Jo Graham - [Numinous World 05]

by The Emperor's Agent (epub)

  "I am Madame St. Elme," I said, "A friend of Major Corbineau's, who introduced us just the other day. I have a terrible problem, and I am hoping that you might be able to help me."

  "I shall do my humble best, Madame," he said, blinking. Men did, when they first put me and Charles together.

  "I need you to lift me up to that window right there. I'm locked out of my lodging, you see. If you might be so kind?"

  Reille blinked again. "If it is necessary, Madame. But could you not use the door?"

  "Not dressed like this," I said. "Not without a scandal. Could you please help me, General?"

  "I suppose," he said, and followed me around the flowerbed to the side of the house.

  "If you can just boost me up," I said.

  "I think it will be better if you remove your boots and climb on my back," he said. "And then I will stand and you can reach the windowsill."

  "Probably so." I shucked my boots and stockings and climbed up.

  Which was where I was when the landlady and Jerome came around the house.

  Of course there was great hue and cry, shouting and explanations, complaints that the gendarmes should be called and remonstrances of all sorts, culminating in my eviction with all my goods from the lodging and dire words about women like me who gave the entire fair sex a bad name, along with insults heaped on Reille's head, not to mention most of my baggage.

  And thus we stood in the street again.

  "Where would you like me to put these?" He gestured with my saddlebags, now draped over his arms.

  "In Colonel Subervie's office," I said, now both hot and irritated. "I'm going to have to talk to him about finding different lodgings anyhow."

  "Oh you're with Subervie!" He looked as though something had suddenly clicked for him, warm brown eyes looking me over more closely. "Now I see. You must be the lady he mentioned."

  "I must be," I said coquettishly. I had no idea what lady or ladies Subervie might have, but I needed somewhere to stay that was neither in Michel's lap or chaperoning me as though I were a schoolgirl. This was getting ridiculous.

  "Perhaps we should go find him then," Reille said, and we set off through the town.

  Subervie was in his office, which I found a bit surprising. "Did you not have an exercise this morning?" I asked as I entered.

  Subervie looked up from the papers on his desk. "It was the shortest battle I've ever seen. We were dead practically the moment we engaged, and Honoré just wiped us up." He glanced at Reille, who was holding my saddlebags. "Good fight, but Jesus, we were terrible today!"

  "I've never heard of 'just charge everything with no regard for losses' as a strategy before," Reille said. "Marshal Ney was not playing a winning game this morning."

  "Yes, well," Subervie grumbled. "We know Xenophon lost. But not in two hours. I was back here by lunchtime." He glanced up at my red face. "So what's the difficulty with your lodging, Madame?'

  "I've been thrown out of it," I said, thinking that I must have rattled Michel seriously for him to blow the battle so spectacularly. "Colonel, I need somewhere that I can come and go at night."

  Reille looked from one of us to the other. We were not talking like lovers. "I thought you said you were with Subervie?"

  "No, I said I needed to find Colonel Subervie," I said.

  Subervie was the one to blush now, his fair skin turning pink. "No, Madame is here with Marshal Lannes. I was merely assisting her in the matter of her lodgings!'

  "Oh!" Reille said, seeming to relax. Presumably he knew Subervie's wife and small son, and was relieved to find out that I was not Subervie's mistress. Lannes' mistress was a different story. Subordinates might be run about tending to a marshal's mistress anytime. "Then I'll just leave your things here?'

  "That's fine," I said. "Thank you."

  Reille left, and Subervie shut the door behind him.

  "I have to be able to go in and out at all times of the day, dressed in any way," I said by way of explanation. "Not being able to leave the house at night is very respectable, but I'm not here to be respectable! I'm here to catch a spy. And I'd like to get some information from you about Lion, if I may."

