Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

They were babbling in Tuscan, the language of Florence and surroundings. He’d spent months in Tuscany so it was easy to follow.

The old woman, tiny, energetic, white haired, with a nose like a scythe, held Cami’s face between her hands, looking, searching. “Truly, it is. I see Marcello in her. She has his eyes.”

“Sia ringrazio il Cielo. Thanks be to the saints.”

“Where have you been? Why didn’t you write? One letter. If you had sent one letter . . .”

It should have been easy for him to step back and become nothing but eyes and ears to observe and evaluate. But this time he couldn’t make himself detached. The cool shell he’d lived inside seemed to be permanently cracked. Cami had done that.

She was passed from woman to woman, embraced, kissed, and—yes—scolded. The matron with rolled-up sleeves and hands white with flour kept muttering, “England of all places. England! A Baldoni hiding in London. It is unnatural.”

“You should have come home. All these years.”

“We thought you were dead, along with Marcello and Giannetta.”

“Ma abbiamo cercato dappertutto! We looked everywhere. Everywhere! There is no corner of Paris we did not search.”

“Why didn’t you come to us?”

The door slammed back. Two men strode in, alert, tense, pistol in hand. Young men with Baldoni faces and cold Tuscan eyes. Florentine bravos, right out of the Renaissance.

Gun barrels came up, swung around. One to Cami. One to him.

He didn’t twitch. Cami went just as still.

The men—barely men, men one step up from being boys—kept their attention tight on him, on Cami. Fingers ready, but not on the trigger. They were idiots to pull guns in a crowded room full of women and children, but they had either training or good instincts.

And they were just as wary of Cami as they were of him. Excellent instincts.

The old woman snapped, “Attenti! Be careful, idioti.”

“Aspetta!” One man grabbed the other’s arm.

Bernardo gestured impatiently and both guns were lowered, uncocked, and put away into deep pockets of the coats. The old woman—Aunt Fortunata—stalked over to cuff the young men and tell them they were fools. They would make Sara think they were outlaws, Bulgars, barbarians, briganti. They would frighten her away, tearing in here like madmen. It did not matter what they’d thought. They did not think at all.

Five or six conversations in rapid-fire Tuscan resumed as if nothing had happened. The pair hung their heads sheepishly and let themselves be poked in the waistcoat by a long skinny finger, soundly abused, and marched across to meet Cami.

A glimpse of the Baldoni at home. A year ago he’d led a gang of hotheaded boys just like these, from Lombardy and Piedmont and Tuscany, making raids on the French. He eased his fingers off the hilt of his knife but left his hand tucked casually into his jacket.

Baldoni arrived from the rest of the house, pushing past him with quick, sidelong, surreptitious inspections. A man of middle years, dressed like a well-to-do merchant. A woman carrying a baby. A younger man with ink-stained hands. Anywhere else, that would make him a clerk or accountant. Here, he was probably a forger. Two girls, thirteen or fourteen, dark-eyed and graceful as fawns. Scouting the fringes of the main army, keeping behind a cover of skirts and chairs, were roving skirmishers, children not yet waist high. Uncle Uberto, Cousin Maria, Aunt Grazia, Cousin Amalia, another Cousin Maria—all indiscriminately related.

Cami folded in seamlessly among them, as if she’d always been there. As if she’d returned from a routine mission to cheat the good folk of Birmingham or Bristol and everyone was glad to see her back. As if they’d saved her a chair by the fire.

This was family. Unshakable bonds and unquestioning acceptance. He’d never had family, but he knew it when he saw it.

This was what she’d lost when the Tuteurs brought her to the Coach House and made a spy of her. She’d slept on the mat next to his in the long attic dormitory the Cachés shared. Most of them cried when they first came. Not Vérité. Night after night he’d seen her lying in the dark with her eyes open and her face empty, not crying at all.

Emotional reunions didn’t change the fact they’d misplaced a nine-year-old girl. He wouldn’t let them just reach out and snatch her back.

Bernardo Baldoni planned to do exactly that.

Cami was having the dramatis personae explained to her at length. “. . . the son of your cousin Catarina. She married an Albini, Geragio Albini, who was the great-grandson of Alrigo Baldoni, your great-grandfather’s cousin. Catarina is also a cousin on your mother’s side through the Targioni.”

Cami kept saying, “Yes,” and “I see,” looking dazed and pleased.

The noise rose, echoing off plaster walls and the stone floor. Uberto—called “uncle” by everyone, but apparently a distant cousin—retrieved wine bottles from a cabinet in the far corner. One of the Marias brought glasses. The pair of shy young girls shook out a white linen cloth together and pulled it across the table. A happy family scene. What made it ironic was that any of these laughing, gesticulating Baldoni might kill him, if they came up with a marginally sufficient reason. He was counting the women in that, right down to those two doe-eyed girls.

Nobody looked at him directly, which said exactly how much everybody was watching him.

“. . . your cousin Emilio’s wife’s niece, Maria-Angiola. The one from Pisa . . .”

The two men who’d come in carrying guns had transformed into smiling, charming, handsome dandies. “Is it really you? The Sara who was lost? I’m your cousin Antonio.”

“Antonio?” Cami blinked up at him. “Tonio? You used to chase me with frogs.”

“I was toughening you up, like a good Baldoni woman.”

That was a Baldoni to keep an eye on. “Cousin Tonio.” Dark, lean, no more than twenty. But older men detoured around him, deferred to him, watched him. He was important in this family.

