The Black Hawk sl-4

by Joanna Bourne

  The Knight Templar bowed his head.

  “Justine DuMotier will be the last to die.” Cleopatra went back to watching the dancers.

  “If she dies,” Amy said.

  Cleopatra said, “We were well taught. That knife will have been poisoned. She won’t live through the night.”

  “I can’t believe one of us did this.”

  “I believe it very easily,” Cleopatra said. “We’ve all killed. Even you, sweet Amy. And you always used a knife.”

  Five

  TWENTY-FOUR YEARS BEFORE

  July 1794

  Paris

  JUSTINE HAD TOLD THE BOY TO MEET HER AT THE guillotine. It was not because she was bloodthirsty—indeed, she was not—but because they would be inconspicuous here.

  She was dressed as a housemaid today, in honest blue serge, white apron, and a plain fichu. In this, she became indistinguishable as the tenth ant in a line of ants. She held her basket to her chest and leaned on the wall that marked the boundary between La Place de la Révolution and the Tuileries Gardens.

  She was too young to pretend to the august status of lady’s maid. A thirteen-year-old must be a housemaid, no more than that. But a housemaid was exactly what a respectable woman would take with her when she went to an assignation in the Tuileries Gardens. A housemaid could be left to stand in a corner of La Place de la Révolution, bored and resigned, while her mistress played fast and loose with her marriage vows.

  So the housemaid assumed her appropriate expression of boredom and resignation and waited. Hawker would find her easily. She was still when everyone else was in motion. Nothing is more apparent to the eye.

  This was a good spot for enemy spies to meet. From a hundred yards away Hawker could look across La Place de la Révolution and assure himself she was quite alone. The chattering stream of humanity that flowed through the square would allow him concealment as he approached. Beyond, to her right, the tight, milling anarchy of the arcade and shops of the Rue de Rivoli offered a dozen paths of escape. Her good intentions would be clear, even to an English spy of limited experience.

  Or perhaps not. She would not trust herself if she were an English spy.

  She frowned, working that out, and kept watch for him.

  In the center of La Place de la Révolution stood the guillotine. The boards of the platform were dull brown. The stones to the right-hand side were nastily, thickly black where corpses had been rolled into waiting carts. But each morning at dawn men washed the instrument and whetted the blade suspended above the chopping block. The edge of the national razor gleamed silver.

  There would be no work for the machinery of death today. For the first time in months, no heads rolled. Robespierre was three days dead, and everything had changed. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was the end of the Terror.

  The citizens of Paris, who were toughened to the most horrendous sights, treated the empty guillotine as one more festival. They came in their dozens and crossed the vast, impressive spaces of the Place to gawk and circle about the platform, poking one another and pointing. Men carried their young children on their shoulders. When they passed nearby she could hear them saying, “Look, son. That is where the tyrant Robespierre died. I saw it myself, with these eyes. He wore a bloody bandage over his cheek and he screamed when they tore it off.”

  She did not care that this was a great moment of history. Her sister was not yet four—the age of those children being shown this “history”—and she would not have taken Séverine anywhere near this abattoir for any reason under the sun.

  Hawker settled to the wall beside her, his arms folded, his eyes on the guillotine. “So that’s where they did him. Robespierre.”

  Hawker was not there . . . and then he was. Close enough to touch. She had not been aware of his approach. How annoying. If he had been a fellow member of the Secret Police, she would have asked him to teach her this trick of becoming part of the crowd, invisible. But he was not Secret Police. Not yet.

  She would try to recruit him. He was young—her own age, no older—and he would be impressionable.

  They shared the wall companionably. She said, “You did not come to see the great man die? That was incurious of you, Citoyen ’Awker.”

  “Doyle kept me busy. I don’t know why he bothered. It’s not like I’ve never seen a man die.”

  Madame had done the same—set tasks to keep her away from La Place de la Révolution. “I am sorry you missed the spectacle.”