  Subervie sighed and sat back down at his desk, gesturing for me to join him. I sat and accepted some coffee, though I did not take a pipe. "Lion," he said, "is a thorn in our side. Marshal Lannes and I are certain that it is through Lion that our plans are leaking to London, but we have never been able to figure out how. The patrols along the beach road are spaced fifteen minutes apart. It would take nearly twice that time for a boat to get ashore under the best conditions, if the tide were in and the sea calm at once. The coast is very rocky there, and Lion can't stand in very far. It's not like it is further south along the coast, where there are broader sandy beaches and it's mostly a sandy bottom."

  "Could they be coming in further south?" I asked.

  Subervie nodded. "It's certainly possible. The problem becomes the distance from Boulogne and the difficulty of getting to the beach. That area is marshland, and there are no roads, only tracks through the marsh that are submerged at high tide. Someone who knew the area could do it, but it would take them more than half the day or night to get from Boulogne out to the beach, and so much back. Which seems to me to preclude the frequency of correspondence that we know about."

  "I see," I said. One of the officers at headquarters could hardly vanish for a full day several times a week without anyone noticing. "And do the patrols continue in bad weather as well as fair?"

  Subervie nodded. "In all weather, and all through the winter. We think that perhaps the correspondence is more frequent in good weather, but that's easy to explain. I've been here through the gales of winter, and there are weeks when I should not like to try to get a small boat ashore, except within the shelter of the harbor of Boulogne."

  "And what about the harbor?" I said. "Any chance of that?"

  Subervie shook his head. "Nothing goes out now, not even fishing boats leaving sight of shore. We're blockaded by the Channel Fleet, essentially. Unless our fleet can draw them off, we can't launch the invasion. That's why it didn't happen last fall. We couldn't get control of the sea for 48 hours."

  I nodded solemnly, thinking about what Lannes had said about not only mastery of the sea, but of the elements. Perhaps what we needed was not even so much to breach those wooden walls as to breach more ethereal ones that surrounded Britain. "And when we do?" I asked.

  "We go," Subervie said.

  Instead of a respectable boarding house in town, Subervie found lodging for me in a cottage a short distance outside the walls, an older house that was not nearly so convenient for the wives of officers, and I expected priced above the pockets of the families of the enlisted men. Here, as everywhere there was a camp, prices rose as the local people took advantage of the unexpected bounty, and charged what the market would bear. I disapproved of this, of everything from lodging to food going for four times what it was worth, because the burden sat most heavily on the families of the ordinary soldiers who had the least to spend. I thought that it would be fair to sell things for only twice the going price, and not try to gouge every sou.

  There was a woman who came in and cleaned, and who for an additional fee would provide one meal a day, which suited me well. Subervie implied heavily that I was a famous actress, the lover of a very distinguished man, who wanted to keep me in a private love-nest. I thought he stretched the point a bit, but it did at least give me a certain amount of privacy, as well as assuring that comings and goings at strange hours would be excused as assignations.

  He helped me move my things in, for which I was grateful, but as he left he turned. "Oh, I nearly forgot! Madame, Marshal Lannes requests that you be available night after next, for the ritual."

  "You are part of this too?" I asked, taking a deep breath. I should not be surprised, as Lannes seemed to trust Subervie in everything. "I see. It is to be day after tomorrow, then."

  "We usually meet on Tuesday night. Sometimes m
ore often when it's needed, but it's hard for so many of us to coordinate schedules," Subervie replied.

  "How many of them are you?"

  "Ten or so," he said. "More like sixteen, but some of us aren't assigned to the Army of Coasts of Ocean, and so only come when they can. We'll expect ten or eleven on Tuesday."

  "I see," I said again.

  Subervie's eyes were kind. "Madame, please do not let it distress you so. We are not ogres, and I do not think what we will ask of you is very hard."

  "I hope not," I said. "I am not very practiced, and I tell you frankly that it terrifies me."

  Subervie put his hand on my arm. "It’s really mostly dull. We try to get something, and sometimes we think we might and most of the time we don't. It's a lot like riding patrol, really. Most of the time you just go back and forth bored to death."

  I smiled at him. "If that is how it is, it doesn't sound so bad."

  "It isn't, Madame," he said. "Thus far none of us has sustained any injury worse than a stiff neck from sitting so long."