He threw an arm across the shoulder of the man at his right. “This fool is my baby brother, Giomar. He was this tall—like this—the size of Nicolo over there—when you left. He won’t remember you at all.”

“I remember her. When we had sweet rolls on Sundays she’d give me the raisins out of hers.”

“. . . Catarina’s mother was Baldoni. That was Luisa, the daughter of Jacobino Baldoni, your great-great-uncle. Luisa ran off with a Frenchman, but her second marriage, after they dealt with the Frenchman, was to a Rossi.”

“. . . counterfeit ducats from the Grisons into France. Everybody knows how it’s done. But, no, they decide to be clever . . .”

“A good wine. Very nice. I’ll bring up another bottle.”

“She is the picture of Giannetta. The image of her.”

“. . . idiots decided they’d save money by not bribing the . . .”

“The mortadella from Prato. That one.”

The kitchen was lit with expressive faces, warmed with bright dresses, punctuated with the impact of ink black hair pulled into a knot at the nape of the neck, plaited in a long dark river of a braid, or tousled in curls. They all had the tawny gold skin of Filippino Lippi angels. The young ones even looked like angels. They must find that useful.

Cami was so unmistakably one of them. Her features, her skin, her hair were Florentine as any Renaissance Medici. I’m supposed to see faces. Why didn’t I see that?

“. . . so I’m playing banker. Me!” Cousin Antonio threw his hands up, protesting, in the easy athletic gesture of a fighter. “A banker. I wear dull coats and pontificate on the pound sterling and the volatility of India bonds.”

Cami murmured something.

“. . . one of Old Paolo’s schemes. We were going to abandon it, but there it sat, making money. Every year, more and more money. We can’t give it up just because it’s legitimate.”

The band of children seethed underfoot, aided by three—no, four—dogs. A baby howled. No one paused in the crowded dance of bodies going to and fro. They touched in passing, put an arm around a cousin—everybody seemed to be a cousin—handed the baby back and forth.

This was how Baldoni lived when they weren’t playing roles, in this din, this confusion, this breathing in each other’s breath. Nothing could be further from the cold expectations of the house he’d grown up in.

“I do this in my office”—Antonio made a motion of moving stacks of coin—“and suddenly money is in the Austrian branch. Then I charge as if I’d shipped gold in a pouch, with a fee and bribes for every border.”

“We will make ribollita from yesterday’s soup and chicken alla cacciatore.”

“The real profit comes from changing currencies. When we buy and sell it’s like coins falling down from the sky.” Antonio shook his head. “There has to be something wrong with that being legal.”

Bernardo Baldoni came across the room toward him, carrying a glass in each hand, and offered him one.

Baldoni bearing gifts. He took the wine and raised it to his lips and didn’t drink any. Baldoni all over the room would make note of that and know what it meant.

“It’s a happy occasion that brings Sara back where she belongs.” Bernardo drank from his own glass. “I thank you for your part in this.”

“She’s Camille now.”

A tiny hesitation. “She has changed,” Bernardo agreed. “But she’s still our Sara. Still Baldoni.”

He said, “Of course,” in a voice that meant just the opposite.

Cami had acquired a glass of wine, Aunt Fortunata, and a pair of young matrons, one at each ear, talking, one with the baby on her hip. That was the baby that had been passed from Baldoni to Baldoni till there was no telling who it belonged to.

“She hasn’t forgotten her Italian,” Bernardo said.

“That’s good. Though your English is excellent.”

“We learn English from babyhood. Something of a family tradition.”

“Is it?”

“Tuscany has always been full of the English—travelers, mercenaries, exiles, artists, madmen . . . spies. We’ve found the English profitable over the years. Our relationship with our French masters is less satisfying.” Without any sign he was changing the subject, he said, “How is an agent of the British Service concerned with my niece?”

“We’ve known each other awhile.”

“And how does that come about?”

“It’s a long story. And not my story. It’s Cami’s.”

Bernardo waited, gravely polite, for more comment. When that didn’t arrive, he said, “You respect her privacy. That is admirable.”

“I respect her skill with edged weapons. Let’s go outside. You could float an egg on the noise in here.”

A nod. “We must talk, Mr. Paxton.”

Cami looked up to see them leave, but it was Antonio who followed him out. Antonio and three Baldoni walking at his back. He didn’t like it that Antonio looked thoughtful. Thoughtful men were more dangerous than angry men.

By the time she disentangled herself from cousins and aunts and a small child inexplicably wound around her legs, Pax was gone. She found him in the hall, almost to the front door. Her path to him was complicated by Tonio and the stiff-legged fighting cocks who swaggered behind him, playing at being dangerous, and didn’t want to share the game with her.

Or—it was no game. These cousins of hers were most certainly deadly. They were simply much less deadly than Pax.

They were three tomcats trailing a tiger. Who was in a bad mood, most likely. And everyone was heavily armed. It is almost impossible to hold reasoned discussion once pistols enter the conversation.

Bernardo opened the front door politely and stepped through first. Baldoni politeness. One does not force a guest to present his back to a possible enemy.

Bernardo was saying, “. . . considerably more joyful than I expected when Lazarus sent word someone had used an old, old recognition signal. I assumed I would be dealing with a fraud.”

“A reasonable expectation.”

“It would not be the first time a stranger has claimed to be Baldoni,” Bernardo said. “Briefly.”

Pax took the front steps, his back insouciant, his step deliberate, his hand—she could tell by the angle of his arm—on a knife. He was ignoring his tail of escort. Tonio would find that annoying.