Side by side, down the hallway, they passed old maps on the walls and the bureau at the front that held the gloves and hats of everybody currently sleeping in Meeks Street.
Doyle began to pick his scar off. It left a thin, shiny line where the glue had held it. “I sent him on missions when he was sixteen. Dogged, cold as ice, ingenious, utterly fearless. I could walk off and worry about something else, knowing he was on the job. The perfect agent.”
“We have arrived at the end of that fiction,” Galba said testily. He took the stairs upward.
Doyle followed. “I should have asked myself why that boy came to us knowing how to kill. That’s not what James Paxton would teach his son.” The false scar came off as a thin skin, pale and stretchy. He rolled it between his fingers, making tacky little balls he dropped into the pocket of his coat.
Removing the scar was getting out of disguise. For him it was becoming the man who’d go home to Maggie and the kids.
The second-floor hallway was cool silence with a single candle left burning in a glass chimney at the end. One bedroom showed a bright strip under the shut door and there were low voices inside. No words leaked through, but the tones were clear. Hawker exasperated. Pax determined.
Galba didn’t pause there. He waited till he was halfway up the next flight of stairs to say, “Paxton knows where the Caché woman is, or how to find her. He knows more about the Merchant than he’s saying.”
“We’re all of us founts of mystery and intrigue when you delve deep enough.” The last of the scar was off his face. Doyle rubbed the rough place it left behind. “One of the things he’s not saying is that he plans to kill the man. When Pax was hurt, he sent Hawk to kill the Merchant. Not follow or capture. Kill.”
“It is not his decision to make. I’ll give orders tomorrow.”
“You’ll give orders. Well, that’s the problem solved, then.”
The third-floor hall was another dim, silent corridor, this one hung with lithographs from a manual on the art of the duello. Swordsmen saluted, lunged, parried, riposted. Agents on long-term assignment to London slept here. They were asleep now, or at least staying quiet as men walked past.
The door to the attic was halfway down the hall. Galba pulled up the simple latch and the attic stairs were revealed, steep, narrow, and utterly black. A draft of chilly air hit their faces.
“Either Pax is a Service agent taking my orders or he doesn’t belong under this roof.” Galba lifted the lantern as he climbed. “I have uses for the Merchant alive. Alive, I can question him. I can trade him to the Austrians. I can give him to Military Intelligence and buy future cooperation. Dead, he’s just an embarrassing corpse. I will not have an agent who kills without orders. That is intolerable.”
“He hasn’t done it yet.” Doyle waited till they reached the top of the stairs, beyond range of anyone’s ears, to say the rest. “We didn’t do well by the boy, putting him to the work we did.”
“We have dirty work to do.” Galba’s face was set in a grim expression. “Paxton seemed strong enough.”
“He was nineteen when he began.”
“It wasn’t his first death.”
“It was too many kills,” Doyle said. “Twenty-six in Piedmont and Tuscany. Five more in France, for Carruthers. Hawker said those assignments were tearing at Pax’s entrails like mythical Greek vultures. I should have stopped it long since.”
“If an assassin doesn’t have bad dreams, we’ve created a monster. We’ve both done that work, Will.”
“They can be very bad dreams,” Doyle said.
“We learned to live with them. Paxton will, too.”
The floor creaked underfoot as they walked the narrow hall of the attic. Light from the lantern reached out to hit odd angles of ceiling beam and door frame.
They walked through the long single storeroom that ran the length of the front of the house. Smaller rooms lined up on the other side. Here, everywhere, the Service kept weapons and an eclectic array of clothing and traveling gear. All the bits and bobs a man would keep in his pocket or carry in his valise. The accouterment of a spy.
“I don’t have to tell you why I kept him in place too long.” Galba frowned his way past stores of clothing made in Paris or southern France or Austria. “We sent an assassin to Piedmont and ended up with an Italian folk hero. I ordered a few strategic deaths among the French officers and Paxton attracts a band of Merry Men and rouses up the countryside against Napoleon. Even now, he could whistle a hundred men out of farmhouses from Genoa to Switzerland.”
