The Spymaster's Lady sl-1

by Joanna Bourne

  She liked sailors, in general, and had spent much time chatting with them in various ports of Europe, discovering what they knew about coastal defenses and the movements of naval vessels. Most sailors were more talkative than this one.

  “I will not bore you again with gratitude, but it is only because you have been capable and brave for me that I did not die today. If you will look away for the smallest time, I will take out my money, which I have hidden.” There was a tavern across the street. Near the docks of a city there is always a tavern. “That house does not appear respectable,” she said, being frank about the women who were inside it, “but the smell of its beer is good. I was traveling for a time with a man who would have called a mug of beer a ‘heavy wet,’ though he did not get around to teaching me that. I will buy you a heavy wet.”

  “You will not buy me a drink. You shouldn’t have anything to do with that place, and you know it.” He considered her some more. “I’ll get us both something. Stay here. Don’t move, not an inch, till I get back.”

  One corner of the market was full of food sellers, and that was his goal. She watched him stride through the crowd. He expected every man to step out of his way. And they did. His clothing might say able-bodied seaman, but his confidence spoke of command. He was first mate, she thought, or captain.

  And, most likely, he was not exactly a fisherman. He walked confidently in this market of Dover. She had heard much of the English press gangs from her smuggler friends. The English navy would take any such man from the port towns, so tall and strong, with his hands marked with pine pitch and tar, and drag him off to their naval ships to be poor and uncomfortable. Unless he had powerful protection. The smugglers had great influence along this south coast of England.

  Almost certainly he was an English smuggler like her friend Josiah. Smugglers were cunning and capable men and it was not altogether surprising she should owe her life to one. How interesting life in England was turning out to be.

  He was so tall it was easy to follow his progress amid the booths of the market. He picked a stall, and the woman dropped her other customer like a three-day-old mackerel to hurry to serve him. She was old enough, that woman, that she should not have been so foolish for a pair of broad shoulders. Or perhaps she was not so foolish. When he left, he flipped her a silver coin, not asking for change.

  He brought back whelks, held in a cone of broadsheet paper. They looked exactly like the ones she had eaten in the fisherman’s hut in St. Grue two days before, though these were English whelks. He carried also two mugs of tea, hooking the two handles with one finger very deftly. The tea contained milk in abundance and great heapings of sugar, neither of which she wanted, but he had saved her life for her and she would have happily eaten a bouquet of meadow grasses if that had been what he offered.

  He sat and drank tea and watched her winkle the whelks out with a peeled wood stick. Two housewives sauntered by, with their shopping baskets and white aprons and pretty bonnets. They shot her smuggler glances. The harlots came to the tavern window and whispered with one another, letting their dresses slip low on their shoulders. And well they might. He was a large and excellently made man. She would indulge herself in smugness for this few minutes while he sat beside her.

  “I am Annique. I have not told you that yet.” No, the tea did not improve upon acquaintance. “Annique Villiers. It is my life you have given me. That was not some slight quarrel you interrupted, monsieur, je vous assure.” She chewed. “Peste. I will speak only English now. I am determined.” She was very hungry, and the whelks were fresh and admirably clean of sand. “I would most certainly be dead if you had not happened by. Leblanc must kill me, you see, to shut my mouth, as I know certain discreditable facts about him. Leblanc is the one I put my knife into. Henri, who would also be happy to kill me, is the one you were kind enough to throw among the garbages.”

  “You should keep out of alleys.”

  “Bien sûr. I shall most certainly do so in the future.” She ate the last of the whelks. “But I will be safe in a few days. Leblanc will not find me again, once I leave Dover. There is much of England to hide in.”

  All this time she had been tossing whelk shells onto the pavement, the way everyone else did. She hated to throw the paper there, so she crumpled it up and put it in her empty tea mug.

  She was delightfully filled. She wanted nothing more than to curl up like a cat and sleep. But cats do not have agents of many governments chasing them. “I thank you for whelks and for the tea, which is very English. I shall have to drink a great deal of it to properly appreciate it, I believe. Will you tell me your name? It is hard to say thank you with such great sincerity to someone whose name I do not know.”

  “My name is Robert Fordham.” How solemn he was with it, as if he were trusting her with a secret. Perhaps he was. It could be that this town was posted with numerous handbills from the Office of the Customs, seeking his capture. He did not know that she had kept many secrets and could be trusted with his. “I’m pleased to meet you, Annique.”

  His expression was somewhat grim, all this time. He was captain, she was almost sure, and in the habit of worrying often and deeply about the safety of his small smuggling ship. This was someone who would lead men as naturally as he breathed or hurl himself into an alley to save the life of a stranger. In the army of Napoleon he would already have risen to high rank, though not in an English army, naturally, which was enslaved to the old order of things.

  A seagull flapped down beside her feet and began upending the shells she had discarded, checking inside. There were multitudes of seagulls pillaging the market. The women who sold fish fought them continually.

  It was time, she knew, to get up and be upon her travels.

