Beauty Like the Night

by Joanna Bourne

  Papa’s hand was casually in his greatcoat pocket, holding something. In this case, a gun. His intention was obvious to anyone who knew him. If Pilar fired, Papa would too. No one would ever figure out which shot had come first and who had killed the colonel.

  Hawker, in his chosen spot, showed no inclination to interfere with events, possibly because all the guns were on his side and he wanted the colonel dead anyway.

  As for her . . . In spite of the growing consensus in favor of it, she disapproved of letting a twelve-year-old do murder. She cleared her throat and entered the conversation. “Pilar, have you considered not killing this man? The entire British legal system is at your disposal.”

  “My mother would wish it,” Pilar said in a dangerously calm voice. “She would demand his blood.”

  “But then, Sanchia was not always wise, was she?” Raoul took six leisurely steps to the right so Pilar could see him without taking her eyes away from the colonel.

  Pilar said, “She was not very wise, but she was my mother.”

  Pilar wore the Deverney Amulet openly on her chest where the folds of her oversized coat hung open. The colonel had his eyes on it, and every malevolent emotion churned in his gaze. Anger, hatred, despair, greed.

  The colonel, all this time, continued to babble claims of innocence. Raoul looked upon him dispassionately, then back to Pilar. He said, “If you wish to avenge your mother, there are better ways.”

  “I do not believe so.” Pilar, too, could be dispassionate. Her variety was like a cold sea filled with toothed monsters. “The law will not touch this man for what he did to my mother. I heard you and Miss Séverine talk about it.”

  “I’ve said a great many things in your hearing, Pilar, that I wish I could take back.”

  “She choked for air and they did nothing. She could not breathe and they laughed, monsieur. That was the last sound she heard. Their laughter. So I will laugh as this colonel dies and hope he appreciates the humor of it.”

  Raoul took a long step toward her. Not within grabbing distance of the gun, but close enough that he and Pilar talked face-to-face instead of across a distance. “Pilar, I offer you a better vengeance. One infinitely more satisfying. He’s committed treason against England. We have the proof of this.”

  She looked suspicious.

  “The paper from the amulet,” Raoul said. “It gives us his name. It’s proof of treason. He’ll hang.”

  Pilar shrugged. “They don’t hang the son of a baron.”

  “For treason, they do. Wellington won’t let this pass. Even if Wellington weren’t the honorable officer he is, some of the men this creeping slug sent to die in ambush belonged to powerful families. For that alone, he’ll hang.”

  “I have vowed to send him to hell.”

  “You will. Send him there by way of a trial that even the shepherds in the fields will know about. His name will be spat upon. His family will slink away in shame, ruined and bankrupt. The ghosts of the men he sent to death will visit him in his prison cell and walk beside him to his execution.”

  Pilar considered this.

  Raoul said, “If you’ll set aside killing him with your own hands, you can destroy him utterly. Don’t give him a quick, honorable death. Let him die like the dog he is.”

  “And if he escapes British justice?”

  “Then we’ll hunt him down together, you and I, wherever he tries to hide. I’ll help you kill him any way you choose. My promise on it.”

  The barrel of the gun did not waver away from the colonel’s chest.

  “Pilar,” Raoul said. “I do not wish my daughter to commit murder before her thirteenth birthday. It does not reflect well upon me as a father. It’s not in the tradition of the Deverneys to send our children to take vengeance when there are still adults to do it.”

  Pilar turned toward him, fiercely, suddenly. It simplified matters that she’d taken her finger off the trigger and pointed the muzzle to the ground. “I am not your daughter.”

  “You are.”

  It was Peter who faced Raoul from under the great flopping brim of his hat, and also Pilar. Whichever one she might be, she was heartbreakingly young. Her voice was unsteady. “I am your wife’s bastard. You said so.”

  “I was wrong,” Raoul said. “A man makes huge mistakes sometimes. This was mine. Enough mistake for a lifetime.”

