The Spymaster's Lady

by Joanna Bourne

  He was trying to distract her. He would discover that did not work. “The story is from Montaigne. It goes, ‘He never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell which had laid it.’ I am not sure I believe that. But then, I do not know any hens with such intimacy. Montaigne does not help me to know what to do about this food, though he was very wise, of course. I have already taken whelks from you. I am not accustomed to being fed by strange men.”

  “Do you think I’m trying to seduce you with boiled eggs?” He picked one and offered it to her, holding it up in three fingers.

  “Do not be the fool.” She suddenly felt very cross. She took the egg from him, and his fingers did not touch hers, not one tiniest bit. She could have been a cloud of vapor for all the interest he took. “You are not in the least trying to seduce me, you.”

  “No.” He smiled. He was perfectly friendly, and he did not desire her in the least. It was a great annoyance. “Lovely Annique, if you were camped out here with your Gypsies…” She had told him that part of her life, since he had told her about growing up on his farm in Somerset. “…would you sneak over to that nice farmer’s henhouse and steal some of his eggs tonight?”

  “Not eggs. The Rom do not eat such things. Did you know you can tell a cooked egg from a raw one when you juggle them?” She tossed the egg in the air and caught it a few times. She had showed Robert her juggling while they walked. It had impressed him, she thought. “The chickens should be nervous.”

  “Then pretend you’re stealing this food from me. That settles your moral qualms.”

  “You make the specious argument. But it is a complex one.” She cracked the egg upon the side of the basket and threw the shells into the fire.

  “Here, thieve some bread from me, too. It’s a good fire. Learn that from the Gypsies?”

  “I do not think I ever made fires at all when I was Rom, or had anything to do with them much. The women do not like children poking their fires, getting ashes in the food. This trick…” She circled her stick around the hole she’d dug into the ground which contained the fire and kept it below eye level and invisible in the night. “This I learned from an old soldier in the Tyrol. For all I know he is still out there in the army, surviving. He was almost unkillable himself, but I do not think he was much good at fighting. He avoided it most remarkably for a man in uniform. He did not like to kill people, he told me.”

  “Did you kill any, when you were being a soldier?” He glanced up from roasting sausages and, as it was so often, his expression was unreadable.

  “Do you know, I don’t think I ever killed anybody at all, except doing surgery on them.” She stirred at the fire. “Some men I was angry at may have died eventually, because I put knife wounds in them, but that is a thing one can do nothing to prevent. There is altogether too much killing in this world, I think.”

  “I have to agree with that.”

  “That was the last thing of importance my father told me before they hanged him. That killing is the stupid answer, not the wise one. I have found it to be true.”

  “You’ve never killed?” His eyes were sharp upon her, searching, weighing.

  “Never that I know.” She looked at him, over the fire. “But I will tell you something that is not so pretty about me, Robert. That man, the first one who attacked me…I cut the tendon at his thumb. It does not mend, such a wound. He will not use his right hand again to hold a knife or for anything else. Not ever in his life. I am not a nice person, me.”

  “Perhaps his next victim would disagree with you. There, you’ve set me one of your moral conundrums. Have a sausage while I think about it.” He held it out to her on the end of the stick so she could wrap bread around it and pull it off. This was as close as he would come to her.

  He would not touch her. He had not spoken of a wife, but it was most probable he had one and was being faithful to her. She was a lucky woman, his wife.

  She had learned Robert Fordham by heart in these days they had walked so far together. She knew the path of every wrinkle across his forehead. There was a curved, faint scar on his left hand from some fishhook he had treated carelessly. She knew, right to the center of her, how he moved. She could not breathe sometimes when he twisted to look behind them on the road, and his muscles danced like poetry.

  This was the gift her memory held for her. She had Robert inside her now, even the lines of the palms of his hands. She would not forget him. “We will be in London tomorrow.”

  “Before noon, if we keep up this pace. Were you planning to spend the night under a bridge?”

  “There, or in an alley. I will not sleep much. My small business will take only a few days. Then I will leave quickly. A city is not kind to a woman alone and without money.”

  “I’ll show you a place I know near Covent Garden. A safe place.”

  How much she wished to stay with him in his safe place near the Covent Garden. She took a bite of her sausage and chewed. “It has allspice in it, this sausage. I find English cooking interesting at times. Robert…” She was glad it was dark. There are words one can say in the dark that cannot be said when it is light. “You may not come with me into London. Early tomorrow, when we enter London, I shall send you from me, on your journey to Somerset.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  She sighed. “You know, do you not, that I desire you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was certain you did, for I have not been concealing this very cleverly. At first, I did not perfectly recognize what had happened to me, and later it became too confusing. It is not important, you understand.”

  “I know.”

  “This comes to me because you have saved my life, I think. And because of a man who was with me in France. I did not tell you about him.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She ate slowly, trying to find the right words. “He was a kind of madness that struck me because I was alone and friendless and in great danger. He changed me. He left me…I suppose you would say he left me ready for you. When you saved my life in that courageous way and are so handsome and strong, I fall into a foolishness.” She thought for a while. “I came to love him in a complicated way. I still do. But I find it is not any protection against desiring other men, which is awkward and humiliating. My mind is in a state of great turmoil. You must not pay too much attention to what my stupid body is doing.”

