The Spymaster's Lady

by Joanna Bourne

  “I don’t hurt women.” That was a lie. He’d hit Annique hard enough to leave her doubled over, gasping. He had an ironic truth to give her though. “I’m not going to touch you.”

  “Then I do not understand why you are here.”

  “There are three men trying to kill you.”

  “Many more than three, Robert.” She thought about that for a hundred yards, nibbling on grass, glancing at him keenly once in a while. “Do you know, I believe you are sincere. But it is not necessary. I am the old hand at this.” She took the grass stem out of her mouth and rolled it back and forth between her fingers. The fluffy head on the end went whirling out and out like some child’s toy. “You are…Oh, you are very tall and strong and brave and a good fighter. But these are entirely committed and evil men who pursue me. It is my own acts which have set them after me, not any concerns of yours. I would not like to see you get hurt.”

  The idiot woman was worried about a husky brute of a man, instead of taking care of herself. “I don’t get hurt easily. May I give you a ride? Harding here…” He had no idea what Fletch called the horse. His Latin teacher at Harrow had been named Harding. “…would be happy to carry you.”

  “You have not listened at all to what I say. I will tell you that England is an even stranger place than I had heard. I do not believe Englishmen toss aside all their concerns to walk to London with some woman they have met in an alley. It is not reasonable.”

  Tricky, this business of lying to Annique.

  “You remind me of someone I knew once. A woman.” He hoped the hesitation sounded like looking at old memories instead of inventing as he went along. “Not in England. She was French. I treated her badly, and I can’t go back and undo it.” That was close to the truth. What he’d already done to Annique ate at him like acid. Maybe regret came through in his voice. “It’s too late.”

  “‘But that was long ago and in another country,’” she quoted softly, “‘and, anyway, the wench is dead.’” She darted another shrewd glance at his face. “I wondered why you studied me so strangely back there in the town.”

  “You look like her.”

  “I do not want to look like someone else. I have troubles enough of my own without a…a doppelgänger making more for me.”

  Maybe it wasn’t convincing. He waited, remembering to keep his breath even. Making himself look at the horse, at the ground. Men telling lies like to look you in the face.

  “I have made mistakes,” she said after a long time, “which haunt me at night and which I cannot erase.” She ran her thumbnail down the long stem of grass, frowning. “You saved my life. All the same, I cannot believe—”

  “I was leaving Dover tomorrow.” Rational, logical Annique. Give her a practical, sensible reason, and it would convince her. “Headed home for a visit. To Somerset. I have to go through London anyway. I’d be glad of the company.”

  He made himself stop there. When it came to lies, as Hawker always said, “Don’t embellish.”

  “Ah. It is not so big a change, that, to leave one day early. To you it would seem like fate, perhaps, when I am presented under your nose. I am not inclined to believe such things myself, but I know many people who do.”

  She looked out over the fields, thinking abstruse, clever Annique thoughts.

  Take it on trust, Annique, just this once. Believe me. Lead me to the Albion plans. Make it easy for both of us.

  Then she nodded. “I will travel with you to London, if this is what you must do to clean yourself of the past. I owe you that much. But Robert…you would be wiser to return to your ship and your family and forget this woman who has long since made her peace with God.”

  “If I get you safely to London, that’s enough. That’s what I have to do.”

  She must have caught the determination in his words, but it didn’t frighten her. Good. He was damned sick of frightening her.

  “Bon. We will travel together then, till London. I will be grateful for the company.”

  She turned her face to the north, to the length of road, measuring distances under the sky. He was seeing the real Annique Villiers at last. This was what she’d been for all those years, trailing across Europe in the raggle-taggle tail of the army, in boy’s clothing, nibbling something plucked from a field. A pair of larks sprang up from the field beside them and flew a complex pattern toward a stand of trees. She brightened, gazing after them, delighting in the moment, squirreling another memory away inside her.

  “I will like England.” She started walking again. “I have been here only four hours, and already I have met three men trying to kill me and one who bought me whelks. For better or worse, this is not a country that ignores me.”

  Nineteen

  The Green Parrot Inn, Dover, England

  “I WILL SLIT HER THROAT.” HENRI’S FACE WAS marbled into an ugly map of bruises. His hand, on the tabletop, was swathed in white cloth.

  “Ass! Do you think the English have no ears?” Leblanc glanced around. Fishermen stuffed themselves with onions and fried fish. At a table in the corner, a woman drank gin. No one was listening. “You will get your chance soon enough.”

  “First, I will deal with him. I will gut him like a mackerel and leave him flopping in his blood.”

  “As you did before?”

  “No one reported this English spy was in Dover. How was I to expect—”

  “Cease! You whine like a dog.” Leblanc hunched over his watered rum. His arm ached unbearably. He was in England, wallowing in this dockside filth, in danger. He might be stopped and questioned at any moment by stupid, clumsy British authorities. Annique had escaped him. This was Henri’s fault, every bit. “She goes to Soulier, in London, to tell him lies about me. He has been her objective all along. I am sure of it.”

  “But she does not carry the papers. We could have stayed in France, if it is papers you want.” Henri doubtless thought he was clever.

