Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  “Pilar is not the umbrella misplaced in a shop, madame.” Deverney sat without invitation and stretched out his legs and crossed them. “You and your . . . establishment are inescapably involved. I will speak to her friends and see what they know.”

  “That is not possible. I will not allow my students to be connected to this dreadful incident. It has nothing to do with the school. Miss Deverney’s mother is undoubtedly the source of whatever horrible thing may have—”

  “I will take tea.” Sévie removed her glove, finger by finger. She was aware of Deverney beside her, filled with amusement. “Hyson, if you have it. Congo, if you do not. You will arrange for the older girls to speak to us, together in one of the classrooms. I may want to see a few of them afterward. Alone. This is not open for discussion.”

  Mrs. Bowker’s jaw muscles tightened. “I will have you know—”

  “My understanding is excellent, thank you.” This Bowker woman reminded her of nothing so much as the keeper of a rough sort of brothel. Bullies were everywhere and it was always a delight to call their bluff. “But you are correct. It will be simpler to interview the girls in their homes with their parents. If it means your school becomes known as one that mislays its young women, that cannot be helped.”

  “I am responsible for these young—”

  “You are free to be responsible for anything you wish. I am finished here.” She began a leisurely gathering herself together to leave. That looked impressive but didn’t involve actually standing up. “I will talk to Lady Hadley first. She is a great friend of my foster mother, Viscountess Markham.”

  Mrs. Bowker opened her mouth and closed it again. “Naturally I want to do everything I can to help find poor Miss Deverney.”

  “Excellent. I will drink tea while you assemble the girls.” The issue had never been in doubt. It was only a matter of setting terms.

  • • •

  THEY met the students in the main schoolroom. The walls were hung with improving paintings. Bookcases held neatly matched, leather-bound volumes, the pages still uncut. Mrs. Bowker huffed away. No teachers lurked in the background, being censorious. Fifteen girls sat on sofas and in chairs around the room and denied all knowledge of where Pilar might be.

  A blond, blue-eyed girl, about twelve, was typical. “I didn’t have anything to do with her.”

  An older girl said, “I heard she ran away with a man. Not that I know anything about that sort of thing.”

  “Following in the footsteps of her mother.” The sly whisper snaked from the far side of the room and everyone giggled.

  “That’s not kind, Edith.”

  “I wasn’t her friend.” Edith wore pink and was admiring the lace on her sleeves. “No one was. She wasn’t much liked, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Suffered from a bad case of nose in the air, if you ask me.”

  “I don’t know what she had to be so proud about.”

  “She wasn’t even English.”

  Deverney had placed himself between a romantic landscape with shepherdesses and a classical landscape with maidens playing lyres and become all that was saturnine and cynical and disturbingly handsome. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Really, she couldn’t blame silly girls for wriggling and posing.

  She cleared her throat. “Did she talk about someone who frightened her? Something she was uneasy about?”

  The room rustled as fifteen girls returned some of their attention to her.

  “She talked about France. And politics.” Edith, the one in pink, sighed. “She’d go on and on about Bourbons and Talleyrand and Richelieu till I wanted to scream.”

  “She didn’t understand half of that, I’m sure. I certainly don’t.”

  “And her clothes. My dear, she wore the same dress till she positively grew out of it.”

  “Something smoky about being a Spaniard with a French name, if you ask me,” a plump girl in white said. “I never understood that.”

  “She didn’t explain.”

  “She didn’t even try to talk to one. Not cordially.” A redhead in pale green dimity simpered. “I have to say it was her own fault if nobody liked her. I cannot count the times I asked after her mother, meaning nothing but amiability. She never had a word to say.”

  “Cold and secretive, I call it.”

  “She never invited anyone to walk home with her.”

  “Not that I would have set a foot in her house if she’d asked me.”

  “My mother said that her mother was a little too friendly with men, if you know what I mean.”

  That called for giggling from all quarters.

