Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

“You come to visit my niece,” Bernardo said bluntly. “At night.”

“Yes.” Nothing to do but admit it. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with Cami’s uncle, on a dark night, twenty feet from her bedroom window. “If there’s fault to be found, it’s mine.”

Bernardo took smoke again, held it, blew it out. The fire-breathing dragon, guarding the tower where Cami slept. “My niece, my little Sara, the child who sat on my knee in the Villa Baldoni in Tuscany, is gone forever. I will miss her. But I am coming to be quite fond of the woman who has returned to us.” He said softly, calmly, with easy dignity, “What do you intend with my niece, Mr. Paxton?”

A Baldoni threat didn’t need to be laid out more plainly. It was there, stark and obvious as the bricks of a wall.

Truth? He was going to get into her room and make love to her. He’d be with her tomorrow. Then he’d be with her the next day and all the foreseeable days after that. He said, “I plan to keep her alive tomorrow.”

“I hope you will.” Bernardo spoke in the same deliberate way. Unhurried. “The Baldoni will be there in our roles and our places. Your plans are well considered. But in the end it is she who must face the Merchant, and you who must be there to protect her.” He grimaced and tossed the cheroot down on the cobblestone and ground it out. “If you live to be an old man, Mr. Paxton, you, too, may someday send others to do work you would wish to do yourself. I give you the task of defending our Cami.”

“I intend to.”

“You will remove her the minute that snake is taken and give her to us. She will not be put into the hands of the Service. Not for an hour. You understand that.”

“I’ll get her out of there.”

“She must leave England. I have considered where in Europe she will be safest—”

“She’ll be with me.”

Bernardo looked once more in the direction of Cami’s room. “Are you going to marry my niece, Mr. Paxton?”

“If she’ll have me. Yes.”

Bernardo nodded. “In my youth, men requested permission of a woman’s family before asking her to marry. Like many customs and traditions it has been disrupted by these years of war.”

“I haven’t asked her.” He hadn’t said the words. The hour of eleven o’clock, tomorrow, lay like an insurmountable cliff, blocking off the days beyond. He wasn’t planning past tomorrow.

“Fortunata and I approve, standing in the place of her grandfather. But it is, of course, Cami who will decide. We do not live in the Middle Ages.”

He had a feeling the Baldoni still lived in the Middle Ages.

“We will discuss settlements at some point,” Bernardo went on. “The legal documentation will be complex, as she owns property in several nations.”

Cami had money? That was going to complicate things. If it was any great amount, he hoped she liked managing the stuff. He sure as hell didn’t want to.

“You do not ask what property or how much,” Bernardo said.

“I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”

“Very wise.” Bernardo began walking, beckoning him along to his side. “You are wondering whether you can come to her in her chamber tonight. The answer is no.”

That, he answered with another Italianate shrug that said everything and nothing. He’d acquired a selection of such shrugs on his travels.

“Since you will so soon be one of us,” Bernardo continued, “we have prepared a bed for you with some of the young men. Bachelors’ quarters, you might call it.” Bernardo indicated the stable they were walking toward. “We are crowded in our accommodations here in London, but we’ve doubled up again and emptied a bed for you. It’s the last bed in the row upstairs. Don’t disturb the others going by.”

“I thank you for the hospitality.”

He didn’t have to see Bernardo to imagine the ironical smile. “Good night, Mr. Paxton. Sleep well.”

A candle next to the door showed six beds lined up against the long wall under the slanted ceiling. Five beds held young men and boys, asleep. Pillows and blankets gave a glimpse of Baldoni faces, hard to tell apart in the weak light. Most of them looked old enough to shave. Barely. He’d probably been introduced to them.

These and some others would be the gang of laborers who would soon be taking furniture from a house one street south of Semple. They’d be the men who would hide in a load of hay being delivered to an inn on the southern corner of Semple and Medwall.

A dog, sleeping between the first two beds, woke and looked at him, accepted him, and resettled its head between front paws and closed its eyes. It was a well-trained Baldoni dog and didn’t bark when familiar smells came and went in the night.

