Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  She broke off a bite of hot cross bun and ate it, standing in her hall. Behind the first door on the left, MacDonald was frying sausages in his room.

  MacDonald was somebody else she hadn’t precisely intended to install here. He was an inheritance of sorts. A sixteenth-century MacDonald bride had brought a dozen retainers with her to France. They’d never gone home again. A line of MacDonalds had attended de Cabrillacs through the halls of Versailles and across the battlefields of Europe, guarding de Cabrillacs and falling beside them. The older brother of her particular MacDonald had died beside her father in the courtyard of the Abbaye Prison in Paris. The French Revolution and resulting chaos left this last MacDonald almost without de Cabrillacs to serve. He’d decided on her, rather than her sister, Justine, for some reason. He’d left France, tracked her to London, then across the mountains and pine forests of Spain, and stuck.

  He was still with her, a short man, broad in the shoulder, strong as a mule, and weathered to leathery stubbornness. He showed no signs of taking up her offer to buy him a tavern or a stable or an inn in the country. His current great love was an actor at Drury Lane, but he spent his nights with the sculptor downstairs, Horace Famble.

  MacDonald was company in her work, a reliable right arm, and an extra set of eyes to watch the trail behind. He brought her meals when she forgot to go out for them and handed her a cloak when it was cold. The night guards liked having another armed man on the business premises after hours, even if they didn’t understand just how much of a defense they were getting.

  She and MacDonald maintained the fiction that MacDonald was a servant, but they both knew better.

  She walked past the door of his room, not being especially quiet about it because that would just make him nervous. On her right was a storage room with the water cistern, washbasin, and shelves to hold everything under the sun. To the left, facing the street, was the room she’d fitted up as a bedroom. She slept there sometimes when she didn’t want to wake up Papa’s household, coming in at three in the morning. Sometimes she housed one of her clients there to keep them safe. Sometimes Papa asked her to invite in somebody who needed sanctuary.

  Her office was on the right. A light was lit inside and the door was open an inch.

  Three

  SHE tossed the currant bun skittering down the hall behind her. Drew her pistol. She set the muzzle against the door panel and pushed.

  Chaos.

  Her case boxes were emptied out across the floor. Her books grabbed off the shelf, tossed down. File folders dumped, the papers higgledy-piggledy across the rug. Every couch and chair in the room had been slashed open. The stuffing was loose in big fluffy piles.

  A man sat cross-legged on the remains of the sofa, a case box open in his lap. He was tall, thin, dark-haired, calm and in command of the situation.

  He said, “You keep an untidy office, Miss de Cabrillac.” The flick of his fingers took in the overturned chairs, the ransacked bookshelves, the rack and ruin of her files.

  Cold reverberated through her flesh. Not fear. She was not in the least afraid of him. This was the old, familiar readiness to fight. She said, “What do you want?”

  “To continue our conversation.” He glanced around austerely. “This carnage was in place when I walked in. Not my work. I’m neater than this when I rummage about.”

  If he’d attacked, his purposes would have been more clear. He remained ambiguous. Perhaps on the harmless side of ambiguous. He’d chosen a position that made it impossible for him to leap at her suddenly. She was supposed to feel safe.

  She decided to act like a potato in a field, passive and mysterious, and not call for help. Meanwhile they both considered mayhem and performed none. It was reassuring, in its way.

  She was more curious than angry, anyway. “Who the devil are you?”

  He inclined his head. “Raoul Deverney.”

  That settled one small question. The trace of accent she’d caught in his voice was French. It came out clearly when he said his name.

  The better light of morning revealed a face long and subtly predatory, with a high-bridged nose and slashed, straight brows. His eyes turned out to be a dark green. Malachite green, flecked with brown and amber.

  Those eyebrows conveyed his opinion that her display of armament was gauche as well as unnecessary. Since she had no desire to kill him before he revealed his intentions, she put her gun away. She could take it out again if she needed to.

