Chapter 88

By the time our airship, Fromage Vert, landed in England, it was too late in the day to continue on to Kent. We broke our journey at his brother’s London townhouse.

Bertie Fortescue-Smythe and his wife, Dinah, had been about to go out for the evening. When they saw us on their doorstep, they ordered our rooms and a meal prepared and then sent ‘round their regrets, insisting it was more pleasurable to spend time with their travel-weary prodigals.

I shouldn’t have been surprised that my lover’s brother and sister-in-law would so casually cancel long-standing plans, and yet it never failed to amaze me how easily they accepted me.

“This is Roddy Sayer,” Tommy had announced when he’d first introduced me to Bertie and Dinah six years before. It didn’t matter to him that I wasn’t in the same social strata as his family, that I was merely the younger brother of a not-very-competent minister who’d wound up as a missionary in Africa. “He’s mine, and I’m keeping him.”