The Spymaster's Lady

by Joanna Bourne

  She ran her eyes over his face, his hair, his shoulders, the whole length of him in his smelly fisherman’s jersey and trousers. Appraising. Approving. She said, “It is a strange thing. I can speak five languages, and I cannot think of a single way to say how grateful I am that you have saved me.”

  Why don’t you know me, Annique?

  She trembled with the shocky aftermath of terror, and laughed, and thanked him politely again and again, and she didn’t know him at all.

  My God. You’ve never seen me, have you? You don’t know my face. You don’t know the color of my hair or the shape of my nose. I could be anybody.

  She didn’t know who he was. If he left her free, and followed her, she might lead him straight to the Albion plans.

  Could it be done? The more he considered it, the better it sounded. She knew where the plans were. He was sure of it. Somehow, after that bloody debacle at Bruges, Annique had been left holding the Albion plans.

  She didn’t bring anything from France. He’d been following her since she stepped out of the fishing boat at the docks, empty-handed. Could the Albion plans already be in England?

  Where are the plans, Annique? Are you headed for them right now? Going to take them to Soulier, I bet.

  If she led him to the plans…It was the cleanest way that could be. One instant of shock, and it would be over. No long, well-practiced interrogation. No poisoned intimacy as he stripped her secrets away, hour after hour. No clever, painless coercion that would leave them both feeling sick.

  At Meeks Street, in his comfortable prison, he’d loosen her hold on the plans, inch by inch. He was expert. He’d take them from her. He’d get dirty fingerprints all over her soul, doing it.

  He could leave her free. It was tempting on every level. If he left her free, he’d have days with Annique when she wouldn’t be his enemy. Maybe she’d keep looking at him like he was some kind of white knight. Maybe that was what he wanted.

  She knows my voice. But I can change my voice.

  Growing up in deepest Somerset, he and his brothers had run tame in the stable, copying the grooms’ speech and getting clouted for using it in the parlor. Broad Somerset still came easily to his tongue when he went home.

  He pitched his voice deep and spoke in the familiar West Country cadence. “Are you hurt?” He didn’t sound like himself to his own ear.

  “Not in the least, thank you. It is very brave of you to attack so many men, three of them, when they were armed.”

  He shrugged. He wouldn’t talk much. She couldn’t recognize his voice if she didn’t hear it.

  “You are modest as well. But it is because of you I am not gutted like a herring, for which I am unendingly appreciative. It is heroism on your part, to throw yourself into a fight with such eagerness, when you do not know me at all.”

  “Anybody’d do the same.” He kept expecting the next word to wake her memory and tell her who he was.

  “Perhaps. There is much altruism in the world.” She pushed herself away from the wall and staggered over to pick her shawl up from the dirt. “But it does not always arrive promptly and with such useful muscles. A friend gave me this, that her mother knitted for her.” She shook out the shawl. “It would have been found beside my body, if you had not come.”

  He made a noncommittal noise. He could fool her for a day or two, if he was careful. That might be all he needed.

  “I have been very lucky this morning, have I not? I cannot begin to think of how I will thank you.”

  She smiled at him. If she kept being grateful to passing strangers, somebody was going to bundle her into a bedroom at the nearest inn and lock the door and let her prove exactly how grateful she was.

  When she walked unsteadily down the alley, stumbling and setting her hand on the wall from time to time, he walked with her, keeping an arm’s reach away. He didn’t try to help. He didn’t lay a finger on her. A single touch, and she’d recognize him with her skin.

  HER sense of direction had not deserted her. She backtracked down one long street and made a right turn, and they came to the small market square with wharves behind it. At the side was a line of stone benches. She sat and closed her eyes and felt the world spin around her. When she opened her eyes, the tall man in the black fisherman’s sweater was still there.

  It overwhelmed her continually, the intensity of seeing. She could have counted the individual dark hairs upon his cheek, and every one of them was beautiful.

  He wiped his hands upon his sweater that smelled so of fish and said, “You don’t look well.”

  His accent was different from the English smugglers she knew. His voice grated harsh from his throat. That would be from those years at sea, probably, or heavy drinking ashore.

  “I am fine.” But she shook in every fiber. It was good to have a clean place to sit. “It is only that I have been frightened to the core, you understand, thinking I would be killed, which could terrify anyone and is a thing I have never become used to.”

  The sailor was a large man, and obviously strong as an ox, which was doubtless useful on boats. He might have been twenty-eight or thirty. His brown hair was cut close to his skull and lay in layers, like shingles. His eyes were a dark, colorless mixture of shades, like the sea itself, a sort of gunmetal gray. The lower half of his face was dark with stubble. None of this should have made him handsome, and yet, to her, he was.

  She liked sailors, in general, and had spent much time chatting with them in various ports of Europe, discovering what they knew about coastal defenses and the movements of naval vessels. Most sailors were more talkative than this one.

  “I will not bore you again with gratitude, but it is only because you have been capable and brave for me that I did not die today. If you will look away for the smallest time, I will take out my money, which I have hidden.” There was a tavern across the street. Near the docks of a city there is always a tavern. “That house does not appear respectable,” she said, being frank about the women who were inside it, “but the smell of its beer is good. I was traveling for a time with a man who would have called a mug of beer a ‘heavy wet,’ though he did not get around to teaching me that. I will buy you a heavy wet.”

