The Spymaster's Lady

by Joanna Bourne

  She brushed off the sand and tore a piece of the good bread and ate it slowly, alternating bites of bread with pulls of water. After a time, she no longer wanted to cry. It was magic, this bread and water, and it gave her heart again. Escape seemed possible once more. Now, perhaps.

  Deliberately, she leaned back on the cushions, eyes still closed, her body slack and weary. The carriage lamps outside burned with a thick, oily smell. In that flicker of light, they were certainly watching her with all attention. The least tensing of a muscle would give her away.

  She filled her voice with discouragement, of which she had any amount handy. “I think you win. See—I take your food, and I no longer fight you.” She lifted the bread as if it were heavy and took another bite and chewed and swallowed. They would not expect her to escape while she was in the middle of chewing. “It is no huge triumph to defeat me. I have not eaten for several days. You are not so clever, Monsieur Grey.”

  Adrian snickered from his place on the opposite seat. Grey said nothing at all. The carriage rocked and jolted. They made some speed through the silent countryside, heading uphill, away from Paris. This road—she knew it well—wound through a region of compact stone villages and fields and grand houses surrounded by huge gardens. She could smell the late-blooming roses of the gardens and the country grasses. Occasionally there was the smell of apples. Everywhere the smoke of hearth fires filled the air, burning to keep the night chill out of the little stone houses.

  It was the perfect place to run, the perfect time.

  She had reached an accommodation with darkness months ago. She knew a thousand tricks of moving without sight that these men had never dreamed of. The night was her friendly kingdom, ready to hide her. None of them could outrun her in the dark.

  She swallowed the bite of bread and pretended to take another. Now. This was the moment. It is not good to plan such things too much. The opponent feels it.

  She twisted sideways in the seat and kicked Grey with all her strength. This time, for variety’s sake, she kicked him in the belly.

  Four

  “THANK THE GODS.” ADRIAN COLLAPSED ACROSS the bed, fully dressed. His coat stank of wine. That was to explain him staggering with every step.

  “You’re bleeding again.”

  “Nobody saw.”

  “Hell. That’s just fine, then, if nobody saw.” Grey slung Adrian’s feet up and began pulling the boots off. “Damned fool.”

  “They’ll be looking for somebody with a bullet hole in him. Not some…idiot carrying a bottle.”

  “Carrying a bottle and singing off key, strolling right through the middle of the innyard.”

  “Nobody sees you when you…don’t hide. Pure genius.”

  It might have been, but it had used up the last of Adrian’s strength. “Next time, do what you’re told.” When Grey unbuttoned the striped waistcoat, the front of Adrian’s shirt was soaked red. More blood lost. And they still had to get the bullet out of him.

  “…and I wasn’t off-key. I have a particularly fine baritone.”

  “So does an ass. Don’t sit up.” Roussel, the innkeeper, already had Doyle’s red valise ready on the dresser. Lockpicks and a collection of subtle weapons were lined up in the barbering kit, disguised as complex grooming aids. There was a choice of scissors. “I’ll cut that coat off.”

  “More wardrobe sacrificed to the needs of the Service.” Adrian’s lips quirked. “Take it. Take it. We’re sick of one another’s company. I’ve been wearing it—what’s it been—three days?

  “Four, since you got shot.”

  “Ah. I lost a day.”

  “That day was no loss. I was there.”

  They spoke French. Even alone, even in this inn that belonged body and soul to the British Service, they never broke into English. It was one of the thousand habits that kept them alive. Voices change when they change to a new language. Grey’s own voice was refined and smooth in the drawling Toulouse French he affected. In English, his normal tone was a grating deep growl, heavy with the underlay of his native West Country accent.

  He rolled his sleeves back and selected a pair of scissors. “There are sharp points on these. Hold still.”

  “Behold me, motionless as a clam.” Adrian let his head fall back onto the pillow. “We shouldn’t have brought her here. We could have dumped her in any of those villages.”

  “I need her. You, I can dump in a Normandy village and say good riddance.” He cut through wool and the heavy silk of the waistcoat and the linen of the shirt. “Lift your arm. Yes. That’s got it.”

