She cut through.
The line of fuse parted. The fizzing white fire curved down to the hanging end. It burned there for an endless moment. Then, abruptly, blinked out.
One tiny orange spark drifted lazily onto the top of the wooden keg below and went dark.
Silence. Cami’s breathing. His own. A woman screeched outside the coach. There didn’t seem to be a second fuse. He didn’t hear one.
He could notice the pain of burns on his thumb and fingers. “Cami . . .” He took the knife from her and opened her hands to show red burn lines where she’d tried to snuff the fuse before it snaked under the seat.
Of course. Of course. He said, “Good work.”
“You, too.” They were both breathing like bellows.
Somebody started shooting on the street.
Fifty-one
Blood cannot be washed away.
A BALDONI SAYING
Three regularly spaced shots echoed off the brick fronts of the buildings. Rifle fire. That would be Grey, shooting from his sniper roost.
Pax swung out of the coach, hit the cobblestones, sidestepped the woman on the ground, drumming her heels and screaming—Camille Besançon—and ran for the end of the street.
Cami was a step behind him, keeping pace and guarding his back. He didn’t have to see her. He knew exactly where she was. Lately, he always knew.
Maybe the Merchant had expected to slip away in the shock of the explosion, in the pandemonium of fires and screaming horses, houses collapsing, and men and women dying. As it was, he made it less than a hundred yards. He lay on his side on the cobbles, twisted in pain. A pool of blood seeped out under his leg from where he’d been shot in the knee. He wasn’t going anywhere.
The Merchant had been brought down at the outermost edge of rifle range. Grey had held his fire till the last possible minute. He’d fired two warning shots, then placed a hit to the knee. Grey stood in the window, reloading one of his rifles. Another leaned beside him, muzzle upright.
A mixed bag of Service agents and Baldoni stood over the Merchant, making sure he didn’t crawl off and watching for any attempt at rescue. They’d searched him. A wallet and notebook, two pistols, a trio of nasty-looking steel spikes, and some small soft pouches lay on the pavement to the side.
There’d be time to sort it out later. He knelt briefly to check the guns. They were well-kept, expensive pieces, probably Prussian. Neither had been fired. The bastard had been shot himself before he could take hostages or loose a shot at anybody. He cocked one and slipped it carefully into the deep pocket of his greatcoat, holding the grip, his finger beside the trigger.
Men fell back to let Cami and him through into the quiet in the center of this circle. The Merchant lay there, pasty white, sweating, daubed in blood. Nothing redder than blood. Somebody’d tied a rough bandage on his knee.
The Merchant turned his head and looked up. “You.”
It had been ten years since he’d met the Merchant face-to-face. He still had nothing to say to this man.
The Merchant said, “You’ve come to gloat.”
“I’ve come to clean up this mess.”
Down the street, at the landau, Doyle held the horse steady. Hawker and Stillwater slopped in that direction, carrying buckets to wet the gunpowder down. The Baldoni boy sat on the curb, head in his hands, bleeding from his nose. Householders poked heads out their windows to see what was happening.
Cami came to stand beside him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. She held her gun in both hands, cocked, but pointed to the ground. She was intent and deadly, legs braced, ready to run or fight, ready to raise that businesslike gun and shoot. His Cami, at her natural work.
The Merchant dragged himself to sitting. “So. The British Service sends my son to destroy me. My sweet butcher of a son. There’s irony in that.”
I’m not your son. “I sent myself.”
The man in the dirt at his feet could have been a stranger. He felt no connection with this Peter Styles, born to privilege, well and expensively educated. Brilliant fanatic of the Revolution. Cold-blooded murderer. A man-killing dog to be tracked down and shot.
Fifty yards away, the woman they’d freed from the landau knelt on the dirty ground, sobbing. A yapping dog in one of the houses provided a tinny antiphony. Men crossed back and forth with buckets, climbing the stairs of one of the houses. Water dripped from the bottom of the landau onto the street and fingered its way into the gutter.
Addington’s coach had already disappeared around the corner. With luck, the Prime Minister would never know how close he’d come to death.
“He scuttles away to save his miserable life,” the Merchant said. “A pity. Going up in flame would have been his finest hour.” He hacked out a laugh that turned into a cough. “Do you know why your Prime Minister comes to Semple Street every week? Not to visit a mistress. He comes to make a mawkish visit to his old nanny. You are led by a milksop sentimentalist. I leave England in his bungling hands.”
A crowd was gathering. People had come out of their houses, being curious. The grocer’s boy and the grocer. A housemaid from Number Thirty. At the back, peeping from behind everybody else, two old women in black. Nobody got close, being wary of the guns, but everybody watched avidly.
Down the street Hawker was half in, half out of the carriage, pouring out buckets, laying down the law about something. Boys ran by the coach windows, peeked in and pointed, and ran away shouting.
“Political murder,” Cami said softly. “This wasn’t about codes or the Leylands or Camille Besançon. It’s me. He needed me here.”
The final pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place as he walked from the landau to this bloody corner of the street. “He needed Vérité from the Coach House.”
