Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  Not a game, this. Or if it was, it was a serious one. There’d been extra men outside the house when he woke up. Extra guards. They all knew what that meant. Papa was worried.

  The usual guards, Tom and Harry, were being even more careful than usual, and that was very careful indeed. They’d been infantrymen in the campaigns across France and Spain with a hundred stories to tell. And they had kids of their own at home. Papa always hired guards who had kids of their own.

  Tom’s children were just young. Six and four. But Harry’s second son was on a merchant ship headed for China and his oldest was apprenticed to a surgeon. That was Johnson. Johnny. They already let Johnny sew people up, and once he’d delivered a baby. That had been a sort of accident. He got to watch them cut up dead people. Johnny promised he could come next time. Johnny would sneak him in.

  Other boys had all the fun. He didn’t want to go to sea or be a surgeon, exactly, but he’d like a life where he didn’t have to stay inside with books all day. Something like what Papa did.

  Maman said the garden in the middle of the square was widely admired. It was beginning to turn green. The holly bushes along the railings still had a few tail-end-of-winter berries on them. The crocuses were out and the snowdrops and primroses. Back home they’d be everywhere in the woods, and he could do chemical experiments in the potting shed.

  Betty unlocked the gate and held it for Mr. Tom to go in first. Harry began to circle the perimeter fence. They had a routine.

  No sign of danger. The birds were singing just the way they should be. This wasn’t like the country where the birds told you ten dozen things by the way they acted. City birds were stupid, though it was worth listening to the one or two things they did have to say. The crows, especially, were knowing, though mostly what they knew was where the cats were.

  The kids slipped under and around Nanny and ran down the gravel paths of the park before Tom had finished the circuit. Muffin waited obediently.

  “Barbarian horde,” Betty muttered.

  In an hour or so, children from other houses around the square would wheedle their decorous nursery maids to take them down so Anson and Anna could lure them into improprieties, like catching beetles. For now that pair had the place to themselves.

  “Look! There’s a package.” Anson ran toward the line of benches under the plane tree. A square box, wrapped in brown paper, sat on the middle of the nearest bench. “It’s for me.”

  “Is not,” Anna said.

  “Is too. Look. It has my name on it.” Anson reached for it. “See. It says Anson.”

  He yelled, “Don’t touch that!” and ran.

  He surprised Anson into doing what he was told. He grabbed Anson up against his chest and ran with him to the gate. Tom, the guard, right behind him, carried Anna.

  At the gate, he let Anson slide to the ground. Nothing had exploded yet. He’d been in time.

  “. . . could just say you wanted me to leave it alone.” Anson continued the comments he’d been making. “I’m not a baby. I wasn’t going to—”

  “Be quiet.” He frowned at the package thirty feet away.

  They all looked at it—Anson, Anna, Betty the nanny, both guards, Muffin the dog, and him.

  “It’s a bomb,” Anna said, thrilled.

  “A huge bomb,” Anson said. “It’ll leave a crater in the ground.”

  “It’ll break windows.”

  It was so completely ordinary. A box wrapped in brown paper sitting on the bench. He said, “It might,” and frowned at it.

  “I can make a bomb.” That was Anson. “Almost.”

  “I can, too,” Anna said. “But mine are better.”

  “We’ll make a small bomb when we get back to Oxfordshire.” Maybe that would keep them from constructing one in the nursery. “A stink bomb, with sulfur. I’ll show you how.” To Betty he said, “Take them back to the house and tell everyone to stay away from the windows.”

  Anna folded her arms and stuck her chin out. “No.”

  “No,” Anson said.

  I should beat them regularly. He had never, never been this difficult as a child. Except for the time he set fire to the nursery. And the incident of the bull.

  He went down on one knee. “This is one of those times when you have to follow orders.”

  Identical mulish expressions emerged.

  “This is an Emergency. That means we go by Emergency Rules.”

  “Papa gets to do that. And Maman,” Anna said. “Not you.”

