Assassin’s Creed®

by Oliver Bowden

  That night after we ate Hélène retired to her berth in the cramped conditions we called our cabin below decks while Byron left to man the wheel. Only this time, I reached for an animal skin of my own.

  ‘Have you ever used your sword in anger before?’ he asked, when I joined him on the upper deck. He sat steering with his feet and drinking from his leather flask of wine.

  ‘By anger you mean …’

  ‘Well, let’s start with, have you ever killed anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d be the first, eh, if I tried to touch you without your permission?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, I shall just have to make sure that I have your permission, then, shan’t I?’

  ‘Believe you me, you shall never have it, sir. I am betrothed to another. Please take your attentions elsewhere.’

  It was not true, of course. Arno and I were not betrothed. And yet, as I stood on deck and the moon-dappled sea sucked at the hull and the night was almost totally still around me, I fought a sudden wave of feeling too far away from home, and a knowledge that, above all, I missed Arno. For the first time I understood that my love for him went beyond childhood friendship. I didn’t just ‘love’ Arno. I loved him.

  Opposite me, Byron nodded, as though able to read my thoughts and seeing that I was serious at least, realizing I was a prize he could not claim. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘This “other”, he is a lucky man.’

  I raised my chin. ‘As you say.’

  He became business-like and raised the point of his blade. ‘Let us begin. So have you ever crossed swords with an opponent?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘An opponent who meant you harm?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  ‘Fair enough. Have you ever drawn your sword in order to protect yourself?’

  ‘Indeed I have.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘Once.’

  ‘And that was the one time, was it? Back there in the tavern?’

  I pursed my lips. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Didn’t go so well for you, did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And why was that, do you think?’

  ‘I know why it was, thank you,’ I said. ‘I don’t need telling by the likes of you.’

  ‘Go on, humour me.’

  ‘Because I hesitated.’

  He nodded thoughtfully, swigged from his flask then handed it to me. I gulped down a mouthful, feeling the alcohol spread warmly through my body. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that the first step to gaining a lady’s permission to get into her bed was to get her drunk. But it was cold and he was agreeable company, if a little frustrating and … Oh, and nothing. I just drank.

  ‘That’s right. What should you have done?’

  ‘Look, I don’t need –’

  ‘Don’t you? You were almost carried away back there. You know what they would have done to you after taking you from that yard. You wouldn’t be above deck sipping wine with the captain. You’d have spent the voyage below deck, on your back, amusing the crew. Every member of the crew. And when you arrived at Dover, broken, mentally and physically, they would have sold you like cattle. Both of you. You and Hélène. All of that but for my presence in the tavern. And you still don’t think I have a right to tell you where you went wrong?’

  ‘I went wrong going in the tavern in the bloody first place,’ I said.

  He arched an eyebrow. ‘Been to England before, have you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, but it was an Englishman who taught me my sword skills.’

  He chortled. ‘And what he’d tell you if he were here is that your hesitancy almost cost you your life. A short sword is not a warning weapon. It is a doing weapon. If you draw it, use it, don’t just wave it around.’ He lowered his eyes, took a long, thoughtful slurp from his leather flask and passed it back to me. ‘There are plenty of reasons to kill a man: duty, honour, vengeance. All of them might give you pause for thought. And a reason for guilty reflection afterwards. But self-protection or protection of another, killing in the name of protection, that is one reason you should never have to worry about.’

  ii.

  The following day Hélène and I bid goodbye to Byron Jackson on the beach at Dover. He had much work to do, he said, in order to bypass the customs houses, so Hélène and I would have to manage alone. He accepted the coins I gave him with a gracious bow and we went on our way.

  As we took the path away from the beach, I turned to see him watching us go, waved and was pleased to see him wave back. And then he turned, and was gone, and we took the steps towards the clifftop, the Dover lighthouse as our guide.

