Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  “A missing child.”

  “—look elsewhere.”

  “But you’re the key, Séverine de Cabrillac. I’ve seen proof. You’re at the center of this, somehow. I don’t know why, but it’s you. No one else. Help me.”

  “Those who ask for my help walk up two flights of stairs and knock on the door. Why the devil you’d climb into my bedchamber with a knife and expect—”

  “Maybe that’s the proper introduction to you, woman of the de Cabrillacs, army spy, investigator, daughter of William Doyle of the British Service. The strange thing is, I might have come here in any case. People keep sending me to you. They say you’re a terrier at a rat hole when you investigate. That you see what nobody else sees. That you uncover the truth.”

  “There’s less truth in London than you’d expect.”

  “They say you can’t be bribed or frightened away. You defend a streetwalker one week and the tender daughter of a baron the next, but when you interest yourself, they’re as good as saved. Will you take a new case?”

  “Not from a man who waylays me in my night shift. You stand in the middle of this serving of malice and speak in riddles. You distrust me. You accuse me of kidnapping that girl. You lie to me.”

  “I distrust you, yes.” He studied her, full of detachment. “I have my reasons, mademoiselle.”

  “What reasons?”

  “I may tell you someday, since you don’t seem to remember. And I haven’t lied to you. Yet.” He’d become sober, the thread of irony gone from his speech. “For your own safety, consider this. If I didn’t despoil your office—and I didn’t—someone else did. Find the girl and you’ll find the authors of this.” He gestured.

  “I don’t respond well to threats.”

  “It’s not my threat.”

  “You ride on the wings of it. You use it to badger me. That makes it your threat.”

  “If I walked away this minute, you’d still have to deal with them.” His index finger made a circle, taking in the disorder of the office. “They’re looking for the amulet and they think you have it. They’ll keep coming after you till they get it. After you, after your man and the boy who works for you, after the laborers downstairs, after your family.”

  Another pause settled down between them, being longer this time and somehow more complex as silences went. An angry pause, in which they considered one another with no great friendliness.

  He said, “Besides, you owe me a debt.”

  “What debt?”

  “You might remember if you think about it. You can’t have condemned that many men to death.”

  He lied. She had condemned no one to death.

  But her hands were not clean. In those years of war in Spain, the information she’d gathered had changed the outcome of battles. Frenchmen died instead of Englishmen. She’d been responsible. Accountable as a soldier is accountable. She’d learned to live with that. She wasn’t the only veteran of the war who had bad dreams.

  One nightmare in particular. The far circles of her mind held an old and bitter grief. Gaëtan, dead on the field of battle. Because of her. Because of the inescapable duty she’d chosen. The vivid pictures still overwhelmed her whenever she let her guard down. They’d been right, the women who told her not to go out on the battlefield to find his body.

  With the skill of long practice, she closed the door on that part of herself. She was no longer the wild girl who’d loved Gaëtan. Who’d been so foolish. Who could be hurt so deeply. She would never be that girl again.

  She drew in a deep breath. Why was she thinking of Gaëtan now? Deverney was nothing like him and Spain was long ago. She said, “Pilar is a Spanish name.”

  “Her mother was Spanish. If you won’t help me, help the girl. She’s twelve years old and she’s been lost for three months. Find her.”

  She wouldn’t let herself think of what happened to an unprotected girl on the streets of London. “I solve puzzles, Monsieur Deverney. I do not find human needles in the haystack of London. Hire a Bow Street Runner. Go to the newspapers and offer a stupendous reward. Talk to the magistrates. However much I pity that girl, I’m not the instrument you need.”

  But now she could see Pilar. Inescapably, she could see her—dark-haired, pale from the English climate, halfway between child and woman, with her father’s odd green eyes. It was hard to turn her back on someone she could see in her imagination.

  Deverney considered her calmly, assessing her reaction and seeing far more than she wanted him to. “Somewhere in London, she’s trapped in God knows what pain and terror. She’s afraid, wherever she is.”