  “You’ve brought a French agent to a British Service shelter house. This is Roussel’s bailiwick. He’s going to want to slit her throat.”

  “Roussel doesn’t get everything he wants.” The bandage beneath was heavy with fresh blood, stiff and brown at the edges. Five, six snips, and he cut it away.

  Adrian curled up to peer at his chest. “Looks like a hell of a mess from here. How is it?”

  “Not bad.” Under a plaque of gummy dried blood, the wound was draining thin, straw-colored liquid. Was that normal? He kept his opinion off his face. “Better than I expected.”

  The Hawker, unfortunately, could read any man living. He leaned back and opened and closed his hand a few times and looked away. From the open window came the faint sound of men talking at the tables outside. “Any chance for a doctor?”

  “Roussel doesn’t trust the local man. We’ll manage on our own.”

  “How intrepid of us.”

  The fever was down, fought to a temporary truce by the Hawker’s leathery toughness. That couldn’t last much longer. This sneaky, brilliant boy was going to die because Grey couldn’t risk getting a French doctor to him. Because they’d been too slow running down an alley in Paris four days ago. Because he’d sent Hawker into France in the first place.

  He was going to kill the boy tomorrow, digging that bullet out. Damn and damn and damn.

  Roussel’s daughter had brought up water. Grey poured some in the basin. It was hot, almost too hot to touch. “We’ll clean up. We’ll eat well and sleep soft tonight. Tomorrow we put more distance between us and Paris, then stop and pull the slug out.” He made himself study the jagged pucker of red skin. “You’ll have a beautiful scar.”

  “It will add to my manifold charms. Who digs into me—you or Doyle?”

  “We talked it over. My hands are better with small work.”

  “You flipped a coin. I know.” Adrian sketched a grin. “We could wait till England. I know a man in Chelsea who has a fine, artistic way with a bullet.”

  “Coward.”

  “Fervently. Tomorrow then. If you’re set on this, I suggest you choose someplace private. I will whine in an unmanly fashion.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  There were towels stacked beside the basin. Grey tried to remember what they did in the medical tents, after battle. There’d been wounds soaking under hot cloths. That worked with horses, too. He’d try it. He wet linen in the steaming water and wrung it out gingerly. “This is hot.”

  “Ach!” The boy jerked. “Hot. Yes. Right you are.” He took a slow, tight breath between clenched teeth. “Oh, that’s toasty hot. Listen…Carruthers has my last report. That’s safe. Tell Giles to take what he wants from my room at Meeks Street. George gets the watch in my dresser drawer. I promised it to him if I didn’t make it back from some jaunt.”

  “You’re making it back from this one.” Grey lifted the cloth and looked at the wound.

  “Orders. You know how I am about obeying orders. Are you going to keep gawking at the bullet hole? Grotesque, if you want my opinion.” Adrian fixed his eyes on the crack that ran across the plaster ceiling. “Grey, if the fever comes back…Don’t let me talk.”

  The Hawker had more than his fair share of secrets. “I won’t.”

  “Thanks.” He took a deep breath. “Oh. Money. There’s a pile of it at Hoare’s Bank under the name Adrian Hawker. And some deeds.” He winced
as the cloth lifted. “Find Black John. I’m godfather, if you can believe it, to his oldest son. The money goes to the boy.” Another deep breath. “I think I owe the tailor. Pay it off for me, will you.”

  “You sound like Socrates over a mug of hemlock.” He squeezed the cloth in hot water again and laid it back on the wound.

  “Who’s…ach…Who’s Socrates?”

  “A dead Greek. Annique admires him.”

  “Wasted on him, if he’s dead. That is a woman born to be appreciated by some man who’s warm and alive.” Adrian’s thin, dark face was a dozen shades paler than it should have been, but he managed an unconvincing leer. “Me, probably. She doesn’t care for you at all, mon vieux.”

  “She’s not supposed to like me. She’s supposed to be afraid of me and stop trying to escape. She can like you.” Grey worked awhile in silence, swabbing blood off the rest of the boy’s chest. “I’m going to sit you up. Don’t help. Let me do the work.”

  “Right.”

  The boy felt light, and brittle as glass, when Grey lifted him. He stuffed pillows to prop him up. “Rest a minute.”

