Rogue Spy

by Joanna Bourne

She was no trained artist, like Pax, but she could see the likeness of blood, the resemblance between Pax and her blackmailer. There was no escaping that bond. Even the vehement denial, the rage, told her that man was, indeed, Pax’s father.

  The blackmailer and Pax, bound together inextricably. “The man who lived with your mother is the Merchant.”

  “That’s one of his names.” Pax didn’t let go. She heard his breath rasp in and out of his chest. “The Merchant of Shadows. For what he did to my mother, I’m going to kill him.”

  Thirty-three

  For advice, go to your oldest friend.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  A house like Daisy’s didn’t attract much general notice. The neighbors deplored it and were avidly curious, but did no more than grumble. Daisy did her shopping for the house up and down these streets close by and confined the noise in the evening to a dull roar. When they weren’t working, her women looked like anyone else. They didn’t go onto the streets without hat and gloves, respectably dressed. The watchman and the beadle got their accustomed bribes. Lazarus collected his pence. Everyone knew she had powerful protectors. The house was tolerated.

  Hawker followed Daisy up the stairs to the second floor, along walls painted pale yellow. There was soft carpet underfoot and a statue of goddesses getting up to some naughtiness at the turn of the stairs.

  “I’ll show the sketches to the rest of the girls, but they haven’t been here,” Daisy said.

  “Wouldn’t think so. They’re what we might call unappreciative of the finer things in life. Not your style.”

  “Which is an excellent style, these days.” Daisy ran her hand along the banister. “Véronique will ask here and there, with the sketches. The Frenchwomen in the trade have their own little society, close as inkle weavers.”

  “That’s companionable.” He climbed a bit more. “You got a new girl.”

  “Sally. She’s going to be Selene in the house.”

  “Who left?”

  “Annie. She’s gone back to the wilds of Ireland to marry into the gentry. ‘To marry above myself,’ as she put it.” At the turning of the stair, Daisy looked over her shoulder to grin. “God help the man she has in her sights.”

  “Poor cove don’t ’ave a chance.”

  He checked for worn carpet, for handprints on the wall, chips in the mopboard, the smell of cabbage or stale perfume. Not that he needed to worry. Everything at Daisy’s, from door knocker to attic, was prime, clean, orderly, and sweet. The whores, too.

  “She’ll make a good wife,” Daisy said.

  “She’s had lots of practice, anyway.”

  “I like the woman Paxton brought. Interesting to talk to. She said she’d send us her cousins, which is not what we hear from most of the guests.”

  He made one of those noises that don’t mean anything in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Cami Leyland. She was another of those deadly women who could turn on a man at any moment. Pax wasn’t seeing that.

  Daisy’s room was at the end of the hall and locked, because she wasn’t an idiot. She found the key, opened it. When they were inside and less apt to be overheard, she said, “You move like something’s broken. Your ribs? Or something wrong with your arm?”

  Trust Daisy to see that. “Nothing much.” He eased his coat off and let it drop on the table beside the door, the way he always did. There was a pair of those fussy china dogs she set such store by on the table, yapping at each other for all time to come.

  She said, “Show me.”

  “I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”

  “Then stop using those black knives of yours to shave. Show me.”

  “It’s practically healed.” Because she wouldn’t let him be till she saw the wound, he untied his cravat and began unwinding.

  “Let me do that.” She brushed his hands away and took over. She didn’t stop at the cravat. The waistcoat was next to go, unbuttoned down from the top. Took only a second and she was pulling that off. Daisy had lots of practice undressing men.

  Three buttons at the neck and she had his shirt open. Push the shirt aside and the bullet wound was revealed in all its ugly glory.

  Not a sound from her, but her face froze.

  “I told you it weren’t much. A professional hazard, you might say. And it’s healing.” He’d taken a long inspection in the mirror this morning when he unbandaged and tossed out the wrappings for good. The swelling and pinkness on his chest was about gone. There was none of that disgusting exudate everybody kept deploring. Its absence was fine with him. He owned a coin-sized red mark with some scar radiating out, like a little red sun. “I feel very manly and professional. All my cohorts have impressive scars. Now I do, too.”

