Get Tracy’s Free Starter Library

  One of the privileges of writing is sharing the fun and joy of stories with my readers. I send newsletters with details on new releases, special offers, deals and news about my books.

  From among the most engaged and long-term subscribers, I offer Street Team membership and the chance to read all my new books before they’re published.

  Sign up for my mailing list and get three free books, as a sample library, and join the community of readers who love good stories told well.

  See details after you have enjoyed The Lavender Semaphore.

  Table of Contents

  Get Tracy’s Free Starter Library

  About The Broadcloth Midnight

  Praise for the Adelaide Becket series

  Title Page

  The Story So Far…

  The Broadcloth Midnight

  Get Tracy’s Free Starter Library

  Did you enjoy this book? How to make a big difference!

  About the Author

  Other books by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  Copyright Information

  About The Broadcloth Midnight

  Lady Adelaide has had enough…

  Lady Adelaide Azalea Margaret de Morville, Mrs. Hugh Becket, cannot sleep. After weeks of brooding about the severe drawbacks of her work for William Melville, spymaster, she travels through London at midnight to find Melville and tell him she will no longer work for him.

  Instead, Adele finds herself in the company of Torin Slane, the Irish professor and Fenian, and Daniel Bannister, Baron Leighton, as they monitor the house of a possible German agent.

  The company and conversation, and the events they witness in the house they are watching, prove illuminating for Adele and for Melville’s continuing search for a master German spy.

  This novelette is the fifth in the Adelaide Becket Edwardian espionage series.

  1: The Requisite Courage

  2: The Rosewater Debutante

  3: The Unaccompanied Widow

  4: The Lavender Semaphore

  5. The Broadcloth Midnight

  …and more to come.

  A historical suspense espionage novelette.

  Praise for the Adelaide Becket series

  Tracy takes you again back in time to an era you could only imagine about but brings it in vivid color through her story

  A delightful game of cat and mouse

  I thoroughly enjoyed this magnificent first in series book!!

  The writing style is easy to read and the plot COMPLETELY unpredictable!!

  It was a marvelous escape from reality

  Breathtaking start to a fantastic new series by Tracy Cooper-Posey.

  Succinct and yet rich in the details that create historical immersion and scenes I found easy to imagine being a part.

  I loooove good quality writing and I love a new series like a junkie. Just give it a try, you won't be disappointed!

  The Story So Far…

  Reader advisory: If you have not yet read the preceding stories in this series, this summary will reveal spoilers.

  Lady Adelaide Azalea Margaret de Morville, Mrs. Hugh Becket, lived in the Cape Colony with her commoner husband for eight years. There, she learned to speak and read German. Adele was widowed in a tragic accident and returned to London in early 1906.

  William Melville, a former Scotland Yard senior official and now a shadowy figure in the British government, recruits Adele to help him uncover German agents in Britain, who seek to weaken the Empire. Adele also meets Daniel Hargrave Bannister II, Baron Leighton, whom Melville also employs.

  While Adele learns how to operate in Melville’s shadowy world, she foils a German conspiracy surrounding King Edward at Balmoral, uncovers an agent among Britain’s peerage and recruits the Fenian and intellectual, Torin Slane, to work for Melville, too.

  When Adele’s dearest friend from the Cape Colony, Isa, suggests that Adele’s husband was a British agent working for Melville, Melville prevaricates and instead reproaches Adele for taking initiative and solving the mystery of a child’s death on her own.

  The life of a British agent is not an easy one. Adele struggles with the impact upon her social life, her friends and her nascent relationship with Daniel Bannister, and most especially with the legal and social limitations set upon women by society as a whole and the unconscious beliefs held by those she knows best…

  Now read on.

  The Broadcloth Midnight

  Turk’s Row, Chelsea, London. October 21, 1907.

  Turk’s Row was an elegant, but short, street lined with larges houses and private gardens behind tall black wrought iron fences, which provoked dusty memories of Adele’s father’s town house in Grosvenor Square. Even the leaves lingering in the gutters and the edges of the footpath were the same, for it had been the end of the season when she had last departed the Mayfair house.

  As Adele crossed the road, heading for the house on the eastern side of the frosty garden, she heard the single low toll of a bell, somewhere toward Pimlico. It was midnight and nothing moved on the street but she. Even the leaves were still.

  Adele had seen rather too many midnights, lately. Most of them she had greeted while staring at the moonlit, ghostly white ceiling of her tiny bedroom, her hands clasped over her waist, the soft linen of her bed gown beneath her fingers, while her eyes ached but would not close.

  Enough was enough. Tonight, she greeted the witching hour in broadcloth and wool, her mind made up.

  Adele turned into the narrow alley behind the houses facing the gardens. Even the rear of the houses were neat and tidy, with boxwood hedges delineating each residence’s narrow band of property edging the lane. She moved down to the servants’ entrance at the back of the second house, and reached into her jacket pocket. She put her key to the lock, then paused to glance to either side of her and then directly behind her. She kept her chin down so the brim of the Homburg shaded her face, for the moon was full, tonight, and there were no clouds.

