The Spymaster's Lady

by Joanna Bourne

  Most certainly she should leave immediately. She had Henri’s horse. Within a few miles of this spot were fifty friends who would help her go to England. She was ruled by grave responsibilities. Whether she gave the Albion plans to England or remained loyal to France, she must not let them fall into Leblanc’s hands. It was stupidity beyond measure to stay in this chapel on such an eventful night.

  If Grey came, he might be wounded. He might need help.

  And so her decision was made. There were various small businesses to attend to. She walked outside into the cold density of rain, to lead Henri’s horse to an inconspicuous spot in the briar jungle behind the chapel. It tried, several times, to bite her and succeeded once. Then there was her trap to set once more, with rocks and rope, above the door. It was Ovid, after all, who said that one’s hook should always be cast, for there will be fish in the pool where one least expects it.

  HAWKER crouched in the sand, feral and silent. They were closing in—not Leblanc’s men, but a gaggle of dragoons on patrol. Nowhere to hide. He was too weak to run.

  But somebody else was out here in the dunes tonight. Smugglers. The sound of gunfire had flushed them out. They had as much to fear from the dragoons as he did. And they had a boat.

  He flogged his body into motion, staggering toward the breakers. Mushy sand dragged at his feet. Nothing to see in this black fog. Nothing.

  Follow the sound. Annique walked around like this all the time. He could do it for a hundred yards.

  The boat was already yards out in the water, oars stroking with a regular slap. He splashed after it. “Attendez. Aidez-moi.” Damn cold stuff, seawater.

  Clomping and shouting their way over the crest of the dunes, came the dragoons. Gunshot skipped across the water. He should have learned to swim. It couldn’t be hard. Dogs did it.

  Waves knocked him down. His clothes weighed like lead. The ground disappeared beneath his feet, and he sank like a stone. He barely felt the arms that pulled him on board.

  “Ain’t one of ours, Josiah,” an English voice said. Sharp corners bit in as they rolled him over. A bullet pinged into the side of the boat.

  “Frenchie by the look of ’im.”

  “Throw ’im back.” Sussex voices reached a consensus. He was lifted roughly and shoved to the gunnels.

  “Slime-gut, buggering pus-suckers.” He skimmed back to consciousness. “Password’s…jasmine.”

  “That’s the king’s English, that is. Stow ’im aboard, lads, I won’t leave even a Cockney drown.” The voice of command was an older man with a Yorkshire accent. Someone leaned close. “Cover ’im up and let’s get out of here.”

  He was pushed into the bottom of the boat and became limp and unknowing as a fish.

  BIRDS chittered back and forth, discussing the coming day to see if they liked it, which was something they did before it became truly light. She sat beside Henri, listening to him grunt and thrash. He was trying to get out of the knots she’d tied. He would not succeed.

  When a single horseman entered the courtyard, she took up the cosh and got into position.

  The second fish in her net fought more strongly than the first. She was not gentle with her cosh. This man, returning so soon, meant the hunt for Adrian was over. He must be dead, somewhere out in those trees. She was crying when she tied the man’s hands behind him.

  Then she checked to see whether she had crushed his skull, subduing him. He was unconscious but breathing. He was Grey.

  She did not often have a chance to indulge in her extensive collection of swear words. She did so now. Did Grey have no care for himself at all? Did he not know how dangerous she was? Nothing could be stupider than for Grey to come to this place, sneaking about, wearing another man’s coat so that she did not know him. She would tell him so when he woke up.

  She went quickly to wet a cloth in the nearest puddle. By the time she got back, he was groaning. She had not hurt him lethally, then, doubtless because his head was of solid, stupid rock. She washed his face with the cloth to bring him fully awake and as repayment for the several wet cloths he had slapped across her.

  “Annique? My God. You’re the one who set that trap?”

  “But of course. My friend, I must tell you. More than two hours ago, men rode into this monastery. Leblanc’s men. Adrian led them away, except for Henri, who is over there.” She waved in the general direction of Henri, who was wriggling noisily by the pillar she had attached him to. “Adrian has not come back. There were shots…He is so weak. And there were at least three of them.”

