The Spymaster's Lady (29 page)

These English. Another realization came upon her. “I am half Welsh.” She could not help feeling dismal about it.

“You are fully Welsh,” Galba said. “Your mother was born in Aberdare.”

The map flashed into her head. Aberdare was in Wales. “Maman was not truly named Griffith, was she?”

“She was.”

“But that is an ugly name. One cannot pronounce it. It is no wonder she called herself Villiers, which is euphonic. At least Griffith is not laughable, as Jones is.”

She had eaten nothing for a day and had no coffee, and now she felt dizzy and light-headed. Many unpleasant truths stared her in the face. She was not prepared for this. No one on earth could be prepared for this. “You are telling me my mother was named Griffith, and she was Welsh. I am not French. Not one little drop.” No one contradicted her.

After a while, she said, “We spoke English when I was very little. Maman called me Annie Kate, before she called me Annique. I had forgotten.”

So serious, their faces. This was all true, not some elaborate lie. She remembered the language her father and mother had whispered to each other in the night when they were alone. She had the certainty that if she remembered hard enough and asked, she would discover it was Welsh.

“I am Welsh. It is like saying I am a giraffe or a teapot or an Algonquin Indian. I have become impossible and ridiculous.”

Galba stood waiting, as still as a tree that had been planted there.

“You need to know the rest.” Grey walked to the table and slid the files there toward her, in a pile. They had wide red bands across, which no doubt meant something. “I saw this for the first time yesterday. I didn't know before.”

The file on top was labeled with many aliases, some she recognized. Among them were Pierre Lalumière and Jean-Pierre Jauneau, but the first name written was Peter Jones.

This was the file of an agent of the British Service who had been born Peter Jones and had taken the name of Pierre Lalumière. He had been a detached agent and a grade 17 when he died. His pension was assigned to his widow, Lucille Jones.

The file held hundreds of pages, old papers with their feel and smell entirely authentic. This was political reporting he had made upon the abuses of the Old Regime and on the intellectual ferment that became the Revolution. The secret societies. The political clubs. She leafed through. Pierre Lalumière, who was so honored in France that every schoolboy knew his name, had been a British and a spy.

The folder below was her mother's. She picked it up, finding it thick.

Pages and pages. Maman's political reporting from Paris. Secrets of the Austrians and Russians from Vienna. Details that were the most deep secrets of Fouché's Secret Police.

The oldest part, deep at the back of the folder, in her mother's tight, spare writing, was the long, dreadful story of the time of the Terror. Notes on top, in another hand, said that Maman had pulled more than three hundred men and women from the machinery of the Revolutionary Council. So many lives saved. Innocents and not so innocent, but none deserving extinction. Annique had not known her mother had done this.

The death of Lucille Alicia Jones was entered on the left-hand side of the folder in ink fresh and unfaded. She had been a grade 20 when she died, on detached service. Her pension was assigned to her daughter, Anne Katherine Jones.

She did not want to look at the last folder. Her own. It was very thick indeed. All the letters she had written to Maman, all her reports, her whole lifetime of spying, was in it.

She had laid so many secrets in her mother's lap and never asked where they went. Now she knew. The French got only the dregs. The best had gone to the British. It had always been the British, all those years.

“You're convinced this isn't fake,” Grey said, when she stopped and closed the file and sat unmoving over it.

“It is genuine.” She stared at a book lying on the shelf. If someone had asked her what it was, she could not have told them the word for it. “Maman was remarkable. There is no French agent so deeply planted within the British. She had access everywhere, my mother.”

“She was unique,” Galba said.

“Even Vauban. All those years I was with him, I told her everything we did. Now I see it written in this file. I was so clever and pleased with myself, and I gave everything to her. René, Pascal, Françoise…and Soulier. Soulier, who trusted me with such messages…I betrayed them all. Vauban would spit upon me for being so stupid.”

Then she could speak no more. It was hard to see because of the water in her eyes. If she once started crying, it would pierce like icicles.

Grey took the files out of her hands and made her stand up and pulled her to hide against his chest. She did begin crying then. It hurt just as much as she had thought it would.

There were many times in the past it would have been perfectly simple to be killed. If she had been sensible, she would have died then and never come to England to this room to see everything of importance shatter to bits.

She had many tears in her, but at last she pushed away from Grey and dried her face upon her forearm, clumsily and quickly, like a child. It was time for her to think and not just hurt. Although she would continue to hurt as well, probably forever.

“I am curious.” It was a crow's squawk. “I am curious to see what you will do with me now that I am made nothing in this way. In one hour, you have destroyed me. I have been a traitor all my life. All my life, everything I did…It was for nothing. Nothing.”

