The Spymaster's Lady sl-1

by Joanna Bourne

  She sighed. “You know, do you not, that I desire you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was certain you did, for I have not been concealing this very cleverly. At first, I did not perfectly recognize what had happened to me, and later it became too confusing. It is not important, you understand.”

  “I know.”

  “This comes to me because you have saved my life, I think. And because of a man who was with me in France. I did not tell you about him.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She ate slowly, trying to find the right words. “He was a kind of madness that struck me because I was alone and friendless and in great danger. He changed me. He left me…I suppose you would say he left me ready for you. When you saved my life in that courageous way and are so handsome and strong, I fall into a foolishness.” She thought for a while. “I came to love him in a complicated way. I still do. But I find it is not any protection against desiring other men, which is awkward and humiliating. My mind is in a state of great turmoil. You must not pay too much attention to what my stupid body is doing.”

  “I won’t.”

  She waited a while before she said the next thing. “I have not wanted men before. Not even one. It is a grave moral weakness to desire two men. I had not known I was this sort of person.”

  “You aren’t.” His words were clipped, dry, and unsentimental. “You haven’t done anything, so you aren’t that kind of person. Forget it.”

  A smuggler would see things so simply. “That is an interesting philosophy and most likely true in its way. You must go away from me, Robert. You have fulfilled your commission to your conscience when I cross the London Bridge. I do not think I can stand much more of this.”

  “I’m not going to touch you. And I’m large enough to fight you off if you forget yourself.”

  She did not laugh, because that would only encourage him. “If I live to be very old, perhaps to a hundred or so, I may understand this thing that is between men and women. What I do know is that touching or not touching does not matter between us. We have gone beyond that. Tomorrow we make an end. It is also not good for you to be in this state, I think.”

  “‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them…’”

  “‘But not for love.’ I am less sure of that than I was a week or two ago when my life was inexpressibly simpler. I do not think one dies. One may well go insane, however.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” He pulled his own sausage off the stick and folded it neatly in bread. He wasn’t laughing at her exactly, but there was an amused look behind his eyes. “I’ll see you settled safe in London. We’ve come this far together, what does an extra day matter?”

  He made it sound sensible. Did he know in the least how easy it was for him to convince her of anything?

  “It is at times like this that I miss my mother.” It was easy also to speak simple truths to him. It was a sign of how dangerous he was to her. “It has been six…no, five weeks now since she died. I keep thinking, ‘I shall tell her this,’ or ‘I shall ask her this,’ and then I remember I shall never see her again. Maman knew all there is to know about men. She was very wise. She would tell me not to stay near to you at all, not for one hour.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Annique.”

  She couldn’t help laughing, though her mouth still had sausages in it. “That is what he said to me. Almost exactly that. The man in France who was unkind to me and whom I loved in a way—he said that. You are a bit like him, did you know?”

  The flames made his eyes glitter. “Am I?”

  “It is that your bodies are alike. A little, anyway. He is even larger than you, I would say, and immensely strong. Though you are strong, too, of course. But you are different in spirit. He had no softness in him at all, not truly, not anywhere inside him, which is as it should be in a person in his position. He is older than you, too.”

  “Older?” Robert stared at her, fascinated.

  “He is very senior in his work. He must be eight or ten years older than you, I would think. He is fiercely determined, as well, though you are that yourself, a little, except that he does not go about it so nicely. Also he does not smell of fishes. That is from your sweater, you comprehend, which is a beautiful sweater and skillfully knitted but in need of washing—”

  The bullet hissed by. It brushed her hair like an insect. Then the blast of sound slapped her skin.

  Twenty-one

  REFLEX THREW HER FLAT TO THE GROUND. SHE scrambled away. There were no trees. No brush. The field was flat and without shelter. No place to hide. Nothing but darkness to protect her. She heard Robert roll away from the light of the fire.

  A man rose out of the black and silent fields, silhouetted against the stars. The first gun had missed. He tucked it into his belt and traded the second pistol to his right hand and raised it.

  She scuttled backwards. Spears of wheat stubble tore her skin. Her knife was under her skirt. Couldn’t get to it.

  The barrel of the pistol followed her. He took careful and deliberate aim.

  No chance to run. She rolled sideways. Fought the cloth of her skirt. Too slow. Too slow. For everyone, there is a last time, when they are too slow. Finally she held her knife. Drew back. Picked her target. Threw.

  The explosion of the gun cracked the night. There was a flash of light. She sucked in a breath. She could not feel where she had been hit. Perhaps it was as they said, that dying did not hurt.

  No. She was a fool, entirely. The man had missed a second time. Unless he was a walking arsenal, he was without guns for the moment. Her hands were wiser than she was. Already they scrabbled and dug for a rock. Found one. She pushed herself up from the ground, cradling it for the throw, straining to see.

  The dark figure crumpled and folded in upon himself. He fell with the clumsiness of something from which the spirit has already departed. She was quite sure, when she went to look, that she would find him dead.

  Robert ran past her, a pistol in his hand. She had not known until just this minute that he had a gun with him. He ran like water flowing, absolutely silent, to where the man lay on the ground. He bent and picked up the man’s head by the hair and then let it flop limply back.

