Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

From the next room, Aunt Violet called, “So vexing. He agrees with Johnson.”

“Then they are both wrong.” Aunt Lily snapped the volume she was studying closed. Emphatically, she pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose.

“Huncher is very unhelpful. I’ll try Middleton.”

“I’d accept Middleton,” Aunt Lily stepped briskly from the room, “cum grano salis.”

. . . with a grain of salt. She would miss them so much.

She folded the letter, feeling the texture of it acutely, seeing every nuance and shade of the wood grain of her desk. The pearl ring was light in her hand when she picked it up.

For ten years, she’d lived in this safe, pretty cottage in the place that belonged to Camille Besançon. At night, in her room up under the slope of the roof, in the narrow bed beside the window, she’d looked out over the fields toward the mill pond and imagined the child who’d died. That child, her parents, and the young brother had been murdered so a Caché could be placed in the Leyland household. So many murders committed so a French spy could live in the cottage in Brodemere with the Latin and tea cakes, German, algebra, Hebrew and Arabic, the intricacies of code, the calculus, Spanish, Polish, chess, good wine . . . “There is nothing worse than inferior wine,” Aunt Violet always said. “One might as well drink ditchwater.”

I couldn’t have saved that child. I was a child myself, and helpless.

But in the silence of the night, all those years, she’d felt guilty.

Could Camille Besançon have somehow escaped the slaughter? Could the little girl who’d worn this ring possibly be alive?

“Whyever am I holding this Von Herder book?” Aunt Violet’s voice receded toward the parlor. “What was I looking for?”

“Middleton. It should be on the shelf behind you, next to the Asiatic Register. To the right. The other right, dear.”

They’d given her so much. She’d been able to give them so little.

Now she could protect them. She could make certain this blackmailer never, ever came near them. If Camille Besançon had somehow survived, she could give the Fluffy Aunts their niece. Their only blood relative. It would be a small repayment for the lies she’d told.

I’ll never see them again. I can’t even say goodbye.

She slipped the ring into her pocket. It was time to go. She turned in her chair and dropped the blackmail letter on the fire. It blackened and became ashes. No one would be surprised to see her burning it. Codemakers burn every scrap of paper they’re not using.

The man who’d written that sly, lying letter could have bribed some villager or one of the servants to report to him. Even now, someone might be standing in the wood spying on them with field glasses. From this moment on, she’d assume someone was watching.

She’d always known that one day, without warning, it would be time to walk away. But she wasn’t ready. She would never be ready.

She’d made her preparations. Two miles past the parish pump, under a great flat stone at the end of an old stone wall, money, warm clothing, and sturdy walking shoes waited, wrapped in oilcloth. She’d help herself to the muff pistol and kit from the drawer in the hall when she went by. Then she’d stroll down the front walk carrying nothing but her reticule, as if she went on some ordinary stroll to the village. She’d stand up and walk away. It was as simple and as hard as that.

In a minute of two she’d get up and do it. When she was quite certain she wasn’t going to cry.

It didn’t matter how determined and clever you were. When the sword of Damocles falls, there you sit, stupid as a chicken, with your skull cleaved neatly in half.

Pax stood at the window of the Dancing Dog, holding a mug of ale, looking out at Braddy Square. He’d come back to London, to duty undone and promises broken. To men he’d betrayed. Back to where it began. Back to Meeks Street. There were no decisions to make. No work left undone. He was just putting off the inevitable. Strange to discover this late in the game that he was a coward.

Stop thinking. He’d slogged the leagues across France, crossed the Channel, and made the long ride from Dover to London by not letting himself think.

He set his mug lightly to one of the windowpanes and didn’t pretend an interest in drinking ale. Nobody in the tavern bothered him. He found himself watching a woman who stood in the open space of the square. At this distance she was just a brown cloak, making a line of dark sienna against the light behind. He couldn’t see her face under the hood. Something in the sweep of cloak from shoulder to ground when she moved said she was young. She’d brought bread to scatter for the birds. A couple dozen pigeons and sparrows had formed an attentive circle.

He hadn’t slept for a long time. Hadn’t tried to. He’d ridden . . . how many horses had he ridden to exhaustion? He’d pushed on through the night, not because what he had to do was important but because he’d rather spend the hours riding than lying down, staring at the ceiling in some French inn. He was almost sure he hadn’t slept since he left Paris.

This last quarter mile, within sight of Meeks Street, was the hardest. He couldn’t make himself go on. He’d washed up at the Dancing Dog, dropped his valise, and stuck.

The woman in her dark cloak had a quality of waiting, as if she were meeting somebody. Maybe that was what caught his eye. She stayed motionless while everyone else passed through the square on business that took them elsewhere.

The wide front window of the Dancing Dog was made of old, thick, wavery panes of glass that distorted the world. A man in a blue coat passed the tavern, west to east, carrying a parcel. His image thinned and stretched from pane to pane. It was like watching him through water.

They knew Thomas Paxton at the Dog. A decade ago, when he’d been doorkeeper and messenger boy at Number Seven, he’d raced in and out of here every day, fetching meat pasties and beer to the agents, rattling through at a run, returning empty jugs to the counter in back.