  “Monsieur…No. I will break myself of the habit of speaking French in a day or two. Mr. Fordham, I am grateful until I have no words, and I am a person who has many words. You have my good wishes, for whatever they are worth.” She had no map of Dover in her head. She carried no exact maps of English cities at all, really. She shaded her eyes and looked up at the sun. London was north, so she would walk north. It always surprised her how often the obvious works. “I hope, if you are ever in danger, someone comes to your rescue.”

  “So do I.” The man rose when she did, and walked with her. “Where are you going?”

  She gave him the truth, since he had saved her life. “To London. I have an errand.”

  “The London stage leaves from the Bear and Bells, at the center of town. The easiest way is back through the market—”

  She laughed. “I have only three pounds, Monsieur…Mr. Fordham.”

  “Robert.”

  “Robert.” She liked that name. She said it in her own way, the French way, so that it sounded correct to her. “I have three pounds and sixpence. It would be silly to squander it. I shall walk.”

  He frowned. “You can’t walk from Dover to London.”

  “But yes. I have walked the whole way here from the south of France, except for some distances when I went in a coach, and I shall tell you, the times walking were the more agreeable. It is a nothing, this walking to London.”

  He was so tall he was able to take slow, deliberate steps and still keep pace beside her. “You’ll take the Canterbury Road then. I’ll show you.”

  He said little as he unwound the town for her, street to street, and finally pointed the way onward. The Canterbury Road led straight uphill and did not look easy, which made it typical of the roads she had encountered in her life. When she turned to thank him, he had already turned away. He had not waited to say good-bye.

  She saw him striding purposefully in the direction of the docks, his black cap and shoulders showing above the other people on the street. He was good to look upon, strong and brown and muscular from carrying illegal cargoes around. It is a healthy life, to be a smuggler, if one does not get hanged for it.

  “It is unfair, this,” she remarked softly, to nobody. The people she would most like to avoid�
�Leblanc, for instance—she encountered everywhere. Someone like Robert Fordham walked away an hour after he saved her life.

  Doubtless he was married to a woman in one of those stone houses and had three small children with slate-colored eyes. He would be hurrying home to them at this minute. She amused herself on the long climb out of Dover, wondering which house might be his and what that good woman, his wife, had fixed him for his supper.

  These white cliffs about her were oddly light colored, as if they were made of old snow. At every height birds flew. The ocean behind her was blue this afternoon, like the warm waters of the south. She walked away from Dover, remembering the cliffs of Italy and France, thinking of the Roman historian Tacitus, who had written about England, and wondering where she would go after she had seen Soulier and then completed her business in London. She must find safety, of course, but also earn a living, since she was no longer to support herself by stealing secrets. Perhaps she would become a cook.

  She was still in sight of the sea when she realized she was being followed.

  Eighteen

  GREY CAUGHT UP WITH FLETCH WELL OUTSIDE Dover on an open, uphill stretch of the Canterbury Road. The sea was a flat, blue line on the horizon. Fletch had hitched a ride in a vegetable cart, keeping a good ways back, curled up in the cabbage leaves with a pocket spyglass. Imaginative man, Fletcher.

  It was Fletch’s horse under him. No point in being Head of Section if you couldn’t borrow a horse now and then.

  He pantomimed scissors as he passed the wagon, cutting Fletch loose from following Annique. Being the peaceable man he was, he ignored Fletch’s return gesture. Fletch would get his bloody horse back, eventually. He clucked the gelding to a brisk walk.

  He saw the moment she spotted him. Awareness slid across the distant figure, like the stillness of a deer scenting its stalker. Half a second, and she relaxed, just as subtly. She’d figured out who he had to be. She did it all without turning back to look. A hell of an agent, Annique Villiers.

  When he came up level with her, she said, “You are following me.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m right beside you.” He dismounted and strolled along, holding the reins.

  He’d never been more impressed by her. In that dull homespun, with the shawl pulled up over her head, she blended into the brown and dun countryside like a quail. She’d become a dusty farm woman. A man could ride right past and never get a glimpse of her beauty.

  “That is sophistry, Robert Fordham. Why are you following me?”

  “To protect you. Until you get to London.”

  “The problem is that I talk too much.” She sighed and kept walking, looking straight ahead. “If I would keep my mouth closed, I would not get in these situations. You are all that is kind, monsieur, but I do not need your protection.”

  She’d called him “monsieur” in France. He didn’t want to rouse those memories. “Robert.”

  “Robert,” she agreed readily. With every minute that passed, to her every sense, he was becoming “Robert.” He was becoming familiar. Soon it’d be impossible for her to see him as anything but Robert. “Robert…” His name, in her mouth, was a caress with a long, warm roll of the r at both ends. “I have played dangerous games all my life, and no one has succeeded in killing me yet, not even Monsieur Leblanc, who is strenuous and resolved. I would very much rather you left me alone.”

  Never in this world. “No.”

  “No? That is all you will say? Eh bien, if I talked as little as you do, I would be in considerably less trouble.”

  She stopped to pick one stalk from the long grasses that grew beside the road, carefully selecting it from among the others. She started off again, peeled away at the stem with a thumbnail. “I will explain something, Mr. Fordham. I am beyond measure grateful to you for saving my life, but I will not sleep with you.”

