“She’s fine as she is,” I said, mentally thumbing my nose at Madame Levene, my father, the Crows and every servant in our house at Versailles, all of whom would have been repulsed by my new friend’s table manners.
“She might be fine for having her supper on board a smuggling vessel,” said Byron cheerfully, “but she won’t be fine when you’re trying to pass her off as your lady’s maid in London during this ‘secret assignation’ of yours.”
I shot him an irritated look. “It’s not a secret assignation.”
He grinned. “You could have fooled me. Either way, you’re going to need to teach her how to behave in public. For a start she needs to begin addressing you as mademoiselle. She needs to know the basics of etiquette and decorum.”
“Yes, all right, thank you, Byron,” I said primly. “I don’t need you to tell me about table manners. I shall teach her myself.”
“As you please, mademoiselle,” he said, and grinned. He did that a lot. Both the sarcastically referring to me as “mademoiselle” and the grinning.
When supper was over, Byron took his flask of wine and some animal skins above deck and left us to prepare for bed. I wondered what he was doing up there, what he was thinking.
We sailed through the next day. Byron tethered the wheel with rope and he and I sparred, my neglected sword fighting skills beginning to return as I danced across the boards and our steel met. I could tell he was impressed. He laughed and smiled and gave me encouragement. A more handsome sparring partner than Mr. Weatherall, though perhaps a little less disciplined.
That night we ate again. Helene retired to her berth in the cramped conditions we called our cabin belowdecks 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 said 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?”
I felt myself go warm despite the chill on the deck.
“Okay. So have you ever crossed swords with an opponent?”
The moon-dappled sea sucked at the hull but otherwise the night was almost totally still, like we were the only two people left alive.
“Of course.”
“An opponent who meant you harm?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Fair enough. Have you 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 primly. “I don’t need telling by the likes of you.”
“Go on, humor 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.
“I hesitated.”
“That’s right. What should you have done?”
“Look, I don’t need . . .”
“Don’t you? But 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 belowdecks, 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 Helene. 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 draught from his leather flask and passed it back to me. “There are plenty of reasons to kill a man: duty, honor, vengeance. All of them might give you pause for thought. And a reason for guilty reflection afterward. 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 Helene and I bid good-bye to Byron Jackson on the beach at Dover. He had much work to do, he said, in order to bypass the customs houses, so Helene 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 toward the cliff top, the Dover lighthouse as our guide.
Though I’d 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, monsieur, 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, Helene 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, Helene discarded her peasant’s dress in favor of my breeches, shirt and waistcoat—not much of an improvement considering the dirt I’d managed 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 coat, who smelled faintly of silver polish.
I introduced us 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 Helene’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 o
f dropping open; May Carroll, who clapped her hands together with sarcastic delight and crowed, “Oh, it’s smell-bag,” and the mood I was in, I could just as 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 the 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-of-fashion dresses were evidently designed to irritate me, they did nothing of the sort.
What irritates me is May Carroll.
Helene, 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, hasn’t been doing an awfully good job when it’s come to masquerading as my lady’s maid, performing strange, random curtsies while shooting constant, terrified glances my way. We’d have to work on Helene, there was no doubt about that. At least the Carrolls were so arrogant and pleased with themselves that they simply assumed Helene was “very French” and put her naivety down to that.
Then Mr. Weatherall knocked.
“Are you decent?” I heard him say.
“Yes, monsieur, I am decent,” I replied, and the 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 Helene and I entered the dining room, both of us looking like—what was the expression Madame Carroll had used?—“like 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 over a decade ago. Madame 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 she had 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 favorite 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 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 learned 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 snow-white beard uncomfortably. “In a manner of speaking. They want you to pose as someone else in order to gain entry into the household.”
“Which is spying.”
“Well . . . yeah.”
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. At this moment in time she’s neither useful nor ornamental.” 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 nodded. “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 exactly what did you do for two days on the English Channel, Élise?”
“Swordplay, monsieur,” I said. “We practiced our swordplay.”
20 MARCH 1788
The Carrolls—that little cabal of Monsieur, Madame and May—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.
Of course 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, of course. 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 Helene with her reading and taught her English, and in doing so, polished my own skills.
“Will this be dangerous?” Helene asked me one afternoon, using English as we took a turn around the grounds.
“It will, Helene. 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, Helene. 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?”
Helene 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 Helene. 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 has seen fit to favor me with this angel.
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