The Black Hawk sl-4

by Joanna Bourne

  When he they left Cummings was walking out too. He watched their carriage drive away, looking grim.

  Forty-eight

  IT HAD TAKEN MORE THAN THREE HOURS TO TRACK down the dressmaker, Elise, who was in a bed not her own. A nicely calculated mixture of bribery and threat was required to cajole this address from her. It was almost dawn when they came to Percy Street.

  Jane Cardiff, a woman of the demimonde, lived above a neat milliner’s shop. It was, Justine thought, exactly the sort of place she had chosen for herself when she retired from spying. Here was a quiet street and neighbors busy enough with their own affairs that they would not meddle with hers.

  The bow window of the shop held five hats, tilted attractively on their posts like flower heads on stalks. The windows of that apartment upstairs were silent and dark, as they should be at this hour. To the right of the shop was the door that led upward. She allowed Hawker to do the business of opening it.

  Monsieur Doyle had already circled to the back, looking into the state of the alley and the garden of the shop, prepared to deal with anyone who fled in that direction. She watched the street, the other shops and houses, and all the windows.

  Jane Cardiff had shown a tendency to shoot people from windows. This should not be encouraged by inattention.

  The breath of the waking city surrounded her, a grumble compounded of sleepy tradesmen opening shutters, sparrows chittering, the drivers of delivery wagons being emphatic to one another, and milk carts rumbling over cobblestones. This was the best hour for breaking into houses. Suspicion was at a low ebb this time of the day. There is something respectable about dawn.

  When Hawker leaned close to the lock to work his skill upon it, his white shirt was hidden. His black coat and her own dark gray cloak were almost invisible against the door. They would not be apparent unless someone looked carefully.

  Hawker set his first pick in the keyhole. Wriggled it. Frowned and tried the knob. The door opened. “It’s not locked.”

  “We break into the only house in London that is not locked. How fortuitous.”

  “I wouldn’t want to calculate the odds.”

  “It is almost certainly a trap. We will be lured to the top of the stairs and shot and lie there in a slowly widening pool of blood while Mademoiselle Jane Cardiff steps over our corpses and escapes. Or possibly, even as we stand here, she is in a window, aiming a rifle at us.”

  “Now you’ve got me nervous.” He put his picklocks away inside his jacket and pushed the door back. A long, straight stair led upward. “Why don’t you stay a ways behind me.”

  “Certainly. We will allow Mademoiselle Cardiff to attempt your life instead of mine. That will be a nice change.”

  He was already padding soft-footed upward. She left the door to the street ajar, drew her pistol, and followed, guarding behind them.

  He did not fill the dusty stairwell with unnecessary chatter. The next sound she heard was the door at the top of the stair swinging open. Another door had been left invitingly unlocked.

  Hawker led the way into the apartment, radiating a cautious readiness, setting his feet with the grace of a cat on a high wall. Hearing, smelling, sensing everything. She was content to send him and his great cunning ahead while she held the gun and followed. She would, at the least sign of hazard, shoot someone. Hawker could explain to the authorities later. Much of life is wasted worrying about the authorities.

  The foyer was a scene of malicious disorder. The little tables were thrown down. A vase of indigo-blue Sèvres-ware was broken. The roses had been crushed underfoot.

  All the delicate, elegant rooms were torn apart. The sofa was ripped open and the feathers spilled out in white piles. Every book was ripped from the bookcase and thrown to the floor. She stepped over a marquetry cabinet, its glass in pieces, the china boxes from the shelves crushed to white chips. The poker that had smashed them was across the room beneath the black mark it made where it was hurled against the wall.

  “Someone is in a rage.” One does not meet rage with rage. One does not become afraid. But this destruction was very ugly. “This is not a proper search. This is a tantrum.”

  “Fast and sloppy.” Hawker stalked around, poking into what was broken and what was not, disgusted. “Even setting aside the damage, this is a poor job of searching the place.”

