‘Why do you think the French helped you when they arrived in Cairo?’ Sir James asked, without the slightest indication he had heard what she said.
‘Because of the savants. My father is a scholar and they, being more observant, or perhaps less insanely suspicious than you are, thought he would contribute to their efforts.’
‘So they facilitated his move to an area they controlled, they arranged a marriage between his daughter and a French officer and they took over his postal arrangements?’
‘Yes.’ Postal arrangements... ‘That is what this is about, isn’t it? My father’s correspondence.’ She stood and confronted Quin, who sat back in his chair, but made no move to stand. ‘You were prying into his letters. Did you search our tent? Is that why you locked up his boxes when we landed here?’
He nodded. ‘And you did not suspect anything?’
Cleo put her knuckles on the table and leaned forward so she could stare deep into his eyes. ‘Suspect that you were up to something? Yes, of course I did. And like a fool I did not tell Capitaine Laurent of my suspicions because I knew he would torture you and I was too soft-hearted to contemplate that. And this is how you repay me.’
There was colour over Quin’s cheekbones, but he did not rise to her taunts. ‘Did you suspect that the French were using your father’s correspondence to channel information from spies and informers across the world?’
‘Why should they bother with one man’s antiquarian gossip?’ She sat down again, twitching her limp skirts around her feet with a disdainful flick.
‘Because that is how intelligence operates.’ It was Quin who answered her. ‘Endless tiny details building into one large picture. Agents wrote to your father from major English ports, from London, from militarily strategic parts of India, from all around the Mediterranean. Their outgoing letters would have raised no suspicions. Antiquarian gossip, as you say—but it was full of codes. The French in Cairo slit the seals, read the letters and passed them on to your father.
‘Troop movements, ship movements, political intrigue, economic intelligence. Tiny grains of sand, just like the ones that irritate between your toes—and which mound up when the wind is right into vast dunes that can swamp a village.’
‘Or an army, or a fleet,’ Sir James added.
‘And you think my father knew this?’ There was an odd buzzing in her ears. Her fingers hurt and when she looked down she found they were twisted tight into the muslin of her skirts.
‘That is what I need to find out,’ Sir James said. ‘If he is innocent of anything except gullibility, then he can help us establish just who is genuine and who is not. There is a mass of paper to sift through.’
‘And if he is not innocent?’
Sir James just looked at her.
If they find Father guilty of this, they will... For the first time in her life Cleo knew she was about to faint. The air darkened, as though someone was slowly drawing a curtain. The buzzing sound filled her ear and she was falling.
‘Very convenient,’ said a dispassionate voice.
‘I think it is genuine,’ said another, close to her. One she knew.
‘I never faint...’ Cleo reached out her hands and found fingers, warm, strong fingers that held her as the world went black.
* * *
She had been dreaming, Cleo decided. She never fainted and she was in bed, so it must have been a dream. Only...it had all made sense. Her father’s letters, the French assistance, the way Quin had acted.
If she kept her eyes closed, none of it would be real. That was what she had told herself when she was a little girl, frightened in yet another strange town where she did not speak the language, where she was hungry or uncomfortable, where Mama was crying quietly.
It hadn’t worked then and it would not work now, she knew. Still, she would huddle under a sheet and pretend to be asleep while she thought. No one could expect her to speak when she was asleep. Speak and risk saying something that would condemn Father.
What was the worst possibility? That he was a deliberate spy, that he had bought French protection and the opportunity to study his beloved ruins unmolested at the cost of betraying the country of his birth. They would shoot him for that.
The best she could hope for was that the British believed he had been an unknowing dupe. He would be shamed and humiliated, his precious circle of correspondents shattered.
She did not think she loved her father. Any affection for him had been worn out over years of indifference, of emotional neglect, of learning painfully that he was a selfish man who had broken her mother’s heart. But he was still her father and she would not have left him unless she had been certain he would be cared for.