The Black Hawk

by Joanna Bourne

  She had been too small to push her way close to the block. The crowd seethed and shifted between her and the execution. She did not get to see everything. She had heard the shrill whine of the blade dropping. Heard the knife thunk on the block. She caught one glimpse of the aftermath when his body was rolled aside like so much garbage, and it was over. “I am the one who sent him to the guillotine.”

  Across the square, a flurry of pigeons flew up, kicked into motion by a small child chasing them. Hawker’s eyes flicked to that, then back to her. “And you were eleven. Deadly brat, weren’t you? Did it help any, killing him?”

  “No.”

  It had not stopped the rage. It had not warmed the chill inside her.

  Grenet had been her father’s friend. The day her parents died he came and took her and Séverine away from their appartement . He had a wife and children at home, so he could not take her there to do shameful things to her. He had taken her to a brothel where men of his corrupt tastes debauched children. For months, he visited again and again. He was one of those who demanded that she smile and tell him she liked what he did.

  She said, “He was one of several dozen I would like to kill. And his death was too fast.”

  “Sometimes fast is all you get. Can we stroll away from here? I don’t like being out in the open. Makes me wonder who you might have invited to meet me.”

  “You are cynical for one so young. If I wished to betray you, which I would not bother to do because you are entirely negligible, I would perform that betrayal in an alley with several large accomplices. But, certainly, let us remove ourselves from this unpleasantness. I have been advised to avoid public places, in case there is disorder.”

  “Half the town’s walking around, hoping somebody will start a riot.” He narrowed his eyes at a band of laborers, swaggering in a group, pushing through the crowd. “Those fellows, for instance. You can see them thinking about it.”

  He was right. Under everyone’s voice, under the laughter, under the holiday atmosphere, they were all waiting. “No one is quite sure what to do next. It was simpler when we feared Robespierre. Now there are fifty devils to take his place, and we have not the least idea what to expect.”

  “Let’s go expect it somewhere else. I don’t like the smell of blood unless it’s a throat I cut myself.”

  It was chilling that he said that and meant it. Hawker was in many ways like a fine gun. At rest, well made, efficient, and even beautiful. Pull back the cocking piece and the gun became deadly. This boy, elegant in motion, perfect in feature, cold as carved crystal, was the cocked gun. He was, in fact, rather frightening.

  “One does not slit throats in a public square.”

  She had never, in point of fact, slit a throat, but she would not admit this to Hawker. He was the entirely genuine murderous spy, and she was not. With a small pang, she envied him.

  He strolled beside her, his pace relaxed, his posture all ease and enjoyment. His eyes were amused and sleepy. Lies, all of it. The energy contained within his skin hummed in the air between them like a sound. He was more alive than anyone she had met. It was as if he carried an invisible top in the center of his chest, spinning strongly, that made her own nerves buzz in sympathy. He was not a restful person.

  Ah, well. She would put his deadliness to use. She let her basket swing free. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

  Six

  MOST GIRLS, WHEN YOU FOLLOW THEM INTO AN ALLEY, are selling you a quick poke, with the possibility of getting knocked over the head by their pimp. Owl, on the other hand, could be engaged in a broad range of sinister plots.

  She brought him to a stone church, small and so old it was sooted up black. There was straw and paper blown up against the bottom of the iron railings of the fence. He’d had a map of Paris pounded into his head, so he knew where they were, but he didn’t know the name of this church. Either he’d forgot or it wasn’t marked on the map in London.

  Whatever saint used to own the building, now it was a shrine to Saint Horse. There were three big geldings out in the churchyard, standing together, lipping at the straw spread around, filling the place with horse droppings and attracting a swarm of flies.

  The French did that when they kicked the priests out and closed down the churches. They used them as stables and hay barns. They’d built a wood ramp up the front to the big double doors with the carved statues around it so the horses could get in and out.

