Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

The darkness was huge and friendly. She would rest in it awhile.

HAWKER PICKED UP HIS RAZOR. IN THE MIRROR over the dresser, he looked back at himself with hard, steady eyes. A killer’s eyes.

“She’s alive for the next little while.” Alive. Exhausted. Sleeping. Just sleeping. Felicity was watching her.

He’d never got into the habit of using a brush to put soap on his face. Just lathered up between his palms.

“Let’s say there’s two groups. One of them goes poking knives into various Frenchmen. The other is trying to gut Justine. Both of them are mad at me and both have some of my knives handy.” He shook his head. “Not likely.”

No argument from the mirror.

He tried the razor along the hair on his arm. Nicely sharp. He did like a good edge on his steel. Swish his hands in the basin. Pull his skin taut with his thumb and shave the right side. No hurry.

Wipe soap off the razor on a towel. Rinse it in the basin. “Not two groups, then. One. They go after the Frenchmen to frame me. They go after Justine because it’ll hurt me.”

Finish the right side. Wipe the razor down again. “They know me fairly well.”

Now for the left side. “But it’s easier to shoot me one balmy evening. Who’s going to take the time and trouble to be that convoluted and that patient? Who hates me that much?”

One name came to mind.

Shaving’s a meditative business. He did the short, careful strokes under the chin. Always a tricky part.

Wipe the final soap off the razor. Wash the blade.

“Try this. Say Justine’s been collecting my knives for a while. She kills a pair of Frenchmen, planning to lay it on me.” Dry the blade with the clean corner of the towel. “Before she dispatches another hapless French cove, one of her confederates gets peevish and pokes the knife into her.”

Fold the razor. Lay it down beside the bowl. Take a new towel and wash his face. “That gives us one group, with infighting. And Justine behind everything.”

Toss the towel away with the other one.

A long time ago, he’d thought it was special between him and Owl. They were friends, right to the heart. Being enemies didn’t change that. Even when he was staggering around, half dead, with her bullet in his shoulder, he kept thinking they were friends.

His eyes looked back at him, particularly bleak this morning. “Owl won’t stop, you know. She never gives up. If she’s behind this, I’ll wake up one morning with my throat slit.” He fingered his throat. “Because I’m still a damn fool when it comes to that woman.”

No answer to that either.

He strapped on the arm sheath, settled his shoulder harness, checked the knives, and wished he was out in the field where he might get to use them. He was in the mood to confront somebody a good deal more dangerous than Lord Cummings, Head of Military Intelligence.

WHEN Hawker walked into his office, he saw that Cummings had taken a place behind the desk. He was sitting in Hawker’s chair.

He’d never decided whether Lord Cummings played the fool on purpose, or if it just came naturally to him. He looked the part of an aristocrat. He was straight-backed and silver-haired, sporting a long, thin, supercilious nose. He sat behind the desk, looking distinguished, pretending to be absorbed in the newspaper he’d picked up. He’d brought along his cur dog, Colonel Reams, who did not look distinguished.

Felicity leaned against the wall just inside the door of his office, keeping a gimlet eye on the visitors. She muttered, “About time,” as he passed.

He barely moved his lips. “You felt it quite necessary to put them in here?”

“You said to be polite.”

“Not that polite.”

She’d let Military Intelligence invade his office just to see what they wanted to get into. And to annoy him. He gave her a “we’ll talk about this later” look and motioned her out.

Back when Adrian Hawkhurst was still Hawker the Hand, stealing for a living and associating with questionable companions—in the flower of his youth, as it were—he’d walked into many an alley to find an enemy sitting in ambush. This felt the same. It was enough to make a man nostalgic.

Cummings had settled his arse into the carved oak chair that belonged to the Head of Service. It was black with age, worn smooth by the behinds of twenty-nine men who’d been Head of the British Intelligence Service. It dated back to the time of Good Queen Bess. To Walsingham, who’d founded the Service.

It’s mine now.

Cummings didn’t do anything by accident. He wanted anger. Now, why did Cummings want him angry? Dealing with Military Intelligence just drove the humdrum out of the morning.