  “You will not buy me a drink. You shouldn’t have anything to do with that place, and you know it.” He considered her some more. “I’ll get us both something. Stay here. Don’t move, not an inch, till I get back.”

  One corner of the market was full of food sellers, and that was his goal. She watched him stride through the crowd. He expected every man to step out of his way. And they did. His clothing might say able-bodied seaman, but his confidence spoke of command. He was first mate, she thought, or captain.

  And, most likely, he was not exactly a fisherman. He walked confidently in this market of Dover. She had heard much of the English press gangs from her smuggler friends. The English navy would take any such man from the port towns, so tall and strong, with his hands marked with pine pitch and tar, and drag him off to their naval ships to be poor and uncomfortable. Unless he had powerful protection. The smugglers had great influence along this south coast of England.

  Almost certainly he was an English smuggler like her friend Josiah. Smugglers were cunning and capable men and it was not altogether surprising she should owe her life to one. How interesting life in England was turning out to be.

  He was so tall it was easy to follow his progress amid the booths of the market. He picked a stall, and the woman dropped her other customer like a three-day-old mackerel to hurry to serve him. She was old enough, that woman, that she should not have been so foolish for a pair of broad shoulders. Or perhaps she was not so foolish. When he left, he flipped her a silver coin, not asking for change.

  He brought back whelks, held in a cone of broadsheet paper. They looked exactly like the ones she had eaten in the fisherman’s hut in St. Grue two days before, though these were English whelks. He carried also two mugs of tea, hooking the two handles with one finger very deftly. The tea cont
ained milk in abundance and great heapings of sugar, neither of which she wanted, but he had saved her life for her and she would have happily eaten a bouquet of meadow grasses if that had been what he offered.

  He sat and drank tea and watched her winkle the whelks out with a peeled wood stick. Two housewives sauntered by, with their shopping baskets and white aprons and pretty bonnets. They shot her smuggler glances. The harlots came to the tavern window and whispered with one another, letting their dresses slip low on their shoulders. And well they might. He was a large and excellently made man. She would indulge herself in smugness for this few minutes while he sat beside her.

  “I am Annique. I have not told you that yet.” No, the tea did not improve upon acquaintance. “Annique Villiers. It is my life you have given me. That was not some slight quarrel you interrupted, monsieur, je vous assure.” She chewed. “Peste. I will speak only English now. I am determined.” She was very hungry, and the whelks were fresh and admirably clean of sand. “I would most certainly be dead if you had not happened by. Leblanc must kill me, you see, to shut my mouth, as I know certain discreditable facts about him. Leblanc is the one I put my knife into. Henri, who would also be happy to kill me, is the one you were kind enough to throw among the garbages.”

  “You should keep out of alleys.”

  “Bien sûr. I shall most certainly do so in the future.” She ate the last of the whelks. “But I will be safe in a few days. Leblanc will not find me again, once I leave Dover. There is much of England to hide in.”

  All this time she had been tossing whelk shells onto the pavement, the way everyone else did. She hated to throw the paper there, so she crumpled it up and put it in her empty tea mug.

  She was delightfully filled. She wanted nothing more than to curl up like a cat and sleep. But cats do not have agents of many governments chasing them. “I thank you for whelks and for the tea, which is very English. I shall have to drink a great deal of it to properly appreciate it, I believe. Will you tell me your name? It is hard to say thank you with such great sincerity to someone whose name I do not know.”

  “My name is Robert Fordham.” How solemn he was with it, as if he were trusting her with a secret. Perhaps he was. It could be that this town was posted with numerous handbills from the Office of the Customs, seeking his capture. He did not know that she had kept many secrets and could be trusted with his. “I’m pleased to meet you, Annique.”

  His expression was somewhat grim, all this time. He was captain, she was almost sure, and in the habit of worrying often and deeply about the safety of his small smuggling ship. This was someone who would lead men as naturally as he breathed or hurl himself into an alley to save the life of a stranger. In the army of Napoleon he would already have risen to high rank, though not in an English army, naturally, which was enslaved to the old order of things.

  A seagull flapped down beside her feet and began upending the shells she had discarded, checking inside. There were multitudes of seagulls pillaging the market. The women who sold fish fought them continually.

  It was time, she knew, to get up and be upon her travels.

  “Monsieur…No. I will break myself of the habit of speaking French in a day or two. Mr. Fordham, I am grateful until I have no words, and I am a person who has many words. You have my good wishes, for whatever they are worth.” She had no map of Dover in her head. She carried no exact maps of English cities at all, really. She shaded her eyes and looked up at the sun. London was north, so she would walk north. It always surprised her how often the obvious works. “I hope, if you are ever in danger, someone comes to your rescue.”

  “So do I.” The man rose when she did, and walked with her. “Where are you going?”

  She gave him the truth, since he had saved her life. “To London. I have an errand.”