  Wide glass doors let in the dawn and showed a balcony where the pots of ferns and flowers had been overturned. She eased her pistol to half cock and stepped out. The garden below was shadowed. It possibly contained Doyle.

  “I don’t know why people always check the flowerpots.” Hawker joined her. “I have never yet found anything in a flowerpot.”

  “I do not see Doyle. I gather one doesn’t.”

  “He’ll drop by when he’s through breaking into the shop downstairs. It shouldn’t take long.”

  Hawker pushed a spindly table out of the way in the hall. An open door revealed the kitchen, ransacked. It would be a desperate or stupid man who searched for secrets in a kitchen, where maids would poke about in every cranny and crevice. Smashed china and spilled flour covered the floor, full of boot prints.

  He said, “This was done after the salon. There’s no flour in there. I make it the foyer first, then the salon. Here, in the kitchen. Then down the hall toward the bedroom.”

  She knelt, holding her pistol at her side, not getting flour on her dress, and touched the pattern of a boot heel. “It was one man in this room.”

  “If we got one man, it took him an hour. Two men go a little faster. Not twice as fast. They get in each other’s way.” Hawker would always make a good estimate of the time needed for theft.

  She agreed with a nod. “This destruction was done recently. The roses in the foyer have only begun to wilt.”

  “An hour or two.”

  “We have just missed him. Almost certainly he was alerted by your search of the brothels today.”

  “Or he saw us in the Pickerings’ ballroom. He came looking for something smaller than this.” Hawker touched the broken pieces of the salt box with his boot. “Less than eight inches long.”

  “Something important that belongs to Jane Cardiff.” She did not say, “Where is she?” but they were both thinking that. “This is an evil man. I can taste it in what he has done.”

  Crescents of flour marked the long carpet toward the door at the end of the hall. Jane Cardiff’s bedroom.

  A hand lantern stood on the writing desk, still lit. The embroidered bedspread, the red velvet pillows, and the mattress were thrown to the floor and slit open. The drawers upended. Dresses, cloaks, and bonnets were tumbled in heaps.

  “And we have more random breakage.” Hawker curled his lip. “He didn’t find what he was looking for.”

  She saw what Hawker saw. This was the last room searched—the lamp had been left behind here. There was no corner left undisturbed. No sign a search ended and the searcher picked up his prize and departed.

  She said, “Perhaps Jane Cardiff grabbed it up and ran. Perhaps he was too late.”

  She uncocked her gun and laid it beside the lantern where it would be handy if she needed it. Every cubbyhole in the desk had been emptied. The secret drawer—such desks always contain one—was pulled out. On the blotter, six fabric-covered boxes, such as jewelers use, were open and empty. Séverine would be able to tell her which jewelers these were. She did not know, herself. She had no reason to buy jewels. “This is robbery. But it is an afterthought.”

  “I never trust a man who is not attracted to valuable objects.” Papers had been shoved from the desk onto the floor. Hawker picked them up and shuffled through, making sense of them. “They’re crumpled up one by one.”

  “Ah. Bon. And these books were opened one by one before they were tossed down. See how they fell? That is true in the salon, also. All the books were searched.” The bookends had been bawdy figures, the shepherdess with her dress raised high, the shepherd with his breeches lowered. They were smashed against the firepla
ce. More malice. “He is looking for a paper or a book, almost certainly.”

  “Stupid to keep secret papers lying about in your bedroom.”

  “A wise agent does not produce incriminating papers at all.”

  “Not everybody’s as careful as you and me. Sad fact.” He began to circle the room, deft and deliberate. Not touching anything. Looking and thinking. “Let’s say Jane Cardiff has secrets to hide, being a woman who lives a full and interesting life. Where does a woman hide secrets, Owl?”

  “Women do not think alike, mon vieux. Do not expect me to understand her merely because I am a woman.”

