The Black Hawk sl-4

by Joanna Bourne

  She allowed this because she did, in fact, wish to sit down. The determination that had kept her going packed up its tent and deserted. Little spots swirled before her eyes. She would not faint, but the fringes of this possibility were distracting.

  He stood for a long minute looking down at her before he let go. His hold imprinted into her shoulders a sense of the solidity of the banyan’s embroidery. Where he held her, the silk remained warm.

  The body has memories deeper than thought. Her body remembered him.

  He lifted one of the chairs that waited at the wall and brought it to the table so he could sit and glare at her, close and familiar. “Too much to hope you’d spend the day flat in bed.” He turned to Séverine. “Too much to expect you’d keep her there.”

  Séverine made herself comfortable in the chair at the end of the table. “I can’t stop her, you know. If you want her in bed, keep her there yourself.”

  Hawker ignored that. “She’s the color of new cheese and she’s shaking when she moves.” He directed an order to the dark, sullen spy girl in training. “Get her some of that catlap we keep feeding her.”

  In the long three years apart, she had forgotten the many ways in which he annoyed her. She said, “Coffee. Very strong. I do not wish to drink bouillon in the dawn, and I detest tea.’Awker, we must talk.”

  “Right. That’s the first thing I said when you fell across my doorstep, bleeding. I said to myself, ‘I must talk to this woman.’”

  “I did not mean to be stabbed. It is not my fault. In any case, you have discovered most of what I came to tell you. There are two murders.”

  “With my knife in their gullet. When it’s my knives, I like to be the one who puts ’em into people.”

  “You must contain your disappointment.” Black knives lay on the table, close enough that she could have laid hand on them. “Those are the knives?”

  He leaned to the side and tapped one, then the other. “Gravois. Patelin. This,” he drew from his arm sheath, “is the one that almost finished you.”

  He spun the knife and caught it, very close to her, all a cold breath of motion that whispered across her skin. He held it out, cutting edge toward her, on the palm of his hand. His eyes were dark, cool, and considering. For the time it took to breathe twice, they were quite, quite still, with the knife between them.

  He reversed the knife and set the hilt into her hand. “You didn’t know it’s poisoned. I wondered about that.”

  “Poison.” She set that morsel of knowledge aside with the rest she had gathered. “I looked upon the corpse of Patelin, but there was no such indication. A little poison is irrelevant when one’s heart has been pierced.” She became very careful with the knife. “It was poison, then, that almost introduced me to Monsieur Death.”

  “You were shaking hands with him. It’s a nasty poison, as these things go. Slow.”

  When had she ever seen his knives that they were not immaculate? Doyle, without asking, passed a small magnifying glass to her so she could examine it. The dark smears were her blood. The white film would be poison. She read the history of her stabbing.

  His knives had always seemed heavy for their size, as if the savage elegance of design added weight. This was one of the knives she had kept in the box in her shop. Almost certainly, one of those three. She had taken them out and held them sometimes, at night, wondering why she kept them.

  She returned it to him, being careful of everyone’s skin. “I hope you have not been buttering toast with that.”

  “I have treated it with circumspection. Nothing more dangerous than sharp objects with poison on them.”

  She must explain those knives to him. His plate was within easy reach. She selected a strip of bacon he had not yet attended to.

  He said, “Should you be eating that?”

  “We will find out.” The bacon was good. Salty. Her stomach accepted the offering with caution. “I am weary of lying in bed and no one brings me anything to eat.”

  “She gave her porridge to the dog,” Séverine said.

  “Who ate it with relish. He is large and strong and will survive an encounter with boiled cereal grains. I may not. It is foolish to survive stabbing and poison and then slowly starve to death on consommé and possets.” She found the most comfortable spot in the chair and pulled the banyan across her legs and tucked them under her. Hawker watched with great attention. The other men turned their eyes away. Really, she was covered from head to foot like a beldame. The color of the robe would set fire to loose tinder, but one could not fault it for concealment.

