Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

“I hope you used thumbscrews.” They passed the framed map of medieval Florence. He liked Florence. For a while he’d kept rooms over a bakery there. “I need five or six men, preferably men the Merchant won’t recognize.”

They’d come to Galba’s office. Doyle set his hand on the doorknob. “Pax, the planning for Monday is no longer your job.”

A lifetime of control kept his voice calm. “Whose job, then?”

“Mine. You won’t be there. You won’t be in England. Giles is packing a trunk for you.”

“You’re taking this operation away from me?”

“Galba’s decision.”

“Why?”

Doyle paused fractionally. He didn’t open the door. He seemed to come to a decision. “How accurate are your sketches of the Merchant?”

It came to this. Again. The unbreakable, unendurable connection with the monster. “Very.”

“Pax, is the man your father?”

“No.” And then, “Maybe.” It was as close as he could come to admitting it. “He claimed to be sometimes. He lied about so many things, he could have lied about that, too.”

“You look like him,” Doyle said.

And the mirror here at the end of the hall said the same thing. He’d watched his face become the monster’s face, year by year. “If it’s the truth, it’s a random accident. A dark joke of the gods. A technicality.”

“A significant technicality,” Doyle said, very quietly. “Galba’s not going to send one of his agents to perform heinous actions.”

“He’s not sending me. If I kill the Merchant, it’s because I’ve been planning it since I was ten years old. It’s taken me this long to get close to him with a gun in my hand.”

“Makes no difference. A man doesn’t kill his father.”

“He’s not my father.” He said it too loud. Galba and Grey would hear it inside the office. “I purged his blood from my veins. I repudiate him.”

“It’s not that easy,” Doyle said. “God knows, a lot of us wish it were.”

“Then I accept the blood guilt.” He forced himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror. Then Doyle’s eyes. “I’ll kill him and let the Furies do their worst.”

“Then you and Galba are going to disagree on some major decisions over the next couple of days.”

Doyle opened the door. Galba and Grey were inside. Galba, at his desk. Grey, standing by the window, studying one of the sketches of the Merchant.

Doyle said, “Did you know the Merchant’s real name is Peter Styles? He comes from Northumbria and he has a title.”

“He attended Cambridge,” Galba said calmly. “Come join us, Mr. Paxton. You will not be permitted to kill the man, whatever good cause you have to do so.”

“Lots of people want the Merchant dead,” Doyle said.

Not as much as I do. He followed Doyle into Galba’s office.

Violet Leyland laid the spyglass across her lap and stretched as well as the low roof of the hackney coach allowed. She straightened her legs and rolled her shoulders. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

Lily said, “Neither of us is young,” without moving or opening her eyes. She was curled on the opposite seat with her coat rolled under her head, dozing. In a long and varied career, they’d spent many days and nights like this, on duty, on watch, taking turns sleeping.

Violet said, “Morte magis metuenda senectus.”

“Old age is indeed more to be feared than death.” Lily sighed. “There was a time Anson would not have sent us off to mind our knitting.”

From where she sat in the hackney, Violet could see the whole length of Meeks Street and everyone who came to the door of Number Seven. It was not a perfect way to understand what was going forward at headquarters, but it would serve.

“He’s protecting us,” Lily said.

“He’s making sure we won’t interfere in his operation.”

“That, too. Oh, look. There’s Mr. Paxton just going up the stairs,” Violet said. “I would say he looks calm, but determined. He has a forceful stride, I think. Matters must be developing.”

“He’ll be in the center of it.”

“Yes.”

“Then we will follow him when he leaves,” Lily said, pleased. “I haven’t followed a handsome young man for ever so long.”

“The life of the mind, dear. We have chosen the life of the mind.”

“Of course. And very satisfying it is.” Lily lay down on the seat again, making herself reasonably comfortable.

“I hate getting old,” Violet said.

“I do, too. But the alternative is worse.”