  Daisy left her hand on his collarbone, not touching the wound but lifting the shirt away from his skin so she could see. “I can see it hurts you from the way you move.”

  “Tortures of the damned, that’s what I’m suffering. I’m just being stoical.”

  As usual, Daisy ignored most of what he said. “Is this all?”

  “You don’t think this is enough? I come back with an actual bullet wound—this is me first bullet wound, by the way. It’s a good one, as these things go. Something I can show off without being indelicate. I like to think it’s artistic.” It was an identifying mark he could have done without.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I got shot, diddin I? One bullet. Lost a piece of skin and a couple pints of blood. Oh, and a waistcoat. I’ve been having bad luck with my wardrobe lately.”

  “What happened?” She held his shoulder lightly and waited.

  He’d been interrogated by experts, but Daisy had ’em all beat. She could always get him to talk.

  “It was her,” he said. “My Frenchwoman. She shot me.”

  He felt tired suddenly. It hit him every once in a while.

  Daisy looked at him for a bit and didn’t say anything. She made him sit on the bed so she could take off his boots. When she’d done that, she pushed at him some more till he was flat on the bed, still in his clothes.

  “I don’t have all that much time,” he said. “There’s evil men to chase up and down Soho this afternoon. You’ve seen the sketches. And I’ll have bodies to get rid of, most likely. Pax has only accounted for one so far, but the day is young.”

  She pulled a blanket over some of him. When she took the robe she wore up over her head, she didn’t have a stitch on underneath it. She got into bed and she was there with him, warm and soft, and she held him. She hadn’t said a word.

  After a minute, he rolled over and pulled her in so they were facing—more than facing—so close there wasn’t any space at all. He grabbed handfuls of her hair and put his head down into it. His breath broke into chunks, cold and sharp, like ice, and fought its way in and out of his chest. There was no way anyone could tell his eyes were leaking.

  A long while passed. Daisy stroked the back of his head and down his back. He hid his face in her hair and let himself shake. He could do that because this was Daisy. She knew him from the beginning, from before they joined Lazarus’s gang, back when they curled up together in corners and kept each other from freezing.

  At last, she said, “So you won’t go back to your Frenchwoman. Your Justine.”

  “No.”

  “That’s the end of it, then.”

  It wasn’t even the end. It was what came after the end. Not the cliff edge, but the sound you made when you hit the bottom.

  “You want one of the girls?” Daisy said.

  Damn. He hadn’t planned to snuffle, not even in front of Daisy. “I got—” He lifted himself up on his elbow so he could wipe his nose on his sleeve. “I got the prettiest girl in the house in bed with me already.”

  “Do you want a girl to fuck?” she said.

  Trust Daisy. Trust Daisy to know the right thing to say. “No.” He flopped back and looked up at the ceiling. “God, no.”

  “I thought you might make an exception today.”
/>
  “Fucking’s the last thing I need, even if I’d do it here, which I don’t.”

  “You want to get drunk? There’s gin in the cupboard. Or brandy.”

  One last swipe of his arm across his face. “Not that, either.”

  They lay side by side looking at the ceiling as if it might do something interesting. A nice enough piece of plasterwork. A central medallion with scrolls and wreaths looping around. When he bought the house, Daisy wanted to give this room to the best of her girls to impress the customers. He’d had to argue her into taking it for herself.

  They’d come a long way from picking pockets on the street, him and Daisy, with Daisy being his stall, bumping into the pigeons to give him that opportune moment.

  She filled up her room with little china dogs. Stupid things. Sometimes he brought one back from a mission. He’d been crossing the border once near Salzburg and the guards found one of those bloody dogs wrapped up in his shirts and about laughed themselves silly. Laughed so much they missed the papers hidden in the false bottom of the trunk.