  She glanced up at the windows of the houses opposite this one. All the windows were dark. No silhouettes made darker shapes behind the glass, nor did the moonlight illuminate any pale faces.

  Satisfied, Adele turned the key, stepped inside and relocked the door. The little entrance contained two sets of stairs, one going up, the other down. Both were narrow, bare wood, worn into mild concaves in the middle from generations of shoes.

  Adele climbed upward, not bothering to mask the sound of her boots on the steps. No one lived in the house at the moment—not on the main floors, at least. The family and their staff were in Northumberland for Christmas and would not be returning to London until after Easter, when the proper Season began.

  She climbed two floors, then moved along the corridor to a narrow door. On the other side was yet another flight of stairs, even narrower and dark with age and grime. The simple banister rail had turned even darker from the touch of many hands.

  At the top was a plain door, which she knocked on. Three swift taps, a pause, then two more.

  A squeak of floorboards said her knock had been heard. A key turned, and the door opened. It wavered, half-open, as the floorboards squeaked.

  Adele pushed the door fully open, stepped in, then closed and locked the door behind her, before she turned to examine the attic itself. Two windows, both at chest height—for her, at least—and extending nearly to the roof, shed slanted beams of moonlight onto the bare floorboards beneath.

  Torin Slane stood to the left of the farthest window, out of the way of the moonlight. He held the precious pair of binocular glasses in his hands, while he watched through the window. There was no other light in the room except for the moonlight, which made his Black Irish skin appear to glow, while the thick black curls of his hair and his even blacker eyes absorbed all the light.

  He glanced at Adele as she locked the door. “I was expecting Melville.” His tone was mild.

  “And good evening to you, too.” She moved to the other window as she removed her coat. She hung the coat from a nail driven into the wall beside the window. Slane’s coat hung on a second nail.

  Adele hung the homburg on the nail over her own coat and rubbed at her forehead, for the hat was slightly too large and the ribbon left an indentation on her skin that itched when she removed the hat.

  She smoothed out the broadcloth jacket and straightened her tie, tucking it back into the waistcoat. The trousers were too large about the waist, which made her waist look thicker than normal. That was a good thing in her estimation.

  “You look fetching,” Slane said dryly. He raised the glasses to his eyes and studied the garden and the houses opposite this one, sweeping slowly along the length of the open area.

  “Melville said we shouldn’t be spotted entering the house more than once or twice.” She tugged at the lapels of her jacket. “No one has seen someone like me enter the house before.”

  “Mmm.” Slane’s grunt failed to tell her if he agreed with her, or was upset at her wearing men’s clothing. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.

  Not that it would matter at bit, after tonight.

  She studied the house on the other side of the little copse of willow trees. “Steinhauer is home?”

  “Not yet,” Slane said. “He went out in a tuxedo and top hat around seven tonight and hasn’t returned.”

  “Melville followed him?”

  “Leighton did.”

  Daniel had been here earlier tonight. He must be as short on slee
p as she.

  As Slane was on watch until Melville arrived, Adele moved over to the darker interior of the attic, where the walls were higher and the dust thicker. A folding camp bed was set up beside the wall, and an unlit kerosene lamp hung from another nail over it. It had been her intention to sit upon the bed, but the mounded blankets at one end and dirty pillow at the other, on top of the sagging canvas stretched between the frames, changed her mind.

  She moved the book and tin mug sitting on the fruit crate beside the bed, turned the crate on end and settled on it. There was a certain freedom which came with wearing men’s clothing. She didn’t have to worry about her hems sweeping over dust and the Lord knew what else might be lying on this floor which the darkness was hiding.

  “Are you still not sleeping?” Slane asked, his back to her.

  “As I am here at midnight when I have no need to be, then demonstrably, yes.”

  “As your temper has not improved, also demonstrably yes,” Slane replied.

  She gripped her knees, squeezing. “I need to speak to Melville. He relieves you at two. Daniel relieves Melville at eight in the morning. I relieve Daniel at two o’clock in the afternoon, then you arrive at eight o’clock and the whole cycle begins again. I never see Melville these days. Waiting here for him is the only way I will cross paths with him.”

  “And what has Melville done to earn your wrath?” Slane asked.

  She squeezed her knees even harder. It was difficult, now, to remember how charmed she had been by Torin Slane’s exotic approach to life and his keen intellect. She had got to know him a little better. She had been disappointed to find that despite his Irish heritage and his extreme political viewpoint, Slane’s attitudes and values were astonishingly, boorishly similar to most men’s. And he had the same indifferent approach to cleanliness and neatness as Melville. The unusable camp bed was a perfect example.

  So was the faint, but distinct odor of a used chamber pot, possibly in the very dark corner to her left. She had no intention of investigating to confirm that. She was only thankful that the lid seemed to be well seated upon the pot, preventing more than a whiff of the contents from escaping.

