Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

He’d been carrying a newspaper for the last little while. Now he shook it open to hide his face. He signaled, Come here, by holding the paper with the first two fingers on his left hand spread and his thumb up.

A minute later, Hawk stopped at the stationer’s window and became absorbed in boxes of nice letter paper, a blotter with green felt, and a gold-plated pen set. He said, “The Moravian church. How religious of her. May I assume our quarry is a dedicated Christian reformer with a grim face and abominable taste in clothes?”

“Our quarry is a dedicated French spy.” Under cover of the newspaper, he slipped his pistol out and checked it. Everything in order.

“Doubtless she’s expecting others of her ilk,” Hawk said. “Or they’re already inside. And me with only two knives concealed about my person. If I’d had some warning, I’d have dressed for work.”

“Don’t kill anybody. Don’t put knife holes in her.”

“Right. No killing,” Hawk said. Then, “And largely unhurt.”

“Yes.”

They considered the church. He, over the top of a stiff newspaper. Hawk, in the reflection in the shop window.

Hawk said, “Do we call for reinforcements, which is my own personal favorite in situations like this, or do we pop in and join her?”

“You wait here.” He folded the newspaper. “I’ll go talk to her.”

“Or I could deal with her, which won’t ruffle my pinfeathers a bit, and you could while away the idle minutes out here.”

“If you hear shots, that’s not a signal to engage. Stay out of it unless I call you. Follow anyone who leaves.”

Hawker said, “You’re giving orders for some discernible reason? Last I heard, you were a French spy and a traitor.”

“‘When two Independent Agents undertake a joint operation,’” he quoted, “‘the senior agent shall command.’”

“The hell with that.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth. Circle round the right of the church and stay in place. I’ll go pay a call on an old friend.” He crossed Fetter Lane, dropping his newspaper in the back of a goods wagon on the way.

There are no congenial places to meet a blackmailer, Cami thought. The Moravian church would do as well as anywhere.

Fetter Lane headed north from Fleet Street, being stingy in width and less than straight about it. It was a street of printers and bookshops, with an inn that had been serving pork pie since the time of Good Queen Bess. Samuel Johnson had lived on Fetter Lane and Thomas Hobbes and Dryden. Even nowadays you couldn’t lob a rock without hitting somebody bookish.

She knew Fetter Lane well. She couldn’t count the times she’d tagged along behind the Fluffy Aunts from bookshop to bookshop, carrying their spoil of carefully wrapped commentaries on the Babylonians and histories of the Scythians. She’d never paid any attention to the Moravian church, though.

She’d passed it three times yesterday, studying the outside but not getting close. Now . . . the door swung open, unlocked. That would be her blackmailer who’d arranged that. How helpful of him.

She pulled her hood up over her hair to be respectful, stepped across the threshold, and closed the door behind her. It was quiet here, a private, muffled-up place to kill somebody, when you came down to it. She was surprised there weren’t more murders done in church.

She swatted the thoughts away and they came buzzing back, like flies.

She was fairly safe. If the French wanted her dead, they’d have drowned her in the duck pond in Brodemere. If they wanted to kidnap her, they’d have done that in Brodemere, too.

She walked corner to corner to corner of the church, feeling cold seep out of the stone of the floor, smelling tallow candles and soap. There were four tall windows on the right side of the church, but they’d built a gallery with extra benches up there, right across them, blocking most of the light. The only thing worse than meeting a blackmailer was meeting one in all this gloom.

A thin descant warbled behind her thoughts listing all the ways she might die in the next hour or so. She ignored it.

The windows were clear glass. The walls were whitewashed, utterly unadorned. The stiff, upright pews were unpadded. At the front, rising high and dominating everything, was a huge pulpit of dark wood, devoid of carving or ornament. It said much about the blackmailer that he held his rendezvous in a church. Such contempt for God, to choose this place. He’d picked a cold, ugly church, too.

She slid into a pew on the left-hand side, along wood worn smooth by many backsides, and straightened her clothes. She touched the hard shape of her knife, safe beneath her skirt. Touched the pistol that rested in the pouch sewed inside her cloak, over her heart. She was comforted, as one always is by concealed weapons.

She’d been born in the hills of Tuscany, into the great, rich, noisy household of the Baldoni, in the town of San Biagio del Colle. In the church there, the carved stone soared to heaven and the pillars unfurled at the top to bloom like lilies. At the feet of the old statues, there was always a garden of lit candles, sending prayers to heaven. The windows told stories in jewels of light.

She’d never understood why the English thought God did not like this. But then, even after a decade among them, there were many things she did not understand about the English.

It wouldn’t be long now. She felt afraid around the edges, but the core of her was vibrating with excitement. Soon the game would be in play. She’d missed this. She was Baldoni, and scheming was in her blood.

She pressed her hands together, knuckle to knuckle, and steadied her breathing, building strength for the confrontation to come, clearing her mind, setting the little voices of fear to rest. She laid row upon row of certainty in walls around her heart and lungs, until she made of herself a fortress.

It was hard to work alone. Hard to be without anyone to guard her back. Without family. The aunts had been—

She cut off the thought before it formed and resolutely laid her hands, one in the other, loose in her lap. Her hands would whisper, I am not worried. I’m prepared to deal with you. It was an old saying of the Baldoni that lies are not words only. One deceives with every fingernail and toe.