  He waited. Pilar said nothing. Gave no sign she’d heard him.

  He said, “Five years ago I followed the English army out of Spain into France. I walked the Deverney lands again. The vineyard was abandoned. The men who weren’t dead had come back missing a leg or an arm. I had killed French soldiers since I was younger than you are now.”

  “I know,” Pilar said.

  “I was no longer proud of this.”

  When Pilar was about to speak, he said, “Let me finish. There’s a high bridge over a gorge in the mountains above Verney. I rode there with my pistols—very like the pistol you’re holding—and I threw them down to the rocks and water below. I was done with killing men. But today I’m carrying a gun.”

  “To protect mademoiselle,” Pilar said, very certain.

  “Yes. Though she seems to do a fine job on her own. I’m carrying it to protect my daughter.”

  When he reached his hand out slowly for the gun, she didn’t back away. She let him gently take it from her and put it up on the box of the Carlington coach, out of the way. Then he stood squarely before her, shutting Colonel Carlington out of sight and out of their attention.

  Slowly, emphatically, Raoul said, “Pilar, you are Deverney, mind and spirit. You act as a Deverney does. You have the Deverney courage. I should have seen it at once, whatever disguise you wore. I ask your forgiveness for what has gone before.”

  Pilar was very still, as if the slightest movement would break this moment. As if the world were glass.

  “Will you be my daughter?” Raoul offered his open hand to her. “I’m proud of you beyond words. I will be honored to care for you and protect you as a father does.”

  Pilar blinked a few times. “You never came. In all those years when I needed you, you never came for me.”

  “I’m here now. I will be here in the future.”

  Pilar had become a little acquainted with him in the past days. The dozen simple words seemed to convince her more than a long speech and six or seven promises would have. She slid a leather cord with the amulet out from under her coat and lifted it to go over her head. “I said I would return this to you when I was finished with the vow to—”

  “Keep it.” Raoul took the amulet in his hand and looked down at it. “It’s been worn by the Deverney heir for many years. We’ll let it pass in the female line for a while. It’s made a choice.”

  “I am a Deverney,” she said slowly.

  “You are Pilar Deverney, latest in a long line of Deverneys. My daughter. You will add luster to the reputation of our house. Never doubt it.”

  Pilar took the amulet back and for an instant her fingers closed around Raoul’s. The significance of the moment rang like a bell.

  “We’ve been a colorful collection down through the years,” Raoul said. “I’ll tell you the stories. You have a lot to catch up on.” The colonel had been providing an annoying background noise, trying to get past Papa toward Carlington House where he would—she didn’t know what—hide in his study? He was going to be a difficulty and an embarrassment to everybody. There’d be more treason and murder to uncover before this was done. Did the son of a baron get sent to the Tower or to Newgate to keep O’Grady company? She’d never thought much about it.

  “The child’s a lunatic,” the colonel barked. “Dressed like that, of course she’s mad. You can’t believe anything she says. The Spanish woman was mad too. Nothing to do with me.” He didn’t meet anybody’s eyes. “I have important people to talk to. I have to go. I—”<
br />
  Gunshot cracked. Very close. She ducked and spun around. Nothing out of place. Raoul snapped Pilar against his chest and looked for the shooter’s direction. Papa and Hawker didn’t move at all.

  The deafening noise carved a silence around it. The colonel stopped in mid-harangue. He had not yet fallen, but he was dead. He touched the jagged red tear in the middle of his chest, looked confused, and crumpled to the ground.

  Into the silence the coachman said, “Oh damn.”

  Hawker muttered distinctly, “Another corpse. What is it about today?”

  Robin backed away from the colonel’s body, the emptied gun slowly lowering in his hold. Softly, clumsily, he sank to the curb. He laid the gun down carefully next to him. He put his head in his hands. Every time he lifted his head he saw the colonel sprawled out on the pavement and looked sick.

