Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

“We’ll know him when we see him again.” He took a deep breath and didn’t think about the pain. Wouldn’t think about the pain. “When it starts to get dark, we’ll collect the woman.”

Hawker said, “That gives me something to look forward to.”

Grab Vérité. Get her to Meeks Street. Help question her.

He wiped his mouth and leaned on the wall, unobtrusive enough that nobody glanced at him as they went by. Ahead of him, Vérité crouched on her cellar stairs and watched the tavern like a cat at a mouse hole. Like him, like Hawker, she’d be memorizing every man who went in and out. They were looking for the end of a string that might lead to that bastard.

Whatever she knew about the Merchant—and she knew something—she didn’t know his lair.

Hawk looked up suddenly. “What have we here?”

At the far end of the street, three men left the tavern. They fell in, side by side, walking in step. The door of the tavern swung open and another two followed them.

Men with a single purpose. A gang.

Vérité. He straightened and tensed, about to run in that direction. Instinct shouted—She’s alone.

But this wasn’t years ago in the Coach House. This wasn’t Piedmont. Not Tuscany. She wasn’t one of his men, left in a forward position, vulnerable, unprotected, about to be surrounded.

And she didn’t need his warning. Vérité’s shadow vanished. Her cloak whipped away and was gone. None of those five men glanced in her direction. They headed for Hawker and for him.

“Soho Square.” He rapped it out fast. A place to meet if he and Hawker got separated. “Follow the man, if you have a chance. I’ll follow the woman.”

A grunt from Hawker. Then there was no time for talking. More men came from the alley behind them and suddenly they were fighting six, seven, eight men.

Now seven. Hawk had kicked one in the groin and stooped to scoop up a knife, saving his own blades for future use.

Damn. They were young. Younger than Hawker. Not one of them as old as twenty, armed with walking sticks and knives and—God help us—fists.

Hawker muttered, “Amateurs,” being contemptuous and also warning him, in case he was about to kill one.

He’d seen the same thing. So he didn’t draw a blade. He ducked under a cudgel aimed at his head, plowed his fist into a belly, and cracked the man’s jaw against his knee as he went down. Satisfying.

Hawker was shaking pain out of his hand, snarling. “He had a book under his coat. What kind of man walks around with a book under his coat?”

“Then don’t use your fists. Kick him in—” He grabbed another boy by his lapels and swung him around to crash into the brick wall. Hard to say what part of the lad hit first, but it made a satisfying thump. “Kick him in the bollocks.”

A dark shape ran in from the left, behind Hawk, fist raised, holding a brown bottle. It blurred downward.

Gunshot cracked and everybody froze.

I’m not hit. It took a second to decide this.

Hawker wasn’t hit, either. It was another man who’d started bleeding from his forearm down his sleeve and dropped his wine bottle and dropped the idea of fighting as well. He fell back against the wall, looking amazed.

He knew what he’d see when he turned around. Cami hovered in a slant of shadow ten feet away. She slid her gun back to its accustomed secrecy.

Damned if she didn’t smile. A conspirator’s smile. Rueful. Guilty. She swirled her cloak and slipped around the corner, gone. He heard her running away.

Then a fellow he thought he’d already discouraged got to his knees and picked up a brick. That was somebody who needed to be kicked in the belly to discourage him some more. Hawker obliged.

“She missed,” Hawk said, “if she was aiming at you.”

“She wasn’t.”

“Well, she missed if she was aiming at me.”

The man—the boy—who’d been hit was yelping about having a bullet in him. “She shot me,” he said. “Shot me.” All amazement.

The last three, the ones who hadn’t engaged in combat and hadn’t sustained any damage, edged shoulder to shoulder and slowly backed away. Scared boys. Damn it, who sent scared boys out to attack somebody like him? Like Hawker?

This was a distraction, a misdirection, a delaying tactic. The man they’d been following had paid these boys to attack or lied to them.

Maybe he could salvage something. He said, “Soho Square. I’ll meet you or send a message. Get some men.” Then he took off after Vérité.

Mr. Smith had long ago abandoned any particular name for himself. A warrior of the Revolution needed no name. “Smith” would do as well as any for the few days he remained in London. He arrived at the inn through various and secret ways, circling in as a spider spirals in upon his web.