  He’d had a taste of this devastating directness while he held her prisoner in France. “I didn’t ask you to. Are you always this blunt?”

  She shrugged. “It is this English. It is impossible to be subtle and beautiful in this language, which is not delicate like French. Besides, I have spoken almost no English since I was a little child. Only read it.” She gestured with the grass stem. “I must say this, even if I am indelicate. I will not lie with you, Robert. You waste your time…unless it is your pleasure to hurt someone and force them.”

  “I don’t hurt women.” That was a lie. He’d hit Annique hard enough to leave her doubled over, gasping. He had an ironic truth to give her though. “I’m not going to touch you.”

  “Then I do not understand why you are here.”

  “There are three men trying to kill you.”

  “Many more than three, Robert.” She thought about that for a hundred yards, nibbling on grass, glancing at him keenly once in a while. “Do you know, I believe you are sincere. But it is not necessary. I am the old hand at this.” She took the grass stem out of her mouth and rolled it back and forth between her fingers. The fluffy head on the end went whirling out and out like some child’s toy. “You are…Oh, you are very tall and strong and brave and a good fighter. But these are entirely committed and evil men who pursue me. It is my own acts which have set them after me, not any concerns of yours. I would not like to see you get hurt.”

  The idiot woman was worried about a husky brute of a man, instead of taking care of herself. “I don’t get hurt easily. May I give you a ride? Harding here…” He had no idea what Fletch called the horse. His Latin teacher at Harrow had been named Harding. “…would be happy to carry you.”

  “You have not listened at all to what I say. I will tell you that England is an even stranger place than I had heard. I do not believe Englishmen toss aside all their concerns to walk to London with some woman they have met in an alley. It is not reasonable.”

  Tricky, this business of lying to Annique.

  “You remind me of someone I knew once. A woman.” He hoped the hesitation sounded like looking at old memories instead of inventing as he went along. “Not in England. She was French. I treated her badly, and I can’t go back and undo it.” That was close to the truth. What he’d already done to Annique ate at him like acid. Maybe regret came through in his voice. “It’s too late.”

  “‘But that was long ago and in another country,’” she quoted softly, “‘and, anyway, the wench is dead.’” She darted another shrewd glance at his face. “I wondered why you studied me so strangely back there in the town.”

  “You look like her.”

  “I do not want to look like someone else. I have troubles enough of my own without a…a doppelgänger making more for me.”

  Maybe it wasn’t convincing. He waited, remembering to keep his breath even. Making himself look at the horse, at the ground. Men telling lies like to look you in the face.

  “I have made mistakes,” she said after a long time, “which haunt me at night and which I cannot erase.” She ran her thumbnail down the long stem of grass, frowning. “You saved my life. All the same, I cannot believe—”

  “I was leaving Dover tomorrow.” Rational, logical Annique. Give her a practical, sensible reason, and it would convince her. “Headed home for a visit. To Somerset. I have to go through London anyway. I’d be glad of the company.”

  He made himself stop there. When it came to lies, as Hawker always said, “Don’t embellish.”

  “Ah. It is not so big a change, that, to leave one day early. To you it would seem like fate, perhaps, when I am presented under your nose. I am not inclined to believe such things myself, but I know many people who do.”

  She looked out over the fields, thinking abstruse, clever Annique thoughts.

  Take it on trust, Annique, just this once. Believe me. Lead me to the Albion plans. Make it easy for both of us.

  Then she nodded. “I will travel with you to London, if this is what you must do to clean yourself of the past. I owe you that much. But Robert…you would be wiser to return to your ship and your family and forget
this woman who has long since made her peace with God.”

  “If I get you safely to London, that’s enough. That’s what I have to do.”

  She must have caught the determination in his words, but it didn’t frighten her. Good. He was damned sick of frightening her.

  “Bon. We will travel together then, till London. I will be grateful for the company.”

  She turned her face to the north, to the length of road, measuring distances under the sky. He was seeing the real Annique Villiers at last. This was what she’d been for all those years, trailing across Europe in the raggle-taggle tail of the army, in boy’s clothing, nibbling something plucked from a field. A pair of larks sprang up from the field beside them and flew a complex pattern toward a stand of trees. She brightened, gazing after them, delighting in the moment, squirreling another memory away inside her.

  “I will like England.” She started walking again. “I have been here only four hours, and already I have met three men trying to kill me and one who bought me whelks. For better or worse, this is not a country that ignores me.”

  Nineteen

  The Green Parrot Inn, Dover, England

  “I WILL SLIT HER THROAT.” HENRI’S FACE WAS marbled into an ugly map of bruises. His hand, on the tabletop, was swathed in white cloth.

  “Ass! Do you think the English have no ears?” Leblanc glanced around. Fishermen stuffed themselves with onions and fried fish. At a table in the corner, a woman drank gin. No one was listening. “You will get your chance soon enough.”

  “First, I will deal with him. I will gut him like a mackerel and leave him flopping in his blood.”