The latch clicked. The door opened and sounds of the street spilled in.

He was early. What did it say about her blackmailer that he’d come to the meeting early?

The boot steps told her it was one man who walked toward her, taking a long stride. There was no scrape or sound of breathing to indicate he’d brought accomplices. He’d decided this was not a transaction to share with the multitudes.

She stayed as she was, seated, head bowed, making him come to her. When he was close, she turned to see him.

He stalked toward her, a tall, lean man, not hurrying. He walked like a fighter, graceful, balanced forward on his feet. Walked like one of the larger predators, entering a dangerous patch of jungle. Nothing about him called attention, and yet the threat of him coalesced from the dimness like one single, pure violin note from noise.

His eyes hid in darkness under the wide brim of his hat. He hadn’t bothered to remove it in this poor excuse for a church. Then he lifted his head and light found his features. High-bridged nose, wide lips, angular jaw. A face of spare bones with the skin tight across.

She knew him. Shock hit like cold water. “Devoir . . . ?”

“Vérité.” He said her name calmly. Her old name. The name from the years in Paris.

“What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“I followed you.”

She tried to match this man with the brilliant boy she’d known, a boy on the edge of manhood, angry inside, tightly controlled, given to long silences, self-contained, secret as a closed watch.

He took hold of the carved wood at the end of the pew. In that simple act, he demonstrated, beyond doubt, that this was, indeed, Devoir. She would have recognized his hand anywhere, in all its familiar machinery of long fingers and the jutting bony knob of his wrist. His hand was like the rest of him—spare, enduring, the flesh and bone stripped to the essential, the necessary, the irreplaceable.

He wore his hair long enough to tie behind, out of his way. Strands of it, uncooperative, marked sharp white lines from his temple, across his cheek. She said, “You haven’t changed.”

“You have. I passed a dozen feet away from you and didn’t recognize you.” His eyes were the same emphatic blue, so dark it was almost black. Devoir’s eyes. “I barely know you even now.”

The cold voice didn’t belong to the boy she’d known ten years ago.

Why was he here? Devoir wasn’t the blackmailer. Not possibly. The boy she’d known might have grown up to lie, kill, commit great crimes and treasons, but he could never have framed the sly melodrama of that note. Why had he followed her? Not to exchange cheerful reminiscences, apparently.

Her blackmailer would arrive at any minute. I can deal with only one debacle at a time. Then she thought, I know that coat.

He wore a dark greatcoat, cut for riding, the sort of anonymous garment a man could buy in any town from London to St. Petersburg. At the Coach House, they’d been taught to dress plainly when they were working.

That coat had passed her in Braddy Square. She’d noticed it because it was dusty and the man who wore it walked carefully and deliberately, as if he were very weary indeed. He’d made his way down Meeks Street a minute after she sent her messenger boy in that direction. The man wearing this coat had climbed the stairs at Number Seven, looking very much at home.

The Service had found her. Or the French. Either way, it was disaster.

In the cool dark of the church, Pax looked down at black, black curls and skin that glowed like a wash of ochre over rose madder. Vérité never lost that gold color to her skin, even in the middle of winter.

He’d said, “I barely know you,” but it wasn’t true.

Ten years had fined down her features and taken the childish plumpness from her cheeks, but the set of the eyes was the same, girl or woman. The long, strong planes of that stubborn face hadn’t altered. The bones are immutable.

Some indefinable interior quality of Vérité remained as well. An unflappable toughness. An ironic intelligence. Whatever it was, it looked up at him from behind the same familiar brown eyes.

There was no better place to confront her. It was private as a tomb in here. Without preamble, he said, “You sent a letter to Meeks Street. Why?”

“Is that where you saw me? In Braddy Square?”

“Feeding birds. You made a pretty picture.”

Her shoulders lifted a fraction of an inch. “That was a mistake, then. Another mistake was waiting to see the message delivered. One can be too conscientious. Next time, I’ll wrap the letter around a spontaneous rock and throw it through the window.”

“That works, too. You sent a letter to Galba. What did you put in the paper, Vérité?”

A moment passed. “It’s not about the words. You’re asking if I sent poison in that letter.”

“You had a certain skill with poisons, once upon a time.”

She looked at her hands, there in her lap. “And having that skill, I must use it . . . as if I were an amateur musician, eager to sing a ditty in the drawing room after supper.” Her voice was empty as wind whistling through a crack in the window. “I put that note into the hand of a young boy. There’s another, not much older, who answers the door at Meeks Street. And you ask if I poisoned the paper.”

“The child I knew in Paris wouldn’t have. You aren’t that child.”

She lifted her eyes to meet his.

A decade peeled away and he was back in the Coach House in Paris, learning to be a good, obedient French spy. Vérité, in the schoolroom, head tilted to the side, deciphering code on a slate. Vérité lying to the Tuteurs, her face innocent as an upturned daisy. Vérité, grinning, reaching her hand down to hoist him up over the wall of the Coach House for an expedition, stealing pastries for everybody. Vérité, sharing her dinner with a stray cat.