The Spymaster's Lady sl-1

by Joanna Bourne

  Henri gazed at the oil painting that hung on the gold and crimson walls of the salon, a landscape that had once belonged to the mayor of Paris. “There are many possibilities.”

  He would deal with Henri. Oh, most assuredly, he would deal with this disrespect. “Go. Go yourself. Give the order that any papers she carries are to be brought to me, unopened. To me alone. Do you understand?”

  “To you. Unopened. Of course.” Henri thought himself sly. If he laid eyes on the Albion plans, he would discover that he was, instead, expendable. “What of Annique?”

  “Take her, if you want an Englishman’s leavings. Use her to reward the men who find her. Then bring her to me.”

  “And the Englishman?”

  “Kill him.”

  Ten

  Normandy

  BESIDE HIM, ON THE DRIVER’S SEAT, ANNIQUE maintained a dry and lofty silence for almost an hour. What finally broke her down was Doyle saying, in a very hurt tone, that she didn’t need to slide her arse all the way to Calais. He weren’t crowding her. The injured tone of voice and the vulgar word quite undermined her resolve. Even pressing her lips very closely together, she couldn’t keep from giggling.

  “That’s better,” Doyle said, satisfied. “I was wondering if you was gonna talk to me.”

  “I do not feel talkative. It is the being kidnapped, you comprehend.”

  “We’ve irritated you, have we?”

  “You have. And I do not like to be so high up.” The driver’s perch was unpadded and far, far from the ground. It lurched frighteningly over every bump. She could not see the ruts and potholes coming, so she must hold on tight and brace her feet continually on the upcurved footrest. Her fingers had permanently taken the shape of the railing at the side of the seat. She would be unspeakably sore and weary by day’s end, which was without doubt why she was up here. She would be in no condition to escape tonight. Grey had, as the English put it, fixed her wagon.

  The coach jolted madly. She tightened her grip. “It is unsteady, this coach.”

  “I ain’t going ter let you fall off.” Doyle had such a wonderful accent. No one but a Frenchman born would have dared to speak French so vilely. “Been to a bit of trouble getting hold of you, after all. You know much about horses, miss?”

  She had located Monsieur Doyle in the vast storehouse of her memory. He had many names. Her mother pointed him out to her, long ago in Vienna, and told her to avoid him, as he was tough and tenacious as a badger and probably the best field agent alive.

  “Not so much,” she said.

  “Then we’ll put you to work, and I can get some rest. You just…That’s right. You just take this.”

  He handed her something. Then she worked out that she was holding the reins and the horses were jogging along with nothing controlling them whatsoever but her hands on thin strands of leather.

  She’d spent a lifetime dealing with the unexpected. She gripped the reins as if they were ropes to a ship and she was in water in mid-Atlantic. “Nom de Dieu.”

  “You don’t want to go choking up on the reins like that. Makes them horses nervous. What you wants to do is hold them bits of leather nice and loose like. Should really be in one hand, o’ course, but let’s us start out with the both of ’em, just at first. What you do…” He put his arm around her, taking both her hands. “No, loosen your fingers up there, and let me show you. What you do is…This gets threaded through here, see.”

  “Would you take these back? Please.”

  He shifted the straps in her hands till they intertwined with her fingers. “This one over here,” he twitched it in her grip, “goes to the left. That there’s a bad-tempered devil on the left. Nancy, I calls him, on account of him not being what you might call complete in his privates. Old Nan’s a great one for nipping at you when he wants yer attention. Now, suppose you was wanting to turn him to the left—not saying you does now, but if you was wishful to—you’d just pull nice and firm on this strap here. You feel that?”

  “Doyle.” She kept a firm hold on the abject terror the thought of these horses running away roused inside her. “It has possibly escaped your notice, but I am blind as a rock.”

