The Spymaster's Lady

by Joanna Bourne

  She closed the forceps and gently took hold and gently, gently brought the last of the bullet out. She fitted one piece of metal with the other. There was nothing missing.

  “It is done.” She laid the forceps onto the blanket, took bandages from her lap, and pressed them to the wound.

  “My God,” Doyle muttered.

  The patient panted fast and shallow, hissing out through his teeth, an animal sound.

  “Finished. Right.” Grey sounded as shaken as she felt. “That’s the worst of it, Hawker. Now we’re going to build a wall between you and the pain. A big, dark wall. Thick darkness. The pain’s on one side, you’re on the other. Breathe in. Slow. Breathe out.”

  She herself had not breathed for a while, obviously. The ground swayed under her, which was an unmistakable sign.

  Adrian—he was Adrian again to her—was losing blood. It soaked through the layers she held. Sluggishly, thank the bon Dieu. She had not nicked the artery. She had not killed him. This was not the hot rush of bleeding that meant death.

  Never before had she operated on someone she knew. It was of a horribleness unimaginable. She would avoid this in the future.

  “I got that.” Doyle set her hands aside. Took over. He discarded the soaked bandages, twitched a clean one into place.

  Adrian groaned and tried to roll. Grey, who thought everyone should do as he commanded, told him to hold still. Told him how to breathe. Again and again, told him how to breathe. It was most odd.

  “We going to close this?” Doyle asked. “I got a hot iron. I can do it.”

  “No fire. He will stop bleeding soon.” She wiped her sticky palms on her skirt. Adrian’s blood. “We will let it drain, as the great Ambroise Paré taught. There is less of…of infection that way. No stitches, unless it bleeds and bleeds. Then one or two small ones to hold the edges together tomorrow.”

  “Lean on Grey, why don’t you. He ain’t busy,” Doyle said.

  “I am fine.” She started to push her hair back from her face, remembered what was on her hands, and stopped. She took various deep, helpful breaths. “We are wise in this, we French. Paré taught that such wounds, we leave open…to heal from within…”

  Grey abandoned his endless, one-sided conversation with Adrian and abruptly stood to walk around. When he returned, he put a cold cloth to her forehead.

  “You should not let me touch you.” But she rested her cheek on his thigh in an intimacy which seemed wholly natural at the moment. The ground still wished to tilt under her. “I am entirely gruesome with blood. I have ruined this dress, though it was probably not decent in any case. But I do not have a great number. One must be provident.”

  He used the cloth to wash her cheeks, then folded it and held it on the back of her neck.

  “You are doing this so I will not faint. I never faint.”

  “That’s good. I’m sorry about the dress.” He was apologizing for several things at once. She became certain the dresses he had given her were improper. “Thank you for saving Adrian’s life.”

  “This was not so bad. Once I took fifty-two pieces of metal out of a man and he lived. An Austrian sergeant. He melted them down to make a paperweight, I heard.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.” Grey was thinking a number of things. She could almost hear thoughts humming and clinking inside him. “Annique…I would have killed him.”

  “Almost certainly. The second tiny piece was close to the axillary artery. I felt it pulsing. Will you let me go free, since I have spared you from killing your friend?”

  He did not hesitate. “No.”

  He was unreasonable, right to the soles of his shoes. “Then I will go wash blood off me and not sit here at your feet in this spineless fashion.” She put her legs underneath herself and stood up, which she would probably have managed even without Grey’s assistance. He put the useful stick in her hold and it supported her very handily without the help of any Englishman. She did not feel at all like fainting.

  “Your bag’s on the far side of the fire,” Doyle said. “It’s…No. More to the right. That’s got it. There’s soap and a towel on that rock. Yes. There.”

  “I am well provided for, then. I shall take these and go wash myself in privacy. Monsieur Grey may again talk to his Adrian with great tediousness. Certainly he has nothing of interest to say to me.”

  “No, miss,” Doyle said pacifically. These English spies spent much of their spare time laughing at her.

