Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

Lily coughed. “That’s hardly to the point.”

“That is exactly to the point, Lily.”

“When one is young, perhaps. You and I are no longer young.” She turned sharp, cynical blue eyes to Galba. “Tell us everything.”

Pax knew London. Not as well as he knew Paris and Florence, but better than most men who’d lived here their whole lives. The carriage let them out on Carnet Street. He’d walked this street with Doyle and Hawker seven or eight years ago, Doyle talking about the history of the place, Hawker discussing the best way to break into the upper-story windows.

A few houses to the north, one of those windows opened, a small rug emerged, flapped vigorously, and retreated.

The big houses had been broken into flats when the fashionable moved farther west, to Mayfair. This was what he’d call half-shabby, a neighborhood where ambitious tradesmen climbing up the social ladder lived cheek by jowl with old gentility, slipping down. Bricks crumbled, the woodwork needed painting, but the front windows were almost painfully clean, glinting in the sun.

The Service had a file on the Baldoni that went back two hundred years. He’d be adding to that later today, if some boatmen didn’t fish his body out of the Thames.

Cami let him help her out of the coach, holding on to his shoulder longer than was necessary. She looked around and gave judgment. “They’re playing the Struggling Emigrée, I think. Or the Prisoner’s Wife. Something like that.”

“The Struggling Emigrée,” Bernardo said. “Your aunt Fortunata is a French widow from Nîmes with a small Rubens hanging upon her wall and no idea what it is. Fortunately, a wealthy baronet has offered to take the worthless picture off her hands, merely as a favor, from the great respect he has for her. He comes to tea and offers more money each visit.”

“The benevolence of mankind,” Cami murmured.

He pitied any baronet who wandered into this nest of Baldoni.

The Baldoni camped in London like a tribe of nomad raiders, taking short forays out to pillage. They were a family of long-established tradition. When north Italy hosted a shooting war, the Baldoni sent their hotheaded young men and women, their children and the old, out of range of gunfire. They scattered their next generation and their movable wealth as far as they could.

Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris . . . he’d run into Baldoni, always in inconspicuous corners, always lingering a whisper outside important events, profiting, knowing everything.

“The baronet is a connoisseur of art, you see, having made the Grand Tour.”

Bernardo Baldoni climbed the front steps and opened the door with a key. He led them along the central hall, dim and painted a dispirited green, down a flight of stairs, to a closed door at the bottom. It opened to a big kitchen, legacy of finer days when this had been somebody’s mansion. This was a high-ceilinged space, well proportioned, with pale, whitewashed walls. The curtains hung in folds of five or six different whites depending on how the light came through. Polished pans hung, a line of copper, above the sideboard. Vermeer would have used this as a backdrop for jewel-colored clothing.

Cami hung back at the door for a moment, pressed against him.

There were four women inside the kitchen. Three at the table dealing with vegetables. One, dressed in black, leaning over the fire.

Bernardo said, “Look who I have brought home, at last.”

They were on their feet in an instant, staring, wondering. The oldest of the three, very old, very thin, took a step forward. “Sara?”

Bernardo pushed Cami forward. “Our Sara.”

“It cannot be.”

“How did you find her?”

“Little Sara? In England? After all this time? How could this happen?”

Baldoni closed in from every side and Cami was swept away from him in a tide of questions and exclamations.

She didn’t seem to be in immediate danger from these family members. He stepped back, put his shoulders to the wall so nobody could get behind him, and watched.

They were babbling in Tuscan, the language of Florence and surroundings. He’d spent months in Tuscany so it was easy to follow.

The old woman, tiny, energetic, white haired, with a nose like a scythe, held Cami’s face between her hands, looking, searching. “Truly, it is. I see Marcello in her. She has his eyes.”

“Sia ringrazio il Cielo. Thanks be to the saints.”

“Where have you been? Why didn’t you write? One letter. If you had sent one letter . . .”

It should have been easy for him to step back and become nothing but eyes and ears to observe and evaluate. But this time he couldn’t make himself detached. The cool shell he’d lived inside seemed to be permanently cracked. Cami had done that.

