Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

She was invading an institution of sorts. Braid’s had bought and sold books in this brick house on Paternoster Row for two centuries. There were castles in England with lesser pedigrees. Probably an antique Marcus Braidus had traveled to Rome on donkey back, brought home Latin scrolls for homesick centurions, and sold them in a mud hut on this site.

The Fluffy Aunts always came here when they were in London.

She concentrated on the padlock on this gate, which might have deterred a toddler with a jackstraw. Otherwise, it was a waste of iron.

She would take this new knowledge away from the day. Devoir no longer fit in the box her memory had made for him. She saw him . . . differently. She saw him as he must appear to a stranger. He’d stood in the center of that yammering mob, his coat discarded and him wet through to the skin, the linen of his shirt being revelatory about his anatomy.

He was still stringy as wrapped leather on that long frame, still thin and drawn out, but he had broader shoulders now. He’d become hardened and steady in his body. Somehow harmonious. The awkward bones and angles of Devoir, the boy, had become this swift, sleek predator, muscled like a man. It unsettled her to see him looking like a grown man.

In future she would avoid Devoir like one of the biblical plagues.

The lock grated open to her. Only imagination made the scraping loud in this empty alley. She pushed the gate slowly inward, balancing it delicately on its hinges so it wouldn’t squeak in an unseemly manner.

Her intrusion onto the Braid’s property was accompanied by a satisfactory silence. No one looked out any of the windows up and down the alley. Behind the board fence of the house next door, the vocal little dog was tearing away at the stale loaf she’d tossed him. Like most dogs he was inclined to bark madly at every wandering cat and let a sneaking invader like her pass unannounced.

She was more tired than she’d expected to be at the end of this day and more wet and less successful. She didn’t begrudge the afternoon spent following and being followed by the bristly head and large ears of a Frenchman. She only wished he’d been more careless. She’d hoped to follow him back to wherever they were keeping Camille Besançon. If that woman was Camille Besançon.

The henchman had not, unfortunately, taken his bristly head back to report to Mr. Smith. Instead he’d wasted his day, and her own, lounging his way from one Soho tavern to another.

So her first plan hadn’t worked. Tomorrow she’d try something else.

The yard behind Braid’s was full of rough sheds and the bins waiting for the rag-and-bone man. None of that showed as even the ghost of a shape in this darkness. The windows were dim red rectangles, upstairs and down. Braid’s left a low fire burning, safe behind a grate, in every room. Books don’t like the damp.

At home they left fire on two of the hearths downstairs and—

Not home. That wasn’t her home.

She pushed away those thoughts. They were painful and unprofitable and there was no going back, anyway.

She had not liked being followed by the skillful, nearly invisible Devoir. Her awareness of him was spun from tenuous glimpses of a hat in a crowd or a face reflected in a shop window. It had taken hours to snip him loose from her trail. The squire back home . . . the squire in Brodemere used to claim the fox enjoyed the hunt as much as the huntsmen did. Piffle.

She eased across the flat, unevenly set stones of this yard. They were slippery in this wet, solid mist, which seemed an unnecessary complication to the evening. If London hadn’t been enjoying such a wet night, she would have had some moonlight to see what she was doing.

Nowadays Baldoni made their living in comfortable salons, cheating at piquet or dealing in meretricious copper mines. But they never forgot they had once been mountain bandits. They still taught their children the not-so-gentle art of tracking prey in city and countryside. How to avoid becoming someone else’s prey. Concealment is a skill with wide applicability.

And she’d been trained in the Coach House. Truly, she had a solid grounding in the robust arts of sneakiness.

The window of Braid’s book storage room, warm looking and welcome in the dark, was a dozen feet away. She’d dry this cloak by the fire and—

She kicked into a pail some nameless fool had left in the middle of everything.

It thudded loudly and rolled down the paving stones, clattering. Every dog up and down the alley took to yapping its head off.

She held absolutely still and counted two hundred in Latin.

A proper Baldoni wouldn’t stub a toe against a wooden bucket, regardless of how dark it was. A good Caché wouldn’t, either. Maybe she should stop congratulating herself on eluding the British Service and pay more attention to what she was doing.