Grey slid a plate across the table toward her. “Annique, eat something.”

She did not move.

“If nothing matters,” he said, “it doesn't matter if you eat.”

It was coffee and rolls. He was right, of course. None of it mattered. She put her elbows on the table to steady herself and drank coffee and then ate most of a roll so her capitulation would be complete. When she was finished, she put her head into her hands.

The floor creaked as Galba moved. “Annique…” He had to repeat it before she looked up. “Annique, I am in some part the author of this injustice. I did not intervene. I am profoundly sorry.”

Which was English too complicated for her. “I am the offspring of a mermaid and a sea cod. And they were married. I had no idea. Why did my mother lie to me?”

“At first you were too young to burden with this secret. Later…” Galba spread his hands. “There is no excuse. Later, she chose to keep it from you. The last time I saw her, you were twelve. We argued about this, fiercely. She told me you were a child of single heart and she would not tear you in half. I don't think she expected either of you to survive this war. Grey, she's not even hearing me.”

“Leave her here with me. She needs time.”

“Do not talk about me as if I am not here.” But she had become insubstantial as smoke. If she was not French, she could not imagine what she might be. Maybe nothing.

“I apologize.” Galba sighed. “Annique, you are not the offspring of a halibut and a mythical sea creature. Your parents were two of the finest people I have ever known. Your mother had great respect for you. She knew someday we might sit in this house and face this moment.”

He waited for something.

“She doesn't know.” Grey took her face between his hands, so she had to look at him, and spoke slowly. “We have to tell her. Galba's name is Anson Griffith. If you were more familiar with the Service, you'd know that.” He waited. “He was Lucille Griffith's father. Your mother's father.”

Her mind was flat and barren as a tidal beach. None of the words made any sense. Maybe she had forgotten how to speak English.

Galba grunted. “When she can think again, bring her downstairs. She shouldn't be alone.”

Grey stroked her hair, slipping it through his fingers. “She'll be fine in a few minutes.”

“I will never be fine again.”

“Yes, you will, my little halibut. You're incredibly tough, did you know that?”

S
HE COULD NOT GUESS HOW MUCH TIME PASSED.
She did not hear Galba go out. When she looked up again, she was alone with Grey.

He stood by the window, lifting the curtain with the back of his fingers to stare into the street. She made some sound or changed her breathing, and he turned toward her. She saw then what was in his eyes. He would have rolled England up by the corners and moved it to Greenland, if that would have helped. He would have done that for her.

She had become pitiable. She had never been the clever Fox Cub. She had been the dog to fetch secrets to Maman. She had felt so smug in her cleverness all those years, but she had always been the dupe. All her life, the dupe.

Blood beat like drums within her ears. The world pulsed red at the edges. “Lies.” The chair scraped behind her and toppled and crashed as she pushed it aside. She pounded her fists down. “Lies and lies and lies!”

Her mother's file lay on the table. She took it with both hands and threw it across the room. Papers disgorged in midair and flapped and scattered. “Nothing but lies!” She swept her father's file from the table with the back of her hand. It spread out in a long, smooth line across the rug—pages and pages of his upright, precise writing.

That left her file. She ripped the cover in half. Everything emptied out across the table. Reports that should have gone to Paris. Her letters. The letters she had written Maman.
Dieu.
The silly, loving, trusting words she had written…all her little secrets. Everyone here had read them.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of letters, written in little minutes on the edge of battlefields, creased from being carried next to her skin. Paper dirty because she had scavenged it from the garbage, paper stolen from the officers' tents, paper bought when she had no money for food. All those letters filled with the careful, rounded script of an obedient child.

She grabbed them and tore again and again and again till they fell out of her hands, between her fingers, small, small pieces that fluttered like leaves. Scraps fell with lines of writing turned in every direction. And she knew every word. That was the pain of it. She knew them all. With each falling scrap, in a little flash, she remembered where she had been when she wrote it.

Paper curled in her fists. Her hands shook.

Grey said nothing and did not try to stop her. She could destroy every file in this room, and Grey would not stop her. None of it, none of it, made the least difference.

The fools had left cup, plate, saucer upon the table. They exploded, one after the other one, when she threw them upon the floor. They were not so smart, these English.

“I hope they were expensive dishes.” She looked at the pieces and the crumbs and the spots of coffee all across the rug and the spoon lying on its side. Her head ached horribly.

“Very expensive. Crown Derby.”

“I would feel better if I killed someone. I am almost sure of it. You are stupid to leave knives all over this room.” She had held her hand back from murder for her whole life, but it was never too late to start. “After I finished stabbing you, I could burn this house down. It would not be so hard. I could burn all your thousands of files you love so passionately.”