  “The London stage leaves from the Bear and Bells, at the center of town. The easiest way is back through the market—”

  She laughed. “I have only three pounds, Monsieur…Mr. Fordham.”

  “Robert.”

  “Robert.” She liked that name. She said it in her own way, the French way, so that it sounded correct to her. “I have three pounds and sixpence. It would be silly to squander it. I shall walk.”

  He frowned. “You can’t walk from Dover to London.”

  “But yes. I have walked the whole way here from the south of France, except for some distances when I went in a coach, and I shall tell you, the times walking were the more agreeable. It is a nothing, this walking to London.”

  He was so tall he was able to take slow, deliberate steps and still keep pace beside her. “You’ll take the Canterbury Road then. I’ll show you.”

  He said little as he unwound the town for her, street to street, and finally pointed the way onward. The Canterbury Road led straight uphill and did not look easy, which made it typical of the roads she had encountered in her life. When she turned to thank him, he had already turned away. He had not waited to say good-bye.

  She saw him striding purposefully in the direction of the docks, his black cap and shoulders showing above the other people on the street. He was good to look upon, strong and brown and muscular from carrying illegal cargoes around. It is a healthy life, to be a smuggler, if one does not get hanged for it.

  “It is unfair, this,” she remarked softly, to nobody. The people she would most like to avoid—Leblanc, for instance—she encountered everywhere. Someone like Robert Fordham walked away an hour after he saved her life.

  Doubtless he was married to a woman in one of those stone houses and had three small children with slate-colored eyes. He would be hurrying home to them at this minute. She amused herself on the long climb out of Dover, wondering which house might be his and what that good woman, his wife, had fixed him for his supper.

  These white cliffs about her were oddly light colored, as if they were made of old snow. At every height birds flew. The ocean behind her was blue this afternoon, like the warm waters of the south. She walked away from Dover, remembering the cliffs of Italy and France, thinking of the Roman historian Tacitus, who had written about England, and wondering where she would go after she had seen Soulier and then completed her business in London. She must find safety, of course, but also earn a living, since she was no longer to support herself by stealing secrets. Perhaps she would become a cook.

  She was still in sight of the sea when she realized she was being followed.

  Eighteen

  GREY CAUGHT UP WITH FLETCH WELL OUTSIDE Dover on an open, uphill stretch of the Canterbury Road. The sea was a flat, blue line on the horizon. Fletch had hitched a ride in a vegetable cart, keeping a good ways back, curled up in the cabbage leaves with a pocket spyglass. Imaginative man, Fletcher.

  It was Fletch’s horse under him. No point in being Head of Section if you couldn’t borrow a horse now and then.

  He pantomimed scissors as he passed the wagon, cutting Fletch loose from following Annique. Being the peaceable man he was, he ignored Fletch’s return gesture. Fletch would get his bloody horse back, eventually. He clucked the gelding to a brisk walk.

  He saw the moment she spotted him. Awareness slid across the distant figure, like the stillness of a deer scenting its stalker. Half a second, and she relaxed, just as subtly. She’d figured out who he had to be. She did it all without turning back to look. A hell of an agent, Annique Villiers.

  When he came up level with her, she said, “You are following me.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m right beside you.” He dismounted and strolled along, holding the reins.

  He’d never been more impressed by her. In that dull homespun, with the shawl pulled up over her head, she blended into the brown and dun countryside like a quail. She’d become a dusty farm woman. A man could ride right past and never get a glimpse of her beauty.

  “That is sophistry, Robert Fordham. Why are you following me?”

  “To protect you. Until you get to London.”

  “The problem is that I talk t
oo much.” She sighed and kept walking, looking straight ahead. “If I would keep my mouth closed, I would not get in these situations. You are all that is kind, monsieur, but I do not need your protection.”

  She’d called him “monsieur” in France. He didn’t want to rouse those memories. “Robert.”

  “Robert,” she agreed readily. With every minute that passed, to her every sense, he was becoming “Robert.” He was becoming familiar. Soon it’d be impossible for her to see him as anything but Robert. “Robert…” His name, in her mouth, was a caress with a long, warm roll of the r at both ends. “I have played dangerous games all my life, and no one has succeeded in killing me yet, not even Monsieur Leblanc, who is strenuous and resolved. I would very much rather you left me alone.”

  Never in this world. “No.”

  “No? That is all you will say? Eh bien, if I talked as little as you do, I would be in considerably less trouble.”

  She stopped to pick one stalk from the long grasses that grew beside the road, carefully selecting it from among the others. She started off again, peeled away at the stem with a thumbnail. “I will explain something, Mr. Fordham. I am beyond measure grateful to you for saving my life, but I will not sleep with you.”

  He’d had a taste of this devastating directness while he held her prisoner in France. “I didn’t ask you to. Are you always this blunt?”

  She shrugged. “It is this English. It is impossible to be subtle and beautiful in this language, which is not delicate like French. Besides, I have spoken almost no English since I was a little child. Only read it.” She gestured with the grass stem. “I must say this, even if I am indelicate. I will not lie with you, Robert. You waste your time…unless it is your pleasure to hurt someone and force them.”