  "I will bear that in mind," I said, and saw him off. I thought, after he was gone, that it had been very kind of him to try to allay my fears.

  Tuesday was a beautiful day, hot and clear, with the sky a lambent shade of blue. To my surprise, however, the sea remained high. It crashed against the rocks with formidable waves, and though the wind was fair Lion labored down the coast, rising and falling on the heavy seas. I walked along the cliffs by day, hoping to find something of note, some clue that would help, but of course I did not. Only in novels does the heroine go for a walk along the cliffs and effortlessly stumble into the very clue which has eluded our heroes for most of the book! I found nothing and learned nothing except what I knew before: that our patrols were thorough and punctual. Certainly in fair weather it would be impossible to get a boat ashore by day. It could be seen for many miles.

  Thus it was with certain frustration that I reported as ordered at seven in the evening at the old castle in Boulogne. Unlike many other castles, the ancient citadel of Boulogne had been modernized in the last century, and its courtyard showed it. It might have a moat and drawbridge, but the windows could not have been thirty years old, clear paned and tight against the winds that must challenge them in winter, while the fireplaces and other appointments were modern and tasteful.

  As Lannes had directed, I had not eaten, and Subervie was waiting for me when I arrived. "Come up," he said quietly, "and meet the other gentlemen. We will be using a parlor upstairs, and no doubt you will want to talk to Marshal Lannes and get situated."

  I glanced back at the silent grenadiers who had stopped me at the gatehouse. "What do they think is happening?"

  "Senior staff meeting. Not to be disturbed except in direst emergency." Subervie winked at me. "There are some perks to being a Marshal of France, after all!"

  The room above must at most times be used as a conference room, for two men were moving a huge carved table from the center of the room off to the side. The draperies over the windows along the courtyard side had already been drawn and the room was stuffy. Four tall brass candlestands had been brought in, the sort that grace churches, and were off to the side, unlit white candles as thick as my forearm on each.

  One of the men moving the table looked up and gave me a smile. "Good evening, Madame." It was Reille, the young brigadier who had proved so helpful in the matter of my landlady. I supposed I should not have been surprised to see him. Still, his presence was not necessarily reassuring. He was the only officer so far for whom I had found any motive to treason -- a brother-in-law sent to the guillotine, a matter of family honor against the Minister of Police. It was a thin lead, but so far the only one I had.

  I nodded pleasantly to him as Marshal Lannes came over. "Good evening," he said. "Are you ready?"

  "I will be," I said. "Can you tell me what we are doing?" I refrained from saying that I had never worked with a legitimate lodge before, only Lebrun's fake one, and my knowledge of procedure was likely to be spotty.

  Lannes took me aside, steering me out of the way of a man I did not know carrying one of the candlestands. "We'll open the lodge as we usually do. You have no part in that, so just stand still and quiet. We'll ward for protection very strongly. Again, you do not have to do anything. And then we'll get to you."

  "A blackened mirror?" I asked, recalling Lebrun's operations, and hoping I sounded professional and unflustered.

  "Yes," Lannes said. "Unless there is some technique you prefer."

  I shook my head. "That is what I have used before."

  "Good." He nodded approvingly. "Then we'll try to get a look at what we're dealing with, what our opposition is doing."

  "Opposition?"

  Lannes gave me a rueful smile. "Did you think that we are the only ones who use such techniques, Madame? Standing against us are the witches of England, and they have no small power. They laid low the Spanish Armada in days past. It is no little feat to call a hurricane into the Channel, to drive the pride of Spain into wrecks on the rocks, or into Drake's fireships. Their witches are as good as their navy, Madame."

  I blinked. "Surely the witches of England are not sanctioned by Mr. Pitt's government!" The idea of that Tory Prime Minister consorting with witches was ludicrous.

