Shadows of War Read Online Free Page B

blue eyes twinkling. ‘Are you ready?’
    Fruity grinned back. ‘I certainly am.’
    The duke turned to his wife.
    ‘Give my love to Charles, Dave,’ Wallis said. Fruity winced. The duke’s family and his closest friends called him by the seventh of his many Christian names, ‘David’, instead of the first, ‘Edward’. But Dave?
    ‘And to Fern,’ the duchess went on. ‘I haven’t seen her for years. See if you can arrange for all of us to meet up soon, will you, sweetheart?’
    ‘I will, darling. Let’s go, Fruity!’
    The duke’s Buick was waiting outside, piloted by his chauffeur Webster, with a former Scotland Yard detective in the front seat next to him. Fruity and the duke climbed in the back.
    ‘I was just writing up my notes for the Wombat,’ said the duke. ‘The Wombat’ was Major General Howard-Vyse, the senior British liaison officer at French headquarters.
    ‘I’d say it was rather a successful trip,’ Fruity said. They had just spent five days together touring a portion of the French lines.
    ‘I suppose so,’ said the duke. ‘But they are a frightful shower, the French, aren’t they? I’ve done my best to point it out tactfully, but it’s damned difficult.’
    It was their third trip. The duke had been given a job at the British Mission to the French headquarters at Vincennes, reporting to the Wombat. In that role he was to inspect the French lines in a series of tours, but he had also been given the task of reporting back to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London with an assessment of the strengths and especially weaknesses of the French defences.
    They had started near the Channel, where the powerful French 7 th Army was poised to speed north following a German invasion of Belgium, and then worked their way east. Their most recent trip had been to the French 2 nd Army stationed along the Meuse in the Ardennes, at the hinge where the Maginot Line along the Franco-German border met neutral Luxembourg and Belgium.
    The duke was right: the 2 nd Army was a frightful shower led by a complacent idiot, a general named Huntziger. But Fruity enjoyed driving around the lines with the Little Man, hundreds of miles from Wallis. The further he strayed from her petticoats, the more the duke loosened up, the more fun he was.
    The Buick cruised down the wide avenue du Président-Wilson towards the centre of Paris. Headlights of oncoming motor cars were barely covered; strips of light spilled out between inadequate blinds in the cafés. Where London was battened down under a grim black cloak, Paris at night was lifting its hem to show some garter.
    The Little Man might have to rush back to Mrs Nibs after dinner, but that didn’t mean Fruity had to.
    ‘How was Bedaux?’ the duke said. ‘I haven’t seen him for nearly two years now.’
    ‘Back to his old self,’ Fruity said. ‘Has a finger in every pie. Knows everything. Dashing about the place: Holland, England. I even got the impression he was going to Germany.’
    ‘Really? How the devil does he manage that?’
    ‘He’s a Yank, isn’t he? Neutral passport.’
    ‘He’s a man of the world, if ever there was one,’ the duke said. ‘I look forward to seeing him again. That man certainly has imagination. And energy.’
    ‘And he was very keen to see you.’
    Very keen. Fruity was staying at the Ritz, and a few days before he had been accosted by Charles Bedaux, a fellow resident of the hotel. Bedaux was a Franco-American businessman, frightfully rich, who had amassed his pile from time-and-motion studies or something. He was a friend of a friend of Wallis’s and had made his chateau available for her wedding to the duke. It was a fine place on the Loire, and Bedaux and his American wife Fern had been the perfect hosts.
    It wasn’t their fault that the wedding itself had been a cringe-making disaster. Almost no one from England had accepted their invitations, and those who had had pulled out once they had recognized their