Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  One recovers from being betrayed. Never, never from betraying someone else. “My disloyalties are complicated. They are also none of your concern.”

  When she was young she’d run away to be a spy, that being the life she knew best. She’d gone to Spain, to Military Intelligence and men who did not know she was Papa’s daughter. They’d set her to spy upon the French officers. That had gone well enough till she met and fell in love with Gaëtan and they became lovers.

  It is tragedy enough to be young and enmeshed in a hopeless love. The greater tragedy is when both lovers do not die of it. When one of them lives.

  She’d done her duty. Coming from the family she did, she did not know how to do otherwise. She’d carried French battle plans to the British Command and stood on the heights of La Puebla, above the battlefield of Vitoria, and watched the Light Division plow into the French line. After dark when the fighting was over, she found Gaëtan among the French dead.

  In the circle of Monsieur Deverney’s arms, she was overwhelmed by emotions she had not expected to feel again.

  She said. “This is probably a disaster in the making. I would much prefer to be flirting with you and not giving a damn.”

  “I know. I couldn’t hold you like this and not know.”

  She bowed her head to breathe against the palm of his hand. The moment was intimate beyond bearing. They were both shaking. They were very annoyed with each other.

  Resolutely, she straightened away from him. “Wanting you makes me stupid. I will stop now.”

  “We’ll both stop.” He paused in stroking the skin behind her ear, his place marked with his fingertips. “It’s hard to think of you being less than wise.”

  “This moment is the rare example. Let’s discuss the amulet instead.”

  “I am obedient to the commands of a woman as well armed as I suspect you to be. We continue, then, with my little story.” He took his finger from her skin. “Have you remembered meeting me?”

  “Not in the least. No.”

  “Then I will remember for both of us, querida. Our young hero—have I told you yet he was a fool?—set out on his quest to retrieve the treasure of his family. They had been scattered far and wide among the French and the English, gambled away, tossed to whores, traded for a plump chicken.” Deverney motioned an unmistakable trade in chickens, doing it so skillfully she could almost hear them squawking. “Every army was awash in stolen goods. No one knew their value.”

  “I suppose a skilled thief could make himself rich on secondhand loot.”

  “I was and I did. You were the first and last ever to catch me. A salutary experience for a young thief.” He paused. “We were near Béjar.”

  Béjar. The air had been dry and dusty there, smelling of pine. Wind blew down from the mountains in the north, cold at night, blisteringly hot in the day. Donkin’s Brigade was encamped on the river in a long bivouac of tents outside the village. She’d delivered her messages to Colonel Donkin, one of the men she regularly passed reports to. A friend.

  He’d grilled her about French troops and given her a meal and a tent to sleep in with guards outside. Her best sleep in weeks. Five hours of it. “Someone was stealing from the officers’ tents.” It was coming back to her. “They took jewels, only jewels, and left the money behind. It made everybody nervous.”

  “My work.” Light streamed through the open door of the stable. All the light she needed to watch the complex interworking of amusement and irony in his face.

  “The jewels were illegal loot, of course. Donkin didn’t want them brought to his attention because he’d have to confiscate the lot and discipline everybody when they were headed into battle. He asked me to make the problem go away. So I did. I owed him favors.”

  “You arranged a loud and drunken dice game with the winnings tossed into somebody’s trunk. They locked it with a big shiny padlock. Nicely done.”

  “Thank you.”

  “They caught me picking that padlock. They dragged me in front of you on the way to hanging me.”

  “You were a thief,” she pointed out.

  “I’m still a thief, but I still don’t want to be hanged.” Absentmindedly he rested his hands on her shoulders. “They dropped me in the dirt in front of you. I looked up and saw you on that ugly horse, high above me, riding astride like a farm girl, dressed in shabby black, with your hair tucked under a man’s tricorne.”

  “That ugly mare could travel two days straight on a hatful of meal. I liked her better than most of the men I served with. And she had more sense.”

  “I’m sure she was all that is admirable in a horse. You bent down to one of the soldiers, asking questions, and I saw your face in the lantern light. Your skin was very white, you sat in the saddle like an Amazon, and you looked tired unto the death. I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

  He’d been thinking that? She hadn’t known.

  “But then,” he went on calmly, “I didn’t expect to lay eyes on very many more women. That may have influenced me.”

  She was catching vivid glimpses of that little interval, long ago. She hadn’t wanted to look at the thief they’d caught. It was hard enough to do the work she did without looking into men’s eyes. “I didn’t get a good look at you.”

  “Obviously not,” he said lightly. “If you’d seen me, you wouldn’t have forgotten.”

  “There was a crowd of men around you and they didn’t bring you close. It was dark.”

  But she remembered a skinny boy, dark-haired, half-naked, covered with dust and blood, his rib cage a stretched bellows gasping for air. He’d been exhausted and beaten and no longer fighting, but his eyes were sharp on everything around him, desperate and alive. He had been so beautiful and so tough. Doomed. She’d thought, He’s no older than me.

  The whitewashed walls of the stable enclosed a quiet space and the past visited, picture by picture. She said, “You were carrying small leather bags in your clothes, each full of jewels.”

