The Spymaster's Lady sl-1

by Joanna Bourne

  “You can pass this along—Leblanc’s wounded, upper right arm. Henri Bréval’s cut across the knuckles. I may have cracked his collarbone. The rest is Annique’s work.”

  “Lethal chit,” Adrian said. “And you’ve brought her here to wreak havoc upon Service personnel. How exciting.”

  Doyle grunted, looking amused.

  “Speaking of our lethal chit.” Adrian inspected his nails. “I ask myself…Why the tub? She’s agile as a little eel, of course, but you don’t want to go taking the first poke at a virgin in a couple feet of water. Makes ’em nervous. With a virgin, what you do is pick a flat spot. Dry, for one thing. Soft, if you can manage it. Then you—”

  “I can do without your expert advice on deflowering virgins.” Grey felt his face get hot. “This isn’t a topic for discussion.”

  Doyle slid a lazy glance. “You been told off, lad.”

  “And…” an edge came into Adrian’s voice, “…you don’t leave the girl to sleep it off alone. You stick around to be there when she wakes up.”

  “God’s chickens,” Doyle muttered.

  Hawker didn’t like the way he was treating Annique. Fair enough. He didn’t like it much, himself. “She needs to dig away at the bars for a while to convince herself I’ve got her trapped. Then she’ll take some time getting used to the idea. She won’t want me there while she does it.”

  “And you don’t get kicked in the guts if she gets testy,” Adrian said dryly.

  “That, too.” Mostly, he wouldn’t be tempted to make love with her again while she was still sore.

  Tacitus was on the bottom shelf, bound in red, in three volumes. It was in Volume One. When he paged through, the passage leaped out at him. “…deformed by clouds and frequent rains, but the cold is never extremely rigorous.” She’d got it right, word for word. That was the positive proof, if he needed it. But he already knew what he dragged into Meeks Street this morning. He slid the book back into the shelf. “We lock up the house, double-lock it. Every key turned.”

  “Already done,” Doyle said, “the minute she walked in.”

  This might be the safest place in England. It still wasn’t safe enough, not for what Annique was carrying. “Leblanc has men and money. He wants her dead. How does he get to her?”

  Hawker’s knife stilled. “There’s the old standby…snipers.”

  Doyle moved along the shelf, checking titles. “We put on extra guards. We watch the neighborhood. She stays away from windows.”

  “Then there’s setting the place on fire. Land mines in the garden. Rockets.”

  Rockets. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “How hard is it to get rockets in London?”

  “Not easy,” Doyle said. “Could be done.”

  “Artillery through the front door. Prussic acid in the next shipment of coffee beans.” The knife disappeared into Hawker’s sleeve. He pushed himself to his feet and started pacing the Bokhara rug. “Satchel bomb over the wall. Cobras down the chimney. Poison darts. Tunneling in from the basement. Armed thugs at the back door. Your standard mysterious package delivery.”

  No one more inventive than the Hawker. “You can’t get cobras in England, for God’s sake. Talk to Ferguson about the food, though. That’s a possibility.”

  “I know where to get cobras,” Adrian said.

  “You would.” Doyle pulled out a book. “And here’s our old friend Montaigne. Why are we looking at Montaigne?”

  “I want a reference. The man at Delphos who could tell eggs apart. Where is it?”

  “Crikey. Well, you picked one I know. ‘Essay on Experience.’ About in the middle. I had to copy it out once, at Eton. Forget what I did to earn that particular punishment.”

  “You’re looking up one of Annique’s clever sayings?” Adrian had taken himself over to the window. He was studying Meeks Street, probably working out ways to kill somebody.

  “One of mine.”

  “Here it is.” Doyle read, “‘…yet there have been men, particularly one at Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell which had laid it.’ Is that what you want? Why are we interested in French philosophy?”

  “She knows that line.”

  “She’s an educated woman. I suppose she—”

  “I offered her three words, and she came back with the rest. I picked a bit out of Tacitus about the weather, obscure as hell. She knew that one, too. I’ll bet I could open any of these books, anywhere, and she’d recite the page for me. She has them by heart. When did she do that?”