  “There’ll be others.” He leaned with his shoulders against the stone and his arms folded. When he shrugged, it was a ripple of his whole body. “No shortage of deaths here lately.”

  “Comme tu dis.”

  His hair fell across his forehead, black and straight as poured ink. He was always pushing it away as an annoyance, casually, without thought, the way an animal might toss back its mane. He was a good-looking boy in a dark, exotic fashion.

  He said, “I suppose you’re keeping busy lately.”

  It was an oblique reference to her many activities. “I am.”

  “How’s the sprat?”

  Because she had involved herself with British spies, they now knew more of her than she wished. Hawker knew the most. He had met Séverine. “She does very well. You should not wear that waistcoat.”

  He frowned at her. “I like it.”

  “I had supposed so, since you are wearing it, but it does not go with what you are pretending to be, which is a tradesman’s son. Unless you wish to portray that you have no taste at all.”

  “I might be.” A minute later, “No stripes, huh?”

  “Not stripes of that color. It is vulgar.”

  “Thanks for pointing that out. Sometimes, when I’m talking to you, I get a revelation as to why certain folks meet a grisly end.”

  They had met one week ago. She had learned much about him and surmised more. He was the most novice of British spies, an ingenious boy who learned with frightening speed. He was of the lowest class of English. He had very little patience. She had not seen him show fear. He possessed a dozen rare skills, some of which she needed very badly. This was what she knew of him.

  In the same time, she had allowed him to learn almost nothing about her. He knew she was one of the great, secret smuggling chain that slipped refugees out of France, saving them from that very guillotine. He might not know she was also of the French Secret Police.

  Pigeons strutted up and down the platform of the guillotine, self-important as sentries. Bold boys climbed and dodged up and over and around the steps where Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, Lavoisier, and Herbert had walked to death, and before them, the king and queen. Every few minutes, a bored soldier would come over and chase the boys away. The pigeons scattered. In a while new examples of both returned.

  “I got your note,” Hawker said. “I must be stupid. I’m here.”

  She had left messages at a café Hawker knew and at a stand on the Rue Denis where she had seen him buy a newspaper. Citoyen Doyle, who was Hawker’s master and an English agent of the most exemplary type, would not have returned to those places. He would not have been lured by her beckoning. Hawker was less wise.

  “You are kind to come. Especially when I did not tell you why.” Of course she had not told him why. Even in the short time she had known him, she had learned his great weakness. He could not resist a mystery. What Frenchwoman worthy of her salt could not make of herself a mystery?

  She was thirteen, but she was a Frenchwoman. Really, he stood no chance against her.

  “I know why. You want something from me.” His eyes slid to her . . . and away. “You’ll get around to asking for it in a while.”

  She did not contradict him. Side by side, they looked across the Place, watching for anyone who might take undue interest in them. There was a certain camaraderie.

  “You ever see anybody chopped?” He jerked his head toward the platform. “Up there?”

  “Once. When I was eleven.” She had come to La Place de la Révolutio
n alone, in a cold rain, and she had been colder inside than any rain that fell from heaven.

  Hawker glanced over, prying at her face. “Somebody you knew?”

  “An enemy.” They had dragged Monsieur Grenet from the tumbrel, the third in line of fifteen who would die. The demon who had defiled her shamefully for so long had become a shaking, white-faced old man, held upright between soldiers. She had been savagely glad to see him so diminished.

  She had been too small to push her way close to the block. The crowd seethed and shifted between her and the execution. She did not get to see everything. She had heard the shrill whine of the blade dropping. Heard the knife thunk on the block. She caught one glimpse of the aftermath when his body was rolled aside like so much garbage, and it was over. “I am the one who sent him to the guillotine.”

  Across the square, a flurry of pigeons flew up, kicked into motion by a small child chasing them. Hawker’s eyes flicked to that, then back to her. “And you were eleven. Deadly brat, weren’t you? Did it help any, killing him?”