  He straightened up and looked toward her. “You’re not hurt?”

  “The bullet did not touch me. Is he dead?”

  “Very.” He cleaned his hand by rubbing it on the ground, then went to take one of the sticks from the fire. When he waved it back and forth, it flamed up brightly. He walked back to hold it over the rag doll thing lying on the field stubble. When he knelt, he stuck it into the ground to give him light.

  “You don’t have to look at this,” he said.

  But she kept walking forward. “The men Leblanc has sent to kill me…Some of them I have known since I was a little child. So I must see.” The dead man was small and dark, about thirty, and he had been shot directly through the center of the forehead. She did not think it was a merely lucky shot.

  “Do you know him?” he asked quietly.

  “He is entirely a stranger to me.” She looked away.

  This man was gone from the circles of the world. He would do nothing, ever again, for good or evil. A final and sickening end to all he might have been. She should not care. In the aftermath of battles she had seen many dead men lying upon the ground in just this way, all of them more worthy than this assassin of women. But never had she become used to death. Never.

  Robert knelt and inspected her knife where it emerged from the corpse. “You missed by five or six inches. Not surprising, given the—” He paused. Then his breath hissed out through his teeth. “You didn’t miss. This is exactly where you hit Leblanc.”

  “At the insertion of the deltoid. It disables the arm, you see.”

  “Annique,” he said in a strange, tight voice. “When someone has a gun pointed at you, you aim for the throat. Not his arm, not his knuckles, not his bloody toenails. His throat. Do you understand that?”<
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  “But of course.” It was not the time to argue with him. Instead, she faced into the night and did not watch while he retrieved her knife and cleaned it on the dead man’s shirt. He did not offer the knife back to her, which was a delicate consideration on his part.

  He muttered as he emptied out the pockets of the dead man. “Nothing. Nothing. Roll of string, tobacco pouch, house key.” One would think he killed men every day, he was so cool about this searching of them. Certainly, smugglers were desperate and violent men. “Another key. English money. French money. Gribeauval pistols. Those are first quality. The jacket’s French. His shirt, too. He’s someone who followed you from France.”

  “But, of course. I have offended the English, certainly, but not yet sufficiently so they will kill me.”

  “He’s not going to tell us anything else. Pack up. Leblanc may have ten more men lurking out there in the dark.” He was already up and striding away, untying Harding’s halter.

  It took her two minutes, no more, to be ready, because she had left places in a hurry on many occasions. Since her blindness, also, she had the habit of neatness and always remembering where each small object had been put. She was ready when Robert mounted and rode forward and reached his arm down to her to draw her up into the saddle before him.

  It was fortunate she was small. Harding could carry them for some time, though it could not be comfortable for him. “I did not know you had a gun. Where was it?”

  “In my coat pocket. A cuff pistol by Manton. I didn’t show it to you because I didn’t want to frighten you.” Harding picked his way through the rough, plowed fields. Then they were on the road and could pick up speed.

  The night was clear, with the curve of the moon in the east. It gave light enough that the trees drew long shadows across the road. Above them were ten million stars.

  “Will they hang us, if they catch us?” They hanged men in England for stealing bread. Certainly they hanged them for killing people.

  “No.”

  “You seem very sure.”

  “I am sure. That, you don’t have to worry about, Annique.”

  He sat straight and stiff in the saddle. Perhaps, like her, he was still sickened and awed by the presence of death. Perhaps he had his ears tuned for the sound of hoofbeats behind, which would mean they were being followed.

  “Will the farmers come to look because of the shots? Or will they be afraid?”

  “They won’t be afraid. They’ll think it was someone poaching deer.”

  He was right. This was England. Safe, peaceful England, where no one would think shots meant murder in the darkness.

  He shifted the reins. “They won’t find him till morning. We’ll be long gone.”

  They trotted, jolting painfully. Finally, they slowed to a walk and she could let go of Harding’s mane, which was a relief to both of them she was sure. She leaned against Robert’s chest. His arms went tight about her, as if he feared she would suddenly disappear from between them.

  “Thank you for protecting me,” she said. “I am sorry you had to kill him, even if you are accustomed. It is drastic, to kill a man.”

  “I didn’t mind. I haven’t taken very good care of you, have I? If he had carried more accurate guns, you’d be dead. I’m sorry.”

  “It is the contrary, mon ami. You have saved my life twice now. That woman you feel such guilt about—the one in France long ago. Upon her behalf I will tell you that the account is closed. You may sleep well at nights.”

  “Not yet.”

  So stubborn a man. This one would always shoulder his responsibility and that of another dozen men as well. His band of smugglers was lucky in its leader. “As you wish. I am not wise enough to be your conscience, so I will not try.” She yawned. Now that she had stopped shaking with fear, she was sleepy. “To me you seem a good enough man for most ordinary uses.”

  He shifted in the saddle, moving her to be easy against him. He was getting used to holding her, she thought. He smelled of the gun he had fired, and of fishes, of course. If she had married a fisherman and gone to live in his village, instead of becoming a spy, it might have been like this for her, riding home from some journey together. Except that she would have washed his sweater more carefully so he did not smell so much of his profession.

