Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  Lucy said in a choked voice, “I need wine. Lots of wine.” Coward that she was, she fled.

  There could be no more self-important old bore in the room than Colonel Carlington. He attached himself to the unwary like a limpet—if there were limpets with a limitless supply of anecdotes about the quartermaster corps. She’d been slower on her feet than Lucy and couldn’t really leave her post, so she was buried under an endless story of Spanish muleteers. And Portuguese wagons. Or maybe Spanish wagons. Full of . . . something. It was not clear what. Something vital, anyway.

  “There we were,” the colonel said, “getting supplies to Obidos. Difficult countryside, that. Steep. Nothing you could call a road, don’tcha know. Foreign, uncivilized place. Wellington—Wellesley, as he was in those days—Wellesley said to me, ‘We’ll meet the French at Roliça, Carlington. I’m counting on you.’”

  The orchestra struck up a lively Dutch Skipper and dancing began again. The rumble of voices rose, everyone making themselves heard over the music and the thump of feet. She could ignore the colonel almost completely. He wouldn’t notice. No one would be surprised to see her glancing boredly around the room.

  The colonel raised his voice. “Had to pick up the pace, you see, to get there on time. Not my fault about the mules.”

  She nodded. “Ummm.”

  Dancers bowed, took hands, circled, reversed. Servants slid through the crowd, carrying drinks, picking up glasses. Footmen followed the same path going and returning, patterns as predictable as the movements of the dance.

  Guests were still arriving in twos and threes. She weighed them up as they passed.

  Why would someone assassinate Wellington now, years after the war? What possible political purpose would that serve? Was it some old vengeance? A private quarrel?

  The colonel had arrived on the plains of central Spain, victim of mule injuries and ambush, mysterious shortages in supplies, and barrels of gunpowder that did not blow up. “Fault of those navy fellows,” he said. “They let everything get wet on the transports. Nothing I could do about it.”

  “Quite,” she murmured.

  At the other end of the ballroom, Papa flanked Wellington on the left, talking to a clever young MP from Cambridgeshire. Hawker was a few feet away, on Wellington’s right, saying something that made Mrs. Kelling-Sherwood toss her head back in laughter. Papa and Hawker didn’t have the look of men ready to throw their body between Wellington and a bullet, but that’s what they were. That’s why they stood so close to him.

  “I told the chief muleteer—villain of a man—I told him, ‘Your job is getting these wagons across those hills.’” Carlington gestured in the direction of some Spanish mountains. She’d probably crossed those mountains herself, one time or another. “I told him, ‘There’s no Frenchmen up there. Tell those thieving cowards of yours I’ll hang any man who’s not on the road in ten minutes.’”

  She said, “Fascinating.”

  “Firmness. Good old British firmness. Only way to handle them. They speak English perfectly well, you know. They just pretend they don’t, lazy bugg— That is to say, lazy badgers.”

  If they had any sense, they deserted.

  The lines of the quadrille parted and she could see down the rows of dancers. Little tweaks of tension twisted like cold wires up and down her back. If she were a professional killer, this was the moment she’d pick. Now, in the middle of a dance, when the room was a confusion of noise, laughter, and spinning color.

  The agents of the Service agreed with her. She saw it in the twitch of a finger, the infinitesimal lifting of a head. A pack of hunting wolves might exchange the same small signals when they caught the distant scent of prey.

  If her fan had been genuine she would have opened it and moved some air across her face to give herself something to do. But the fan didn’t open, it merely hung on its loop on her wrist, being deceptive, waiting to serve other purposes.

  Carlington launched into excuses for the French ambush he’d sent his supply train into. Ambushes everywhere, apparently. Thick as plums on a tree. Not his fault.

  “How remarkable,” she said, considering and discarding faces. Papa and Hawk expected her to know O’Grady in whatever disguise he wore. Trusted her to stop him, whatever weapon he carried.

  “Portuguese troops perfectly useless, of course. I told Wellington they couldn’t be trusted to hold the center.”

  Wait. Wait.