  Though I had been told the carriage ride to London could be hazardous, thanks to highwaymen, our journey passed without incident and we arrived to find London a very similar city to the Paris I had left behind, with a blanket of dark fog hovering above the rooftops and a menacing River Thames crowded with traffic. The same stink of smoke and excrement and wet horse.

  In a cab I said to the driver in perfect English, ‘Excuse me, Sir, but could you please be transporting myself and my companion to the home of the Carrolls in Mayfair?’

  ‘Whatchootalkinabaht?’ He peered at us through the hinged communication hatch. Rather than try again I simply passed him the piece of paper. Then, when we were moving, Hélène and I pulled the blinds and took turns hanging on to the communication hatch as we changed. I retrieved my by now rather creased and careworn dress from the bottom of my satchel and instantly regretted not taking the time to fold it more carefully. Meanwhile, Hélène discarded her peasant’s dress in favour of my breeches, shirt and waistcoat – not much of an improvement considering the dirt I’d manage to accrue over the last three days, but it would have to do.

  Finally we were dropped off at the home of the Carrolls in Mayfair, where the driver opened the door and gave us the now-familiar boggle eyes as two differently dressed girls materialized before his very eyes. He offered to knock and introduce us but I dismissed him with a gold coin.

  And then, as we stood with the two colonnades of the entrance on either side, my new lady’s maid and I, we took a deep breath, hearing approaching footsteps before the door was opened by a round-faced man in a tailcoat who smelled faintly of silver polish.

  I introduced myself and he nodded, recognizing my name it seemed, then led us through an opulent reception hall to a carpeted hallway where he asked us to wait outside what appeared to be a dining room, the sound of polite chatter and civilized clinking of cutlery emanating from within.

  With the door ajar I heard him say, ‘My lady, you have a visitor. A Mademoiselle de la Serre from Versailles is here to see you.’

  There was a moment of shocked silence. Outside in the hallway I caught Hélène’s eye and wondered if I looked as worried as she did.

  Then the butler reappeared, bidding us, ‘Come in,’ and we entered to see the occupants seated at the dining-room table having just enjoyed a hearty meal: Mr and Mrs Carroll, whose mouths were in the process of dropping open; May Carroll, who clapped her hands together with sarcastic delight, ‘Oh, it’s Smell-bag,’ she crowed, and the mood I was in I could easily have stepped over and given her a slap for her troubles; and Mr Weatherall, who was already rising to his feet, his face reddening, roaring, ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing here?’

  11 February 1788

  My protector gave me a couple of days to settle in before coming to see me this morning. In the meantime I’ve borrowed clothes from May Carroll, who was at pains to tell me that dresses lent to me were ‘old’ and ‘rather out of fashion’ and not really the sort of thing she’d be wearing this season – but would be fine for you, Smell-bag.

  ‘If you call me that one more time, I’ll kill you,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Thank you for the dresses.’ And I meant it. Fortunately, I have inherited my mother’s disdain for fashion, so although the out-o
f-fashion dresses were evidently designed to irritate me, they did nothing of the sort.

  What irritates me is May Carroll.

  Hélène, meanwhile, has been braving below-stairs life, finding that the servants are even more snooty than the aristocrats above, and it has to be said, wasn’t doing an awfully good job when it came to masquerading as my lady’s maid, performing strange, random curtsies while shooting constant terrified glances my way. We’d have to work on Hélène, there was no doubt about that. At least the Carrolls were so arrogant and pleased with themselves that they simply assumed Hélène was ‘very French’ and put her naivety down to that.

  And then Mr Weatherall knocked.

  ‘Are you decent?’ I heard him say.

  ‘Yes, monsieur, I am decent,’ I replied, and my protector entered – and then immediately shielded his eyes.

  ‘Bloody hell, girl, you said you were decent,’ he rasped.

  ‘I am decent,’ I protested.

  ‘What do you mean? You’re wearing a nightdress.’

  ‘Yes, but I am decent.’

