The Dardanelles Conspiracy by Alan Bardos (best ereader for pc TXT) 📗

‘At last, yes please. After all that drivel, I was starting to wonder if the war had actually blunted your sword.’ She pouted. ‘You can still perform, can’t you? You haven’t been wounded or gone lame, after all the money I gave the porters?’

‘I’m sure her ladyship will find me to be in satisfactory working order,’ Johnny said cupping her face in his hands.

‘I expect a damned sight more than satisfactory.’

Johnny pulled her towards him and kissed her lightly on the lips and moved his hand down the back of her dress, searching for the fastenings.

‘Ouch, what are you doing now?’

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Johnny said, resisting the urge not the rip the thing off her.

‘Oh, you’re quite useless.’ Libby pushed him away and neatly removed her dress, revealing a violet taffeta chemise that matched the ink of the letter she’d sent him.

With all the preliminaries achieved and his passage secured, Johnny was able to relax and glory in the moment. The way things were going he doubted that he’d have many more. Libby lay in his arms, briefly appeased, but he knew that it was just the quiet before the storm returned.

He buried his face in her thick honey blonde hair and was disappointed to find that it didn't smell of disinfectant. 'You smell like a summer meadow.'

'And you stink of soil and cheap brandy,' she murmured.

Johnny was slightly hurt but supposed it must be true. Staff Nurse Lee-Perkins had done her best to clean him up, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd taken a bath.

He moved his hand over Libby's long tapering body, to her small, pink breasts. Everything about her had the utmost economy and the least amount of excess. Anything else would simply have been gauche. She was quite different from his bouncy Staff Nurse, and he adapted his new line appropriately. 'I thought women like you only existed in the imagination of classical sculptors.'

‘That sounds like something you've said before,’ Libby purred. 'But I quite like it, you never used to be so fanciful.'

‘That’s what happens when you spend months in a muddy ditch, dreaming of this moment. I want to be as familiar and as expert with your body as I am with my rifle.’ Johnny was pretty sure he hadn't used that line before.

‘How charming.'

‘I need to remember you as you are, every inch of you, every blemish, every mole, every hair, each tells the story of this moment.’

‘I’m not Braille.’ Libby sounded amused by the idea, then her voice almost softened. ‘So you will go back then?’

‘I have to…’ Johnny felt queasy at the idea, but he couldn’t see what else he could do.

‘You can’t go back to your regiment, you’ll be shot,’ she said, turning to look at him.

‘No, well, I was thinking about joining the French Foreign Legion,’

‘That doesn’t really sound like much of a plan, Johnny.’

‘I don’t know what else to do, I have a duty. I’ll get off at the next station and make my way back to France somehow. Could you lend me some money?’

‘Really, I find that most insulting. Here we are naked in bed together, living the moment you have apparently been dreaming of for months and you don’t know what else to do apart from run off!’

Johnny could feel her hand urgently running up the inside of his thigh and whatever he’d been talking of was lost on the winds of lust.

Johnny felt at peace for the first time in months, as their train chugged its way across the Venice causeway. The winter sun reflected on the lagoon around them, burning off the early morning mist and picking out murky greens and blues in the water.

They alighted the train and were greeted by a light snow and the usual swarm of porters. One of them even snatched Johnny’s valise out of his hand.

Johnny held Libby’s arm and guided her through the pillared platform and out onto a large piazza in front of the station. Mist hung over the doom of a spectacular church on the opposite side of a large canal, which was lined with a collection of elegantly decaying renaissance and medieval palaces.

The smell of the sea and the sound of screaming gulls reminded Johnny of his childhood seaside holidays in Wales. He looked at Libby. Venice to him was a seductive blonde and the promise of carefree nights, gliding through moonlight canals in this fairy tale city.

The porters had hailed one of the teaming gondolas and Johnny moved down the station steps towards them, with Libby.

‘You’re a slippery bastard aren’t you, Swift?’ A soft Irish brogue stopped Johnny in his tracks. Fitzmaurice was standing in front of him.

‘Fitzy, have you followed me all the way here?’ Johnny went to push past him and found a revolver stuck in his guts.

‘I’ve told you, I do not appreciate being addressed in that manner,’ Fitzmaurice said, and for a sick man, he could put a lot of bile into his words.

Two men grabbed Johnny’s arms before he could knock the pistol aside. Fitzmaurice sneered, ‘You needn’t have run off like that, you could have come along for the pilgrimage and still made our connection. We were all travelling on the same train. As it is, I dread to think how far behind you are on your Turkish. Call yourself a scholar of languages?’

A cold wind blew maliciously through the piazza and Johnny looked at Libby, not believing it to be true. He’d allowed himself to be tricked by her. ‘You planned all this. Doesn’t anything matter to you?’

‘Oh, Johnny, really. George needed a way of ensuring you stayed on the train.’ Libby smiled enigmatically. He’d been beguiled by her, again, and now she was casting him out