He turned to look at her through the open door. He’d collected silver points of rain upon him everywhere. On his coat, in his hair, in his eyebrows, on his eyelashes.
“You do not lock your door,” she said.
“They don’t in the country.” Hard, dark eyes ran up and down her. He stood aside to let her in. “Pointless anyway. Just encourages somebody to break a window. Do you know how much it costs to buy a window?”
The cottage was a single room with plaster walls and a stone fireplace at one end. A table, black with age, was pushed against the wall under the window. There were books everywhere—on the wide windowsill, on the bureau, on a table between the two big, comfortable chairs that faced the hearth. French books, so far as she could see. Clouet’s Géographie Moderne on the table. Lalumière’s thin volume, Sur l’Égalité, dropped in the chair cushions. Hawker was making a Frenchman of himself in every way but his loyalties.
Propped on the mantel over the fireplace was one of Séverine’s watercolors, framed. This was someone in blue—perhaps Séverine—beside a large brown dog. Or possibly a pony. The brown rectangle with door and windows was recognizably the house of Doyle.
“They leave the place empty for months when I’m not here.” The bag Hawker carried thumped onto the table. “A waste. I’m about never in England.”
“You are in Italy, causing trouble for me. I will make tea.”
She left her cloak on the straight-backed chair next to the table and knelt to the hearthrug. How does one make such a decision? When had it happened? She could not place a finger upon the moment everything changed, but she had decided.
The coals were orange under the ashes. It took only an instant to blow fire into life and lay down a few lengths of beechwood shavings and build a blaze with the kindling.
Hawker closed the shutters at the window over the table, giving them privacy from the day, then crossed to the other windows. Two in front. One in back. “Tea’s about all I have to offer. I eat at the house or in the tavern in the village.”
Or he stayed here alone, she thought. There were signs of his solitary meals. A half loaf of bread was cut-side-down on the table. The shape under the checked cloth was a cheese. A bowl held two apples. And he had tossed remnants of orange peel onto the fire. They curled like old leaves in the ash. She could smell the acrid, not unpleasant bite of burned citrus.
She pictured him sprawled, loose limbed, in one of the deep, chintz-covered chairs, his legs stretched to the firedogs, peeling an orange, absorbed in the book in his lap, with the lantern lit beside him. It would be a domestic scene, if one imagined a domestic scene with panther, couchant, at the fire.
The black kettle was half full and still warm from lying on this hearth. He had been gone from the cottage for two or three hours, then. The kettle and the heat of the hearthstones spoke of a fire built, tea brewed, boots and coat warmed, before Hawker had gone out into the cold mist this morning.
He put himself into a rush-bottomed chair to take off his boots, using the toe of one upon the heel of the other to loosen them. He wore thick knitted stockings like a good countryman. These he removed also and tossed to keep company with the boots.
She rearranged herself from kneeling to sitting on the hearthrug. The gun she carried in the pocket under her skirt thumped against her thigh. She pulled her knees close to take off her own boots.
“If you plan to run, leave those on,” Hawker said. “This would be a good time for it. I can’t chase you in the woods without my boots.”
“If I wanted to run, I would shoot you first and you would also not chase me in the woods. You would lie here bleeding.”
“That is what they call a cogent point.”
She pulled off her boots and arranged her skirt around her legs. The cloth clung and sucked and made her damp and uncomfortable. Nothing is more gloomy than sitting about in wet clothing. She poked at the fire, hoping to remedy that dampness somewhat.
She liked his hideaway, both the superficial clutter and the underlying austere neatness. A stack of shirts had been left lying upon the coverlet of the bed. The red painted chest on the floor was open, showing more clothing inside. Hawker went, barefooted to tame this disorder.
Agents are well organized in this way. They live, ready to pack their belongings in a handful of minutes and decamp hastily. The life of a spy is uncertain.
