The Black Hawk sl-4

by Joanna Bourne

  “Well, then. That makes it all right.”

  “We are no longer the young fools to indulge ourselves in this way.”

  Deep voiced, slowly, he said, “I like indulging you.”

  Old memories swept in. Nights of generosity shared. The dark of hidden beds. Days side by side in fields and woods, lying, watching the clouds whirl by overhead, talking and touching.

  She curled her hands where they rested in her lap and a pang of emotion struck through her. She desired him unreasonably and completely, at this moment, in this inconvenient place. She remembered his body with an intimacy deep as the memory of her own.

  She could not help herself. She lifted her eyes to him.

  He was dark and vital, every feature finely chiseled, and all of them unreadable.

  She had seen him in rags so often, or in the clothes of a laborer or dockworker, it was almost disconcerting to see him dressed respectably. As always, he was perfect in his role. He wore rich gray of several shades. The sober waistcoat carried a thin silver thread. The glint of silver was the small jarring note, almost flirting with vulgarity, which made the disguise human and fallible and utterly believable.

  All the world would observe what he wanted them to see—a handsome young fop of the town, lounging at ease, his legs stretched out. Only she saw the iron of his muscle and knew that he carried three, or possibly four, knives. Knew that his pretty walking stick was lead-weighted and heavy as a cudgel.

  No one here, except her, saw that he was angry.

  The waiter returned to place coffee and apple tart, water and a glass before Hawker, who accepted this service with nonchalance and waved him away, his role today being that of a dandy of means and taste. Arrogance came naturally to Hawker.

  He set his fork into the crust of the tart and gave it a taste. Approved. Wiped his lips delicately. Put the napkin on the table. “It’s been five years, I guess. Since that first time.”

  “Almost exactly.” She could have told him to the day. She could have told him how many times they had met since then, and where. She suspected he too knew every minute they had stolen to spend together.

  He put sugar in his coffee. “Five years. After five years, I fall asleep in your bed and when I wake up, you’ve ended it. No warning.”

  “I do not prolong the inevitable.”

  “You’re a practical woman.”

  “I did what was needed. Quickly. Cleanly. We make a break with our past mistakes. It does not mean there is no fondness between us. It does not mean we cannot meet and talk like rational people. Only one thing has changed.” She took a deep breath. “We are no longer lovers.”

  “And you couldn’t say that to my face?”

  “There was no reason.” She turned her coffee cup so the handle was exactly to the side. So the spoon in the saucer was aligned just so. “There is nothing to discuss.”

  “We’re discussing it now.” He said that pleasantly.

  “And I find nothing to say.” She was not afraid of his anger, which she had encountered before, in full force. He was cold and deadly and he lied routinely, for the Game of Spies, for fun, for profit. She trusted him more than any man she had ever encountered.

  In the quiet of the morning, the great expanse of the Palais Royale held only a few dozen loungers and saunterers. The tables of Café Foy were mostly empty under the calm of the stone columns and the huge trees. Men played checkers at one. At another, three soldiers of the garde engaged in a game of cards. An old woman poured coffee into her saucer and set it down for the tiny yappy dog at her feet. Solitary men read newspapers under the clear and blue autumn sky.

  “It’s always been your right to end it,” he said. “Always the woman’s prerogative. Ten words would do it. I just thought you’d face me, when the time came.”

  “Perhaps . . . I have been cowardly.”

  “Well, yes. Stripping down to the bare and quivering skin of it, you have been.” Hawker’s bite of sarcasm.

  Bold brown sparrows hopped about the ground between the tables, picking up crumbs. She watched them. “There is a long tradition of such letters, you know. They place a necessary distance. They do not release words one will regret later. It is easy to say too much in such cases.”

  “You got discretion down to a fine art. Why, Owl? Why now?”

  She told him. She owed him much more than such a simple explanation. “I have been advanced in the Police Secrète. I have men and women working for me now. I cannot behave foolishly anymore.”