“Don’t know where he learned to run a secret organization, but he has a genius for it.” Doyle smiled. “We’ll use that. I can always find killers.”
“I agree.” Galba added tartly, “Paxton may celebrate retirement from the trade of assassin by not killing the Merchant.”
They’d come to a door at the end of the passageway, a sturdy door with a grille in it. It looked like it would lead to a prison, and it did. Meeks Street had played host to many unwilling guests.
Doyle said, “Is this what you plan for the cuckoo in the Leyland nest? Put her here?”
Galba fingered the cold iron of the key before he put it in the lock. “She’s a French spy, Will.”
“So is Pax.”
“Pax is ours.” The lock was noisy and stiff. The lantern tossed shadows around while Galba turned the key. “He’s been ours since he walked into my office ten years ago, starved down to a skeleton, with burns festering on his arm. We made him what he is. You made him what he is.”
“Right now, he’s lying up one side and down the other to protect the woman. He doesn’t trust us with her. And he’s right.”
“I am not the archfiend.”
“How hard are you going to question her? Can you promise we won’t turn her over to Military Intelligence? Or let the Foreign Office put her on trial?”
“Not unless I have no other choice whatsoever.” Galba sounded impatient. “I intend to have other choices.”
The prison cell was painted stark white and held a bed, dresser, basin and pitcher, desk, and chair. When they had prisoners, they hung a lantern outside the grille of the door and built a fire on the hearth in the main attic.
Doyle said quietly, “This is what Pax is afraid of.”
“There are worse fates for a spy than comfortable detention.” Galba pushed the door all the way open and brought the lantern inside. The light revealed more detail but didn’t make the space less spartan. “I’ll bring some books up. Paper. Quills.”
“Oh, that’ll be a comfort to her.”
“Cervantes wrote Don Quixote in prison. Maybe she has a book in her. I’ll have George put on fresh sheets and light a fire. It’ll take a day to get the chill out of the plaster.”
Doyle ran his fingers into the grille in the door. “Is this what we’re planning? Because I’ll tell you right now, it’s a bad idea.”
“We are prepared for all eventualities.” Galba studied the room, one side to the other, his eyes unrevealing. “I like this no better than you do.”
“Are you prepared for Pax to break her out of here?”
Galba frowned. “It is more than fellow Cachés, bound by oath, then. Is he épris? Has she seduced him? He’s not indifferent to women, even if he lives like a monk.”
“He’s not thinking of her as a friend who happens to have breasts. And it’s past time he made a fool of himself in that particular way.” Doyle checked the hinges of the door into the white cell. Checked the lock. “When he came out of the bookshop, he looked like a man who’s been with a woman.”
“That is a complicating factor,” Galba muttered.
Doyle gave the lock one final shake and stepped back. “I hate dealing with Cachés in every particular and all directions.”
“It’s just as well you let her leave the bookshop. It delays the moment Paxton is forced to choose between the Service and the woman.”
“When he does, we’ve destroyed him,” Doyle said. “Or we’v
e lost him for good.”
Twenty
London-living Lazarus,
The Dead Man risen and risen again,
Your hand in an L just like this
Brings you to his trusted men.
If you want to see his face
The second sign brings you to his place
First finger up, three fingers down,
The thumb just touches the littlest one.
A BALDONI CHILDREN’S RHYME
No man, as John Donne points out, is an island, but some of them are very slender peninsulas. Cami had felt like a stretched and thin extension of the great continent of mankind since she’d cut herself off from the Fluffy Aunts to adventure upon the lonely business of rescue and, quite possibly, murder. Maybe that was why Paxton could wrap her so quickly in so many strands of old friendship and new obligation. Because she had made herself so alone.
How would she free herself of him when this was over?
