Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

They worked in tandem, silently, for a few minutes. She said, “There’s nothing by the driver’s seat. Not a speck. Not a crumb.”

She looked at every crevice of the frame and springs while he went over the four wheels. After a while, she said, “I haven’t killed very many men. Those people in the Coach House were the first. And then, one man who came to Brodemere. And now the Frenchman.”

Pax said, “You didn’t kill this man. Those horses did.”

“I’ve also never been shot at.” A tarp covered the surface of the little wagon. She took a corner and waited for Pax to take the other. “I don’t think I like it.”

“Getting hit is worse.”

“Strangely, that is no comfort at all.” She nodded and they pulled the tarp back, uncovering the bed of the cart.

She knew the smell. Would have recognized it earlier if a whiff of it hadn’t already been floating in the air.

Pax said, “Gunpowder.” He was not informing her. He confirmed what they’d both realized.

“Guns?” She shook her head slowly. “An attack on something? A riot?” Twenty years ago, the Gordon Riots had torn the town apart, threatened the rich and powerful.

“Not riot.” The dark-haired man, Pax’s friend, came up behind her. “If the French were brewing civil insurrection, we’d have heard about it. We have well-paid informers. Informers on informers.” He asked Pax, “You want to see a collection of dull coinage? No? Can’t say I blame you.” He tucked away a bulky handkerchief. “And that is the delicate odor of gunpowder.”

“We noticed,” Pax said dryly. “Cami, this is Hawker. Hawk, this is Cami.”

She ignored the introduction, as did Mr. Hawker. She’d heard of Hawker from the Fluffy Aunts’ gossip. She could only hope he knew far less about her than she did about him.

The planking of the wagon was gray-brown, dry, and clean. She paced two steps sideways, watching the light on the wood’s surface. She said, “Not guns.”

Pax was looking at the same thing. “No oil.”

Guns live in a light film of oil, or they rust. Everywhere they’re stored, they leave smears of gun oil. Even wrapped in burlap, they’d leave the distinctive smell of the oil behind. None of that here.

She swept her fingers into the crevice between boards and came away with coarse black powder under her nails. She smelled it, rubbed it between her fingers, and confirmed what she did not want to know.

“Gunpowder,” Pax said. “A wagonload.”

The young man, Hawker, murmured, “We are in big trouble.”

This was suddenly no longer a spy game played with secrets and codes. The lives to be lost were no longer counted in twos or threes.

In the dust at the side of the wagon, she made out a curved mark, most of it already brushed away. Then another curve next to it. Wordlessly, she followed the lines with her fingers.

“Kegs,” Pax said.

“Kegs. Kegs and kegs of gunpowder.” She felt sick in the pit of her stomach. “They must have been lined up all the way down the cart. You could blow up Parliament with this much powder. Or a dozen ships in harbor. Or London Bridge.” Or anything you wanted. Who would die? Where? When? How many lives?

“Ten or twelve kegs. God help us,” Pax’s friend said.

“Sixteen.” She counted out the places with her hand, showing him.

“You can’t just buy this much.” Hawker peeled the last of the canvas back, careful not to disturb the dust, doing the same thing she had, studying the faint circles left behind and the thin trace of powder. “We have a traitor somewhere in military supplies.”

“It’s naval stores or artillery.” She tested the texture between thumb and forefinger. “Not for guns. There’s a different feel to this. Larger grit. This is for cannons.”

Hawker glared at her. “Of course you’d learn that, out in Brodemere, between studying Babylonian and German.”

She said, “I don’t actually speak Babylonian. No one does. I learned the distinctions of gunpowder when I was eleven or so.”

“Cachés,” Hawker said in disgust. “Gunpowder and sawdust. Probably Babylonian, too. I’m going to Daisy’s.”

Pax said, “We’ll join you. I have to make sketches.” He waved two men out of the crowd and talked to them, fast, with gestures that said it was about moving the wagon somewhere.

Someday, there would come a point at which her life could become no more dangerous and complicated. She hadn’t arrived there yet, apparently.

Pax said, “Have you ever been to a whorehouse?”