  Doyle flipped the pages under his thumb and closed the book and set it down. “It shouldn’t be. You’re right.”

  “She’s been traipsing around Europe, following armies. When did she go to school and sit down and learn these books word for word?”

  “She didn’t. I should have seen this.” Doyle looked disgusted with himself. “She has one of those trick memories. I’ve heard about them. Never actually met one.”

  Adrian slammed the wall with the flat of his hand. “Maps. She told me she had maps in her head. I wasn’t listening.”

  “That’s why they sent a ten-year-old into army camps.” Doyle’s eyes narrowed over a hard expression. His oldest girl was ten. “They couldn’t pass up the chance to use that trick memory. They dressed her as a boy and put her to work in those hellholes the first minute she could survive on her own.”

  She’d survived. What was it like to live like that, remembering every freezing night, every forced march, every death? Never forgetting. No wonder she filled her brain with philosophers. “She’s carrying it all,” he circled his hands as if he were holding her, the smooth forehead, the soft, dark hair, “inside her head.”

  They stood, looking at each other, absorbing the implications.

  “Do the French know what she is?” Doyle answered himself. “Not Fouché. He’d have her locked in a cage. Or dead. Probably dead. Who knows about this?”

  “The mother had to know.” Adrian was pacing again, crossing between the long windows and the fireplace. “And Vauban. Both of them dead now. It’s likely Soulier knows. He picked her up and put her to work when she was half grown. What do you wager they used her as a courier—Soulier and Vauban—back and forth across France, keeping messages in her head?” He tapped his fingers as he walked, one by one, against his thumb. “Not Leblanc. He doesn’t know.”

  The mother, Vauban, and Soulier. The three of them using her to pass secrets around. She was the perfect hiding place. Somebody—Vauban probably, back in Bruges, for some god-awful reason—had decided to use her to store the ultimate secret. “She has the Albion plans.”

  “Will you stop that?” Adrian swung around and confronted him. “I don’t give a damn what Leblanc said. I don’t give a damn she was in Bruges. She didn’t kill our men in cold blood.”

  “I agr—”

  “Vauban wouldn’t send that girl out to kill under any conceivable circumstances. No chance. Not the remotest. She wouldn’t stick a knife in somebody’s throat for a pile of gold. How could you spend two weeks with her and not know that? I saw it in six minutes.”

  “I agree. It isn’t in her.”

  “She…You agree?”

  Nice to catch Hawker off guard for a change. “I watched her not kill four men between Paris and London when they were doing their damnedest to kill her. Very convincing. There is no murder in the woman.”

  “Oh. Well then.” Adrian tugged his jacket straight. “Sweet reason prevails.”

  “But she is carrying the Albion plans.” He held his hand up. “No, listen to me. I’ve seen them inside her. She gave herself away fifty times, walking up from the coast. She knows the invasion route, foot by foot.” She hadn’t thought to hide that knowledge from a sailor she’d trusted, who’d saved her life, who had nothing to do with spies and secrets. “At least some of the troops will be taking the Dover Road. I watched her figure out exactly where people are goi
ng to die when Napoleon invades, which streets, which hillsides. I saw the villages burning in her eyes. She has the plans.”

  Adrian was mutinous but silent.

  “A heavy weight for someone like her,” Doyle said.

  “It’s eating her alive. She could be that Spartan boy with a fox hid under his shirt, gnawing away.”

  “We don’t have any choice, of course.” Doyle picked the stack of playing cards from the table and began shuffling them from one big hand to the other. “We take the plans from her. She’s lucky it’s us doing it and not Military Intelligence. Reams isn’t above using torture.” He spread the cards in a fan and closed them up again.

  “Is that a problem?” Adrian flung it over his shoulder and started pacing again. “We haven’t misplaced the thumbscrews, have we? Myself, I like a heated knife and that thin skin between the toes. Sensitive spot on women. I always say there’s nothing a clever man can’t do with a knife.”

  “You’re annoying Robert,” Doyle observed mildly.

