Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  A carriage turned the corner behind him and slowed. What he saw was an ordinary brown carriage without markings, a heavy chestnut horse, and a driver with his face half covered by a scarf.

  He set off again, picking up the pace to see if they’d do the same. They did. He was almost sure now.

  He wasn’t scared yet, though he probably should be. What was it Sévie said? “Being afraid keeps you alive.”

  Hard to imagine Sévie was ever afraid, though.

  He’d been making this trip to Mr. Landeta’s house three times a week since he got well enough to walk a mile without getting black spots in front of his eyes. He didn’t like Latin, but he liked Mr. Landeta, who’d talk about anything under the sun when the exercises were done, so long as it could be said in Latin. They had to make up words for things like alcohol lamp and grenade and sulfur, though they’d finally confirmed sulfur in a book by Francis Bacon. It was almost the same word. Sulphure.

  Last time he’d walked to Landeta’s he’d felt an odd uneasiness along his spine, an itch that made him want to spin around and catch somebody watching. He’d taken a narrow alley on the way, a shortcut, and the feeling was gone before he got to Landeta’s tiny crooked house. So he ignored it. Sometimes he got dizzy when he walked a long way. He wasn’t altogether past the measles.

  This morning the itch was back. He was being followed. He was almost certain of it.

  What would Sévie do? Or Hawker or any of the rest of them?

  They’d find out who it was. And they wouldn’t lead whoever it was to Mr. Landeta.

  Frigate Bookseller lay thirty feet ahead on the right. It wasn’t open for the day, but the shutters were off and the shop boys were carrying books out to the display tables in front. He ducked through the door as if he had business to conduct inside and waited, looking out the window.

  The carriage rolled past. The passenger, a man-shaped outline inside, didn’t turn to look at the shop. One glimpse and the coach was gone, clattering along the street.

  He tossed his Latin books onto the counter, muttered, “I’ll be back for these,” and ran.

  They’d already disappeared around the corner. For a minute he thought he’d lost them, then he saw the coach, almost anonymous. Almost getting away from him. He wove in and out of horses and carts and caught up with it five streets later.

  No time like the present.

  He sprinted till he was level with it, grabbed the frame of the window, pulled himself up, and hung there.

  The coach was empty. If there’d been anyone inside, they were gone now. Not so much as a glove left behind. If this was even the right coach.

  The driver twisted round. Holding the horses left-handed, he brought his whip down again and again, hitting face, shoulders, and hands, dislodging a human barnacle.

  A final sharp crack on his knuckles and Bart lost his hold. He hit the cobbles of the street with the wind knocked out of him. Blackness slapped down across everything.

  “Fool boy!” A passerby grabbed his arm and pulled him from under a set of oncoming hooves, up to the pavement. And dropped him there. Vigorously.

  “Serves you right,” the man said. That was London for you. Always somebody taking an interest.

  He sat on the curb, elbows propped on his knees, forehead in hands. The coach disappeared into the traffic. The driver didn’t look back. His rescuer stalked off, muttering. And Bart concentrated on not vomiting. That would be the final indignity.

  Was he being followed or was it all his imagination? Had there even been somebody in that coach?

  He’d tell Papa the next time he saw him. At supper tonight or breakfast tomorrow morning. He didn’t relish the prospect. Any way you looked at it, he’d made a fool of himself.

  Nineteen

  DOYLE sat in the Chinese dining room in Meeks Street going through the clothes O’Grady had worn for his masquerade as a waiter, every item right down to the skin. The gleanings from the pockets rested in the blue-and-white bowl that usually held fruit. O’Grady’s gun, unloaded, was on Doyle’s left.

  “Torture,” Hawker was saying in the next room, “is not the art of pain. That’s a layman’s view. Torture is negotiation.” He was repeating, almost word for word, something Doyle had said two decades ago when they were hiding in the basement of a house outside Paris. “Reasoned discourse is more persuasive than pain.”