  “Forget the papers. What is important is that she dies. She must not reach Soulier.”

  “We are in his territory. When he hears what we have done…”

  “She is my agent, assigned to me. I can do what I like with an outlaw who crosses the Channel without my orders.” Leblanc finished the glass in one swallow. What he would not give for an hour in privacy with that bitch. One hour. “I have sent word to Fouché what she does. When the Directeur of the Secret Police supports me, I do not give a fart for Soulier. Faugh. Who can drink this?”

  “There is brandy.” Henri looked for the serving maid.

  “It is all pig wash. Rum, gin, beer, brandy—they are horse piss in this stink of a country. You will take six of the men and go east, along the coast. Send the others west. She is squatting by the fire in some fisherman’s hut, thinking she has outsmarted me.”

  “Why would she hide in some small village where everyone peers and spies and chatters? She will go to London. To Soulier. When he learns we are in England—”

  “Enough.” Leblanc slammed the empty glass on the table.

  One fisherman, and then another and another, shot looks in their direction. The whore at the corner table hastily dropped a coin by her mug and left. Even the innkeeper eyed them with suspicion.

  Leblanc held rage behind clenched teeth. He could not order these scum hauled into the street and beaten. He, Jacques Leblanc, friend of Fouché, had no power here. Everything…everything…was in ruins. He had lost any chance of the Albion plans. That bitch whore, Annique, would run to Soulier and complain. He should have killed her, her and Vauban, too, there in the inn at Bruges.

  Henri would not cease. “I only say that we must watch the road to London—”

  “I am not a fool, Bréval. I, myself, will watch the coaching inn to see if she takes the stage to London. You will search the coast. And you will not concern yourself with papers.”

  The Albion plans were lost. The payment that should have been his—lost. His very life was threatened. Annique had many sins to pay for.

  Any
minute, she would learn of the death of Vauban. She must not reach Soulier and babble in his ear. “She is to be killed on sight. They need not be gentle.” Let her suffer a lifetime of pain in every second it took her to die.

  “Soulier is fond of her. He will be furious.”

  “When she is a corpse, it does not matter what Soulier is fond of.”

  Twenty

  IN THE LIGHT OF THE THIN NEW MOON, ROBERT groomed the horse Harding. He brushed his way with care and thoroughness from mane to withers to rump and tail. From bite to kick, as it were. She thought the horse Harding liked it. He looked smug.

  “You are indulgent to that horse.” She watched the outline of him against a gray sky. “He has done no work whatsoever except to walk a little.”

  “I like taking care of animals.”

  She supposed a life surrounded by fishes and smuggled brandy would not allow time to care for livestock. “Is he from your home, the horse Harding? Perhaps one that your brother bred, who is so fond of horses?”

  “Spence? No, Harding isn’t one of his. I picked Harding up in Dover. Spence would like him though. If I brought him home, he’d try to win him in one of his card games. He’d cheat, most likely, since it’s just family.”

  “It must be interesting to have brothers and sisters. I have often thought so.”

  For four long days Robert had laid his whole history out before her, like a gift. It was as if he’d waited all his life for the chance to tell his story to a grubby French spy walking on the dusty roads in Kent. She knew now of the house in Somerset where he had grown up, where his mother and father and the older brother Spence and a young sister still lived.

  She could picture it, that huge old farmhouse with the horses in the stable and the chickens his mother was proud of, who each had names and were of a special breed from Constantinople and not at all like other chickens. Robert had, she knew now, a house of his own called Tydings where an aunt looked after him, and another brother in the army and three other sisters, younger than he was, but married, who did not live at home.

  It was a joy and a burden to know all this. She would remember it when they parted and it would make her infinitely sad.

  They were encamped far back from the road, deep in the stubble of harvested fields. She turned the embers with a pointed stick. She had built such clean, invisible fires a thousand times. There was little smoke. No sparks flew into the night to show where they were.

  Robert finished with his pampering of Harding and came to sit beside the fire with her. “That’s a pretty tune. What is it?”

  “What? Oh. I had not realized I was humming. It is a children’s song.” She sat back on her heels. “Let me think…In English it would go, ‘Let the gutters flow with the blood of the aristocrats. Let us wash our hands in their entrails. Let all who stand against the voice of the people perish like rats.’ There is much more of it.”

  “Good God.”

  “Most exactly. It is a pretty tune, though. It is sad that my voice is like a jackdaw, as many people have told me. We used to sing that one, jumping rope. ‘The fat aristos shall perish, one and two. The traitors shall die, three, four.’ We were all without exception bloodthirsty when I was six. That was the year we took the Bastille. It is strange to know all those boys I played with are in the army now, or dead.”

  “An interesting time.”

  “It was to stand at the pivot of history, to be in Paris in those days. Dreams were as solid as the stones of the street. A thousand possibilities. That is what you English do not understand. We French will not stop until the whole world is conquered for the Revolution. Napoleon puts his harness upon those dreams and drives them for his own purposes. You do not know at all what you are up against.”

  “You think the peace won’t last?”

