The Forbidden Rose

by Bourne, Joanna

  The sun was hot as bronze overhead. The streets were crowded. The cafés of the Boulevard des Italiens were filled. At first glance, nothing had changed.

  Five years ago, we were not afraid.

  Restauranteurs pulled tables out onto the walkway, as always. Women in bright print dresses and wide hats drank wine or coffee. They gathered like flocks of birds under the trees, perched on rush-bottomed chairs, their skirts spread wide, fanning themselves and chatting, surrounded by their maids and their children and their dogs. Young men, the flâneurs of the boulevards, lounged their way from group to group. They leaned over the backs of the chairs, trading witticisms, flirting.

  It was a species of courage, this laughter and the crumbs of biscuit shared with the strutting pigeons. A mile away, to the east of Paris, men died on the guillotine. Death and the most humorless brutality held the high ground. But not here. This boulevard was the front line against the barbarians who had destroyed her Paris. Wit and le bon mot and talk of the theater made a stand at these barricades. The ribbon on a bonnet, the lace of a starched cap, were the weapons.

  Another jolt and the fiacre pulled to a stop in front of the Chinese Baths.

  A boy from the baths ran to open the door of the carriage and let down the steps. He climbed like a squirrel to pass her payment to the driver. He followed her inside, carrying her basket, chattering about the heat. Oh yes, many fine citoyennes, many dashing young men, came today to relax in the waters. He had been busy since the morning, carrying lemonades and coffees upstairs. What heat. Everyone complained.

  One entered this most fashionable of public baths between artificial hills on either side of the gate. Statues of Chinese gentlemen, holding umbrellas, sat atop promontories. The central court held a red and yellow pagoda with the café and garden where the bathers might refresh themselves. The chambers for the baths were above. The left-hand side for men. The right for women.

  Whether this Chinese bath would have passed muster in Peking or Shanghai, she did not know. But it was Chinese enough for Paris. She climbed the stairs to the righthand side and found an old friend, Olivie Garmand, the matron on duty. She stood behind the counter, neatly compact, with smooth night-black hair. In La Flèche she was called the Quail. She was as discreet and unobtrusive as her namesake.

  Olivie kept the gate to one of pathways out of France. Men and women entered the baths and were not seen again till they were safe in England.

  Olivie nodded, polite but not curtsying, as if she were the most staunch of revolutionaries. “Citoyenne. It has been a long time. It is good to see you again.”

  “Citoyenne Olivie. Good day.” She put a coin in the boy’s palm and sent him away. Under cover of setting her basket on the counter, she passed the note that was ready in her hand. She whispered, “For the Gardener.”

  A glance along the hall. The letter disappeared. Olivie said, “How may we serve you?” and under her breath, “Are there orders?”

  “None.” She raised her voice. “The hot bath today, even though it is so unpleasantly hot outside.”

  A maidservant came then, with towels and a robe de chambre piled flat across her arms, holding them carefully for they were still hot from being warmed over the little braziers. Olivie, herself, led the way. They went to a cabinet far down at the end of the row, where silence and discretion were abundant. To her left was the inconspicuous door between the men’s side and the women’s. These rooms had seen many discreet meetings. It was a sad commentary on life that adultery and the intrigues of La Flèche had much in common.

  The bathing cabinet was a bright room with huge windows covered by screens that let the light through. The walls were painted to resemble marble. The maid placed the stack of towels and the folded linen robe on the sideboard and went to prepare the tub.

  Olivie, who had brought the basket, set that down also and uncovered it and began to lay out the clean clothing from inside and the hairbrush and the bottles of bath oils. “May we bring you wine? A light meal? No? You are right. It’s too hot to eat. There is a compress of crushed mint leaves for the forehead, if you would like to try it.” Olivie uncorked one of the bottles of bath oil. “This is nice. Neroli and coriander?”

  “Exacte. From that shop in the Palais Royal. Near the end, next to where they sell the fans. You know the one.”

  Olivie sniffed again. “It would not suit me. For you, though, it is good. Fresh and forceful. Uncommon. I would have said it is not the scent of a young girl.”

