Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

The crowd tumbled out of the room, pushing and choking. Staggering to safety.

She tripped a madman who yammered and tried to run into the blaze. Elbowed him in the belly when he got up and tried again. Saw him held and dragged off by others. She beat at the dress of a woman whose light printed cotton had caught fire. A man—brother or lover or passing stranger—pulled his jacket off and closed it around the girl, smothering the flames.

She yelled at him, over the shouting and the howl of the fire, “Get her out of here. To the fountain outside. Soak her with water.”

Those who had escaped were blocking the path of those still in the room. She pushed one man and another. “Go. Get out of the way.” Sent them down the hall. And still Napoleon did not come.

It was bright as fireworks inside. Men and women ran for the door through a corridor of the fire. Through flames that poured like rivers, going upward.

The First Consul was the last man out. His guard pushed two women, a gasping man, and a boy carrying a baby ahead of them. Then Napoleon emerged, even after his guard, covering his face with his arms.

Behind him, in the open doorway, smoke descended like a slow curtain. A hollow roaring built. The fire became solid, flames fingering the doorway. Wind blew from the hall behind her toward the fire.

An inferno of heat. Such heat that she retreated from it. Anyone left inside that room was dead.

Men ran past her, toward the fire. Soldiers carrying buckets of water and sand. Down the hall, outside in the courtyard, men yelled, “Fire,” and “Get the pumps,” and “This way.”

She followed the black, ash-smeared figure of Napoleon. He strode, upright and rigidly controlled, his square, pale countenance set. Men gave way before him. Anyone with clear eyes looked around for orders now. They trailed in his wake or stopped to help the survivors of the Green Salon who coughed and cried out, faces covered with soot.

Smoke snaked over her head, down the corridor, filling the space beneath the ceiling, covering the nymphs and gods.

“Owl.” Hawker was in her path. “Your hair’s on fire. Hold still.” He slapped around her face. Pulled her fichu out from around her neck and pressed it to her head. “You’re burned.”

Now she felt stinging points of pain. Pieces of falling fire had burned through her clothes. The damage was on her back where she couldn’t see. It didn’t matter.

“It’s nothing.” Her throat was raw from breathing in the smoke. She swallowed and tasted ash. “At the other door. There will be a soldier. Go.”

“There are men headed that way.” Hawker pulled out a handkerchief, spit on it, and swiped across her eyes. “I’ve got to find the Englishman. For God’s sake, get away from the fire. And move these damn idiots along.” He was gone, dodging through the crowd, his friend Paxton at his back.

She ran to catch up with Napoleon. He strode through this tumult alone, sending his soldiers to help others. It would be easy, easy, for someone to slip toward him and shoot. That might be their plan all along. In the madness of the fire, to kill him and escape.

Napoleon took his place in the center of the marble entry hall under the great chandelier. Men rushed by in this direction and that, shouting. Then they saw him, and chaos ceased.

Suddenly, officers’ voices could be heard. Men formed quickly moving lines, passing buckets. The injured and grimy survivors of the fire were helped outside. The doors cleared.

Napoleon treated this as he would a battlefield. He stayed where he could be seen and consulted. He issued orders to one man and sent him on his way. Spotted another and motioned him forward. Gave more orders. Men came to him in panic and departed with purpose.

She set herself four feet from his back and drew her gun from her pocket, cocked it, and held it at her side, pointed to the floor, hidden by the folds of her skirt. Ready. She studied the eyes of every man who approached him, watched the hands of every man and woman who hesitated in the corridor and stared.

The First Consul had escaped one threat. He must be guarded from the next. That was her job, in this confusion, to guard his back.

Leblanc came from the courtyard outside. He’d washed his face somewhere, but his hair was still full of black ash. He breathed raggedly as he approached the First Consul, whether from exertion or fear, she did not know. “The Englishman got away. We’re searching the building for him. I will send—”

“It is not the English.” Napoleon commanded armies in the field. Now he raised his voice so it could be heard above the shouting, over the weeping of women who had collapsed on benches in the corridor, over the tromp of soldiers. “This is an unfortunate accident. The fire has been controlled.” In a lower voice, he said to Leblanc, “See that nothing else reaches the papers. This is a small fire that accidentally broke out.”

