The Black Hawk sl-4

by Joanna Bourne

  “Please.” She had no words. “Please. Now.”

  He began to drive each stroke strongly inside her. She pulled herself to him, meeting him. Matching him.

  Arched and straining, gasping for breath, plucked like a bow, she became the exultation. She convulsed around him. She felt him join her, losing control. He groaned deeply, hard and low, in triumph.

  She heard that and let herself fall into red pleasure and was consumed by it.

  SHE watched him through lazy and half-closed eyes, not wanting to move. He was so perfectly beautiful. He was skilled beyond measure. She felt wonderful.

  He touched across the bandage on her arm, seeing that all was safe. Then he sat, his half of the blanket across his lap, gazing down at her with an unreadable expression in his eyes.

  She reached to hold his hand. Even with all the intimacy between them, the straightforward holding of hand in hand was one more.

  He said, “Will you marry me?”

  “No.” She sat up.

  “Ah. That’s your considered reply, that is?” One might spend a week with a magnifying glass and not read one iota of expression upon that face. She tried to take her hand away, and he did not let go.

  “I mean, ‘No, what are you saying?’ ”

  “Then you shouldn’t make it sound so much like, ‘No, we can’t get married.’”

  “That is also true.” She paused. “Probably.” When he was silent, she said, “I have not thought this through.”

  “Think it through.”

  She would have jumped up and put more space between the breath and heat and immediacy of his body. She would have liked to become somewhat more clothed. Almost no rational thinking occurs when one is naked.

  He held her hand and looked at her, quietly serious. “There is no one else for me. Never has been. The war’s been over a long time.”

  “It is not a matter of our nations at war.”

  “Just pointing out that that small impediment no longer exists. We’re not enemies anymore—England and France. I heard the speeches. Nobody on either side will care if we marry.” He turned her hand over to look at the palm. Stroked across it as if he brushed dust away. “Is it me being a gutter rat? Me coming from nothing at all?”

  “You know that does not matter to me.”

  “It should. You deserve better.” His lips quirked. “But since you haven’t picked anybody better, why not me? I have money. I came by it honestly, picking good investments. Property mostly. There’s a house in the West End I’ve never bothered to live in much. It has a Grecian foyer and an Adam fireplace in the dining room.” Startingly, suddenly, he grinned. “I have a damn butler. You can help me intimidate him.”

  “I do not give one penny for your butler and your thousands of pounds and the blood you carry in your veins. I have fought all my life to make a world where such things do not matter.”

  “But the answer is still no,” he said.

  “How can I say yes? We have been apart for years and years. We do not know each other.”

  “You know every alley in my mind, every broken bottle and rat scuttling in there. You put me in my place when I get above myself. Austria, Prussia, Italy, all up and down France—you always figured out where I was going to mount the next operation. Half the time, you blocked me. Just uncanny that way.” He hadn’t let go of her hand. “I know you pretty well too.”

  “I have some familiarity with the workings of your mind. That does not mean we should get married.”

  He kissed her knuckles. One, two, three, and four. She was twitching inside by the time he finished. “No, we should get married so we can go to bed together and do all these interesting things with each other and still stay respectable.”

  “You, who are a paragon of respectability, always.” Never, not once, had she expected to marry. She had not considered the possibility.

  Perhaps it was being naked, which befuddled her mind. Perhaps it was being wholly happy, with every inch of her body exultant. Perhaps it was merely that this was Hawker, and he could always make his mad notions seem possible. “I do not say, ‘No,’ precisely. I feel very strange about the whole idea.”

  He stood and used the hand he was still holding to pull her to her feet. “Let’s go to bed—my bed—and talk about this in the morning. I want to lie beside you and soak up the warmth coming off of you.”

  His bed was very nice, so much so that they made love again almost as soon as they had wriggled down into the sheets.

  When she sank into sleep at the end of it, she felt Hawker pull the covers over her. He did that after they made love, however far the blankets and sheets had strayed. It was an act of most gentlemanly kindness, the sort of habit a man might follow with a cherished wife.

