She considered this. “To be fair, I am a spy. I’m Caché. I’ve been an interloper in the household of the Leylands. I’ve befooled and befuddled the British Service for years. No one is better suited to be the linchpin of a French assassination plot than I am.” She grinned suddenly. “I would have been admirably silent if questioned.”

She could laugh, because that was the way she was made. Pure courage. When he thought how close he’d come to losing her forever, it made him want to knife somebody.

He cupped his anger inside and let it sit there, waiting. “A month ago, men tried to kill Napoleon and make it look like an English plot. This is the same. The Merchant’s fingerprints are all over both of these schemes.”

“It’s a pity no one’s killed this man.” Cami sighted down the barrel of her gun at the Merchant. “It would improve him.”

“Napoleon dead at English hands. Addington dead at the hands of a French spy. The peace would break. The treaties wouldn’t hold. It would mean war.”

“We’ve had enough war to last us into the next century,” Cami said.

“Revolution is born in the storm of war.” The Merchant’s breath hissed between clenched teeth. “It demands the blood of martyrs.”

He knew the words. They came from the bleak lessons of his childhood. “There are no martyrs here.”

“Death is the purest revolutionary act.” The Merchant wrapped his arms into his coat, ignoring the smears of blood. “If I die, a hundred other men will finish my work. The revolution will come.”

“It won’t come today.”

He was finished here. And the Merchant was finished.

Rough wheels clicked on cobblestone as Tenn led the pony cart out of the alley toward them. The sooner they took this show off the street and out of sight, the better.

“He expects you to kill him, Pax. Will you?” Cami could still disconcert him when she became cryptic and Baldoni.

“What? No. I’m—”

“Pax, let me say this before you do. One thing. It is a great and ancient evil to spill the blood of your family. In every place and time, it has been a horror beyond speech.” She frowned earnestly. “My father killed his cousin, you know. It was by accident, but he never felt clean of that act.”

“Galba agrees with you. He thinks it’ll give me nightmares.”

“It will,” she said. “Give you nightmares, I mean. Killing doesn’t lay devils, it raises them. That’s not a family saying. I just made it up.”

“I like your sayings.”

He’d expected to feel cold rage when he finally confronted the Merchant. He’d expected the old pain, despair thick and black as night, spikes of ice in his belly. That was the way it’d always been when he thought about his father.

The moment for revenge had come and gone. He’d felt nothing. “I don’t need to kill him. He doesn’t matter enough.”

“Ah.” After a minute, Cami nodded and lowered her gun. “That’s a great relief. I was ready to do it for you.”

Incongruously, in the middle of the street, while he kept one hand on the gun in his pocket and dozens of people watched, he wanted to smile.

When he’d loaded his pistol this morning, he’d held the lead bullet and imagined it stopping the heart of the Merchant. Old habit. He’d done that when he went hunting one man in particular in Tuscany and Piedmont.

He had no orders to kill the Merchant. The need to do it had drained away.

“He can live long enough to hang.” A cold truth. The greatest revenge was sending the Merchant to the gallows.

“You’ve suckled the bourgeois morality of the British Service.” The Merchant grimaced and leaned inward upon himself, arms wrapped under his coat. “Do you think you’ve become one of them? They use you to do their dirty work. You are their perfect, stone-cold assassin. You are their monster.”

Maybe once he had been. But Cami had changed him. The empty man who’d come to London was filled. He didn’t even recognize that Paxton anymore.

The Furies could go home. There’d be no patricide today. “We all have a monster inside us.”

“When I go to trial, I’ll tell the world about my son, the French spy in the British Service. The bloody killer. The aristocrat who joined the revolution.”

“The bastard of Ilse Dalgaard, Danish subject. Father unknown.” It felt good to say it. “The flotsam and jetsam of Europe. Nobody cares what I do.”

“The legitimate grandson of an English earl.” The Merchant, hoarse and whispering. “I married your bitch of a mother in Amsterdam. When I stand trial, you’ll be beside me. We’ll give them a crime they can’t sweep under the carpet.”

The Merchant’s eyes found Cami. “You will be my martyr for the cause. My loyal revolutionary, shot by the British Service as she tried to assassinate the Prime Minister.” He jerked his hand from hiding. Something glittered in the sunlight. A thick silver pencil case, smeared with blood.