“The Englishman lit the—”

“There is no Englishman. This is a plot of the Jacobins. There are a number already under suspicion of treasonous activities. I want them arrested. Find Fouché. I must talk to him.”

“Of course, First Consul, I—”

The First Consul would naturally blame the Jacobins. He would take any excuse to harass them. And he did not wish to go to war with England. Not at this minute. Not before he prepared.

Leblanc tried to say more, but Napoleon had already turned away to listen to a sergeant who spoke of pumps. Then he called over to him a man in the clothing of a clerk, saying again that this was an accident only. Not the first fire in these old buildings. This information must appear, just so, in the press.

Vezier came from the direction of the fire, his face smeared, his eyes tearing tracks down to his mustache. He saw the gun she held ready, and at once understood the danger to the First Consul. He gestured three men from the work of carrying buckets to set them in a phalanx around Napoleon. They were ordinary soldiers, but they took up positions, as if by instinct, putting their own bodies between the threat of an assassin and the future of Europe.

Leblanc stalked toward her, determined and furious, and closed his fist around her arm. “We will find the Englishman who did this. Come with me.”

HE DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE OWL, BUT HIS JOB WAS to find the Englishman before the French did.

She was alive. Coughing, wheezing, eyes watering, with a nasty burn on her back, but alive. She’d feel the hurt later, when she stood still.

He spent one minute with her, just long enough to hear her breathing clear. No time to say he’d thought she was going to die—thought they both were going to die—and he would have traded his life to get her out.

No time, no place, to kiss her. They’d do that later. He’d find the Englishman and wring his damn neck. Then he’d take Owl to bed.

He signaled Pax, and they took off, following the route the Englishman must have taken, down the corridor and out the door, into the courtyard between the Tuileries and the Louvre.

Ten feet from the door he let himself look back. Owl had attached herself to that bastard Napoleon, playing guard. She was drawn up straight, all steel, ready to shoot anybody who looked at Bonaparte cross-eyed.

The best strike came after the first one failed and the target relaxed. If he was running an operation to kill that cove, he’d do it now.

Clever Owl. Consummate professional. Nothing she didn’t see.

Smoke plumed out of a line of windows to his left. The whole side of the building was covered with a blanket of black. Men pumped water into the horse trough, scooped it up, and ran with buckets into the Tuileries.

He motioned Pax to the center of the courtyard and some clear space. “Our Englishman is six foot, built heavy, brown hair going thin on top, red face. Fifty years old. Dark blue coat with brass buttons. Blue vest.”

“I got one look at him, running away.” Pax kept up. “He won’t be out here where everybody can see him.”

“He’ll stay, though. Stay to see what happens.”

“Amateur.”

“This all stinks of the amateur.”

A hundred people had come out to stare at the fire. Office clerks, maids, cooks, and floor scrubbers from the Tuileries. Gaggles of art lovers running across from the Louvre, pointing and shouting. Soldiers headed in from all quarters, dodging the gawking idiots, trying to get to the fire and do something useful.

The Englishman was here, somewhere.

“A professional would have killed you so you couldn’t move that heavy bit of furniture away from the door. He’d have shot Napoleon when he came out of the smoke. And he’d be halfway to Montmartre by now.”

“That’s what you’d do.”

“That’s what anyone sensible would do.” They were jostled by men wanting a better view of the fire. “Only a bloody amateur traps six dozen people in a fire. When you set out to kill a man, you kill the man. You don’t burn half a bloody palace doing it.”

“Lots of places for him to hide and watch.” Pax looked from door to door, window to window, rooftop to rooftop. “Or set up a gun.”

He stripped away the anger and considered the kind of man who put together a plot with so many deaths. “He doesn’t have a gun. He planned one big, showy spectacular moment. Mopping up afterward isn’t in his calculations.”

“He doesn’t kill face-to-face.”

“Right. It’s not the gut hit and the blood he’s after. He wants to wind everything up like a clock and set it down and watch it happen. He wants to be . . . like the ceilings in this place. All those gods sneering down from the clouds. Jupiter. That lot.”