Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

Pax swung into the carriage last and took the backward-facing seat. In a coach one noticed the length of him. He had to fold his legs up to fit.

This is the first time I have ever been in a carriage with him.

“You. I give you no permission to accompany me,” Uncle Bernardo snapped. “Stay with Lazarus, who owns you.”

Lazarus was leaning in at the window of the coach. “Paxton isn’t my man.”

“Then what is he doing here?” Uncle Bernardo was disapproving.

“Paxton belongs to the British Service.” Lazarus smiled, as a great mastiff dog might smile, showing teeth that looked like they would bite very hard. “You have a senior agent of the British Service in your coach, about to go home with you. If the Service makes a claim on your niece, Mr. Paxton would be the one enforcing it.” He tipped his hat. “Good day to you.”

“So you won’t tell us where she is.” Lily Leyland removed her gloves and, with them, much of the vagueness of her manner. She was still a frail old woman, swallowed by the chair she’d taken beside Galba’s desk—Doyle’s favorite chair—but she didn’t look the least silly or dithery.

Galba centered the decoded note on the desk between them. “I do not, in strict fact, know where she is.”

“I don’t suppose you’re trying very hard to find out,” Lily said. “If you knew where she was, you’d have to bring her to Meeks Street.”

“Which you do not wish to do.” Violet blinked at him owlishly.

“It would present you with the most appalling dilemma.” Lily dropped her gloves in her lap.

“One we hoped would never arise,” Violet murmured.

Lily said, “When I retired—forgive me for oversimplifying in the interests of brevity—I did not expect bloody revolution in France.”

“And ten years of war,” Violet added.

“Dis aliter visum. The gods saw it otherwise. But we’re all aware that if Cami appears at Meeks Street—”

“As an enemy spy,” Violet added quickly.

“—she becomes prey of Military Intelligence. And Military Intelligence is populated by nincompoops and swine.”

“Besides, she hasn’t been spying.”

“He’s well aware of that,” Lily said. “Aren’t you, Anson?”

“Unfortunately, I am.” Galba sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “My life would be simpler if I were dealing with a straightforward enemy agent instead of your pet.”

“Pet or no, she’s not a French agent. No, dearest,” she hurried on before Violet could speak, “Anson is well aware Cami isn’t selling codes to the French.”

“She’s not even French,” Violet said. “She’s Italian. Tuscan.”

Lily shot a sharp glare at Galba. “Did you know?”

“I had no idea. But then, I only found out she’s an impostor,” Galba glanced at the clock on the mantel above the small hearth, “thirteen hours ago.”

“When she came to us . . . when that unconvincing clergyman dropped her on our doorstep—”

“He brought her all the way from Folkestone, but hadn’t bothered to wash the sand out of her hair,” Violet muttered. “Or wrap her warmly. He was the most callous man. That’s someone I would have enjoyed shooting.”

“Yes, dear, but we had other concerns at the time. Cami was in a high fever by the time she came to us. Of course we knew she wasn’t our niece—”

“No resemblance to Hyacinth.” Violet shook her head. “Nor to the Besançons. She was so miserably unwell and so terrified, poor child. So obviously a fraud.”

“We knew, then, finally and with certainty, that Hyacinth, Jules, the baby, and our niece Camille were dead. It was a great shock.”

“A sadness we’ve learned to accept. This woman the blackmailer writes of . . .”

“Is an impostor. Cami shouldn’t spend a minute pursuing that chimera.” Lily nodded toward the bookcase. “I’ve refused your tea, Anson, but I wouldn’t say no to a brandy.”

Galba took three small, plain glasses from the side table. He didn’t pour from the decanter on the table, though. He reached up to the high shelf and brought down the bottle that had no label on it. They waited while he poured, then lifted glasses together and gave the first sip of brandy the silence it merited.

Violet spoke first. “We didn’t take Cami in without considering the matter carefully.”

“We’re not sentimental simpletons,” Lily said. “That first night, when her fever rose, she began to babble in Italian. It was revealing in every way.”

Violet took another delicate sip. “A lovely dialect. Pure Tuscan.”

Galba said, “That’s when you should have sent for me.”