“Start with these.” He pointed at the limp, desolate heaps of paper on the floor. “I'll help.”

She would not cry again. Probably she would never cry again in all her life. She wanted to hold Grey and fall to pieces in his arms like a weakling, but assuredly, she also wished to kill him.

The hearthrug had a hundred little holes in it where sparks had fallen for many years. “My father was a great man.”

“A very great man,” Grey said. “We argued about him at Harrow, in the common room at night. What he wrote. What he and the others did in Lyon. I was halfway a Revolutionary from reading him.”

Beside her was one of those strong, heavy chairs in which the room abounded. It was old and worn from spies sitting upon it. For Grey and the others, this was their refuge, their place to talk and read and forget their work. The heart of the house. These wise and terrible men had brought her here so she would be enclosed in their concern, in their most sheltered place, while they destroyed her.

She swallowed. “It is hard to believe my father was an English.”

“Welsh.”

“Do not nitpick at me. It is a difference only an English would notice, as trout are enthralled by the difference between a trout and a pickerel.”

The fire on the hearth was newly lit. They had built a fire to comfort her because they had no other help to offer. They knew she would be cold. When one's heart is ripped entirely from the body, it leaves one quite cold.

She wrapped her arms around herself, but it was not like being held by Grey. “I was taken by Russians, once, when I was fourteen.” Talking cut like knives in her throat, but it hurt less than staying silent. “I had been betrayed, as one often is. They knew my name. One of them, when he heard it, knew whose daughter I was. All of them, all of the officers, had read Papa's books and knew how he died. And they let me go. The interrogators had barely started on me. I was not even scarred.”

Grey was stiff with his anger at those long-ago Russians. “No scars. How nice.” He could be sarcastic sometimes.

“My life was spared, in lands far from France, because men knew my father's name.”

He had decided she was safe to approach again. He came behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. It was warm, being held. “Your father was a brave man.”

“I was there, do you know. The day of the march. They carried no weapons. Not a pocketknife. The loom workers who were starving walked to the town hall to face men with guns, knowing that some of them might die. They asked only for the honest wage. Only that. Every French schoolboy knows the names of those who were hanged.” The lump of ice that was her stomach began to melt. “I have always been proud to be his daughter.” That had not changed. The most important truths had not changed. “He did not make that march because he was a spy for England. He did it for those men. He loved France and died for her. “

“He was a man capable of loving more than one nation.”

“My father would not have lied to me. If he had lived till I was old enough to talk with, he would not have lied to me.”

“Your father would have sent you to England when things went bad in France. Before the Revolution. You'd have been safe in a girls' school in Bath.” He let that sink in. She would have been a schoolgirl in some provincial town. That would have been her life. It was a thought to chill the blood.

Grey knew her. He had taken her to his bed, and held her while she was vilely sick, and walked with her all the long road from the coast. He knew exactly what he said to her.

“I would not have liked a school in Bath. You are being subtle with me, and I wish you would stop. I am disgusted with cleverness. I am drowning in it.”

Wind played with the curtains and slipped under papers all over the floor, making them lift and settle like birds getting ready to sleep. One paper turned over altogether. One of her so-many letters. She had written, always, by every courier, when she was off spying. Because Maman worried. She had believed, right to her soul, that Maman worried about her.

He saw where she was looking. “Have you asked yourself why your mother lied to you?”

“To make me her puppet. To use me. You have never seen me in the field, Monsieur Spymaster. I am useful beyond measure.”

“You're not a child, Annique. Stop acting like one. She could have told you the truth and still used you. You'd have done whatever she asked of you.”

“I do not want to hear this.”

He went on relentlessly. “She didn't have to lie to you. She could have told you the truth when you were eight. You'd have been even more useful to her. Think about it. Why did she lie?”

“I hate you.” That, at least, required no thinking. That, she could have done in her sleep.

“She lied to you, so you didn't have to lie. She gave you René Didier and the house in the
Quartier Latin.
She gave you learning to cook in Françoise Gaudier's kitchen. She gave you being one of Vauban's people. She gave you those years.”

She closed her eyes. Grey made no demands, not even that she speak. It was possible to stand and absorb these thoughts and consider what her life would have been if Maman had told her the truth.

She had seen clever ceramics from Dresden, painted and glazed to look like apples and lettuces and cauliflowers. Wholesome and edible to the eye, cold as skeletons to touch. She would have been like that, if she had grown up playing a double role.

“Maman was wise,” she whispered at last, “and very alone. I had not realized how alone.” She looked around the room. “I should pick up the papers.”

“Leave it for Adrian to clean up. He wants to slay dragons for you. Come downstairs.”

“No. Take me to your bed. I need you.”