The Spymaster's Lady (10 page)

Adrian was adding hot milk to her coffee, handing her a roll, unobtrusively doing those things that were hardest for a blind woman to do without betraying herself.

“Thick as inkle weavers,” Doyle said. “Pretty, ain't it?”

“Hawker's a good interrogator.” He kept annoyance out of his voice. “Women like him. We can use that.”

“Might work. She's young and scared, for all she's a professional. She's going to be looking for someone to talk to.” Doyle flicked a look at him. “Hawker ain't gonna lay a finger on a woman of yours. He's just bedeviling you.”

Damn the pair of them. “I'm putting Annique up next to you on the box. She has sense enough not to jump from up there. If you can get an arm around her…Her back muscles wind up a little before she attacks. Gives you some warning.”

“Right.”

“Try to get her to talk to you. Be nice.”

“I like being the nice one.” Doyle screwed his seamed and evil face into an innocent expression. “Wonder what they're saying.”

“…ABOUT
two o'clock on your plate,” Adrian was saying. “They have the first horse hitched. That looks like the last bags going up on top. We have five or six minutes.”

“I will eat with dispatch, then.” She kept her eyes down, directed to her hands. That had been the very first trick she taught herself. She pointed her eyes to her hands so her gaze did not wander about, staring at nothing, telling the whole world she was blind. Her hands she kept carefully beside her plate. She had burned herself already this morning, encountering the coffeepot. She did not wish to do so again.

The roll was indeed at two o'clock on her plate. She broke it into three neat pieces and ate deliberately, spacing the bites out. It had been a hard trip from Marseilles, and her stomach was not yet used to enough food.

“You have sense enough to eat slowly.” Adrian approved. “You've been hungry before.”

“You, too, I think.”

“I was starving pretty much all the time till I got old enough to steal for a living.” He chuckled. “Maybe I'd be a great walking mountain like Grey if I'd got fed regular.”

“Almost certainly. You will sit back in the chair more, Adrian. If you wish to faint, do not knock my cup of coffee into my lap doing it.”

The table told her of his movement. “Bouquets of womanly sympathy. Would you love me if I had Grey's muscles and walked around towering over all these Frenchmen? I wouldn't be half the agent I am if I had his height. Too conspicuous.”

“I find myself not in the least sympathetic to the problems of being an English spy in France. I would not waste my love on such as you, in any case. You should eat something, especially if that man is to remove bullets from you today, as you say.”

“I don't think food will help. Disconcerting when your surgeon dreads the procedure more than you do. When were you hungry, Annique? The Terror?”

She chewed and swallowed. It was harmless enough to speak of this. “At that time, yes, but not in Paris. I was living with the Rom, the Kalderash, for those years. That life is hard in the winter, if the times are troubled.”

“Stolen by the Gypsies, were you?”

“That is a very false story, as you must know, being the so-intelligent spy that you are. The Rom never steal children, having many of their own, since they know as well as anyone how to make babies. It is not a matter of great difficulty, in case you wondered.”

“I've heard that. I wouldn't try to hide that roll if I were you. No place for it under those clothes, delightful as they are.”

“It is that this dress is not decent then,” she said darkly. “I suspected as much.

“It's charming. Leave the roll next to the plate, please, and refrain from pilfering crusts in my presence. Roussel's over there handing up baskets to the coach. Enough food for a small army. One benefit of getting kidnapped by Grey, Fox Cub—you'll eat well so long as we manage to hold on to you.”

“I will eat well for some time then.” She had room in her stomach for a last sip of coffee or a bite more bread. Not both. She chose the coffee. She did love coffee.

“I
MBÉCILE.”
J
ACQUES
L
EBLANC SPREAD THE MAP
flat, fingering across the roads of Normandy. “You waste my time with your whining.”

“She is in Paris,” Henri said sullenly. “They are on foot, without food, without money. The boy is wounded…”

“The boy is certainly dead. They abandoned him long since in some alleyway.” Leblanc unrolled the map further. “By now they have horses. Even a carriage perhaps.”

“The Englishman will go to ground. If Annique escapes him, she will go to her friends in Paris. Why would she—”

“She has friends everywhere. Be silent.” Leblanc set two inches of Normandy shoreline between thumb and index finger. “This is the stronghold of smuggling. The path to England. Together or apart, injured or well, they must come here.”

How long would it take the English spy to break Annique? Two days? Three? The Englishman was a hard brute. Even Henri was afraid of him.

This was a problem in simple logic. Allow three days for the Englishman to break the little bitch and strip the location of the Albion plans from her. Then…Leblanc walked his fingers upon the map, town to town to town. Where had the plans been hidden all these months? Paris? Rouen? Near the Channel? They could be in England itself. The girl could have taken the plans to England for safekeeping when she left Bruges. There had been enough time.