  “You will press down upon those bandages until the bleeding stops. As you well know.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  She batted away at the small bushes with her stick and found where the path descended to the stream. “And put a blanket upon him.”

  She was angry with herself. Stupid, stupid woman that she was, she wanted to stay with Grey and allow him to coddle her. He was destroying her, that one, with his kindness and his strong arms that held her and felt so full of caring, while he continued to be, inside, utterly ruthless.

  He tempted her. He was a trap in every part of him. It would be so treacherously easy to place herself into his hands. But she did not trust him in the least. She had not yet lost her mind. Not quite.

  When she came to the water it was pleasant, and warmer than she expected, which relieved her feelings somewhat. So did the deep silence on every side. As she worked her way downstream to find the bathing place for women, she reflected that these were thick woods around her everywhere. One could hide in them very well, at night, when one was escaping.

  “WELL, that weren’t so bad, then,” Doyle said when she’d gone down the path and couldn’t overhear. “Not like Adrian’s a bloody Austrian sergeant with fifty-two pieces of lead in his gut.”

  “Name of God, Will, how long did she take?”

  “Two minutes. Three, tops. I can see why those army surgeons put her to work. Jerked that bullet out like a plum in a Christmas pudding.”

  “How many goddamned battles was she in, to learn that? What the hell kind of mother sends a child to an army camp to spy? How old was she? Eleven? Twelve?”

  “About the same age we put the Hawker to work.”

  “Hawker wasn’t a child. He was never a child.”

  “I don’t suppose Annique was either. From what I hear, she was there when they hanged her father. She’d have been about four.” Doyle blotted Adrian’s chest with clean bandages. “He’s not even leaking blood much. Get that blanket, will you? You going to do more of that talk-talk to make him sleep?”

  “Every hour for a while. What the devil am I going to do with that woman?”

  “Now, that I wouldn’t care to speculate on. Spread your bedding over there a ways so you don’t disturb Adrian when you do it.”

  “Very funny. I’ll reconnoiter up the ridge and keep an eye on her so she doesn’t sneak off. Call me if the boy wakes up. She’s going to run for it tonight, isn’t she?”

  “All these woods and fields to hide in…yes. Hit you over the head with a rock first, I think.” Doyle picked up the bits of lead that had been pulled out of Adrian, looked at them soberly, and put them safe in his pocket. “Hawk will want these.”

  “Good idea.” Grey stared down the path she’d just taken. “She’s already planning. I can feel her doing it. I don’t think I can stop her. She is so ferociously competent.”

  “Be like trying to hold this one,” Doyle gestured at Adrian, “when he wanted to run.”

  “You’re saying it’s not possible.”

  “Not easy. Not outside of Meeks Street.”

  Even if he tied her up, she’d find some way to get loose. “Leblanc’s on our heels. If she gets away from us, he’ll find her.”

  “Or Fouché might get to her first and pop her into a brothel. If she’s lucky.” Doyle began wiping the instruments and laying them back in the bag.

  There was only one damned thing to do. “Put some food together. She’ll be hungry, once she cleans up. And Will…”

  Doyle looked up.

 
“Give her opium in the coffee.”

  Doyle bound a new pad of bandages on Adrian.

  “You have something to say?”

  “It’ll work. She likes coffee.” Doyle took the blanket and spread it over Adrian, easing the boy into a more comfortable position. “It had to come to this. I’ll keep the dose low as I can. Go watch her.”

  Eleven

  DOYLE HAD CONSTRUCTED AN OMELET OF FRESH eggs and butter from the inn’s basket and chanterelle mushrooms from the woods. He was a good cook, Monsieur Doyle. But then, she thought, he did many things well besides pretending to be a coach driver. Grey sat next to her on the blanket, close but not touching. She felt his eyes on her though, continually. She considered escape plans for the evening.

  “That innkeeper took a fancy to you,” Doyle told her. “We got a pot of cream for your coffee, because you liked it so much this morning.”