  “I’ll have to congratulate you on your promotion, won’t I?”

  “It is a small one, as these things go. A cadre of twelve.” He thought she had weighed him against advancement in her profession and discarded him as nothing. It was not true. She set him aside because one day she might no longer choose her work over him.

  That was why they must end this intimacy between them. Not because it was foolish—though it was. Not because it was dangerous and close to treason. Because they had come to mean too much to each other.

  She had hurt him. She had not meant to do that. She had not known she could. “I was wrong to dismiss you, coldly, in a letter. I ask you to forgive me.”

  “I will eventually.”

  “You are all that is kind.”

  “I should let you stew awhile, first.”

  “That would be salutary. But then, you would not hear my thoughts upon Monsieur Millian’s letter, would you?”

  “We’ll talk about that. In a bit, we’ll talk about being lovers. You might,” he glanced up, “reconsider.”

  “Do not delude yourself.” She did not trust the many resolves that lurked behind his bland placidity while he toyed with the apple tart. But he was no longer angry. “Meanwhile, there is a trivial little riddle before us that will change the course of the world for the next several centuries. Perhaps it deserves our attention when we are quite through with the matter of who shall sleep with whom?”

  “Go ahead.” Hawker leaned back and folded his arms before him.

  “‘La Dame est prête.’ The woman is ready. She is at the start of this, I think, whoever she is.”

  “The most efficient of the lot, anyway. So we know one of them is a woman. A Frenchwoman.”

  “It is not so uncommon for French conspirators to be women. We are a hardy breed in France. There is this also . . . Millian wrote those words with capitals—‘La Dame’—as if it were a title. That is the way he heard it, I think.”

  Hawker’s hand stilled from the restless play he made, finger upon finger, tapping. “Yes. That makes sense.”

  “It is an . . . an old-fashioned way to speak. A respectful way. One might say ‘La Dame’ of a very old woman. Or an aristo. It adds the flavor of disgruntled Royalists.”

  “Or he didn’t hear ‘La Dame’ at all. He heard ‘La Place Vendôme’ or ‘the dome of St. Paul’s’ or some other fool thing.”

  She opened a gesture around her coffee cup, agreeing. “It may be. Or this may be a code. Amateurs love their codes.”

  “Oh yes. We have our own amateurs.”

  “‘La Dame’ may be a box or a book or a fifty-year-old veteran of the Vendée. ‘Tours’ may be the steps of Notre Dame. ‘Le fou’ may be an army unit or gunpowder or a shipment of boots.”

  “In which case we’ll never figure it out.” Hawker had become brisk and practical. “Let’s stick to possibilities. We got ‘The Lady.’” He dipped a finger in his glass and took a drop of water to draw a line on the tabletop. “We got ‘Tours.’ Something or someone in Tours.”

  “I would hazard the British Service has sent men to Tours.”

  “Don’t fish for information.” He drew another line. “Tours is a sleepy provincial town a hundred miles to the southwest. What’s happening in Tours?”

  “I have no idea. It is a city that plays a very small part in the life of France. I do not think of Tours from one month to the next.”

  “Napoleon’s not going there?”

  “Not a
t all. I have inquired—not once, but from three sources within the Tuileries Palace. There is no journey to Tours.”

  “So we think of places in Paris. La Tour du Temple. La Tour Saint-Jacques.”

  “La Tour is simply ‘the tower.’ It could be the tower of any church in the city.”

  “So we stack up another pile of nothing useful.” He wet his forefinger again and drew a third line. “‘Le fou.’ The madman. The fool.”

  “Which is obvious. Only a mad fanatic would attempt this assassination. It tells us nothing. The supply of fanatics is inexhaustible.”

  “And we come to the Englishman.”

  “Of which there is also an endless supply. We have nothing.”

  Under the canopy of linden trees in the great courtyard, women chattered like exotic monkeys. They pushed their chairs close together and leaned against each other and passed something back and forth to coo over it. Something small that glinted in the sun. She could not see exactly what it was—a jewel, a gilt box, a painted miniature, a bottle of perfume. One could buy anything in the shops of the arcade of the Palais Royale.

