Joanna Bourne - The Black Hawk

In so short a moment, the atmosphere changed.

She did not know quite how to explain those knives.

Doyle dropped his napkin beside his plate. “Right. I’ll leave you two to talk about that. I’m for Soho and hunting down some witness to the first stabbing. That is a neighborhood full of shy game when it comes to flushing out witnesses. Sévie, you got a nice, innocent, confiding look about you today. Come along. Maybe they’ll talk to you.”

“I am delighted to be your stalking horse.” Cup clinked into saucer. Séverine was on her feet. “See that she rests, Hawker. It is no use to nurse her back to health if you are going to badger her to death.” Séverine dropped a kiss on her cheek as she passed by. “Do not be cruel to him,” she whispered.

Fletcher muttered something about papers from the inquest and slipped out the door. The sullen apprentice spy stacked a pile of dishes in the dumbwaiter and strode after him. By that time, Paxton had already exercised his most excellent talent for vanishing.

“Are you the enemy, turning my knives against me?” Hawker said.

It became very quiet.

AFTER HE SIGNALED DOYLE AND EVERYBODY CLEARED out, he was left alone with Owl, who wasn’t in any shape to go stomping off when he asked awkward questions.

The wooden box from her shop—the one that had played host to his knives for a while—was in the top drawer of the sideboard. He brought it out and laid it on the table. You could call that a conversation piece.

She worked on her coffee in little sips, eking it out as long as she could, avoiding the moment when she’d have to come up with explanations for having three of his knives.

He wasn’t in a hurry. He fetched the silver coffeepot and poured into her cup. Added cream the way she liked it. “Two lumps?”

“Thank you.”

Enough sugar to set his teeth on edge. That hadn’t changed. “We can go to the study, if you like. There’s a sofa in there. I can let you lie down.” He handed the cup over.

“I have been lying flat for several days. It loses its appeal.”

Owl, lying flat, never lost its appeal. He didn’t point that out. He was the pattern card of discretion.

The banyan was embroidered with dragons, a gift from an old friend who dealt in cloth. One lascivious lizard curled all comfy on her left breast, tongue out, as if he were tasting her nipple through the cloth. The black dragon on the back, the one with a smile, had his pointy tail hung down so it was caressing the rounded arse underneath.

He didn’t let his mind follow that path, however much it tugged at the leash and whined.

She wrapped both hands around the little cup and sank back, boneless, in the chair, her head bowed, considering the coffee. She looked tired. Getting stabbed, poisoned, and fighting off fever had worn her down a little.

She’d primmed the sensual complexity of her hair, scraped it away from her face. Tamed it to an orderly braid to fall down her back. But it wasn’t tied up at the bottom. Maybe she hadn’t found a ribbon. Even the concerted force of her will wasn’t going to keep it from unraveling.

He stood close, breathing down onto all the bare skin at her neck. It wouldn’t intimidate her—he couldn’t think of anything right off that was likely to intimidate her—and he could catch her if she started to slip sideways.

Always a pleasure to watch Owl. He’d missed that. “You’re quiet.”

“I am thinking of the several things I must say to you. None of them is easy.”

Probably she was weighing her lies. Sorting the big ones from the small ones. Wondering what she could get away with. God, but he loved this woman. “I’m a patient man. Begin at the beginning.”

She sighed out slowly. “It is not the beginning, but it is the most recent of our encounters. You rescued me from the Cossacks. I wanted to kill you. You will remember that.”

“Vividly.”

IT was in the last days before Paris fell. Armies were scattered around the French countryside, fighting off and on. He’d been liaison to the Prussians. Napoleon put up a defense a half day south.

There was gunfire in the distance, but the front line was so mixed up, that could be anybody shooting at anybody else. The Prussians were using him to run messages back and forth and report what was happening, generally. He was so tired he hurt like one big bruise. He smelled like his horse.

Some Cossack officers he knew spotted him and called him over. They needed help interrogating a prisoner. A woman.

He ducked under the tent flap. She was sitting on an old wooden stool, bloodied, with torn clothes. She hadn’t been raped. He’d been in time to stop that.

“She fought like a tiger.” Pavlo was admiring. “Fortunately, the sergeant she stabbed wasn’t popular.”