  “Also me, because I’m the oldest here.” He watched them measure him against the parents, not impressed yet. “If there’s a bomb in that box, Muffin could get hurt.”

  “I’ll put Muffin in the house and come back,” Anna said.

  Around the square, curtains twitched back as various inhabitants looked up from their breakfast and noticed odd behavior. They’d be coming out to investigate in a minute. There’d be the devil of a job keeping them back from the park.

  That package could be a pound of gunpowder, enough to hurt people all the way to the park railings. Could be set with a friction fuse or one of the chemical fuses Fletcher taught him about. Or it could just go off by itself from sheer inefficiency. Fletcher said bombs were a stupid man’s weapon, more likely to kill somebody by accident than not.

  He couldn’t leave it in place. He couldn’t go over and open it up. He couldn’t stand here while he waited for help to come. Some idiot would walk right past him and try to take charge of this and get killed.

  He said, “Harry, get me some cricket balls. They’re in the nursery closet, on the left, in a box. Middle shelf.” He felt a moment of shock when Harry turned around and ran for the house without asking questions.

  Papa said, “Talk like you know what you’re doing. That’s all you need.”

  It wouldn’t work on the kids. He looked from Anson to Anna. “What do we do when we hear a rocket?”

  “Flat on your face,” the kids said in unison.

  He thumbed over his shoulder, toward Mrs. Willoughby’s staid and respectable town house. “And you take shelter when you can. That’s your shelter. Get down the cellar stairs and watch from there. Keep your head down.”

  They slid eyes toward each other to consult. Made a decision. They ran for the Willoughby stairwell, pursued by Betty and by Muffin, who thoroughly approved of this new game.

  The package still sat innocently on its bench. He was going to look like an idiot if that turned out to be a parcel of books left by one of Anson’s friends.

  He said, “Tom, Old Gillmore’s toddling out his front door. Get him back inside.”

  For the second time a guard took his orders. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was enough to have a plan.

  Harry came from the house, carrying his hat close to his chest. “Three cricket balls.” Harry breathed heavily. “I brought the croquet balls, too, in case.”

  “Good thought.” He set the hat on the ground in front of him and took off his coat.

  “I should do this part, Mr. Bart,” Harry said.

  “Play a lot of cricket, do you?”

  “Not often. Not since I was a boy.”

  “Then it better be me.” He rolled up his sleeves. “Eton does prepare you for life, they say. You go keep the kids’ heads down.”

  An instant of sharp, narrow-eyed inspection. Then Harry loped across the street to where four heads poked cautiously above the level of the pavement—Anna, Anson, Betty the nanny, and Muffin.

  Bart tossed and caught the cricket ball a few times. This would do the job nicely or get somebody killed or accomplish nothing at all. It was an accustomed balance and heft from an old familiar game. Unlike Harry, he played a lot of cricket. He was good at it.

  He didn’t need to think about it anymore. He drew back. He threw.

  Forty-five

  RAOUL held
two fingers, marking the space of an inch and a half. “That long,” he said, “and the thickness of a thumb. Silver. Dull black with tarnish unless somebody’s polished it. In the right light you can see designs marked into it. A red stone at the bottom.”

  Papa was at the little hearth that kept her office warm, feeding coal into the fire with his hands, setting neat, black, shiny pieces in a row on the burning logs. He said, “You had it in your hands, Sévie. Does it look valuable?”

  “Not in the dark when you’re in a hurry and there’s a man in front of you about to get hanged.”

  Papa said, “An important object? Significant?”

  “Nobody would throw it away,” she said, because that was what he was asking.

  Raoul said, “The top comes off, if you work at it a while. My father let me take it apart once. That’s a family secret, by the way, that it’s hollow. It’s not in any of the books.”

  “Anything interesting inside?” Hawker asked.

  “Empty as a lover’s vow,” Raoul said. “I recall being disappointed when I was eight.”