  “I have a great allure for innkeepers, always.” She set her plate down on the blanket beside her and picked up the coffee again. “They sense in me, you comprehend, a great cook, which is unbearably attractive to them. You are also that, I find. A cook. This is an excellent omelet for being made over the fire, which is most tricky to do. I would not care to attempt it.”

  She did not mention the coffee, which was not as good as his omelet, being strong and very bitter. It was possible the events of the day had disrupted him, and he would do better this evening. Or maybe it was that he was not French and therefore incapable of understanding coffee properly.

  “You want one of them rolls like you had for breakfast?” Doyle said. “Not too tired to eat are you?”

  “But no. It is a nothing, this taking bullets out of English spies.”

  She doubted the dress she wore now was more decent than the one she had ruined. Grey told her it was green and covered everything it should. Doyle said it was the color of curled baby oak leaves and so entirely respectable she looked like a matron of forty years. She was not yet so foolish as to believe the words of either of these English.

  When she had eaten as much of the omelet and some of the bread as she could fit into her, she settled against a tree and sighed in deep contentment and sipped coffee. It was relaxing, this, not to feel angry or afraid for a short time. She had learned many years ago to grab at any small moment of peace that presented itself. “Do you know, Grey, I like this place. It feels very old. Many, many of my people have been here.”

  “The Gypsies?”

  “Yes. The Rom. I should not call them my people since I am no longer part of them. I cannot go back. Not anymore. There is no place among the wagons for a woman such as me.” She hurt piercingly for a minute before she shook her head and put the thought away. “This camp, I think, is of great antiquity. The Rom must have been coming here as long as long. Hundreds of years maybe. That lovely stream…Rom would come a long way to camp here.”

  “You enjoyed that.”

  He was in a peculiar mood. He stayed close, intent upon her. It was as if he waited for something. He had finished his own meal and was drinking red wine with a complex woody smell. He had not yet offered her any.

  “I enjoyed it most immensely. To wash…This is the first time in a month I have felt completely clean. It is one of the great pleasures of life, to be clean after one has been dirty so long. I went to the pool downstream. It is not broad, but deep, and the bottom is clean sand. They swim there, the women and children, I am sure. Farther down there will be rocks to wash clothes upon.”

  “Cold though, I imagine.”

  “I do not mind. I wished never to come out again, but I realized it is impossible to spend one’s life in a forest pool, however pleasant. It is lovely soap Doyle gave me. What is it made with? Lavender?”

  “I’m not sure. He stole it someplace.”

  “Of course. How silly of me.” She drank coffee again. It seemed odd to sit beside Grey and talk of everyday things, as if they were old friends. She would not have expected it.

  “You liked being with the Gypsies?”

  “Oh yes. Maybe it was being young, I do not know. When I was one of them it was the only time in my life I was completely happy. I would wake up in forests like this or in fields full of crickets—you can just hear the crickets here, Grey, if you listen—and there was the whole day ahead with nothing at all that must be done at any time. Nothing whatsoever. Everything came to one in great naturalness, gathering sticks for the fire and the horses to water and always the fields and woods to search for food. Or, in town, dancing and begging. I was not much good at dancing, I shall tell you, despite certain lies I have told. But Grey…you cannot imagine what a juggler I was.”

  A pause. “A good one, I suppose.”

  “Doyle will have told you about my juggling, since I am sure he knows the entire story of my life. I was incomparable, I must tell you. I was even better with throwing the knife. Even now, without seeing, I could aim for that little bird singing up in the tree there—I do not know the proper French name for him. The Rom would call him bardroi chiriclo.”

  “That’s a greenfinch, Annique.”

  “Ah, now I shall know. Well, even now, with the proper knife, I think I could hit that bird one time in ten, if I wished to eat finches, which I do not. One must be very hungry to eat finches.”

  Doyle spoke up beside her. “You don’t like the coffee, miss? I think maybe I made it too strong.”