Owl looked up and knew it was over. He watched her face break.

He said, “I know this one. She’s harmless.”

It had been a dozen years since she’d shot him on the steps in the Louvre. In all those years, all those cities, they hadn’t crossed paths often. When they did, it had been interesting.

She’d changed from the woman he’d known. She was exhausted to the edge of endurance, for one thing. Pale, with her eyes set in hollows like two big bruises and her mouth slack. She hadn’t given up though. She was calculating, planning, scheming, ready to pay any price and take any chance to get away. Behind her eyes she was . . . she was just more. Everything she’d been when he knew her twelve years before, she was more of now. More strong. More shrewd. More stubborn.

“She’s just another courier,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

The papers she had on her were in one of the standard French codes—a message for Napoleon’s eyes. The attack on St. Dizier was a feint. The real drive was direct to Paris. He had no idea how she’d found that out.

He said she wasn’t worth the trouble of guarding. Said it set a bad example, shooting women. When he took her out of the tent with him, they probably thought he was marching her off for his own use.

He made her walk a mile from the Cossack camp before he stopped his horse. The road ran along the marshes around the lake.

“Your shoes,” he said.

Wordlessly, she took the clogs off and handed them over. He threw them as far as he could, in different directions, far out over the marsh.

St. Dizier was fifty miles away. Alone, unarmed, walking barefoot, even Justine wouldn’t make it to Napoleon in time. Paris would fall. It was the end.

“I will kill you for this.” She stood in the dirt of the road, her arms crossed over her breasts like she was holding her heart inside. “I will wait until you no longer expect it, and then I will kill you. Do not sleep deeply.”

SHE sat in his headquarters at Meeks Street in the Chinese dining room, wrapped in his dragons, and drank his coffee.

“That day, outside the Cossack camp. I said a great many things.” She consulted her coffee cup. “I was beyond myself.”

“I knew that.”

“You were the enemy, and you destroyed our last hope.”

“It was already too late before I saw you in that tent. Everybody knew that but Napoleon. He was outnumbered. The country was sick of war. All he could do was pick the battleground where he’d lose. If you’d got through to him, he would have taken the final battle to the walls of Paris. Did you want house-to-house fighting across the Latin Quarter? Artillery fire from Montmartre?”

“I see that now. That day, I knew only that I had failed in my duty.” The past filled her face. She was a long way away. “I tried to get to Napoleon, and every step of the long way, I planned how I would kill you.”

“You were inventive about it, I imagine.”

“There has never been a man in the history of the world who was killed as ingeniously as you were, in my mind, that day. I tried so hard, and I failed. When they told me Paris had surrendered, I sat upon the floor of a farmhouse and wept.”

Nothing he could say. The war was over. “He had to be stopped.”

“I have had a long time to think about this. I do not say you are wrong. But then . . . Paris was full of foreign armies. Prussians strutted about the Champs-Élysées. The cafés were full of Austrians. Cossacks camped on the Champs de Mars. Everywhere I turned, I became sick with rage. I was forsaken and mad with grief. So I blamed you.”

“You think I don’t understand that?”

“I would have spit upon your understanding, if you had offered it to me then.” She gave a crooked smile. “I was most utterly alone. There was no place for me in the new scheme of things. Even the Police Secrète became suddenly supporters of the monarchy. Those of us who had been loyal to Napoleon found it prudent to leave France.”

“To England.”

“It is ironic that the safest place for me was here, openly among my old enemies.”

“Ironic.”

“But I lie.” She took a deep breath. “As I lay in bed this morning, I promised myself I would not do that. Habit is very strong. I came to England because you were here.” She glanced at the knives that lay in the center of the table, being decorative. “I had decided, very cold-bloodedly, that I would kill you.”

“I hope you changed your mind.” Gods, but I hope you changed your mind.

“I am being honest about complex matters. It is not easy, and you are not helpful in the least.” She always got more French when she was annoyed.

He touched her cheek. One brush with his finger. Anybody looking on would have thought it was just friendly. “We never hurt each other. We played fair. Leaving aside that one deplorable incident fifteen years ago, you never shot me.”