It did not matter where they were. In the end—this was the Englishman's great weakness—in the end, the Englishman must cross the Channel. He had no choice but to go to the coast and fall into the trap laid for him.

Henri did not have enough sense to be quiet. “There is no proof she is with him. No proof she has ever left Paris. We should be searching the—”

“This is the Fox Cub, you fool, not one of your
poulettes
. She walked here from Marseilles, blind. Do you think she sits sucking her thumb in some corner in the
Quartier Latin
waiting for you? If she is not with the Englishman, she will still go to the Channel. She goes to Soulier. She thinks she will be safe with him.

Henri said stubbornly, “I think—”

“You do not think. Faugh. I am surrounded by idiots.”

Events were escaping his control. Even now, Annique might be crawling to the Englishman, broken and begging, telling him anything he asked. Telling him about Bruges.

The map crackled. He closed his fist over Normandy. This was not disaster. Not disaster. He would scoop them up like bugs. The Englishman would be stopped. Even if he spilled some story of Bruges, who would believe what an English spy said? It could be quashed, every whisper of it. Every breath that spoke of it could be stopped.

And if he had the Albion plans on him…
ventre bleu,
but there was no limit to the gold a clever man could get for those plans.

It would not be like Bruges, with all his work, all his planning, cheated from him. For what? A ridiculous few coins. An insult of coins.

He pressed his thumb on the city of Rouen and marked the road to the coast. “You will order patrols here, here…and here. Stop everything that moves and search it.”

“We cannot stop every—”

“Look for a blind woman, for God's sake. That is simple enough for even you.”

The Albion plans had dissolved from Bruges like a puff of smoke. He had torn that inn apart, looking for them. This time, they would not get away, not if he had to rip them from the belly of that bitch with his own hands.

“I will order patrols.” Henri gave a terse, insolent nod. Another discourtesy he would eventually regret.

He would salvage this calamity Henri had created. He would retrieve the Albion plans. And he would shut Annique Villier's mouth. When she was dead, he would be safe.

“Here…and across here…place the customs. Let them do some useful work for a change. Send our men here.” His fingers tented, spiderlike, above the names written into the blue wash that marked the Channel. These were the villages, tiny, fish-stinking, each with fifty huts and three dozen boats turned down on the sand. “She knows this coast from the days of the Vendée. She made allies among the smugglers, men whose names she never reported to me. This is where she will go, if she is free.” He sat back abruptly and pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The room was too warm. “Unless she expects me to look for her there. Perhaps…” He frowned at the south. “If we spread the patrols…”

Henri gazed at the oil painting that hung on the gold and crimson walls of the salon, a landscape that had once belonged to the mayor of Paris. “There are many possibilities.”

He would deal with Henri. Oh, most assuredly, he would deal with this disrespect. “Go. Go yourself. Give the order that any papers she carries are to be brought to me, unopened. To me alone. Do you understand?”

“To you. Unopened. Of course.” Henri thought himself sly. If he laid eyes on the Albion plans, he would discover that he was, instead, expendable. “What of Annique?”

“Take her, if you want an Englishman's leavings. Use her to reward the men who find her. Then bring her to me.”

“And the Englishman?”

“Kill him.”

B
ESIDE HIM, ON THE DRIVER'S SEAT,
A
NNIQUE
maintained a dry and lofty silence for almost an hour. What finally broke her down was Doyle saying, in a very hurt tone, that she didn't need to slide her arse all the way to Calais. He weren't crowding her. The injured tone of voice and the vulgar word quite undermined her resolve. Even pressing her lips very closely together, she couldn't keep from giggling.

“That's better,” Doyle said, satisfied. “I was wondering if you was gonna talk to me.”

“I do not feel talkative. It is the being kidnapped, you comprehend.”

“We've irritated you, have we?”

“You have. And I do not like to be so high up.” The driver's perch was unpadded and far, far from the ground. It lurched frighteningly over every bump. She could not see the ruts and potholes coming, so she must hold on tight and brace her feet continually on the upcurved footrest. Her fingers had permanently taken the shape of the railing at the side of the seat. She would be unspeakably sore and weary by day's end, which was without doubt why she was up here. She would be in no condition to escape tonight. Grey had, as the English put it, fixed her wagon.

The coach jolted madly. She tightened her grip. “It is unsteady, this coach.”

“I ain't going ter let you fall off.” Doyle had such a wonderful accent. No one but a Frenchman born would have dared to speak French so vilely. “Been to a bit of trouble getting hold of you, after all. You know much about horses, miss?”

She had located Monsieur Doyle in the vast storehouse of her memory. He had many names. Her mother pointed him out to her, long ago in Vienna, and told her to avoid him, as he was tough and tenacious as a badger and probably the best field agent alive.

“Not so much,” she said.

“Then we'll put you to work, and I can get some rest. You just…That's right. You just take this.”