  “No, no. It is good indeed.” She drank the last of it to the dregs and let him take the cup from her hold.

  “Don’t know but what I may end up drinking coffee me-self, instead of tea, if I make many more trips over here,” Doyle said. “You going to learn to drink tea in England?”

  “I drink tea now, sometimes, when my stomach does not agree with me.”

  “You’re getting better. You didn’t even bother to say you’re not going to England,” Grey said.

  “If you imagine I say what I am thinking, monsieur, then you are very foolish, which I do not consider at all likely.” She leaned back again against the tree.

  Adrian began stirring restlessly, so Grey went to him, and she was forced to listen to another extremely boring discourse on the subject of floating and sleeping. That was strange, when he droned on and on and Adrian became quiet enough to operate upon. She would ask Grey to explain this, later, when she was not so tired. It was annoying he should keep talking when she wished nothing more than to relax and rest. But after a while, she supposed, one paid no more attention to him than to the buzz of bees or a cricket calling.

  It was very warm in the clearing this afternoon. Doyle went back and forth. The sound of his boots as he cleared away dishes and mended the fire seemed as right in this camp as the birdcalls and the shuffle of the horses, tied at the edge of the clearing. All the smells, all the sounds, were as they should be.

  When she was young and dressed as a boy and following armies, sometimes Vauban would come to meet her. They would sit in the fields or in woods like this and build a small fire. He brought her food when he could. She was always hungry. She would eat and report to him every tiny thing she had seen, and Vauban would praise her and give her orders. She had felt safe at such times, for an hour or two. Vauban would have protected her with his life.

  Sometimes Soulier came, elegant even when he wore rags or a soldier’s uniform. Soulier smuggled her bonbons from Paris with such care they might have been secret documents. He made her laugh. Always, he had good advice for her. There was no one more cunning than Soulier.

  He was in London now, Soulier, since he had become chief of all French spies in England. He played the role of the open agent, the agent that all men knew worked for the Secret Police but no one touched. It was an old agreement—who knew how old—that there should be one open agent in each capital. There must be, after all, a man the British could come to, to ransom sailors and agents and the odd soldier who had fallen into French hands, or to convey the most discreet and private messages from government to government.

&
nbsp; Soulier must enjoy that work, as he had a taste for political games. He would enjoy also flaunting himself beneath the noses of Military Intelligence when they could not touch him.

  “You are resting quietly, getting stronger. The pain is very far away.” Grey’s voice was only a murmur in the background. Something she could ignore. “You’re safe, where nothing can touch you. The pain is far away. It can’t touch you.”

  She was so drained from what she’d done to Adrian, she was drowsing in the sunlight, lulled by good food inside her and Grey’s voice. He spoke in the accents of the South, which were so familiar. Her father had spoken thus. It was the language she spoke as a child. The language her dreams came in. She stretched and yawned and rearranged herself. The tree bark at her back wasn’t at all rough. Soft, in fact.

  After a while, Grey’s feet came near to her and stopped. She yawned again. “You are an odd Head of Section.”

  “He’s good at it,” Doyle said.

  Grey folded something smooth and warm around her. It was his coat, and it smelled of him. Then she knew.

  “You have given me drugs.”

  “Yes, Annique,” Grey said.

  It was too late to do anything about it.

  Twelve

  The coast of Northern France, near Cayeux

  “DO NOT GIVE ME FAMILY PARTIES OF DUTCH, with their three children and a grandmother.” One hand on the reins, the other clenching a rolled list, Leblanc sat stiff in the saddle. “Or schoolgirls. Or two old men who tune pianos. This is useless.”

  “These have passed today. No one else.” The corporal of militia stood stolidly.

  “I tell you again, you are looking for a blind woman. Young, dark-haired. Very lovely. It is inconceivable no one would notice. There will be a man with her. Tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes.”

  “There may be another with them. A young man, wounded,” Henri added.

  Leblanc scowled him to silence. “Forget the others. We have to find the blind girl. She will come this way. She must.”