They’d come to a big, solid house that fronted on one of the narrow passageways in which Soho abounded. Hawker, who had stalked the whole way, ten paces ahead, ignoring them, trotted up the stairs, knocked, and was admitted. The maid who answered the door, a neat black woman of middle years, waited patiently for them to catch up.

Cami climbed the stairs beside Pax. “I find myself desperately wishing I could claim to have been a frequent visitor to brothels instead of bookshops and botanical gardens and bootmakers and that nice man in Terne Street who sells magical herbs. I’m perfectly certain female British Service agents spend more time in brothels than in hat shops.”

“I’ll have to think about that.” As they entered, Pax got not only smiles from the black woman keeping the door but a kiss on the cheek and whispers of welcome that were not meant for Cami to hear. He was obviously much at home.

He said to the woman, “Give us a few minutes. We’ll come upstairs.”

They were left alone in a long, luxurious hall scattered with Persian carpets. The sideboard held an explosion of expensive lilies, roses, and irises arranged in a red Chinese vase. On the landing above, a naked bronze nymph was caught in the act of covering breast and pubis from public view.

She’d do better to just put some clothes on.

Pax had bedded the women here. Some of them. All of them? She pictured him upstairs in some . . . would there be vulgar, red-velvet coverlets? She could almost see his large hands, sensitive, assessing, responsive, on a woman’s white flesh.

It would be easier to chat with the Merchant than to face these smug women who knew the secrets of Pax’s body. She would be very cool and—

“I don’t use whores.” He interrupted her imaginary conversation with several dazzlingly beautiful courtesans. She was being polite to them. “Not the ones upstairs. Not the ones on the street.”

“They know you here.” Before she finished saying that, her brain had raced ahead to various logical conclusions and she knew. “You draw them. You go to brothels to sketch nude women.”

“Only because women don’t walk around the streets nude in this climate.”

She considered whether she wanted to walk upstairs and meet the women Pax had studied in great detail, nude. Then she decided that, yes, after all, she would.

He untied the string that held her cloak and tossed it behind him, over the stair railing. “It’s not that different from drawing flowers, Cami.” Her bonnet was held by a simple slipknot, easy to loose. He removed it and let it fall to the smooth wood of the table, beside a vase of flowers.

“You used to draw me, when we were in the Coach House. You drew my face all the time and then you burned the sketches, because the Tuteurs would have taken them.”

“You had an interesting face. You still do.” His hand was on her face, his thumb, blunt, rough skinned, and gentle, slid across her lips. “Why did you tell the Baldoni you’d go with me?”

“Because I’m a grown woman and they have no control over where I will go or who I’ll see. Because I want to be with you.” The sands run out between my fingers. I have a day and a little more. Not quite two days. I am very afraid. She said, “Could you hold me. Next to you, I mean. In your arms.”

“Just what I was going to suggest.”

She went toward him and folded herself into him as she would have pulled a large, warm blanket around her. His chest was the right height to lay her head upon. His shirt was soft. His coat, rough textured under her cheek. His sternum had no padding on it at all. When he put his arms around her, she felt straightforward bones and hard muscle. The knife sheath on his left forearm was bumpy and obvious. Had she ever embraced a man carrying weapons? She didn’t think so. Her lovers had been comfortable country gentlemen. Unarmed.

Pax said, “For that four minutes when we were all discussing whether you were going to stay with the Baldoni or go off with me, I was wondering where to take you.”

“I know a good bookshop,” she said against his chest.

“I would have brought you to Daisy’s. I don’t have any better place to take you.”

“I like to try new things. Life is a vast banquet.”

“That’s more of your family wisdom, isn’t it? But I don’t think they mean taking you to whorehouses.”

“They might. We lead adventurous lives.” The living presence of him, breathing and solid, was intensely real. He wore the simplest of cravats and the trailing ends of the tie hung down to press into her forehead.

Pax said, “Daisy’s is a sanctuary of sorts. A neutral place. The Service hides people at Daisy’s every once in a while. Lazarus does, too. The Foreign Office isn’t above dropping some tricky Polish exile in here for a while. Nobody bothers anybody else. Dangerous men visit this house and they like it quiet.”

“An interesting establishment.”

“You’d be safe here if you don’t want to go back to the Baldoni. Hawker owns part of the place. He calls himself a sleeping partner.”