“I’m not surprised.” And she wasn’t. She had seen him gather the Cachés around him and transform them into a band of brothers and sisters.
Her uncle, with almost visible reluctance, went on. “He is an assassin, Sara. He has killed many times. There is an emptiness in the soul of such men.” Uncle Bernardo paused. “What is he to you?”
Pax gave no sign he was being discussed in this depth. He stood in that relaxed fighter’s stance that meant he might pull out his watch and consult it for the exact time or he might attack, without warning, in any direction. He had his hand negligently on his knife and was exactly one lunge from Uncle Bernardo’s waistcoat buttons. He was also keeping an eye on her cousins. Who could blame him?
She said, “He is a friend.”
“Friend” was wholly inadequate to describe Pax. He was bastion, shield, and implacable protection. He was a friend as a stone castle is a house.
“Baldoni use the word ‘friend’ carefully,” Bernardo said. “It is an obligation second only to family. We do not—”
“I understand what that means.” It is at such moments one chooses loyalties.
“Whatever this Paxton has been to you—”
“You cannot imagine what he has been to me, Uncle Bernardo. When I was alone in Paris, without family, abandoned—”
“The family never abandoned you. It was Francesco. Only Francesco pursued your father.”
“Vendetta.”
“Not vendetta. Never vendetta. My child . . . My child . . . Cesare sent your father into exile to prevent a bloodbath that would have destroyed us all. Francesco acted in evil madness, in unforgivable betrayal.” Uncle Bernardo was pale, breathing heavily, his voice harsh with suppressed anger and pain. “When you knocked on the gates and begged for help, every Baldoni was gone from Paris. Francesco sent lying words to you. Lies. An hour later he hanged himself inside the house.”
Pax said, “She was a child. She was alone. With all the resources of the Baldoni, you didn’t find her.”
“We shook that city like a rug, street by street. A dozen of us, for weeks.”
“You didn’t find her,” Pax said.
“For which there will never be sufficient recompense.”
“Then pay her back now,” Pax said. “She doesn’t need a hearty convivial dinner or more cousins with babies. She needs . . .” He faced her. “What do you need, Cami?”
She started with the blackmail letter delivered in Brodemere and ended with the address on Semple Street. Some secrets—the Mandarin Code, the Fluffy Aunts’ profession—she omitted.
Tonio and the cousins returned and drew in close, listening.
She ended with, “If I can’t find where the Merchant has hidden Camille Besançon and free her, I will walk alone on Semple Street into the hands of the Merchant. With your help, I am hoping to do that and still live.” She looked from one face to the other. They were so intent, so eager, she could smile.
“I’d like to kill the Merchant.” Giomar said that. “I’d like to be the man who did that.”
“You will be the man who holds the horses. I’ll do the killing.” Tonio suddenly didn’t look much older than when she’d known him in Tuscany.
Pax, in a voice of calm reason, said, “The kill is mine. My choice whether he lives or dies. This is not open to debate.”
They were all speaking Tuscan. This, in itself, was an incitement to extremity. From the Medici onward, she could not begin to imagine the number of murders that had been planned in that language.
Cousin Alessandro suggested drawing cards for the privilege.
Pax cut him off. “The British Service wants him taken alive. That’s a good deal harder than just shooting him.”
Tonio grinned, all but rubbing his hands together. “This sounds like fun.”
“We do not undertake a hazardous game because it is ‘fun.’” Under half-closed lids, Bernardo regarded Pax, then her. “Nor do the Baldoni annoy the British Service unnecessarily. So long as someone destroys the Merchant it does not matter which hand holds the knife. Cami, let us come inside and you will tell us your exact plans. Mr. Paxton, join us. Perhaps you will feel safe in drinking wine with us this time, having been declared a friend.”
Thirty
If you do not have the rope to hold your ass, do not weave a halter to catch him.
A BALDONI SAYING
Mayfair belonged to the decorous, well-groomed rich and their deferential servants. The City of London was public buildings, the mint, the great banking houses, and many boring, self-important men.