  Doing whatever she must to stay alive.

  She knew about fear. In Paris, in the Revolution, her sister had done terrible things so the two of them could survive. Everyone thought a three-year-old was too young to remember much. They were wrong.

  Sometimes one cannot turn aside. Deverney had brought her to one of those times. She could easily dislike him for that.

  “Tell me about this kidnapping of yours.” She wasn’t committing herself to anything by listening.

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you.”

  Four

  HE might be sharing the carriage with a murderess. Considering what she’d been in Spain, that was even likely. Or he might have recruited an ally beyond price. One or the other. Weighing the possibilities added a certain piquancy to the journey across town.

  Séverine de Cabrillac was inextricably linked to Pilar’s disappearance. Innocent or guilty, she’d involve herself in this business sooner or later. He might as well keep an eye on her.

  He hadn’t precisely lied about how he got into her office early this morning. He just hadn’t mentioned it was his second visit. Seven days ago he’d come over the roofs and down the back stairs from the attic. His search of desk and file boxes had been a work of art, silent, secret, and traceless as the passage of a ghost. Her safe was excellent. It had taken him an hour to get into it.

  He’d found much that was interesting, but no trace of Sanchia or the amulet or Pilar’s whereabouts. However, a letter in her desk mentioned the Shield and Staff, an inn on the Bristol road, as the place to forward messages. An unwary groom at her livery stable revealed the rest. He’d gone to waylay this de Cabrillac.

  He’d found a remarkable woman. Jerked from sleep, in her night shift, she’d betrayed no guilty knowledge. Not on her face, not in her voice, not by her words. Not in the naked courage she’d showed, facing him. He’d been impressed by her. He was pretty sure he’d come closer than he liked to getting killed.

  Now, when a sensible woman would be shaking like a leaf in a high wind, she looked at the street going by with a calm, considering expression. She said, “You could just as easily talk to me as not. I’m not bored—the morning’s been full of incident—but your secrets annoy me.”

  “You’ll see everything for yourself in a few minutes.”

  She wore a working costume of practical wool dress and a dark cloak. Also that ugly bonnet. In those clothes a man would be forgiven for seeing her as irredeemably sober and brisk, a well-born meddler on her way to distribute largesse among the deserving poor. But he’d seen her dressed in fashionable printed muslin, shopping in Bond Street with her friends. More telling, he’d seen her in bed, in a bit of thin linen, exquisitely beautiful. Now he couldn’t see her any other way.

  The hackney rolled at a city pace, patient with the carts and wagons and foot traffic. The pack of street children who trailed them through the streets would find it easy to keep up.

  Séverine—she was Séverine in his mind now—took an intelligent interest in the prosperous houses and little shops, the pleasant selection of London’s worthy citizens, and that band of grubby followers they’d acquired at her office. That was an escort of sorts, provided by the chief of London’s criminals, Lazarus, King Thief. Lazarus was an inqui
sitive man.

  They turned into Gower Street. This was a genteel neighborhood in the West End on the fringes of Mayfair, a pleasant place where women didn’t get murdered. Hayward, his man of business in London, had established Sanchia in snug rooms in Kepple Street, a little farther on. There was no allowance Sanchia couldn’t squander and her lovers were unreliable about housing her, so he had Hayward pay the lease. There’d always be a roof over her head—hers and her daughter’s—no matter how much debt she fell into.

  Kepple Street, when they came to it, was dull, worthy, comfortable, and well-behaved. In the end, it hadn’t kept her alive.

  “Not far now,” he said. It was more to have something to say than to give her this information.

  Séverine had cinnamon-colored hair. In the right light, and this was the right light, it was full of gold streaks. That, and the fierce, intelligent eyes, made her look like the falcons he and his father used to trap on the cliffs of the Dordogne and carry home to gentle. He remembered carrying the half-tamed birds on his arm when he was small and they were almost too heavy for him to lift. He’d admired them for their beauty and approached them with caution and respect. He’d do the same with Séverine de Cabrillac.