  He tipped the dirty water out the window, down into the pawlike ivy that climbed the stone walls. It was a warm night. On the terrace below, men lingered late around the tables. They were local farmers mostly, but a few were travelers carrying the accents of Paris or Normandy. A pair of men playing cards chatted softly in the patois of the Brittany coast. Candles flickered on the tables, illuminating a peasant cap, a fashionable chapeau, and a shock of fair hair. One of Roussel’s plump, dark-haired daughters sidled between the men, collecting glasses. Beyond the innyard gate, the shadowed fields were full of the trill of crickets.

  They’d be safe tonight, in this tiny village, in this obscure inn, which was a waystation of the British spy network in France. Tomorrow was going to be hell.

  The bed creaked. “You’re handling her wrong,” Adrian said. “She’s battering herself to bits against you. It’s sickening.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. It’s like wrestling a starved cat.”

  But he lied. It was wrestling lightning wrapped in silk. Annique Villiers wouldn’t admit she was beaten. Desperately, madly, she kept throwing herself against him, trying to get out of the coach. Again and again, he’d trapped a kicking, writhing, squirming body beneath him. Every time he pinned her, she’d sigh and lie back and accept another defeat. The sharp angles melted. The pulsing energy went quiescent in his hands. It was like the soft, sweet letting go of a woman after climax. She was everything beautiful and insidious. Addictive as opium.

  Hell of a way for a senior officer to feel about a treacherous French bitch. “I’m trying not to hurt her. It’s not easy. She’s fast as a little cobra.” He put the dressing in place and set Adrian’s hand to cover it. “Press hard.” He tied up the last corner of bandage. “I doubt she’s looking forward to the discussions I have planned. I know what’s she’s done.”

  Will Doyle pushed into the room, balancing a tray. “What has she done?” He had a roll of clothing bundled under his arm, a swirl of burgundy and white, moss green and slate blue. He edged the door shut with his foot. “Besides run rings around us in Italy and Austria the last couple years?”

  “You’re supposed to be watching her.”

  “I put a pair of Roussel’s boys at the door and window. Annique Villiers ain’t going to run when there’s thirty people milling around downstairs. She’s not an idiot. Robert, there’s something wrong with her.”

  “I don’t have to hear this from you, too.”

  “She wouldn’t even turn around and talk to me. Not a word.” Doyle slid the tray to the table and dropped clothes in a heap on top of the dresser. “I saw her at work in Vienna. She chatters like a magpie. Something’s wrong when she shuts up.”

  “I’ve hurt her then.” All those tiny bones, strung together with catgut. So fragile.

  “Or Leblanc did. He had her longer than we did.”

  He didn’t want to think about her being hurt. It was too easy to feel sympathy. Too easy to forget what she was. “I’ll take a look at her when I put her to bed.”

  “That’s an intriguing notion,” Adrian said. “Wasted on you, I expect.”

  “And ain’t you feeling better.” Doyle lifted the napkin tented over a flowered blue and white bowl and sniffed appreciatively. “Roussel’s stew. Leeks and chervil, smells like.” He tipped a spoon into the bowl and handed it to Adrian with a brusque, “Eat.”

  “To hear is to obey. Toss me some of that bread while you’re at it.”

  Doyle tucked the loaf against his forearm and sawed a slice with quick, practiced strokes. “I been downstairs making excuses to Roussel—who wants your blood, by the way, Robert, for bringing her here. I pretended to know what’s going on. You going to explain?”

  “One lives in hope,” Adrian said piously.

  Doyle said, “You start discussing that stew with yer belly. The Head of Section don’t explain himself to the likes of—”

  A sharp crash broke the peace. Outside and nearby. Doyle froze. Adrian’s eyes snapped to the window.

  My gun’s in my bag, on top, loaded. There’s another in Hawker’s. Doyle carries his on him. The stairs are defensible. They’d—

  Masculine laughter rumbled over the sound of a woman’s rueful giggle. Chairs scraped on the stone. A dozen low-voiced conversations resumed. It was some kitchen mishap. Not Leblanc’s men. Not yet.

