Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  • • •

  HIS boots hit the cobbles. Raoul Deverney absorbed the impact, folded in on himself, rolled, and ran toward the straggling line of bushes behind the stable. He’d be invisible against the stone wall.

  Séverine de Cabrillac appeared in the second-floor window, searching for him in the darkness, the linen of her night shift pale in the firelight behind her. He wondered what she was thinking.

  The yard smelled of the horses sleeping in their stalls. No noise from them. The inn dogs were either asleep or taking a cynical view of folks who wandered to and fro among the bedchambers in the deep of night, and remained silent. The stable cats were more wakeful. One came to twine about his boots, purring. He went down on one knee to scratch behind its ears.

  After a minute the de Cabrillac woman pulled the curtains closed and went away.

  He’d watched her from the day he’d found her name written at the scene of Sanchia’s death. More than a week now. The name had meant nothing to him, but he’d recognized her at once, even after so many years. She was as beautiful as he’d remembered. In the same room with her, in her bed, the self-contained force of the woman struck like a hammer blow. It had been impossible to leave her without that one touch.

  She’d been a legend in Spain a decade ago—the woman who took many names, who wore many disguises, who was always frighteningly effective. They said she’d given up spying. That she was a private person now, investigating private crimes. It looked as if the British Service still called her back to work.

  Maybe the rage and helplessness he’d felt when they hauled him in front of her ten years ago colored his judgment, but he didn’t believe she’d “retired long ago.” Spies never retire. She was, at heart, the same as she’d always been. He had no trouble believing she could be involved in Sanchia’s death.

  One question remained. Would she kidnap a child?

  Tomorrow, we continue. Tomorrow, another dangerous approach. Another hazardous move forward in this game.

  He collected his hat from the tree branch where he’d left it and went over the low wall around the inn, out to the field where he’d left the horse. He knew more about her now, but not what he needed to know. Was she friend or enemy? If the latter, she’d be a formidable opponent.

  Two

  “SMALLER than you,” Séverine said.

  “Everybody’s smaller than me.” Papa ambled along beside her.

  “Taller than Hawker.”

  “Most men are taller than Hawker.” She led last night’s memories through her mind one by one. Pictured the man standing over her, holding a knife. Mentally measured him against the window frame where he’d paused an instant before he slid away over the sill in a smooth, practiced twist of his body. “He’s midway between you and Hawker.”

  Papa—William Doyle in the spy world, Viscount Markham to the ton—was not her father by blood. That had been the Comte de Cabrillac, dead in the Terror of the Revolution. She barely remembered the horror of his death and her mother’s. The months afterward when she and her sister Justine struggled to survive were a nightmare of pain and fear. Then a huge, gentle stranger had said, “She is my daughter,” and carried her in his arms out of the gates of Paris. She’d never doubted for a moment that he’d spoken the truth. He was Papa.

  “Fat? Thin?” Papa said.

  “Thin and his muscles lie down flat to his body. He’s not”—she grinned at Papa, who would appreciate the joke—“muscled like a fairground boxer.”

  “We can’t all be great hunks of muscle,” Papa said tranquilly. “You say he’s thin. Thin and puny? Thin and stretched out long? Thin and nervous?”

  “Lean. He does something that stretches his muscles out. He might be a fencer.” The open street was a good place to discuss private matters. No one could overhear more than a half-dozen words in a row without making it very obvious they were following. She’d chatted secrets on the boulevards of all the great cities of Europe and felt reasonably safe about it.

  She walked along beside Papa, neither of them hurrying on this fine cold morning. The hackney had dropped them at Cheapside, so they had a goodish walk through sleepy back streets to her office near the docks. The cloak she wore kept her warm in the chilly wind. Papa didn’t so much ignore the cold as just not notice.

  “He had a trained body.” She could pick that certainty out of all the impressions crowded into her head. “When he came stalking across the room I could almost see a sabre in his hands. He’s studied as a fighter.”