He came to stand beside her, to frown down and think deep spy thoughts. When she leaned back to look up at him, his hair dripped three distinct drops onto her face. “Sorry.” He pushed wet hair back from his forehead with the back of his fingers. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t need somebody to make a fire for me.”
“Comme tu dis. But it is not altruism. I am warming my hands over these coals and your kettle. I have skulked in the bushes for hours. Skulking is cold work.” In truth, she had spent much of yesterday and all the last night wrapped in her cloak, half buried in old leaves, waiting for her chance to see Séverine. “You may hand me that teapot, and the cups too. I will put them on the hearth to take the chill off. All the crockery in England must shiver continually.”
“Chilblains in the china. Well-known English problem.”
The teapot he took down from the mantelpiece was plain brown, such as could be found in any cottage up and down these hills, or in France, for that matter. The handleless cups were slightly more refined, but they were still crockery that might be slapped onto the table of any country inn.
She felt a moment of annoyance at those dishes. Maggie could have found something finer for him. The country manor of Doyle was like the great houses of France, filled with treasures.
Hawker picked up the teapot, one-handed, his hand wrapped familiarly through the handle, his thumb holding down the lid. He collected a pair of cups with the other hand, hooking them both with one finger, letting them clank together. He was as casual with the tea caddy, unstoppering it, peering in to scoop out tea leaves.
The teapot and cups were valueless. The blue-and-white tea caddy was Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty. Her father had kept one very like it in a glass case in the red salon at the chateau, before the Revolution.
Hawker tamped the scoop of tea leaves against the lip of the jar, carelessly, with a fine melodic ring. He did not know.
Marguerite was wise. She took what Hawker carried from his past and gave him the rush chairs, the heavy, cheap teapot, the well-scrubbed old table. She offered him his future in those fine books and the soft chintz chairs by the fire. Then, casually, upon the mantelpiece, Marguerite set a piece of porcelain fired when Joan of Arc was young.
Hawker would find everything in this small cottage easy and familiar, because Marguerite made it so. Someday, when he moved easily among the rich and powerful, he would not even realize it began here.
She lifted the teapot so he could turn scoops of tea leaves in. He had artist’s hands. Sculptor’s hands. Such hands are not delicate and white with long fingers. They are strong, precise, exact, and purposeful.
His chin was shadowed with a need to shave. She had known a boy three years ago. She did not really know this young man.
I do not know how to ask. Everything I can say is ugly. I do not want this to be ugly.
She gave her attention to pouring hot water onto the tea leaves. Rain drummed on the roof. Since they were not talking, since they were not looking at each other, it seemed very loud.
He said, “As soon as you drink that, you should leave. It’s getting worse out there.”
I must do this now, before I lose my courage. “I am hoping to spend the night.”
Twenty
SHE CHOSE WORDS CAREFULLY, TO CLARIFY MATTERS beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. “It is my wish to spend the night with you, in your bed.”
There. She had said it. It was now too late to take it back. Her mind, which had many cowardly corners, immediately went looking for plausible ways to pretend she did not mean what she had said.
Hawker was silent
. He would be this self-possessed if tribesmen of the Afghan plains burst through the door and attacked him with scimitars. The refusal to be ruffled was one of his least endearing traits.
Time stretched, very empty of comment, while she swirled the teapot gently and he was inscrutable.
Finally, he took the oil lamp from the end of the mantel and busied himself adjusting the wick, lighting it with a paper spill from the fire. “The hell you say.”
“But, yes. That is what the hell I say. You need not treat this as an inconvenient importunity. Even you do not have hordes of women proposing to share your bed.” I expected him to be stupidly pleased. Instead, he is suspicious of me. “I will pour you tea. Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“You need not thank me. It is your own tea, after all.” Once, she could have offered him an explicit choice of sexual acts. In six languages. Now she had no words. She could not even call to mind the French ones. She lifted the lid of the pot. “I will add water. The tea is a little strong.”
A nod from him, and she did the pouring of hot water into the pot. Then she poured two cups of tea.