  Vienna had been a good operation. He and Justine had—

  No point in remembering. He said, “It was her duty to put a bullet in me, her being French and all. I don’t blame her.”

  “How nice for her.”

  “She didn’t enjoy doing it. Give her that much.” It was a while before he could think of anything else worth saying. He said, “It hurts.”

  “So I imagine.”

  “Not this.” He tapped his chest where he had his handsome new bullet scar.

  “I know.”

  Funny how he couldn’t even laugh at the china dogs. Usually they cheered him right up. “And here’s Pax downstairs doing the same thing. Got himself involved with a woman who’ll turn into a cobra and bite him, given the least inducement.”

  “Seems nice enough,” Daisy said.

  “They do. Women like that. I was looking right at Justine when she shot me and I didn’t think she’d do it.”

  “You still love her.”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Yes, you do. You used to be smarter than that.”

  Him and Pax. Both stupid. “I’ll stop doing it pretty soon.” He rolled over on his stomach, being careful with his shoulder. If he broke it open, he’d start bleeding and ruin Daisy’s bedcovers. “So. Give me some advice, then. If you were French and mad as a rabid dog and wanted to blow up a bit of London, what would you pick?”

  Thirty-four

  Every small venture may be the last. Attend mass frequently.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  “He’s dead,” Jacques said. “I didn’t see the body, but I talked to men who had.”

  The Merchant was silent for a long time, thinking. Then he said, “Édouard died at once? He said nothing?”

  “The woman who owns a shop directly in front of where he died said he was dead when they pulled the horses away.”

  “It was an accident?”

  “I heard a dozen stories. He ran into the street. He was shot. He was stabbed. He was in a fight over a woman. He fought a German. He fought a Norwegian. He attacked a judge from Antwerp. He was a jewel thief carrying a fortune in rubies.” Jacques shrugged. “I could look at his body. The magistrate took it away.”

  Sharply, “No. If there’s interest in the death, you may already have been noted.”

  “I was one of a hundred curious fools looking at bloodstains. I listened. I let other men ask questions.”

  A careful man, Jacques. Reliable. It was unlikely he’d made mistakes. The Merchant acknowledged it. “You did well.”

  “He was carrying a gun.”

  The Merchant considered. “It may have been given to the magistrate or carried away with the body or stolen. It’s an English gun with no ties to us.”

  “The woman from the shop said his body was searched and robbed by a gypsy.”

  “Even better. Theft will break any possible small link to us. What else did you see?”

  “A pool of blood beside the road. The cart and horse, gone, probably back to the livery stable. Chatter from a dozen English mouths, but no one asking official questions.”

  “The mission is not endangered. No harm done,” the Merchant said. “We will remember Édouard tonight, in a toast. He died doing his duty to the Revolution.”

  “There is no better death,” Jacques said.

  The Merchant showed no impatience, no anger. Nothing. “There is almost no chance they will trace us here. But we will advance our plans.” He sifted details in his mind. “Hugues and Gaspard will take that woman to the cabinetmaker’s shop and guard her.”

  “Now, instead of tomorrow night?” Jacques said.

  “Now. We will spend this night and tomorrow at the cabinetmaker’s. A small change of plans. And on the day of the operation, you will perform Édouard’s tasks as well as your own. Do you see a problem with this?”

  It was a measure of Jacques’ long, careful experience that he didn’t agree until he’d thought deeply. “Only the woman.”

  “Who is always a problem. Tell Hugues and Gaspard to persuade her if they can. Tie and gag her when she becomes noisy. They need not be gentle.”

  On the far side of the inn parlor, Camille Besançon sat in the most comfortable chair in the room, wearing the crimson silk robe that had been the price of peace for today. She’d let her long, black hair free over her shoulders to comb it in front of the fire.