  A waiter had come from the hall, carrying a tray of drinks. His eyes were fixed on the group far down the room. Nothing odd in that. Everyone was trying to get a glimpse of Wellington, even the waiters.

  Something wrong about him.

  The colonel’s voice became the buzzing of a fly. The music and the noise of the ballroom disappeared.

  This waiter wore black, not the blue-and-gold livery of the Carlingtons. He was one of the men hired from inns around the city to fill out the numbers for the party. But his suit was tight across the shoulders, long in the waist. His stockings weren’t perfectly smooth. He was shorter than the others too. That was wrong. Inns sent their best, the tallest and handsomest.

  Six glasses on his tray, laid out in two lines, instead of eight in a circle pattern. He didn’t collect the empty glass on a table he passed. Didn’t offer a drink to anyone. Just headed toward Wellington.

  The left side of his jacket bulged over something tucked close to his ribs. How often had Papa stood up from the breakfast table and turned a slow circle, asking Maman, “Does my gun show?”

  This man’s gun showed. O’Grady.

  She saw this in one round, ringing instant. She pushed past the colonel and went to do her job.

  A dozen steps and she was in O’Grady’s path. She gripped her fan and pressed the spring that released the thin hidden blade. Breathed deep and steady through her mouth and didn’t look directly at O’Grady. I’m a silly woman getting in his way. I don’t even notice him.

  O’Grady didn’t waste attention on her. He was blind to everything but his goal and she was just another highborn woman, harmless as a flower and stupid as a cow. His disguise as waiter might be flawed, but hers, as a lady of the ton, was perfect.

  He changed course to avoid her. Excellent. She swung around and jabbed her left fist into his groin. The speed of it, the weight of her whole body behind her fist, the unexpectedness of it, folded him in half.

  His tray crashed to the floor. Glasses shattered, crashed, skipped and rolled everywhere. The silver tray rang like a gong.

  She snaked her foot between his legs and tripped him. He went down face-first on the broken glass and she landed on him. He was taller than she was and much stronger, but he hadn’t been prepared for an attack. His mind was still caught by his plan, not ready to deal with a knee on his back, his arm twisted behind him, and her weight holding him down.

  She reached into his jacket, quick as a snake, jerked out his gun, and sent it skidding across the floor, out of reach, under a line of chairs. O’Grady elbowed her in the soft of her belly and knocked the breath out of her. Not enough to paralyze her, but it hurt like hell.

  She jabbed her knife that disguised itself as a fan to his throat, hard enough to be felt by a man in the middle of fighting. Hard enough to draw a little blood. “Be still.”

  He didn’t know death was at his throat, or he didn’t care. He didn’t stop fighting. Blood splattered the floor underneath them from the little cuts of her knife. From the sharp glass on the floor.

  The closest onlookers were beginning to notice the struggle. “What? What? I say, what’s happening?” from the colonel. A woman shrilled a question.

  Then Pax was there, smooth and silent, coming to her at a dead run. He slammed O’Grady’s head against the floor. Hard. Jerked him to his feet. Fletcher appeared a second later, scooping up the gun on his way. The two of them hustled O’Grady through the nearest door and out of sigh
t down the servants’ stair.

  That was fast. Fast, quiet, and satisfying. She’d almost forgotten what it was to work with a pack of capable companions.

  She rolled to her feet and began backing away, looking as if she were wholly bewildered by the broken glass and blood on the floor. Looking uninvolved. Looking, in fact, as if nothing had happened at all.

  The orchestra played on, covering the patter of interest, Ladislaus and his violin setting an example of obliviousness. Dancers craned to see what was going on but stayed in their proper patterns and merely asked one another what the commotion might be. In most of the room, conversation never paused. It had happened so quickly, from her first punch to this final, decisive tidying away, that almost no one noticed.

  She shook with reaction. It took both thumbs to slide the blade into the shaft of the fan. The tip of the knife was red and a few spots of blood had fallen on the fan’s decorative trim of lace, but her dress hid any blood that had fallen on it, red onto red. A successful operation is half intelligent preparation.