  She knew the peace would not last. The Albion plans set a date for the invasion. She knew the very road troops of the Grande Armée would march upon. Some of them, a third part of the army, would murder and pillage their way down this one. “It is Napoleon’s passion to conquer, not to rule. There will be no peace.” The fire made a comfortable hiss and sputter as she flipped ember after ember. She had seen houses and villages burned till they were just this. Embers. “He prepares again for war, even as we sit here.”

  “Maybe he’ll pick some other country to invade, one with less water around it and a smaller navy.”

  “And a better climate.” It had rained upon them today for a time. And yesterday as well. She did not like to be wet so continually.

  “One of those Roman writers said something about the rain in England. Deformed by rain…something like that.” It had surprised her at first that Robert Fordham, smuggler and yeoman’s son from Somerset, should have the education he did. Perhaps he read much when he was at sea.

  “That is Tacitus. He said the sky in this country is deformed by clouds and frequent rains, but the cold is never extremely rigorous. I do not suppose matters have changed much in a thousand years. Certainly there is still rain.”

  He had taken off his black sweater to groom the horse Harding and unbuttoned his shirt far down his chest and rolled up his sleeves over his forearms. He was brown, as men become who work upon the sea, with a roughness of skin from wind and salt water. In the dim yellow light of the fire, he was a dark and massive form, with the strongness of rocks and tree trunks, uncompromising and very beautiful.

  Once she could have admired him, or admired the strength of his horse, and it would have been the same. She had still possessed innocence of a sort. Her time with Grey had made her wiser and infinitely more foolish. Now when she looked upon Robert Fordham, she brooded and yearned like a schoolgirl and felt the most shameful heatedness inside her.

  She did not make herself turn away and gaze upon something that would disturb her less. She had become weak.

  The fire developed nicely. Soon it would be useful to cook upon. “It is not right that we French should invade here.” She glanced across at Robert. “Oh, you smile, but that is not obvious if one is French. Of a certainty, you English would be better off without your foolish German princelings who spend so much public money. You should have a republic and voting by everyone.”

  “Is that what Napoleon would bring us?” Robert said softly.

  “That is how it would begin.” Her life would be simpler if she did not think so much. “Napoleon would make some things better here. But at a great cost. When he comes to this green island, he will burn all those pretty farmhouses we passed today.”

  “You can’t stop it, Annique.”

  But she could. It was her choice whether those farmhouses would burn and the plump farm women and the barefooted children burn with them. It had become her decision when Vauban set the Albion plans into her hands in that inn parlor in Bruges, six months ago.

  If she betrayed the Albion plans to England, she would be a traitor. She would die for it. Vauban would be pulled from his bed to go to disgrace and death upon the guillotine. And France would be at great peril from the detailed knowledge she gave to the British. But the children in that white farmhouse would live.

  Or perhaps not. She could not know. Perhaps different children, equally innocent, would die instead. This meddling in the fate of nations was a grim affair.

  Even a year ago, she would have gone to London, to Soulier, and laid everything in his lap and followed his orders. But she was not a child anymore, and her answer could not be that simple.

  She turned a small square coal of glowing orange over carefully on its side, giving it most considered attention and accomplishing no purpose whatsoever. She need not decide today, after all.

  Robert searched into the basket he had acquired an hour ago from that very farmhouse down the road. Under the red flowered cloth that was tucked across, it contained the most lovely things—sausages and bread and small brown eggs. This was one more thing she did not know how to deal with.

  She watched him investigate. “I would not have dared to ask for these
foods. You are very courageous, did you know.”

  “Braving the dread Kent farmer in his lair?” He spread the cloth between them. “They’re not so dangerous.”

  “He might have set his dogs upon you. Me, I do not like dogs.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  The hairs of his chest were gold where the firelight struck them. She imagined how it would be if she reached across to his shirt and opened the last buttons and drew it off of him. She could almost see herself doing this.

  He would feel furry, with those hairs, but his skin would be of the toughness of leather. Grey had worn a leather coat. He had wrapped it about her, keeping her warm as she wandered in and out of the drug. If she lay her cheek upon Robert, he would feel like that leather, with softness that went no farther than the outermost glide across his skin. He would be hard muscle underneath, as Grey was. His hands would be like Grey’s hands, too, rough from the work he did, only great carefulness making them soft upon her. If he put his hands upon her breasts…

  She closed her eyes. Her body clenched immodestly and moistened. She did not know whether she was desiring Grey or desiring Robert. She was most probably going mad.

  “Bread. Sausages.” Robert took bread from the basket as he named it and laid it on the red cloth. The sausages he skewered on a forked stick. “I’ve had enough hedge berries and sour apples. It’s no life for a man.”

  “Bien sûr. But you have paid that farmer. I do not have the money to buy such a meal, having only three pounds—”

  “And sixpence. Yes, you told me. I have a good bit more than that.”

  “You are to be felicitated. But I cannot take this food and not pay my share. And I cannot pay my share.”

  “You face moral qualms.”

  “They are everywhere if one goes looking for them. Though perhaps I am being silly.”

  “Sounds like it to me. And eggs.” The eggs were in the bottom, in the nest of straw the farmer’s wife had made for them. “There was a man who could tell eggs apart. At Delphos.”