  “We need to talk to you, anyway. You’re the puzzle piece.” Paxton accepted a cup of tea from Séverine with a shade of surprise, as if he had not realized he wanted it. Like everyone else in this room, he looked exhausted. “When we find out why you got stabbed, we’ll know who did it.”

  “That is my hope, certainly. I do not like puzzles that involve my death in the cold rain.” She ate in tiny bites, playing with the bacon between her teeth. Three years ago she had turned her back on the games of death and war that spies played. It seemed she was not finished with them.

  She stole a second piece of bacon. The gray behemoth of a dog heaved to his feet and thudded toward her. They named him Muffin, instead of Behemoth. They would have their small jokes in this household. He sat—thump—and looked expectant.

  It was an ancient policy with her to be on good terms with anything that outweighed her and had so many teeth, so she broke the bacon in two and gave him the smaller piece. He was a dog. He would not realize he had been slighted.

  With surprising delicacy the dog picked bacon from her fingers and carried it away to the warm spot in the sun.

  Doyle said, “We know the poison. We worked it out from what it did to you.”

  “I would not wish to die of an unknown poison. It seems impersonal.”

  Coffee arrived before her, brought by the dark apprentice spy girl, poured and creamed and sugared by Séverine. It was hot, giving off steam in a thin, blue cup. To sit and be alive and discuss poisoning and mayhem with experts while drinking impeccable coffee—it was enough to make one believe in Divine Providence.

  “The poison’s French.” Doyle cut into his ham, getting on with the business of eating.

  Or perhaps matters were not so perfect. “You must not assume every exotic deadliness is French. That is a British superstition.”

  Paxton stacked notes from three piles into one. “The poison’s called la vis. The ingredients are Hindi and Spanish, but the mixture’s French. The Cachés were taught to make it.”

  “They were taught all kinds of sneakiness, if you’re anything to go by.” Hawker let light run up and down the blade one last time, then set the knife between the other two. “You can make la vis in London. Or Prague or Amsterdam. All the ingredients are here. Assassination’s a portable trade.”

  Three black blades lay in a row, like herrings on straw in a fish market.

  Coffee was made in the French style in Meeks Street. One did not merely drink, one indulged.

  She considered the knives. “I bribed the coroner’s assistant to see Patelin’s body, which is why I knew for certain it was he. At Bow Street a more substantial bribe let me see your knives, but I was not able to steal them. They are protective of their murder weapons at Bow Street. Not protective enough, obviously.”

  “I run tame at Bow Street. They’re used to seeing me.” Doyle drank ale with his breakfast. One would think he studied how to be the caricature of an Englishman. “Now the knives in evidence boxes have NB written in the curlicues, instead of AH. Which is almost the same, and a perfectly natural mistake anybody could make.”

  Paxton said, “We won’t fool Military Intelligence. They’ll know we switched them.”

  Doyle smiled, looking evil. “So they will.”

  “I wonder if they think I have some particular reason to go killing Frenchmen.” Hawker pulled at his lower lip, thinking.

  It was good to be
back among those who spoke so bluntly, so easily, of death and deceit. She missed this in her exile. “I visited the death scenes of Messieurs Gravois and Patelin. You would never have committed murder in those places. You would never have run from a death, drawing attention to yourself.”

  “Somebody’s painting my name in big letters on these murders.” Hawker glanced at her. “Somebody with three of my knives. An enemy.”

  She ran her thumb down the smooth wood of the chair arm. “Yes. An enemy.”

  In so short a moment, the atmosphere changed.

  She did not know quite how to explain those knives.

  Doyle dropped his napkin beside his plate. “Right. I’ll leave you two to talk about that. I’m for Soho and hunting down some witness to the first stabbing. That is a neighborhood full of shy game when it comes to flushing out witnesses. Sévie, you got a nice, innocent, confiding look about you today. Come along. Maybe they’ll talk to you.”