  “You are not reassuring me, lass.”

  “I didn’t feel reassured, myself, at the time. Thinking back, I am. If he’d wanted to kill me, he could have done it when I was under the blanket.”

  “Where your admirable fighting skills are irrelevant.” Papa hooked a thumb into the pocket of his waistcoat. “You think he knew you could fight?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “That’s not widely scattered information. He knows too much about you, Sévie.”

  “Seems to. I’ll find out how, eventually.” They passed Londoners on their way to work, as she was. Papa looked them over as if they were sheep and he was waiting for one of them to bolt out of the flock and do something stupid or dangerous. There was a bit of the vigilant sheepdog about Papa.

  Having shared what she could about unexpected midnight encounters, she went on to what she’d learned in Bristol, being discreet as usual and not naming names.

  Eight years ago, in Spain, she’d fallen from a horse, broken her ankle, and been set to watch the Irish of the British Army while that healed. Typical of Military Intelligence that they were just as happy to spy on British subjects as on the enemy.

  The Irish had known all about her, which was also typical, since Military Intelligence didn’t keep secrets well. For one long, hot, dusty summer she and the Irish had amused themselves fooling one another not at all. They became friends of an odd sort.

  Sometimes, even now, the Irish sent her information. A month ago her Eyes and Ears, the old women who collected rumors for her, heard whispers of a plot in London. An Irishman was boasting through the taverns that he’d kill Wellington “right under the long noses of the English nobs.” She’d sent out word to old friends here and there, asking for help, and Sean Reilly in Bristol gave her the name O’Grady.

  The threat to Wellington made it political and a matter for the British Service.

  O’Grady, Sean said, was a back-alley bully from Dublin. A criminal. No friend of Ireland. Not one of them. She could pass his threats along to the British Service with a pound of tea and their compliments.

  “Could your visitor be this O’Grady?” Papa scratched at his chin a little, the way he did when he was thinking. He never shaved closely when he was being a colorful London workingman. He’d taught a generation of young male agents the same tricks. All those British Service agents wandered around with a bit of scruffy beard. “You’ve sent your Eyes and Ears looking for him. He might have heard.”

  “My Irish say O’Grady’s a hulking, red-faced bully. A bruiser and a brawler. Dublin born, with a Dublin accent. Former army. All of that makes him the opposite of the man who paid a call on me at the midnight hour.”

  “A useful description of O’Grady though.”

  “I hope so. That’s all I brought back from three days back and forth to Bristol.”

  “More than we had before,” Papa said easily.

  She hadn’t talked to Papa about this at breakfast. It was impossible to get a word in edgewise with the little kids squabbling and Bartholomew—Bart—invalided home from Eton, mostly free of measles now, and edgy with boredom. Besides, she didn’t bring work home. Papa had taught her that by example. Hawker, friend from her first days in England, married to her sister Justine, had too. She didn’t let the ugliness of her work come near the family.

  “That’s the meat of it.” She kept an eye
behind them and around them. No one was tagging along, listening. “Whoever’s after Wellington, it’s not my Irish and not anyone they know of. I have what we call a negative result.”

  “Was your man with the knife Irish?”

  She shook her head. “He spoke Mayfair English. Educated, upper-crust, London English.”

  “Born to it? Could there be Irish underneath?”

  “You’re determined to make him part of the Wellington business, aren’t you?”

  “Is he?”

  She picked apart that drawling, deep voice she could hear so clearly in her head. “Not Irish, if he is. He’s French, I think. Or he might be Italian or Spanish. You hear it in his r’s. And he moves like a Frenchman.” She gave an impatient shrug, using her own Frenchness to indicate all the habits of body and movement that made a man French.

  “So we could be dealing with one of the late enemy.” Papa took some long slow steps. “All else being equal and considering tonight’s business, I’d rather the French weren’t involved. Is he a spy, Sévie?”

