Read The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller for Free Online Page B

forehead as if I were a young man on the mash.
    I refused to play along. “We have the compartment to ourselves, Mother,” I said, in a tone of We both know this, so what are all the theatrics for?
    She flared her hands in front of her. “Can’t we have a little fun, my darling? Improvisation? How long has it been since we rode a train together? We used to have so much fun.”
    I shrugged and looked out of the window beside me. A conductor strode past blowing his all-aboard whistle.
    “You were always a clever boy,” she said. “A talented boy.”
    We rode enough trains together between theater towns to circle the earth and circle it again. For as long as I could think back, we would play roles together to pass the time. Over the years, I was everyone from a beggar boy running away from an orphanage to a dry goods commercial traveler who was Isabel Cobb’s biggest fan and overwhelmed to meet her. She once had hopes I’d follow her into the theater.
    The train was moving now, and I turned back to Mother. She was watching out the window. Her face was blank. I knew the look. I’d seen it often, in stage wings just before she would make her first entrance. This blankness was all she would show of the actor’s inevitable terror of reinventing herself before a thousand strangers watching from the dark.
    This time her audience would be smaller and she would walk among them and things were at stake far beyond entertaining a theater crowd.
    I knew to let her be. The outward blankness would last until her entrance cue, and then she would come suddenly alive as if she’d flipped an electric light switch. I glanced at her only briefly and stealthily, but her preparatory state went on and on, through our run across the Thames and through Clapham and Herne Hill, with their old estates turning into middle-class commuter houses, and through our plunge into the dark of the long tunnel beneath the Crystal Palace. Here, the electric lights in the compartment flickered us into total darkness. We clattered through the blackness for a long moment, and when the lights flared back on again, I looked frankly at her and she had closed her eyes.
    I believed her fear.
    I wanted to reach out and take her hand.
    But I knew better.
    What would she take as her entrance cue on this day?
    The lights blinked off once more and then almost instantly back on and her eyes were open, as if they had been all along and what I’d seen was wrong.
    But she was still preparing.
    Only when we were above ground and finished with London and into the county of Kent and we were rushing through vast hops gardens, the plants beginning to bloom into gold, ready for the seasonal pickers to come down from the slums of London, only then did she turn her face back to me.
    “The curtain goes up,” she said.
    I nodded.
    “What the hell are you doing?” I said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “This role of yours.”
    “And you, my son? I was quite surprised to learn about your own specialized acting career.”
    “You already knew about me the other night.”
    “Of course.” She leaned forward and patted me on the knee. “Aren’t we having fun?”
    There was nothing to say to that. Of course she was.
    I decided to watch the hops for a while.
    Trask had briefed me before we parted at Buffington’s. I’d been invited to stay the weekend at Stockman House, his family estate high on the chalk cliffs between Broadstairs and Ramsgate. I was following Isabel Cobb, doing a feature story on her for the de facto syndicate of German-leaning American newspapers that were making my reputation. The news hook was the next stop on her tour of Hamlet . Berlin. A detail she deliberately withheld from our discussion of her tour in her dressing room. I was to stay alert to—even, at my discretion, seek out—evidence that Sir Albert was indeed actively aiding the German cause. My mother was doing the same.
    “This will be an interesting test of your new identity,” Trask had said.
    I