Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

“We’ll be at war again.” The treaty patched up between England and France had lasted for a year. It wouldn’t hold forever, but any day men weren’t shooting at each other was a good day for somebody.

“War. Within a week,” Owl agreed.

Armies in the field. Thousands of men dead.

“Casus belli. Doyle called it that.” Always had a way to wrap things up in some dead language, Doyle did. The cause of war. Casus belli.

That was why he was ordered to bring this letter to the French Secret Police. After ten years of fighting, rational men on both sides were sick of it.

“I will copy this.” She folded the letter. “Several times. There are people I must inform. Give me your glass. You are finished with it.”

“What? Oh. Yes.” He put it in her hands. He should stand up and walk around to keep himself awake. Ask what the French knew about the plot, if anything. Put his shirt on. Leave. Find a bed at headquarters. Carruthers would want to talk to him. When he yawned and started to get up, Owl shoved him back to the bed.

“You will wait and not go wandering off into the night. You will probably fall into the Seine and drown.”

He yawned again. Bone-cracking yawn. “I’m not fit to stay here. I should—”

“You should sit and be quiet. I must read this again.” She studied him impatiently. “No. Lie down. You need not go anywhere, and I may have questions for you again. This is all you have? This one letter?”

“One letter. A couple mouthfuls of words spilled out in a Palais Royale restaurant or gaming den in front of a damned idiot who barely spoke French.”

“It is not much to work with.”

“It’s so close to nothing it amounts to the same thing. The gods must love war. They’re making it hard to stop this one.”

He let her bully him into lying down. Let himself fall across the blanket. Let her swing his legs up on the bed. His muscles had turned to jelly and it didn’t seem worthwhile trying to get up. He closed his eyes.

Not a soft bed. Justine didn’t sleep in a soft bed. But the linen was worn silky by the turning of her body, night after night. The pillow smelled of her.

Paper crackled. Owl sat at the table, reading. Checking the words again and again.

She said, “I do not think it possible your Monsieur Millian made a mistake in the word Anglais. He will have heard it often.”

“He probably got that part right.”

“It may be code. ‘The Englishman arranges everything’ may speak of the arrival of some émigré or the storage of spikes and guns in a warehouse in Dijon. There are hordes of disgruntled royalists. This may be yet another band, with no living, breathing Englishman involved at all.”

“Hope so.”

He heard her uncork a bottle. Then the scratch of pen on paper. “August.”

“Today’s the tenth.” He didn’t have to tell her that.

“If it is to be in August, we have no more than twenty-one days.” Her pen continued. “I will be canny in choosing where to place this information. There are men in my service who would like the war to resume, just as there are Englishmen who wish that.”

“Yes.”

She came to him, rising from her chair, crossing the room. Silk slithered like water spilled along his bare arm when she pulled the blanket across him. Like being licked. He was so tired. Too tired to say anything.

SHE copied Monsieur Millian’s letter six times, in a fair approximation of his handwriting, in the exact lines and spacing he used, in case this turned out to be a cypher that depended on the placement of words. These would go to the three men most senior in her service, immediately. She must also take a copy to Leblanc, who would be useless but must be included. She would send one copy to Soulier, the Police Secrète’s chief in London. She would keep one copy herself.

Napoleon must not die.

This filled her mind as she wrote the first copy and the second—the utmost seriousness of this task. Napoleon was all that held France together. He was the great man of this age. He renounced the worst excesses of the Republic but kept the great gains. Because Napoleon held France, all men could vote. The Jew, the Black, the poorest peasant in the field—every one of them was French and free. He even invited the émigrés back to France, without penalty, if they would only renounce the special privileges of noble blood.

The Republic had been purchased with rivers of blood. Only Napoleon could preserve it.

She would protect him and the Republic.

She tried not to think of Hawker while she wrote. It is a discipline to set aside pain and do one’s work. It makes one strong.

After an hour, she finished and set the last pages aside to dry.