  The door at the side was locked up snug and suspicious-like. Owl produced a set of lockpicks she had about her person and set about dealing with that. He stood in the doorway, scratching his privates, which was going to make most people look away, shielding her from the curious.

  There were various touchstones that said you had fallen among disreputable folk. Carrying lockpicks was one bad sign. On the other hand, Owl was taking long enough getting the lock open she almost counted as honest.

  “I’m not going to offer to do that,” he said. “It’d just annoy you.”

  “If you do not wish to annoy me, be silent. I am trying to be quiet about this.”

  Which was what he would have said if he was housebreaking and one of his confederates kept flapping his lips. Or churchbreaking. He hadn’t spent much time in churches, once he got past his first youth and graduated from the trade of snatching poor boxes.

  She had pretty hair—shiny and light brown like good ale. When he wasn’t keeping an eye on the street he watched it make an escape out of the side of her cap. Every time she pushed a dozen strands up over her ear, a few more snuck out and started hanging down in the breeze. All this passed the time till she got the lock sprung and picked up her basket and went in.

  It was cooler inside and dim and it smelled of horse. Two windows—one in the front, one at the other end—were still full of glass, colored like it was made of sapphire and ruby. The rest were boarded up, that being what you had to do if you go smashing all the glass out. A lesson to mobs everywhere.

  This was all comfy enough, if you were a horse. They’d covered the stone floor with straw and put up wood slats to make some stalls across the front, under the windows. There were twenty good-sized horse bastards in here. A couple of them swung their heads around, looking right at him.

  He didn’t know a damn thing about horses, except they bit you when they had a chance or kicked you if that end happened to be closer. If you avoided them in the stable, they ran you down in the streets.

  Two grooms were working up at the far end, one of them carting a bucket, the other with his back to them, stroking his way down the side of the horse with a brush.

  Owl hissed. It sounded like a little wind coming in at a keyhole. “Do not stand there like a turnip. Come.”

  He followed her, sneaking past a horse left on his own in a big stall. Owl had decided that one wasn’t going to bite. She was probably wrong. Horses spend their time just waiting to break your bones and stomp on you. It’s all they think about.

  The door she headed for opened up easy. Just as well, considering how long it took her to pick locks. They slipped into a room with cabinets on all the walls and a stairwell off in the back. He had only a second to take this in because Owl closed the door and it got black as under a hat.

  He didn’t mind dark—it was what you might call his area of expertise—but if he’d known they were going to bump around in it for any length of time, he’d have brought a candle.

  “This way.” Her voice came from a ways ahead, where he hadn’t expected her to be. You’d think she did that on purpose.

  Fine. He put one hand out to skim along cabinets. Put a knife in the other. One of the prime characteristics of dark is that it’s full of people who want to do you harm. At least, that had been his experience.

  They said the churches were rich before the Revolution. No telling what kind of stuff the priests left behind. Gold cups. Jewels. Bags of coin. If he’d been alone, he’d have stopped to take a look through those cupboards, just in case something triflin
g had been overlooked.

  Ten paces and the cabinets ran out. Now he had stone wall under his fingers. His foot hit a stair—sturdy, solid-build, wood, curved in a circle, headed up. Air flowed down from above, carrying the wind in from outside and a small, sharp lemon smell with flowers at the edges. That was Owl. No aspect of that girl that didn’t have a bite to it. He didn’t hear footsteps, but she rustled the way women do, faint and subtle.

  So. Upstairs. He counted the steps as he went in case he had to retreat with some deliberate speed.

  The good news was, she probably hadn’t brought him here to gut him. If she wanted him dead, she’d be sensible about it and stab him in the street. She was complex, not perverse.

  He took the steps two at a time, which was why he ran into her, full-tilt, in the dark. Because she’d stopped to wait for him. He didn’t run into her hard, but she jerked like he’d poked her with a stick.

  He felt shock in her muscles. Her whole body went stiff, ready to fight or run. He stepped back, quick-like, but tension kept right on drumming in the air around her. “Sorry.”