  “The fruit of several robberies. You had me dead to rights that night. I liked the way you barely glanced at a fortune and waved it off to a sergeant. You said, ‘Take it to the quartermaster. It’s his problem.’”

  “It wasn’t mine, anyway,” she said.

  She’d been impatient to leave. The moon was an hour from setting and she had a long way to go. The hills were full of armed men, most of them casually murderous. MacDonald waited for her with the Spanish partisans. The French and the English were on the move. Everything in her life was more important than the fate of a young Spanish thief.

  Who’d turned out to be Deverney.

  “That’s when you saved my life,” Deverney said. “You told them to turn me over to the mayor of Béjar. You said, ‘He’s a Spanish thief. Let the Spanish hang him.’ Did you know the mayor could be bribed and that he wasn’t fond of the British?”

  “No one is fond of the army occupying their land. You have to be in that army to think otherwise.” She remembered sending him to the mayor. Yes. She’d been trying, again, to save one life in the middle of so many horrible deaths. Sometimes she succeeded. “I didn’t think you’d have anything left to bribe with.”

  “A gold ring, sewed into the seam of my breeches.”

  “So you lived.”

  “No one was more pleased than I.” He might have been taking the most gentle inventory of the bones of her shoulder, touch by touch. She didn’t object. She was lured so easily, so thoroughly, by this unsuitable man.

  He said, “We come to the Deverney Amulet.”

  “You wore something around your neck, a dark cylinder the size and shape of a man’s thumb.”

  “Perfectly remembered. You win.”

  “I thought it was lead. Base metal. Valueless. That was the amulet?”

  “It’s silver, with a couple centuries of tarnish. In the family it
’s considered bad luck to polish it.” He left one hand on her shoulder. With the other he gestured an impression of something intricate. “There are symbols cut up and down the sides that no one can read. The stone in the bottom is a cabochon ruby.”

  “I didn’t see the symbols in the dark. Or the stone.”

  “It is the oldest treasure of my house, brought back from the Crusades and already old then. A reliquary. They say it held something important once upon a time. Nobody knows what.”

  “You wore it, instead of carrying it in your clothes with the other jewelry.”

  “They were just jewels, not the amulet. You said, ‘What’s that?’ and they pulled it from around my neck and walked over to hand it up to you. You said, ‘Put it with the rest. Give it to the quartermaster.’ When I was assisted in the direction of the mayor’s house, you were just handing it down to the sergeant. It turned up in an antiquary shop in Madrid a year later, then went bouncing around Europe from there, changing hands as a curiosity.”

  “Until Sanchia.”

  “Six months ago a London jeweler recognized the amulet and returned it to the Deverneys. To Sanchia.” Deverney touched the base of her throat, on her heartbeat there in the notch of her collarbone. “Most of the baubles you took from me in Béjar ended up with your friend from Spain, Colonel Carlington.”

  The accusation came offhandedly, in the best tradition of interrogation. She was no stranger to those methods.

  “The Carlingtons are no friends of mine,” she said, coolly. “Not Robin Carlington, who tells lies about me. Not Lord Carlington, who could have stopped Robin’s lies with a single word. Not Colonel Carlington, Robin’s uncle, with his endless boring stories about Spain. I never met him there, you know. Not once.”

  “There were many English soldiers in Spain.”

  “A quarter of a million. I was with the French, anyway, or the guerrilleros or Military Intelligence or English officers of the line, none of which describes that old fool. Is that why you came to Carlington House? To retrieve those jewels?”

  Gravely, as if he were telling an important truth, he said, “I came to dance with you.”

  “You came to spy on me. And play the Comodin. And pursue schemes of your own I can’t even imagine.”

  “All of that. But before everything else and more important, I danced with you.” His mouth tucked up at one side in what might have been amusement or might have been anything else. “I didn’t go there planning to kiss you, but I enjoyed it immensely.”

  She disbelieved most of what he said. “It’s more complicated than that. In Pilar’s room, two weeks ago, you found my name written beside the word ‘amulet.’ Everything you’ve done since then is to find out if I’m a killer and kidnapper.”

  “I thought you might be.”

  She had been—she was—a woman of some ruthlessness. That knowledge lay between them, almost toothed in its intensity. She put her fists, the tight knuckles of them, to his chest and pushed. He stepped back at once.

  She said, “I’m not an innocent white lamb. Distrust me if you want, but don’t kiss me again.” Robin Carlington had begun the job of humiliating her. Raoul Deverney had finished it, and his work was infinitely more skilled. “You didn’t have to make a fool of me.”

  She shouldered past him and started toward the door of the stable.

  “Nothing we’ve done makes a fool of you,” he said.

  She just kept walking.

  He said, “One thing more.”

  She turned back. She wasn’t the only angry person in the stable this afternoon. “Do you know how dangerous you are to me? Do you think I’d toy with someone protected by the British Service if I were sane? Do you imagine I sat down one morning over coffee and decided to walk into a den of lions?”

  “I think you came to Carlington House to stir up the hornets’ nest and see what would fly out. A waltz with me was a good way to do that.”