  Grey took his hand off the valise. “I’ve been out of action too long.”

  Adrian slid a dark, thin-bladed knife back under the covers.

  “We’re all on edge,” Doyle said, “not least from having that damned dangerous woman locked up in the next room. Are we going to get rid of her any time in the foreseeable future?”

  “He’s going to drag her all the way to Meeks Street. I’d lay money on it. Any brandy on that tray?”

  “For you, wine.” Doyle uncorked the jug with his teeth. “I gave her that indecent nightgown, Robert. She weren’t best pleased.”

  “I’m not trying to please her.”

  Doyle slopped wine into a glass, then added water till the deep red went pale. “I don’t like what you’re planning for that girl.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “First off, I don’t like dressing Annique Villiers in some whore’s castoffs.” Doyle nodded to the bright dresses heaped on the table. “That’s what Roussel had in the storeroom—the leavings of some ladybird who flew off without paying. It’ll fit her, but it’s brothel wear.”

  “She’s worn less in the service of France.” He picked up a dress. The complex, enigmatic blue was the color of her eyes. Thin, soft cotton clung to his fingers. Brothel wear. “Very nice. Paris work.”

  “Not the garb to blend into a Normandy village, is it? She won’t get far if she gets loose.” Adrian took the glass. “There’s a bench in hell reserved for men who water good wine.”

  Doyle poked around the tray and helped himself to a flaky square of pastry. “You can read print through some of those dresses. It’s going to be distracting.”

  “She could wear sackcloth and be distracting.” When he put Annique in this, she’d look like what she was—an expensive courtesan, a woman born to entice men. She sold those sweet little breasts like apples in the market. “I watched her take Henri Bréval down with a cosh she slid behind her skirt. These won’t hide a toothpick.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Robert. She’s one of us. One of the best. She’s been in the Game since she was a child. You don’t take one of the great players and treat her like a doxy. You put her in that nightgown or one of these flimsy dresses, and you’re going to start thinking she’s a whore.”

  “She’s not. For one thing,” Adrian chased vegetables around the bottom of the bowl, “she can kill you with the odd bit she finds lying around the house.”

  “She’s probably stropping something down to a sharp edge right now.” Doyle scratched the scar on his c
heek. It was a clever fake. When he wore it a long time, it itched. “She’s not really safe, left alone for any length of time. I do wish that girl worked for us.”

  “No, you don’t.” Grey crossed the room, hunkered down at the hearth, and set a thin log of beechwood on the fire. They’d need more wood in here. Adrian would feel the chill if his fever came back. The flames teased him with images, flickering and writhing. In tongues of fire, a dozen Anniques danced Gypsy dances, gleaming with sweat, sleek with scented oil. “She was at Bruges.”

  He could feel the change in the room.

  “Bruges,” Doyle said.

  “I was in the market square, in the café by the tower, waiting to be met. On the other side of the square was a half-grown Gypsy boy, juggling. He had four or five knives in the air, laughing. Enjoying himself the whole time.”

  “Annique,” Doyle said.

  “Annique.”

  “I’ve heard she makes a reasonably convincing boy.”

  “I didn’t know she was a woman till I saw her at Leblanc’s.”

  He’d nursed a cup of coffee, there in the square at Bruges, letting himself soak in some of that joy and brightness, letting it seep through the tense watch he was keeping. He’d remembered, later, that he’d been glad to see that boy. “He made a game of it, throwing ’em, hitting small, exact targets. Collected a fair capful of coins before he wandered off.”

  “She’s good with knives. Not up to the Hawker’s standard, but good.”

  “Nobody’s up to my standards,” Adrian said.

  There were pinecones in the box on the hearth. Grey lay a few on the fire and shifted logs with his fingers, coaxing a draft in. “An hour later Fletch came to tell me they’d been ambushed, and the gold was gone. McGill, Wainwright, and Tenn’s brother were dead.”

  Adrian put his bowl on the table. “I served with Wainwright in Paris.”

  “Tenn’s brother was one of mine,” Doyle said. “That was his second mission. Stephen Tennant. I took it hard when I heard.” He hooked his thumb into the boy’s bowl, tilted it, and looked in. “You going to finish this?”