  The door between dining room and front study was left a hand-width open. Closed, it was a firm barrier to sound. A little open and conversation traveled easily between the two rooms. Through the gap Doyle could see a slice of Hawker’s back. He held his cup of coffee. He’d gone over to stare out the window and enjoy the gray dawn. Hawker would be in no particular hurry. Time is always on the side of the interrogators.

  Out of sight, O’Grady, tied to a chair, was complaining. Felicity made click-click sounds at the hearth, dealing with pokers.

  O’Grady would have said the questioning hadn’t begun yet, but Hawker, drinking coffee and ignoring him, was part of it.

  Doyle went through the pockets of O’Grady’s greatcoat and felt along the seams. O’Grady would hear the slither of cloth and the click of buttons against the wood of the table and know somebody was in the next room. Nothing more discouraging to a man being tortured than an unseen audience.

  “Are we ready?” Hawker asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Felicity said. “See.” Scrape. Click.

  “Lean them there, against the andirons. It works better if you let iron cool a bit before you put it to use. Same way you use a dull knife instead of a sharp one.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Felicity’s voice was perfectly serious.

  O’Grady panted. “You can’t just drag me in here. There’s no charge against me. You can’t get away with this. I have friends.”

  Nobody bothered to answer.

  “You don’t want to do too much damage, right at first,” Hawker said. “You need unbroken skin to work on. I prefer the side of a hot knife, myself. Small burns. Precision and control.”

  “Precision and control,” Felicity repeated.

  Doyle hadn’t expected to find anything in the greatcoat, and he didn’t. He was doing the second or third search. The coat smelled of tobacco and beer. Less strongly of gunpowder. A little bit, of oranges.

  Hawker said, “The key is taking your time and doing it right.”

  “Stop this,” O’Grady snarled. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  Hawker, pleasantly, “Yes. You will.”

  This was not the first prisoner questioned at Meeks Street. There was a routine. Agents went through the house and picked up gunsmithing tools and intimidating kitchen implements. The cruel apple corer generally played a part, and the fiendish corkscrew. There was something of a competition to locate the most horrific machineries.

  “Where are the thumbscrews? When I find out who keeps running off with my thumbscrews, he’s in trouble.” Hawker murmured, “Felicity.”

  “Sir?” Surely the first time in memory Felicity had called Hawker that.

  “I need a knife. A blade about so long. There’ll be some in the kitchen. It doesn’t have to be clean.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door banged behind her.

  “It was a job. I did it fer a hundred pounds.” O’Grady coughed and coughed again. “I’ll tell you everything if you let me loose. Everything.”

  Hawker crossed the open slit of the door, into sight and out. “Who wants Wellington dead, Mr. O’Grady?”

  In the dining room, Doyle turned to O’Grady’s possessions, loose in the blue-and-white bowl. A handkerchief, cheaply made. Under it, a key suitable for getting into a house.

  O’Grady said quickly, “I was ordered to wound the man, not kill him. As God is my witness, I didn’t go in there to kill. Just hit him somewhere. Frighten him. Lay him up for a
while.”

  “Who gave the order?”

  “A nob. A foreigner, dressed fancy. I don’t know his name. A man like that’s not going to give his name to the likes of me.”

  “Then you have nothing to bargain with, do you?”

  This was going predictably. Doyle laid a silver watch beside the handkerchief. It wasn’t ticking, but it started when he wound it. A careful man, O’Grady. He carried no noise with him when he went to work.

  “Listen to me. Listen.” Fast words from O’Grady, but he wasn’t panicked yet. “I met him twice. We were in the Olive Tree in Covent Garden.”

  “A good place for hiring a killer. It’s dark and the immediate surroundings are not salubrious. Ah. That’s our knife arriving.”

  Felicity’s voice. “Will this do? Can I use it on him?”

  Hawker, cheerful. “Of course. The first rule is, burn shallow and close-spaced. You can take off an amazing amount of skin and still keep the man alive. There’s an art to it.”