  “No.”

  It had not stopped the rage. It had not warmed the chill inside her.

  Grenet had been her father’s friend. The day her parents died he came and took her and Séverine away from their appartement. He had a wife and children at home, so he could not take her there to do shameful things to her. He had taken her to a brothel where men of his corrupt tastes debauched children. For months, he visited again and again. He was one of those who demanded that she smile and tell him she liked what he did.

  She said, “He was one of several dozen I would like to kill. And his death was too fast.”

  “Sometimes fast is all you get. Can we stroll away from here? I don’t like being out in the open. Makes me wonder who you might have invited to meet me.”

  “You are cynical for one so young. If I wished to betray you, which I would not bother to do because you are entirely negligible, I would perform that betrayal in an alley with several large accomplices. But, certainly, let us remove ourselves from this unpleasantness. I have been advised to avoid public places, in case there is disorder.”

  “Half the town’s walking around, hoping somebody will start a riot.” He narrowed his eyes at a band of laborers, swaggering in a group, pushing through the crowd. “Those fellows, for instance. You can see them thinking about it.”

  He was right. Under everyone’s voice, under the laughter, under the holiday atmosphere, they were all waiting. “No one is quite sure what to do next. It was simpler when we feared Robespierre. Now there are fifty devils to take his place, and we have not the least idea what to expect.”

  “Let’s go expect it somewhere else. I don’t like the smell of blood unless it’s a throat I cut myself.”

  It was chilling that he said that and meant it. Hawker was in many ways like a fine gun. At rest, well made, efficient, and even beautiful. Pull back the cocking piece and the gun became deadly. This boy, elegant in motion, perfect in feature, cold as carved crystal, was the cocked gun. He was, in fact, rather frightening.

  “One does not slit throats in a public square.”

  She had never, in point of fact, slit a throat, but she would not admit this to Hawker. He was the entirely genuine murderous spy, and she was not. With a small pang, she envied him.

  He strolled beside her, his pace relaxed, his posture all ease and enjoyment. His eyes were amused and sleepy. Lies, all of it. The energy contained within his skin hummed in the air between them like a sound. He was more alive than anyone she had met. It was as if he carried an invisible top in the center of his chest, spinning strongly, that made her own nerves buzz in sympathy. He was not a restful person.

  Ah, well. She would put his deadliness to use. She let her basket swing free. “Come with me. I have something to show you.”

  Six

  MOST GIRLS, WHEN YOU FOLLOW THEM INTO AN ALLEY, are selling you a quick poke, with the possibility of getting knocked over the head by their pimp. Owl, on the other hand, could be engaged in a broad range of sinister plots.

  She brought him to a stone church, small and so old it was sooted up black. There was straw and paper blown up against the bottom of the iron railings of the fence. He’d had a map of Paris pounded into his head, so he knew where they were, but he didn’t know the name of this church. Either he’d forgot or it wasn’t marked on the map in London.

  Whatever saint used to own the building, now it was a shrine to Saint Horse. There were three big geldings out in the churchyard, standing together, lipping at the straw spread around, filling the place with horse droppings and attracting a swarm of flies.

  The French did that when they kicked the priests out and closed down the churches. They used them as stables and hay barns. They’d built a wood ramp up the front to the big double doors with the carved statues around it so the horses could get in and out.

  The door at the side was locked up snug and suspicious-like. Owl produced a set of lockpicks she had about her person and set about dealing with that. He stood in the doorway, scratching his privates, which was going to make most people look away, shielding her from the curious.

  There were various touchstones that said you had fallen among disreputable folk. Carrying lockpicks was one bad sign. On the other hand, Owl was taking long enough getting the lock open she almost counted as honest.

  “I’m not going to offer to do that,” he said. “It’d just annoy you.”

  “If you do not wish to annoy me, be silent. I am trying to be quiet about this.”