  She thought that over. “He said, ‘You’re still playing the same games.’ He said, ‘You.’”

  “And thereby claims he’s not in the Game. A retired spy? The woods are thick with retired spies.”

  “I’m one,” she pointed out.

  “He seems to know that,” Papa said.

  “Not precisely a secret. What Military Intelligence knows, the world knows.”

  Their reflections paced beside them in the shop windows. Nobody was taking an undue interest in them. Good.

  Papa dressed as a laborer today in leather trousers and vest, thick brown coat, gray wool socks. He wore his fake scar, as he did when he was working.

  She looked small beside Papa in those reflections, a straight-backed woman matching steps with the big brute. There was no real resemblance between them, of course. They were not related by blood, only by iron-strong ties of affection. Papa had stood near the gates of Paris and said she would be his daughter, always and completely, just as if she’d been born his daughter.

  To her own eyes she looked thin and grumpy and tired. The stranger in her room had found her interesting. Nothing she saw in the dim images in the shop window explained why that man had casually tossed “beautiful” into the conversation.

  She knew what it was like to be beautiful. Gaëtan, her gentle soldier, had called her that with all the passion of first love. She’d felt beautiful when she’d been with him. They’d both been so very young. He was long dead on a battlefield in Spain. It still hurt to remember him.

  Robin Carlington—she would be in his house this evening—had lavished extravagant compliments upon her more recently, written witty poems to her arched eyebrows and red lips. With his hand on his heart, on bended knee, he’d called her a stern and lovely goddess. But he’d turned out to be no friend at all and certainly no lover. It spoke well of her common sense that in all the months he’d courted her she’d never believed him for a minute.

  She said, “Sometimes there really are coincidences. I’m beginning to think this amulet and missing girl and a man who tosses his spare knife in my lap have nothing to do with Wellington. What if it’s just an ordinary crime? London’s littered with the murdered, kidnapped, blackmailed, robbed, and just plain knocked over the head.”

  “True,” Papa conceded handsomely. “I like to think we have the most active criminal class in Europe.”

  “A matter of national pride.”

  “But there’s still a fine selection of spies on offer.”

  They crossed Cannon Street, busy with delivery wagons and carts. It was not the most fashionable area of London, and the neighborhood deteriorated a bit from here to the Thames. But it suited her clients, who were generally not fashionable themselves.

  She took a different path to work every day. Old habits. Old bits of caution that clung to her long after she should have become a mild and respectable investigator. Today she chose to turn down a narrow alley, nameless so far as she knew, and not on any of the maps. “I collected enigmatic remarks and a knife instead of questions about Bristol and Wellington and O’Grady. He’s a lackadaisical spy if he is one.”

  “Not everybody has the concentration and deadliness to shine in this profession.”

  At the corner of Turnwheel Lane, within sight of the ordinary brick building where she kept offices, a woman with a thousand wrinkles sold hot cross buns. Papa gave thr’pence for a ha’penny bun, as he always did, and they walked on.

  She picked away at the bun and went back to the salient point of her midnight encounter. “He didn’t try to kill me.”

  “A model of decorum.”

  “I think so.”

  Papa walked with his hands clasped at his back. Eventually he said, “I’m not trying to protect you, Sévie. You don’t need that. But my thumbs are pricking.”

  “I don’t have your educated thumbs. But I’m uneasy.”

  “Deep currents.”

  Currents indeed. She felt herself being swept along, back into the spying life. Thinking like a spy. Acting like one. When you’re good at something and you do it for a while, there’s always a string pulling you back in. Probably bakers, retired to Hampstead village, kneaded dough in their sleep the way Muffin the dog yipped and ran while he dreamed.

  They stopped across the street from her office. Papa said, “You don’t have to go to the Carlingtons’ tonight. This isn’t your work. I have enough agents.”

  That was Papa trying to keep her out of the Wellington business. Too late, really.