  “I have been standing here for over two hours,” Slane said. “If you intend to wait there, you might at least relieve my boredom with some lively conversation.”

  “I thought my temper was too chancy for your tastes?”

  “I’d rather argue than listen to steaming silence.”

  She nodded. Slane was a gregarious man. He liked to tell long, rambling, and highly improbably tales about adventures he’d lived through, sights he’d seen and the most extraordinary people Adele had ever heard of, including an Irish whorehouse madam with one leg, who charged clients for the use of the false one in depraved, unimaginable ways, and a freak show dwarf who spoke seventeen different languages and could write his name in the sand with his…when he urinated.

  Adele suspected none of Slane’s acquaintances were actually real, but when Slane spoke about them, they sounded highly authentic and very colorful. But he only told his tales to Daniel and Melville, never to her. She knew of them only because she happened to be in the room when he related them…as if he had overlooked her presence.

  But he did like to talk. He would put a book aside if someone came into the room, preferring to chat with them than finish his page or the chapter. Adele was the complete opposite. She resented having to put the book aside. Possibly because the adventure of reading anything she wanted to, without regard to what society or her family and friends thought of her reading material, was a very new and mind-broadening occupation for her.

  “I need to speak to Melville about something personal,” Adele told Slane.

  “You won’t get a private word with him tonight.” He lowered the glasses and glanced at her over his shoulder. “None of us has any privacy while we watch Steinhauer.”

  “Even when we are not watching Steinhauer,” she replied tartly.

  “Even then,” he agreed. He returned to his survey of the house across the park. “It’s not about your husband possibly having been Melville’s agent in Cape Town, because you’ve already tackled him about that and been rebuffed.”

  “And why won’t he confirm it? Or deny it?” she demanded. “Why didn’t he tell me so when he asked me to work for him? I don’t understand his coyness in this matter!”

  “Ah…!”

  “What does that mean? Ah?”

  “It means that you are angry with Melville.”

  “And why shouldn’t I be? He knew Hugh and lied about it. My dearest friend in all the world won’t speak to me anymore because she thinks I am lying to her—”

  “You are lying to her.” Slane sounded amused. No, as if he was laughing at her, with a little roll of the eyes that made her feel as though he was patting her on the head.

  It was exactly that tone which made Adele seethe every time he used it. Did he really have to remind her all the time that he was extraordinarily well educated, while she had been taught to speak bad French and embroider?

  “I am lying to everyone,” Adele replied heatedly. “The ton looks at me sideways, every time I attend a Season event. I cannot seem to spend more than two minutes alone with Daniel—”

  “We’re not playing games here, you know.”

  “How could I forget? I am directly responsible for Charlie Longbottom’s death! And Melville is determined to ensure I learn that lesson as thoroughly as possible!”

  Slane shook his head. “The boy was dead already, Lady Adelaide. From the moment he stole t’message. The Germans would have found him sooner or later.”

  “Stop lecturing me!” she cried. “I have worked longer and harder at learning this business than you, yet you all treat me as though I know nothing!”

  Slane turned, so that his shoulder was to the window, which let him glance at her, then back to the house, without having to twist. He stared at her, and in the darkness, all she could see was two dark pits for his eyes.

  “I apologize,” she said stiffly. “It is the lack of sleep which makes me so testy.”

  And still Slane did not speak.

  She wrung her hands together. “Perhaps silence is best.”

  “You’re waiting for Melville, to tell him you willna work for him anymore.” It was not a question he was asking.

  “And do you blame me?” Adele shot back. “One can only be punished for so long without breaking.”

  “You t’ink Melville is punishing you?”

  “Isn’t he? I followed up on that lavender business without his express permission. It’s fine for you and Daniel to run off and investigate whatever you fancy, but I am not permitted to think for myself.”

  “Now I see why you canna sleep,” Slane muttered. Then, “If Melville is punishing you, then he is punishing all of us. We’ve been tied to this house for more than a month.”

  The sound of horses’ hooves ringing on the cobbles of the street was loud in the still, cold night.

  Slane immediately raised the glasses to his eyes and peered through the window. “I t’ink Steinhauer is finally home. The cab has stopped at the garden gates.”

  Adele remained on the crate, her heart thumping unhappily. She hadn’t intended to shower Slane with her grievances, but she had been mulling over them while not sleeping.

  “And he has a lady with him,” Slane added.

  Adele rose and moved over to the other window. She peered down at the garden gate, while taking care to not step into the moonlight, which would illuminate her face.

  The cab was pulling away as the gate opened. Two figures stepped through, both foreshortened by the angle from which Adele viewed them. A top hat and dark evening coat, and a long stride. Steinhauer.

  The woman next to him had golden curls piled on the top of her head, a glittering tiara and earrings, and a fur stole. The gown trailing behind her looked to be apple green in color.

  “I know that gown,” Adele murmured, as the pair hurried along the wide path, then took a branching path that led past the willow trees, directly to the Steinhauer house.