That was the dog saying, “You belong here. You’re one of us.” It was strangely heartening to be approved by a dog.

He wove between chairs piled high with coats, stepping over shirts bundled and thrown on the floor. Found footing among books, empty wine bottles, and cricket bats. Passed a table playing host to three rather fine throwing knives. The empty bed was at the end of the room. He lay down fully clothed, booted, and armed. The snores, the rasp of bodies against blankets, the smell of men together in a close space were all familiar. It felt like being back in the hills in Piedmont, with his men under cover and safe for the night.

He let go of wariness. He was deeply asleep in three minutes.

He woke himself an hour later to the same dim light and reassuring small sounds. He rose from the bed in the same silence he’d taken it and walked the length of the room and out the door without disturbing anyone.

In the dim yard behind the Baldoni house, a lantern still burned at the back door. Cami’s window was lit only by the fire on the grate, still no welcoming lamp.

He needed a cold, empty room.

He took a while, going up and down the obstacles of wall and shed and alleyway, looking at all the windows, till he picked his entry point. If he had to, he could cut fingerholds and go up an unbroken plaster wall. But this front door was furnished with pilasters and an ugly pediment and the window directly above the peak of the pediment was dark as a well.

It could be a trap, of course. Always that to consider.

He toed one boot into a tight corner, set the other in the next crevice. Fingerhold by fingerhold, toehold by toehold, his cheek flat to cold stone, he climbed. A minute later, he curled his fingers over the lip of the lintel and pulled himself up.

No curtains blocked his view into the room. Light leaking under the door at the far side showed a small bedroom with the clutter of somebody’s possessions. The bed was empty. Good.

The locks in a Baldoni household, he wasn’t surprised to find, didn’t slide away tamely to a knife edge. But where there’s a glass window, there’s a way through. He braced himself against the sill and slowly, patiently scraped putty from one of the windowpanes with the point of his knife. If anybody heard, it would sound like a mouse gnawing away at the woodwork.

He’d entered a lot of houses, planning to kill somebody. Nice to break and enter for the purpose of loving a woman.

A little prying and the glass pane fell into his hand. He reached through and pulled back the dead bolt that held the window in place. The sash lifted silently. He climbed into a faint smell of perfume and soap.

A woman’s bedroom, then. He laid the pane of glass aside. By touch and the smell of soap, he found the washstand, brought the soap ball back to the window, and ran it over and over the edges of the putty. He fit the pane of glass into the empty square, tapped the edges in, and it held. That would do for now.

The bedroom door wasn’t locked. He eased it open.

On the rug in the hall, in a line, three dogs sat and looked up at him.

The Baldoni favored a breed of ugly, brown-and-white dogs with a calm, deliberate temperament and a well-toothed underbite.

He squatted down, murmured, “Signora,” and offered the rightmost bitch his fingers to sniff. “Buonasera, dolce mia.” He pulled the soft ears. Scratched the high-domed head.

He went down the line, doing the same for Caterina and Lucrezia, giving a few words to each. Curved lower fangs gleamed in the light of the little candle at the end of the hall. He didn’t let himself imagine what that trio would do to housebreakers.

When he got up and walked away, not looking back, the three padded off in the opposite direction, patrolling, doing their job.

Cami’s door wasn’t locked. He stepped into the room far enough to see her in bed, awake, looking at him. The trundle bed beside her held one of the children—Lucia—asleep.

He slipped back into the hall and waited.

Her door opened and closed noiselessly. She threw herself into his arms as if every inch of her would cling to every inch of him. Cami’s body—warm, breathing, holding everything important, alive with promise. He closed his eyes and took her to him.

She didn’t say anything, just held him as if he might be torn away in a storm. He lifted her face, still by touch, still with his eyes closed so he could feel every density and softness of her skin, and found her mouth with his and kissed into her.

Knowledge of what was coming tomorrow swept around him like turbulent water. The islet of safety they stood upon eroded by the minute. They had so little time.

He kissed her over and over again, every feature of her face. The darkness around them made this a moment of touch only. Of shapes emerging into the darkness, disappearing into the dark again.