  “It is nothing.” A stiff little answer, in a tight voice that barely escaped her throat.

  She didn’t much like men. He’d seen that the first time he laid eyes on her. Seen all the signs that said some man, sometime, had done a right professional job of hurting her. Where he came from, he’d known a lot of women like that.

  She said, “Ahead, there is better light. Perhaps you will refrain from stumbling over me until we get there.”

  He could have said he wasn’t the one standing stock-still in somebody’s path, but he didn’t.

  When the stairs circled again, light started filtering down from the top. A hundred and six steps more and they got to the trapdoor, already opened. Owl crawled up onto the platform of the bell tower. His eyes stung, coming out into the sunlight. Sparrows came out of nests tucked up in the edges of the roof and flew back and forth, objecting.

  He’d never been in a bell tower before, largely because there was nothing to steal in them. But this . . . This was prime. You could see all the way from the Seine out to the hill at Montmartre with the windmills on top. Notre Dame really was on an island. It looked like a bloody map.

  All four sides were open. Up top, over his head, the roof had a beam across it from corner to corner, thick as a tree trunk. That’s where the bell had been. You could see the grooves where it used to fit. The wood floor was scraped up where they’d dragged the bell across. They’d have taken it off to melt down for cannons. There was a square in the floor where the bell ropes must have come up. Big enough to fall through. Somebody’d set three boards across the space.

  Owl put her basket on the stone sill and leaned over, showing off a pretty, rounded arse. He didn’t take any notice of that, since she was a French agent and didn’t like being touched anyway. But when she was grown up a little, she was going to drive some man mad.

  She pointed southeast. “They are outside. You will see them.” She’d brought field glasses in her basket. “Take this.”

  What she handed over was a nice sturdy set of optics, standard issue for the English military. It was just a wonder and a mystery how the French got their hands on so much British equipment, wasn’t it?

  He wasted forty seconds thinking how much money a man earned smuggling and being wistful about it. But he was a spy now, not a member of the criminal classes, and he was reforming himself, so there was no point in thinking about profits from smuggling.

  He shook hair out of his eyes. “What am I looking at?”

  “That street. The long wall. You see it? The gate is green.”

  He was good with maps. “Rue de la Planche.”

  “It is. Do not boast to me. Look at it.”

  He adjusted the optics, set his elbows on the ledge to keep the view steady, and followed where she was pointing. Swung past. Came back again and found it. Adjusted the glasses. And he had it.

  That was another exercise Doyle kept setting him—using glasses just like these and finding his target fast as blazes. “A house. Green shutters on the windows. Iron bars. It is just a pleasure to see somebody take provident care of their possessions.”

  “Go back toward that gate.”

  The double doors in the long wall had gouged pale half-circles into the stone of the street, opening and closing a thousand times. The gates were closed at the moment.

  “In the courtyard behind that.” She brought out another pair of glasses and stood at his shoulder, mirroring his concentration. Since he was a noticing kind of fellow, he observed she had a little white-handled gun left in the basket.

  She shaded the lenses with the flat of her hand. “Good. They are all there.”

  Shade the glasses from the sun and they won’t glint and give away your position. Doyle taught him that. And wasn’t it disconcerting that Owl, who probably worked for the French Secret Police, knew the same trick.

  “What do you see?” she said.

  The courtyard was mottled brown and gray. Cobblestone with dirt. Dark boxes and crates were stacked up everywhere. One small wagon. Two handcarts. There was a big, light-yellow pile of hay. No horses. There were fourteen . . . fifteen people.

  Two men attacked a boy about half their size, whacking at him with sticks, while everybody else stood around and watched. The boy dodged and twisted like an alley dog, keeping out of reach. Just barely.

  Hawker feathered at the optics, fixing on the boy, trying to bring his face in. It was tempting to lean forward, trying to see better. Doyle had cured him of that particular bad habit by clouting him on the head every time he did it.