  “Yes, miss. This other line here, the one you gots lying across your palm like—”

  “Being blind, Monsieur Doyle, is not merely a lack of appreciation for the delightful blue sky and the field we are passing. It means I cannot do some practical small tasks. Like drive horses. This is a fact most self-evident that I tell you.”

  “Lord love you, miss, you don’t have to see to hold on to these reins. Why, half the time I’m driving along with me eyes closed, just napping. The horses does all the work. The tricky part is remembering which of them lines is which, just in case somebody should climb up and ask you about it.”

  She clutched the pieces of leather till her fingers ached. This was not the small, creaky wagon of the Rom and a single, placid Rom horse, which was the only thing she had ever driven in her life. “I most extremely do not think this is a good idea.”

  “Best way for you to get around, miss. Driving. If you don’t mind me advising you. Nothing like a pony cart for tooling around the country and no reason you shouldn’t drive as well as any of them ladies in England. Why, from what I’ve seen, a full half of ’em driving must be as blind as you are, begging your pardon for bringing it up and all.”

  “You are a man of the most remarkable cold blood, Monsieur Doyle. Mon Dieu, but your reputation is fully deserved.”

  “An’ what would a nice young lady like you know about my reputation? When you gets to England, you just go out and get yerself a little cart, a pony cart, and you finds a pony with some sense to him, like this pair has. He’ll take you round as pretty as you please without you do more than set your hands around the reins just like yer doing there.”

  “Get…a cart. A cart. But yes, I shall certainly do that if I ever go to England.”

  “Now, miss, don’t go on like that. You knows we’re taking you to England with us. Going there just as fast as can be. Getting closer with every mile.” He shifted the straps lightly in her hands, steering the horses past some object in the road. “The sooner you stop fighting Grey about that, the easier it’ll be on all of us. Makin’ us all mortal edgy, you are, not knowin’ if you’re going to kill him tonight or not.”

  “Yes. Or no. Whichever it is.” His arms were around her in a friendly way, but he’d let go of the reins again and left her with the whole carriage and these horses who might at any minute do anything at all. “Would you take these lines back, Doyle? Because I, of a certainty, do not want them.”

  “You just ease up on the reins a little, the horses’ll walk right along and take us with ’em just fine. Holding on tight just distracts ’em.”

  “Lean back and go along most nicely, is your suggestion. Doubtless I am to do the same with all that Monsieur Grey intends for me. It is a very masculine way to advise me.”

  “Exactly, miss. And while these horses is walking so nice in the direction of the coast, what you gots to do, if you’ll pardon me saying so, is learn Hinglish.”

  “Hinglish?” The meaning penetrated. “Oh. Anglais. But no. I do not just immediately plan to go to England, as it happens.”

  “Well, miss, that’s just where you’re going, if you’ll forgive the contradiction. So we’ll teach you Hinglish. Ain’t hard. Me youngest girl—she’s just three—speaks it a fair treat.”

  It was easier staying on the box with Doyle’s arm around her. It was even easier when he took the reins and held them, a little way above where her hands were, “Jest to show you how it’s done, miss,” and she could stop being terrified witless.

  “Now take them.” He must have made some gesture and realized an instant later she couldn’t see it. “Them horses. In Hinglish we say, ‘Them ’osses is slugs.’”

  “Them is…But that is a terrible thing to call horses. Unless the English are fond of slugs, which is possible.”

  “Nah. Them’s
the buggers gets in the lettuce and crawls all over and eats it. Me wife, Maggie—I tell you about me Maggie yet?—she’s a little spitfire, she is, and mortal proud o’ that garden of ours. Me Maggie ’ates slugs. Sets out saucers of beer to lure ’em in and lets ’em die happy like. Goes against the grain, somehow, drownin’ ’em in good beer.”

  She waited for her lips to stop twitching. Her mother had told her Doyle graduated from Cambridge. With honors. “I would agree, though I have never killed slugs. It is still a very strange thing to call horses.”