  Young Felicity, playing housemaid, slipped between guests, carrying dustpan and cloth to sweep the glass up and mop away the spilled wine. In three minutes, every sign of disorder would be gone. It would be as if this incident never happened. The Service erased the attack entirely. There would be no questions asked in the House of Lords about Irish unrest. No letters to the Times about radical challenges to the aristocracy.

  And, obviously, Miss Séverine de Cabrillac had never held a knife at anyone’s throat. The very thought was ridiculous. She dropped her fan into a tall Chinese vase as she went by. Her gloves had collected only a few pinpoints of red, almost invisible.

  Nothing had happened. She repeated that to herself. Nothing whatsoever had occurred. She’d been nearby when that nothing had happened. If anyone asked, she’d seen it not happen.

  The colonel found her, just exactly as if he were a good hound with his nose down on a scent. “There you are, my dear. It seems there’s some problem . . .”

  The colonel had seen nothing of what happened under his nose. No one quite so reliably dense as Colonel Belford Carlington. Regiments of British soldiers survived the war because he’d never led men into battle.

  “I’m not quite sure . . .” The colonel considered among the many things he was not sure of and chose, “What happened?”

  “He seems to have had a fit, poor man. The waiter, you know. I was quite close. He dropped his tray and then dropped to the floor himself.”

  “He had a fit?”

  “He staggered about in a most peculiar fashion. Then he had a nosebleed.” She shook her head. “I think he’s drunk.”

  “Drunk?” The colonel opened and closed his mouth. “Good heavens!”

  Thomas Stevenson, an honorable from the vast clan of Yorkshire Stevensons, came up and said, “What happened here?”

  She held her breath. Could she count on the colonel?

  “He was drunk,” Colonel Carlington declared, no shadow of doubt in his voice. “Been tippling the wine. Not one of our servants. One of the hired lot.”

  “I’d have a stern word with his master,” Stevenson said.

  Behind Stevenson, one man explained to another, “Blind drunk. Tripped over his own feet.”

  “Knocked into a woman when he fell.”

  The colonel tut-tutted. “Broken glass everywhere. I’ll take the cost of those glasses out of his pay.”

  “Shouldn’t pay him at all.”

  “Hear. Hear.”

  “Disgraceful.” Mrs. Wythestone pronounced judgment. She passed it along to the Misses Carstairs behind her. “A drunken servant. And on the good wine.”

  “What’s the world coming to?”

  The word drunk spread through the room like rings in a pool around a dropped stone. Mrs. Wythestone informed everyone that this was all the fault of Charles Fox and his followers in Parliament. The colonel held forth on drunkenness among muleteers in the late war. And the Honorable Mr. Stevenson appeared at Sévie’s elbow to explain what had happened and advise her to avoid the glass on the floor.

  She retreated, separating herself from events, becoming more and more a bystander with every step. By the time she’d made herself an unnoticed onlooker, there were three or four versions of what had happened circling the room. She could only hope her name wasn’t attached to any of them. Here and there people looked at her with curiosity.

  She caught Papa’s eye and Hawk’s approving nod. They didn’t leave their post but signaled that she could. She had lost all usefulness. She’d been exposed for what she was to any hostile eye.

  Determined gossips began slow approaches. She took a deep breath and selected which chatter from Maman’s latest letter she would toss in their direction. Baby to be born. Snow in the passes of the Highlands. Drafty castles. She could be cheerful and informative about many aspects of Maman’s adventures on the road. It was time for her to retreat into dull respectability.

  She was so demure, in fact, her eyes so modestly lowered, that she didn’t notice a perfectly tailored jacket and tasteful knotting of cravat till they appeared directly before her.

  Deverney said, “My dance, I believe.”

  Ten

  DEVERNEY said, “It’s a waltz. I do love a waltz, especially at an otherwise dull party.”

  She didn’t let herself show surprise. Deverney probably saw it anyway.