  “I am delighted to be your stalking horse.” Cup clinked into saucer. Séverine was on her feet. “See that she rests, Hawker. It is no use to nurse her back to health if you are going to badger her to death.” Séverine dropped a kiss on her cheek as she passed by. “Do not be cruel to him,” she whispered.

  Fletcher muttered something about papers from the inquest and slipped out the door. The sullen apprentice spy stacked a pile of dishes in the dumbwaiter and strode after him. By that time, Paxton had already exercised his most excellent talent for vanishing.

  “Are you the enemy, turning my knives against me?” Hawker said.

  It became very quiet.

  Forty-one

  AFTER HE SIGNALED DOYLE AND EVERYBODY CLEARED out, he was left alone with Owl, who wasn’t in any shape to go stomping off when he asked awkward questions.

  The wooden box from her shop—the one that had played host to his knives for a while—was in the top drawer of the sideboard. He brought it out and laid it on the table. You could call that a conversation piece.

  She worked on her coffee in little sips, eking it out as long as she could, avoiding the moment when she’d have to come up with explanations for having three of his knives.

  He wasn’t in a hurry. He fetched the silver coffeepot and poured into her cup. Added cream the way she liked it. “Two lumps?”

  “Thank you.”

  Enough sugar to set his teeth on edge. That hadn’t changed. “We can go to the study, if you like. There’s a sofa in there. I can let you lie down.” He handed the cup over.

  “I have been lying flat for several days. It loses its appeal.”

  Owl, lying flat, never lost its appeal. He didn’t point that out. He was the pattern card of discretion.

  The banyan was embroidered with dragons, a gift from an old friend who dealt in cloth. One lascivious lizard curled all comfy on her left breast, tongue out, as if he were tasting her nipple through the cloth. The black dragon on the back, the one with a smile, had his pointy tail hung down so it was caressing the rounded arse underneath.

  He didn’t let his mind follow that path, however much it tugged at the leash and whined.

  She wrapped both hands around the little cup and sank back, boneless, in the chair, her head bowed, considering the coffee. She looked tired. Getting stabbed, poisoned, and fighting off fever had worn her down a little.

  She’d primmed the sensual complexity of her hair, scraped it away from her face. Tamed it to an orderly braid to fall down her back. But it wasn’t tied up at the bottom. Maybe she hadn’t found a ribbon. Even the concerted force of her will wasn’t going to keep it from unraveling.

  He stood close, breathing down onto all the bare skin at her neck. It wouldn’t intimidate her—he couldn’t think of anything right off that was likely to intimidate her—and he could catch her if she started to slip sideways.

  Always a pleasure to watch Owl. He’d missed that. “You’re quiet.”

  “I am thinking of the several things I must say to you. None of them is easy.”

  Probably she was weighing her lies. Sorting the big ones from the small ones. Wondering what she could get away with. God, but he loved this woman. “I’m a patient man. Begin at the beginning.”

  She sighed out slowly. “It is not the beginning, but it is the most recent of our encounters. You rescued me from the Cossacks. I wanted to kill you. You will remember that.”

  “Vividly.”

  IT was in the last days before Paris fell. Armies were scattered around the French countryside, fighting off and on. He’d been liaison to the Prussians. Napoleon put up a defense a half day south.

  There was gunfire in the distance, but the front line was so mixed up, that could be anybody shooting at anybody else. The Prussians were using him to run messages back and forth and report what was happening, generally. He was so tired he hurt like one big bruise. He smelled like his horse.

  Some Cossack officers he knew spotted him and called him over. They needed help interrogating a prisoner. A woman.

  He ducked under the tent flap. She was sitting on an old wooden stool, bloodied, with torn clothes. She hadn’t been raped. He’d been in time to stop that.

  “She fought like a tiger.” Pavlo was admiring. “Fortunately, the sergeant she stabbed wasn’t popular.”

  Owl looked up and knew it was over. He watched her face break.

  He said, “I know this one. She’s harmless.”

  It had been a dozen years since she’d shot him on the steps in the Louvre. In all those years, all those cities, they hadn’t crossed paths often. When they did, it had been interesting.

