The Spymaster's Lady sl-1

by Joanna Bourne

  The hearthrug had a hundred little holes in it where sparks had fallen for many years. “My father was a great man.”

  “A very great man,” Grey said. “We argued about him at Harrow, in the common room at night. What he wrote. What he and the others did in Lyon. I was halfway a Revolutionary from reading him.”

  Beside her was one of those strong, heavy chairs in which the room abounded. It was old and worn from spies sitting upon it. For Grey and the others, this was their refuge, their place to talk and read and forget their work. The heart of the house. These wise and terrible men had brought her here so she would be enclosed in their concern, in their most sheltered place, while they destroyed her.

  She swallowed. “It is hard to believe my father was an English.”

  “Welsh.”

  “Do not nitpick at me. It is a difference only an English would notice, as trout are enthralled by the difference between a trout and a pickerel.”

  The fire on the hearth was newly lit. They had built a fire to comfort her because they had no other help to offer. They knew she would be cold. When one’s heart is ripped entirely from the body, it leaves one quite cold.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, but it was not like being held by Grey. “I was taken by Russians, once, when I was fourteen.” Talking cut like knives in her throat, but it hurt less than staying silent. “I had been betrayed, as one often is. They knew my name. One of them, when he heard it, knew whose daughter I was. All of them, all of the officers, had read Papa’s books and knew how he died. And they let me go. The interrogators had barely started on me. I was not even scarred.”

  Grey was stiff with his anger at those long-ago Russians. “No scars. How nice.” He could be sarcastic sometimes.

  “My life was spared, in lands far from France, because men knew my father’s name.”

  He had decided she was safe to approach again. He came behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. It was warm, being held. “Your father was a brave man.”

  “I was there, do you know. The day of the march. They carried no weapons. Not a pocketknife. The loom workers who were starving walked to the town hall to face men with guns, knowing that some of them might die. They asked only for the honest wage. Only that. Every French schoolboy knows the names of those who were hanged.” The lump of ice that was her stomach began to melt. “I have always been proud to be his daughter.” That had not changed. The most important truths had not changed. “He did not make that march because he was a spy for England. He did it for those men. He loved France and died for her. “

  “He was a man capable of loving more than one nation.”

  “My father would not have lied to me. If he had lived till I was old enough to talk with, he would not have lied to me.”

  “Your father would have sent you to England when things went bad in France. Before the Revolution. You’d have been safe in a girls’ school in Bath.” He let that sink in. She would have been a schoolgirl in some provincial town. That would have been her life. It was a thought to chill the blood.

  Grey knew her. He had taken her to his bed, and held her while she was vilely sick, and walked with her all the long road from the coast. He knew exactly what he said to her.

  “I would not have liked a school in Bath. You are being subtle with me, and I wish you would stop. I am disgusted with cleverness. I am drowning in it.”

  Wind played with the curtains and slipped under papers all over the floor, making them lift and settle like birds getting ready to sleep. One paper turned over altogether. One of her so-many letters. She had written, always, by every courier, when she was off spying. Because Maman worried. She had believed, right to her soul, that Maman worried about her.

  He saw where she was looking. “Have you asked yourself why your mother lied to you?”

  “To make me her puppet. To use me. You have never seen me in the field, Monsieur Spymaster. I am useful beyond measure.”

  “You’re not a child, Annique. Stop acting like one. She could have told you the truth and still used you. You’d have done whatever she asked of you.”

  “I do not want to hear this.”

  He went on relentlessly. “She didn’t have to lie to you. She could have told you the truth when you were eight. You’d have been even more useful to her. Think about it. Why did she lie?”

  “I hate you.” That, at least, required no thinking. That, she could have done in her sleep.

  “She lied to you, so you didn’t have to lie. She gave you René Didier and the house in the Quartier Latin. She gave you learning to cook in Françoise Gaudier’s kitchen. She gave you being one of Vauban’s people. She gave you those years.”

  She closed her eyes. Grey made no demands, not even that she speak. It was possible to stand and absorb these thoughts and consider what her life would have been if Maman had told her the truth.

  She had seen clever ceramics from Dresden, painted and glazed to look like apples and lettuces and cauliflowers. Wholesome and edible to the eye, cold as skeletons to touch. She would have been like that, if she had grown up playing a double role.

  “Maman was wise,” she whispered at last, “and very alone. I had not realized how alone.” She looked around the room. “I should pick up the papers.”

  “Leave it for Adrian to clean up. He wants to slay dragons for you. Come downstairs.”

  “No. Take me to your bed. I need you.”

  Thirty-three

  IN THE DEEP OF NIGHT, SHE DREAMED.

  The prison courtyard was dark, full of bobbing lanterns and loud voices. She could not get to Papa. He was in the wagon with the other men. They grabbed at Papa. Shoved him.

  “It’s the little girl,” someone said.

  “Dieu. Get her out of here.”

  It was not right. Papa should not look like that. Jerking like a fish on a string. Kicking and swinging. His face was…ugly. Not like Papa. Black and ugly with his mouth open.

  They tried to grab her. Darkness around her and stone walls. She ran and ran, back the way she had come, into the prison. “Maman. Maman. Où es-tu?”

