The Black Hawk sl-4

by Joanna Bourne

  They held each other. While he shook. While she trembled and her bones melted and she let her head fall to his chest. While he gasped into her hair.

  His grip opened and closed on her shoulders. It was long minutes before he spoke. “Well. That was . . . That was very good.” His voice was gritty. Hoarse.

  She did not want to open her eyes. She was crying. She could not imagine why she was crying. “I will not tell you . . . You are conceited enough.” Then she said, “It was good. I didn’t know it would be that good.”

  “Me neither. Joke’s on us, innit?” He breathed heavily. “Let’s get inside before you catch an ague.”

  “Yes. That is wise.”

  “We’ll see how we do in bed.” He did not make her walk back to the cottage in her bare feet. He carried her in his arms while it rained down on them, hard, every step of the front path back to the door. She became cold, as well as filled with amazement.

  He dried them both in front of the fire. They made love in bed, very slowly, and it worked there too. He had the most skillful and amazing mouth.

  Twenty-two

  1818

  Meeks Street, London

  SHE WAS IN HAWKER’S ARMS. SHE KNEW THAT before she knew where she was. It was rare and important, being with him.

  Even now, after so many years, she dreamed of him. Sometimes, when she first woke up, she’d think he was with her. She’d feel his arm under her head, his body naked beside her. Then the day would come and wash dreams away. Then it was not his arm under her. It was a pillow. It was not his body. It was the rolled and tumbled blanket. Time after time, she slid out of a dream and she was alone, but for an instant, the bed smelled of him.

  This time, it wasn’t a dream.

  She lay awake for a time before she opened her eyes, hurting and vaguely angry about it.

  She was in bed, in a quiet room, under a soft blanket, held by Hawker. She glided back to consciousness, riding the currents of that certainty. She was with Hawker, so she was safe. In all the world, there was no flesh, no bone, no sound of breathing she would mistake for Hawker’s.

  “I can tell when you’re awake,” he said.

  Her mouth was dry. “You always could.”

  “A matter of being cautious.” He unwound from her and tucked the blanket into the space he’d emptied. The bed moved. He sat up to lean over and look down at her. “I never quite trusted you, you know, not even when we were closest. I just thought it was worth the risk. You were always worth the risk.”

  I was stabbed because I came to warn you. “You do not trust me. Wise.”

  “We did well enough, for enemies.” His smile pulled down at the side and didn’t reach his eyes. He shifted his weight, careful not to joggle her. “You’re harmless for the moment. You were about half dead for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s been three days. A little more.”

  So long? She thought of days frittered away, like small coins out of a pocket. Pouring from her mind, like grains of silver. “I don’t remember.”

  “Just as well.”

  Someone had put her in a night shift. Her left arm was an ache from shoulder to fingers. Under the bandage, she itched. She held her hands up. So heavy. Her joints felt like old iron wheels and gears that had lain abandoned for a long time and were now set moving again, creakily.

  Bruises circled her wrists and ran in regimented lines, forearm to elbow. Blue finger marks showed where someone had held her.

  “I am bruised.” Events took shape in her mind like shadows in fog. She had been in Braddy Square, trying to get to Hawker, to warn him. She remembered being stabbed. Staggering toward Meeks Street. “Who did I fight?”

  “I held you down when you were being sewed up. You objected to that for some reason. And later, when you were out of your head with fever.” He rolled smoothly off the bed and stood over her. “I hurt you doing it. No choice.”

  His voice said how little he had liked hurting her.

  Oh, Hawker. We have hurt each other so much.

  He was unshaven, which always made a ruffian of him. He wore trousers and a loose shirt, open halfway down his chest. She had felt it next to her as she slept, cradling the edge of her dreams—the warmth of him, the creases of the linen of his shirt, the old, familiar comfort of his skin.

  He poured from a pitcher to a small cup. “Everybody wants you to drink this. I have seldom encountered such unanimity of opinion. I’m going to slip in next to you and hold it up. You sip out of the side here.”

  It was not water, but lemonade. Exactly right. She was very thirsty.