  "Of course not," Lannes said. "But do you think that means they do not fight? The witches of England fight for a government that outlaws their existence, but fight they do. We cannot launch the invasion when wind and waves themselves conspire against us. We have been here almost two years, waiting for the confluence of tide and weather, for their navy to be distracted or called away, for the favorable moment for a crossing. We can embark 64,000 men in an hour and a half and we can be over in seven hours. But we must have those seven hours, and the guardians they have called do not sleep."

  "The guardians they have called?"

  Lannes sighed, though his face was patient, the look of a man who wishes he didn't have to explain things that doubtless everyone more qualified would know. "When you have worked before, have you called elemental guardians?"

  "You mean to the circle?" I nodded. "We called maidens of the elements, Spirit of Air, Spirit of Fire, et cetera, with each one voiced by a girl."

  "That's the mildest form of what I mean," Lannes said. "The Spirits of the Elements are very minor visualizations of elemental power, candy-bright, suitable for pretty engravings. But the true elementals are much different. Imagine if you can the power of elemental fire."

  I bent my head. I had felt something like it once, I thought, when we had done the angelic possession. "I see," I said.

  "But you're not going to be tangling with any elementals they've called," Lannes said. "You're just going to scout. Like a good cavalry screen, your job is to see what you can see and get back with word, not engage any superior forces."

  "I understand," I said. I did. It meant there was a good chance there would be superior forces, and I should have to employ that time-tested technique of light cavalry, running away. Best not to ask what failing to get back with the word entailed.

  I looked past Lannes' shoulder just in time to see Corbineau coming in, his hat in his hand, a broad smile on his face as he saw me. Perhaps he would have rushed up, if I hadn't been talking to a marshal.

  "We're going to go change in a bit," Lannes said. "You can have the room to yourself after we're done." M. Noirtier was trying to get his attention and he hurried off before I could ask him what I was to change into. I had not brought a special chemise with me, like the ones I had worn for Lebrun long ago, but I supposed I could wear my regular one if they did not have a robe or such I could borrow. I would ask him about it later, when he was not so busy.

  I went and embraced Corbineau instead, tremendously relieved to see him. "Jean-Baptiste, I should have known this was the mysterious thing you were talking about!"

  "Wasn't it the one you were talking about?" he asked.

  "I'm terribly sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to put
you in such a mess the other morning. It was very inconsiderate of me. I promise you that I don't usually do such things. I hope you haven't gotten in too much trouble."

  Corbineau shrugged. "Not so much. In fact, none. You would think that it never happened at all! Did you and the Marshal have a good talk?" He looked at me speculatively.

  "No," I said. "Jean-Baptiste, you know it's over between us. Over. It's awkward and painful, and I hope that we do not run into one another again."

  He opened his mouth, but I had already seen past him, appearing like a bad stage ghost right on cue. Michel came in, stopping to talk to someone just inside the door.

  "Oh shit," I said. I grabbed Corbineau by the arm. "Why didn't you tell me Michel was involved with this?"

  "I didn't tell you I was involved with this," Corbineau protested. "I couldn't. It's secret. That means we don't run around telling all our friends."

  "Not even when…."

  "Not even when what?"

  "When Michel is going to kill you," I finished. Michel looked up from his conversation and saw me standing with Corbineau, and I saw the thought as clearly as if he'd spoken. He was going to kill Corbineau.

  Corbineau spun around as his fate approached. "Sir! Good evening!"

  Michel did not even look at him. "Lannes' Dove," he said.

  "Hello, Michel," I said.

  Michel frowned. "I wish you'd told me that you'd be here."

  "How could I do that?" I asked. "I didn't know you'd be here."

  "I'm the Ground. I have to be here."

  As though whatever that was made sense to me. "Well, I'm the Dove, and I have to be here too." If he wanted to leave he certainly could, but Lannes had made it clear that I couldn't.

  Corbineau was backing away silently, hoping nobody would notice him.

  "I had no idea…" Michel began.

  On the other side of the room, Lannes raised his hands. "Gentlemen, can we get started please? If you have not yet changed, please go and do it so our Dove can have the room by herself."

  Michel looked as though he wanted to swear.