  Silently, keeping an eye on all his bland innocence, she went to attend to the profoundly depressing landscape of her office.

  At her desk, every drawer had been pulled out and upended on the floor, the contents kicked in every direction. Ink splattered her letters and papers. They’d broken her little blue vase. If she’d been alone she would have kicked the still-standing furniture or torn ruined papers apart or done something else angry and useless. But she wasn’t alone.

  Maybe she could kick Raoul Deverney. He was handy.

  She turned to the windows, sick with anger and sadness and a sense of violation she didn’t want to show him. “How did you get in?”

  “I walked in the front door, unchallenged, to the accompaniment of horns and fiddles, drumming on the table, and clapping. And a flute. I was gathered into a scene of mild debauchery in the rooms of a man on the first floor. There were expensive liquors, which I drank, and opium of which I did not partake. A woman took her clothes off and danced. The conversation was interesting. I was there till almost dawn and regretted leaving.”

  “Horace Famble, sculptor. Sometimes his friends show up and hold a party. It enlivens an otherwise dull establishment.” MacDonald would have been there, pouring drinks and seeing that Famble didn’t get too drunk.

  Deverney watched her under deceptively sleepy eyelids. “I came upstairs when the party began to wind down just before dawn and discovered your door unlocked. This”—a sweep of the hand—“was already in place. I almost walked out again to disassociate myself from the destruction, but it wouldn’t have done any good. You’d have suspected me anyway.”

  “I would have, certainly.” She stripped off her gloves and laid them in the only clear space on the desk. “In your favor—a fox massacres the chickens in the henhouse and runs. He doesn’t settle down among the feathers and wait for the farmer.”

  “A clever man might think of that,” he said. “He might do the opposite of what you expect.”

  “A clever and devious man.”

  “Like me.” Deverney set aside the case box he was snooping into and went to resurrect the hat rack to an upright position by the door. He crossed to where she stood, held out his hand. “Your cloak.”

  The eyes of a clever man considered her. Saw every expression that crossed her face.

  We’re pretending to be civilized, are we? She handed over the cloak—the gun in a pocket on the left side was no secret, after all—and untied her bonnet and gave that to him too.

  He propped it on his fingertips and turned it slowly back and forth. “This is a remarkably ugly hat. Do you wear this to hide the fact you’re pretty?”

  Such an offhand, indirect compliment. Perhaps it was intended to sneak under her defenses. It did not.

  Vanity was a weakness well and truly burned out of her. In the years in Spain she’d used her prettiness to flirt with French officers and lure indiscretions from them. She’d teased out battle plans and troop locations and sent them in coded notes to her superiors in the British Military Intelligence. French soldiers, sometimes those same young French officers, had fallen in battle for injudicious words. She’d done her work and been charming and men had died. Gaëtan had died, taking with him all joy in being pretty.

  She said, “It’s just a bonnet. It keeps the rain off. It makes me invisible.”

  “And you’re still pretty.”

  “You have a handsome face, Monsieur Deverne
y. Do you enjoy that? Employ it for your own ends? What do you think of men who trade on their looks?”

  “I see what you mean,” he said dryly.

  Their eyes met. A little frisson of mutual assessment buzzed between them. Was it sensual awareness? Anger? Some odd feeling of connection? She wasn’t even sure.

  She was the one who looked away first. Whatever this tugging between them might be, it was a complication she would not allow.

  Stop feeling. Start thinking. This is just another puzzle, even if it’s set down in your own office. She circled her desk, letting her fingers run along the edge, till she came to the glass on the floor at her feet. Swirling blue glinted among the crushed green leaves and indigo petals of hothouse iris. Her fragile little Venetian vase, ground to bits under a boot heel.

  Deverney said softly, “A favorite of yours?”

  “Yes.” It had been one tiny connection with her parents of birth, the de Cabrillacs. A lovely object, gone. Small things hurt and one is never prepared. Whoever had done this knew that.

