Lammas Night by Katherine Kurtz

They’ll have started intensive rescue operations with first light.”
    Numbly, he watched William rise and begin pacing in front of the seaward window, restless fingers twisting a gold signet ring on his left hand. After several passes, the prince paused and gazed out to sea. For several seconds, both of them watched the silent parade of ghost ships gliding out of the mist toward safe harbor between the arms of the breakwater. In the stillness, they could faintly hear the thud of shelling thirty miles away and the occasional closer whoop of a destroyer overtaking slower ships.
    â€œYou never told me what the Leo mission was all about,” William said after a long silence. “Do you think he’d succeeded before all of this happened?”
    Graham tried to make his shrug convincingly noncommittal, for while most of the mission itself could be discussed freely with the prince, some of the methods could not. He also dared not indicate that he knew for certain Michael was still alive—or had been half an hour ago.
    â€œWe have good indications that he had.”
    â€œAnd if he doesn’t come back?”
    Graham sighed. “If he doesn’t come back, we’ll have to find another suitable agent and start all over again. Some of the information is—very sensitive,” he added, wondering where he would find another suitable agent to handle some of the material he hoped Michael was carrying.
    â€œBloody war,” the prince said, shaking his head dejectedly as he leaned both hands against the back of his chair. “Didn’t you already lose a plane and a crew?”
    â€œAnd a wireless operator and a courier,” Graham added. “They’ll all be very difficult to replace.”
    â€œTo replace? How does one really replace human lives? And now Michael.…”
    The prince sighed as he turned to lean an elbow against the side of a window casement, absently brushing a strand of fair hair off his forehead as he continued to stare out at the ships.
    â€œI’m sorry, Gray. I know you didn’t come here to listen to me echoing all your own worry. Maybe he’s all right. I’m no good at waiting, though. Waiting isn’t standard in a prince’s training—unless, of course, he’s the Prince of Wales.” He glanced at the toes of immaculately polished shoes. “I suppose my brother would have known how to do that, at least.”
    Graham had no words to answer that, for he knew, perhaps better than anyone else, how the abdication more than three years ago had wounded this youngest royal brother, who would never wear the crown. That crown had its burdens, as the new King was discovering and the former King had realized all too well. What Edward VIII had never grasped was the fulfillment that could also come from exercising a sacred trust and duty whose beginnings stretched back beyond recorded English history. Modern Britain no longer gave more than lip service to the “divine right” of kings, but remnants of that mystical concept remained, nonetheless, in the peculiar reverence and affection in which Britain had almost always held its Royal Family. William, a descendant of that royal line and a student of history, could not but feel the tragedy of his brother’s dilemma acutely, as had all of England.
    Graham was saved from having to answer by the appearance of Wells in the doorway of the next room, one hand over a telephone receiver.
    â€œBeg pardon, sir,” he said as William turned. “I have a call for Colonel Graham, patched through from Operations. It’s a Brigadier Ellis.”
    Instantly, Graham was on his feet and moving to take it, not pausing to ask the prince’s permission, even in front of Wells. He could feel his pulse racing as he nearly snatched the phone from the aide and clapped it to his ear. William had been right on his heels, waiting eagerly as Graham spoke.
    â€œGraham