Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

“Why?” From Pax.

“She did not tell us.” Thompson was patient. “And we did not ask. Let me finish saying what I have to say.”

The right-hand wall of Justine’s shop was hung with lethal instrumentation, a collection of fifty or so. Spears for poking holes at some distance. Sabers for cutting from horseback. Knives for doing it close up. Bloodthirsty woman, Justine.

Pax picked down a kris knife to examine. Pretty, but impractical. “Go on.”

Chetri said, “In twenty minutes she descended to the shop. She was worried.”

“Not worried,” Thompson contradicted. “Angry. Very angry.”

A nod. “She cleaned and loaded her gun. The little Gribeauval she carries. She sat here,” Chetri patted the chair back, “and did so. She put her knife into the sheath inside her cloak, as if she would need to use it. She gave us no instruction, except to say we should close the shop.”

“I am ashamed,” Thompson said. “She loaded her gun, took a knife, and left in the rain. I did not offer her my escort. I knew she was going into danger, and I did not go with her.”

“She would have refused,” Chetri said. “You would only have annoyed her.”

“Yes. But I did not offer. I did not ask.”

Whatever ambush Justine walked into, she wouldn’t have dragged them in with her. “Did you know where she was going?”

The black man said nothing.

“We must show him,” Chetri said. Then, “This is the time. This is what she spoke of.”

Thompson did not hesitate or show uncertainty. He simply thought for a while before he spoke. “You are right.”

Abruptly he left. He strode toward the counter and around the end of it, to the door that led to the back. In his plain black suit, he walked as if he wore robes that spread out around him.

Chetri lowered his voice. “She was enraged when she walked into the shop yesterday. Furious. As soon as we were alone in the shop, she went to the shelves in the back room . . .”

Noiselessly, Thompson returned. He carried a plain wood case and laid it upon the table. “He is wondering why you babble secrets to him, Mr. Chetri.” He gave the other man no chance to reply. “We are not fools. We would not speak like this to anyone else.”

“We follow Mademoiselle’s orders.”

“Three years ago she told me—told Chetri as well—that if anything happened to her, we were to go to Number Seven in Meeks Street and seek out the dark-haired, dark-skinned son of a bitch who ran the place.”

“You forgive us,” Chetri said. “We only repeat what she said.”

“When she said, ‘dark-skinned,’ she looked at me and laughed and said, ‘Perhaps not so dark.’ She said, ‘He is called Black Hawk, but he moves like a cat.’ ”

Chetri spoke up. “I went—we both went—to spy upon the house in Meeks Street. To look at you. We had heard of you, of course, Sir Adrian.”

With a small click, Thompson turned the box. It was yew wood, without carving or inlay, thinner than a gun case, but with the same utilitarian design. “I was to give you this, if anything happened. She said I was to trust you.”

Thompson’s face had become grave, closed, and immovable as obsidian. He released the simple hook that clasped the lid. “That day, she opened this box. This is why she armed herself and went into the rain, to whatever fate awaited her there.”

The box was empty. The gray velvet lining showed three identical imprints where three knives had rested, parallel, point left. He didn’t have to pull his own knife to know it would fit right into place.

That was one mystery solved. Knives were sticking into Frenchmen across London. This is where they came from.

Somewhere, somehow, Justine had got hold of three of his knives.

SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER 1802 La Pomme d’Or, Paris

HAWKER HUNG IN THE NIGHT, BALANCING AGAINST the side of the building, just touching the windowsill. He heard Owl inside her room, being busy, making the little rustles a woman makes, getting ready for bed. When he was sure there was nobody with her, he scratched at the shutters.

She came to let him in, wearing a peignoir the color of peaches over her night shift.

For five years they’d been lovers, and he never got tired of the sight of her. Her hair was loose down her shoulders in honey-dark rivers. Her feet were pink and bare on the floorboards. She looked cross.

He crouched on the window ledge. “I keep expecting to find you in some pretty apartment on the Rue St. Denis.” He knew every fingerhold on the shutter and the open casement. A good thing. He was clumsy tonight. “But it’s the same pokey old attic.”

“It is a very safe attic, mon vieux. There is nowhere in Paris so well-guarded as an expensive brothel.”