  I am not so young. A mirror hung over the sideboard. In it she saw unremarkable brown hair. A wide, stubborn-looking mouth. Her nose was sunburned. Her eyes were sunk deep with weariness. A bruise shadowed the side of her face.

  Guillaume said she was beautiful.

  What part of this face is lovely? What does he see? Maybe it was Maggie that Guillaume found beautiful. She had lost Maggie in the last hours. In the mirror she saw only Marguerite.

  The maid leaned over, giving the copper bathtub one last scrub. It was only to demonstrate more thoroughly that all was entirely fresh and perfect. Nothing had been skimped in cleaning before. The woman arranged cloths inside the tub so one did not rest against the hard metal and turned on the faucets, both hot and cold, before she made the silent, sagacious exit of a well-trained servant.

  All was silently, gracefully done. Marguerite said, “Is she one of us? I do not recognize her.”

  “No. A police spy, we think. I shall set her to some distant task for the next hour or two. Something unpleasant, if I can manage it.”

  In Paris every café and bookshop, every corner market, was political. The Chinese Baths, as well. Here, was a stronghold of the most radical Jacobins, ardent supporters of Robespierre. It was an excellent place for La Flèche to hide, of course, in the very lap of the fanatics. But one must be circumspect in such a lap.

  Olivie untied the back of her gown. “This is pretty.” It was a round gown of the newest style. Soft and cool, but it had inconvenient fastenings. “I do not quite dare such fashions myself, but you have the figure for it. You have all you need?”

  “Everything, except the bath itself. I am beyond filthy. I am a compendium of all the dirt in the world. I am a library of dirt. In a week or two, if I soak carefully, I will be human again.”

  She was left in privacy to free herself of the light stays and let her shift fall to the floor. To settle into the water and lean back and close her eyes.

  There seemed to be nothing she could think about that did not hurt. So she would not think at all. She had an hour, perhaps more, before Jean-Paul crossed the Seine and came to her from the Jardin des Plantes on the Left Bank. There would be time enough to think when he got here.

  Twenty-two

  HAWKER STOOD FOR A BIT, TAKING EVERYTHING IN, scratching under his arm on the principle that somebody scratching looks harmless.

  It was odd, being in a city where none of it was familiar. Miles of places he’d never been in every direction. The mumble of a language that wasn’t English all around him. Having to think about what he said before he let it out.

  And his clothes. Back home, he’d be wearing something with a bit of color in it. Men knew him in London. He had a reputation to live up to. He’d been the Hand of Lazarus for three years. He’d killed men. His mates expected a certain degree of style.

  Paris was about being invisible. Blending in.

  Nothing smelled right. Sour wine, instead of beer. Brandy, not gin. Garlic and some kind of herbs coming out of the chophouses. Just plain foreign.

  He felt strange, walking the streets without the damned donkeys.

  Funny how he’d figured it out at last. Those donkeys were stalking horses. Nobody looked at the man driving the donkeys. All they saw was the animals. A pair of donkeys in your company and you could stop anywhere you want, as long as you wanted, and nobody thinks it’s odd. You could look at the hooves. That’s a job to keep a fellow occupied for the better part of the day if he does it right.

 
; He strolled along, his thumbs hooked in his breeches. East was this way. Only took a second to figure it out from the way the shadows lay. That was another trick Doyle knew. Watch the sun. Keep a map in your head. Always know where you are. Always be thinking about which way to run. Those hard-faced coves in Meeks Street had a hundred maps with notes all over them. They’d made him study them for hours. He was a right expert in Paris before he set foot in it.

  He never had to worry about maps before. Not in London.

  Look like you know where you’re going. That was something Doyle let drop. Just no end to what Doyle knew about this work. He called it the Game. That felt right somehow. The Game.

  He’d have to learn what he could from Doyle before they parted company. Before one them got his throat cut.

  Rue de Montreuil. He knew where he was. He wrapped his lips around Rue de Montreuil a couple times, practicing how to say it. They put names on the streets. Carved them right into the houses sometimes. You’d think folks who lived here would know where they was. If somebody didn’t live close by and was too stupid to ask where he was, who gave a damn about them anyway?