  “I won’t.”

  She waited a while before she said the next thing. “I have not wanted men before. Not even one. It is a grave moral weakness to desire two men. I had not known I was this sort of person.”

  “You aren’t.” His words were clipped, dry, and unsentimental. “You haven’t done anything, so you aren’t that kind of person. Forget it.”

  A smuggler would see things so simply. “That is an interesting philosophy and most likely true in its way. You must go away from me, Robert. You have fulfilled your commission to your conscience when I cross the London Bridge. I do not think I can stand much more of this.”

  “I’m not going to touch you. And I’m large enough to fight you off if you forget yourself.”

  She did not laugh, because that would only encourage him. “If I live to be very old, perhaps to a hundred or so, I may understand this thing that is between men and women. What I do know is that touching or not touching does not matter between us. We have gone beyond that. Tomorrow we make an end. It is also not good for you to be in this state, I think.”

  “‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them…’”

  “‘But not for love.’ I am less sure of that than I was a week or two ago when my life was inexpressibly simpler. I do not think one dies. One may well go insane, however.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” He pulled his own sausage off the stick and folded it neatly in bread. He wasn’t laughing at her exactly, but there was an amused look behind his eyes. “I’ll see you settled safe in London. We’ve come this far together, what does an extra day matter?” />
  He made it sound sensible. Did he know in the least how easy it was for him to convince her of anything?

  “It is at times like this that I miss my mother.” It was easy also to speak simple truths to him. It was a sign of how dangerous he was to her. “It has been six…no, five weeks now since she died. I keep thinking, ‘I shall tell her this,’ or ‘I shall ask her this,’ and then I remember I shall never see her again. Maman knew all there is to know about men. She was very wise. She would tell me not to stay near to you at all, not for one hour.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Annique.”

  She couldn’t help laughing, though her mouth still had sausages in it. “That is what he said to me. Almost exactly that. The man in France who was unkind to me and whom I loved in a way—he said that. You are a bit like him, did you know?”

  The flames made his eyes glitter. “Am I?”

  “It is that your bodies are alike. A little, anyway. He is even larger than you, I would say, and immensely strong. Though you are strong, too, of course. But you are different in spirit. He had no softness in him at all, not truly, not anywhere inside him, which is as it should be in a person in his position. He is older than you, too.”

  “Older?” Robert stared at her, fascinated.

  “He is very senior in his work. He must be eight or ten years older than you, I would think. He is fiercely determined, as well, though you are that yourself, a little, except that he does not go about it so nicely. Also he does not smell of fishes. That is from your sweater, you comprehend, which is a beautiful sweater and skillfully knitted but in need of washing—”

  The bullet hissed by. It brushed her hair like an insect. Then the blast of sound slapped her skin.

  Twenty-one

  REFLEX THREW HER FLAT TO THE GROUND. SHE scrambled away. There were no trees. No brush. The field was flat and without shelter. No place to hide. Nothing but darkness to protect her. She heard Robert roll away from the light of the fire.

  A man rose out of the black and silent fields, silhouetted against the stars. The first gun had missed. He tucked it into his belt and traded the second pistol to his right hand and raised it.

  She scuttled backwards. Spears of wheat stubble tore her skin. Her knife was under her skirt. Couldn’t get to it.

  The barrel of the pistol followed her. He took careful and deliberate aim.

  No chance to run. She rolled sideways. Fought the cloth of her skirt. Too slow. Too slow. For everyone, there is a last time, when they are too slow. Finally she held her knife. Drew back. Picked her target. Threw.

  The explosion of the gun cracked the night. There was a flash of light. She sucked in a breath. She could not feel where she had been hit. Perhaps it was as they said, that dying did not hurt.

  No. She was a fool, entirely. The man had missed a second time. Unless he was a walking arsenal, he was without guns for the moment. Her hands were wiser than she was. Already they scrabbled and dug for a rock. Found one. She pushed herself up from the ground, cradling it for the throw, straining to see.

  The dark figure crumpled and folded in upon himself. He fell with the clumsiness of something from which the spirit has already departed. She was quite sure, when she went to look, that she would find him dead.

  Robert ran past her, a pistol in his hand. She had not known until just this minute that he had a gun with him. He ran like water flowing, absolutely silent, to where the man lay on the ground. He bent and picked up the man’s head by the hair and then let it flop limply back.

  He straightened up and looked toward her. “You’re not hurt?”

  “The bullet did not touch me. Is he dead?”

  “Very.” He cleaned his hand by rubbing it on the ground, then went to take one of the sticks from the fire. When he waved it back and forth, it flamed up brightly. He walked back to hold it over the rag doll thing lying on the field stubble. When he knelt, he stuck it into the ground to give him light.

  “You don’t have to look at this,” he said.