  “You never have enough agents.” Before Papa could say more she added, “I can’t avoid Robin Carlington forever. I’ll look like a fool if I try.”

  Papa gave her an instant of calm study. Shrewdest eyes in England. “I could encourage Robin Carlington to visit Serbia for a while. Or China. Lots of ships at dock.” Papa always knew exactly what to say.

  “It’s a kindly thought, but not necessary. I’ll be aloof and ever so slightly puzzled at the fuss. He should behave himself in his brother’s house.”

  The morning air filled up with comments Papa wasn’t making. He only said, “We’ll meet at Meeks Street this afternoon to go over plans for tonight. If you see your visitor, take care.”

  “I always do.”

  “If I believed that, I’d be a fool.”

  She didn’t kiss Papa as they parted. They were not dressed as two people who would kiss affectionately on the street. They both knew better than to break a disguise.

  • • •

  SHE felt no eyes upon her as she crossed Turnwheel Lane. Forty windows in the buildings up and down the street had a clear line of sight on her, but they felt empty. That didn’t convince her she was safe. It made her worry she was losing her old skills.

  Ten years ago, when she’d been tired of everyone treating her like a child, she’d run away to war. She’d joined, not Papa’s British Service, but the less competent and extensively more problematic Military Intelligence. In markets and city squares of Portugal and Spain, across Pyrenees mountain passes, and through scrublands and ravines, she’d walked with every sense extended, every nerve quivering, knowing she might be in enemy sights. Today she was reminded of those days.

  The man who’d come to her bedchamber was somewhere in London, obsessed with amulets and a lost girl and Miss Séverine de Cabrillac. She had the absurd notion she’d know if his eyes were on her.

  At the front door to her office building a brass plaque read Fielding and Sons Imports; Cyril Malone, Solicitor; and Horace Famble. Famble was a sculptor with a studio and rooms on the first floor back. Finally, at the bottom of the list was De Cabrillac Consulting.

  She walked past the stairs to the front door and on to the right, to the wide doors that led into the loading yard of Fielding’s Imports. She was hit, as always, by the noise penned up in
here. Wheelbarrows bumped up and down the ridges of the ramp. Ironclad wagon wheels clanked on cobbles. Men swore and shouted. Only the horses went about their business quietly.

  She wove between wagons and horses, keeping her feet out from under hooves and wheels. Warehouse laborers unloaded barrels from the wagons and rolled them up the ramp onto the warehouse floor. They touched caps to her if their hands were free. They were used to Miss de Cabrillac being eccentric and taking the back stairs.

  Young Peter was there, being useful among them, rocking barrels down the length of the wagons so men could unload them. He was too scrawny to be of much use otherwise.

  It was early enough that the night guard was still on duty on the warehouse floor of Fielding’s. That was Holloway, a former soldier with one arm and two sharp eyes. A crack shot. He only needed one arm for that. He gave her a casual salute when he saw her looking his way.

  She climbed the bare, businesslike back stairs of the place, picking the currants out of her bun and eating them as she went. The floor above smelled of sweet smoke, ale, and marble dust. In Famble’s studio, men were arguing about a boxing match in Essex. Those gentlemen weren’t up early in the day. They’d been at it all night. Famble and his friends lived what might be called an irregular life.

  Her office was above. She took the whole top floor. Everything up here was a shade more closely dusted, more freshly painted, better lighted, and better swept.

  This was where she’d put Peter, here at the landing in the triangle-shaped space under the attic stair in what used to be a storage cupboard. It was warm and dry. The lantern on the hook burned day and night to light the steps. She’d found a straw-stuffed mat and blankets for the boy.

  Peter had been sleeping in the alley behind the loading yard, taking any odd job he could find and not quite freezing to death. So she’d put him in this empty space she happened to have, just till the weather warmed up.

  Then MacDonald started sharing breakfast with the boy. She’d associated with enough stray dogs and cats to know Peter was now a permanent resident.