The Black Hawk

by Joanna Bourne

  A voice said, “Owl?”

  No one else called her that anymore. “’Awker.”

  It was his body, immovable behind her. His breath on the back of her neck. She should have recognized it somehow.

  The moment throbbed with danger. Hawker would not kill her. She was sure of that. Almost sure. But he might well drag her off to prison. One does not lightly invade England. One does not capriciously approach the household of important British agents, however much it is the home of one’s sister.

  The knife no longer pricked at her throat. Roughly he turned her around to face him. “What are you doing sneaking around?”

  “What do you think I am doing? Bird-watching? I come to Séverine.” Calmly. She spoke calmly. No mean feat. It was a hard, dark, unforgiving face that confronted her, devoid of humor. And there was the knife.

  She had seen him six months ago, in Verona. Their eyes met across the Piazza dei Signoria. They were both pretending to be Italian. France held the city, but matters were complicated by the Austrian army marching about the countryside trying to take it back, and the Veronese hated all foreigners equally, which was not unreasonable of them. She and Hawker had both deemed it prudent to turn in the opposite direction and walk away.

  He had grown since she last stood this close to him. He was not tall. He would never be tall. But he was now taller than her.

  She said, “I must see her, you know. I do not come here often.”

  Hawker put his knife away in an inner jacket pocket, a single ingenious disappearance. He gazed upon her, looking dangerous. Looking familiar and being very much a stranger. “You shouldn’t be here at all. Now what do I do?”

  “You will let me go, of course. I am not spying upon all these fields of cows. I have no work in England at this time. Do you think agents do not take holidays?”

  It had begun to rain harder, which was the favored choice of English weather. Hawker was bareheaded and water dripped down his forehead, pulling his hair into thin black lines, sharp as the knives he was so menacing with. He was becoming very wet. This would not sweeten his temper.

  He said, “The trouble dealing with you, Owl, is that there’s no way to tell whether you’re lying.”

  “What use would I be to my country if any passing British Service agent could tell I was lying? I will admit it puts me at a disadvantage when I happen to be telling the truth.”

  “Fortunately, that doesn’t happen often.” He looked around as if the dripping woods and the little running stream would give him advice. “This is awkward. I should probably take your weapons off you.”

  “A cautious man would do that, certainly.”

  “But I don’t think you’ll stab me a couple hundred feet away from Sévie. It’s surprisingly difficult to get rid of a body in Oxfordshire.”

  “As you will know by experience, no doubt.”

  He would not harm her. The possibility of that had passed. He also would not drag her into William Doyle’s house in disgrace and indignity. “Neither of us will do anything to hurt Séverine. It is the most perfect of truces, is it not?”

  He only growled at her, less pleased with this stalemate than she was.

  She said, “Why are you here, anyway? It is very strange of you to be wandering in the damp shrubberies of Oxfordshire. Me, I would be inside in front of one of your English fires on a day like this.”

  He wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. “Right you are. I don’t know why I’m standing in the rain anyhow.” He turned his back on her and stalked off into the drizzle.

  She had forgotten, in three years, how much he was master of such simple, brute subtlety. A shrug, a turning away, and he discovered whether she meant to attack him. Or he invited her to escape so he need not be bothered with deciding what to do with her. She would not, however, shoot him or try to run away. She possessed her own subtlety. She followed him and caught up and walked alongside. “Where are we going?”

  He gestured ahead, along the path. “I have a place up that way.”

  Of such unpromising material, great plans are born.

  She had thought of him, often and often, in the three years since they parted in Paris. He was a person one remembered vividly. Sometimes, confronting some particularly egregious stupidity of this long war, she imagined telling him about it. She could almost hear a caustic, cynical reply spoken over her shoulder.

  She had collected every small scrap of rumor about him, all across Europe. She still carried his excellent knife. And here he was. They met upon a neutral ground. Fate served him up to her on a lordly platter.