The heavy, foggy air drizzled on her, determined about it. Stubborn. She could have done without such firm decisiveness. She counted to two hundred in the Tuscan of her childhood.

The dogs became bored with inciting one another to frenzy. One final deep bark some distance away ended it. No windows lit up anywhere along the alley.

The count in Spanish was not strictly necessary, but she did it anyway. Patience separates the amateur from the professional.

She whispered, “Doscientos,” before she limped her way forward, feeling ahead of her with cautious, intelligent feet.

There were no more obstacles. The lock on the window yielded to the logical argument of a thin blade. The windowsill, when she hiked herself up to it, was slippery with the wet and full of splinters. She swung her feet inside, into the ground-floor storeroom, and was in an old familiar place.

Books on every side, shelves and shelves of them. Crates stacked at the far end. A sizable pile of clean straw, tidy in the corner. More books, a roll of brown paper, scissors, and a ball of twine on the table. The half-open door was full of reddish light from the little fire on the grate in the main shop.

The shop cat, a long, languid tom named Pericles, curled his way around that door and padded over, prepared to welcome her with his usual indiscriminate affection. This was a quiet, contemplative room to break into, filled with the smell of book bindings and glue, warmed by the buzzing purr of Pericles the cat.

She didn’t close the window at once. She set her hands against the frame on either side and looked out, pleased she wasn’t being rained on. The fabric of the night stretched around her . . . sky and streets, wet brick, dark smells, the random sounds of London.

Men were looking for her. She felt it as a tiny prickle on the skin, a touch on the mind. They wouldn’t give up. She was in danger every day she stayed in London.

Pericles jumped to the windowsill and bumped at her hand with cold nose and feathery whiskers. Nothing more comforting than a cat.

The night was empty except for a mist that didn’t quite become rainfall. When she was as sure as she could be that she was alone, she removed Pericles from the sill and closed the window, shutting out the damp and the darkness. For tonight, she was safe.

Pax walked through dark rain that didn’t so much fall as hang suspended in the air. It condensed on his face and formed droplets that fell from the brim of his hat. He had the feeling that if he stood still he wouldn’t get wet at all.

Goods wagons rumbled past, making deliveries in the empty streets long before dawn. A few laborers plodded toward the fish stands and vegetable markets, head down, enduring, and the mist ate up their voices when they passed. There were almost no women out.

He’d sent word where to meet him. He’d wondered if they’d come. If they’d let Hawker come.

They were waiting outside St. Paul’s.

The hackney stood in the circle of wet paving lit by a streetlamp. Thin, bright lines traced the brass railing of the coach and the stippling of worn gilt on the window frame. They’d lowered the carriage lights to coin-sized points of red. Walking toward it felt like approaching a huge animal crouching in the dark. Up on the box, Tenn slouched inside his driver’s coat, dozing, leaned back, the reins slack in his hand, playing a black coachman hoping for one last fare of the evening. Thirty feet away the steps of St. Paul’s led into black mist.

Hawker, in a shabby jacket and cap, held the cheekpiece of the right-hand carriage horse, stroking the long nose and verbally abusing the pair in broad Cockney. They were right nodcocks, weren’t they, letting somebody talk ’em into dragging a coach around? Then he switched to his beautiful, educated Parisian French, misquoting Rousseau. “Le cheval est né libre, et partout il est dans les rênes.”

Hawker made a convincing groom till you heard him speak French.

The horse is born free, and everywhere he is in reins. Rousseau wrote some of the books he’d used to teach Hawk French. It had seemed a good idea at the time.

How many meetings like this, in how many open fields and dirty alleys? How many welcomes by old friends, a circle joined together by a hundred shared dangers in the past?

This would be the last time. Even now, he wasn’t one of them. They just acted as if he were. They all knew better.

He said, “Where’s Doyle?”

Hawker switched from his fluent French to his fluent Cockney. “If I kept the estimable Mr. Doyle in me pocket, I’d inform you of his whereabouts. As it is—”