  They were some years older than she was, entirely lighthearted and pleased with themselves. They made her feel centuries old.

  Hawker had barely touched his apple tart. Delicately, she slid his plate to her side of the table and began to eat, using his fork. “I have questioned three senior officers of my service, also several operatives who feel the pulse of Paris in their blood. They know nothing. All morning I have rolled a madman, a lady, an Englishman, and the Palais Royale around in my mind like so many peppermint drops in a mouth. I am no wiser.”

  “I spent the last three hours talking to Millian’s idiot friends at the British embassy. Nobody was with him. Nobody knows where he was when he overheard all that.”

  “Gaming rooms, restaurants, shops. There is a whorehouse, also, though it calls itself a club. He might even have been here where we sit. The Café Foy is the veteran of many conspiracies.” She pointed with the fork to the arches of the colonnade. “See there? Desmoulins stood on that table and sent the mob marching on the Bastille. It was the first great strike of the Revolution. Men are impelled to rashness by the coffee of the Café Foy.”

  “Might be. But I wouldn’t conspire here if a damn Englishman was sitting at the next table.”

  “I would not also.”

  “Cross off the cafés. You’d go someplace with men coming and going, crowded together, talking. The gaming rooms.”

  But he spoke almost at random. The feral animal inside him looked out of his eyes. He reached out. “You have sugar. Here.” He touched the side of her mouth. When he took his fingers away, she saw the fine sparkle of sugar grains. He licked his fingers.

  She knotted inside and scooped in a sudden breath. She . . . wanted. This will stop. When I accept that I cannot have him, this will stop.

  He said, “It’s been a while since we sat and drank coffee.”

  The Piazza San Marco of Venice. Carnevale. He had worn the costume of a corsair, his shirt open at the neck, a red sash at his waist, a small gold ring in his ear. The saber was quite genuine.

  She was avoiding the corrupt and brutal police of the Austrians that night. England was the ally of the Austrians. But Hawker had taken her to the pensione on Via Ottaviano, saying, “The town’s overrun with French spies. You’re my spy. Let them find their own.”

  For all of Carnevale they had strolled the city together, masked, and pretended they were not enemies. She’d kissed the pirate ring in his ear, tasting gold and the hint of blood. He’d pierced himself to wear it. He was always a man of precision in his disguises. The taste of Hawker was . . . She swallowed and remembered. The nights had been a rough insanity and the tenderness that follows madness.

  Hawker watched her from the hot core of his eyes. “You’re distracting me.”

  “We distract one another. This must stop. Talk to me about the Palais Royale. If it is our only clue—”

  The waiter approached, bringing her a second cup of coffee, taking away the old, glancing into the bowl that held its small lumps of sugar. He came and took himself and his small round tray away, all in a single movement as expert as the transit of a hummingbird to and from a flower.

  Hawker said, “I’ll come back tonight with some men. We’ll walk around, listening in the gaming hells. You do the same with those dozen people you got.” He pulled at his lower lip, something he did when he was thinking.

  I know his lips. I know the taste and texture of them at every hour of the night. I have kissed his lips a thousand times.

  Never again. Never. Never. Never. She made herself pour water from the carafe into her glass. Made herself drink. The fabric of her dress scraped her breasts when she breathed, she had become so sensitive.

  Hawker’s hand slid across the table till it just touched her, the back of his hand to the back of hers. “I’m not pushing you, Owl. It’s your choice. Always been your choice.”

  “But you will be persuasive.” At the core of her body, the memory of him inside her arose, sweet and tenacious.

  “I am that.” He grinned. “We are about to be invaded by the English.”

  She could hear them. From the shops of the arcade, commenting loudly in their native language, a pack of four young gentlemen approached. They swaggered in a line, arms linked, loud, expensively rigged out, unkempt, pushing everyone from their path. They came from the gambling rooms on the floors above where they had spent the night drinking and losing money.