“Yet here I am, getting in without let or hindrance.”

“You, of course, are the exception to many rules. It is a pity you will break your neck one of these days, showing off. It will be mourned by all the women of Europe. A more sensible man would simply—”

“Walk in the front door. I know. That takes all the fun out of it.” Even if he wanted to tell the world he was in Paris, he wasn’t dressed to stroll into a place like the Pomme d’Or. They’d looked at him twice even in the livery stable where he’d left his horse.

He stumbled when his feet found the floor. His legs were giving way now that they knew he was at the end of the road. “Am I welcome?”

“If you were not welcome, I would not have opened the window. Or perhaps I would have opened the window and then pushed you to a sudden death on the stones of the courtyard. In either case, you would receive the hint.” He could smell the clean bright smell of her. Lavender. “You may give that extremely dusty coat to me, if you please. You have been rolling in the dust. Fighting?”

“Falling off a damned horse.”

“I will be tactful and not point out how maladroit you are.” She took the cuff of his left sleeve and began to ease it downward. He didn’t wear a tight fashionable coat. It came right off. She made one of those disapproving French shrugs. “You are hurt. Why did you fall off a damned horse? And where?”

“Careful. That’s sore. I fell off . . . somewhere.” He honestly didn’t remember. He’d been moving for ten days straight, eating in the saddle, sleeping rolled in a blanket in the bushes. “I think it was yesterday. I was going downhill.”

“You have no affinity for horses. That is strange in an Englishman.”

Two floors downstairs, somebody tinkled away at a piano. Skillful about it, for all he knew. They had one of the best pianists in France working in La Pomme d’Or. It went along with the best food and the best paintings on the wall. The best women.

Justine wasn’t one of the women. The French Police Secrète hadn’t made her a whore, though they might have tried it. She was Owl, who confounded them all and went her own way. So far as he knew, the only man she slept with was him.

He never told her he didn’t go to other women. For five years it had been only her. Nobody else. Nobody, not even when it was months that went by without seeing her. He wouldn’t have admitted that under torture.

She slipped his coat down over his shoulders and down his arms. Unbuttoned his waistcoat. His senses filled up with swirls of the apricot color she wore and the sweep of her hair. Everything about her flowed like water.

He’d have let her hurt his ribs, just for the pleasure of feeling her hands on him. But she didn’t hurt when she undressed him. She was neat and quick, getting his shirt untucked, pulling it off over his head.

His shirt joined his coat and waistcoat on the floor. She ran her fingers lightly over his chest, up and down his ribs. “You look as if you have been laid upon the road to be trampled by an advancing army. You have many bruises, for one thing. They are very ugly.”

“You, on the other hand, are luminous as daybreak. Exquisite as . . .”

“Sit,” she said. “On the bed. And be silent. I do not wish you to collapse facedown on the floor and become even more inconvenient to me. You have burned yourself away to nothing at all.”

Pain jabbed in his side when he sank down. Linen sheets on the bed and one light blanket. Everything was orderly, simple, well arranged. Everything said “Owl.”

He sighed out a deep breath. “It was a long ride.”

“So you fall from the horse because you are exhausted. I am all out of patience with you.” Her hands were light on his shoulders. “If you are determined to kill yourself, ask me to do it. I would earn great praise in certain quarters if I brought you down. Have you broken any bones? There is a surgeon downstairs in the parlor tonight, only half drunk. I can bring him to you.”

“There are two hundred and six bones in the human body and not one of them is broken. Remarkable, isn’t it?” Who’d told him how many bones a man had? Doyle maybe. Or Pax. They carried that kind of useless information in their heads.

Her breasts, small, perfect, and kissable, rose and fell, about six inches from his mouth. He wanted to start, right there, and taste his way across her body. He wanted to put his head down onto her breasts and fall asleep. “Feels like I’ve been beaten with rods. Very Turkish.”

“One may expect you to explore such novelties. You are very stupid to fall off horses, but I do not suppose you will change.”

“For you, my sweet—”

“Oh, be silent. Your boots demonstrate all the reasons women should not entertain men in their rooms. I will remove them so you do not suffer doing it. I am a marvel of sensitivity every time I am with you. I astound myself sometimes.”