  Raoul turned Pilar so she wasn’t looking at the body and began talking to her, quickly, in a low voice. “. . . as dead as anyone could wish. And by the hand of his nephew. It is fitting.”

  She could count the seconds before housemaids would come running out to take part in this event. Daylight murder was usually well attended. She walked to put a hand on Raoul’s shoulder and on Pilar’s. She said, “We must leave. Pilar, you should not become part of this. Do you want to see his body? The colonel’s body? Or I can take you away from this altogether.”

  “I will look at him,” Pilar said in a small voice, very stiff and determined.

  Raoul put his arm around Pilar and took her to view her vengeance. The two of them contemplated this outcome, side by side, becoming father and daughter.

  In architectural crannies up and down the street the sound of birds started again. Hawker and Papa stood over the body, heads together, conferring on technical details. Then Hawker glanced up at the Carlington coachman. He said, “You’re . . . ?”

  “Jeffers, sir.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  That was when Jeffers exhibited the sense of wily self-preservation that is the birthright of every freeborn Englishman. “Not a thing, sir.”

  “Excellent. You keep doing that. In case anyone asks, Colonel Carlington was putting the coach pistol into the coach before his journey. It went off and shot him straight through the heart.”

  “That it did. A turrible h’accident, sir. Very sad.”

  “Very.”

  In his place on the curb Robin had begun speaking in a random, disjointed way. He wasn’t speaking to her or answering a question. It was only words coming out. “I had no choice. He would have destroyed us all. He wouldn’t leave England. He would have gone to trial and lied and everything would have come out.” Robin’s mouth twisted in a sort of smile. “At least he doesn’t have to go live among foreigners. He would have hated that.”

  It seemed a suitable epitaph for Colonel Carlington.

  Hawker left the colonel’s body in Papa’s charge and joined them. He knelt in the street so his eyes were level with Robin’s. “The colonel was a fool to come after Séverine. Why did he do that, by the way?”

  “She knew about the amulet.” Robin’s eyes shifted. Pilar was wearing the Deverney heirloom. “Ugly thing, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Hawker agreed.

  “That’s the heart of it all. My uncle was a fool. And O’Grady was a lumpish, violent fool.”

  “Tell me about it.” Hawker sat more comfortably.

  “You know about the treason,” Robin said dully.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I thought you did. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know everything.”

  “We try.”

  Servants were dribbling back out of the house into the street to gather around the colonel’s dead body, making a great deal of noise and waiting for somebody to give orders. Papa obliged. He told them to stand back and keep out of everybody’s way.

  “O’Grady was the colonel’s sergeant in Spain? Right?” Hawker sounded only mildly curious.

  “It was O’Grady from the beginning. He found the French spies. He used the amulet to carry the location of the next arms shipment to the French and to carry the payment back. This is his fault.”

  “It does sound like that. Then he misplaced the amulet. How?” Hawker prompted.

  “He got his pocket picked. Knowing what I do of O’Grady, it was probably in a brothel. That was when my uncle realized the amulet could be traced to him.”

  “That’s when my Sévie gets involved. Between a pickpocket and a brothel. Here. Use this.” Hawker shook out a handkerchief and gave it to Robin. Tiny specks of blood had hit Robin’s hand from when he fired.

  Robin wiped the red speckling off with a sort of blank distaste, as if he couldn’t imagine how it got there. “One person knew. It was ‘your Sévie,’ as you call her. She must have been very young. She was working for Military Intelligence in Spain. She saw the amulet in some army camp and sent it to the quartermaster. To my uncle. She was the only person who could tie the amulet to him.”

  She didn’t want to interrupt Hawker when he was getting information out of Robin, but that was wrong. “A dozen men were there that night. They saw better than I did.”

  “I think they’re dead.” Robin wiped his hands again on the linen square and let it drop to the cobbles. “I think my uncle sent them as guards with convoys that were ambushed. I suppose you could say he murdered them.”

  “I’d call it that,” Hawker murmured. “The army takes a dim view of that sort of thing.”

