Chapter Three
Istanbul, Turkey, 1925
Sean watched the vivacious young chit as she wound her way through the throngs of people. From his balcony vantage point on the sixth floor of the hotel, his eyes easily found her, clad in a conspicuous red dress and looking for all the world like she was the focal point of one of those paintings where everything else was brown. He had trailed her all the way from Ravenna, where she’d gone with her friends. At first, he had thought she’d finally decided to behave herself and was genuinely holidaying with girls she used to go to school with. But then, she had parted company with them and hopped onto a boat to Greece, from where she had journeyed to her current position, in Istanbul.
He didn’t think she was safe here; he’d heard so many tales of women disappearing around the border without a trace, and while he was sure it wasn’t the Turks doing the kidnapping, there was certainly something amiss. He didn’t want Bobbie to go through the terror of being taken by someone against her will, and possibly being sold to some rich warlord from a neighbouring country, so he had to keep her in his sights at all costs.
More to the point, he wanted to know what she was doing here. He hadn’t glimpsed her travel plans, and it seemed that this time, she was holding her cards very closely to her chest, because she hadn’t informed any of the ticket clerks, car drivers, or hotel assistants of her intended destination. There were plenty of safer places for a young woman to rebel against her parents. And she was rebelling, regardless of how she denied it. While he didn’t really think she should get married if she disliked the idea, she did need to stop fighting her station in life, which was eventually to administer the huge tracts of land her father owned, when he died, and to take care of the five villages that depended on her family’s large and productive estate.
Sean could trace his family back centuries, to a small village near Dunfermline, north of Edinburgh, on the other side of the Firth of Forth. His ancestors had moved to Edinburgh a hundred years earlier because the local laird hadn’t been able to manage his lands, and had ultimately lost them.
Sean had heard the story from his grandfather a thousand times: his family had arrived in Edinburgh with one almost empty suitcase containing all their worldly goods. They had worked all the hours of the day to get out of the poverty trap, and had passed down that relentless work ethic, until a hundred years later, Sean had been left with a comfortable existence, if not an especially wealthy one.
He had a bit of income from other ventures, and enough money that he didn’t really need this job, but his sense of honour dictated that he needed to do his best to protect Bobbie, and his hardworking nature wouldn’t allow him to let her get away from him when she was only going to put herself in more danger.
He watched Bobbie through his field glasses, as she went into a particular shop. When she didn’t come out after ten minutes, he cursed and went indoors, before clattering down six flights of stairs to the entrance hall, where he dashed out of the front door and straight into a tarry sea of people, whose only purpose in life seemed to be to amble, ensuring Sean was moving at the speed of treacle pouring out of a jar. The more energy he put into trying to get down the road, the more resistance the crowd gave him. He retraced Bobbie’s steps and stopped dead when he saw where she’d gone: It was a hairdresser’s shop, and she was getting a cut, by the looks of it.
Was this a good time to make it known that he was here? Probably not. She could escape in any number of ways between the hairdresser’s shop and where her hotel was, to which he was sure she would insist on returning to collect her belongings, giving her the perfect chance to get away. No, this time, he would lure her into a trap.
He breathed, then tried to return to his hotel, but going in the opposite direction to the stodgy crowd was even more difficult, and he found himself jostled, bumped, and shouted at in what he assumed was Turkish before he finally got back to the cool marble hallway, from which it was a quick job to ascend to the correct floor once more.
He settled down to read a book. He’d started The Thirty-Nine Steps recently, which was an exciting adventure set in the Highlands of Scotland, and Sean wanted to know how Richard Hannay was going to get out of his current predicament.
It was unsettling, though, reading about all the intrigue and espionage that the author thought had been going on before the Great War. The trades and deals that took place beneath the surface of the outbreak of war were fascinating, but Sean didn’t want to think about it too deeply, because he didn’t want to know whether he had been fighting on the right side or not. At the end of the day, he’d gone to war because it was the right thing to do and he wanted to keep his country safe. Anything else, any other information, wasn’t important.
He hoped that the Germans were able to make their peace with their role in the fighting, too. He remembered Christmas 1914, the football match, where everyone had gotten out of the trenches, and for a brief moment, there was the distinct sense that everyone involved were people; real people. They all shared humanity and the same adverse situation. They had all signed up to defend their countries, but what were they defending them from? If both sides had just stopped, what would have happened? The conflict had originally been between Austria and Serbia, and yet, in a field in France, school leavers too young to shave from Germany and Britain were stuck in an unmovable standoff, killing one another slowly for no real gain.
So on Christmas Day, they had stopped. Carefully emerged from the trenches. Kicked about an old tin that young Corporal Jenkins had found, because nobody had brought a real football. The offside rule wasn’t even considered. But it was footie. And they hadn’t been able to stretch their legs in weeks. As a lieutenant at the time, Sean knew he shouldn’t have allowed it. He knew there was a good chance he’d get court-martialled for allowing the men to fraternize with the enemy. But for that one shining moment, they had needed to glimpse the fact that the Germans were people, too.
And then they’d all returned to their own sides and the next day they’d picked up their guns and started shooting each other again. Sean got away with letting the football happen because dozens of other lieutenants had made the same decision on Christmas Day, and the British and German armies would have swiftly run out of officers if everyone had been held accountable. It was the politest and least confrontational mutiny in military history.
Sean tried not to remember the fact that young Corporal Jenkins had been killed the very next day by a trench mortar, but now, the young man’s face haunted him again. The lad had been a fantastic footballer. Under other circumstances, he would have played for England. Instead, he lay dead in a field in Flanders.
Sean didn’t like to think about any of it, because it was hard to reconcile the side of him that had shot other men, whose only crime was to be on the other side of No-Man’s Land, with the side of him that only wanted to be protective. He knew he hadn’t survived due to any kind of military prowess; it had been sheer luck that kept him from getting killed for four years. Most of the men who had been deployed in 1914 hadn’t lasted two years out there. It was bad fortune, and nothing more. Sean had hated living in a world where he could be talking to someone one minute, then moving their dead body a moment later. Bobbie, despite her travels and desire for adventure, would never truly understand what that was like, and he hoped for her sake that she never experienced it first-hand.
Being a bodyguard for an heiress was frustrating, but better, somehow. He wouldn’t trade his team’s camaraderie for anything in the world, and if he’d had his time again, he’d join up without hesitation, but… he was still very glad the war was over.
Following Bobbie was a full-time job, but Sean knew he had to take good care of her. She was precious, to her parents if nobody else, and he was determined to ensure she didn’t get herself killed while she was out gallivanting around the world looking for old things. He’d seen too many people he cared about meet untimely deaths, some of them younger than her, and he wanted to make sure she was safe.
If only he could convince her to settle down at home, perhaps he’d get a chance to find a girl of his own, instead of constantly chasing after something he couldn’t have. Memories of tying Bobbie up in Sweden came to the fore again, and Sean put his book down to find a cold bath. He wanted nothing more than to bind her with rope like that while she was completely naked, then take her, hard, until she screamed her release and begged him for more.