The family gave her a small, pretty room at the back of the house. The clothing bundled onto the seat of the chair would fit somebody about twelve and the handwriting in the half-finished letter on the desk was the hand of a young girl.

She told them, “I don’t mean to push someone—is it Maria?—from her room. I can sleep on a trundle bed somewhere.”

“For this first little time, you are guest as well as kinswoman.” Great-Aunt Fortunata herself stuffed a feather pillow into a clean pillowcase.

“Maria is beside herself with excitement to give you her room. ‘Puffed up,’ as they say in English.” Aunt Grazia, comfortable and maternal, made the bed and pulled a coverlet over the top. “I sent her to the park with a clutch of children so you may bathe in peace. The house will be quieter for a while.”

“Sleep if you can,” Aunt Fortunata said. “Sleep through supper. There will be food in the kitchen even in the middle of the night.”

They keep feeding me. “I’ll be fine.” A fire the size of a spaniel dog burned in the grate, lit there as much for company as for warmth. Tea was made and set upon the table. A kettle vibrated on the hob. At the edge of the mantelpiece, little cakes were neatly stacked on a plate. There seemed nothing they would not do to welcome her here.

“The boys will be back late,” said Aunt Grazia, “clattering in, talking at the top of their voices, and starving. You need not worry about waking the household. They will do that.”

By “the boys” she meant Tonio, Giomar, and Alessandro, who’d gone out to wander the neighborhood of Semple Street in picturesque guises.

“I won’t even hear them.” Her heart and mind were stretched tight as twisted string, yet she must sleep. She was so desperately tired. Maybe, in dreams, she’d see a way to close her fist around the Merchant and snatch the human bait from the trap he would set.

I renounced the lessons I learned in the Coach House. I resolved that I would not kill. I would not spy. Maybe I became too ordinary.

The curtain at the window was pulled back to show sunset, a high wooden wall, and the three large sheds in the complicated kitchen yard. The roof of the nearest shed was directly below the window, a nothing to get to. Perhaps young Maria wriggled out this window and went wandering London at night. There was a certain look of devilment in Maria’s eye that argued the possibility.

Aunt Grazia held up a night shift. “You’re much of a size, you and Amalia. We’re making this for her trousseau, but there’s plenty of time to make her another. The embroidery is not quite finished.”

“Because Lucia does not tend to her needle.” But Aunt Fortunata sounded indulgent.

Aunt Grazia draped the night shift over the back of a chair, absentmindedly stroking it smooth. “Amalia has a blue dress she will lend you for tomorrow. It will be most becoming. And for Monday, a dark green, inconspicuous and easy to run in. Would you like a gun? A second gun, I mean.”

“One cannot carry too many guns when going to meet an enemy.” Fortunata plumped the pillow on the bed and centered it carefully. “There.”

“Let me lend you one of mine,” Grazia said. “A lovely little Austrian cuff pistol my oldest brought back from the battle of Millesimo.”

“After having been told to keep well away from the fighting.” Fortunata clucked her tongue. “Headstrong.”

“The payroll funds were simply too tempting.” Aunt Grazia laid a round ball of soap in the dish beside the towels. “She is Baldoni, after all.”

“. . . not so different from the way you placed your men in Italy. Your street is an ambush in a ravine. Those houses have upper stories. That means snipers.”

Always good advice from Doyle, Pax thought. “If he wants Cami dead, he can reach out and do it. A sniper won’t stop him.”

“Sniper fire from our side closes off an escape route. Traps the Merchant in that canyon of a street,” Doyle said.

“Good point.” If I let him live that long.

Deep midnight and the smell of the Thames. Pervasive damp and the rustle and slap of water against the pilings. Doyle and Hawker didn’t hurry in this stroll along the nighttime docks of London, down to the ship that was supposed to take him to Italy. They were lax and lackadaisical guards. It was clear they expected him to escape before they got to the Pretty Mary.

“Complication with fighting in a city, though,” Doyle went on, “is you got civilians popping out of every doorway, just asking to be taken hostage.”