  In the long corridors of the cells, she heard screams. Thin, high screams like a pig being killed. Soldiers were everywhere with their high leather boots and their guns. She clawed her way through. In the middle, Maman was on the floor. She was naked. There was red blood on her mouth.

  The man had pulled his breeches down. White, hairy thighs showed under his jacket. He was hurting her. Making her cry.

  She would make them stop. “Arrêtez. Arrêtez. Maman. Maman.”

  Someone picked her up. She could see nothing but the blue coat with brass buttons while he carried her away.

  “Maman…”

  She woke in bed, sweating and cold.

  Grey held her. “It’s a dream. It’s only a dream. Go back to sleep.” He spoke French and pulled the blanket over both of them.

  She shivered. “She found them later. The men who hurt Papa.” She was only half awake. She put her arms around Grey, slipping back into sleep. “She told me once. The judges and the soldiers from Lyon. The men who killed Papa. During the Terror she found them, and they died for it. Every one.”

  Thirty-four

  GALBA COUNTED ELEVEN CHIMES FROM THE clock in the front parlor. Another hour had passed. Still no sign of Robert and the others.

  There were no clocks in the study. This was one of the places they occasionally kept prisoners and contained no glass, no sharp points, no wire and springs, nothing that could be made into a weapon. Even the plumed and bannered army of chessmen, Venetian and very old, was papier-mâché.

  His granddaughter set her index finger upon a scarlet miter. “I will not move the bishop, I think.”

  She’d advance the queen, he thought. She’d send it scurrying around the board instead of manipulating pawns and knights and rooks. Emotionally, right to the core, Annique was an independent agent. When she joined his Service, she’d never be Station Chief or Head of Section. She was
not another Carruthers. And she was a truly dreadful chess player.

  “I am not good at this.” She slid the queen forward. “I would rather play cards.”

  “But sometimes you win at cards.”

  “I thought, when I first came to know you, that you had no sense of humor whatsoever…” She managed to add the next word, though it was obviously prickly as a cocklebur in her mouth. “Grandpère. I now believe you have a diabolical one. I do not enjoy being related to you. It is like being granddaughter to one of those large monuments in Egypt that no one can read the writing upon. You are about to tell me I am in check, are you not, with that annoying pawn of yours?”

  He’d had ten days with her. She delighted him and filled him with boundless regret that he’d never known her as a child. When she tilted her head like that, he could see his Anna in her, his wife, long dead. Her face was the face of Peter Jones. The passionate warrior. The dreamer. She had Lucille’s charm, all of it, and made it distinctly her own. But her brain—that cool, amused, assessing brain—that came from him. She and Robert would have formidable children.

  “Check, Annique.”

  He was coming to understand her moderately well, his Lucille’s daughter. It had puzzled him, at first, that she could be such an effective agent and yet so unguarded, so open and direct. In ten days, his spontaneous, unstudied, frank granddaughter never slipped up, not once, in all that chatter.

  “So.” He did not intend to let her sit brooding about Robert. “We were talking about the nature of secrets, were we not?”

  “Yes.” She slid her knight into his trap.

  He didn’t immediately fall upon it. It would be more instructive if she had time to apprehend her mistake before he moved. “We agreed, did we not, that secrets are intangible, but commodities? That they may be bought or sold or stolen? They may be owned?”

  “Certainly they may be owned.” There. That flick of an eyelash. She had realized her knight was doomed. She was probably beginning to suspect her bishop was the next to go. He would teach this woman to play chess yet. “We are agreed upon it. I wish my conversations with you did not consist of me agreeing with things you have said and then concluding things I do not at all want to believe.”

  She was so strictly disciplined under that frivolity. Not once did she glance to the front of the house. There were no signs even he could detect that her whole spirit was poised, waiting for the carriage to return.

  Robert and the others were taking a long time. The negotiations with Lazarus must be more difficult than expected.

  “If a secret may be owned, it can change ownership,” he said.

  “Oh, surely. Secrets are most promiscuous. I have eloped with a few myself, in my time.” With a thoroughly French shrug, she accepted the loss of her knight and sent her queen to cunningly waylay his bishop.

  “Can they also remain faithful? Do my cuff links remain mine, though resting in Robert’s dresser drawer?” He moved a knight. “The drawer does not own the secrets.”

  “Hah. You say, in effect, the secrets in my head do not belong to me. I disagree.” She scooped up his bishop, muttering, “This does me no good whatsoever. You merely toy with me, I think.”

  “So I do.” He moved a pawn. “Check.”

  “But where? You do not…Oh.” She bit her lip. “I think that is cheating. You have not moved your rook for such a long time I forgot him altogether.” She set her finger on the queen. “I see clearly how to escape this trap so it is probably more subtle than is believable. Grandpère, my head is not a dresser drawer. I do not care who has put the secrets into it or who needs them. They are mine now. I will decide.” She moved the queen.

  He set the last pawn into place. “Exactly. They are no longer French secrets. They are yours. You must dispose of them according to your own conscience. That is checkmate in three moves.”