  “He’ll make it. He’s the sneakiest man alive. The men chasing us are great blundering dolts in the woods. City men. Untie me.”

  “Doyle is…?” She couldn’t finish the question.

  “Leading them in circles. They won’t get Doyle. He’s been doing this longer than you’ve been alive. And we killed a couple. Get these ropes off my hands.”

  “I do not think so.” She did run her finger over the ties she had made, but it was to check that they were quite secure. “I wish Doyle very well. You also, Grey. I wish you the good luck in your travels.” She spoke to him, this last time, in the intimate form of the language, the one used between friends and lovers. “I part company with you now, as has been my intention for some while. This should not amaze you.”

  “Don’t do this, Annique. Let me loose.”

  Oh, but Grey was furious. He did not like to be helpless, this one. But there were other things in his voice…Worry for her. Caring. She could not be completely mistaken about that. She would not hurt like this if he did not care at all.

  “I cannot stay long,” she said. “Leblanc’s men may become bored with chasing the excellent Doyle and return. And there will be gendarmes, before many hours pass, who will ask themselves why this wood is completely full to the brim with dead bodies everywhere. Do you need money? I will give you some of Henri’s, if you like.”

  “Let me get you across the Channel. I’ll set you free on the other side, I promise. I’ll give you a head start. Whatever you want. Don’t do this on your own. You don’t have a chance.”

  She smoothed the coat on his shoulder, where there were admirable muscles. She could indulge herself also in stroking his cheek. That was even better—the touch of skin upon skin. “Do you know, when I am with you I am not afraid at all. It is a magic altogether curious that happens inside the heart. I wish I could take it with me when I leave.”

  She should not waste her time sitting and talking to him. They both had numerous tasks to accomplish before dawn. But she had not engaged in so many dissipations in her life, after all. She could allow herself a few minutes. “I am frightened of this next journey. The noise of the sea makes it hard to hear what is around me. I must go a long way through this desolation, which is chaotic and full of men trying to kill me. I would avoid it, if I could. I am not an idiot.”

  “Think. Just stop and think. If by some miracle you get to England, you’re going to fall into my hands anyway. You’re just delaying the inevitable.” He was working very hard to get free, but she was no amateur at the craft of tying people. “I’m not going to hurt you. I swear it.”

  “It is sad, my Grey. We are constrained by the rules of this Game we play. There is not one little place under those rules for me to be with you happily. Or apart happily, which is what makes it so unfair.” She sat more comfortably, pulling her knees up, resting her arms across them. “I have discovered a curious fact about myself. An hour ago I was sure you were dead, and it hurt very much. Now you are alive, and it is only that I must leave you, and I find that even more painful. That is not at all logical.”

  In all the time she had known Grey—well, it was not so very long after all—she had never searched his face with her hands to know what he looked like. She could do it now. His hair was short, but soft to hold between her fingers. He had strongly marked bones in his nose—it had been broken once, she thought—and skin of an uncivilized roughness. The ridge of his eyebrows was mo
st pronounced. Not pretty, Monsieur Grey. She had not thought he would be.

  “I shall leave you the knife of Henri,” she said, “though I could use it myself. It is in apology for those bumps I have given you with this useful small cosh of mine. You must cut your way free when I am gone. I shall gift you also with Henri, who, I must tell you, I am beginning to find boring in the extreme in his attentions. I have still not murdered him, as you see. I am all benevolence.”

  “You’re going to get yourself killed out there.”

  “It is very possible.” She had one last minute to stroke his body, to hold on to the warmth of him. He was strong and worthy of respect, and gentle, and her enemy. Her choice of him seemed as inevitable as tides in the ocean. One drowns in the ocean. “Do you know the Symposium, Grey?” She set her palm against the stubble on his cheek. Men were not like women at all, to the touch. “The Symposium of Plato.”

  “I’ll find you, wherever you go. You know that. I’ll never give up.”