  They looked at each other while she drank. He was deeply tired. His face was pared to the bone, to sarcasm and deadliness. He had watched her come very close to death, she thought.

  “That’s better.” He eased her down to the pillow again. “You almost slipped away from me. There was one time there, you stopped fighting. I thought it was over.”

  “It was not. Not this time.” When she lay still, the pain was not great. There was much to be said for holding still. “Lie beside me, if you would. For comfort. I am in pain and I’m cold.”

  “My pleasure, anyway.”

  She started to laugh and took the warning her body gave and did not. “The papers? You have them. Important.”

  “I have them.” He lifted the blanket and crawled in beside her. So many times, he had done that.

  “I will tell you what I saw . . . when I wake up.” One more thing to say. “Do not send for Séverine.” She would come all this long distance and worry about her. “It is unnecessary.”

  “Go to sleep, Owl.”

  “Do you know? You are the only one in the world . . . who still calls me Owl.”

  The darkness was huge and friendly. She would rest in it awhile.

  Twenty-three

  HAWKER PICKED UP HIS RAZOR. IN THE MIRROR over the dresser, he looked back at himself with hard, steady eyes. A killer’s eyes.

  “She’s alive for the next little while.” Alive. Exhausted. Sleeping. Just sleeping. Felicity was watching her.

  He’d never got into the habit of using a brush to put soap on his face. Just lathered up between his palms.

  “Let’s say there’s two groups. One of them goes poking knives into various Frenchmen. The other is trying to gut Justine. Both of them are mad at me and both have some of my knives handy.” He shook his head. “Not likely.”

  No argument from the mirror.

  He tried the razor along the hair on his arm. Nicely sharp. He did like a good edge on his steel. Swish his hands in the basin. Pull his skin taut with his thumb and shave the right side. No hurry.

  Wipe soap off the razor on a towel. Rinse it in the basin. “Not two groups, then. One. They go after the Frenchmen to frame me. They go after Justine because it’ll hurt me.”

  Finish the right side. Wipe the razor down again. “They know me fairly well.”

  Now for the left side. “But it’s easier to shoot me one balmy evening. Who’s going to take the time and trouble to be that convoluted and that patient? Who hates me that much?”

  One name came to mind.

  Shaving’s a meditative business. He did the short, careful strokes under the chin. Always a tricky part.

  Wipe the final soap off the razor. Wash the blade.

  “Try this. Say Justine’s been collecting my knives for a while. She kills a pair of Frenchmen, planning to lay it on me.” Dry the blade with the clean corner of the towel. “Before she dispatches another hapless French cove, one of her confederates gets peevish and pokes the knife into her.”

  Fold the razor. Lay it down beside the bowl. Take a new towel and wash his face. “That gives us one group, with infighting. And Justine behind everything.”

  Toss the towel away with the other one.

  A long time ago, he’d thought it was special between him and Owl. They were friends, right to the heart. Being enemies didn’t change that. Even when he was staggering around, half
dead, with her bullet in his shoulder, he kept thinking they were friends.

  His eyes looked back at him, particularly bleak this morning. “Owl won’t stop, you know. She never gives up. If she’s behind this, I’ll wake up one morning with my throat slit.” He fingered his throat. “Because I’m still a damn fool when it comes to that woman.”

  No answer to that either.

  He strapped on the arm sheath, settled his shoulder harness, checked the knives, and wished he was out in the field where he might get to use them. He was in the mood to confront somebody a good deal more dangerous than Lord Cummings, Head of Military Intelligence.

  WHEN Hawker walked into his office, he saw that Cummings had taken a place behind the desk. He was sitting in Hawker’s chair.

  He’d never decided whether Lord Cummings played the fool on purpose, or if it just came naturally to him. He looked the part of an aristocrat. He was straight-backed and silver-haired, sporting a long, thin, supercilious nose. He sat behind the desk, looking distinguished, pretending to be absorbed in the newspaper he’d picked up. He’d brought along his cur dog, Colonel Reams, who did not look distinguished.