  How long had he been in the ballroom, watching her? She hadn’t felt his eyes. She should have. She should have seen him before he got this close. She’d been too pleased with herself. Too complacent. And her instincts didn’t seem to work when it came to this man. He waited while she decided on her next move.

  “I hate it when someone sneaks up on me,” she said.

  “Does that happen to you often? What an exciting life you lead.” His smile was mocking. “Do you know how many people are interested in you at this minute?”

  “I have a fair estimate.” The music seemed very clear, somehow. In deep notes under the melody, the cello repeated a six-note motif.

  Deverney said, “They aren’t all stupid and blind, you know. Some of the distinguished gentlefolk of London are asking each other what you did. Some are already fabricating tomorrow’s gossip. The most ambitious are coming this way to pester you with questions. I suggest you dance.”

  “With you?”

  “I’m closest.” He held out his hand the way a man does when someone has just agreed to take the floor with him. “Let’s give them something to gossip about besides your odd encounter with a drunken waiter. Come. It may not be obvious, but I’m rescuing you.”

  “You’re annoying me.” She set her hand in his and walked blithely to the dance floor with a housebreaker and possible wife killer and at the very least a man who should not be here. “How did you get in?”

  “I know the French ambassador.”

  That had the ring of truth. “You sell wine to him?”

  He consulted some inner accounting. “Oddly enough, I believe I do. He’s a distant cousin.”

  “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “I came for the pleasure of seeing you assault a waiter. That was nicely done, by the way. I am filled with fear and respect.”

  “You’re filled with lies.”

  “That too.”

  They stood a little apart from the dancers, letting the music eddy around them for a while. “I’m glad it’s a waltz,” she said at last. “A complicated country dance is beyond my powers.”

  “We’ll strive for simplicity.”

  “You offer many things, monsieur, but not simplicity.” She said it amiably enough, playing a part for the room. She was used to this sort of playacting. To be a member of the ton was to be on stage at all times, dissected by a critical audience.

  The chill that follows fighting crept damply along her sk
in. A hollow edginess filled her muscles. Deverney’s eyes were thoughtful upon her and it came to her that he knew what she was feeling. Another proof he’d been in battle. She had no doubt of it.

  “The waltz,” he said softly. “Let me remind you how it’s done. First you do this.” He lifted her hand to rest on his shoulder. No bird ever sat more uneasily upon a shaky branch than her fingers perched on the finely woven wool of his jacket. “I, in turn, do this.” He flattened his hand over the small of her back, lightly. The intimacy of the touch made her stiffen.

  “Be at ease,” he murmured. “Unique among your colleagues and family, I’m free of knives and guns.”

  His clothes were tailored to an exact fit that left little room for armament. That wouldn’t deter a clever man. She said, “I reserve judgment.”

  “I will reassure you with my mild behavior. Now we hold hands. Come. Dance is a civilized art. It’ll take the taste of fighting out of your mouth.” His lips twitched. “You don’t have to like me or trust me, mademoiselle. It’s a dance, not a kiss.”

  She surrendered—with reservations—to Deverney’s urging and let him lead her into the music, among the waltzers. His hand was light on her back, feeding tiny guidance to her body, warm and persuasive. This was not a bad vantage point to watch for a secondary attack. She could study every corner without being obvious about it. Deverney, damn him, knew what she was doing. He marked a slow and staid course around the room, a waltz of sufficient dignity to please the most starchy matron. He turned their steps to let her see what she needed to see. They could have been fellow agents, partnered together, working at the same operation. Deverney’s understanding of what she was doing and what she needed, his awareness of what was in her mind, was disturbingly accurate. He knew, before she did, what path she wished to take through the dancers. He listened to her body even as he spoke to it. His awareness of her was as worrisome as whatever plans hid behind his face.

  She would worry about this awareness and understanding later. For now, she sorted through the mosaic of faces. The butler, a man named Foster, set dignity aside and knelt to check that all the glass had been swept up. Colonel Carlington was boring one of the Jessup-Towelle girls. Robin took a glass of wine from one of the footmen and drank it in a couple of swallows, not talking to anyone. Not looking anywhere.