  A selection of street rats had carried crates from the wagon upstairs. Peter was just stacking the last of them in front of the bookcase. He straightened and stood considering it with blank eyes. His skin was pale under the floppy hat he never remembered to take off.

  She should send him to bed. It was already morning. This had been a horror of a night, ending with dead men strewn everywhere and bloody surgery on the desk where they were gathered to work. She kept forgetting how young he was.

  She was about to tell him to go rest when he left the room, looking as if he had places to go and things to do, his shoulders squared and his step steady. It looked like he was good for a few more hours. They certainly needed the help.

  “Any guesses as to where the amulet is now?” Hawker asked it generally to the room, but he meant that for Raoul.

  Who answered readily. Almost boredly. “I didn’t find it in Sanchia’s rooms. She had it six months ago, certainly. She planned to ransom it back to me at great cost. I would have paid it.”

  “Now you don’t have to.” Papa wasn’t accusing. Just pointing it out.

  “If I haven’t murdered Sanchia in the last dozen years, I’m not going to do it now.” Raoul shrugged. “I’m a peaceable man.”

  “Who rounds off the night with five men dead,” Hawker said amiably. “We’re going to run out of criminals.”

  Papa finished with the fire and came to join the rest of them where they were working. He didn’t show up at her office often, always careful about encroaching. He hadn’t visited at all since her office had been ransacked. She could see him noticing where things were missing. Being Papa, he was probably wondering how to get replacements for her without being obvious about it.

  The bronze Artemis was back on the shelf in its usual place, playing bookend. Papa touched the proud Huntress as he went by, one touch to her shoulder. He had a superstitious relationship with that statue. It was very, very old. “The words ‘amulet’ and ‘de Cabrillac.’ They were written by the girl? Are we sure?”

  She said, “I wondered the same thing. They were genuine.”

  “I don’t feel good about your name in the middle of this,” Papa said.

  “Not to mention bullets going in her direction.” Hawker had settled into a chair at her desk. Not the big Walsingham chair he was entitled to. He’d left that to her. “If we were keeping score, we’d be losing. I hate it when that happens.” He pushed papers aside, put his elbows on the blotter, and tapped his lips with his templed fingers. “I sent Stillwater to the docks to see what ship is missing a handful of able-bodied seamen. They look Neapolitan. Corsican, Sicilian.”

  “Hard to tell when they’re dead,” Papa said.

  “Neapolitans,” Raoul said.

  Hawk gave a brisk nod. “I briefed Wellington at dawn. He’ll spend the day at the Admiralty Office with strapping Marines on duty. And I stopped at Newgate. There was an attempt to poison O’Grady that failed. He continues remarkably durable.”

  “Happy news,” Papa said, “I’m sending the kids and house staff out of London.” Out the window dawn was beginning to show. “I’ll send word over when it gets light. I sent more guards to the house.”

  By tomorrow the kids would be home, back in the country, where every farmer and every villager was a guard for them. Every stranger would be noted and watched.

  “You could go with them,” Papa said casually, meaning her.

  “I’ll be careful,” she said.

  “I know you will. But your doorstep’s full of dead men.”

  “Enough to unsettle any father,” Hawker said.

  “Intriguing, when you think about it,” she said.

  “I know you’re not going to leave.” Papa sounded resigned. “But I don’t like the mind behind this. He hired a man to kill his own man.”

  “Hires them by the dozen,” Hawker said.

  “Ruthless. Pragmatic,” she agreed.

  “Fast.” Hawker turned papers over, just glancing, setting them aside. They were working their way through the letters out of Hayward’s office. “The attempt on Wellington. O’Grady stabbed the next afternoon. Sévie, or possibly Deverney, targeted in the evening. O’Grady again, about midnight. Our murderer keeps busy.”

  Papa said, “O’Grady knows something.”

  “They’ll bring his food from different cookshops. I am determined he’ll live long enough to see Australia.” Hawk rejected his way down the pile, letter by letter.