  Felicity leaned against the wall just inside the door of his office, keeping a gimlet eye on the visitors. She muttered, “About time,” as he passed.

  He barely moved his lips. “You felt it quite necessary to put them in here?”

  “You said to be polite.”

  “Not that polite.”

  She’d let Military Intelligence invade his office just to see what they wanted to get into. And to annoy him. He gave her a “we’ll talk about this later” look and motioned her out.

  Back when Adrian Hawkhurst was still Hawker the Hand, stealing for a living and associating with questionable companions—in the flower of his youth, as it were—he’d walked into many an alley to find an enemy sitting in ambush. This felt the same. It was enough to make a man nostalgic.

  Cummings had settled his arse into the carved oak chair that belonged to the Head of Service. It was black with age, worn smooth by the behinds of twenty-nine men who’d been Head of the British Intelligence Service. It dated back to the time of Good Queen Bess. To Walsingham, who’d founded the Service.

  It’s mine now.

  Cummings didn’t do anything by accident. He wanted anger. Now, why did Cummings want him angry? Dealing with Military Intelligence just drove the humdrum out of the morning.

  Reams stood to the side of the office, a thick-bodied, red-faced bulldog of a man. His hands were gripped together behind his back and he sneered at the map on the wall. He wore scarlet regimentals, as usual, though he didn’t have any particular right to a Guards uniform. One of Military Intelligence’s little fictions. No battlefields for the colonel.

  Reams looked particularly self-satisfied this morning. Possibly he felt he’d done something clever. He was probably wrong.

  The map held a hundred numbered and colored pins, set from Dublin to Dubrovnik and points east, as far as India. His agents. Austrian, Russian, and French agents. Trouble spots. Nothing Military Intelligence would make head nor tail of.

  “The lumpy yellow shape off to the right is Austria,” he said helpfully. “The square blue one is France.” He jostled the colonel off balance as he strolled past.

  “Watch it, you—” A glance from Cummings, and Reams swallowed the rest of his comment.

  Cummings took his time folding the newspaper. He tossed it on the desk, toppling a pile of unopened letters into a stack of reports, making a point, doling out his second nicely graded insult of the morning. He’d got them in before they exchanged a word. “Good. You’re here.”

  “A pleasure to see you, Cummings. As always.”

  “You haven’t answered my messages.”

  “How careless of me.” There’d be notes from Military Intelligence somewhere in that pile on his desk. How wise of everyone to ignore them. “The press of work . . .”

  “I don’t have time to wait on your convenience.” Cummings tapped his fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair. The hand rests were carved wolf heads, snarling.

  British Service wolves. Not Military Intelligence. He knew just how they felt. He wouldn’t mind snarling himself.

  “Always so awkward to settle upon another man’s convenience. And you’ve come all the way across town to do it.” He skirted around the desk and sat on the edge of it, chummily next to Cummings, his boot heel hooked on to a drawer pull. He showed his teeth, copying the wolf heads.

  Cummings slid back in the chair, harrumphing. “I mean to say . . .”

  Let us loom over the man. I get so few opportunities to loom. “Why don’t you tell me what we can do for Military Intelligence today.”

  In Cummings’s world, men in authority sat at desks and gave orders. Inferiors stood at attention. Sitting down meant you had power.

  In the rookeries of East London, men in authority kicked you in the guts to drive home the salient points of their discourse. Sitting down just put you closer to somebody’s boot.

  In his office, the rules of Whitechapel applied.

  Cummings had propped his cane against the wall. He reached out and put it between them, the ivory head clutched in his hand. “I say . . .”

  “Yes?” For two days he’d lived on coffee and anger and watched Owl fight for her life. When he looked down at Cummings, he let some of that show in his eyes.

  Cummings cleared his throat. “Mean to say . . . you should speak to that girl of yours, Hawkhurst. Damned if you shouldn’t. She left me standing on the steps ten minutes before she opened. She was blasted impertinent. Wouldn’t leave the room when I ordered her to.”

  You do like to order my people around, don’t you?