  She was learning that a better class of ‘osses’ were ‘rum prads’ and the Hinglish word for coach was ‘bangup rattler,’ when he took the reins from her and pulled to a halt.

  The tenseness of her body must have shown how afraid she was. Doyle said at once, “Nothing to be worried about, miss. Jest looking for a place to stop for a bit. Might be here.”

  She felt a sense of humid openness and heard wind and the sound of a stream and humming flies. Birds sang in the distance. They were in the middle of fields then, away from any village, and there was a woods not far. They would operate upon the poor Adrian in the country where his outcries could not be heard.

  “This is a good place?” The door of the coach swung open. She heard Grey jump to the ground and walk along the road.

  “Might be.” Doyle’s voice was accompanied by a noise that puzzled her, till she identified it as someone scratching an unshaven chin. “What we got here…There’s a couple or three rocks by the road, piled up casual like. That might be Gypsy work. We been following one of their trails a ways now—them scraps of cloth they tie in the trees up about level with a wagon top. So this rock likely means one of their campsites. Maybe back there in that bit o’ woods.”

  They were both waiting for her to speak. The British spies, one and all of them, knew a great deal more about her than she liked. “What do they look like, Monsieur Doyle, these rocks of yours?”

  “One great lump of a fellow, sorta roundish. That’s in the middle. Then there’s three in a line, running…Lemme show you.” He tucked the reins somewhere and took her left hand and spread it back against his knee and made dots on her palm, showing her how the rocks sat, each with the other. “And then a flat one off here past your little finger, oh, a good foot or so to the right. Don’t know whether that one’s in the flock, or just a stray. Ain’t no twigs or feathers or twists o’ grass anyplace. Just the stones.”

  “You have read such signs before.” They had found a Rom campsite, beyond doubt.

  “The patrin? Seen ’em here and there, miss. Can’t say I read ’em.”

  “Wagon tracks,” Grey called from the fields to their right. “They’re one in the other, dead center in line. Gypsy.”

  If Rom were encamped here, they would help her. They would not want to become involved in a quarrel of the gaje but neither would they like to see a woman who spoke Romany in the clutches of such men as these. If she lied ever so small an amount…

  Doyle cleared his throat. “They’re not here. Them threads o’ cloth been there a while. Months. An’ the wheel tracks is old. We got the place to ourselves.”

  They saw too much, these two. She would have much preferred to deal with fools. “You are right about the patrin, the signs. There is a camp not far from here. A safe place. It will be higher on that stream we passed, higher than the road, so the water flows clean. The Rom are careful in this.”

  After a little discussion of the countryside, she directed the coach, not to a closest patch of wood which beguiled them, but up a long track that led into thickets and seemed to them less promising. She knew at once when they reached the clearing that was the Rom’s safe haven. The smell of old campfires hung in the air. The herbs crushed under the coach wheels were the ones the Rom leave behind in their favored camps. Wild garlic, fennel, and mint grew here.

  “It’s a good place you’ve found us.” Grey swung her down from her high place on the coach. “This is what we need. You have Gypsy blood in you, Annique?”

  “Not from my mother’s side, I am almost sure.” She could smell his shirt, the starch and the vetiver-scented water that was ironed into it, which was wholly a French custom and not a British scent at all. They had such meticulous technique, these agents. “I do not know enough about my father to say—he died when I was four—but I think he was Basque. He spoke with my mother sometimes in a language I have never heard anywhere else.”

  He did not touch her, but something in her body reached out and greeted his body as if the two were old friends who had not seen one another for a long time. She did not like it that her body chatted to his in this fashion. She cleared her throat. “They were Revolutionaries, you understand. In those days, the radicals did not speak so much of where they came from and their families. It was not safe.”

  “I’d have called you a Celt, myself, with those blue eyes. A Breton, maybe. Stay here a minute.” Twigs crackled under his boots as he walked into the brush.