  And that was not a boy running every which way between the crates. That was a girl. She wore trousers and a loose shirt and she didn’t have any tits on her, but when she flipped around, dodging a kick, long braids fell from their mooring and swung on her back, pale as wheat. She was twelve maybe. Younger than he was.

  One of the men managed to hit her a good one across the back. Then the other man moved in. She got away, scrambling up over a pile of boxes. They chased her. Once, she tripped longwise and didn’t roll away fast enough and got herself kicked in the belly.

  Around the edge of the yard, a dozen boys did nothing . . . Hawker squinted into the eyepiece. No. That was probably girls and boys. Hard to tell from here.

  Five minutes. Ten. Eventually it stopped. The men backed away. The girl struggled back to her feet and leaned over, arms braced on her thighs, braids falling straight down to brush the backs of her hands.

  The two men motioned another kid over and began the creative process of beating the hell out of him in a purely instructive way. The girl limped to join the group lined up along the wall. It made him hurt, just looking at her.

  He glanced across at Owl. “Some men take their pleasure in strange ways. Is that what you brought me here to see?”

  “Yes.” She held her hand out for the field glasses, wrapped them up carefully in a checked cloth, and gave some attention to settling both pairs, and the gun, neatly in the basket. “What do you think?”

  I think there’s men better dead. “She’s a nimble little thing.”

  “She has been in training for a few years, I would think. She is good at fighting. Today, they are being taught that one may be hurt and hurt and hurt again and still continue. It is a valuable lesson. Those men, the Tuteurs who rule that house, repeat it frequently. Let us go. Someone might possibly look up and see us in this tower where we have no business being.”

  “Who are they?” He stepped in front of Owl, blocking her way. Not touching. A man risked whatever part of his body he laid on Owl, careless-like.

  She looked away from him, down into the spiral of descending dark in the opening of the trapdoor. “They are called the Cachés. The hidden ones. They are being groomed to be sent to England.”

  With the last words, she went off down the stairs, as if she’d said everything that needed saying.

  Since he knew a fair amou
nt about women, he didn’t hurry. He came along slowly after her, counting steps so he didn’t trip at the bottom, hearing her footsteps in front of him. At the bottom of the steps he could see the outline of the door. Owl was blocking off some of the light at the lower edge.

  If he’d been waiting there, he’d have stood off to the side so he didn’t give away where he was. Lots of tricks Owl didn’t know yet.

  He took the last few steps and reached past her to spread his hand flat on the door before she opened it. “What do you want from me?”

  She whispered, “We will talk outside. I—”

  “We will talk here. Explain, or I walk out and leave you.”

  She made some gesture he felt in the air. “You bluff. You will not walk away after what you have seen. You have no choice but to listen.”

  “You’d be amazed what kind of choices I have.” He opened the door an inch.

  Her fingers touched his arm. “Wait.” It was enough to stop him.

  He was looking at a smooth, pretty face that didn’t belong to a child. Determined eyes. Eyes that suggested it was probably not a good idea to cross her. He didn’t know what she saw when she looked at him.

  She stood and breathed on his shoulder long enough to make a warm, damp spot. Then she spoke, low and fast. “That place is called the Coach House. They made carriages there, years ago, in the work building behind the courtyard. There is a school now in the house where the master once lived.”

  “A damn strange school if you ask me.”

  “When one considers its purpose, it is not so strange.”

  “Are we going to stand here and play guessing games? Spit it out or swallow it.”

  “I am deciding what you should know.” A moment passed. “I take a great risk. In all of Paris, there are no more than a dozen people left who know the Coach House exists and what happens there.”

  “Well, I’m not one of them yet, am I?”

  “That is because you are an imbécile and keep interrupting me.” Another minute passed. “They are orphans, those children. A man of the Police Secrète searches for young orphans of a particular quality.” The long slit of light from the door fell on her face. Her mouth pulled in at the corner. “There have been many orphans in France, since the Revolution.”