The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller by Robert Olen Butler Page A

castle, and it bustled with bodies setting up the high-tea food service for the public. The marquee directly ahead of me, due west, about a hundred yards away, was the source of the waltz, the salon musicians dimly visible at the far end, on an elevated platform. To the left was the third tent, set with folding chairs, and flowing past it was the vanguard of the public, now unleashed upon the grounds, some peeling off to sit, some moving on toward the music, others veering away to prime places on the grass and beginning to spread blankets.
    I was glad for the hubbub. Martin and all the other Gray Suits would be the watchers tonight, stationed out here, keeping an eye on the unsorted public wandering the grounds. They’d have their hands full. Stockman would be working his constituents, with Isabel Cobb on his arm. I needed to be patient. And careful. But I figured I’d have a chance to look around inside. For only a limited amount of time, however. I needed to think this out. To make a plan.
    Something moved at the right periphery of my sight.
    I looked.
    The other Gray Suit had stepped up even with me, a few yards away. He had a boxer’s battered-and-mended nose and close-cropped dark hair.
    He did not look my way. He was watching the flow of townspeople.
    I strolled into the green.
    I tried to reason things through. If Sir Albert spent much time at Stockman House—and it seemed that he did—the confirmation of his connection to the Germans was somewhere in the castle. The most likely place was wherever he did his personal work. An office. I kept moving toward the music marquee.
    But I was mostly thinking about the house behind me.
    “Songe d’Automne” dipped and rose and dipped again, to a finish.
    I was nearing the tent. The elevated musicians were silhouetted against the now sunlit distant tree line.
    Men in seersucker and women in percale were flowing into the chairs set before the music.
    The ensemble struck up “Maple Leaf Rag,” the song’s brothel-born syncopations sounding odd with all the inappropriate strings. But the smattering of gathering crowd applauded in recognition.
    I stopped and turned to look back at the house.
    My eyes instantly were drawn to the flapping of the British flag up its high pole on the Gothic tower. The wind was brisk. The sun was shining.
    All of this registered on me as stage whiskers and greasepaint, this elaborately fortified flag and the high-society orchestra putting on music hall airs. Stockman was trying hard to be English, and a man of the people, no less.
    Where was his office? Not on the kitchen and bachelor side of the castle, surely. Perhaps over the library. But more likely in the south wing, the family quarters. It was formalized as private. Visitors knew never to wander there. And he no longer had any family residing with him. I’d go there first, when I had the chance.
    I turned away from the house but wished, as well, to distance myself from the music. I walked north, toward the cliff edge along the gate, passing the marquee next to the service wing. The black-and-white-liveried kitchen staff was laying out food on a long row of folding tables. At the end of it, three men in blue serge were setting up another row at a right angle. Two of these boys were heading toward a stack of collapsed tables a few yards outside the tent while the third was unfolding the legs of the next table in the new line.
    I realized these guys were dressed not only like each other but also like the baggage handler who met us at the station. These were indeed de facto uniforms. The blue suits were the privates in Stockman’s army. I thought all this and slowed a step or two as I did and it all happened quickly: as I was about to turn my attention again toward the cliff, the man in the tent popped the last leg of the table into place and looked up.
    I stopped.
    He turned his face to me.
    It was the stage-door lug from the Duke of York’s.

9
    Of course he was Stockman’s man.
    I broke