  Perhaps . . . A great perhaps grew in her mind.

  He was no longer the grubby boy she had known in those desperate times in Paris. He was expensively and well dressed. Not as a young country gentleman or a town beau, which were modes altogether different. He wore the loose soft collar and casual neckcloth of the liberal artistic set. He might have been a student or painter walking about on holiday, strolling through the countryside with friends, going from inn to inn, carrying luncheon and a sketchbook in that leather bag over his shoulder.

  He glanced at her from time to time as they walked. He said abruptly, “You grew breasts.”

  “Thank you. Do you know, there are many things one may notice without commenting upon.”

  “When did you get to be a woman, Owl?”

  “I was a woman when you first met me.”

  He shook his head, perfectly serious, as if he’d given the matter consideration. “You were a kid. A scrawny one.”

  “Tu es galant. I am immeasurably flattered.”

  They spoke French, having fallen into it naturally, without thinking. He sounded utterly Parisian now, with the bare soup-çon of the Gascon tongue underneath. If she did not know better, she would have thought he came from the south of France when he was a child. This suited him, with his Gascon looks and the arrogant assurance of the Gascon male. His voice was deeper than it had been.

  “We might speak English,” she said. “I have never heard you do that.”

  But she had. She remembered suddenly. Three years ago, in Paris, when she was following him secretly, she had overheard him hiss a dozen harsh words in an English she barely understood, it was so much the language of the London poor.

  “They don’t want me speaking English.” Humor sliced across his face. “I don’t do it right.”

  She would like to hear him speak English, “not right.” It would make him seem even more himself. “I will cajole you. I have lured many men into disobedience.”

  “I’ll be one more of your dupes.” He said it in English. “I fall into lots of bad habits.”

  Ah . . . but he no longer spoke the Cockney of London. His English had become overprecise, slow, careful of every syllable, as if it were not his native language. It was a pleasure to see him a little ill at ease. He had entirely too much self-assurance.

  She, on the other hand, was very proud of her English. She had almost no accent. “You have not explained why you make the squashings about in the wood of the house of Doyle. Why are you haunting the bushes?”

  “Somebody’s got to keep an eye out for French spies in the underbrush. And what do you know, I found one.”

  “I am the delightful happenstance, am I not?”

  “Too bloody right.”

  Nineteen

  THE DIRT LANE WAS MUDDY, OF COURSE. EVERY LANE in England was muddy. She followed him and they kept to the grass in the middle, between the wagon wheel ruts. A fine drizzle fell lightly upon them.

  “Not far,” Hawker said over his shoulder. He walked like a cat, both assured and infinitely circumspect, with not one wasted motion. And also like a cat, there was no inch of him that was not elegantly constructed. Bone to bone and nerve to nerve fit together as deftly as the parts of a clock. It was as she remembered.

  It would be Hawker. Hawker and no other.

  When had she decided? Was it the moment he lowered his knife from her throat and they knew ea
ch other, there in the brush by the stream? Was it when he spoke his careful, uncomfortable, upper-class English to her? Or had she known this for months? From the beginning?

  For a year she had planned, putting one face and then another into her thoughts, and saying, “No. Not that one. He is not right.” Had she discarded every other possibility because they were not Hawker?

  I thought it would be a matter of cold calculation, but it is not. He is the man I want. If not here and now, with him, I think it will be never.

  How stupid of me.

  The stone cottage at the end of the lane was tiny, smaller even than the smallest of the farmhouses she had passed in Oxfordshire. The twists of the lane had brought them again to the stream. It could be seen through the woods behind the cottage. Beech trees rose on every side, a very soft green. The door of the cottage faced open country.

  “Doyle owns it,” Hawker said abruptly. “He bought the land a while back. There’s ruins of a big house out that way.” He waved to the right. “Burned down fifty years ago. This was the gamekeeper’s cottage.” Hawker had become studiously casual. “I ride up from town and stay here when I want. They keep it ready for me.”