  “You will not find me. You shall not know at all where to look for me. Pay attention. Plato says that lovers are like two parts of an egg that fit together perfectly. Each half is made for the other, the single match to it. We are incomplete alone. Together, we are whole. All men are seeking that other half of themselves. Do you remember?”

  “This isn’t the goddamned time to talk about Plato.”

  That made her smile. “I think you are the other half of me. It was a great mix-up in heaven. A scandal. For you there was meant to be a pretty English schoolgirl in the city of Bath and for me some fine Italian pastry cook in Palermo. But the cradles were switched somehow, and it all ended up like this…of an impossibility beyond words.”

  “Annique…”

  Swiftly, softly, she leaned to him and covered his mouth and kissed him. It seemed to surprise him.

  “I wish I had never met you,” she whispered. “And in all my life I will not forget lying beside you, body to body, and wanting you.”

  “For God’s sake…”

  She stood up and jammed the knife in a crack between two stones some distance away, where it would take him a while to get to it. “Adrian was right. I should have made love to you when I had the chance.”

  She walked out of the chapel, ignoring his words behind her, which were angry in the extreme, and taking care not to trip on the bits and pieces of her trap that were strewn around the entryway.

  Henri’s horse was glad to see her. It did not like being so enclosed by briars. There was less trouble than she would have thought to mount, and no one in this dead monastery would see that her dress was hiked up far beyond decency. She gave the horse its head to find a way out of the courtyard and onto the road. Then all she could do was point toward the sound of the sea, hold on to rein and mane very tightly, and kick hard. It would be dawn soon. There was enough light for a horse to see. At the water’s edge she could follow the line of surf north.

  She had come a mile when the road straightened and sloped downward. Henri’s horse picked up speed.

  A blow slammed her. Shock. Pain. Falling. She had an instant to know it was a tree branch, hanging over the road, that had hit her. That the horse had done this on purpose.

  She fell. Cried out in fear. Her head hit the ground, and the world exploded.

  Then, nothing.

  The horse, having demonstrated the vicious streak that allowed Henri to buy him cheaply, gave a satisfied grunt and trotted off in the direction of St.-Pierre-le-Proche. Annique lay in a ditch by the side of the road, her face upturned into the drizzle.

  SHE hurt. Tendrils of pain reached into the nothing and gave it shape and form. She was pulled unwillingly to a place where pain knifed into her. Her head, in particular, hurt.

  It is better to be unconscious. That was her first thought.

  Pain filled her head like fire. Like fire. Like…

  That was her second thought. Between one instant and the next, she knew.

  Light. Light diffused through her closed eyelids. In terror and awe, she opened her eyes and saw pale dawn in the sky. Light everywhere. Light across a whole mass of swirling clouds.

  So it had happened. The doctor in Marseilles, with his unnecessary Latin, was right. The horrible bit of something in her skull had shifted off her optic nerve and was now wandering about, preparing to kill her.

  She lay, getting ready to die, as the doctor had said she would.

  It was entirely typical she should have a view of stubby pine trees to look at for her last minutes of life. Typical she should be stretched flat in soggy, cold mud. She tried to compose her mind to a nobility suitable for such a serious moment. What she thought upon, however, was her stupidity in trusting Henri’s horse and how uncomfortable she was and how hungry her belly felt and how radiant were those tiny drops that quivered down the needles of the pines…the drops that slid along the pine needles and fell one by one onto her face.

  She waited. Minutes passed. Nothing happened, except that she became more wet.

  It came to her that she was not going to die. Or at least, not just immediately. She sat up. In ordinary times, the ache in her skull would have occupied her attention to the exclusion of all else.

  “But this is bizarre.” She found herself looking down at her hands, so automatically did her eyes go to where she’d rested them when she was blind. Amazing to see her own hands again. To see this dress she wore—pale green, smudged with dirt. To see…

  She could see. She was no longer the blind, ridiculous worm. She was herself. She was Annique, the Fox Cub. Spy extraordinaire. “I can…see.” She felt hollow with amazement, a shell containing only joy. “I can do anything.” She scrambled to her feet. She wanted to dance. To fly.

