Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

From everywhere, all at once, men closed together in a circle and started shouting. One could count on the enthusiasm of the Englishman for a fight. Any fight.

She headed in, considering tactics as she went. Pax could do a kill on his own. A disable-and-capture was hard as the devil. An easy way to get killed. It needed two fighters, not one.

Slash. Slash. Pax forced the Frenchman back toward a shop front, avoiding the knife the man brought out left-handed.

Corner. Control. Disarm. We have him. She slipped between bystanders to join this endgame. When we have him, we have the Merchant.

Then some idiot hurried into the fight, squawking orders. A wide little man, well padded, waddling with importance. “See here. See here, now. There’ll be no public brawling in the streets. I am Sir Henry Clitheroe, Justice of the Peace for Roxingbury and Upper—”

Of all the fools—

Every other soul in the crowd—man, woman, beldame, and toddling baby—had sense enough to keep away from the edge of those knives. Sir Henry stepped right between Pax and the Frenchman, waving his hat as if chasing off chickens.

Was there ever a greater invitation? The Frenchman grabbed Sir Henry, pressed his knife to the flapping wattles of that chin, and backed away, dragging along the Sir Henry and all his protests.

Pax began talking in French, soft and calm. “Let him go. You haven’t hurt anyone yet. It’s easy now, because nobody’s hurt.”

She slid through the crowd, closer and closer to the Frenchman’s back. A man at the curb fretted and poked his cane in the direction of all the drama, asking everyone around him what was going on. As she passed, she appropriated the cane because it was going to come in useful.

Faster now because she used the cane to clear her path, she came in behind the Frenchman. He didn’t see her. Pax, though, did. He crossed, light-footed, left to right, edging the man between them. He made the handsignals they’d used when they fought as a team at the Coach House on the training field.

Sir Henry, bleeding from shallow cuts at his throat, threatened transportation and hanging.

She swung the cane like a club, whacking the Frenchman’s elbow. The knife jerked away, dropped, and stopped threatening that throat. Pax pulled Sir Henry—protesting, squirming, yelling—out of the way.

The crowd howled like a single animal. She jammed the cane between the Frenchman’s legs. He kicked at her and missed, kept his footing, spun, and ran into the jumbled wagons, horses, and carts of the street.

She threw the cane away and went after him. To her left, Pax ran flat out to circle around and cut him off.

And in the street a sporting rig and high-stepping pair pranced along, two wheels on the pavement, avoiding the brouhaha, making good time.

The Frenchman pelted out in front of them. The horses reared and came down with iron hooves and the Frenchman fell. The driver fought, pulling the reins, and the horses screamed, a terrible sound. Rose up on their haunches and came down again. Impossible to stop. Impossible to control. The light carriage rocked and tilted, about to go over.

Frantic men came to help, grabbed at the halter and straps, trying to contain the plunging, squealing carriage horses.

In the gutter, the Frenchman died without a sound. When the white-faced, terrified young driver backed his horses away from the red bundle on the street, life had been gone for a long time.

“You took it from me. You stole it. Everybody saw that. Theft. Outright theft.” That was the man whose cane she’d borrowed. He talked at her from one side, then tap-tapped around to the other side and said much the same thing there.

A very dead man lay in the road. Pax stood behind her, his arms wrapped around her. He was wonderfully solid and she let herself lean back against him just the smallest amount. She would rather have been with him somewhere they weren’t looking at dead people.

Far down the street, some merciful souls had taken the horses to the street pump to wash them clean. The driver sat on the steps of a house a dozen yards away, his head in his hands. Every once in a while he’d get up and go into the alley to the side and empty his stomach.

She hoped Cousin Lucia had left. She didn’t see the girl anywhere in the circle of avid faces. Lazarus’s apprentice thieves were at the front, showing an intense, professional curiosity.

Pax’s friend, the angry, dark-haired one, knelt and searched the corpse from his hair to the soles of his boots, efficiently and with no sign of distaste. His findings—a handful of coins and two keys—were piled on the pavement at his side. The dead man hadn’t carried a scrap of paper. There was no maker’s mark in the hat that lay, brim upward, next to him.

