Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  He’d spent three days searching these rooms and he hadn’t seen any of that. The rumors were true. He confronted a remarkable mind in this woman. This was good news if she took on the task of finding Sanchia’s child for him. Bad, if she was his enemy.

  She began another slow, clockwise circuit of the room, this time delving deep, opening drawers, shifting the fussy decorations. From time to time she used the magnifying glass. Intense concentration closed seamlessly around her. He was now a mere distraction. He might have become invisible.

  What was she thinking? What did she see that he didn’t see? “Are these the same men who sacked your office?”

  “I was wondering that. It’s right-handed men in both places, one of them tall enough to reach the top shelf. You’re involved here and in my office so I’m drawing all sorts of conclusions.” She shifted her eyes to him. He could almost feel her picking clues and guesses off his face, however still he held it. “One of the men is your height.”

  “Or the height of any man or any woman, standing on a chair.”

  “Or that,” she agreed. “I’m glad we’re having this frank little chat.” She unfolded the clever rosewood game table and studied it dispassionately. “I find myself wondering what do you do, Monsieur Deverney, when you’re not sneaking into women’s bedchambers.”

  “I grow the grape and make wine. Some of it I sell in England.” The usual words came smoothly.

  “You’re a vintner? A trimmer of vines and a crusher of grapes?”

  “I make very fine wine.” It was amusing she doubted a story that was more or less true. “I have a few bottles in my hotel room. I’ll send some to your office.”

  “Thank you, no. I will content myself with imagining you tromping about your fields, wearing a long blue smock and clogs, pruning your grapes.”

  She wasn’t so very wrong. Deverneys had made wine as far back as there were records of the land. He walked the fields and knew his workers, as Deverneys always had. Every year since his return from the war he’d managed to be at the chateau for the vendage.

  The Pinot Meunier grapes on the cool, west-facing slopes of the vineyard at Verney-le-Grand produced a full-flavored wine of intense bouquet. He could sell it for any price he liked, even in a poor year. A glass of it filled the senses. Two glasses and you were overwhelmed, drunk by the complexity.

  When he was a boy, the families who’d cared for the vines time out of mind had taught him to respect the grape. “We care for them,” they said. “That is our work. Then we stand back and let the vines do theirs.”

  It was a lesson with wide applicability. Today he would stand back and let Séverine de Cabrillac work. Séverine took a shallow dish of gaming pieces, pencils, dice, and three decks of cards from the drawer in the gaming table. She tossed dice across the green felt a few times. Rolled one interrogatively between her fingers. She flicked through one deck of cards and then another. It was a delight to watch the glinting intelligence in her face. “Marked cards,” she said, “and loaded dice.”

  “It’s a sad, dishonest world.” Sanchia hadn’t changed at all over the years.

  “I wouldn’t play cards with that mirror at my back anyway. My twelve-year-old brothers know better.”

  “It does remove the element of chance.”

  She ran her fingers inside and outside the empty drawers and knelt to explore the underside of the gaming table. He was gripped again by an awareness of the disciplined elegance of her body. Just lovely. Maybe a man got used to that if he spent a lot of time in her company. He hadn’t. “There are men in London,” she said, “nearly as smart as my little brothers. I’m surprised your wife didn’t get caught. Unless she did.”

  “Get caught and killed?”

  She stood up and dusted her hands. “It’s one explanation. Cheating at cards is a dangerous profession.” At the writing desk, she ran a finger in the dust. “You emptied this?” The desk lay open. The pigeonholes and drawers were vacant. The papier-mâché basket beside the desk was empty.

  “My man of business took papers away the day after her death. Letters, bills, her account books. I assume he has anything of interest. I can bring those to your office.”

  “Or I’ll visit your Mr. Hayward myself and collect what he’s carried off. If I decide to continue with this.”

  But she was already caught up. He saw that. She could no more step away from this puzzle than she could leave a chess game half finished. Maybe that was why she hadn’t attacked him in the bedchamber of the inn on the Bristol road. She’d wanted to know who he was and why he’d come there more than she wanted to stay safe.

  She completed the long spiral of her search to the center of the room, stepping carefully over boot marks left by the magistrate’s men, the coroner, Hayward, the laborers who’d taken the body away on that rainy afternoon, and the men who’d killed Sanchia. Tracks led back and forth to where Sanchia’s death had come to her. Séverine had saved that for last.

  “The Watch found Sanchia on the floor. There.” He pointed. “Beside the chair.”

  Séverine stood perfectly still, eyes intent, no expression on her face. The errand boy, who’d been watching him the whole time, tight lipped and frowning, turned resolutely away, not looking at where there’d been a dead woman. New at his job, apparently.

  “No blood,” Séverine said.

  “No blood. There was no mark on her. The coroner called it apoplexy or a weakness of the heart.”

  “Did he now?” Séverine got down on her hands and knees, undignified and not caring about that, to look closely at the spot. Her lips were tight. Her eyes, angry. They’d finally reached a moment when she was no longer distant and cool. “Why do you think it’s murder?”