  Abrupt, impatient, she said, “If you’re hoping to capture my interest with this secrecy—”

  “I want you to see things for yourself and make your own judgment.”

  “Or you expect me to leap back in remorse and terror, confronted by the scene of my evildoing?”

  “Perhaps.”

  She made a sarcastic little bow, sitting in the coach. “I will disappoint you.”

  She hadn’t disappointed him so far. She intrigued him more than he wanted to admit. More than was wise. Only a stupid man let himself be attracted to a dangerous woman.

  He undertook a risky game with her. Séverine de Cabrillac had been an agent of Military Intelligence. She was sister to a senior Police Secrète officer in France, foster daughter to one of England’s top spies, and lifelong friend to Adrian Hawkhurst, Head of the British Intelligence Service. A selection of dangerous men and women protected her. She was deadly in her own right, as he’d learned in Spain a decade ago.

  So far he’d played his hand correctly. He’d come to her office, faced her, and carried her off with him. He’d acquired no knife wounds or bullet holes in the process. He hadn’t even been arrested. It was an auspicious beginning.

  She ran a finger along the frame of the coach window. Not a nervous gesture, but as if she marked the thoughts going through her head. She said, “You might as well talk to me. I’ll have nothing to do with this business unless you’re honest.”

  “You’ll find Pilar whether I’m honest or not, now that I’ve dragged her in front of you.”

  “That’s one of several possibilities.” She inspected the finger of her glove and made a little face. “Let’s use this time for something besides staring into space. Tell me the things everyone knows. I’m useless to you if I know nothing at all.”

  “I’ll tell you what was in the papers. Three months ago, Sanchia Deverney, my wife, was found dead in her front parlor. Dead without a mark on her. Pilar Deverney, aged twelve, was missing. No one’s seen her since.”

  She thought that over for a while. “The amulet? The one you want, or don’t want. Tell me about that.”

  “You can uncover that for yourself.”

  “I don’t like mysteries.”

  “Then you’ve chosen the wrong profession, haven’t you?”

  One reason to say so little was to let Séverine de Cabrillac enter the appartement with an open mind. Another was to catch her revealing knowledge she shouldn’t have. Yet another was because a hackney coachman and Séverine’s short, ugly, well-muscled bodyguard sat on the driver’s box, overhearing every word. Her errand boy, who clung to the top of the hackney like a monkey, was getting an earful too.

  This part of Kepple Street was a line of houses and shops he recognized. Last week he’d methodically crisscrossed the neighborhood of Sanchia’s house, street by street, asking questions. So many people and not one of them had seen a thing. In the end, he’d just walked, looking into the face of every young woman, though he would have passed Pilar without knowing her. He’d never met her and never wanted to.

  The carriage slowed and stopped. Séverine hooked her fingers into the bow on that appalling bonnet and tightened it down. No chance she was going to lose that in the wind. Before he could open the door she’d tipped up the latch herself and pushed it open. Her errand boy clambered down to the pavement and unfolded the step. They had arrived.

  If she recognized the house, if she’d done murder in the front room behind those lacy curtains, she gave no sign of it. But then, being what she was, she wouldn’t make such a basic mistake. In Spain, she’d sent him off to die without a backward glance.

  Five

  SANCHIA’S flat was in a house identical to the ones on either side. The same red brick, the same four steps in front, this same drainpipe running down the right side of the building, the same tall windows. This door was on the left-hand side, with a fanlight above.

  The ground-floor windows up and down this respectable street were unbarred and open to the day. Where Sanchia had lived, the curtains were pulled tight across the dark space inside.

  Séverine stepped down to the pavement. She wore a curiously blank expression. She was . . . He sought for the right word. She was detached. Seeing and listening only, not coming to any conclusions, setting expectation and emotion aside. Where had she learned to do that?