  She could not imagine herself, married.

  Forty-five

  PAX SAT AT THE DESK IN THE LIBRARY, DRAWING the face of the Caché woman with pen and charcoal. This was his tenth copy, and they were going faster now. He’d got the face close to right. The nose and the shape of the eyes hadn’t changed from when she was a child.

  The study on the ground floor of Meeks Street held a couch and armchairs. The walls were stocked with some of the books in the house, the ones that weren’t upstairs. The day’s newspapers, as always, had been opened and folded at random and left on the tables everywhere or stuffed sideways in the shelves.

  Felicity had come at dark to close the curtains. She hadn’t cleaned away the dirty teacups or lighted the lamps. Back when he was doorkeeper and errand boy, he’d been more conscientious.

  He’d lit the stand of candles from the mantelpiece and taken it over to the desk to give him light to work.

  Doyle was in a big chair by the fire with his feet up on the andirons. He had a pile of file folders on the table at his elbow and was leafing through them, taking out reports and news clippings, leaving a strip of red paper with his name and the date behind as a marker.

  A little stack was growing on the floor beside Doyle. News of men who disappeared. Men who died with a single knife stroke to the heart. Unexpected deaths in the night where men forgot how to breathe. Rumors about Cachés. Anything in the files that might touch on this business.

  He’d be going through the files himself, if he weren’t busy drawing. “Are we going to pick up the ones who gave evidence to Bow Street, saying the killer looked like Hawk?”

  “Three false names.” Doyle didn’t look up. “Which is not what you’d call useful, and an army captain who didn’t crack like an egg when I questioned him. He’s being watched.”

  “They’ll turn out to be Cachés.”

  “Likely.”

  “Blackmailed into it. I may know them from Paris.” He blew charcoal dust off the portrait, studied it, and set it aside on the edge of the desk. “From when I was training to spy on the English.”

  “Now you spy for the English. France’s loss. Our gain.”

  “I like to think so. I’m glad Galba decided not to garrote me.” He flexed his fingers and pulled a sheet to him. “This is going slow.” He picked up the finest of the pencils, and drew the oval of the face.

  It wasn’t just copying. Each time, he had to catch what made the face unique. “I’ll do two or three for Bow Street. Hawk can drop them by tomorrow.”

  Hawk had come back to Meeks Street an hour before. The only sign of him was Felicity muttering her way down the hall to open the door and then muttering her way back to bed. He hadn’t poked his head into the study. There was no sound of his footsteps on the stairs. No click of a bedroom door closing. Hawk didn’t make noise moving around a house at night.

  Doyle said, “I’d guess everything went smoothly with Conant.”

  “Seems so.” Lines horizontal. Lines vertical. The geography of the face that set the longitude and latitude of eyes, nose, mouth. “They’re an odd pair to be friends.”

  “They sit around and talk about murder. Conant helps the Service when he can and Hawk doesn’t kill people in London. Bow Stre
et appreciates the courtesy. This one’s interesting.” Doyle picked a clipping from a file. “Two years ago an MP from the wilds of Buckinghamshire got himself stabbed in Mayfair walking home from a dinner party.”

  “I remember. Vessey. William, I think. Never solved.”

  “Good memory. Six months before that . . .” Doyle indicated the papers on the floor beside him, “a Thomas Daventry was taken out of the Thames with stab wounds in him. Not an MP, but active in politics. A Radical with money.”

  “If somebody’s planning to wipe out the Whigs, they’re taking their time about it.” He sketched the shape of the lips.

  “And this is a bloke from the Foreign Office. George Reynolds, politics unknown. Death by a surfeit of steel through his belly.” Doyle closed one file and reached for another.

  Upstairs, in the hall, there was a scratching of dog toenails. Muffin tapped claws down the hall, transferring his guarding duties from Justine DuMotier’s door to Hawk’s.

  Justine had gone into Hawk’s room.

  Doyle tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. “They’re keeping Muffin awake.”

  “Nobody’s getting any sleep tonight.”