“A careful man,” she said quietly. “He never put anything in his pockets.”

“Carry nothing when you’re working,” Pax said, quoting the Tuteurs at the Coach House.

“My family has a similar motto. We say, ‘Everything in your pocket gossips about you.’”

“You have an interesting family.”

“Thank you. We pride ourselves on our collected wisdom.” She leaned more strongly against him. She shook in her muscles, fine little trembles that came and went. Just the tiniest shaking. It was from being shot at, she thought.

“I’ll report you.” The man she’d deprived of the use of his cane, for a very few minutes, brandished it in her face. “I’ll have you arrested. There’s a Justice of the Peace here.”

At the edge of all great events, there will be some fool who has no idea what’s going on. Who makes a nuisance of himself and gets in everyone’s way. She kept her eyes on the grim, careful search of the body and said, “If you don’t put that stick away, I’ll ram it up your posterior till it comes out your nose.”

She continued to not look at him. After a minute, heels, interspersed by the tap of his cane, clicked away rapidly.

Pax hadn’t released his arms from around her. She felt his amusement playing back and forth in his muscles.

“I’d better look at the body,” she said. “Your friend knows what he’s doing with the dead, but I might see something.”

“The more eyes, the better.” He tucked her arm through his as if they were strolling across a park. Where they went, however, was to the corpse.

She knelt beside the limp bundle on the pavement, careful to keep her skirts out of the widening pool of blood. The man’s eyes were open and staring. That was the worst part of those dead by violence. The eyes were always open and always empty.

“I suppose you can improve your sketch,” she said to Pax, “now that you have the model in front of you.”

“I can.”

She didn’t really look at the body for a while, though her eyes were pointed in that direction. Her mind seemed stuck in place, like a wagon spinning its wheels in deep mud. Finally, stupidly, she said, “At least we killed the right man.”

“He needed it,” Pax said. “He worked for the Merchant. See anything?”

Only death. This sort of thing was what she escaped when she chose the quiet life of Brodemere. Pax’s friend rolled the body to this side and that to unbutton clothing and methodically go through pockets.

She put out a hand. “Stop.”

He glared at her.

“On the trouser leg. There.” She pointed. “What is it?”

“Stable dirt.” He dismissed her.

She pinched some up. Smelled it. “Sawdust . . . wood shavings. Oak maybe. It needs an expert.”

Annoyance flickered in the young face and was gone, leaving a sort of dark amusement. “Maybe he visited a coffin maker. He’ll need one.” Pax’s friend plucked out a new handkerchief—he seemed to have several—spread it on his open hand, and brushed shavings and wood dust into it. “I would have come to that part of him in a bit. See anything else?”

She shook her head and stood up. “I’ll look at the wagon.”

Someone had led the Frenchman’s horse and cart out of the middle of the road, where he’d abandoned them. She ran her hand over the horse’s back. This was a piebald horse, short legged and unlovely, matched with a sturdy, short cart. Everything utilitarian and well cared for, from the wheels to the hooves of the horses. This was a jobbing cart from a reliable yard. When she made a circuit of it she found, burned into the wood on the back right side, the words McCarthy, Nibb Lane, Soho.

“Six streets that way.” Pax indicated with a little jerk of his head.

“The Merchant is in Soho.”

“Or he wants to make us think he’s here.”

“Then he’s succeeded. I think he’s in Soho.”

The little horse was of a placid, urbane disposition, calm in place and incurious. She went over the harness, which was wholly ordinary and recently cleaned. The horseshoes held the usual collection of city detritus. They’d been cleaned recently. “He hires a small cart, not a coach. He needs to shift something he won’t carry in a coach. Something dirty. Something bulky. Secret. Stolen. Something that attracts attention.”

“A body,” Pax contributed.

Was Camille Besançon already murdered, and her body disposed of? “Or a prisoner, bound and gagged.”

Pax might have turned the pages in her mind and read them. “He has no reason to kill that woman before the meeting.” Pax squatted beside the front wheel and took out a two-inch magnifier. “He plans ahead. He leaves people alive while there’s any possible use for them.”