  The Merchant said, “After she is removed from here, you will pack our bags and cleanse these rooms. Dispose of her clothing and all this . . . trash she has brought in.” What useless, pointless things women were. At least this one was pretty. “My one small regret is that I didn’t give Édouard that woman to enjoy. He asked, last night.”

  Jacques shook his head. “You were right to refuse. We are warriors. Women are for after the battle, not before.”

  “It’s a waste, though. After the battle that one will be dead,” the Merchant said.

  Thirty-five

  Hope for the best. Expect the worst. Plan for both.

  A BALDONI SAYING

  “We’ve found the hat shop,” Cami said. “Miles of walking the streets and the clue is here. One of the women recognized that . . . masterpiece. She saw it in a window and thought it looked good enough to eat. She did not, understandably, buy it to put on her head, but she also didn’t forget it.”

  Cami propped her chin in her hands, her elbows on the table, and watched Pax create a map. He swiped flour together into a pile on the tabletop, took it between the palms of his hands, and let it sift down from left to right. He did it the way a man sows fine seed mixed with sand, evenly, scattering a thin film.

  They were at the big dining table in the front room of the whorehouse, sitting on Chinese Chippendale chairs, surrounded by paintings of women in various stages of undress. She recognized some as Pax’s work.

  She said, “It’s Lilith who knew the hat.”

  “Trustworthy source.” Hawker paced the room, side to side, aiming annoyance at Cami every once in a while. Perhaps he was irritated at being called from the bed of the brothel owner, Daisy.

  It was late afternoon with the sun at a long slant into the room, but breakfast had just been cleared away and the table polished. Supper would be laid out at nine or ten tonight, when the men began arriving. The women of the house lounged about the parlor and front room in pretty négligée. They wore quite respectable dresses in the evening, apparently.

  “Men who visit early gets a bit of a thrill, see,” Lilith had explained. “Makes ’em feel all naughty, seeing us dressed like this.” She was the oldest of the whores in this house and not particularly beautiful, except that she radiated warmth like a stove. “One gentleman comes here regular to watch Luna—that’s Molly over there—put her clothes on.”

  Cami knew more about expensive whorehouses than she had this morning. Any day one learned something new was a day well spent. That was a saying of the Fluffy Aunts, not the Baldoni.<
br />
  “They leave the kegs of gunpowder . . . somewhere. Then the empty cart goes north.” Pax drew a line in the flour on the table with his finger. “Up this street, headed back to where it was rented. That’s here.” He touched a spot. “Livery stable.” More strokes to show more streets as he named them. He held his breath when he leaned over to study the lines, not disturbing the lines in the flour. Straightened. “Crown Street, Sutton, Denmark, Rose. Those are all possible lines of approach to the livery stable. But he doesn’t take them.”

  She let her open hand hover over the rough map. “He comes this way.” That was the streets south and east of Soho Square. “Through here. By way of Moor Street.” She took her hand away and went back to staring at the table. “They left the gunpowder somewhere south and east of Moor Street.”

  “Well, that doesn’t leave much to blow up, does it?” Hawker, tightly, sarcastically polite, stopped striding up and down the room and came over to frown at the impromptu map. “Maybe three-quarters of London. I’d start with the mint, myself. Then maybe the royal family. Or London Bridge. I’ve always had a fancy to blow up London Bridge, myself.”

  “London Bridge is falling down,” she said softly, to annoy him.

  Pax ignored this little byplay. It was not the least of his many fine qualities that he felt no need to protect her from his deadly young friend. He made a square in the center of his map, empty of flour. Soho Square. “The man we followed yesterday when you left the Moravian church.”

  “Now dead,” Hawker muttered.

  “The man I followed on a long tour of Soho,” she agreed. “Drink to drink, tavern to tavern. One of those boring afternoons.”

  “Not boring for somebody with his eyes full of poison,” Hawker snapped.

  Hawker was one of the several men in London who’d be happy to lock her up indefinitely. His eyes were full of iron doors shutting behind her and the keys sent to problematic and distant storage. No bonhomie in that direction.