  The pack of street rats who’d followed the hackney claimed a stretch of pavement on the other side of the street and began a game with dice, throwing them against the steps of some honest householder.

  Séverine ignored them. Without comment, she followed him up the steps, waited while he unlocked the front door, and went before him into the hallway. It smelled of fresh wax and breakfast recently cooked. Faint, intermittent noise from above said there were people upstairs.

  He said, “The front appartement,” and went to open it with the second key on the ring.

  Séverine’s errand boy, head down, tapped up the stairs after them and caught the street door before it closed. He held it open and followed, not leaving a dubious Raoul Deverney alone with Mademoiselle de Cabrillac. Her mastiff of a hired man paid off the driver, frowned at Lazarus’s rats, and loped after his mistress. He wedged the street door open with a flat bit of wood he took from his pocket and leaned against the wall outside, arms folded. The way he took his place without orders, with assurance and authority, said ex-army. Said old colleague. This was not a servant.

  There was a certain irony in the suspicion emanating from the boy and the bodyguard. Séverine de Cabrillac was utterly safe with him till she found Pilar or proved herself to be a villain.

  He pushed back the door to Sanchia’s appartement and held it open, patient while Séverine stopped in the doorway and took her first impression of the opulence and clutter.

  They’d begin in the parlor, though some of what he wanted her to see was in the back. She’d believe that evidence better if she uncovered it herself.

  He tried to see the room through her eyes. Brocade sofa, French bibelots, spindly chairs, ornate little tables. “Expensive things,” she murmured. “Well-chosen, feminine, rare. This doesn’t match the neighborhood. Always interesting when things don’t match.” She stepped across the threshold. “How did she pay for this?”

  “She had an allowance from me, administered through my man of business, Thomas Hayward in Clement Lane. An allowance for her and the girl. And men gave her money.”

  Séverine untied her bonnet and dropped it on the table near the door. She laid her cloak, folded once, over the back of a chair. She continued to assess the room as she removed her gloves. “Generous men.”

  “She is—she was—generous in
return.” He’d had only one brief encounter with her. Even now, many years later, he remembered Sanchia’s skill in bed.

  “This room’s been searched.”

  Why did she say that? “Not by me or my agent. Not by the magistrate’s men.”

  “Then maybe by whoever killed Sanchia.” Séverine was already at work. Without touching, she minutely inspected the surface of a table. The frown between her eyes meant she’d found something interesting. She went to the next piece of furniture.

  The messenger boy closed the door quietly behind him. Making no pretense of formality, he slid his back down the wall beside the doorframe, sat on the floor, and pulled his thin legs up to his chest. His shabby, overlarge coat tented around his knees. The big-brimmed hat, which he didn’t bother to remove, swallowed his face in its shade. What could be seen of him looked sourly judgmental.

  Séverine made her way around the room, utterly focused, unself-conscious, a magnifying glass in her hand, looking at everything but touching nothing. He and the boy, in their separate places with their separate attitudes, settled in to wait.

  It took a while, all of it in silence. At last she stood from examining the bottom of the escritoire. “It’s two men, working together, both right-handed.”

  “Is it?” He didn’t hide his skepticism.

  “You can see it here.” She almost, but not quite, touched the shelf of the bookcase. “The books were taken out a handful at a time and slid back in place. They’re pushed in, angling right to left. Right-handed. On this table”—she passed a gesture across it—“the magazines were laid back fanned left to right. Right-handed.”

  Formidable work, if she read that from lines in the dust. Or she might have been here when Sanchia died. Always that possibility. “Why two men?”

  “They deal with the world differently. All the lamps were picked up and put back, which means they were looking for some piece of paper. See the marks in the dust.” She touched the closest lamp, large, with a round, pink-flowered base. “On this side of the room, every lamp and candlestick was put back exactly in place. On that side, they’re all off-center, one way or the other. Sometimes an inch off. Different men.”