  The grass was scythed on either side of the path in the front, and someone had planted flowers that splashed color into the gray mist. Hawker would perhaps think these things happened of themselves.

  He ducked under the lintel going in—the threshold was that low—and paused on the braided rug that lay across the doorway to shake his head like a dog, scattering water. A small thing, but it told her he was at home here. He would be less wary, perhaps, in a place he felt safe.

  He turned to look at her through the open door. He’d collected silver points of rain upon him everywhere. On his coat, in his hair, in his eyebrows, on his eyelashes.

  “You do not lock your door,” she said.

  “They don’t in the country.” Hard, dark eyes ran up and down her. He stood aside to let her in. “Pointless anyway. Just encourages somebody to break a window. Do you know how much it costs to buy a window?”

  The cottage was a single room with plaster walls and a stone fireplace at one end. A table, black with age, was pushed against the wall under the window. There were books everywhere—on the wide windowsill, on the bureau, on a table between the two big, comfortable chairs that faced the hearth. French books, so far as she could see. Clouet’s Géographie Moderne on the table. Lalumière’s thin volume, Sur l’Égalité, dropped in the chair cushions. Hawker was making a Frenchman of himself in every way but his loyalties.

  Propped on the mantel over the fireplace was one of Séverine’s watercolors, framed. This was someone in blue—perhaps Séverine—beside a large brown dog. Or possibly a pony. The brown rectangle with door and windows was recognizably the house of Doyle.

  “They leave the place empty for months when I’m not here.” The bag Hawker carried thumped onto the table. “A waste. I’m about never in England.”

  “You are in Italy, causing trouble for me. I will make tea.”

  She left her cloak on the straight-backed chair next to the table and knelt to the hearthrug. How does one make such a decision? When had it happened? She could not place a finger upon the moment everything changed, but she had decided.

  The coals were orange under the ashes. It took only an instant to blow fire into life and lay down a few lengths of beechwood shavings and build a blaze with the kindling.

  Hawker closed the shutters at the window over the table, giving them privacy from the day, then crossed to the other windows. Two in front. One in back. “Tea’s about all I have to offer. I eat at the house or in the tavern in the village.”

  Or he stayed here alone, she thought. There were signs of his solitary meals. A half loaf of bread was cut-side-down on the table. The shape under the checked cloth was a cheese. A bowl held two apples. And he had tossed remnants of orange peel onto the fire. They curled like old leaves in the ash. She could smell the acrid, not unpleasant bite of burned citrus.

  She pictured him sprawled, loose limbed, in one of the deep, chintz-covered chairs, his legs stretched to the firedogs, peeling an orange, absorbed in the book in his lap, with the lantern lit beside him. It would be a domestic scene, if one imagined a domestic scene with panther, couchant, at the fire.

  The black kettle was half full and still warm from lying on this hearth. He had been gone from the cottage for two or three hours, then. The kettle and the heat of the hearthstones spoke of a fire built, tea brewed, boots and coat warmed, before Hawker had gone out into the cold mist this morning.

  He put himself into a rush-bottomed chair to take off his boots, using the toe of one upon the heel of the other to loosen them. He wore thick knitted stockings like a good countryman. These he removed also and tossed to keep company with the boots.

  She rearranged herself from kneeling to sitting on the hearthrug. The gun she carried in the pocket under her skirt thumped against her thigh. She pulled her knees close to take off her own boots.

  “If you plan to run, leave those on,” Hawker said. “This would be a good time for it. I can’t chase you in the woods without my boots.”

  “If I wanted to run, I would shoot you first and you would also not chase me in the woods. You would lie here bleeding.”

  “That is what they call a cogent point.”

  She pulled off her boots and arranged her skirt around her legs. The cloth clung and sucked and made her damp and uncomfortable. Nothing is more gloomy than sitting about in wet clothing. She poked at the fire, hoping to remedy that dampness somewhat.