Cami had made the same calculations and come to the same conclusions. “None of this is about killing Addington—who cares what happens to Addington? It’s someone from the Police Secrète killing Addington that is significant. Me, killing him.”
“You, yourself, are nothing.” The Merchant hunched inward, holding his knee. The little smirk stayed on his lips. “You are my puppet, not remotely worthy to play the role I assigned you. You were trained and nurtured by the Revolution, and you betrayed it. But you came to this place, tame and obedient, as I planned.”
“I didn’t die, however, which pleases me.” Cami made an eloquent shrug. She slowly lifted the gun she held, till it pointed at the Merchant’s heart. “I would have felt very stupid when I found myself scattered in small bits from one end of Semple Street to the other, interlarded with scraps of coded paper.”
He touched her arm with the hand that wasn’t in his pocket, holding a gun. Just to feel her being alive. Just to know she was here. “You would have made a convincing French spy.”
She considered this. “To be fair, I am a spy. I’m Caché. I’ve been an interloper in the household of the Leylands. I’ve befooled and befuddled the British Service for years. No one is better suited to be the linchpin of a French assassination plot than I am.” She grinned suddenly. “I would have been admirably silent if questioned.”
She could laugh, because that was the way she was made. Pure courage. When he thought how close he’d come to losing her forever, it made him want to knife somebody.
He cupped his anger inside and let it sit there, waiting. “A month ago, men tried to kill Napoleon and make it look like an English plot. This is the same. The Merchant’s fingerprints are all over both of these schemes.”
“It’s a pity no one’s killed this man.” Cami sighted down the barrel of her gun at the Merchant. “It would improve him.”
“Napoleon dead at English hands. Addington dead at the hands of a French spy. The peace would break. The treaties wouldn’t hold. It would mean war.”
“We’ve had enough war to last us into the next century,” Cami said.
“Revolution is born in the storm of war.” The Merchant’s breath hissed between clenched teeth. “It
demands the blood of martyrs.”
He knew the words. They came from the bleak lessons of his childhood. “There are no martyrs here.”
“Death is the purest revolutionary act.” The Merchant wrapped his arms into his coat, ignoring the smears of blood. “If I die, a hundred other men will finish my work. The revolution will come.”
“It won’t come today.”
He was finished here. And the Merchant was finished.
Rough wheels clicked on cobblestone as Tenn led the pony cart out of the alley toward them. The sooner they took this show off the street and out of sight, the better.
“He expects you to kill him, Pax. Will you?” Cami could still disconcert him when she became cryptic and Baldoni.
“What? No. I’m—”
“Pax, let me say this before you do. One thing. It is a great and ancient evil to spill the blood of your family. In every place and time, it has been a horror beyond speech.” She frowned earnestly. “My father killed his cousin, you know. It was by accident, but he never felt clean of that act.”
“Galba agrees with you. He thinks it’ll give me nightmares.”
“It will,” she said. “Give you nightmares, I mean. Killing doesn’t lay devils, it raises them. That’s not a family saying. I just made it up.”
“I like your sayings.”
He’d expected to feel cold rage when he finally confronted the Merchant. He’d expected the old pain, despair thick and black as night, spikes of ice in his belly. That was the way it’d always been when he thought about his father.
The moment for revenge had come and gone. He’d felt nothing. “I don’t need to kill him. He doesn’t matter enough.”
“Ah.” After a minute, Cami nodded and lowered her gun. “That’s a great relief. I was ready to do it for you.”
Incongruously, in the middle of the street, while he kept one hand on the gun in his pocket and dozens of people watched, he wanted to smile.
When he’d loaded his pistol this morning, he’d held the lead bullet and imagined it stopping the heart of the Merchant. Old habit. He’d done that when he went hunting one man in particular in Tuscany and Piedmont.
He had no orders to kill the Merchant. The need to do it had drained away.
“He can live long enough to hang.” A cold truth. The greatest revenge was sending the Merchant to the gallows.
“You’ve suckled the bourgeois morality of the British Service.” The Merchant grimaced and leaned inward upon himself, arms wrapped under his coat. “Do you think you’ve become one of them? They use you to do their dirty work. You are their perfect, stone-cold assassin. You are their monster.”
Maybe once he had been. But Cami had changed him. The empty man who’d come to London was filled. He didn’t even recognize that Paxton anymore.
The Furies could go home. There’d be no patricide today. “We all have a monster inside us.”
“When I go to trial, I’ll tell the world about my son, the French spy in the British Service. The bloody killer. The aristocrat who joined the revolution.”
“The bastard of Ilse Dalgaard, Danish subject. Father unknown.” It felt good to say it. “The flotsam and jetsam of Europe. Nobody cares what I do.”
“The legitimate grandson of an English earl.” The Merchant, hoarse and whispering. “I married your bitch of a mother in Amsterdam. When I stand trial, you’ll be beside me. We’ll give them a crime they can’t sweep under the carpet.”
The Merchant’s eyes found Cami. “You will be my martyr for the cause. My loyal revolutionary, shot by the British Service as she tried to assassinate the Prime Minister.” He jerked his hand from hiding. Something glittered in the sunlight. A thick silver pencil case, smeared with blood.
No!