She walked, listening for any sound behind her. The last small mists of the drizzle had disappeared an hour ago. Here and there a piece of the night sky opened up above the city, holding a moon. Sometimes she could have counted the bricks in the wall she was passing and the moon reflected in every pane of glass. Sometimes the details were frankly obscure.
She felt vulnerable under the sky in this huge, ugly city, driven from her bookshop lair like a fox from its earth. Predators grow fat on animals turned out of their accustomed places. London was full of predators.
A little wind pushed at her back like an encouraging kitten.
She should be safe enough. Men who wanted to hurt and terrify women would take their custom to Seven Dials and amuse themselves with impunity among a rich selection of prostitutes. The tethered lambs under the streetlamps were her best assurance of safety. And she was close to Bow Street. Men didn’t like to cudgel and rob right on the doorstep of the magistrate’s office. Really, she was as safe as any woman out on the night streets of London could expect to be.
Besides, she was armed. Extensively so.
She watched the night alertly and wondered what to do about Pax.
Because of Pax, she was damp, weary, and free, instead of dry, warm, and imprisoned. He’d lied to his friends for her. He’d stabbed himself in that coldly accurate way and used his blood to paint more lies inside that bookshop. He’d bled for her. She might have fallen into the middle of an Elizabethan stage drama.
Now she owed a blood debt and must find a way to repay it. What could be more traditional? More Baldoni?
Maybe Englishwomen didn’t think that way, but the women of Tuscany did. In all the years that lay between this night in London and her Italian childhood she had never become anything else but Baldoni.
Pax seemed to have become as Italian as she was. He hunted this Mr. Smith, this blackmailer, with a determination like cold iron. Hated with the poignancy of needles of ice. Pursued with the ferocity of Nemesis. Whatever this Mr. Smith had done, Pax would avenge. The Baldoni understood vengeance.
She took a left turn and a right, avoiding men not yet in sight who did not sound entirely sober. Carriages rolled past, taking the fashionable home after the ball, after the opera, after a light, select supper, after the assignation with a secret lover. A more prosaic wagon clanked along a side street, heading the same direction she was, but slower.
Blackmore Street crossed Drury Lane. Ahead of her, two women carried heavy baskets and chatted companionably. She was getting close to the market. To the north, not close, a night watchman woke everybody up, telling them it was three o’clock on a cloudy Saturday morning. “All’s well,” he said.
All was well. The Fluffy Aunts slept safe in their flowered bedrooms in the cottage in Brodemere. In a day or two, when Meeks Street sent word, they’d learn what had become of her. They might even be glad the impostor was out of their house. With luck, their niece, their blood kin, would be under their roof in a week or two. That would balance the scales.
Nothing is more important than family. No one knows this better than the woman who has none.
Avoiding chummy little knots of gentlemen strolling from ballroom to brothel, she came at last, by roundabout ways, to Covent Garden.
At three in the morning London’s great market buzzed like a hive of bees. Yellow light licked faces bent over the fires lit on the cobblestones. Yellow lanterns hung from the poles that lifted the awnings over the stalls. Under the smell of greenery and apples, rotten vegetables and garden dirt, the night smelled of those oil lamps. There were less pleasant smells, too, though some of the worst had been washed away by the rain.
It was yesterday’s rain now. She’d walked her way into tomorrow, a day that inherited a number of old problems and would grow a fine crop of new.
She would meet Paxton today at noon in the square outside Gunter’s. Whenever she tried to think about the logical reasons for doing this, she thought instead about long fingers gentle on her face, persuading her mouth upward for the glide of his tongue into her. Thought of the brush of white hair on her cheeks, smooth as silk. He’d kissed her with the care and attention usually given to the creation of a work of art. Kissed her as if he had all the time in the world. As if that were the most important event of this sharp-edged and dangerous night.
That was not a foolish reason to trust him. Men reveal themselves at such moments.