  “You give me undeserved credit. I’m not nearly that cunning.”

  She said, “I think you are. The last time we met you almost got yourself hanged. Take it as a warning.”

  Twenty-seven

  HAWKER on her right side, Papa on the left, Sévie walked down one of the low-ceilinged, unlit, and smelly corridors with which Newgate was plentifully supplied. The guard went ahead, carrying a lantern, making excuses. Newgate was not a pleasant place but it was a familiar one. She’d been here any number of times, mostly trying to get men and women out.

  She said, not referring to Newgate but continuing with what they were talking about, “I’m not a political person.”

  “Wellington asked for you in particular,” Papa said. “Apparently you briefed some of his officers before the battle of Salamanca, talking about the ground they’d have to cover.”

  “You were, of course, impressive,” Hawker said.

  “That reputation of yours,” Papa said. “It haunts you still.”

  There were uglier buildings than Newgate prison. Buildings more dour. Any workhouse or tenement held a generous helping of human misery. But Newgate was bad enough.

  They went through the huge iron gate that locked off the yard from the interior, iron bars thick as her thumb, suitable for stopping riot and invasion or leading to a deeper section of hell. Oh, she was feeling cheerful today.

  “Wellington’s not short of political advisors,” Hawker said. “They’re stacked up around him like ship lumber. You’ll be a refreshing change.”

  “When he’s talking to you about army transport problems in the Peninsular Campaign,” Papa said, “he’s not riding in Green Park, being a target.”

  “The army calls me in and asks questions because I’m a woman. They’re amazed I know anything at all.”

  “World’s full of fools,” Papa said comfortably. “Wellington isn’t one of them, though.”

  Papa was right. She had friends in the army who were alive because he’d been the man in charge of battle. “Then send me over if you need a raree-show to entertain the Great Man. We all do what we can.”

  Inside the stone walls, the quality of chill changed. The cold slithered like water under her clothing. Maybe it was actually warmer in here, but it didn’t feel like it.

  For someone moderately honest, she’d spent a remarkable amount of time behind bars, including a few weeks as a prisoner in Madrid as a guest of the British Army when they decided she was a French spy rather than Military Intelligence. One couldn’t blame them for that, she supposed, since her French was suspiciously fluent and Madrid was full of French sympathizers. She was lucky not to have been shot.

  That was the story of her life. It mostly boiled down to she was lucky not to have been shot.

  They were here because O’Grady had not been so lucky in his prison stay. Shortly after arrival he’d been stabbed in the back, just grazing the kidney. The “just grazing” part was why O’Grady was still alive.

  “If he were in Meeks Street he wouldn’t be flirting with death,” Hawker said. “He’d be locked up, suffering as much mortal terror as I could inflict, but not bleeding internally.”

  The guard called back over his shoulder that they’d kept O’Grady from escaping. That was what they did at Newgate. They locked people up. Nobody expected them to stop prisoners from killing each other if they took it in their head to do that.

  “A lesson to us all,” she said, holding her skirts up out of the mud and so on because Newgate was not just pristine clean at the best of times.

  “If he’s going to die anyway, I could have arranged it with less muss and bother,” Hawker said. “After I talked to him.”

  They’d come to a hall with a row of ten closely spaced doors, all of sturdy wood and all with a slot to pull back and look in at a prisoner. These were cells for prisoners who could afford a little luxury, oases of privacy from the crowded hellholes downstairs. It was even fa
irly quiet up here. Stone walls muffled all the noise from the general cells.

  At the next-to-the-last door a man sat on a wood stool, doubled over to play a game of solitaire laid out on the stone floor in front of him. This was Dick Soames from Bow Street, a tough and conscientious Runner. He’d hung a lantern on a hook on the wall above him.

  “Still alive, I take it?” Papa said.

  “Last I checked.” Soames heaved himself up. He didn’t bother to peek through the bracket on the door. His key rattled in the lock and he pushed his way in.

  O’Grady lay on a decent enough bed with a blanket over him. His eyes were closed and his face gray as the dead, but for the moment he clung precariously to life. He breathed in a damp wheezing way she didn’t like.

  “Alive,” she said, “but just barely.” O’Grady might yet live to die on the gallows or discover a new and useful life in Australia. The rookeries of Dublin bred durable felons.

  “He’s not going to talk to us anytime soon.” Hawker frowned around the cell and went over to look out the window that opened on the exercise yard twenty feet below. “I could get in through here.”

  “Let’s hope no one else decides to.” Papa put his hand flat on O’Grady’s forehead. “I’ll order wood brought up.” To Soames, he said, “Keep a fire lit as long as he lives to need it.”

  She said, “Somebody thinks he’s worth killing. He must know something.”

  “Let’s keep him alive, just in case,” Hawker said.

  “No reason not to,” Papa said equitably.

  She checked the pitcher, which turned out to be empty. “He’s not going to last long at this rate. I’ll send up a woman to nurse him. There’ll be someone down in the general cells who knows how. Don’t let her get drunk.”

  Down the corridor. Down the stairs. Out into the yard under a gray sky. She said, “I don’t like the timing of this.”