  Raoul Deverney shifted position slightly and every eye snapped in his direction. The young ladies of the school assumed attitudes of grace and femininity. Deverney gazed steadily out the window, looking bored.

  A sallow example of young British womanhood said, “It’s not Pilar’s fault, of course, poor thing. With a mother like that . . . Well, we try to be charitable.”

  Just the sort of girl one wants to kick in the shins. She wondered if Pilar felt the same way.

  Another girl said, “I was always pleasant to her, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “When I said she was cold and secretive, I meant it in the kindest possible way.”

  An older girl, about sixteen, spoke for the first time. She sat in the largest, most comfortable chair, the one closest to the fire. With her first words, the titters died away. A power in this school, obviously. She said, “Pilar shouldn’t have been here.”

  Many agreements came at once.

  “Of course not, Catherine.”

  “That’s exactly what I meant. This is not the school for Her Sort.”

  “My mother told me—”

  Cutting through the chatter, Catherine said, “She deserved better.”

  Every voice died away.

  “Pilar speaks five languages. She’s finished the advanced mathematics book for seniors and is working ahead on her own. She has the best mind this school has ever seen.”

  The girls shifted uneasily. One said, “I’m sure I don’t see what that has to—”

  “Let me tell you what none of them are saying.” Catherine shook her shoulders as if throwing off an annoying insect. “We’re the daughters of ambitious shopkeepers and genteel merchants. We come here to learn a better accent and how to tinkle out a dozen easy tunes on the piano. We pretend to be well born, but we’re not. My father made his tidy pile selling salt meat to the navy.” She smiled scornfully, looking girl to girl. “Pilar was the real thing. An aristocrat. The envy here was so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

  In the silence, Catherine took a long look at Deverney, then at Séverine. “You took your time coming to ask about her. There’s a street sweeper on the corner who’d get more attention if she vanished.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sévie said. Explanations and excuses would sound frivolous. She didn’t attempt them.

  “I’m her friend, as much as she has a friend here, and she didn’t come to me. She wouldn’t have gone to anyone else here. Wherever she’s been for three months, she’s been alone.”

  When the other girls crept from the room, she and Deverney talked to Catherine for more than an hour. It was revealing and sobering, but it was hard to say if they learned anything useful.

  Twenty-two

  WILLIAM Doyle sat in the Crocodile near Covent Garden, playing with his pipe and thinking. On the other side of the glass panes, it was a bright, warm day, full of birds and the open carriages of the rich, headed for the park. A relief after the cold weather. Metaphorically speaking, he’d sent ferrets down an assortment of holes, seeking information about O’Grady and Deverney and any rumors touching on Wellington.

  Reports were coming back to him. O’Grady had a woman in Seven Dials. He rented a room in L
emon Street in Whitechapel. He was a former army sergeant with an explosive temper and a liking for drink. He’d served in the Peninsula from Roliça till he got cashiered after Fuentes de Oçoro.

  Of Deverney, he’d learned nothing. The most harmless man in France, apparently. His usual informants shrugged when confronted with that name.

  He couldn’t help thinking Deverney was a man considerably more dangerous than O’Grady. No tie between the two of them, so far.

  Doyle tamped tobacco into the bowl of his clay pipe, taking time about it. Pipe tamping and filling and scraping was a meditative activity. It gave him something to do with his hands and it scattered an authentic workingman’s smell about his person. Eventually he might even light the pipe, though that was not strictly necessary.

  Four laborers, familiar faces here, left the tavern together. A market woman, fat, hearty, and red-faced, came in to settle on a bench.

  The Crocodile was a convenient meeting place. The dregs of humanity and the more or less respectable rubbed shoulders here. The tavern had collected a fine patina of age in its long history compounded from ale spills, the marks of knives drawn in anger, and clay pipes knocked clean on oak tables that were never scrubbed down to the wood. Old smoke lurked ghostlike in the plaster. Cracks in the floor held mud tromped in anytime in the last few decades. Regular patrons were especially fond of the grime on the windows. Daylight filtered in tactfully, keeping everybody dim and anonymous.