  “But you’re a sneaky woman. Have I ever told you how much I admire that? We can eliminate the easy places—all the drawers and bookcases.”

  “Certainly, that is a foolish place to hide something.” She set aside her distaste for the man who searched this apartment. It was not the vandal she must understand. It was Jane Cardiff.

  “I’ll send men to pick the place apart. It’ll take a few hours.”

  But she did not want to wait for that. Neither did Hawker.

  “She is no sweet squire’s daughter to trust a secret drawer in her desk.” She had picked up the poor, sad obscenity of the broken shepherdess. The lingering of malevolence disturbed her more than she had realized. “The man who did this was one of her lovers. He comes to her apartment and searches it as such a man would.”

  She had Hawker’s attention. “Tell me.”

  “He gives his time to the places he knows. His world. The salon, where she entertained him. This bedroom, where she practiced her art upon him. These are important to him, so he thinks they are important to her.”

  “What he searches, he destroys.”

  “Her clothes, this pretty dressing table, the sofa in the salon. This vulgar object.” She set the little shepherdess upon the desk. “He crushes all the trappings of a harlot. And he takes his jewelry back.”

  Hawker pulled at his bottom lip, thumb and forefinger. “Searches the familiar territory. His territory. What he feels like he owns.”

  “You see that. But Jane Cardiff has lived a different life in this apartment. This bed is the stage upon which the courtesan plays her role. Whatever power she found there, she did not enjoy. This room . . . I will tell you. I have been in rooms like this.”

  “You don’t have to say it.”

  “But I will. I have acted horrible games upon exactly such a bed. Long ago. I understand this room.”

  “Owl, you’re not Jane Cardiff.”

  “It is the same.”

  “Well, bugger that for a lie.”

  He stomped off to look out the window. She had made him angry, in that sudden way she sometimes did.

  She said, “I was also a whore.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  He was angry for her sake. Even after all these years, always angry. Perhaps she had healed, because she knew her anger still lived inside Hawker. “I understand her this well. She doesn’t sleep in that ugly, red bed. Look here.”

  She opened the door of the small room beyond and brought the lamp. There was barely space for both of them. The disorder was less. Here was only a narrow bed with wool blankets and the simplest of rough linen sheets—something a young maid might have been given. The table held an oil lamp and an oak box, flat-topped, a foot square. It had been pried open. A rush-bottomed chair stood under the window. The white curtains were closed, leaving the room dim in the earliest light.

  She said, “This is her place.”

  “You think she slept here?”

  “When she was alone, yes. This is her private place. There are nuns who own more, but everything here is hers. If she has secrets, we’ll find them here.”

  They would not find clandestine drawers under the bed frame or secret panels in the table. Such hiding places were for fools and amateurs.

  “Floorboards.” Hawker did not sound enthusiastic. It was a tedious job, on hands and knees, pulling at floorboards. He was examining the pieces of the ruined box. And frowning.

  “Lift the light, will you?”

  “You have found something?”

  “I think . . .” Hawker ran his thumb along the back of the box where the wood was pried away and turned the wood to a slant against the light. “We have something . . .” He picked it out between thumb and forefinger.

  A tiny triangle of metal glinted on his palm.

  “That is the point of a knife,” she said.

  “Second-rate steel. Dagger point. Half an inch of it broken off. Somebody was impatient in his prying. I keep telling people a knife is a delicate instrument, not a pry bar. No one ever listens.” He pulled out a handkerchief and wrapped the bit of metal. “A gentleman always carries a handkerchief,” he murmured. “There’s a knife in London missing its tip. Needle in a haystack comes to mind.”

  “It is likely someone will try to stab you with it soon.”

  “I will hold that happy thought in mind.”

  “He did not find what he sought in that box.” In this spare, childish room, there was nowhere else. “I think it is above this table. Whatever it is, when she wants it she climbs the table and steps upon that box and reaches up.”