  She glared at the board. It took her a minute to work the moves out, twice that long for her invincible stubbornness to admit she was beaten. She gave an exclamation of disgust and stood up. “I do not know why I continue to play chess with you, since I never win.”

  “You play because I ask you to, Annique.”

  He set the white king and queen, side by side, into their velvet-lined nests in the box, then the red queen and king. It was always a pleasure to touch these old chessmen. His Annique picked a rook, a bishop, and a pawn from the table and began to juggle. The pieces hovered before her like hummingbirds while her hands flew in circles around them.

  He stopped, fascinated. The girl was such an odd compendium of talents. She used just the tips of her fingers, soft as the wind.

  “I am teaching Adrian to juggle.” Her attention was all on the chessmen; absorbed, unselfconscious, cat-quick. “It will help him with his throwing knives and also amuse him. Doyle will not learn. It does not accord with his persona, he says, though not in those words. Grey has not the time, since you work him without mercy at all hours of the day and night.”

  “Is it hard to do that? Juggle with the different shapes?”

  She caught them. One. Two. Three. Then tossed the bishop by itself so it spun in the air. “But they are the same, these pieces. There is a weight inside—small stones, perhaps, from the feel of it—and it is alike for all. One juggles the center of balance.” She set the three pieces down in a row on the edge of the board so he could put them away.

  He should have brought this child to England ten years ago. What Lucille had done to her, what he’d allowed, was nothing short of criminal. It was one more regret among many he lived with. “Find the center of balance and everything falls into your hand.”

  “That is one way to think of it. I must tell you, though, that I am not so easily manipulated as these chessmen you use so well.” She gave her street urchin grin. “Do you know the small thing I missed most when I was blind?”

  He put the red bishop, rook, and pawn each into its place in the box and closed the lid. “Juggling?”

  “Juggling, too.” She was looking past him, out the window. “I missed pigeons. I could hear them everywhere, but I could not see them. I am very fond of pigeons. I admire of them that they are large and yet they do not continually bully the sparrows. They also keep their tongues within their teeth and do not argue politics at one continually through the day and night. Do not be the natural historian and tell me pigeons do not have teeth.”

  “I would argue instead that pigeons do not have politics.” Now he must choose something else to distract her till Robert and the others returned. They were on a small errand, this business with the criminals of the rookeries of East London. But he’d lost agents doing small errands. And Marguerite was with them. “To the piano, Annique. It is time for your practice.” He pulled the cord for Giles to come and unlock doors.

  “They do not know, any of them, the hideous things you do to prisoners in this house.” Her eyes danced when she said that. She was comfortable with him, feeling at home here in even these few days. His granddaughter was a woman of strong, uncomplicated loyalties. She was binding herself to him and his organization and to England every hour. In another week, or even a few days, it would be done.

  Giles was another lure. The two of them walked ahead of him down the hall toward the front parlor, heads together, murmuring. She was enchanted to have a blood relative her own age, a cousin. She listened endlessly to the dullest family gossip, marveling that all these people should be related to her.

  She’d already forged an unbreakable bond with Robert. His daughter and his granddaughter had both chosen remarkable men to love. The Griffith line was safe.

  But not its music. That had been misplaced along the way. He followed her into the parlor to find her standing, outlined by the sunlight of the front windows, scowling mutinously at the piano.

  She was beautiful as the dawn, of course. One of those troublesome women born to drive men mad. That old devil Fouché was right in one thing—it was high time this agent exchanged boys’ clothes and the battlefie
ld for the salon and politics. She was too valuable to waste on the military side. “You will wish to portray a young woman of good family someday. You should have learned to play the piano badly years ago. I don’t know what your mother was thinking of.”

  “I am not musical, me.”

  “Neither are the young ladies of good family. They worship at the shrine of Euterpe, but they hear her not.”

  “Which is to say ‘they cannot play.’ You make my head ache with your classical allusions and your piano lessons and your endless arguments.” She propped sheet music on the stand. “You are very certain I will stay here and work for you and give all my secrets to England.”

  “I am certain. You’ve spent ten years wading through the carnage Napoleon has made of Europe. You are neither a nitwit nor a savage. Rather than see Kent raped and burned, you will give me what is in your head.”

  “And shift advantage to England, so I may see British soldiers burn the little farms of Normandy.”

  “Or perhaps you will save the Vendée from being burned again by Napoleon. No one can know the final consequences of his actions.”

  “No one can know…It is foolish what you say.”

  She was so very young. He forgot that, sometimes, talking to her. “For thirty years I have contrived and schemed to command events. What I have learned is that the future is not a performing dog. Nothing happens as we plan. Expedience is the most delusive of guides.”

  “And yet, one must choose.” She turned a page of music and then another. “I must choose.”

  “Then stop trying to read the future and do so. Do what is right to do, here, in this minute. And that, granddaughter, you are perfectly capable of discerning.”

  The knowledge she carried, the unbearable weight of it, showed in her eyes. Just a glimpse. Then she hid it and thumped herself down on the piano bench and flipped the wood panel up from the keys. “Even if I could understand you, which I do not, I would not listen. You will say anything, you and Grey, to get what you want.”