  She liked his hideaway, both the superficial clutter and the underlying austere neatness. A stack of shirts had been left lying upon the coverlet of the bed. The red painted chest on the floor was open, showing more clothing inside. Hawker went, barefooted to tame this disorder.

  Agents are well organized in this way. They live, ready to pack their belongings in a handful of minutes and decamp hastily. The life of a spy is uncertain.

  He came to stand beside her, to frown down and think deep spy thoughts. When she leaned back to look up at him, his hair dripped three distinct drops onto her face. “Sorry.” He pushed wet hair back from his forehead with the back of his fingers. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t need somebody to make a fire for me.”

  “Comme tu dis. But it is not altruism. I am warming my hands over these coals and your kettle. I have skulked in the bushes for hours. Skulking is cold work.” In truth, she had spent much of yesterday and all the last night wrapped in her cloak, half buried in old leaves, waiting for her chance to see Séverine. “You may hand me that teapot, and the cups too. I will put them on the hearth to take the chill off. All the crockery in England must shiver continually.”

  “Chilblains in the china. Well-known English problem.”

  The teapot he took down from the mantelpiece was plain brown, such as could be found in any cottage up and down these hills, or in France, for that matter. The handleless cups were slightly more refined, but they were still crockery that might be slapped onto the table of any country inn.

  She felt a moment of annoyance at those dishes. Maggie could have found something finer for him. The country manor of Doyle was like the great houses of France, filled with treasures.

  Hawker picked up the teapot, one-handed, his hand wrapped familiarly through the handle, his thumb holding down the lid. He collected a pair of cups with the other hand, hooking them both with one finger, letting them clank together. He was as casual with the tea caddy, unstoppering it, peering in to scoop out tea leaves.

  The teapot and cups were valueless. The blue-and-white tea caddy was Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty. Her father had kept one very like it in a glass case in the red salon at the chateau, before the Revolution.

  Hawker tamped the scoop of tea leaves against the lip of the jar, carelessly, with a fine melodic ring. He did not know.

  Marguerite was wise. She took what Hawker carried from his past and
gave him the rush chairs, the heavy, cheap teapot, the well-scrubbed old table. She offered him his future in those fine books and the soft chintz chairs by the fire. Then, casually, upon the mantelpiece, Marguerite set a piece of porcelain fired when Joan of Arc was young.

  Hawker would find everything in this small cottage easy and familiar, because Marguerite made it so. Someday, when he moved easily among the rich and powerful, he would not even realize it began here.

  She lifted the teapot so he could turn scoops of tea leaves in. He had artist’s hands. Sculptor’s hands. Such hands are not delicate and white with long fingers. They are strong, precise, exact, and purposeful.

  His chin was shadowed with a need to shave. She had known a boy three years ago. She did not really know this young man.

  I do not know how to ask. Everything I can say is ugly. I do not want this to be ugly.

  She gave her attention to pouring hot water onto the tea leaves. Rain drummed on the roof. Since they were not talking, since they were not looking at each other, it seemed very loud.

  He said, “As soon as you drink that, you should leave. It’s getting worse out there.”

  I must do this now, before I lose my courage. “I am hoping to spend the night.”

  Twenty

  SHE CHOSE WORDS CAREFULLY, TO CLARIFY MATTERS beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. “It is my wish to spend the night with you, in your bed.”

  There. She had said it. It was now too late to take it back. Her mind, which had many cowardly corners, immediately went looking for plausible ways to pretend she did not mean what she had said.

  Hawker was silent. He would be this self-possessed if tribesmen of the Afghan plains burst through the door and attacked him with scimitars. The refusal to be ruffled was one of his least endearing traits.

  Time stretched, very empty of comment, while she swirled the teapot gently and he was inscrutable.

  Finally, he took the oil lamp from the end of the mantel and busied himself adjusting the wick, lighting it with a paper spill from the fire. “The hell you say.”