Besides, if she didn’t meet Pax at noon, he’d tear London apart looking for her. And he might be useful. Perhaps his plans to destroy Mr. Smith and hers to rescue the niece of the Fluffy Aunts could bump along comfortably, side by side, on the same road.
She entered the market and almost immediately nipped back to let a handcart roll past. Thus she did not get knocked to the stones, bruised and dirty. It was a reminder that “Any worthwhile enterprise is filled with hazard.” She heard that wisdom inside her head in Tuscan. The English would perhaps say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” but that lacked the flavor of the Italian.
The more substantial stalls on the far side of Covent Garden were closed and shuttered, but the long tables in the middle of the square were busy. Men and women were purposeful there, unloading baskets from wagons, stacking beets and apples. She made her way through the crowd, jostled by wicker baskets, pushed aside with a brusque, “Watch it, girl,” from men who rigged their awnings in the dark, ready to shelter vegetables from a sun that wouldn’t come up for another two hours.
She’d come to Covent Garden to send a message and required a particular sort of messenger to carry it. Not the hackney driver yawning and scratching on his seat behind the horses, there at the door of a brothel. Not that laborer hunched under a sackful of turnips. Not the farmer with a load of cabbage. Her man or woman belonged to the market itself.
The water pump was across the square, just south of the church, neatly placed in front of the watch house. She pumped and caught the stream in her hands, so cold it made her hands numb. It was a shock when she burrowed into it and washed face, neck, ears, and up and down both arms. It was ice cold to drink. Good water, tasting of iron.
Nearby, two girls sat cross-legged on the curb, skirts drawn up over their knees, washing watercress in a bucket. Another, this one older, tied the leaves into plump, practiced little bundles and arranged them in rows in the flat basket at her side.
Children of the market. Natives of this dangerous jungle, sweet-faced and hard-eyed. They’d know.
She wandered casually toward them, not meeting eyes but just looking out over the square. She held her hand, thumb and index finger making an L, in the shadow of her cloak so that only those three girls could see. She said, “I want to buy a service,” as if she were asking about green beans. The words had been the unvarying formula of request for more years than anyone could count.
The L was for Lazarus. Magistrates and bailiffs enforced the law of the land elsewhere. In Covent Garden the King of Thieves ruled. Through the rookeries of St. Giles, along the docks of Wapping, even in considerably more respec
table places, no barrow wheeled, no booth hawked its wares, no prostitute inveigled a customer into her room upstairs without paying a pence to Lazarus. To the ruler of London’s own horrific underworld. He was threat and brutality and a kind of rough justice.
One watercress girl looked at another. Eyes shifted to an old woman twenty paces away.
That was all the direction needed, a nod being as good as a wink.
The watch house was surrounded by a low wall and iron railings with spikes on top. It was well lanterned down the walk to the door and inside the windows. At this hour it was quiet as the grave. Nothing less than riot would open that door and call out the watch.
She’d send her message to Lazarus within spitting distance of the watch station. Her world was compounded of irony and discomfort this fine morning.
The woman sat on the little wall, wearing shabby black, her back to the rails and the light. She held a basket of apples in her lap. This time the signal of introduction brought no reaction, except that the woman took an apple out of her basket and began to polish it on her skirt. That went on for perhaps half an apple before she said, “Wotcher want?”
“I need to buy a service. Can you send the message?”
“Mebbe.”
So. She’d found the first link in the chain, one of the legion of street sellers, pickpockets, peddlers, and beggars who occupied the fringes of Lazarus’s realm.
“Wot service?” The woman spat on the apple, regarded it dispassionately, and polished some more. Not a woman spendthrift with her words, the apple seller.
“You don’t need to know.” She gave another hand sign, then, this one old and powerful. Baldoni are taught such secrets in the cradle. “Can you pass a message to a man who understands that?”
Can I even use that sign? Is it forbidden to someone running from a sworn vendetta?
The woman finished the fine polishing of the apple, set it in a basket, and chose the next. “Might be I could. Might not.” Her expression was compounded of slyness and greed.
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