  She faced a scene in the street with a sprawled, bloody figure in the foreground. Years of war and the casual violence of the rookeries had not dulled the edge of her dislike of such things. But that man, that colonel who lived in this expensive mansion and wanted for nothing, had killed so many men. So coldly. It’s a just ending. More merciful than he deserves.

  Robin plodded painfully on. “My uncle didn’t find his woman spy for years. When he finally found out who she was, the war was long over. And the amulet had never turned up. Gone forever, he thought. He didn’t go after her.”

  “A lucky escape for Séverine,” Hawker said.

  None of her unfinished business from Spain had come hunting her with guns. She should be grateful, she supposed.

  Pilar, having looked well and long at the colonel’s dead body, came to listen to what the living Carlington had to say. Sometimes she murmured a word to Raoul. The overlarge boys’ clothing she wore hung in folds around her like some ceremonial costume. It was because she stood very straight.

  Robin didn’t pick up Hawker’s handkerchief from the ground. He hunted one out of a pocket in his coat. “Then, about six months ago, that Spanish whore found him.” His hands trembled when he wiped his nose. “And blackmailed him.”

  “My mother,” Pilar murmured dangerously.

  Hawker said, “The colonel and O’Grady killed Sanchia Deverney?”

  “They went there to talk to her. Just talk. I don’t know how she died. An accident. I don’t know.” Robin licked his lips. “I didn’t know about any of this.”

  “You lie,” Pilar said.

  “Comprehensively,” Hawker said. “But he wasn’t there when they did it. Think about his voice. Did you hear him?”

  Reluctantly, “No.”

  “Then we must remove that from the list of charges.”

  A shrug from Pilar. “As you say.”

  “They sent me to Séverine.”

  The they he spoke of must be the Carlington family. Robin was not the only one involved in this.

  Robin spoke without any animation in his voice. He still hadn’t looked at her. “They told me to get you out of England. ‘Marry her,’ they said. ‘She’s rich. Take her and go live on the Continent.’ They said, ‘If that doesn’t work, ruin her and she’ll leave on her own.’ We both know what came of that.”

  Raoul looked
like a man pondering carefully nuanced reprisals.

  Hawker did, too, though he was less obvious about it. “As you have discovered, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot make Sévie do what she doesn’t wish to. Tell me about Wellington.”

  “I didn’t know what they were planning. I had nothing to do with it.”

  Hawker said, “Wellington’s studying army transport records from the Peninsula. He’s going to expose some fools.”

  “Somebody wanted Sévie dead last night,” Raoul said. “Is that something else you had nothing to do with?”

  “None of this is my fault. I did what I could. I warned her.” Robin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “O’Grady made a bomb. He was going to leave it in her office.

  “I poured out most of the gunpowder and packed it with flour. I figured it’d scare you out of London.” Abruptly, Robin ran out of things to say. He lowered his head into his hands and hunched up tight.

  • • •

  PAPA had already left, on his way to give the newspapers the information they needed and deserved. Hawker grabbed the nearest of the milling servants, who turned out to be the butler. “You. Yes, you.” Hawker snapped his fingers. “Look at me. That’s right. Now, I’m leaving. This is your problem. Get the body off the street. Send to the magistrate and tell him the colonel shot himself accidentally as he was getting into the carriage. And take that”—he indicated Robin, who was rocking himself back and forth—“inside and put him to bed. Don’t let him talk to anybody. Don’t let the magistrate question him. He’s taken some strange notions into his head about this accident. Find the baron and tell him to be quiet too. That’s it. You understand?”

  She walked off with Hawker, leaving the butler doing none of those sensible things but just standing and staring around.

  Hawker said, “This ties everything up nicely. I like that.”

  “I’m fond of neat endings,” she said, “though not of dead men on the pavement.”

  “I don’t know what it is about you, Sévie. Kingdoms have changed hands with less bloodshed than I’m encountering lately.”