  Hawker was convincing as a torturer, maybe because there’d been a time in his life he’d have done torture without a second thought. Maybe because he’d been intelligently and creatively tortured by the French a couple of times.

  O’Grady said quickly, “I got a good look at him.”

  “I’m sure you’re about to describe him to us,” Hawker said.

  “Short, brown-haired, stoop-shouldered. Spoke with a French accent. He has a scar on the back of his left hand. He said to call him Mr. Cooke, but that’s not his name.”

  “No. I don’t think it is. You forgot to say he walks with a limp.”

  “He— How did you know?”

  “We’ll move on to better lies as time goes by.”

  Doyle opened and set aside a thin wood box holding powder, shot, and the damping rod. Then a comb. Shirt studs. A two-pound note and a dozen small coins in a pouch. If O’Grady had been paid, he wasn’t carrying the money around with him.

  “There is a school of thought,” Hawker pontificated in the other room, “that says to start with the bollocks. I respect that point of view and I’ve seen it done artistically. But overall, I disagree. I like to save the genitals till later.”

  All this time O’Grady had been talking. His voice was getting hoarse. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “Then I’m wasting my time, aren’t I?” Hawker said amiably. “Except for a chance to instruct the young.”

  “Can I start now?” Felicity sounded eager.

  “I don’t see why not.” Hawker, indulgent. “We’ll begin with the feet. They’re sensitive, they have lots of little parts you can break, and the fellow’s not screaming right in your ear when you do this. After you’ve burned a man’s foot for a while he’s unlikely to escape with any speed.”

  “It was a Frenchman,” O’Grady said quickly. “LaForge. Jacques LaForge. It’s something to do with Wellington when he was in Paris. Some woman.”

  “Liar.” There was no anger in Hawk’s voice. More quietly, to Felicity. “The first thing we do is double-check the ropes. You don’t want to get kicked in the head by somebody you’re working on. Remind me to tell you a funny story about that sometime. Check the ropes and then go ahead and heat up that knife.”

  “I won’t talk,” O’Grady said. “No matter what you do to me. I won’t talk.”

  “Fine. I’ll chat with my colleague here and you stay quiet,” Hawker said. “We’ll manage to amuse ourselves.”

  Doyle caught an eager murmur from Felicity. “I’ve never worked with hot knives before.” It was acting, of course, but she was also letting her inner ruthlessness show through.

  Something bright gleamed at the bottom of the blue-and-white bowl, there, among the coins. Doyle fished it out by its well-made silver chain.

  He turned the medal face up, but he already knew what it was. A burly St. Christopher held his staff in one hand and cradled the Christ Child to his chest with the other. A roil of water curled at his knee.

  Doyle studied it a minute, got up slowly, and crossed to knock on the door to the study. Within seconds, Hawker came through and closed the door behind him.

  He looked down and saw the medal. He went death pale. “Justine.”

  “Not hers! Sorry. Sorry.” Doyle held it out. “I should have warned you. It’s not hers.”

  Clumsily, Hawk took the little silver medal into his hand. He was breathing hard and his voice wasn’t entirely steady. “Right. Of course.” Color took its time getting back into his face. “She’s wearing hers in the wilds of the north.” He ran his fingers across the silver. “It’s not worn on the edges the way Justine’s is. And it doesn’t have that scratch on the back. Nothing like it, really. Mine’s upstairs in the top drawer in my room. So this is—”

  “This is Sévie’s,” Doyle said. When she was seven, Sévie had given one St. Christopher to her sister Justine, who spied for the French, and a matching one to Hawker, who spied for England, because they traveled into danger again and again and needed protection. The third she took for herself.

  Doyle said, “She keeps it in her office, in her desk. She likes having it there while she works.”

  “So O’Grady’s one of the men who broke into her office. Deverney was in her office that same night. There’s a coincidence for you.”

  “Coincidence one.”