Reams stood to the side of the office, a thick-bodied, red-faced bulldog of a man. His hands were gripped together behind his back and he sneered at the map on the wall. He wore scarlet regimentals, as usual, though he didn’t have any particular right to a Guards uniform. One of Military Intelligence’s little fictions. No battlefields for the colonel.

Reams looked particularly self-satisfied this morning. Possibly he felt he’d done something clever. He was probably wrong.

The map held a hundred numbered and colored pins, set from Dublin to Dubrovnik and points east, as far as India. His agents. Austrian, Russian, and French agents. Trouble spots. Nothing Military Intelligence would make head nor tail of.

“The lumpy yellow shape off to the right is Austria,” he said helpfully. “The square blue one is France.” He jostled the colonel off balance as he strolled past.

“Watch it, you—” A glance from Cummings, and Reams swallowed the rest of his comment.

Cummings took his time folding the newspaper. He tossed it on the desk, toppling a pile of unopened letters into a stack of reports, making a point, doling out his second nicely graded insult of the morning. He’d got them in before they exchanged a word. “Good. You’re here.”

“A pleasure to see you, Cummings. As always.”

“You haven’t answered my messages.”

“How careless of me.” There’d be notes from Military Intelligence somewhere in that pile on his desk. How wise of everyone to ignore them. “The press of work . . .”

“I don’t have time to wait on your convenience.” Cummings tapped his fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair. The hand rests were carved wolf heads, snarling.

British Service wolves. Not Military Intelligence. He knew just how they felt. He wouldn’t mind snarling himself.

“Always so awkward to settle upon another man’s convenience. And you’ve come all the way across town to do it.” He skirted around the desk and sat on the edge of it, chummily next to Cummings, his boot heel hooked on to a drawer pull. He showed his teeth, copying the wolf heads.

Cummings slid back in the chair, harrumphing. “I mean to say . . .”

Let us loom over the man. I get so few opportunities to loom. “Why don’t you tell me what we can do for Military Intelligence today.”

In Cummings’s world, men in authority sat at desks and gave orders. Inferiors stood at attention. Sitting down meant you had power.

In the rookeries of East London, men in authority kicked you in the guts to drive home the salient points of their discourse. Sitting down just put you closer to somebody’s boot.

In his office, the rules of Whitechapel applied.

Cummings had propped his cane against the wall. He reached out and put it between them, the ivory head clutched in his hand. “I say . . .”

“Yes?” For two days he’d lived on coffee and anger and watched Owl fight for her life. When he looked down at Cummings, he let some of that show in his eyes.

Cummings cleared his throat. “Mean to say . . . you should speak to that girl of yours, Hawkhurst. Damned if you shouldn’t. She left me standing on the steps ten minutes before she opened. She was blasted impertinent. Wouldn’t leave the room when I ordered her to.”

You do like to order my people around, don’t you?

“She talked back to me.” Cummings sucked his lip in and out, deploring the situation.

“We all have that problem.”

“I suppose you keep her around because she’s a toothsome little thing. You have a reputation for liking the ladies, Hawkhurst. You have that reputation.”

“Do I?”

The cane jiggled nervously in Cummings’s hold. There was a blade hidden inside. Anyone would know that from the way Cummings carried it, even without the wide gold rim that circled the head. Hardware like that meant a cane dagger.

A rich man’s trinket. A short dagger, with no hilt but that little hexagonal rim. Good for one sneaky, unexpected strike. Useless in a fight.

Cummings fingered it as if it were a favored piece of his anatomy. “I envy you Service Johnnies sometimes. Pretty petticoats stashed away at headquarters. Drinking coffee on the Via Whatever-o in Rome. Jaunting off to the opera in Vienna. No real work for you, now that the war is over. Nothing to do but write up reports and shoot them off to the Prime Minister.”

“We keep busy in our own modest way.”

It wasn’t the British Service out of work. It was Military Intelligence. When the last of the occupation army pulled out of France, Military Intelligence went with them. Cummings was reduced to spying on Englishmen, playing informer and agent provocateur to discontented Yorkshire weavers. Intercepting the mail of liberal politicians, hoping to find something treasonous. Harassing purveyors of naughty etchings in Soho.

Military Intelligence was being whipped through the newspapers as the “secret police” of England. It wasn’t just the radical press that said it was time to close them down.