No!

A gun. A trick. A toy for idle gentlemen. A tiny pistol, good for one shot only. Pointed at Cami.

She snapped her pistol up.

She has no time. His own finger was on the trigger. Without drawing, he shot through the pocket of his greatcoat.

His bullet hit the Merchant square in the middle of his forehead. The man fell backward, already dead. He looked . . . surprised. As if death had refused to follow the plans he had for it.

He had to push Cami’s gun aside so he could pull her to him, breathe in the smell of her, kiss her face, eyes, ears, nose. Her hair. Her mouth. It wasn’t enough. Cami was alive. He’d never be able to hold her close enough.

* * *

On the edge of the small, excited group that had gathered to comment upon the first shooting and was now expounding upon the second, two old women craned their necks to observe events.

Violet said, “He appears to be dead.”

“There is a hole in his forehead. Ipso facto,” Lily said.

“I cannot help but feel this is the simplest solution to several difficult problems. Mors omnia solvit.”

“As you say, death solves everything.” Lily had been holding a small gun hidden in the folds of her skirt. She returned it to her reticule. “The business of shooting one’s father is fraught with social and moral implications. One cannot like it.”

They were both silent while they considered the complications of a man shooting his father.

“Paxton’s actions are . . . unfortunate,” Lily said. “On the other hand, one would not have wished that task to fall upon dear Cami.”

“A sensitive girl. More so than one would think,” Violet said. “Young Paxton, as well.”

“A young man of some complication. Not really suited to be a patricide.”

“We must see this hushed up a bit,” Violet said.

“It can’t be silenced.” Lily waved a thin, blue-veined hand across the collection of British Service agents and Baldoni. “Everyone saw. Gossip and rumor will scatter to the four winds. No stopping it.”

“We will shape the official story.”

More thought. Lily said, “We could say that I did it. By accident, of course.”

“You tripped.”

“While I was examining the gun.”

“The man was shot twice,” Violet pointed out.

“Not the sort of thing one would do inadvertently. A pity we can’t just drop the body in the Thames.”

“Heir to an earl. So necessary to prove the succession has passed.”

Lily said austerely, “It is more than necessary to demonstrate the Merchant is actually dead this time.”

“Perhaps . . . a robbery. In St. Giles.”

“Or Hampstead Heath.”

Violet said, “I’m tempted to have him dropped in an alley in Soho. It adds a French flavor to the death.”

“Soho. Yes. Excellent.”

Another minute passed. “They should remove the body,” Violet said. “It’s unsightly.”

“They’re waiting for those two to finish.” But Lily’s voice was indulgent.

“So romantic.” Violet applied her elbow ruthlessly to the kidney of the man in front of her, gaining a better view. “I do admire an enthusiastic man.”

“Eventually, they’ll have to come up for air,” Lily said.

“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, more attractive than a man who’s just killed on your behalf.”

“They should clear away the body, though. And find privacy for that.”

Violet sighed. “Amantes sunt amentes, as Terence says.”

“Lovers are lunatics.” Lily sniffed austerely. “I’m not surprised Paxton overlooks the matter. Men are not naturally tidy. But Cami has always been neat in her habits. It’s not like her to leave a body lying about.”

“They are distracted,” Violet said. “And who shall blame them?”

Over the rumble and jabber of the crowd, in the background, where the landau was still being drowned in buckets of water, the sound of sobbing continued.

Violet said, “We should see to her, I suppose.”

“She very likely is our niece.”

“She does sound exactly like Hyacinth in one of her crises de nerfs. Hyacinth did have a delicate spirit.”

“This one, too, apparently,” Lily said.

They turned to walk toward the sobbing. “I think,” Violet said judiciously, “we should find her a French husband.”

“Soon,” Lily agreed.

They glanced back, one last time, to Cami and Pax, madly kissing, surrounded by a circle of interested spies and criminals.

Lily said, “That’s taken care of.”

Violet nodded. “I do like a happy ending.”

Fifty-two

Drink, dance, laugh, love. A man who does not enjoy the pleasures of life is poor indeed.