  She murmured, “I see why Mr. Millian met the end he did. It is surprising the English are not more frequently defenestrated.”

  “You’re too harsh.”

  Englishmen swooped upon the Café Foy in a jangle of fobs and a great clumping of riding boots, the many capes of their coats flapping as they walked, the lapels of their jackets wide as outspread wings. They would take breakfast, they said to one another and all the world. The waiter tried to lead them to a spot distant from anyone, behind a pillar, but they ignored him and shoved their way between chairs toward where she sat with Hawker. They sprawled into seats at the next table, bare inches away, close enough to share their reek of drink and tobacco.

  The waiter brought brandy and glasses for them without being asked and was rude, addressing them as ‘tu,’ which they did not have knowledge enough to resent. He pretended to understand no English in the hopes they would go away to find their beefsteak and ham elsewhere.

  They were persistent. Beefsteak they would have or know the reason why. Really, what sensible man would eat food served by a waiter he had offended?

  The waiter bowed apologetically to her as he left, then to the old woman nearby who had picked up her dog into her arms protectively.

  The café was allowed to listen to a recounting of the nighttime exploits of four well-to-do foreign louts. They were frank in their opinion of the women of the Palais Royale and Frenchwomen in general. The old woman and her dog departed. The pretty young ladies under the linden trees arose and went back to shopping their way down the arcade.

  Then the Englishmen became interested in her. “Pretty little bird,” one said to the other, staring at her rudely. “Damn, but that’s a fine pullet. Think she’ll come back down when she’s finished servicing the black ram?”

  “I know where I’d like her to come down.”

  “Come down for breakfast. She can breakfast on me.”

  “She can wrap those sweet lips around my sausage anytime.”

  Men of such high good humor. Did they imagine no one spoke English?

  She shrugged ruefully, “It is my fault, ’Awker, that our peace is done. I will leave.” It was a tame surrender, to be chased from their coffee by such apes, but agents do not engage in public brawls. “I must arrange for this evening, in any case. Shall we meet at—”

  If Leblanc had not been furtive, she would not have noticed him.

  Leblanc stood fifty feet away, half hidden by a column, inspecting the
merchandise of a seller of opera glasses and scientific instruments. The hunch of his shoulder shouted hidden purpose. The angle of his head spoke of surreptition.

  He had not followed her here. She would have noticed. He came because he knew she would, to interest himself in her investigations and to snoop into her sources.

  He was no practiced field agent, Leblanc. He was a political and scheming animal. He had not even changed his coat from their meeting this morning.

  “Do not turn around,” she said. “Face more to the right.”

  Hawker was so instantly upon guard, the snap of fingers took longer. His arm remained relaxed upon the back of a chair. His dark, ironic expression did not change in the least. But his fingers went to close over his cane.

  “Why should I not look left?” he said genially.

  “I do not choose to share your face with others. Their curiosity is intrusive.”

  He slipped a coin on the table, under the edge of the plate. “Someone is interested in us? How delightful. Do we know who it is?”

  “A man I know. Do not turn to look.”

  His snuffbox held a polished mirror inside. He already held it in his hand and examined the world behind him. “The gentleman with an interest in opera glasses. Who is he?”

  How annoying he should spot Leblanc at once. “If you do not know him, I will certainly not enlighten you. Stand, bow once, walk away, and do not show your face. I will meet you at the shop that sells fans, at the end of the arcade, at sunset.”

  “We’ll be more creative than that. Watch.”

  “Do not—”

  He took up the cane as he stood. “Ma chérie, let us go.” He was so gentlemanly. He bowed as he took her hand. His cane . . .

  One of the Englishmen had tipped his chair back on two legs so he might sprawl even more inelegantly. Somehow Hawker’s cane encountered the chair.

  The chair spilled backward. The Englishman fell with a yelp and a flailing of arms. Hawker sprang back to avoid him and knocked into another Englishmen. Stumbled. Was tossed against a third.