  A solid, comfortable thump from the upstairs hall. Muffin settled down, meaning Justine was staying for bit.

  “Be nice if this simplified matters,” Doyle said.

  “And about time.”

  “But they don’t do anything simple, do they?”

  “Not so far.” The Caché’s mouth wasn’t wide, but the lips were full. She had a flat bridge on the nose. He’d finish that up with white chalk, last thing. “You’re Hawk’s executor, if he dies, aren’t you?”

  Doyle didn’t look surprised. Hard to make Doyle look surprised. “Have been for years.”

  “Who gets the money?”

  Doyle pulled a new file into his lap, opened it, and started through. “There are easier ways to kill somebody if you just want his money.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Ask Hawk.”

  “No.” He worked on the eyebrows. Then went over it with pen and India ink.

  Doyle said, “Setting aside that it’s illegal for me to talk about this and Hawk wouldn’t like it, it’s not useful.”

  “We have to cross it off the list. He’s a rich man.”

  After another minute of thought. Doyle said, “He’s left houses and businesses to old friends who are already running them or living in them. A gold watch to George. Justine DuMotier gets a silver chain with a medal on it. He’s set up fifty or sixty annuities. Retired agents, mostly.”

  “I don’t see Hawk leaving property to somebody who’d kill him for it.”

  A grunt from Doyle.

  “What about the rest? That’s a good many tens of thousands of pounds. Who gets that?”

  “Well, that goes to me, you see. Which is a technicality, meaning it goes to Maggie.”

  “For the orphanages.”

  “What Hawk calls, ‘those damn brats too clumsy to make a living at theft.’ ” Doyle had worked his way through the files for April. He set that down and opened up May. “I could steal the lot, if he obliged me by dying.”

  “And you’d step in as Head of the British Service.”

  “I would indeed,” Doyle said. “You keep coming up with reasons for me to kill him.”

  “Except you don’t need the money and you don’t want to run the Service. You’ve spent a long career avoiding it.”

  “There’s that,” Doyle agreed amiably.

  Forty-six

  THE SMELL OF A FANCY BALL IN LONDON WAS SWEET wine, sweat, and perfume. In winter, add damp wool to that. It didn’t smell too different from a whorehouse, really.

  “I hate seeing her without a gun,” Hawker said.

  “Here I thought you didn’t like guns.” Doyle strolled at his side, looking stupid and benign and well-groomed. The quintessence of English aristocrat.

  “I don’t. But Justine does.” He followed the lilac silk weaving through the forest of black coats and pastel debutante gowns. That was Owl, with Séverine beside her, working her way around the reception room. “I let her talk me into sending her in with one wing out of commission and no gun. I must be out of my mind.”

  “You and the generality of mankind.”

  The Pickerings’ ballroom, reception room, all the antechambers, and every damn room in the place was noisy, crowded, and covered with gilt and mirrors. Overheated, over-scented, overdecorated. Pax and Owl searched, dancer by dancer, wallflower by wallflower, looking into every face, trying to spot one sparrow out of the flock.

  “She has a knife in her sleeve,” Doyle said. “She’s got another under her dress. She’s been in worse places, with less—so has Sévie, for that matter—and we got five men wandering around, armed to the teeth. I’ve seen pitched battles with less weaponry.”

  That was an exaggeration. “It only takes one bullet.”

  “Which our Caché is not going to contribute unless she’s stuffed a gun down her titties.” Doyle shook his head. “You’re staring at Justine again. I taught you better than that.”

  “I’m keeping track of an operation.”

  “You’re staring. This is why I never put a husband and wife in the field together.”

  “We’re not married.”

  “I don’t put lovers together, either.” Doyle nodded to a man Hawker didn’t know. When they were out of earshot, Doyle murmured, “Richard Shaw, Justice of the Peace, up from the country. Rabid Tory. Probably trying for an introduction to Liverpool.”

  Liverpool, the Prime Minister, was standing in an alcove on the far side of the room. Eight or ten men had gathered in close, basking in the glow of power, chatting. A respectful distance cleared around them.