  He shook his head behind his hand. ‘No, look, in England, when we say, “Are you decent?” it means “Have you got your clothes on?” ’

  May Carroll’s nightdresses were hardly revealing, but even so I had no wish to scandalize Mr Weatherall, so he withdrew and some moments later we tried again. In he came, pulling up a chair while I perched on the end of the bed. The last time I’d seen him was the night of our arrival, when he’d gone a shade of beetroot as Hélène and I entered the dining room, both of us looking like – what was the expression Mrs Carroll had used? – ‘something the cat had dragged in’, and I had quickly spun a story about having been held up by highwaymen on the road between Dover and London.

  I had cast my eyes around the table, seeing faces that I had first laid eyes on well over a decade ago. Mrs Carroll looked no different, the same for her husband. The two of them wearing the usual bemused smile so beloved of the English upper classes. May Carroll, though, had grown – and if anything looked even more tiresomely haughty than when we had first met in Versailles.

  Mr Weatherall, meanwhile, was forced to pretend that he was aware of my upcoming arrival, masking his obvious surprise as concern for my well-being. The Carrolls had worn a selection of bemused looks and asked a number of searching questions, but he and I had bluffed with enough confidence to avoid being ejected there and then.

  To be honest, I thought we’d made a good team.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he said now.

  I fixed him with a look. ‘You know what I’m playing at.’

  ‘For crying out loud, Élise, your father is going to have me killed for this. I’m not exactly his favourite person as it is. I’m going to wake up with a blade at my throat.’

  ‘Everything has been smoothed over with Father,’ I told him.

  ‘And Madame Levene?’

  I swallowed, not really wanting to think about Madame Levene if I could help it. ‘That too.’

  He cast me a sidelong glance. ‘I don’t want to know, do I?’

  ‘No,’ I assured him. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  He frowned. ‘Well, now you’re here, we have to –’

  ‘You can forget any thoughts you have of sending me home.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to send you home if I could – if I didn’t think that by sending you home your father would want to know why, and I’d get in even deeper trouble. And if the Carrolls didn’t have plans for you …’

  I bridled. ‘Plans for me? I’m not their serf. I am Élise de la Serre, daughter of the Grand Master, a future Grand Master myself. They have no authority over me.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Oh, get over yourself, child. You’re here in London as their guest. Not only that, you’re hoping to benefit from their contacts in order to find Ruddock. If you didn’t want them to have authority over you then maybe it would have been best not to have placed yourself in this position.’ I began to protest, but he held up a hand to stop me. ‘Look, being a Grand Master isn’t just about swordplay and behaving like Charlie Big Potatoes. It’s about diplomacy and statesmanship. Your mother knew that. Your father knows that and it’s about time you learnt it, too.’

  I sighed. ‘What then? What do I have to do?’

  ‘They want you to insinuate yourself into a household here in London. You and your maid.’

  ‘They want me to – what – myself?’

  ‘Insinuate. Infiltrate.’

  ‘They want me to spy?’

  He scratched his snowy-white beard uncomfortably. ‘In a manner of speaking. They want you to pose as someone else in order to gain entry into the house-hold.’

  ‘Which is spying.’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  I thought, and decided that despite everything, I quite liked the idea of it. ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘You’d like that, would you?’

  ‘It’s better than the Maison Royale. When am I to find out the details of my mission?’

  ‘Knowing this lot, when they’re good and ready. In the meantime I suggest you spend some time licking that so-called lady’s maid of yours into shape. Right this very moment in time she’s neither use nor ornament.’ He looked at me. ‘Quite what you did to inspire such loyalty I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.’

  ‘Perhaps best you don’t know,’ I told him.

  ‘Which reminds me. Something else while on the subject.’

  ‘What is that, monsieur?’

  He cleared his throat, stared at his shoes, worked at his fingernails. ‘Well, it’s the crossing. This captain you found to bring you across.’

  I felt myself redden. ‘Yes?’