This time, I will be in control. I will be the one with all the power. This is how I will free myself. Memory wriggled like dark worms at the edges of her mind. She pushed it away.
He took the sugar bowl from the mantel and stood, holding it. “Do you want sugar?”
“It is kind of you to offer. Yes.”
“I have sugar tongs and spoons around here. Maggie keeps putting silver tableware in here, which is an incitement to theft if I’ve ever seen one. I shove ’em out of sight and that blasted woman they send to clean goes and hides them someplace else, just to make a point.”
“It is the subtle warfare of the servant classes. I am frequently a servant, so I sympathize.” She held up both cups, resting in their saucers. “Do not go seeking sugar tongs, which are probably well concealed. Two lumps for me. You may use your fingers.”
He slid two fingers into the bowl and brought out sugar lumps scissored between first and second finger. Dropped one into his cup, clever and deft. Two into hers. He never took his eyes off her face. “You and me go to bed.”
It was impossible to say anything. She, who had mouthed so many unclean words, so many bawdy songs, poems, ditties . . . could not get that small “yes” off her tongue.
“You want to . . .” He made a gesture. A rude one.
She nodded.
“It’s a dull day that doesn’t bring some surprise.”
He walked away, taking off his coat, hooking it over a peg on the wall. Underneath, he wore a waistcoat of such vivid burgundy one blinked. His knife sheath rested between his shoulder blades, the knife hilt upward. The harness had its own peg. He rolled up his right sleeve to unbuckle another knife sheath. His shirt was full sleeved in an old-fashioned way, the better to hide weapons.
He was unarming himself. A hopeful sign.
In her teacup, the layer of dissolved sugar swirled like silk at the bottom. She drank and watched him over the rim of the cup.
When he turned, she saw that he was aroused. Very aroused. His coat had kept that hidden. A little shock ran through her, as if she had taken a step that was not there, and her pulse raced.
He did not hurry, coming toward her, but practiced the nonchalance of a bird of prey circling something in which it has developed an interest. When he was close, he leaned on the stones that surrounded the hearth. He paid no attention to the insistence in his breeches. He would not be ruled by his cock, would he? He was not apologetic, either, but seemed wholly unconcerned.
She was the one who did not know how to deal with this. She had sought this confrontation. Sought him. Now, the reality confounded her.
I should not be nervous. I have unbuttoned the breeches of many men.
She imagined herself closing her fingers gently around that bulge and his cock growing even larger and harder under her touch. She knew how to drive a man to unreason with her hands and her mouth. She had been so well trained.
That was what haunted her. Not hunger. Not humiliation. Not waiting in cold corridors, dressed in schoolgirl white, till a man called her into the parlor to hurt her. Not even pain.
She woke in the night, trembling and sweating, because of what she had done. Smiles, practiced in front of a mirror. The sly admiring lies of a whore. The clever tricks of pleasing men. She had not pretended to become a whore. She had become one.
I will never be clean of it.
“Hey.” Hawker laid the flat of his hand on her cheek. It was warm from holding the teacup. “Hey. Owl. It’s just me.”
She looked into his eyes. The moment held a perfect stillness. The rain drummed the slates of the roof, empty of judgment. The fire was harsh and hot all on one side of her body with an indifferent, inhuman intensity.
Nothing could be more masculine than that hard palm of his hand. She had become the center of a determined and focused hunger. Hawker’s hunger. It was hard in his body and his spirit. Clean-edged as one of his own knives. She read all that in the single touch on her face.
Soon, he would thrust into her and she would receive him.
A man. Inside her. She waited for the slick chill of nausea to uncoil in her belly. It did not come.
HAWKER ran the side of his thumb along her cheekbone, feeling the soft of it. Strange to know a woman like Justine DuMotier was soft to the touch. In her eyes, the pupils were contracted to tiny hard points. If she wanted a man’s hands on her, he was a caterpillar.
“Why me?” he said.
