Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

“. . . and more experienced,” one of the men said.

“We’ll send Paxton.” That was Althea. “He’s young enough to look unthreatening.”

Paxton. Everybody’s pet. The perfect agent. Paxton wouldn’t forget to use his damned napkin. Paxton probably didn’t slurp his tea. Probably he was no use at all on a job.

But the Old Bitch thought it was a glorious idea. “Pax will keep him out of trouble. You,” she turned to Hawker, “are walking a fine line. An agent gets to contradict me three times in his career. You’ve used one of them. You will now write a report of everything you saw and heard this morning.”

“I can’t—”

“The ink and paper are in the cupboard. Work at this table. Make two copies.”

Great. Just bloody great.

JUSTINE, WEARING TROUSERS AND SHIRT, WAS INTIMATELY entangled in this small space with the boy Hawker. His knee thrust into her ribs. Her elbow poked his belly. He remained unconcerned to the point of insult. She might have been a large dog or a sack of grain placed in his way.

“You’re squashing me.” He shoved at her buttocks as if they were melons at market. “Move.”

“Two people cannot fit here. Frankly, I do not need—”

“And keep your voice down.”

She hissed, “I am silent as the grave compared to you.”

“Like hell.”

One thin brick wall separated them from the house of the Cachés. The Tuteurs would be downstairs, playing cards or reading, but they would be alert these days, suspicious and vigilant as crows. “This is my project and I—”

“Are we going to spend all night talking, or are you going to shift your arse out of my lap?”

She was not the possessor of the body that did not fit here. Hawker created the problem. He was composed of flat and hard muscles that did not budge an inch when she pushed them. He was heavy and uncooperative as wood.

He was correct in this much—they had no time to waste. She said, “I will scrape the last bricks free. Do not remove them yet. Do not, in fact, do anything.”

“We both work,” he said.

She picked up the chisel and pushed herself away from Hawker till her backbone rubbed the splintery wood of the crossbeam. “Then do not be clumsy.”

“I’ve done this before.”

The candle of the dark lantern spread a circle of light barely six feet wide. Within that space were boards laid down to make a floor and the ribs of the rafters. Beyond was an ocean of darkness. They could not afford more light. Some crack in the eaves might gleam down to the coach yard below. Too much light would leave them blinking and blind when they entered the hallways of the Coach House.

At the far end of the attic, Hawker’s friend knelt in the dark and kept an eye on the street. He was called Pax. She had met him briefly once before, though he gave no sign he remembered that. Tonight he pushed his way into this operation to protect Hawker’s back. The spies of England did not trust her to the width of a thread.

Citoyen Pax was the first of many unforeseen difficulties. Possibly she would find some use for him.

She wiped sweaty hands on these pants she wore. She had scrambled through many attics and basements in them. They were less indecent than skirts, but skirts would be cooler.

She took up the chisel, holding the shaft slack in her fist, tapping the butt with the flat of her other hand. Softly. Carefully.

The attic ran above the workshop where men had once constructed coaches. This end—this wall under her hand—was shared between the workshop and the old house where the master coachbuilder and his apprentices had once lived.

She had plotted to free the Cachés since the first moment Madame discovered what was being done here. This was her second night of sweating and choking in the close air, chipping away at the mortar between the bricks.

Now everything was held in place only by a little plaster. The mortar was of some substandard sort. It crumbled from its brick in pea-sized morsels that she teased out with her fingers and laid into piles behind her. Each time she cleared a brick she chinked in a wedge of wood to hold everything in place.

All was precarious. All was poised to give way. A single incautious pressure, and the bricks and plaster would crash into the upstairs hall of the house.

Hawker was, indeed, deft in his work. He bent to the wall and set his forehead on it. His hair was tied back with a black ribbon. His face was grimy from crawling about in this attic and smeared with white powder from the mortar. His lips held a tight, intent grimace. He began scraping between bricks with the point of his knife.

She said, “You will ruin that blade.”

“I got lots of knives.”