  The door opened and a boy came in hesitantly. He stood blinking just inside the door and everybody in the Crocodile got a long look at him while he squinted into the darkness. That argued he was a lad without evil intentions or a green and innocent youth. Or stupid.

  Somebody’s messenger, most likely. The boy spotted his goal, being obvious about it, and picked his way between the tables.

  Eventually the lad stood before him, body stiff as if he expected attack, eyes lowered. An unprepossessing specimen. He was small and thin, with a narrow pale face, wearing mismatched, oversized clothing. The word that came to mind was “flimsy.” He took off his oversized hat and held it. “Mr. Doyle, I—”

  “That’s me. Sit.”

  That earned a blank stare. Fingers clutched the hat more tightly. “It’s just a few words, sir.”

  “You’re not the newest page reporting to the Lord Chancellor. You stand there and you’re pulling every eye in the room in this direction, which I don’t want.” With his boot, Doyle skidded the closest chair in the boy’s direction. “I said, ‘Sit.’”

  Slowly the lad lowered himself into the chair. His hat found shelter in his lap, clutched tight. “Miss de Cabrillac sent me with a message. I’ve been—”

  “When did she give you the message?”

  “Two hours ago. I’ve been looking for you off and on ever since. You weren’t at Meeks Street.”

  “Sometimes I’m not at Meeks Street. I expect to get words delivered in good time anyway.”

  So this was Sévie’s latest acquisition, Peter something. She’d found him sleeping on the streets, concluded he didn’t belong there, and taken him in. She’d fed him, as one might feed a stray cat. Now she was stuck with him.

  The boy’s mouth set mulishly. “It wasn’t urgent. She would have told me.”

  “Or maybe she thought you’d figure that out for yourself. What’s the message? Softly now.” There was enough space around them it wouldn’t be overheard.

  “She said, ‘Tell him the man I danced with showed up at my office at dawn. My thumbs aren’t pricking yet. Thanks for the loan of the red couch.’”

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Where is she now?”

  The boy considered that, apparently making finely honed decisions on how much information he could hand over. “I left her in Kepple Street.”

  “Deverney’s with her?”

  That called for more thought. “He was when I left.”

  When he left, but not necessarily now. Clever young Peter. Doyle had trained Service agents for years, some of them as young as this boy. That kind of hairsplitting generally meant someone was lying.

  This boy wasn’t a beggar’s brat. By his accent, he’d fallen a long way to end up on the streets. He’d probably acquired a number of things to hide along the way. “That’s precise.”

  “I am precise,” Peter said. “It’s my nature.” A tic pulled at the corner of his eyelid but his voice stayed steady.

  “What did they talk about, Sévie and Deverney?”

  Opaque black eyes showed absolutely nothing. “They didn’t talk in front of me.”

  “Where will she go next?” Before the boy could say he didn’t know—being precise—he said, “Guess.”

  The boy looked down at the oak table, admiring the collection of rings left by glasses and mugs over the years. “She sent a note to the surgeon, Mr. Tweed. She’s meeting him at the Sleeping Hound for lunch.”

  “She’s not taking you with her. Why is that?” It was a bit of a prod, just to see what emerged.

  “Because I’m delivering a message to you. Then I’m carrying letters back and forth across town. When I get through with that, I’ll start copying three-month-old newspaper articles. Next I’ll buy bacon, carrots, and a bottle of ale for MacDonald and cart it all upstairs.” He stood abruptly and dropped his floppy, shapeless hat back on his head. “At that point, if nobody has more work for me, I’ll get on with my true calling. I’ll scrub the hall floor.”

  That was sarcasm for you. And a temper. Pride in the way the chin lifted. Education in every word he spilled out. There was more to the lad than showed at first glance.