She was passed from woman to woman, embraced, kissed, and—yes—scolded. The matron with rolled-up sleeves and hands white with flour kept muttering, “England of all places. England! A Baldoni hiding in London. It is unnatural.”

“You should have come home. All these years.”

“We thought you were dead, along with Marcello and Giannetta.”

“Ma abbiamo cercato dappertutto! We looked everywhere. Everywhere! There is no corner of Paris we did not search.”

“Why didn’t you come to us?”

The door slammed back. Two men strode in, alert, tense, pistol in hand. Young men with Baldoni faces and cold Tuscan eyes. Florentine bravos, right out of the Renaissance.

Gun barrels came up, swung around. One to Cami. One to him.

He didn’t twitch. Cami went just as still.

The men—barely men, men one step up from being boys—kept their attention tight on him, on Cami. Fingers ready, but not on the trigger. They were idiots to pull guns in a crowded room full of women and children, but they had either training or good instincts.

And they were just as wary of Cami as they were of him. Excellent instincts.

The old woman snapped, “Attenti! Be careful, idioti.”

“Aspetta!” One man grabbed the other’s arm.

Bernardo gestured impatiently and both guns were lowered, uncocked, and put away into deep pockets of the coats. The old woman—Aunt Fortunata—stalked over to cuff the young men and tell them they were fools. They would make Sara think they were outlaws, Bulgars, barbarians, briganti. They would frighten her away, tearing in here like madmen. It did not matter what they’d thought. They did not think at all.

Five or six conversations in rapid-fire Tuscan resumed as if nothing had happened. The pair hung their heads sheepishly and let themselves be poked in the waistcoat by a long skinny finger, soundly abused, and marched across to meet Cami.

A glimpse of the Baldoni at home. A year ago he’d led a gang of hotheaded boys just like these, from Lombardy and Piedmont and Tuscany, making raids on the French. He eased his fingers off the hilt of his knife but left his hand tucked casually into his jacket.

Baldoni arrived from the rest of the house, pushing past him with quick, sidelong, surreptitious inspections. A man of middle years, dressed like a well-to-do merchant. A woman carrying a baby. A younger man with ink-stained hands. Anywhere else, that would make him a clerk or accountant. Here, he was probably a forger. Two girls, thirteen or fourteen, dark-eyed and graceful as fawns. Scouting the fringes of the main army, keeping behind a cover of skirts and chairs, were roving skirmishers, children not yet waist high. Uncle Uberto, Cousin Maria, Aunt Grazia, Cousin Amalia, another Cousin Maria—all indiscriminately related.

Cami folded in seamlessly among them, as if she’d always been there. As if she’d returned from a routine mission to cheat the good folk of Birmingham or Bristol and everyone was glad to see her back. As if they’d saved her a chair by the fire.

This was family. Unshakable bonds and unquestioning acceptance. He’d never had family, but he knew it when he saw it.

This was what she’d lost when the Tuteurs brought her to the Coach House and made a spy of her. She’d slept on the mat next to his in the long attic dormitory the Cachés shared. Most of them cried when they first came. Not Vérité. Night after night he’d seen her lying in the dark with her eyes open and her face empty, not crying at all.

Emotional reunions didn’t change the fact they’d misplaced a nine-year-old girl. He wouldn’t let them just reach out and snatch her back.

Bernardo Baldoni planned to do exactly that.

Cami was having the dramatis personae explained to her at length. “. . . the son of your cousin Catarina. She married an Albini, Geragio Albini, who was the great-grandson of Alrigo Baldoni, your great-grandfather’s cousin. Catarina is also a cousin on your mother’s side through the Targioni.”

Cami kept saying, “Yes,” and “I see,” looking dazed and pleased.

The noise rose, echoing off plaster walls and the stone floor. Uberto—called “uncle” by everyone, but apparently a distant cousin—retrieved wine bottles from a cabinet in the far corner. One of the Marias brought glasses. The pair of shy young girls shook out a white linen cloth together and pulled it across the table. A happy family scene. What made it ironic was that any of these laughing, gesticulating Baldoni might kill him, if they came up with a marginally sufficient reason. He was counting the women in that, right down to those two doe-eyed girls.