  Papa said, “So many murders planned. Wellington, O’Grady, Sanchia Deverney—”

  “Sanchia was an accident,” she said.

  “Premature. Not an accident,” Papa said. “O’Grady wouldn’t have let her live after she’d seen his face. Then they came after either you or Deverney or both.”

  “One of them.” Hawker set another page aside. “It’s too much a coincidence they’d scoop up both the fish they wanted in one net.”

  Raoul was across from Hawker, occupying one of the hideous chairs from the Meeks Street parlor, going through Sanchia’s journals. They were not pleasant reading. She’d looked at them herself. He said, “They were after Séverine. The bullet was aimed at her.”

  “Six men is rather a lot to send to kill just me.” Strange to be talking about her own death like this.

  “Wasn’t enough, though, was it?” Hawk said.

  Papa took away old papers that had been sorted through and brought new ones. He upended the little box of them in the middle of the desk. “Desperation. Stupidity. Recklessness. Madness to try for four or five deliberate deaths in the middle of London.”

  “Some of us manage it.” Hawk gave Raoul a long glance.

  “Whoever’s doing this doesn’t stick at killing women,” Papa said. “That’s why I want you out of town, Sévie. It’s become dangerous for you. If you were one of my agents, I’d tell you the same thing.”

  She had to smile. “You’re the second person who’s warned me I’m not safe.”

  “Who was the other one?” Papa sat, picked up some likely-looking pages, and began to read.

  She said, “Carlington.”

  Raoul said, “He warned you a few hours before you were attacked. Should I be worried?”

  “Only if you think him capable of hiring a halfdozen Neapolitan sailors to kill me. It seems beyond him, somehow.”

  “I could ask him,” Hawker said, “while slowly removing his skin.”

  She didn’t look up from what she was doing. “No.”

  “I may anyway.”

  “Much braver than I am,” Raoul murmured. Raoul and Hawker wore almost identical expressions of craftiness. Nobody commented on Robin, which was good because she didn’t want to talk about him. They were probably thinking of all the unpleasant things that might happen to him. They w
ouldn’t do anything.

  For a good long while they were all silent except for rustling paper and the creak of a chair sometimes. Her own little stack was less promising. She examined and dismissed a dozen letters in a row. Hat shops were not centers of treason and murder. Squabbles over porcelain bonbon dishes did not hold the fate of nations. The next one, though . . .

  She said, “I know this handwriting.”

  “What?” Hawk looked up. They all did.

  Life is filled with small correspondence. Dresses to be delivered, a cousin in Paris, books for sale, friends to be met at a confectioner’s next Tuesday, and clients asking Miss de Cabrillac to investigate some minor matter.

  Sometimes she hired men to do research for her.

  She said, “Joseph Smithson.”

  “Army archivist,” Hawker said.

  She said, “He does research in army and navy archives for a modest fee. The British Service uses him sometimes. So do I. This”—she passed the letter over—“is his bill for investigating the troops in the vicinity of Cuevas del Valle on May 9, 1809. He charged Sanchia twenty-one pounds, which you’ll see she has not paid.”

  They passed the letter around. Frowned over it. Smithson had rather distinctive handwriting, fortunately.

  “We have that report.” It was Raoul who’d seen it and remembered it. It had been in one of the wood boxes he’d packed in Hayward’s office. A thick document.

  Three or four boxes later, they had it. Smithson’s report.

  Papa spread it flat on the desk. “Let us see what Smithson has to say.” And they all leaned over it.

  Papa said, “He gives us every British unit within thirty miles.”

  “They were moving into battle.” Raoul had gone hard-eyed. “I was there myself, with the partisans, scouting, working for the English.”

  “I was not so very far from there myself, with the French,” she said, “who lost.”

  “An argument against battles.” Hawk ran his finger down the list. “First Division, Guards, infantry, the Rifles, and the plucky light artillery. And here we have a list of officers. What the devil am I looking for?” A glance in her direction. “You’ve found something, haven’t you? You’re looking pleased with yourself.”