  What was he made of, this Peter with the educated voice and no last name? Doyle took out the pouch he carried and slipped the string, felt through banknotes—all of them folded differently so he’d know what they were by touch—and pulled out a pound note. He held it up between two fingers. “I need to know what Sévie’s doing. Where she goes, who she sees, what they talk about. Report to me and I’ll give you one of these every week.”

  “No.”

  Immediate and singular and the boy didn’t feel impelled to explain his reasons. Wise, in the circumstances. He needed training in what to do with his face, though. It wasn’t enough to keep it blank as a sheet of notepaper. He needed to write something there—a layer of fake interest, outrage, cupidity, puzzlement—something. Blank was an invitation to curiosity.

  Doyle tapped the note on his sleeve. “You’re sure?”

  One nod. Obviously this was somebody who’d learned to hold his peace. That was useful in a henchman. Henchboy in this case.

  He held the boy’s eye a minute before he motioned dismissal and watched him out the door. Young Peter might do for the Service. He’d ask Sévie what she thought.

  Doyle pushed himself to his feet and went to the hearth to lift a twisted paper spill of fire into his pipe, being calm and meditative about it. That was his practiced façade—a big, placid, reasonable man.

  He sat back on the bench, sprawled his legs out under the table, and took a few puffs to get the pipe going well. He blew smoke out and watched it weave through a patch of light.

  Years ago, he’d promised himself he wasn’t going to be an interfering father. Or rather, Sévie’d told him he wasn’t going to interfere with her life. Then she’d taken off for Portugal and Spain and the war to do work he hated to see his daughter do.

  He was ridiculously proud of her. She’d become a major source of French strategic information. Done it with no help from him or anyone in the Service. Military Intelligence hadn’t even known who she was till she’d made herself too useful to send away.

  He’d had to watch Military Intelligence waste her talents. They’d never used her as well as they could have. And they kept putting her in danger.

  The tavern cat leaped up to sit in
the window. The barmaid, making rounds, glanced at his mug, saw it was still full, and passed onward. Doyle let the worry that lodged in his belly unravel and looked at it.

  She was a wise and canny woman, his Sévie. Tough. Uniquely perceptive. She’d be a top agent in the Service, if she ever wanted. There was no one better at fitting complex puzzles together.

  She was also the little girl he’d carried out of Paris in his arms when she’d weighed about as much as a bird. He’d sat by her bed, up all night, when she had fever. He’d come to poke through all the shadows in her room when she lay awake with nightmares. He’d swung her up on her first pony. Taken her to feed ducks on the Serpentine. Taught her to clean her first pistol.

  He’d never stopped being her father.

  Now she was part of this Wellington business. She was also hunting a murderer and a missing girl. Two dangerous bits of business, possibly related.

  She was interested in a man he didn’t trust. Deverney. If that man hurt Sévie in the smallest degree, he’d pound him into a pulpy mass. And enjoy it. Fatherhood did that to you.

  Because he was dwelling wistfully on violence, it seemed perfectly natural to see Hawker walk into the Crocodile, slinking like a feral cat and sober as a bank clerk in black trousers and coat and a gray vest.

  Doyle offered him the chair Peter had just vacated. “You’re wearing a lot of black.”

  “I am mourning my reputation.” Hawker motioned for his usual glass of gin. “Last night, I was the man who saved Wellington. A model for the ambitious. A hero adored by the multitudes— Thank you, Polly.” He picked the glass from the barmaid’s hand. When she’d sauntered away, he went on, “Or at least heroic to a select group of Service agents.”

  “A credit to the corps, in short. I gather that is no longer the case.”

  “Today I am in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes.” Hawker drank gin. “I had the pleasure of a visit from Lord Carlington an hour ago. He is not leaking bonhomie from every pore. He reports a burglary at Carlington House. Stolen jewels. Many of them.”