

“Do you think he’ll know what hit him?”

“As long as he doesn’t hit Daniel. If I see any sign of that…”

Fen’s eyes danced, but she said, “Daniel can take care of himself. You need to keep your guns and your temper stowed away until we find out what the Armstrongs have to do with Lady Graham’s death.”

On the train, it was a relief to shed the silly/prim act they’d maintained through the rest of their stay at Peakholme, including their own debriefing with Sir Maurice Vaizey. They’d pointed out to him the photographs of Lady Graham; he’d promptly given them a new assignment.

“Poor Archie,” Fen murmured, reaching for Pat’s hand.

Pat’s smile was wry. “I didn’t have to shoot him. All will be well.”

Fen arched a brow. “You sound very sure.”

“They’re not half as incoherent as Bill and Jimmy, and every bit as smitten.”

Their eyes met, and they simultaneously burst into laughter.

Madame Rongier’s club was marvellous because one didn’t have to have artistic talent or aspirations to attend its sketching parties. The participation of ladies like Fen and Pat helped cover models’ fees and provide supplies for the more gifted but less pecunious members.

They had met Madame Rongier during a case, and the club had brought other Bureau business to them, but they were still caught by surprise when the hostess unveiled Archie Curtis for nude figure studies. Pat lost her war with giggling when Fen whispered, “Mon Dieu, far better than marble. Do you think she’ll get Daniel too?”

Apparently a bet had been involved. Archie’s explanation hadn’t been coherent, but Pat didn’t actually want details and Fen didn’t press for them. But when Daniel posed for the club a year later, Madame Rongier gathered up all the sketches at the end of the session, announcing that the lot would be given to an anonymous collector who had donated the equivalent of a travel scholarship, to send a worthy artist to Berlin.

Something terribly wrong had happened there, but the men’s lies about that mission were so brazen that all Fen and Pat could do was laugh at them.

After seeing Sir Maurice out, Pat returned to the parlour: Daniel’s eyes were snapping. Archie’s remained closed in mortification. Fen’s face was streaked with tears—not from consternation, but from laughing.

“Do settle down,” Pat said to Daniel, cutting off the curses he’d been about to let fly. “At least you weren’t completely bare when he walked in. Which is more than certain colleagues can say, which is why Fenella here has lost all composure.”

“Ah,” Daniel said, looking significantly less affronted.

“I was laughing at them,” Fen confessed, once they were alone.

“I still am,” Pat admitted, lips twitching.

Of the visitors to Fen’s hospital, Archie and Daniel were two of the most popular. It was shocking, how time had flown: many of her patients had been in the cradle or nursery when she’d first met the men.

Late at night, it soothed her to write about how soldiers felt they could rant and rail to Archie without fear of seeming less manly. Daniel’s jokes were the right kind of terrible. Fen pictured Pat wincing and chuckling at them, which was like enjoying them a second time. Which was better than crying again over how much she missed Pat.

Surveying her masquerade guests from a balcony, Fen was pleased at the turnout. It included a lean man in a headscarf making gnomic utterances in the company of a similarly lean man dressed as a lady antiquarian with a parasol. A wheat sheaf with unruly eyebrows held ribbons attached explicably to a dark-haired maypole and less explicably to a distinctly agile chicken that had scaled its way up to the balcony during a minor kerfuffle earlier in the evening.

“It’s not cricket when people show up to this sort of thing in work clothes,” Archie mock-complained, nodding to a blonde aviatrix clinking glasses with a very curvy Cleopatra.

Daniel snorted. “Did Mademoiselle Zie conquer Alexandria while we were busy?”

Archie was acres better at banter than he used to be, but he merely rolled his eyes. Pat declared, “She absolutely could have, if she’d wanted to.”

Fen pointed out, “The people who know of Fee piloting planes for you also know better than to say so.”

“Still not cricket,” Archie intoned. “The young people should be making more of an effort. Their idle ways will be the ruin of the country.”

It was such an accurate parody of Daniel that Fen and Pat both cackled loudly.

“Quiet,” Daniel managed, trying to look severe and failing.

“Shan’t,” Archie replied. “Someone has to keep you in line while Madame Rongier has your protégés corralled.” Their eyes all swerved to another corner of the ballroom, where a feminine incarnation of Cyrano de Bergerac was holding forth to a cowgirl with a purple lariat and her prize bull.

“I should put her in charge of the Bureau,” Daniel muttered. “She has more sense than the two of them together on a good day.”

“That’s too much sense for anyone willing to follow your footsteps,” Pat observed.

Daniel greeted this with a snort of appreciation. “Far too true.” His eyes fixed on the tableau in the corner, he quietly added, “Far better having had you all by my side, for all these years.”

For a long beat, they silently basked in their memories of all the times they’d come through for one another.

Then Daniel spotted the flash of Cyrano’s sword, lifted against—“I didn’t invite him!” Fen exclaimed, glaring at the Ruritanian intruder.

“Of course you didn’t,” Archie sighed, hurrying after Daniel towards the staircase.

Pat stayed where she was, hand in her pocket.

Fen pouted. “I really did think I would win our wager. That—for a change—nothing about tonight would get into the papers.”

Pat grinned. “I’m looking forward to Madame’s next sketching soirée. Even though I can’t draw you properly, someone else there surely will.”