  Funny folks, the French.

  Le Brochet wouldn’t be hard to find. A day like this, hot as Hades, he’d be in some tavern, out of the heat, easing his throat. He’d be a hundred yards from his ken. Men like him stuck close to home and did their drinking with friends. It was dangerous, going after a cove tucked up in the middle of his mates.

  DOYLE signaled Pax up to the lead position and dropped back. It’d take three men to follow somebody like Hawker. That was the Service for you. Never enough agents.

  Pax set down the board he was carrying and pulled a cap out of his jacket.

  Hawker looked French. Walked French. Held his hands like a Frenchman. He walked the same speed as the men in front of him. Became one more fish in the stream, a little grubbier and less interesting than the others. He had the art. You couldn’t teach that.

  He was headed east and down to the Seine, which meant he’d be crossing a bridge. In Paris, following somebody was all about the bridges. You could slip by your man and wait on the other bank. Your pigeon would walk right to you.

  Doyle took a side street down to the river.

  HAWKER ran his man to earth at L’Abondance, the tenth tavern he tried. Le Brochet was sitting in the back, with friends. Unsavory lot of friends he had. “Remember me?”

  Le Brochet squinted a while. “You’re the boy with Lazarus . . . Hawker. That’s right. They called you the Hand. I remember you.”

  Except Le Brochet said, “ ’awker.” When the French said his name they didn’t slap a howling great h out in the front of it the way a nob Englishman did. They said ’awker and made it sound right. Hell of thing when a pack of Frenchies could say his name better than Englishmen.

  “You’re the one brought me that girl. Polly. She was a lively piece.”

  “A right artist in bed, that girl.” Hawker sat down with his back to the room, which marked him as a fool, except that the glasses of wine on the table were good as a mirror when it came to seeing somebody come up behind. “Let’s talk.”

  “Alone,” he added, when Le Brochet’s mates didn’t shove off.

  Le Brochet grinned. Not one of the world’s most beautiful sights. The other men wandered away, leaving them to discuss Dorcas and Fat Legs Lucy and a few more. Le Brochet had fond memories of his stay with Lazarus.

  After a bit it was time to say, “Wine,” to the old woman behind the counter. He used the tone Doyle had used this morning. Set the same coin down on the table. His glass got sloshed barely half full—that hadn’t happened this morning—with wine of the dog piss persuasion. There was just no reason in this world not to drink gin.

  “I’m on an errand,” he said. “For Lazarus. Thought you might be of use to me. I need to find the man who paid Lazarus for the killing job.”

  Le Brochet coughed up a laugh. “Him? His kind don’t come here.”

  “Where is he, then? There’s money and I can’t leave this bloody country till I’ve got shut of it.”

  “Money?” Le Brochet brightened.

  “We can’t do the contract. Lazarus says, ‘Give it back to the man who paid. To the Frenchman. Go find him.’ ” If Le Brochet swallowed that story, he didn’t know much about Lazarus. He touched the money belt at his waist where he had that stack of assignats folded up. Made it rustle. Let it incite a little greed. “So that’s what I have to do. Trouble is, I don’t know how to find the bastard.”

  He pretended to take a swallow and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Don’t know where to look. And I don’t like carrying this much around with me.”

  He touched the money again and sealed his fate. He saw Le Brochet decide to kill him.

  Don’t be impatient. That was what Lazarus always said. Be generous with your time. Anything worth doing is worth taking pains over.

  He made Le Brochet work fifteen minutes to lure him out into the yard behind the inn. Made him use three “Got something to tell you” and half a dozen “Don’t like to say it in here” before he let Le Brochet lead him out of the room, through the hall beside the kitchen, and into the stinking courtyard.

  “This is nice and quiet.” He admired the courtyard. It was private enough back here to kill five or six men. As he walked, he rolled his right sleeve up to the elbow, which would have been a warning to somebody knowledgeable.

  Le Brochet moved in behind him. The slip of cloth on cloth and the change in breathing told him Le Brochet had his knife out.