The inn made the right noises. The innkeeper scolded one of the maids in the front hall. The men in the taproom murmured and coughed. The clank from the kitchen was just right. Not too loud. Not a dangerous silence.

Upstairs he checked the hall from end to end, drew his pistol, then pushed open the door of the private parlor. He stood in the doorway and flicked his gaze side to side across the room. Two of his men sat at the table. So did the tiresome woman he’d brought from France.

Everything was as expected. He uncocked his pistol and set it on the mantelpiece, ready and loaded. The woman began complaining loudly even before he dropped his hat on the back of a chair and pulled his coat off to lay over the seat.

“Where have you been?” She had a peculiarly piercing voice and a provincial accent. “What is the use of sending me for a drive when I am not allowed to go into any stores or talk to anyone? Why didn’t you come with me? Why didn’t you tell me you’d be gone this long?” There was more in that vein.

She had not seen him on Fleet Street when she passed in the carriage. Good. It saved explanations.

He nodded at the end of each sentence she said and caught the eye of Jacques, his second-in-command.

“Everything proceeds.” Jacques tilted his bowl and wiped it round and round with a piece of bread. “No one has shown interest in us.”

“Good.” An approving nod to Jacques. At the same time, he expended a reassuring smile upon the woman Camille. He was patient with women. They required that homage to their weakness. To Jacques he said, “The work on the carriage?”

Jacques chose his words. “They have almost finished . . . preparing it. The shipment from Thompson will arrive . . . in the proper place, tomorrow.”

“Hugues is on guard?” He went to the window and pulled the curtain back an inch and looked down into the ugly, cluttered courtyard below. There was no reason to expect trouble, but he was alive today, when many men wanted him dead, because he took precautions.

Gaspard dunked bread in his soup and took a sopping bite. “I will relieve him when I have eaten.” They were good republicans, his men. No complaints from them about the inn’s swill. They ate to give the body sufficient fuel to serve the cause. “I’ve hired the wagon we—”

“I am mad with boredom.” The tiresome, inevitable woman rose from her chair and flounced across to confront him. “Since we returned from the carriage ride, Jacques has stopped me from going outside. Not even for one little walk.”

You break into a conversation where men speak of serious matters. “They obey my orders. I regret if they have been impolite.”

“You said there would be theater in London. Opera. Music. You said there were shops more beautiful than anything in Lyon and I would see them all. Instead, I cannot go to the pastry shop twenty paces down the street.”

He’d promised any number of things. “It is not possible today. Perhaps tomorrow.”

“I am sick of this tomorrow and that tomorrow and I am sick of this place. You bring me racing along your foul English roads until I am bruised. Now you ignore me. I stay here and stay here, day after day, and you do not take me to my family.” She stamped her foot like a child. “You promised to take me to my aunts.”

His men ate in silence. Gaspard, who lacked Jacques’ intelligence, smiled derisively around his bread.

“My poor Marie-Claire. You have been very brave for so long. So strong through all these difficulties.” He flattered her back to her place at the table. “I have explained the danger. Your enemies are everywhere. You must be wise as the serpent.”

She was wise as a pig’s intestine.

Once this fool of a woman had been Camille Besançon. Now she was Marie-Claire Gresset, pampered foster daughter of the watchmaker Gresset, a man of some importance in Lyon. She had escaped the fate of her family, rescued by one of the smugglers and given to the Gressets to take the place of a daughter who’d died.

He’d known of her survival. Of course he’d known. In those days he gave the execution order for every man, woman, and child who died to allow the placement of Cachés. He chose each death as carefully as a jeweler selects the next pearl in a necklace.

It had seemed profitable to let a member of the Council of Lyon cheat the Revolution and effect his petty rescue. Who knew when he might want to destroy Gresset?

“You leave me all day with servants,” the woman whined, as all women whine. “Ill-bred, impolite, poorly trained servants who ignore my orders. I don’t even have a maid.”

Useless herself, she wanted another parasite to wait upon her. “I will see to it,” he murmured. “A day or two and all will be arranged.”