She held the quill, watching a drop of ink gather at the tip. My lover is an Englishman. This cannot continue.

Her bed was so full of Hawker. His body disconcerted her, always, with its fierce energies concentrated inside his skin. He lay on his back, half naked, his head turned toward her, his arm across his chest upon the sheet. She did not think he had broken any ribs, but he was holding pain inside him as he slept.

He lay, sunk fathoms deep in exhaustion. All the deadly knowledge of his blood and bone was quiescent. He was like a well-honed sword someone had carefully set down. Sometimes she forgot how beautiful he was when they had been apart for a long time.

The gathering of ink at the end of her pen would drop in an instant and make a mess of this clean sheet of paper. It would be stupid to let that happen, would it not? She touched quill to the lip of the ink bottle.

His country and mine will fight again. It is inevitable.

France, every day, showed the world that men could be free. The kings of Europe could not permit this. They were resolved to destroy the Republic. If an Englishman schemed to kill Napoleon, it was part of a larger plot to topple everyone into war.

We will be enemies when war comes.

Hawker made not the least noise or movement when he slept. It was as if he had trained himself to concealment, always and everywhere. He was the least trusting man she knew, but he trusted her. He should not. It pierced her like a knife that he would sleep so deeply in her bed. It was the last time he would do so.

It is over. We are no longer heedless children to take these wild risks.

She was the one who must end it. She was the practical one.

Now that the moment had come, she found she could not say the words to him. She slid a new sheet of paper forward, choosing a kind that was cheap and common everywhere. By habit, she wrote in an elegant hand that was not her own, and she did not address him by name. Such reasonable precaution was second nature. Letters can be a source of endless inconvenience.

My friend,

Our time together is finished. We have known from the beginning that this day would arrive when we would set aside what has been between us. Let us part now, while there are still no regrets or consequences.

I will send you any news I have of this new matter. You know how to leave messages for me.

C

C for chouette. “Little owl.” He sometimes called her that.

She rose. She folded Hawker’s clothing and left it on a chair. She brushed her hair in front of the mirror. She had thought when women spoke of their heart breaking it was merely a way of speaking. It was not. Very distinctly, in her chest, she felt the crack inside her.

She would sleep alone from now on. There was no one else she wanted.

She folded the several copies of Mr. Millian’s letter together to take with her and laid the original in the center of the table for Hawker to find.

Her words to Hawker were quite dry. She set the letter on top of his clothing and left him.

JUSTINE STOOD BEFORE THE DESK IN LEBLANC’S office in the Tuileries and gazed past him, out the window, down into the courtyard below, and ached tiredness. Her heart also ached, but that was something she did not think about.

She acknowledged weariness somewhere in the recesses of her mind and set the knowledge aside since there was nothing she could do about it. She had crisscrossed Paris, delivering warnings to important, impatient men who did not like being awakened before dawn. Between those trying interviews, she had drunk four cups of very strong coffee. Or perhaps five. In any case, a great deal. Tiny bright lights jittered and blurred at the corners of her vision.

Leblanc was the last man to whom she must give the Millian letter, and by far the most unpleasant. She might need his men and resources, however. One deals with unpleasant men in any hierarchy. It was the way of the world.

Leblanc’s office was on the second floor of the Tuileries Palace with the rest of the Police Secrète. She had quite a good view of the Louvre.

“. . . which you claim is private correspondence,” he sneered at his copy of Millian’s letter, “between a diplomat in Paris and the British Foreign Office in London. Sent in the diplomatic pouch, doubtless.”

“That is most likely.”

“A letter transported with all elaborate precaution, in inviolate secrecy. Yet you obtained it easily.”

“Not easily. It did not drop into my lap like cherry blossoms.”

“Then how did it come into your hands?”

Leblanc would keep her standing here an hour, to no purpose whatsoever. He would ask stupid questions he knew she would not answer, merely to show he had the power to do so.