He handed her something. Then she worked out that she was holding the reins and the horses were jogging along with nothing controlling them whatsoever but her hands on thin strands of leather.

She'd spent a lifetime dealing with the unexpected. She gripped the reins as if they were ropes to a ship and she was in water in mid-Atlantic.
“Nom de Dieu.”

“You don't want to go choking up on the reins like that. Makes them horses nervous. What you wants to do is hold them bits of leather nice and loose like. Should really be in one hand, o' course, but let's us start out with the both of 'em, just at first. What you do…” He put his arm around her, taking both her hands. “No, loosen your fingers up there, and let me show you. What you do is…This gets threaded through here, see.”

“Would you take these back? Please.”

He shifted the straps in her hands till they intertwined with her fingers. “This one over here,” he twitched it in her grip, “goes to the left. That there's a bad-tempered devil on the left. Nancy, I calls him, on account of him not being what you might call complete in his privates. Old Nan's a great one for nipping at you when he wants yer attention. Now, suppose you was wanting to turn him to the left—not saying you does now, but if you was wishful to—you'd just pull nice and firm on this strap here. You feel that?”

“Doyle.” She kept a firm hold on the abject terror the thought of these horses running away roused inside her. “It has possibly escaped your notice, but I am blind as a rock.”

“Yes, miss. This other line here, the one you gots lying across your palm like—”

“Being blind, Monsieur Doyle, is not merely a lack of appreciation for the delightful blue sky and the field we are passing. It means I cannot do some practical small tasks. Like drive horses. This is a fact most self-evident that I tell you.”

“Lord love you, miss, you don't have to see to hold on to these reins. Why, half the time I'm driving along with me eyes closed, just napping. The horses does all the work. The tricky part is remembering which of them lines is which, just in case somebody should climb up and ask you about it.”

She clutched the pieces of leather till her fingers ached. This was not the small, creaky wagon of the Rom and a single, placid Rom horse, which was the only thing she had ever driven in her life. “I most extremely do not think this is a good idea.”

“Best way for you to get around, miss. Driving. If you don't mind me advising you. Nothing like a pony cart for tooling around the country and no reason you shouldn't drive as well as any of them ladies in England. Why, from what I've seen, a full half of 'em driving must be as blind as you are, begging your pardon for bringing it up and all.”

“You are a man of the most remarkable cold blood, Monsieur Doyle.
Mon Dieu,
but your reputation is fully deserved.”

“An' what would a nice young lady like you know about my reputation? When you gets to England, you just go out and get yerself a little cart, a pony cart, and you finds a pony with some sense to him, like this pair has. He'll take you round as pretty as you please without you do more than set your hands around the reins just like yer doing there.”

“Get…a cart. A cart. But yes, I shall certainly do that if I ever go to England.”

“Now, miss, don't go on like that. You knows we're taking you to England with us. Going there just as fast as can be. Getting closer with every mile.” He shifted the straps lightly in her hands, steering the horses past some object in the road. “The sooner you stop fighting Grey about that, the easier it'll be on all of us. Makin' us all mortal edgy, you are, not knowin' if you're going to kill him tonight or not.”

“Yes. Or no. Whichever it is.” His arms were around her in a friendly way, but he'd let go of the reins again and left her with the whole carriage and these horses who might at any minute do anything at all. “Would you take these lines back, Doyle? Because I, of a certainty, do not want them.”

“You just ease up on the reins a little, the horses'll walk right along and take us with 'em just fine. Holding on tight just distracts 'em.”

“Lean back and go along most nicely, is your suggestion. Doubtless I am to do the same with all that Monsieur Grey intends for me. It is a very masculine way to advise me.”

“Exactly, miss. And while these horses is walking so nice in the direction of the coast, what you gots to do, if you'll pardon me saying so, is learn Hinglish.”

“Hinglish?” The meaning penetrated. “Oh.
Anglais.
But no. I do not just immediately plan to go to England, as it happens.”

“Well, miss, that's just where you're going, if you'll forgive the contradiction. So we'll teach you Hinglish. Ain't hard. Me youngest girl—she's just three—speaks it a fair treat.”

It was easier staying on the box with Doyle's arm around her. It was even easier when he took the reins and held them, a little way above where her hands were, “Jest to show you how it's done, miss,” and she could stop being terrified witless.

“Now take them.” He must have made some gesture and realized an instant later she couldn't see it. “Them horses. In Hinglish we say, ‘Them 'osses is slugs.'”

“Them is…But that is a terrible thing to call horses. Unless the English are fond of slugs, which is possible.”

“Nah. Them's the buggers gets in the lettuce and crawls all over and eats it. Me wife, Maggie—I tell you about me Maggie yet?—she's a little spitfire, she is, and mortal proud o' that garden of ours. Me Maggie 'ates slugs. Sets out saucers of beer to lure 'em in and lets 'em die happy like. Goes against the grain, somehow, drownin' 'em in good beer.”