Soho was considerably livelier. It housed most of the French of the city, rich and poor, royalist and radical, a congregation of every sort and condition of French humanity. If the Merchant wanted to be inconspicuous, this was where he’d come.
Cami visited Soho Square when she was in London with the Fluffy Aunts. This was another neighborhood of bookshops, Italian and French. It occurred to her, as she walked past familiar shops and cafés, that she knew London chiefly by its bookshops.
Pax walked beside her. He slid his thumb along the brim of his hat, turning it downward a fraction of an inch, perfecting his disguise. He’d made himself look entirely French, somehow, by putting on an artist’s neckerchief and a faint smell of turpentine. He carried a large sketchbook—borrowed from her cousin Maria—against his chest.
The half-pleasant, half-uneasy buzz of desiring hadn’t left her. If anything, it was growing stronger as they went about this workaday task together. He distracted her. Part of her attention was stuck to him like glue, pulling significance from every ordinary gesture. She looked at his careful, clever fingers wrapped around the book and wanted them on her skin.
“You should dye your hair darker,” she said.
“I will in a bit, when I get back to Meeks Street.”
“My cousin Maria would have done it for you. She’s good at things like that.” After a minute she added, “You’re safe with my family.”
He made a noncommittal noise.
Perhaps he had a point. She’d eaten the piccolo convivio with her family, reveling in cheeses, fine olives, and bread pulled quickly from the iron pan on the coals of the hearth. But she’d taken her wine from the bottle Pax drank from and made sure nobody slipped anything in his soup.
She trusted her family implicitly. She simply didn’t trust them with Pax.
She said, “It’s only for these next two days. After that you won’t have to meet them again. When I finish dealing with the Merchant, I intend to run from England like a scalded cat.”
“To a desert island with coconuts?”
“To Tuscany.” She supposed she was happy to be going home. The thought of leaving England—and Pax—was a squirming bundle of worries and hopes and fears. She didn’t even try to sort it out. She just carried it around with her and took it out now and then to shake her head over it.
Here was another hat shop. The sixteenth hat shop. She was keeping count. “Two minutes,” she said and accepted the sketchbook from his hand and ducked inside.
Pax watched her through the plate glass window while she opened his sketchbook to the milliner’s assistant, the milliner, and two women from the back of the shop. He’d drawn Camille Besançon’s hat right down to the last cherry from her description.
But—No. Not their work. No one had seen one like it. No one knew who’d made it. Sorry.
They were also unacquainted with the Merchant and the Merchant’s henchman when she flipped over the next page and the next and showed those sketches.
Back on the street, she shrugged. “I wish they wouldn’t try to sell me bonnets. I’d never noticed how many hideous hats there are in London. She says there’s a milliner’s in the next street.”
“We’ll head that way, then.”
They walked on, side-by-side, studying every face they passed. She said, “There are more hat shops in Soho than I would have guessed.”
“It always seems that way, whatever you’re
looking for. I once carried a bit of cake around Vienna, trying to find who made it. Lots of pastry shops in Vienna.”
“If this is being a spy, I’m glad I gave up the work. It’s boring.”
“This is being a spy,” Pax said.
He was a spy, honed by years in the mountains of her homeland, killing men and avoiding the French army. He looked particularly harmless when carrying a sketchbook.
She’d have Pax with her when she went to meet the Merchant. The knot in her stomach loosened a little, remembering that.
There were plenty of Frenchmen to look at in Soho, men washed ashore by the Revolution and the wars. Old Frenchmen wearing wigs and shabby brocade coats from the Old Regime. Young Frenchmen wearing the sober black and long hair of the French radicals. None of them were the Frenchmen she needed, however.
“The man has to be in Soho.” She wasn’t trying to convince Pax. She was coercing the world into doing her bidding. “Soho is close to Semple Street. Close enough to the church in Fetter Lane. Everything fits. Everything about Soho makes sense.”