  He took out what he’d been carrying in his pocket, folded into a handkerchief. The piece of silk ribbon was about a foot long, creased and twisted, cut through, with a knot still intact. He handed it down to Séverine, wrapped inside the linen so she wouldn’t have to touch it.

  “They found this under her body,” he said.

  She took it from him to lay across the palm of her hand, her fingers delicate and careful. If she felt distaste, she didn’t let it show. A strand of her hair, loose from the knot at her neck, slid across her cheek. She took no notice.

  “If it was used to tie somebody, most of it was carried away.” She frowned through the glass. “No obvious blood. Neatly cut ends. Nothing clinging to it but what might be a single hair.” She wrapped the ribbon in the handkerchief again and slipped it into a pocket. “I’ll look at it under the microscope in my office with a good light. Do you know, one thing I don’t find in this room is any sign of your daughter. No painting of her. No schoolbook. No basket of handwork. Nothing. I would have expected—”

  “We’ll get along better if you stop calling her that.”

  “Calling her . . . ?”

  “My daughter.” He was annoyed every time he heard those words. “It’s unlikely I had anything to do with Pilar’s conception. When Sanchia finally wrote to tell me of the child, she didn’t even pretend it was mine.”

  “A bastard?”

  “Almost certainly. The wonder is Sanchia didn’t have half a dozen.”

  Séverine wiped her hands on her skirt and said nothing. If she could read the history of a three-month-old crime in a smear of dust, she’d see the story of his ancient stupidity even more clearly.

  “I was seventeen and drunk.” Very drunk. “But I still should have known better. I accepted an invitation to Sanchia Gavarre’s bed. In my defense, I was not the first man in that bed by any means and certainly not the last. At dawn I was awakened by her brothers, dragged in front of the priest, and offered a choice of castration or marriage. Wisely, I chose marriage.”

  “You think Pilar is another man’s child.”

  “Who bears my name. My responsibility, but not my daughter.”
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  “I see.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “It’s not the child’s fault,” she said after a minute.

  “I didn’t say it was. She’s not the first bastard with the Deverney name in the last six centuries. She’ll be provided for. Will you find her for me?”

  “I’ll think about it.” But her eyes said she was committed. “This is enough for today. If I agree to search for the girl, I’ll need to come back tomorrow. Give the boy a key to this place.”

  If Séverine de Cabrillac was party to death and a kidnapping, he’d put her in charge of solving her own crime. If she was innocent, he’d just recruited the most useful woman in London. He’d see which one it turned out to be.

  The errand boy accepted a key from him as if it were a small, venomous snake. He was probably another of the world’s bastards, one who didn’t have anyone responsible for him. Except Séverine. He could do worse.

  Six

  SÉVERINE de Cabrillac approached the headquarters of Britain’s most feared and respected spy organization in a pensive mood.

  Number Seven Meeks Street was as familiar to her as Papa’s London town house. She’d come with Maman to visit Papa—the best spy in the world—in his office when she’d been so small she’d had to stand on tiptoe to see the top of the table in the front hall. It was an interesting table because it told her who was in the house. Papa’s battered slouch hat would be there or Hawker’s cane or Pax’s gloves that she knew because they had smudges of colored chalks in the seams.

  In those days she’d check that table and skip ahead of Maman into the study or the dining room and find Pax sketching or Hawker frowning at the report he was writing. She’d climb into a lap, sure of welcome. Pax taught her to paint in watercolors and Hawker gave her sips of his glass of gin or let her play with his knife. Maman had been patient.

  Then she’d run to Papa’s office to be swung up for bristly kisses and huge hugs. Papa kept sweets for her in the second left-hand drawer of his desk, but sometimes they were all gone. The agents were always sneaking in and stealing them.

  She’d had free run of the house. She disturbed no one at their work. Even at five years old she’d known how grave and desperate the life of an agent was. How lonely. So she hugged all of them and sat close to even the most grim and short-tempered of the agents, because no one else dared. But she’d come from that house of spies in Paris where women carried their lives lightly in their hands, knowing they had enemies, knowing disaster might come at any moment. No word spoken and no sight seen at Number Seven Meeks Street ever passed her lips.

  She was passing Number Eleven now, a house painted and washed and polished within an inch of its life. The stuffy, self-important family that lived there possessed a small dog that stood on something—a sofa perhaps—and looked out the window all day and yipped importantly when anyone passed. The ancestor of this dog had yipped at her when she was five. This one yipped at her today. Things did not change much on Meeks Street.

  When she was a child she’d wondered why the British Service set their headquarters in such a dull place. With more experience she realized the dangerous and unusual show up better against a bland background.

  The big stone pots at Number Seven offered a collection of discouraged flowers, little purple crocus at this season. She’d never figured out why flowers in these pots never seemed to thrive. She walked up the stairs thinking she’d put her mind to that question one of these days.

  Felicity opened the door almost at once and gave a brusque nod that might have been a greeting. She was the latest in the long line of doorkeepers and apprentice spies Sévie had known. Felicity went before her across the parlor of calculated hideousness and unlocked the door on the other side.