“There is not one man in a thousand who would ask such stupid questions when a woman offers herself to him.” Now she looked annoyed. That was better.
“I’m an unusual man.”
Touching her distracted him, so he stopped doing it and folded his arms. Her skin still called to his fingertips. Sort of an itch, making him want to touch her some more. “Why me? Why here? Why now?”
“Oh, then. Reasons.” She huddled into herself, hunching a shoulder, looking sulky. “I have heard rumors of you and I am curious. Is it so strange I would wish to pass a pleasant afternoon with . . . an old friend? We have been something like friends, have we not, though it is inconvenient for both of us. There is no reason we should not come together pour le plaisir.”
“For pleasure.” But she wasn’t hungry for him. Not a sign of it in her anywhere. “Do you do this much—go to bed with men?”
“You know what I am. There is nothing I do not know of the many acts of love.”
That didn’t answer his question, did it?
She raised her cup from the stones of the hearth and hid her face behind it. Hid her eyes by looking down into the tea. “It is not so surprising I wish to lie with you. You have acquired a reputation, did you know? You are said to be a young steed in bed. I stayed in an inn in Milan run by two widows. They had many interesting tales to tell about you.”
Milan. The merry widows. Oh, yes. He remembered them kindly, and not just for being warm and welcoming and what you might call educative in bed. They cooked like angels. “I offered to marry them both, but they didn’t take me up on it.”
“They admired your skill, however. You would blush to hear them speak of it. There was also the foolish young kitchen maid you sent away from your room in the night, telling her to come back when she was older. They have not forgotten that.”
“I’m a prince of a fellow.” He squatted down next to her so their eyes were level. “What are you up to, Owl?”
“Nothing evil, I promise you. A few hours of your expertise in bed. With you, I might . . .” She drank the last of the tea. “I did not come here with this intent. Now it seems inevitable, as if it were destined. I have been thinking about this for more than a year.”
“Thinking about going to bed with me?”
“Sometimes. I have imagined others, but it did not . . .” There was a little tremor in her hands where they were wrapped around the empty cup. “It did not turn out to
be possible, after all, when I faced them.”
He’d made it a policy never to take on a woman with a herd of private nightmares. He broke that rule more often than he kept it, but that didn’t stop it being a good one. If he had any sense, he’d stomp off into the rain and find a bed in Doyle’s house.
But Owl was shaking. A woman like her, afraid.
And, by God, he wanted her. He kept pushing that out of his mind, but it kept coming back. She’d turned into a woman. She had breasts, for God’s sake. Nice ones, from what he could see. He could almost taste them. But he wasn’t going to play the fool for a lovely body. Not even Owl’s lovely body.
Then she said in a small, flat voice, “I am weary of being a coward,” and he was lost.
She’s leading around three thousand demons, give or take. I guess I could kill a few. “I keep hearing that. ‘Justine DuMotier, the coward.’ Battle of Arcola and you underfoot through the worst of it. They sent you into Verona, alone, and you went. Coward right to the heart.”
“Do not be stupid. That is our profession. If it terrified me, I would take up knitting.” She breathed out. The air brushed his face like she was touching him. “I wake from sleep, shaking. When I think of being with men, I am afraid and ashamed and my stomach is unwell. This will stop, when I have done this with you.”
“It might. Owl, it might not.”
“You are skilled. You have that reputation. You are known to be discreet. We will part, and our paths do not cross often.” She looked up with an absorbed and grave expression. “We will do this once. It should not take long. I know what to do to—”
“You don’t know a damn thing. You’re worse than bedding a virgin, which I will mention is something I do not do. You know too much that’s wrong.”
“I am very skilled. I am not ignorant. I—”
“You are ignorant as a clod of dirt. If I had any sense I’d just walk right out of this and go sleep in the rain.” Looked like he didn’t have any sense. “I’m not flattered, in case you’re wondering. There’s a name for men who pleasure women for a living.”
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