“A good reason for him to be elsewhere.”
“I know.” She felt grumpy about this truth.
They turned the corner, both of them taking the opportunity to assess the streets in every direction. They were still being followed by the street rats who belonged to Lazarus. One of her cousins—young Lucia—had attached herself to them when they left the Baldoni kitchen. It was considered good training for the young to follow a friendly family member about the streets. The dark-haired man, Pax’s friend, brought up the rear, insolent and open about it.
Pax took the sketchbook into the next tavern while she inspected the tiny shop window next door. Behind dusty glass, it displayed many shades of silk thread. She thought about the supply needs of a small band of murderous Frenchmen based in Soho. It made a sort of grid pattern in her mind, relating importance and frequency. Wine was near the top left. A hat with cherries on it was relegated to the bottom right. Small corners of speculation and conclusion filled her brain. Pax, in the taverns, had more chance of success than she did.
From time to time she half turned to the street, taking inventory of the pack that kept an eye on her, studying the faces of men going past.
She was seen in return.
A man driving a one-horse cart suddenly dropped the reins, vaulted down to the street, and ran. She caught the flash of movement but not one single impression of his face. If he’d kept driving and looked away from her, she wouldn’t have noticed him at all.
Too short and stocky to be the Merchant. It had to be one of his French minions. Someone who’d seen her and knew her.
She dove into the street, offending the horses of an oncoming carriage, already startled by the Merchant’s henchman running under their noses, already clattering and snorting, dancing in the traces. A man on horseback skittered sideways and snarled words she didn’t catch.
She dodged all that. Followed an outraged shout ahead of her, wove past one dark coat and another. Her quarry looked back over his shoulder and now she recognized him. It was the man of large ears and poorly cropped hair that she’d tracked from one Soho tavern to another. The man the Merchant had set to following her.
A second chance at him. A second chance at everything he knew if she could catch him, bring him down, question him.
Thirty feet ahead, he shoved a woman aside. Her companion—a stocky, pugnacious middle-aged fellow—objected. Grabbed him. The two men grappled back and forth across the pavement. Then the henchman kicked out and hit groin. Broke loose and plunged ahead.
She ran after him, dodging the idiots who blocked her way. Too many of them—
Somebody yelled, “He’s got a gun!”
Men scrambled back. A space opened in front of her. The Frenchman held a pistol in his outstretched hand. Raised it.
Hard muscle crashed into her. Knocked her sideways, stumbling, off balance. The pistol fired with a huge crack and a flash of light.
For an instant, everything was eerily silent.
Pax’s body crushed her to a rough brick wall. His strength, his miraculous speed, had knocked her out of the line of the bullet.
His face, hard and angry, was inches away. He ran his hands over her, roughly, fast, up and down both her sides. Over the back of her neck. Looked at his hands and didn’t see blood.
One sharp nod and he was gone, running in a long stride, bent low, a spear cast through the confusion, unstoppable, headed straight for the Frenchman.
Who saw him coming, threw away the useless pistol, and drew a knife. Swung to meet Pax in a wide-legged defensive stance.
He’d have done better to run. None of these people had ever seen Pax on the sparring field of the Coach House.
Pax didn’t meet the Frenchman head-on. At the last moment of the headlong charge, Pax flipped his knife to a reverse grip, flashed past on the right, avoided a strike, and slashed the inside of the man’s forearm.
Classic Pax. That was a permanent disarm, if done right.
The Frenchman gasped and dropped his knife.
The kill stroke for that attack was an immediate upward jab to the right kidney. But Pax just raked across the jacket as he went by, leaving it slit and hanging, the shirt exposed, and a line of bleeding red across the man’s back.
From everywhere, all at once, men closed together in a circle and started shouting. One could count on the enthusiasm of the Englishman for a fight. Any fight.
She headed in, considering tactics as she went. Pax could do a kill on his own. A disable-and-capture was hard as the devil. An easy way to get killed. It needed two fighters, not one.