  ‘What nationality was he?’

  ‘English, monsieur, like you.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, nodding, ‘right.’ He cleared his throat again, took a deep breath and raised his head to look me in the eye. ‘The crossing from Calais to Dover takes nothing like two days, Élise. It’s more like a couple of hours, if you’re lucky – nine, ten at the outside, if you’re not. Why do you think he kept you out there for two days?’

  ‘I’m quite sure I couldn’t possibly say, monsieur,’ I said primly.

  He nodded. ‘You’re a beautiful girl, Élise. God knows you’re as beautiful as your mother ever was and let me tell you that every head turned when she walked into the room. You’re going to meet more than your fair share of rogues.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, monsieur.’

  ‘Arno awaits your return, no doubt, in Versailles?’

  ‘Exactly, monsieur.’

  I hoped so.

  He stood to go. ‘So precisely what did you do for two days on the English Channel, Élise?’

  ‘Swordplay, monsieur,’ I said. ‘We practised our swordplay.’

  20 March 1788

  The Carrolls have promised to help find Ruddock, and, according to Mr Weatherall, this puts a network of spies and informants at our disposal. ‘If he remains in London then he’ll be found, Élise, you can be sure of that.’ But, of course, they want me to accomplish this task.

  I should be nervous about the assignment ahead, but poor Mr Weatherall was nervous enough, constantly fretting at his whiskers and worrying aloud at every turn. There wasn’t enough anxiety for us both.

  And, anyway, he was right to assume I found the idea exciting. There’s no point in denying it, I do. And, after all, can you blame me? Ten years of the drab and hateful school. Ten years of wanting to reach out and take a destiny that remained just inches away from my fingertips. Ten years, in other words, of frustration and longing. I was ready.

  Over a month has passed. I had to write a letter, which was then sent to Carroll associates in France, who sealed it and forwarded it to an address here in London. While we waited for a reply, I helped Hélène with her reading and taught her English and, in doing so, polished my own skills.

  ‘Will this be dangerous?’ Hélène asked m
e one afternoon, using English as we took a turn round the grounds.

  ‘It will, Hélène. You should remain here until I return, maybe try to find employment at another house.’

  She switched to French, saying shyly. ‘You’re not getting rid of me that easily, mademoiselle.’

  ‘It’s not that I want to get rid of you, Hélène. You’re wonderful company and who wouldn’t want a friend who is so warm and generous of spirit? It’s just that I feel the debt is paid. I have no need of a maid, nor want the responsibility of one.’

  ‘What about a friend, mademoiselle? Perhaps I can be your friend?’

  Hélène was the opposite of me. Where I let my mouth get me into trouble she was more reticent and days would pass when she’d barely say more than a word or two; while I was demonstrative, as quick to laughter as I was to temper, she kept her own counsel and rarely betrayed her emotions. And I know what you’re thinking. The same as Mr Weatherall was thinking. That I could learn a thing or two from Hélène. Perhaps that’s why I relented, just as I had when I first met her, and on several occasions since. I allowed her to stay with me and wondered why God had seen fit to favour me with this angel.

  As well as spending time with Hélène, not to mention avoiding either of the stuck-up Carroll ladies, I have been practising sparring with Mr Weatherall, who …

  Well, there’s no getting round it – he’s slowed down. He is not the swordsman he used to be. He’s not as fast as he used to be. Not as clear-eyed. Was it age? After all, some fourteen years had passed since I first met Mr Weatherall, so undoubtedly there was that to consider. But also … At mealtime I watch him reach for the carafe of wine before the serving staff can get there, which doesn’t go unnoticed by our hosts, judging by the way May Carroll looks down her nose at him. Their distaste makes me feel very protective of him. I tell myself he still mourns Mother.

  ‘Perhaps a little less wine tonight, Mr Weatherall,’ I joked during one session, when he bent to pick his wooden sparring sword from the grass at our feet.