Ten years ago he’d kept an appointment with a traitor in that dim and shadowy back corner to the right. He’d handed over a sheaf of secrets and become a traitor himself. A milestone in his life.

He snuffed out that thought the way he’d pinch off flame to save the candle for another day.

The battered valise at his feet held two changes of clothing, money, and a spare knife. His gun was packed on top, loaded. Carruthers had handed it back when he rode out of Paris, probably hoping he’d use it to suicide. That might be the simplest solution for everybody.

Damned if he’d make it that easy for them.

In the false bottom of the bag he carried a dozen letters, correspondence from Paris to the Meeks Street headquarters. They’d made their resident traitor the courier on this trip. The ways of the British Service were mysterious indeed.

Maybe Carruthers knew this particular burden was the best way to get him to London alive, and as fast as a horse could travel. That might be what she had planned. The British Intelligence Service worked five or six levels of subtlety deep.

He was carrying a copy of his confession with the other messages. That last week in Paris he’d written out a lengthy account of his life, with particular attention to the ways he’d betrayed the British Service. He was also delivering a final report on the whole matter from Carruthers, Head of Section for France, to Galba, Head of the British Service.

He could have opened that. He could have lifted the seal and replaced it undetectably when he was eight. Twice, he’d taken that report out from the other letters and thought about reading it.

Snare after snare. Temptation after temptation. Maybe Carruthers advised a swift and final end for the man who called himself Thomas Paxton. What did a man do when he opened that letter and found his death warrant?

He’d never know. Both times, he’d put the report back with the other letters and repacked the bag. He hadn’t taken the bait, if it was bait. He didn’t have much honor left—just a patched-up, threadbare rag of it—but he would have used the gun on himself before he lost the last of it.

He ran the back of his fingers across the window glass, feeling the ripple in it, feeling the cold. Trapped inside the glass, pinpoint bubbles glinted silver.

Galba wouldn’t be content with killing him. Galba would want to pry the top off his soul and drag every one of his slimy secrets out into the sunlight.

Mugs clicked behind him. A chair scraped on the floor. The barman cleared tables. Two plump women walked past the Dancing Dog, side by side, one neat in dark green, the other in dark blue. They leaned together, their heads close, their handbaskets bumping, steps matched, a picture of old friendship and a lifetime of confidences shared. He’d have sketched them in quick slashes of watercolor, then stacked up ink in a blunt, dark splotch on the pavement at their feet to give them a single shadow.

On a bench in the square, a man unfolded a cloth across his lap and took out bread and cheese, enjoying an early lunch. The woman he’d been watching tossed another wide circle of crumbs and her cloak flowed like water falling. Sparrows hopped and scuttled madly left or right around her feet. He’d do that lone, self-contained figure in chalks, the sweet curve of her cloak laid in burnt sienna over indigo. He’d thumb in one soft smudge of pale amber under her hood, where the plane of her cheek showed. He would have liked to see her face.

There. That was her last handful of bread. He watched her dust her fingers and motion to the boy lounging on the step at the mercer’s. Sam, floor sweeper, delivery boy, holder of horses, one of the fixtures in the neighborhood, ran over to conduct business. He took coin, accepted a letter, and headed down Meeks Street.

She wasn’t here to feed sparrows, then. The calculations that always churned in the bottom of his mind broke the surface. Why would a woman send a note from the middle of Braddy Square instead of from her own front door? Why not drop it in the post? Why was she wearing her hood up on a fine day like today?

Life was full of mysteries he’d never solve. Maybe that was a love letter she was sending. Maybe she’d spend the afternoon naked in the arms of her man.

Enjoy yourself, pretty lady. His own afternoon would be less pleasant. Time to get on with it.

His mug of ale was still full when he slid it onto the nearest table. He set a coin beside it and picked his bag up, taking it left-handed so he’d have his knife hand free. Nobody looked up to see him leave. It was a point of pride to him that nobody noticed.

He checked to make sure he wasn’t followed out of the Dog. It was habit. Just habit. He had all the habits of a spy.

* * *

Cami trailed her messenger lad to the top of Meeks Street and stood watching him strut down the pavement. He was brisk as any boy who knew eyes were on him.

The church bells finished up the count of eleven. Her flock of birds flew away to do bird errands now that she had no more bread for them. Probably their lives were full of whatever troubles birds fell heir to and all that cheery chirping and hopping about was a deception. She was something of an expert in deception.

When she paid the boy tuppence to deliver the letter, she’d pressed a shilling into his hand on top of it. “If they ask who gave you the letter, describe someone else. If they ask where I went, point the other way.”

Her family—the Baldoni—used to say, “Prepare for many evil eventualities. Some of them will arrive.”

The air settled around her, still and heavy. The sky over London was white, opaque and dull as cheap crockery, full of bright sun. Her boy turned at Number Seven, tripped up the stair, and stood waiting for an answer to his knock. She waited also. She’d stay to see this letter delivered. There was too much at stake to take that for granted. Inside the shell of calm she’d closed around her was a chaos so loud she couldn’t think. It was fortunate she’d made her plans beforehand and needed only to follow the path she’d laid out.

From the corner of her eye she saw the shift of light. A man walked toward her across Braddy Square. For a sharp instant, she was afraid.