  Which was what he would have said if he was housebreaking and one of his confederates kept flapping his lips. Or churchbreaking. He hadn’t spent much time in churches, once he got past his first youth and graduated from the trade of snatching poor boxes.

  She had pretty hair—shiny and light brown like good ale. When he wasn’t keeping an eye on the street he watched it make an escape out of the side of her cap. Every time she pushed a dozen strands up over her ear, a few more snuck out and started hanging down in the breeze. All this passed the time till she got the lock sprung and picked up her basket and went in.

  It was cooler inside and dim and it smelled of horse. Two windows—one in the front, one at the other end—were still full of glass, colored like it was made of sapphire and ruby. The rest were boarded up, that being what you had to do if you go smashing all the glass out. A lesson to mobs everywhere.

  This was all comfy enough, if you were a horse. They’d covered the stone floor with straw and put up wood slats to make some stalls across the front, under the windows. There were twenty good-sized horse bastards in here. A couple of them swung their heads around, looking right at him.

  He didn’t know a damn thing about horses, except they bit you when they had a chance or kicked you if that end happened to be closer. If you avoided them in the stable, they ran you down in the streets.

  Two grooms were working up at the far end, one of them carting a bucket, the other with his back to them, stroking his way down the side of the horse with a brush.

  Owl hissed. It sounded like a little wind coming in at a keyhole. “Do not stand there like a turnip. Come.”

  He followed her, sneaking past a horse left on his own in a big stall. Owl had decided that one wasn’t going to bite. She was probably wrong. Horses spend their time just waiting to break your bones and stomp on you. It’s all they think about.

  The door she headed for opened up easy. Just as well, considering how long it took her to pick locks. They slipped into a room with cabinets on all the walls and a stairwell off in the back. He had only a second to take this in because Owl closed the door and it got black as under a hat.

  He didn’t mind dark—it was what you might call his area of expertise—but if he’d known they were going to bump around in it for any length of time, he’d have brought a candle.

  “This way.” Her voice came from a ways ahead, where he hadn’t expected her to be. You’d think she did that on purpose.

  F
ine. He put one hand out to skim along cabinets. Put a knife in the other. One of the prime characteristics of dark is that it’s full of people who want to do you harm. At least, that had been his experience.

  They said the churches were rich before the Revolution. No telling what kind of stuff the priests left behind. Gold cups. Jewels. Bags of coin. If he’d been alone, he’d have stopped to take a look through those cupboards, just in case something trifling had been overlooked.

  Ten paces and the cabinets ran out. Now he had stone wall under his fingers. His foot hit a stair—sturdy, solid-build, wood, curved in a circle, headed up. Air flowed down from above, carrying the wind in from outside and a small, sharp lemon smell with flowers at the edges. That was Owl. No aspect of that girl that didn’t have a bite to it. He didn’t hear footsteps, but she rustled the way women do, faint and subtle.

  So. Upstairs. He counted the steps as he went in case he had to retreat with some deliberate speed.

  The good news was, she probably hadn’t brought him here to gut him. If she wanted him dead, she’d be sensible about it and stab him in the street. She was complex, not perverse.

  He took the steps two at a time, which was why he ran into her, full-tilt, in the dark. Because she’d stopped to wait for him. He didn’t run into her hard, but she jerked like he’d poked her with a stick.

  He felt shock in her muscles. Her whole body went stiff, ready to fight or run. He stepped back, quick-like, but tension kept right on drumming in the air around her. “Sorry.”

  “It is nothing.” A stiff little answer, in a tight voice that barely escaped her throat.

  She didn’t much like men. He’d seen that the first time he laid eyes on her. Seen all the signs that said some man, sometime, had done a right professional job of hurting her. Where he came from, he’d known a lot of women like that.

  She said, “Ahead, there is better light. Perhaps you will refrain from stumbling over me until we get there.”

  He could have said he wasn’t the one standing stock-still in somebody’s path, but he didn’t.