  “She talked back to me.” Cummings sucked his lip in and out, deploring the situation.

  “We all have that problem.”

  “I suppose you keep her around because she’s a toothsome little thing. You have a reputation for liking the ladies, Hawkhurst. You have that reputation.”

  “Do I?”

  The cane jiggled nervously in Cummings’s hold. There was a blade hidden inside. Anyone would know that from the way Cummings carried it, even without the wide gold rim that circled the head. Hardware like that meant a cane dagger.

  A rich man’s trinket. A short dagger, with no hilt but that little hexagonal rim. Good for one sneaky, unexpected strike. Useless in a fight.

  Cummings fingered it as if it were a favored piece of his anatomy. “I envy you Service Johnnies sometimes. Pretty petticoats stashed away at headquarters. Drinking coffee on the Via Whatever-o in Rome. Jaunting off to the opera in Vienna. No real work for you, now that the war is over. Nothing to do but write up reports and shoot them off to the Prime Minister.”

  “We keep busy in our own modest way.”

  It wasn’t the British Service out of work. It was Military Intelligence. When the last of the occupation army pulled out of France, Military Intelligence went with them. Cummings was reduced to spying on Englishmen, playing informer and agent provocateur to discontented Yorkshire weavers. Intercepting the mail of liberal politicians, hoping to find something treasonous. Harassing purveyors of naughty etchings in Soho.

  Military Intelligence was being whipped through the newspapers as the “secret police” of England. It wasn’t just the radical press that said it was time to close them down.

  His lordship liked to see himself as the spider in the center of a vast web of international intrigue. Now the only agents in the field in Europe were British Service. Cummings spied on the British Service, fishing for minnows to carry back to the Prime Minister, Liverpool. Always gratifying to be the object of interest.

  “But you haven’t told me what brings you to Meeks Street.” He hitched himself more at ease on the desk and let his boot swing right next to his lordship’s immaculate, buff-colored trousers. Cummings couldn’t get to his feet without scrambling like a crab, losing dignity. “Not that we aren’t delighted to—�
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  Doyle came in, with no sound to announce him. Silent as the grave, Doyle, when he wanted to be. He said, “Cummings,” being blunt to the point of rudeness. Then he gave a respectful, “Sir,” in Hawker’s direction.

  That was Doyle propping up the fiction that Adrian ran the place. Listen to Doyle, and anybody’d think Adrian Hawkhurst was somebody important. Somebody an earl’s son deferred to as a matter of course.

  “Join us. Cummings is about to reveal why he’s graced me with his presence today. I’m . . . what’s the word I want?”

  “Intrigued.”

  “Exactly. I knew you would have the mot juste in your pocket. I am intrigued.”

  The wide chair pulled up on the other side of the desk was Doyle’s. It was big enough to hold him. In the years Doyle had been reporting to Heads of Section—five of them now—the chair had taken on his shape and something of his character. It was not unknown for new Heads of Section to sit at the desk and hold conferences with the empty chair, asking themselves what Doyle would advise in a particularly sticky situation.

  Doyle sat down, playing Lord Markham to the hilt, showing off the Eton and Cambridge and the estate in Oxfordshire. He’d changed into a suit of gentleman’s clothes. Nothing fancy, because you didn’t decorate a man like Doyle. Understated. It wasn’t what he wore that made him look like Lord Markham. It was the hundred subtle little gestures and flickers of expression that did it. Right now he was applying a nicely graded aristocratic disdain when his eyes landed on Reams.

  Doyle had unassailable credentials. Adrian Hawkhurt’s were more . . . imaginative. One popular theory was that Tsar Paul got him on an English noblewoman. Then there was the rumor he was a Hapsburg, exiled for doing something too disgraceful for even the Austrian nobility.

  A soft grinding noise. That was the cane twisting into the rug. Cummings said, “I’ll get to the point then. You brought a woman here, injured. Do you know she’s a notorious spy? She’s a French émigré we’ve been keeping an eye on for years. A shopkeeper in Exeter Street.”