  “They’re upstairs.” Felicity jerked her chin in the direction of the staircase and stalked off. Not one of the world’s chatterers, Felicity. Papa and the others were meeting in the study upstairs as a delicate courtesy to her. If it had been only Service agents, they would have met in the library on the ground floor. This was Hawker reminding himself and everybody else that Sévie wasn’t part of the Service. She was a civilian expert brought in for the day. They’d all pretend it was that straightforward.

  She went up, her hand on the banister, another familiar object. Right from the first, she’d slid down this banister whenever the halls were empty and everyone in the house was occupied elsewhere. To this day she didn’t know if they’d purposely let her get away with it.

  At the top of the stairs she went to the front of the house and opened the door to the shabby, comfortable, familiar informality.

  A place had been left for her at the big square table. Papa was drawing lines on the dark wood with a piece of chalk. Everyone else stood or sat to listen and watch, except Hawker, who was pacing the room while he did his listening and watching. Six men and a woman, the agents for this operation.

  “I’ve put you here,” Papa greeted her without looking up and tapped his finger on one corner of the floor plan he’d drawn. “First line of defense.”

  She recognized the floor plan of Carlington House, of course. She’d danced in this ballroom a dozen times over the years, as one danced in all the ballrooms of the ton. She’d been to dinner in the grand dining room four times. Sat in the parlor downstairs with Robin Carlington and laughingly avoided being kissed by him. She hadn’t studied Carlington House as a venue for assassination any of those times, unfortunately. A failure of imagination on her part.

  She leaned to inspect the map of Carlington House—ballroom, entrance foyer, first-floor parlor at the left side, dining room, the corridors leading in and out. She’d never looked at the whole from a tactical standpoint, but one couldn’t help noticing. “There’s a door to a staircase. About here. It’s almost invisible because it’s painted the same color as the walls. It goes down to the kitchen.”

  Papa took chalk and marked that and the other details she brought up. Hawker stopped to look, then resumed pacing.

  “So.” She spread her hand over her station, not touching the chalk lines. “I take this corner of the room and the top of the stairs.”

  “The orchestra’s to your right.” Pax—meticulous and truly deadly Pax—put his index finger on the spot. “Where you will see Ladislaus, violin in hand. He has the best view in the house.”

  An inclination of the head from Ladislaus.

  “I’m here.” Pax made a little circle with his index finger. “On the left. We split this part of the room between us. Everyone coming up the stairs has to pass you or me.”

  This was her contribution to the operation tonight. Séverine de Cabrillac, French aristocrat, knew every face in the ton. The guests she didn’t know by sight she could still identify as genuine or pretender by the way they acted. There were many signs. Her training as a spy met her training as a lady of the haut monde and made her invaluable.

  “Stillwater’s here.” Pax touched a spot halfway down the room. “She’ll be somebody’s dowdy country cousin. Fletcher’s in as one of the hired waiters. MacAllister’s in the mews behind the house, being a groom, watching the back.”

  The door to the study opened. Felicity came in carrying a tray with teapot and cups.

  “Felicity,” Pax looked up, “is a housemaid, hired for the night from an agency.”

  “One of you could come help with the tray.” But Felicity muttered that without real heat. She was young and she was going on assignment, carrying a gun. She dearly wanted to shoot somebody. She set her tray on the sideboard and began to make tea.

  Hawker had circled back to the table. He cupped his hands around the top of the ballroom. “Doyle and I keep Wellington here, at the far end. He’s been told what’s going on.” Hawker worked his lips in and out, playing with possibilities. “This section will have the usual politicians and titles, but there’ll also be a dozen old soldiers ready to throw t
hemselves on the sword if they notice somebody trying to kill him. They’ll be a damn nuisance, in fact. Is there a line of sight to those windows on the roof?”

  That question was for her. She tried to picture it. “Yes.”

  “I’ll send one of the Bow Street men to nail up the door to the roof.” Hawker frowned. “O’Grady doesn’t sound like a man to be acrobatic sixty feet above the ground, but you never know. It’s impossible to keep a public man alive if somebody’s determined to kill him.”

  “We might as well all stay home,” Pax murmured.

  Quiet amusement from everybody.

  “That said,” Hawker went on, “I don’t want Wellington to die messily while I’m guarding him. Let us see if we can avoid it.”

  Papa was in charge of strategy for the operation tonight. Hawk would provide sarcastic comments.

  This whole time, everybody in the room was thinking about Robin Carlington and wondering how she’d behave when she met him. They worried she’d be hurt or angry. Worried she’d be distracted by him. She wouldn’t be.

  Papa said, “Give me thoughts, everybody. When does O’Grady pick his moment? Early in the evening or late?”

  The agents were in a tight group around the table now.

  “Early.” Felicity set a cup in front of Hawker. One sugar. No milk. “He won’t take the chance Wellington leaves for another party.”

  Pax nodded. “Hit as soon as the target’s in place. Your odds decrease every minute.”

  “It’s inside the ballroom. Not on the curb outside. Not on the steps.” MacAllister looked up at her. “Your Irish gave us that. O’Grady’s words. ‘Under the nose of the lordships.’”

  “Many sizable noses,” Felicity murmured. That got a grin passed around.