  She moved the chair from the window. When she stepped up on the table, it was obvious what section of the molding had been touched again and again. She pressed, and the spring released. The panel slid away easily.

  She took a small black leather book out. Hawker’s hands around her waist lifted her down and set her upon her feet on the floor.

  THEY did not stay in that stark room. The light was better on the terrace, but that was not why they went to stand there.

  “In code . . .” She turned the pages.

  Hawker read over her shoulder. “French. And old. I think that’s the first of your codes I ever learned. I can probably read it better than you.”

  “Almost certainly. You are good with codes. It was expunged many years ago. If she had been working with the Police Secrète, she would have changed to a more recent one.” She flipped through the pages. “Everything is undated, but see how the ink has gone pale at the beginning of the book. This is years of writing.”

  “Let’s see the last pages.” He opened the book near the end. A minute passed. “She’s not just using the old symbols. She’s added new stuff. And it’s in English.” He frowned. “It says, ‘I have failed in my . . .’ There’s something I can’t read here. ‘In my mission once again. The rifle was inaccurate. Le Maître will not be pleased.’ Owl, we’re going to find it all. It’s in here.”

  “Her mission. Her Master. She was working for someone.”

  “She says, ‘I have been seen. I must wait until their suspicions are—’”

  She heard a whistle below, from the garden. A snatch of song.

  She would have ignored it. A boy in the lane on an errand.

  Hawker leaned over the railing of the balcony and watched the man who had entered the garden. Watched hand signs. Made one of his own and then another.

  “Outside,” he said. He headed for the front door of the apartment, hurrying.

  She did not make complications when important matters went forward. But she also did not follow blindly. “What is happening? Give me ten words.”

  “There’s a body on the street out back. A woman. I think we know what became of Jane Cardiff.”

  They went downstairs and circled the house to go look at the body.

  Forty-nine

  JUSTINE PULLED THE SHADES OF THE WINDOWS OF the coach. She did not think anyone was observing Jane Cardiff’s house, but there was no reason to advertise their presence here, where a murder had so recently happened.

  She was not stunned by the death she had confronted. She had seen many men die, and women too. But it had seemed Jane Cardiff’s blank eyes stared at her accusingly before Doyle had reached his big hand to close them.

  She sat beside Hawker in the coach. The dead woman and Doyle, who must deal with the grim forma
lities of death, receded behind them. She said what she had been thinking for a time. “She was what I might have become.”

  “You’re not Jane Cardiff,” Hawker said. “You’re not anything like her.”

  “If things had gone differently—”

  “Never.”

  “We cannot know.”

  “I know,” Hawker said. “You’d have woke up one fine morning and stabbed the bastard. Nothing more certain.”

  “I hope so.”

  “We’ll deal with him now, you and me.” He shifted on the seat so he held her against the motion of the coach as they turned the corner, not letting it jostle her arm. Always, at every instant, he was careful of her. “I know how I’m going to do it. Just a matter of settling some of the details.”

  “Always, it is the small details that trip one up.”

  “I’ve never wanted to kill anyone as much as I want to kill the man who sent a knife after you.”

  Adrian Hawkhurst sprawled beside her on the seat of the coach and constructed the scheme that would end in a man’s death. She imagined she could see the plan stretching through his mind, weaving itself in strong simplicity, like the threads of a snare.

  They were still dressed for the evening party at the Pickerings. He, in black coat and starched neckcloth. She, in lilac silk.

  Last night, she had watched Sir Adrian Hawkhurst weave his way among the charming, flirtatious women of the ton. They had followed him with their eyes, admiring and speculative. Not one had seen beneath the deceptive surface of him.

  “You’re thinking,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “I am thinking of what we have become over the years, you and I. Where we ended up.”

  “The head of an obscure government department. A shopkeeper. Ordinary folk.” He spread his fingers over the silk of her sleeve, appreciating it. She saw the smile in his eyes before it showed up on his lips. “Let me hold you, shopkeeper.”