She watched him work for a moment, disquieted by the edged beauty of his face. Lines of his hair fell in thin slashes of black. His lips were strongly marked. He was like one of the old Celtic spirits who still lived deep in the woods in the province she came from. They appeared in twilight of high summer and tempted girls to lie with them. Her nurse had told her the old stories. Someday soon, Hawker would be admirably suited to tempting silly young girls.

She said to him, “You will bring the Cachés this way. Not down the stairs. Through this opening. You understand?”

“Right.”

They had discussed this already, but it did no harm to repeat instructions. “And out to the street. Get across the street and around the corner. You will be met. That’s the end of your work. My friends take them onward.”

“Where?”

“They will be safe. I would not spend this much time and trouble to be careless at the end.”

“I’ll find out. You might as well just tell me.” He chipped away.

“You do not need to know.” All was prepared. The Cachés would leave Paris in hidden compartments of the barge now tied to the quay at the Jardin des Plantes. They were not the first human cargo smuggled out of Paris in that barge.

They worked in silence for a few minutes. The loft was stifling. Sawdust from old carriage-making clogged her nose and lay on her tongue like cloth. The single flame in the lantern added to the suffocating closeness.

Sweat from Hawker’s face dripped on her arm. His knee pressed into her side. He did not fidget, though he must be as uncomfortable as she was. He was a steady comrade for this work. Curled up, cramped, and hot, his concentration was absolute. Most obviously, he had dismantled many walls and broken into many houses. It was not an admirable history, but it reassured her at this moment. She had chosen him well.

“Last row,” Hawker whispered. “We pull them out starting from the top.”

Of course, he would try to take charge. “And you will be altogether silent, if you please. Starting now.”

“Wait.” He stopped her hand. Released it. He reached out to open and close the door of the lantern, covering and uncovering the light.

His friend materialized, crawling without sound from the dark, dressed in black, his hair darkened in an unconvincing way and his face smeared with dirt. Perhaps they thought she would not recognize him again. They were overly optimistic.

“Go over it one more time,” Hawker said. “This breaks through into the upper hall.”

“If I have calculated correctly. You will find the door to the attic. The Cachés sleep there, up under the roof. I have seen them looking out the window at dusk.”

“And the door’s to the right.”

“So I believe. When I was working here, doing this,” she touched the ranges of exposed brick of the wall, “I heard them pass. That way.” She gestured. “The door will probably be locked upon them. I have lockpicks.”

“I brought my own.”

“That does not amaze me. You and your friend—”

“He’s not my friend,” Hawker said shortly.

She let her eyes run over the British spy who had been foisted upon her. “You and your associate will convince the Cachés to leave. That is the whole of your work, to get them out of the house. Mine is to see that you are not disturbed while you do this. I will be downstairs.”

“Those two men that I saw—the Tuteurs—they’re downstairs.”

“Those two men at least. Maybe more.”

“You’re going to stop them.”

“If it becomes necessary. I have a gun. And I have brought a knife.” She swallowed the chalky air. In this small space, a great, hot silence closed around them and they breathed each other’s hot breaths, like animals.

Hawker regarded her without favor. “Did you ever actually fight anybody?”

“That is not your concern.”

“It is when you’re guarding my back.”

“I have killed.” She did not say that it was not with her own hands. “I know how to fight. I have trained with a man from the army.”

“Lessons. Now I’m impressed.”

“Matters are as they are. I suggest you accommodate yourself.”

Hawker said a single word, very rude.

“We will follow the plan as I have laid it out.” She waited. The single candle was hidden within the dark lantern. Hawker was compounded of various sorts of shadow—inky black, shadow like smoke, ash-gray shadow. The knife he held did not reflect the smallest particle of light. It was as if he held darkness itself.

At last he turned away and touched the center of the upper row of brick. He did not answer directly. He flicked a last bit of mortar away. “Let’s break through.”

He used a lockpick to make the first small hole and put his eye to it. “Good. They’re not dancing minuets on the other side. It’s dark and quiet.”

They removed the bricks. Hawker’s skinny, untalkative comrade made himself useful. He accepted bricks from her and from Hawker in turn and stretched to the eaves to stack them out of the way.