  The ditch was full of pinecones, which had been uncomfortable to lie among. She found five of them, tightly curled, heavy, and palm-sized.

  One. Two. Three. She tossed the simple circle she’d learned from Shandor, when she was eight…that first night she’d come to the Rom and been so lonely.

  Catching was easy as breathing. The Two and Two. The Half Shower. The Fountain. So beautiful. She craned her neck far back, swaying to keep under her catches. Her head ached like blazes, but it did not matter in the least.

  Bon Dieu, but she was stiff. There had been a time she could sometimes juggle five. Today she was happy to keep a circle of four in the simplest of patterns, a child’s juggling.

  She wanted…oh, how she wanted Grey at this moment. She wanted to show him this. Her juggling. Her little art. The trick she had mastered only for the joy of it.

  The pinecones were bright and happy in her hands. Nothing lost after all these empty months. Hands and eyes working together. The wonderful eyes that could see for her.

  Grey would never see her juggle. Never.

  She became clumsy suddenly and missed a cone, so she let the others go. They landed, left and right, hitting neatly on each other, as juggled things do.

  She set her face against the tree trunk. It was the same tree that had knocked her into the ditch. In the thick, muzzy silence of the wood, her breath caught in her throat and tears slipped from her eyes. She cried, sad and unspeakably happy.

  Sixteen

  The coast of Northern France, near St. Grue

  THE HOVEL FRONTED THE BEACH. AN OVERTURNED fishing boat flanked its door. Leblanc ignored the sobs that came through the wood shutters from inside, ignored also the girl child, held between two burly dragoons, snarling and fighting. His attention was all for the man kneeling at his feet.

  “When did she leave?” he demanded.

  “With the fishing fleet. At dawn.” The fisherman’s voice slurred through a cut and bleeding lip. “In the boat of the English smugglers.”

  “Where do they go? What is their home port?”

  “Who can say? They have many safe harbors, up and down the coast. They—”

  Leblanc’s riding crop slashed the man’s face, sudden as a snake, and left a line of blood. “Where?”


  “Dover. They go to Dover.” Panting, the fisherman bowed his head.

  “Dover, you say?” Leblanc moved his gaze to where the girl was stretched, wriggling, between the soldiers. “Be very sure.”

  “It is their place, so they have always said. I do not know if they tell me the truth. They are English.”

  “It is you who must tell the truth.” Leblanc studied him another minute. “Henri!”

  Henri appeared at the doorway, tucking his shirt into his trousers. “There’s nothing in the house, just some clothes she left behind. That’s all.”

  “No papers?”

  “None.”

  Leblanc went white around the mouth. Abruptly he turned and stalked back to where the horses waited. He took reins from the trooper standing at attention. “She can see. She’s made a fool of us all.” He mounted. “Come.”

  “What do you want done with these?”

  Leblanc stepped into a soldier’s cupped hands and swung into the saddle. He looked from father to young daughter, and to the house where a woman wept. Then he smiled. “We will reward them, of course.” He pulled out coins and tossed them. “They have been helpful. See that the other villagers know of this.” His horse kicked up sand. The dragoons rode across the coins, following him.

  The fisherman watched them out of sight.

  “You told them.” His daughter collapsed to the ground, crying, now that the troopers were gone.

  “Someone would have told them, in the end, after they hurt more women.” He stooped like an old man and began to gather up the coins, running his fingers into the sand to find any buried deep by hooves. “Help me with this. Your eyes are better than mine.”

  “You betrayed Annique.”

  “Do you think she would expect us to fight him?” He did not meet her eyes. “It was what she told me to do, if that man should come here. She made me promise.”

  “If he finds her—”

  “He will not.” He brushed dirt off the coins and put them into his pocket and turned to the house. “Stay here and look for the money. I must go to your mother.” He stopped at the doorway. “He will not find Annique. She is the Fox Cub. And she made me promise.”