“To do what?” Lily snorted. “Drag the North Sea for the bodies of my sister and her family? Scour France for the fanatics who killed them? Should I have given you that little girl lying in a bedroom upstairs out of her head with fever? Do you imagine you would have gleaned the least scrap of useful intelligence from a ten-year-old?”

“Of course not.”

“You would have taken all that courage and brilliance and dropped it in some orphanage.” Lily rested the glass of brandy on the arm of her chair.

“I would have found her a place in a comfortable girls’ school, somewhere very far from the centers of power. Cardiff comes to mind.”

“Which would have been a great waste of an excellent codebreaker,” Lily said.

“At that time she would have been a solvable problem.” Galba took a sip of brandy and sighed. “Now she is not. Lily, you can’t take in French spies like stray kittens.”

“She is not a French spy. If anything, she’s a British one. Here.” Lily leaned to tap the note that lay open on the dark wood of his desk. “She is reporting to the Head of Service. I’ve had charge of Cami since she was a child. I know how to select and train agents. Even cocky little lordlings who think they know everything.”

“For which this little lordling will be forever grateful.” Galba held his glass between both palms and rolled it slowly. “Your Cami isn’t some child the French picked off the street. She came to you a trained spy. She’s a Caché.”

“We know that.” Lily tapped her glass impatiently. “As soon as the Caché business came out, we knew that was what Cami had to be.”

“It explained so much,” Violet said. “Iniquitous to use children that way. Truly evil.”

“There was an incident that convinced us she was not loyal to France. An unpleasant man showed up looking for Cami. The man the Police Secrète had put in charge of her.”

“A bumptious little man,” Violet said. “Watching the house. Interrogating the maid. Leaving notes under rocks.”

“We thought we’d have to deal with him. Fortunately, it turned out to be unnecessary.”

“Cami stabbed him,” Violet said. “Very quietly, by the hollyhocks in the back garden, during a thunderstorm.”

“Difficult for her to dispose of the body.”

“Raining, you see.”

“He looked heavy. We were tempted to go out and offer our help,” Lily said. “Fortunately, she’d arranged to have a wheelbarrow handy.”

“She put him in the millpond. With rocks and burlap bags and rope. Quite an efficient job for one so young. Though I never could bring myself to fancy fish from the millpond, after that.”

Galba closed his eyes. “I see.”

“What you should see, Anson, is that she’s not a spy or a threat to England.” Violet’s nose turned pink with indignation. “As if we would harbor traitors and spies under our roof.”

“The situation in France became confused shortly after that,” Lily said judiciously. “The execution of Robespierre and his followers, the suppression of several factions of the Police Secrète . . . we assumed Cami’s connection with the French had been lost in the shuffle. No one else has ever shown an interest in her. Certainly Cami never approached the French.”

“She is our niece in everything but the small matter of blood,” Violet said.

Galba set his hands on the desk, making two temples of them. “Vi, much as I might like to hand her over to you and return to the status quo, you can’t simply take her back to Brodemere in a handbasket. There are serious matters at stake. And a major complication.”

“Which is?” Lily raised eyebrows.

“She has attacked and seduced one of my agents.”

“Has she?” Lily said.

“It can’t be much of an attack if he was in any state to be seduced afterward,” Violet observed.

Lily murmured, “It seems so unlike her.”

“The attacking or the seducing?” Violet asked.

“Neither.” Lily frowned. “But doing it to an agent. So odd of her to become involved with a Service agent while she’s fleeing . . . whatever it is she’s fleeing. One does not seduce agents in the middle of a desperate enterprise. l don’t understand at all.” She turned to Galba. “Which agent? Not Hawker, surely. I would regret doing something violent to Hawker.”

Galba said, “Paxton.”

Lily exchanged glances with Violet.

“Matters are a bit more serious, then,” Lily said. “One expects someone more light-minded to be part of a seduction.”

“He’s not at all what I expected,” Violet said. “So . . . self-contained. One sees the attraction, of course. The artistic temperament. There is that intense concentration.”

Violet discovered her glass was empty and held it out for a refill. Galba obliged. She said, “He seems a responsible young man.”

“He’s an Independent Agent.” Lily pursed her lips.

“Which vouches for his usefulness.”

“He was polite when I talked to him about Moldavian. At length. That’s a good sign.” Violet leaned back comfortably in the chair. “And, really, he has quite a nice body.”