She waited for her lips to stop twitching. Her mother had told her Doyle graduated from Cambridge. With honors. “I would agree, though I have never killed slugs. It is still a very strange thing to call horses.”

She was learning that a better class of ‘osses' were ‘rum prads' and the Hinglish word for coach was ‘bangup rattler,' when he took the reins from her and pulled to a halt.

The tenseness of her body must have shown how afraid she was. Doyle said at once, “Nothing to be worried about, miss. Jest looking for a place to stop for a bit. Might be here.”

She felt a sense of humid openness and heard wind and the sound of a stream and humming flies. Birds sang in the distance. They were in the middle of fields then, away from any village, and there was a woods not far. They would operate upon the poor Adrian in the country where his outcries could not be heard.

“This is a good place?” The door of the coach swung open. She heard Grey jump to the ground and walk along the road.

“Might be.” Doyle's voice was accompanied by a noise that puzzled her, till she identified it as someone scratching an unshaven chin. “What we got here…There's a couple or three rocks by the road, piled up casual like. That might be Gypsy work. We been following one of their trails a ways now—them scraps of cloth they tie in the trees up about level with a wagon top. So this rock likely means one of their campsites. Maybe back there in that bit o' woods.”

They were both waiting for her to speak. The British spies, one and all of them, knew a great deal more about her than she liked. “What do they look like, Monsieur Doyle, these rocks of yours?”

“One great lump of a fellow, sorta roundish. That's in the middle. Then there's three in a line, running…Lemme show you.” He tucked the reins somewhere and took her left hand and spread it back against his knee and made dots on her palm, showing her how the rocks sat, each with the other. “And then a flat one off here past your little finger, oh, a good foot or so to the right. Don't know whether that one's in the flock, or just a stray. Ain't no twigs or feathers or twists o' grass anyplace. Just the stones.”

“You have read such signs before.” They had found a Rom campsite, beyond doubt.

“The
patrin
? Seen 'em here and there, miss. Can't say I read 'em.”

“Wagon tracks,” Grey called from the fields to their right. “They're one in the other, dead center in line. Gypsy.”

If Rom were encamped here, they would help her. They would not want to become involved in a quarrel of the
gaje
but neither would they like to see a woman who spoke Romany in the clutches of such men as these. If she lied ever so small an amount…

Doyle cleared his throat. “They're not here. Them threads o' cloth been there a while. Months. An' the wheel tracks is old. We got the place to ourselves.”

They saw too much, these two. She would have much preferred to deal with fools. “You are right about the
patrin
, the signs. There is a camp not far from here. A safe place. It will be higher on that stream we passed, higher than the road, so the water flows clean. The Rom are careful in this.”

After a little discussion of the countryside, she directed the coach, not to a closest patch of wood which beguiled them, but up a long track that led into thickets and seemed to them less promising. She knew at once when they reached the clearing that was the Rom's safe haven. The smell of old campfires hung in the air. The herbs crushed under the coach wheels were the ones the Rom leave behind in their favored camps. Wild garlic, fennel, and mint grew here.

“It's a good place you've found us.” Grey swung her down from her high place on the coach. “This is what we need. You have Gypsy blood in you, Annique?”

“Not from my mother's side, I am almost sure.” She could smell his shirt, the starch and the vetiver-scented water that was ironed into it, which was wholly a French custom and not a British scent at all. They had such meticulous technique, these agents. “I do not know enough about my father to say—he died when I was four—but I think he was Basque. He spoke with my mother sometimes in a language I have never heard anywhere else.”

He did not touch her, but something in her body reached out and greeted his body as if the two were old friends who had not seen one another for a long time. She did not like it that her body chatted to his in this fashion. She cleared her throat. “They were Revolutionaries, you understand. In those days, the radicals did not speak so much of where they came from and their families. It was not safe.”

“I'd have called you a Celt, myself, with those blue eyes. A Breton, maybe. Stay here a minute.” Twigs crackled under his boots as he walked into the brush.

She opened herself to a sense of the clearing around her, as she did with new places. Sun warmed her skin. The stream was not so close as to bring a feeling of damp and coolness, but its voice was loud and comforting. The coach jogged behind her as Doyle released the second horse from its harness. He took both horses, hooves clopping on the leaves, in the direction of the water. The air was thick with the pollen of the trees, filled with old smells of charcoal and tobacco and the pomade the women wore in their hair. It was all familiar. This was a camp like the ones of her childhood. This was a home place of the Rom.

Life had been simpler when she lived among the Kalderesh. If Maman had never come to take her back, perhaps she would have made a life among them. By this time she would have a black-haired baby to dote upon and a swaggering young husband, instead of a kidnapper who was carrying her toward an intricate and unpleasant interrogation in London.