  She knelt and retrieved a curve of blown glass that was a piece of the rim. Picked up the thick pontil mark from the bottom. She set the pieces on the corner of her desk. Light from the window shone through it in a line of piercing sapphire blue across the wood. The vase had been made in Renaissance Venice. Its fragility had survived the journey from Italy and the sack of her father’s chateau. Justine had found it and carried it across France to England in the middle of the war. She’d filled the vase with red-striped peppermint sweets and given it to her when she was seven. For her birthday. “Do you remember this, Sévie?” she’d said. “It sat on a table in the White Salon when you were a baby.”

  The men who’d searched her office had allowed themselves an extra minute to spoil a thing she might value.

  A thing of value. Uneasiness struck her. She knelt on the floor in the scatter of destruction, bunching her skirts under her knees against edges of glass. Pencils, uncut quills, wiping cloths, ink-spoiled paper, a ruler, and a dozen small tools lay tumbled across the rug.

  Her purse of coins and the expensive, accurate compass she’d bought in Paris were missing. Not important. But . . .

  She turned everything over, all the rubble of her desk, till she was entirely sure. Her medal of St. Christopher was gone.

  Maybe it took their fancy. Maybe they took it because it was silver. Maybe they guessed she cared about it. She hated to think they knew her well enough to know it was dear to her.

  Damn them. Damn them, damn them, damn them to hell. She took a deep breath and made herself unclench her fists. Pain and bitterness ached behind her eyes, but she would not cry. Think what this says about those men, not how much it hurts. Don’t give them the satisfaction of hurting you.

  Experienced bastards had searched her office. At least two men. That was obvious from all the little signs. They’d gone clockwise around the room, from the edges to the middle, covering every square foot in turn, the way she’d been taught to search, both by Papa and by Military Intelligence. Somebody had received at least a portion of the solid training she’d had. No ordinary thieves had been in here.

  But these hyenas were not the stuff of skilled spies. They were careless, greedy men. There was nothing more unprofessional than stealing during a search. She could eliminate the great spies of Europe. Training or not, these bastards were amateurs.

  This wasn’t Deverney’s work. Deverney would not be stupid.

  She kept her face turned downward toward the carpet, hiding her eyes, which, despite good intentions, would not stay entirely dry. “They appear to have stolen the gun from my desk.”

  It was a Brunon L’Aine, the most accurate pistol of its size ever made. It had been exactly fitted to her hand.

  “You have another gun with which to shoot me,” Deverney said mildly. “Shall I fetch it?”

  “Not now. This one was a gift,” she said. From her sister. There was a goat engraved on the handle. Cabri for goat. Cabri for de Cabrillac. That was Justine’s little joke. “You’re safe. I haven’t killed anyone recently.” She called one incident to mind. “Except once. Or twice if you want to be technical about it. Most of the people who hire me got into trouble by applying weaponry to a situation that called for running.”

  “Yet here I am and you’re not running.”

  “I may yet.” She got to her feet. Water and ink beaded in a spray across her desk told the story of a single vicious backhand that had hit the vase, a silver paperweight, and the ink pot. She ran her fingers across the wood. “That’s the first thing they did when they got to my desk. They knocked the vase off and stomped it to bits. They did that instead of dumping the flowers out and looking inside. That reflects a certain crude brutality of outlook. You’d be more subtle.”

  “Unless I chose to be crude to throw you off the scent.”

  “The ultimate subtlety.” She had to admire the way his mind worked. He saw the same things she did. Drew the same conclusions. “Doing this says, ‘See what I can do. Be afraid of me.’ I don’t think you’d make that kind of threat.”

  “It doesn’t seem to work, for one thing.”

  “You’d drop a sharp knife in my lap.”

  “I do believe I would.”

  “Or you’d tear the place apart and wait for me to come in and run to check my secret hiding places.”

  “A clever touch.”

  “Or you’d search invisibly. Then you’d leave a fresh quill pen upright in my vase to show you’d been here. Now that’s frightening.”