  “Castlereagh, Granville, and Melbourne.” Doyle named them.

  “Liverpool is knee deep in Whig politicians.”

  “Diplomatic business, since it’s Castlereagh. Probably the Prussian tariffs.” Doyle said, “Cummings is busy.”

  Lord Cummings had wedged himself into a place on Liverpool’s right hand. He was taller than the other men around Liverpool, gray-haired and distinguished, but he seemed flimsy next to the others.

  “Small fish for that pond.” Lordship or no, Cummings wasn’t the equal of the other men in Liverpool’s circle. “He’s talking nineteen to the dozen. I wonder what he’s up to.”

  “At a guess, he’s mending bridges. Military Intelligence is unpopular in England. Liverpool’s being criticized in the newspapers, and he doesn’t like it. He’s not cozy with Cummings lately.”

  “Who shall blame Liverpool? Let us go trolling for a Caché.”

  The ton parted to let them through—diplomats, MPs, bankers and bishops, staid country gentry, the aristocracy of Europe. They moved aside for the boy from the rookeries of St. Giles.

  There’d been a time when his greatest ambition was to be a gentleman. Gentlemen—he was sure of this—ate all the sausages and eel pie they wanted. They kept coal fires burning on every grate. They wore silk nightshirts to bed and they pissed in gold chamber pots.

  He’d set out to make himself a nob. He’d succeeded. Trouble was, it had stopped being an act years ago. Somebody named Sir Adrian had crawled into his skin and set up housekeeping. The boy from St. Giles wasn’t quite comfortable in there anymore.

  “Hawkhurst. I thought you were out of town.”

  “Jeremy.” Greet a friend. Shake hands. Promise to talk when they met for cards next week at Mortimer’s house. Walk on.

  For all he was a friend, Jeremy knew Sir Adrian. He didn’t know Hawker. In St. Giles, men knew Hawker but not Sir Adrian. Sometimes, it felt like neither half of him was the real one.

  “You’re watching her again,” Doyle said.

  “I like watching her.” He kept his eye on Owl as she slipped along, inconspicuous, looking at faces. A flock of women milled around her, fluttering, gesturing. Any one of them could be carrying a knife.

  For a decade, she’d
kept herself alive on battlefields and in back alleys. She was watching her back. He had to believe she could survive one night at the Pickerings.

  Besides, Pax was following her, ten paces behind.

  He turned away, casual-like, so he didn’t have to notice Mrs. Gaite-Hartwick waving cheerily in his direction. The Gaite-Hartwicks weren’t the only family making it clear they’d overlook any amount of Hawkhurst mysterious origin as long as he owned a snug little manor near Oxford, part of a shipping company, and considerable London property.

  Doyle said, “If I were her husband, I’d drink. Let’s get out of the main thoroughfare.”

  “Suits me. Looks like Owl’s about finished.”

  “Let’s go down and take inventory of the latecomers in the lobby. Terrington party next. Anybody who wasn’t here is going to be there. It’ll be larger than this.”

  “Always a silver lining.”

  “There’s more of a foreign contingent at the Terringtons’. Our Caché may have gone back to being French.” Doyle narrowed his eyes. “Cummings is whispering in Liverpool’s ear, and they’re both looking this way.”

  “Have we done anything to irritate Liverpool in the last little space of time?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Let us hope Cummings is annoying him with the antics of the Yorkshire Luddites. Ah . . . Reams comes this way, being impolite to all the nice old ladies in his path. How very direct the military is.”

  Colonel Reams arrived in all the glory of his scarlet coat, dress sword at his side, a big, red-coated slab of aging muscle. He wouldn’t think of himself as a messenger boy, but that was his role. “Liverpool wants to talk to you.”

  Reams might as well have capered in triumph. Cummings had something clever planned, and Reams knew what it was. The Prime Minister was involved.

  Interesting.

  Nothing like walking into a trap to set the blood pumping. Plots and machinations littered the ground like caltrops. The game was in play.

  He signaled Pax to move in closer to Owl. “Keep an eye on things,” he told Doyle.