  But she kept walking forward. “The men Leblanc has sent to kill me…Some of them I have known since I was a little child. So I must see.” The dead man was small and dark, about thirty, and he had been shot directly through the center of the forehead. She did not think it was a merely lucky shot.

  “Do you know him?” he asked quietly.

  “He is entirely a stranger to me.” She looked away.

  This man was gone from the circles of the world. He would do nothing, ever again, for good or evil. A final and sickening end to all he might have been. She should not care. In the aftermath of battles she had seen many dead men lying upon the ground in just this way, all of them more worthy than this assassin of women. But never had she become used to death. Never.

  Robert knelt and inspected her knife where it emerged from the corpse. “You missed by five or six inches. Not surprising, given the—” He paused. Then his breath hissed out through his teeth. “You didn’t miss. This is exactly where you hit Leblanc.”

  “At the insertion of the deltoid. It disables the arm, you see.”

  “Annique,” he said in a strange, tight voice. “When someone has a gun pointed at you, you aim for the throat. Not his arm, not his knuckles, not his bloody toenails. His throat. Do you understand that?”

  “But of course.” It was not the time to argue with him. Instead, she faced into the night and did not watch while he retrieved her knife and cleaned it on the dead man’s shirt. He did not offer the knife back to her, which was a delicate consideration on his part.

  He muttered as he emptied out the pockets of the dead man. “Nothing. Nothing. Roll of string, tobacco pouch, house key.” One would think he killed men every day, he was so cool about this searching of them. Certainly, smugglers were desperate and violent men. “Another key. English money. French money. Gribeauval pistols. Those are first quality. The jacket’s French. His shirt, too. He’s someone who followed you from France.”

  “But, of course. I have offended the English, certainly, but not yet sufficiently so they will kill me.”

  “He’s not going to tell us anything else. Pack up. Leblanc may have ten more men lurking out there in the dark.” He was already up and striding away, untying Harding’s halter.

  It took her two minutes, no more, to be ready, because she had left places in a hurry on many occasions. Since her blindness, also, she had the habit of neatness and always remembering where each small object had been put. She was ready when Robert mounted and rode forward and reached his arm down to her to draw her up into the saddle before him.

  It was fortunate she was small. Harding could carry them for some time, though it could not be comfortable for him. “I did not know you had a gun. Where was it?”

  “In my coat pocket. A cuff pistol by Manton. I didn’t show it to you because I didn’t want to frighten you.” Harding picked his way through the rough, plowed fields. Then they were on the road and could pick up speed.

  The night was clear, with the curve of the moon in the east. It gave light enough that the trees drew long shadows across the road. Above them were ten million stars.

  “Will they hang us, if they catch us?” They hanged men in England for stealing bread. Certainly they hanged them for killing people.

  “No.”

  “You seem very sure.”

  “I am sure. That, you don’t have to worry about, Annique.”

  He sat straight and stiff in the saddle. Perhaps, like her, he was still sickened and awed by the presence of death. Perhaps he had his ears tuned for the sound of hoofbeats behind, which would mean they were being followed.

  “Will the farmers come to look because of the shots? Or will they be afraid?”

  “They won’t be afraid. They’ll think it was someone poaching deer.”

  He was right. This was England. Safe, peaceful England, where no one would think shots meant murder in the darkness.

  He shifted the reins. “They won’t find him till morning. We’ll
be long gone.”

  They trotted, jolting painfully. Finally, they slowed to a walk and she could let go of Harding’s mane, which was a relief to both of them she was sure. She leaned against Robert’s chest. His arms went tight about her, as if he feared she would suddenly disappear from between them.

  “Thank you for protecting me,” she said. “I am sorry you had to kill him, even if you are accustomed. It is drastic, to kill a man.”

  “I didn’t mind. I haven’t taken very good care of you, have I? If he had carried more accurate guns, you’d be dead. I’m sorry.”

  “It is the contrary, mon ami. You have saved my life twice now. That woman you feel such guilt about—the one in France long ago. Upon her behalf I will tell you that the account is closed. You may sleep well at nights.”

  “Not yet.”

  So stubborn a man. This one would always shoulder his responsibility and that of another dozen men as well. His band of smugglers was lucky in its leader. “As you wish. I am not wise enough to be your conscience, so I will not try.” She yawned. Now that she had stopped shaking with fear, she was sleepy. “To me you seem a good enough man for most ordinary uses.”

  He shifted in the saddle, moving her to be easy against him. He was getting used to holding her, she thought. He smelled of the gun he had fired, and of fishes, of course. If she had married a fisherman and gone to live in his village, instead of becoming a spy, it might have been like this for her, riding home from some journey together. Except that she would have washed his sweater more carefully so he did not smell so much of his profession.

  “My mother was right.”

  “Was she?”

  She felt the immense strength that was Robert behind her and on every side of her. Safe as houses—that was what the English would say. She yawned. There was no hurry to speak. What she had to say was not, after all, so earth-shattering a bit of wisdom. “She said that the bodies of all men are alike in the darkness. I did not quite believe her, but I find she was correct. This is remarkably like being held by that man in France. Why is it only Kent?”