A gun. A trick. A toy for idle gentlemen. A tiny pistol, good for one shot only. Pointed at Cami.
She snapped her pistol up.
She has no time. His own finger was on the trigger. Without drawing, he shot through the pocket of his greatcoat.
His bullet hit the Merchant square in the middle of his forehead. The man fell backward, already dead. He looked . . . surprised. As if death had refused to follow the plans he had for it.
He had to push Cami’s gun aside so he could pull her to him, breathe in the smell of her, kiss her face, eyes, ears, nose. Her hair. Her mouth. It wasn’t enough. Cami was alive. He’d never be able to hold her close enough.
* * *
On the edge of the small, excited group that had gathered to comment upon the first shooting and was now expounding upon the second, two old women craned their necks to observe events.
Violet said, “He appears to be dead.”
“There is a hole in his forehead. Ipso facto,” Lily said.
“I cannot help but feel this is the simplest solution to several difficult problems. Mors omnia solvit.”
“As you say, death solves everything.” Lily had been holding a small gun hidden in the folds of her skirt. She returned it to her reticule. “The business of shooting one’s father is fraught with social and moral implications. One cannot like it.”
They were both silent while they considered the complications of a man shooting his father.
“Paxton’s actions are . . . unfortunate,” Lily said. “On the other hand, one would not have wished that task to fall upon dear Cami.”
“A sensitive girl. More so than one would think,” Violet said. “Young Paxton, as well.”
“A young man of some complication. Not really suited to be a patricide.”
“We must see this hushed up a bit,” Violet said.
“It can’t be silenced.” Lily waved a thin, blue-veined hand across the collection of British Service agents and Baldoni. “Everyone saw. Gossip and rumor will scatter to the four winds. No stopping it.”
“We will shape the official story.”
More thought. Lily said, “We could say that I did it. By accident, of course.”
“You tripped.”
“While I was examining the gun.”
“The man was shot twice,” Violet pointed out.
“Not the sort of thing one would do inadvertently. A pity we can’t just drop the body in the Thames.”
“Heir to an earl. So necessary to prove the succession has passed.”
Lily said austerely, “It is more than necessary to demonstrate the Merchant is actually dead this time.”
“Perhaps . . . a robbery. In St. Giles.”
“Or Hampstead Heath.”
Violet said, “I’m tempted to have him dropped in an alley in Soho. It adds a French flavor to the death.”
“Soho. Yes. Excellent.”
Another minute passed. “They should remove the body,” Violet said. “It’s unsightly.”
“They’re waiting for those two to finish.” But Lily’s voice was indulgent.
“So romantic.” Violet applied her elbow ruthlessly to the kidney of the man in front of her, gaining a better view. “I do admire an enthusiastic man.”
“Eventually, they’ll have to come up for air,” Lily said.
“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, more attractive than a man who’s just killed on your behalf.”
“They should clear away the body, though. And find privacy for that.”
Violet sighed. “Amantes sunt amentes, as Terence says.”
“Lovers are lunatics.” Lily sniffed austerely. “I’m not surprised Paxton overlooks the matter. Men are not naturally tidy. But Cami has always been neat in her habits. It’s not like her to leave a body lying about.”
“They are distracted,” Violet said. “And who shall blame them?”
Over the rumble and jabber of the crowd, in the background, where the landau was still being drowned in buckets of water, the sound of sobbing continued.
Violet said, “We should see to her, I suppose.”
“She very likely is our niece.”
“She does sound exactly like Hyacinth in one of her crises de nerfs.
Hyacinth did have a delicate spirit.”
“This one, too, apparently,” Lily said.
They turned to walk toward the sobbing. “I think,” Violet said judiciously, “we should find her a French husband.”
“Soon,” Lily agreed.
They glanced back, one last time, to Cami and Pax, madly kissing, surrounded by a circle of interested spies and criminals.
Lily said, “That’s taken care of.”
Violet nodded. “I do like a happy ending.”
Fifty-two
Drink, dance, laugh, love. A man who does not enjoy the pleasures of life is poor indeed.
A BALDONI SAYING
She knew he’d come to her window. Not a sound in the night, but she knew he was there.
It crossed her mind that he had come to many windows this secretly. The deaths that haunted him had begun this way. It would be healing to him to use his skills on such benign purposes.
She got out of bed in her shift, slipped on shoes, and padded along the blue carpet to the window, which was open, even though it left the room chilly. She carried a knife with her, being prudent, but laid it aside on the table when she looked out and saw him below.
His hair was perfectly white under the moon, disheveled and unraveling from its tie. He was outside the window, sitting on his haunches, keeping an eye on the empty backyard and maybe studying London.
She said, “Have you come visiting, or did you climb up to enjoy the view?”
“I promised Bernardo I wouldn’t go to your room tonight.”
“Did you, now?”
He would not come into her room, only this close. Close enough, maybe, to hear her turn in her bed or sigh in her sleep. He wouldn’t lightly break his word, once given.
“I’m not sure why. It had something to do with your great-aunt Fortunata fixing me with an unwavering stare.”
“You are wise to be terrified of her.”
Rogue Spy Page 30