Slash. Slash. Pax forced the Frenchman back toward a shop front, avoiding the knife the man brought out left-handed.
Corner. Control. Disarm. We have him. She slipped between bystanders to join this endgame. When we have him, we have the Merchant.
Then some idiot hurried into the fight, squawking orders. A wide little man, well padded, waddling with importance. “See here. See here, now. There’ll be no public brawling in the streets. I am Sir Henry Clitheroe, Justice of the Peace for Roxingbury and Upper—”
Of all the fools—
Every other soul in the crowd—man, woman, beldame, and toddling baby—had sense enough to keep away from the edge of those knives. Sir Henry stepped right between Pax and the Frenchman, waving his hat as if chasing off chickens.
Was there ever a greater invitation? The Frenchman grabbed Sir Henry, pressed his knife to the flapping wattles of that chin, and backed away, dragging along the Sir Henry and all his protests.
Pax began talking in French, soft and calm. “Let him go. You haven’t hurt anyone yet. It’s easy now, because nobody’s hurt.”
She slid through the crowd, closer and closer to the Frenchman’s back. A man at the curb fretted and poked his cane in the direction of all the drama, asking everyone around him what was going on. As she passed, she appropriated the cane because it was going to come in useful.
Faster now because she used the cane to clear her path, she came in behind the Frenchman. He didn’t see her. Pax, though, did. He crossed, light-footed, left to right, edging the man between them. He made the handsignals they’d used when they fought as a team at the Coach House on the training field.
Sir Henry, bleeding from shallow cuts at his throat, threatened transportation and hanging.
She swung the cane like a club, whacking the Frenchman’s elbow. The knife jerked away, dropped, and stopped threatening that throat. Pax pulled Sir Henry—protesting, squirming, yelling—out of the way.
The crowd howled like a single animal. She jammed the cane between the Frenchman’s legs. He kicked at her and missed, kept his footing, spun, and ran into the jumbled wagons, horses, and carts of the street.
She threw the cane away and went after him. To her left, Pax ran flat out to circle around and cut him off.
And in the street a sporting rig and high-stepping pair pranced along, two whee
ls on the pavement, avoiding the brouhaha, making good time.
The Frenchman pelted out in front of them. The horses reared and came down with iron hooves and the Frenchman fell. The driver fought, pulling the reins, and the horses screamed, a terrible sound. Rose up on their haunches and came down again. Impossible to stop. Impossible to control. The light carriage rocked and tilted, about to go over.
Frantic men came to help, grabbed at the halter and straps, trying to contain the plunging, squealing carriage horses.
In the gutter, the Frenchman died without a sound. When the white-faced, terrified young driver backed his horses away from the red bundle on the street, life had been gone for a long time.
Thirty-one
A man who does not take pains in small matters is careless in great ones.
A BALDONI SAYING
“You took it from me. You stole it. Everybody saw that. Theft. Outright theft.” That was the man whose cane she’d borrowed. He talked at her from one side, then tap-tapped around to the other side and said much the same thing there.
A very dead man lay in the road. Pax stood behind her, his arms wrapped around her. He was wonderfully solid and she let herself lean back against him just the smallest amount. She would rather have been with him somewhere they weren’t looking at dead people.
Far down the street, some merciful souls had taken the horses to the street pump to wash them clean. The driver sat on the steps of a house a dozen yards away, his head in his hands. Every once in a while he’d get up and go into the alley to the side and empty his stomach.
She hoped Cousin Lucia had left. She didn’t see the girl anywhere in the circle of avid faces. Lazarus’s apprentice thieves were at the front, showing an intense, professional curiosity.
Pax’s friend, the angry, dark-haired one, knelt and searched the corpse from his hair to the soles of his boots, efficiently and with no sign of distaste. His findings—a handful of coins and two keys—were piled on the pavement at his side. The dead man hadn’t carried a scrap of paper. There was no maker’s mark in the hat that lay, brim upward, next to him.
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