  “Duly noted.”

  Annique had recruited a pair of strong protectors. Good.

  No sound came from the study downstairs. She’d be awake by now, exploring the edges of the box he’d locked her in, soft-footing around the room with her robe knotted over that miraculous white body and her mind all sharp-edged and racing. She’d be scared. He couldn’t do this to her and not scare her. Even if she was just standing there, part of her would be battering against the bars, frantic to escape. It was his job to keep those bars in place.

  “No force. No pain.” But they already knew that. “No threat. No coercion. We don’t even have to argue hard. She’s going to talk herself into doing what we want. Why do you think she’s in England? She’s about to give us what we want. Freely.”

  Doyle turned the idea over. “She didn’t just come to hide. She didn’t come here looking for safety. She’s here to stop the French fleet from sailing.”

  “Being what she is, she can’t do anything else. She’s going to weigh the damage those plans can do to France against the hell that the invasion will be. She’ll give us the plans. When it comes down to another one of Napoleon’s bloodbaths, or helping England, she’s going to go with England. Whoever gave her the plans must have known that.”

  That was something else he’d find out. What the hell had happened in Bruges, that Annique ended up with the Albion plans? “I almost wish we were using coercion. Then she could hate me, instead of herself.”

  “Oh, that’s deep, that is,” Hawker muttered.

  Doyle said, “Waste o’ breath, warning you. Always was.”

  Twenty-five

  Cockle Lane, Soho

  THE TWO MEN PUSHED BRUSQUELY PAST IDLERS at the tavern door. Henri limped, keeping up with Leblanc. “…watching Meeks Street. They report she entered the house with Grey himself. Grey of the British Service. It is disaster.”

  “You should have killed her in Dover. Why am I surrounded by idiots?”

  “Do you not see? The man we held in Paris…it was this same Grey. Sans doute. The description is unmistakable. The one who attacked me in Dover—it is Grey. He has been with her since Paris. Since you put them in the same cell.” Henri clenched his fist and flinched. “Bougre de Dieu. I am crippled by that man.”

  “You are worse than crippled. You are an imbecile. There is no proof the man was Grey.” Leblanc kicked at a black dog that sniffed along the gutter edge.

  “We held the Head of the British Section in our chateau and did not inform Fouché. We let him get away. If this comes out, I do not want to face Fouché.”

  “You will not face Fouché.” Leblanc’s gaze flicked across Henri. He slipped his hand under his jacket, to the knife that rested there. “You have brought the men up from the south? The money? All is prepared?”

  “Done. All done. It is always a mistake to use women. You all trusted that bitch, and now she spreads herself for this Grey and squeals our secrets. It must be stopped.”

  “Not by you. You are useless to me with a broken shoulder. I need men who can shoot a gun.” Leblanc looked up and down the deserted street. An alley opened to one side, shaded and crooked and private. “Come. We will take this shorter way.”

  Twenty-six

  “BUT THESE ARE LOVELY CLOTHES.” SHE HELD up a walking dress of figured silk. “And you say they are English. Life is very strange, I find.”

  She still wore the white bathrobe that reached almost to her feet and was large enough to surround her twice. It belonged to Grey. He had enjoyed wrapping her in something of his.

  His bedroom was a snug place, with blue brocade curtains and a very large bed. It was untidy with his things in a pleasant way. The lovely clothing was spread out across the bedspread.

  “Dress for dinner.” He chose the pale green dress with an embroidery of flowers upon the bodice. “This one, I think.”

  The gowns were beautifully cut, the apparel of a woman of taste and refinement. The boxes at her feet held shifts and pantalets, all completely new and as delicately immodest as any she had ever seen in Paris. It was not usual for a prisoner to wear such clothing to dinner. She had been a prisoner several times, and she knew.

  “These are given to me by a friend of yours? That is kind.” She did not like it that he knew a woman of whom he could ask such favors. “When one considers how many respectable women there are in the world, it is remarkable I am not sometimes presented with more modest underclothing.”