  She’d changed from the woman he’d known. She was exhausted to the edge of endurance, for one thing. Pale, with her eyes set in hollows like two big bruises and her mouth slack. She hadn’t given up though. She was calculating, planning, scheming, ready to pay any price and take any chance to get away. Behind her eyes she was . . . she was just more. Everything she’d been when he knew her twelve years before, she was more of now. More strong. More shrewd. More stubborn.

  “She’s just another courier,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  The papers she had on her were in one of the standard French codes—a message for Napoleon’s eyes. The attack on St. Dizier was a feint. The real drive was direct to Paris. He had no idea how she’d found that out.

  He said she wasn’t worth the trouble of guarding. Said it set a bad example, shooting women. When he took her out of the tent with him, they probably thought he was marching her off for his own use.

  He made her walk a mile from the Cossack camp before he stopped his horse. The road ran along the marshes around the lake.

  “Your shoes,” he said.

  Wordlessly, she took the clogs off and handed them over. He threw them as far as he could, in different directions, far out over the marsh.

  St. Dizier was fifty miles away. Alone, unarmed, walking barefoot, even Justine wouldn’t make it to Napoleon in time. Paris would fall. It was the end.

  “I will kill you for this.” She stood in the dirt of the road, her arms crossed over her breasts like she was holding her heart inside. “I will wait until you no longer expect it, and then I will kill you. Do not sleep deeply.”

  SHE sat in his headquarters at Meeks Street in the Chinese dining room, wrapped in his dragons, and drank his coffee.

  “That day, outside the Cossack camp. I said a great many things.” She consulted her coffee cup. “I was beyond myself.”

  “I knew that.”

  “You were the enemy, and you destroyed our last hope.”

  “It was already too late before I saw you in that tent. Everybody knew that but Napoleon. He was outnumbered. The country was sick of war. All he could do was pick the battleground where he’d lose. If you’d got through to him, he would have taken the final battle to the walls of Paris. Did you want house-to-house fighting across the Latin Quarter? Artillery fire from Montmartre?”

  “I see that now. That day, I knew only that I had failed i
n my duty.” The past filled her face. She was a long way away. “I tried to get to Napoleon, and every step of the long way, I planned how I would kill you.”

  “You were inventive about it, I imagine.”

  “There has never been a man in the history of the world who was killed as ingeniously as you were, in my mind, that day. I tried so hard, and I failed. When they told me Paris had surrendered, I sat upon the floor of a farmhouse and wept.”

  Nothing he could say. The war was over. “He had to be stopped.”

  “I have had a long time to think about this. I do not say you are wrong. But then . . . Paris was full of foreign armies. Prussians strutted about the Champs-Élysées. The cafés were full of Austrians. Cossacks camped on the Champs de Mars. Everywhere I turned, I became sick with rage. I was forsaken and mad with grief. So I blamed you.”

  “You think I don’t understand that?”

  “I would have spit upon your understanding, if you had offered it to me then.” She gave a crooked smile. “I was most utterly alone. There was no place for me in the new scheme of things. Even the Police Secrète became suddenly supporters of the monarchy. Those of us who had been loyal to Napoleon found it prudent to leave France.”

  “To England.”

  “It is ironic that the safest place for me was here, openly among my old enemies.”

  “Ironic.”

  “But I lie.” She took a deep breath. “As I lay in bed this morning, I promised myself I would not do that. Habit is very strong. I came to England because you were here.” She glanced at the knives that lay in the center of the table, being decorative. “I had decided, very cold-bloodedly, that I would kill you.”

  “I hope you changed your mind.” Gods, but I hope you changed your mind.

  “I am being honest about complex matters. It is not easy, and you are not helpful in the least.” She always got more French when she was annoyed.

  He touched her cheek. One brush with his finger. Anybody looking on would have thought it was just friendly. “We never hurt each other. We played fair. Leaving aside that one deplorable incident fifteen years ago, you never shot me.”