  “My mother was right.”

  “Was she?”

  She felt the immense strength that was Robert behind her and on every side of her. Safe as houses—that was what the English would say. She yawned. There was no hurry to speak. What she had to say was not, after all, so earth-shattering a bit of wisdom. “She said that the bodies of all men are alike in the darkness. I did not quite believe her, but I find she was correct. This is remarkably like being held by that man in France. Why is it only Kent?”

  His hold tightened further. “Why is what only Kent?”

  “The others are Yorkshire or Cheshire or Wiltshire or something shire. Why is it not Kentshire?”

  “They can’t all be shires.”

  “Oh. That accounts for it.”

  She could hear his breath move and his heart beating. He pulled his coat around her more so she would be warm. He had saved her life, and she was very tired. She let herself pretend, just for this little time and in the secrecy of her mind, that she was married to Robert and they were going home together.

  Twenty-two

  SHE SLEPT, HELD IN STRONG ARMS, WHILE Robert and the horse Harding brought them the last of the way to London. He was taking her where she would be safe, he said, and she was content to let him do so.

  She had awakened in the dawn to the sound of wagons on cobblestones and women in white kerchiefs selling ladles of milk from the huge cans on the back of their carts. The sky was still pink when he brought her past the Covent Garden, which was not a garden at all but instead a market of incredible size, full of flowers and vegetables and chickens in cages, complaining. He bought buns there, from a street seller who handed one up to her, still on Harding’s back, and spoke an English she could not understand at all. It was sweet and had raisins and cinnamon in it.

  Beyond the market, the streets were quieter. Robert guided Harding into a long, well-tended alley between houses now, little more than a walkway, that angled into a mews, a passageway behind the houses where carriages and horses were kept. Then through alleys again. She could match none of this with the map she carried in her head, which did not mention such small lanes. They were going west and north, away from the rising sun. In the green square they crossed, the windows of every house were still shuttered and the curtains drawn. The only people in the square were two maidservants carrying baskets piled with bread, who looked at them curiously as they rode by.

  “Your friends are bourgeois.” She assessed the neat, stuccoed facades. “They will not want such guests as we are, even in their kitchen, I think.”

  “They’ll take us in.”

  He imposed her upon his family, then—an uncle or cousin. Only with family would he be so certain of a welcome. She regretted the lack of a family of her own from time to time. Maman had said quite absolutely nothing about her past or Papa’s, not even the town they came from. Now she would never know.

  Another alley led them to the middle of a self-satisfied street with linden trees trapped in fences. Dull and respectable was written on every door. She had spent little time in places like this. She did not expect to be comfortable here. Whatever he believed, his respectable relatives would not welcome a questionable and not-so-clean woman to their home.

  “Here we are.” Robert slid from the horse across the rump. He had great skill in riding for a man of the sea, she thought. He must be as stiff and tired as she was, but the arms that lifted her down were steady and strong as tree limbs. He held her even after she had gained her footing.

  It was a large, white, solidly built house…a rich one, on this quiet street. He tied the reins to a post, and they went to the front door, like guests, up seven stone steps. Stern, unamused-looking iron barr
ed the windows. A careful and suspicious householder, then. She was cautious herself, as a rule, but she did not think she would like people who barricaded themselves in such a determined fashion against the hazards of the world. The knocker was in the form of a curled rose—brass, richly detailed, highly polished.

  Robert knocked loudly. After a minute a boy opened the door. He was expensively dressed, but in shirtsleeves. Not a servant then, but perhaps a member of the household. He was taller than she was but perhaps three years younger. Though it was early, he did not look in the least sleepy. He began to smile in a way that said Monsieur Robert was indeed welcome here.

  The bars on the windows plucked at the back of her mind. None of the other houses upon this street had bars on them. Odd. Even this early there should have been a servant at the door, not a young boy in a fine linen shirt who examined the street so alertly and stepped back at once to let them in.

  Robert pushed her rapidly across the threshold into the house, into a dull, tasteless parlor, stiff with disuse. The door that closed behind her had strong locks on it. Expensive locks. Very faint, below the smells of cooking and beeswax, the house held the scent of gunpowder. A house should not smell that way.

  “Robert…” She tried to turn, and his hands tightened and did not allow it. “I have decided not to stay here. I do not…Stop it, Robert.” But he was very strong.

  The boy locked the door behind them. “The others made it back safely. All of them. We didn’t expect you till later.” He went to unlock the other door on the far side of the parlor.

  What others? Robert was expected. But he had not told her he was going to London. Robert was not a man who told light and easy lies.

  “I do not understand. I don’t like this…” It did not matter what she said. Robert thrust her ahead of him through the second door, into the house.

  The boy followed and locked it behind them. “Galba wants to see you.”

  Her mind splintered, brittle as shattered ice. Galba? No. She was confounded, utterly, at what was happening and at the change in Robert. He forced her swiftly, firmly forward, down a wide hall with a bare wood floor and the strong smell of fresh bread and eggs and ham coming from behind one of its closed doors. He didn’t say anything at all.