  “Isn’t it?” His expression was hungry and knowing. She was entirely sure he looked forward to seeing her wear these silk and lace nothings. He already pictured himself taking them off of her and laying her down upon his bed. He was Head of Section for England, assuredly, but he was also a man.

  She found she was not at all in the mood to lie back and make love upon that big bed with the blue covers. She wanted to hit him with something, not in a lethal manner, but hard.

  She picked up a shift and turned away before she loosed the robe. It fell to the floor, and she pulled the shift on, all in one movement, so quickly he would have only a glimpse of her being naked. That was her reply to the look in his eyes. He would comprehend. He was a man given to subtleties.

  “This is an agreeable room.” She pulled the green dress over her head and smoothed it down her hips. It fit well. His woman friend was almost precisely of a size with her, except with a larger bosom. A lovely and womanly bosom. “I notice it contains a great many deadly things. I would not trust me here if I were you. I would keep me in your dungeon, which you insist you do not have.”

  “No dungeons. I have a comfortable, boring room I put dangerous people in. I won’t show it to you because I don’t want to frighten you out of your wits. I promised Galba you’d behave sensibly.”

  “At least I shall not attack you with any of these tempting objects you have left strewn about. Not at this moment.” She tried to reach the buttons on her back, but he nudged her gently around and did them up for her. “Thank you. It is difficult to dress in fashionable clothing, unaided. One would expect life to be better managed.”

  He watched her as if he were trying to take her heart apart like a puzzle box. As he was her interrogator, it would be his task, for a time, to take her apart piece by piece. It is inexpressibly frightening to be the puzzle box in these cases.

  He did the last button. “Maggie bought a comb. It’s on the dresser.”

  “The Maggie of Doyle? Do you tell me these are her clothings? I am very surprised.” She thought about Doyle, who had been to Cambridge and bought his wife such dresses. And such underthings. “I think she is not at all as I pictured her.”

  Grey did not wait for her to take the comb but picked it up himself and began to use it in her hair. He combed and smoothed after it with his hand. It was a common action, strong and simple as a sunset or standing in the sea. A man did such things for a woman who belonged to him.

  In the mirror, her mouth was ripe as fruit, and her eyes were soft and foolish
. She looked altogether like a woman who had just given her virginity to someone. The bathtub part of it was no longer obvious, since she was not dressed in a long white robe. Grey had transformed himself into a gentleman, here in the heart of his power. He wore an evening jacket that was the blue black of midnight and a waistcoat with thin stripes of burgundy and white. A heavy signet ring gleamed dull gold as it slid in and out of her hair with each stroke of the comb. He was not handsome. Men such as Grey ate handsome dandies for breakfast twice a week. If she had been a foolish young girl, she would have been dazzled.

  “When I escape from this prison,” she said, “I shall find a boy of the Rom, younger and darker and handsomer than you. I shall make love to him in barns and haystacks until I do not feel this way for you.” She said it to hurt him and to free herself from him. She did not like what she saw in her own eyes in the mirror.

  “I hope you enjoy yourself. You won’t change what’s between us, Annique, not with fifty Gypsy boys.”

  She wished he did not speak so many excellent truths to her. She stepped from his hold and began to straighten the clutter upon his dresser, lining everything up. “One does not love one’s jailer. It is a fallacy jailers have, that their prisoners like them, but it is never true. If you had not trapped me, I would have walked away by now. In a week I would have forgotten you altogether.” Or in a month, or a year. Or never. “There is nothing between us except a hunger of bodies.”

  “There’s that, too.”

  “I do not want to feel anything for you. Do you understand? Can you imagine what it is to have not even a shift to wear? To be so dependent upon a man that I must ask him for clothing? This is not a good basis for friendship.”

  “I know. It makes it harder. Will you sleep with me tonight?”

  He would ask. Not demand. Just ask. She did not know how to fight such cunning. “Can I say no?”

  “Of course you can. There are five or six empty bedrooms, one right across the hall. I can put you in there.” He took back the space between them till they were almost touching. “I’ll leave my door unlocked. Will you come to me?”