  If a man doesn’t know how to fight with a knife, he should leave it at home. Hold a knife and you can’t do anything else with that hand. Hold it stupid and it throws you off balance. A fool with a knife keeps trying to jab it at you instead of using his whole body to fight.

  So the fight started with Le Brochet lurching at him. Which meant he ducked under Le Brochet’s arm, slammed an elbow into that flapping mouth to keep him quiet, and kicked him in the bollocks. Took the knife away. Ten seconds’ worth of fight, give or take.

  He stepped over Le Brochet’s back. Straddled him. Took a handful of hair and pulled his head up, throat bare. He held his knife under Le Brochet’s ear. It’d be a clean stroke in, down and across. With his sleeve rolled up, he wouldn’t even get his shirt messy. He’d be over the wall and out of Faubourg Saint-Marcel before the corpse stopped twitching.

  Doyle won’t like this.

  That messed up his concentration. Le Brochet started gargling, so he pressed the knife in, just a bit, to remind the man of his own mortality.

  Lazarus said to kill the cove. Clean up the loose ends. Nobody disobeyed Lazarus.

  Doyle wanted the names on that list. Wanted to save men slated to die. He wouldn’t mind knowing the French agents working in England either. Nobody was going to get answers out of a corpse.

  Damn and rot Doyle anyway.

  Le Brochet babbled, “I swear it. I was just scaring you a little. I swear to God. Sweet Saint Vincent, forgive me. I wasn’t going to kill you. Wasn’t going to lay a hand on you.”

  Unlike some, Hawker didn’t get any pleasure out of men begging. That was why he was good at his job. He didn’t get distracted.

  Doyle would say any damn fool can kill a man. A dog can kill a man. A little bug you can’t barely see can kill a man. “Shut yer trap. I can’t think with you yapping.”

  “I got money. Jewels. Aristo stuff. The real thing. I can tell you where. Split everything with you. I wasn’t going to hurt you. I swear it. By Saint Vincent. Just having a little fun. Wasn’t going to—”

  If I leave this garbage alive, Lazarus is going to break my neck in one snap. He’s going to laugh while he does it. “Let’s talk about your visit to England. Just you and me, friendly-like. You are going to tell me every man you saw. Every paper you carried. You are going to tell me every time you took a piss by the side of the road.”

  It took a while. His arm got tired, holding Le Brochet’s hair.
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  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Just a man. A gentleman. Nothing to say about him. I swear. He met me on the street. He knew me. I didn’t know him.” Le Brochet sucked in blood, his face having got cut up while they were refreshing his memory. “I run messages. Carry packages. Do it all the time. He give me the money and told me where to go. Go to Lazarus. A man named Crawford. Go to this tavern. Ask for Mr. Phineas. Hand over an envelope. Then go somewhere else and ask for Mr. Tuckahoe.”

  He hadn’t noticed what they looked like. Just men. Ordinary men. Some were French—he thought. Some were English—he thought. No, he hadn’t looked at the papers he was delivering.

  He remembered every girl he’d slept with in obscene detail. He hadn’t noticed a damn thing about the assassins he paid to kill men.

  Waste of blood, putting it in this fool. Bigger waste letting it out. Nobody’s going to believe him if he talks about Lazarus.

  Le Brochet panted, “Swear to God. I don’t remember any more.”

  That was the trouble with leaving the bugger alive. You had to conduct damn, bloody conversations with him. He’d got wet and sticky with blood. For this much gore he could have just killed the cully.

  Time to leave. He kicked Le Brochet in the gut, so the man didn’t have a chance to poke him with some knife he’d got hidden on his verminous body. He pulled up over the wall and took off running.

  A dozen streets away, he turned a corner and found a public fountain and stopped to wash the blood off. Le Brochet was yelling death threats after him in the distance.

  He had the meeting places used by French spies in England. He had some descriptions that weren’t worth much and a few passwords the French used. That was a start. Might be enough for the Service to track some of them down. Nobody could have got more.

  Pretty good for a rabid weasel.

  DOYLE uncocked the pistol and lowered it. There’d been one moment he’d almost used it. The boy had taken a while, deciding whether he was going to slit that Le Brochet’s throat.