  She opened herself to a sense of the clearing around her, as she did with new places. Sun warmed her skin. The stream was not so close as to bring a feeling of damp and coolness, but its voice was loud and comforting. The coach jogged behind her as Doyle released the second horse from its harness. He took both horses, hooves clopping on the leaves, in the direction of the water. The air was thick with the pollen of the trees, filled with old smells of charcoal and tobacco and the pomade the women wore in their hair. It was all familiar. This was a camp like the ones of her childhood. This was a home place of the Rom.

  Life had been simpler when she lived among the Kalderesh. If Maman had never come to take her back, perhaps she would have made a life among them. By this time she would have a black-haired baby to dote upon and a swaggering young husband, instead of a kidnapper who was carrying her toward an intricate and unpleasant interrogation in London.

  Grey came toward her. “Take this.” He set a stick against her palm, a good sturdy one. She would call it a sort of quarterstaff, though she had never held a quarterstaff, as they did not figure heavily in one’s daily life. But her father had told her stories of Robin Hood. This was exactly what Little John was accustomed to hitting the sheriff of Nottingham over the head with. Scaled down to her size, of course.

  “This is very fine. Thank you.” Possibly she might give Grey a whack with it at some time. “Will you take the bullet out of Adrian?”

  His voice was tense. “That’s what we’re here for.”

  “I see.” Never could she stop herself saying that. “You have much experience, perhaps, from the army?”

  “None whatsoever. I’m going to unpack. Don’t pick this time to wander off.”

  He was not pleased to be doing this piece of field surgery. He was worried sick. She could hear it in every step he took from the coach to the center of the glade, carrying things. That was where he would work, where Doyle was laying a fire.

  She had not yet made her decision. She walked for a while, tapping with her useful staff, finding the old fire rings, coming to understand how the wagons lined up in this place. It had the feel of a rich camp. There would be, in those flowery fields beyond the wood, berries and many rabbits, even hedgehogs, if one were lucky. Her feet crunched the old shells of beechnuts. One would eat well here without stealing chickens.

  The ground sloped gradually toward the stream. Anywhere she stood, that slope and sound of water told her where she was. It was comforting, that small certainty.

  Once, she tripped, because she was thinking hard, and a tree root had been more clever than she was. She did not hurt herself badly. To fall from time to time is part of being blind. One must be philosophic.

  On the highest side of the clearing were blackberry bushes, which she found by impaling herself upon the thorns. She ate a few and made her decision and went to listen to Doyle and Grey getting Adrian prepared.

  “…repaint the attic rooms the last week of November.”

  “…files into storage in the basem
ent…”

  “…everlasting whitewash. There’s a lack of imagination that…”

  They spoke of inconsequential things. A thousand times she had listened to men before battles, talking just this way. Grey’s voice held nothing but calm confidence. Most certainly, to hear him, one would think he had taken several pounds of metal out of men in the last month, without exception a great success at it. Adrian had an almost French courage, as she had thought before. In his light words, she could hear his resolution to trust Grey, to put his life in those hands. In some time and place, Grey had earned the confidence of that cynical, knowing boy.

  It would be a great pity if she had brought Adrian out of Leblanc’s cellar and all this long way to die.

  Most likely he would. Grey had not the least idea how to remove bullets. If she were entirely loyal to France she would be glad, for of Adrian she had heard some few things that told her he was a master at spying and a formidable enemy to her Republic.

  Metal clattered. Doyle was setting the instruments in place, there, on the ground. She had decided to be disloyal to France in this matter.

  “Grey, I would talk to you,” she said.

  “Later.”

  “Now.” She walked off.

  Tiens. This was the test of him, was it not? If he did not trust her to know what was important, he would not trust her with Adrian’s life.

  Ten paces downhill, she stopped. His steps followed her.

  “I don’t have time for this, Annique.”

  “I can take the bullet out of him.”

  She was treated to one Grey’s long silences. Then he said, “I shouldn’t be surprised. You were with the armies, weren’t you? Where did you learn to take bullets out of people? Milan?”