  “Chilling,” he agreed.

  She touched the surface of her desk lightly. “This says . . . anger, impatience, arrogance. It may also say desperation. I don’t know yet.”

  “But stupidity rules them all. They wasted time doing this. You wouldn’t hide valuables in the seat cushions or your desk drawer. You’d put them in your safe.”

  He didn’t glance at the bookshelf that hid the safe. He didn’t avoid looking at it either. He was greatly skilled. She could picture him making his discreet exploration of the wreck of her office while raucous music played below. See him poking and prying, stepping lightly over broken things, finding the safe. She knew three people who could open a Magaud de Charf safe. It was unlikely this man was a fourth, but not impossible.

  “If you aren’t one of the burglars, you just missed them.” Her ink bottle had splattered across the blotter and a half-dozen letters on its way to the rug. She touched along the line where ink lay in streaks and spots. “It’s still tacky in the puddles. This was done less than two hours ago.” No useful reaction came from him. Voice, eyes, face, and body gave nothing away. She was playing this game with an expert. Under other circumstances she would have enjoyed this.

  “He spilled the ink early on,” she said. “Then he went through the drawers and read my letters.” Crumpled, ink-stained paper littered the rug. “His hands were messy over everything. Then he wiped them on a stack of my notepaper and threw it on the floor.”

  “Untidy of him.”

  Deverney had come to stand beside her and look over her shoulder. He didn’t resist when she grabbed his wrists and turned his hands palm up and pushed them down on the desk. She said, “No ink.”

  “Not a speck.” He didn’t try to break her hold.

  “If you’d rifled the desk, there’d be ink on you. Cuffs, sleeves, possibly your vest. The creases of your palms. Fingernails. There are inky fingerprints everywhere.”

  A slow smile eased across his mouth. “Unless I deliberately set a scene for you to find.” He was baiting her.

  “The man who climbed through a window and dropped a knife in my lap doesn’t lay out crude, overelaborate schemes. This—” She rolled a shoulder to take in the ugliness of the room. “This is a boar pig rooting in the parlor. Grunting threats. Soiling everything. Stealing what he wants. Destroying what he can’t
use. You’re not a pig. You’re a fox.”

  “Fox meets vixen.” The twitch of his lips was gone before she was sure she’d seen it. He contemplated the grip she still held on his wrists. This was the first time she’d touched him.

  She became fiercely aware of every detail of the man. The dark coat was fine wool, tight-woven, fashionably tailored. His flesh was full of insistence. His forearm was the most stringent muscle. His skin, surprisingly warm to the touch. The linen of his shirt cuffs lay against the back of her fingers, smooth and soft, expensive, crisply starched.

  She’d called him fox for his twisty thinking. Touching him, she felt the disquieting strength of a wild animal. He did something regularly that demanded great strength. She wondered what it was. She knew he spent at least some small portion of his time climbing rough stone walls, like the walls of an inn, hand over hand, sucked close to the stones, his toes finding crevices. At least sometimes, he was a housebreaker.

  He opened his hands in her hold, offering . . . what? A question? Reassurance? A promise of complex delights? Follow me, those hands seem to say, and I will show you Paradise.

  In that instant, he became unabashedly male to her, a sexual and sensual being. Because she was no inexperienced girl, her body reacted before she could stop it. Anger transformed to something else. Her skin prickled. Little thrills poked into every cranny of her and left her excited and dismayed. She didn’t meet his eyes, preferring to pursue her acquaintance with the lines drawn in his palm.

  The stubbornness she’d carried with her from childhood returned in full force. She did not want this. She would not have it.

  She dropped his wrists and took a step away and another, not caring that it looked like retreat. It was a retreat and she felt no shame in it. He was more than she could deal with. However curious she was—and he’d managed to hook her curiosity as few men ever had—she would not be fascinated by him. She was no child to be lured by mysteries. She wanted him out of her office. “You might as well leave. Whatever it is you want—”