  Hawker closed his hand around the medal, held it an instant, then slipped it into a pocket in his jacket. “I’ll get this back to Sévie. Let us go on to coincidence two. Deverney was in the Carlington ballroom when O’Grady came to kill Wellington.” Hawker pulled at his lower lip. “Sévie disposes of O’Grady and immediately Deverney’s dancing with her, being charming. Coincidence three.”

  “He’s not the first man to be charming to her.”

  “He made her laugh, which is worse than being charming for a fortnight. Then she wandered off with him, out of the room, out of sight.” Hawker frowned. “He’ll show up at her office today.” After a pause, “Damn him.”

  “She can protect herself.”

  Hawker—almost—smiled. “I’ve been teaching her the fine points of deadly since she was four years old and I handed her my knife for the first time. I still don’t like this.”

  “We don’t have to like it.” Doyle scooped O’Grady’s pile of small possessions back into the bowl. “I’ll be at the Crocodile, consulting with my wide criminal acquaintance. One of them may know something about Deverney.”

  “I’ll talk to the French.” Hawker measured the light outside the window. “The attaché, I think. Tardieu’s the greatest gossip to come out of the Loire Valley. He won’t be in bed yet.”

  “Or he’s in bed with company.”

  “I’ll roust him out.”

  “And O’Grady?”

  “I’ll let him stew in his own juices for a while. With luck, I have ten or twelve hours before I have to turn him over to Bow Street.” Hawker pushed open the study door. “Felicity, put Mr. O’Grady back in his cage. I’m going out.”

  Twenty

  SÉVIE backed her way out from under Pilar’s bed and sank onto her heels.

  “Will you need this again?” Deverney indicated the lamp he’d been holding for her at floor level while she scrambled about under the bed.

  “You can douse it.”

  She’d learned a great deal about the girl Pilar in the last hour. She’d done some thinking on the matter of Raoul Deverney while she was at it. Facts and suppositions slopped over the brim of her brain.

  This last discovery she’d made, lying on her belly under the bed, was disturbing for many reasons. She rubbed her face, which was dusty and beginning to itch. “So. I find my name and the word ‘amulet.’ I don’t suppose you scratched that into the bedframe yourself?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody noticed those interesting words till yo
u showed up in London and made your own search? Everybody and his cousin tromped through these rooms and that wasn’t found?”

  “I said no.” He was angry behind that well-controlled façade.

  Good. Nothing was more revealing than anger. A man who didn’t let himself get angry was hiding something. Of course, Deverney was hiding encyclopedias of things whether he got angry or not.

  She sat on the rug and gave herself time to calm down. Her name. Here. She’d been at the center of murder and kidnapping for three months. She just hadn’t known.

  Raoul Deverney had studied her and made judgments. Even now, this minute, he stood over her and watched her reaction.

  My name here and a dead body in the next room. It’s damning.

  “You should have told me this was here,” she said.

  “You’d have accused me of making those marks myself. You believe this better when you find it on your own.”

  “I don’t like being manipulated.”

  “I don’t like anything about this, mademoiselle.”

  Dislike it and be damned to you.

  “Is there very much else you’re lying about?”

  “I’d call it concealment.”

  She thought about concealment while she studied the coverlet since it was a few inches from her face. She preferred dealing with what was right in front of her face when other questions were too large to answer. “It would be hard for somebody your size to fit under that bed and write at that angle. There are a dozen easier ways to leave a message.”

  “Any number.”

  “You saw ‘Cabrillac’ and tracked me down to my room at the inn. You tossed that word ‘amulet’ in my face, looking for a reaction.” She tilted her head back and met his eyes. She was tired of this cat-and-mouse they played. “What is this amulet?”

  He said, “You held it in your hand, in Spain.”

  “If I did, it was long ago and I’ve forgotten.” How long ago? Where? Spain had been filled with things she’d tried to forget. “I don’t have time to play stupid games, Monsieur Deverney.”