She ran across the courtyard to where the stable door hung open and ducked inside. Her sabots clicked down the rank of stalls where each window stood open to the gray outside. No whicker came. No click of a hoof. Only the dry commentary of barn swallows, nesting in the eaves. The stable was empty and desolate under the high roof. The heart had gone out of here with the horses.

The villagers had come, thrifty and sharp-eyed and acquisitive. There was not one small valuable object left in place. Not a blanket. Not a jingling bit or rein or a braided rope. Not a scrap of worked leather. They’d even emptied the feed bins into sacks and carted the oats away, all but a handful in the bottom of the bin. The chickens of Voisemont would eat well this summer.

At the last stall, she stopped below the hayloft where the ladder slanted down. She stood ankle deep in straw, well back in the shadow. The shutters were open everywhere, creaking in the light wind, dripping with the damp congealed on the boards. It would have taken three minutes to close them, but no one had bothered. Perhaps it was a revolutionary principle that good straw should spoil in the rain.

There was a clear view of the courtyard. She would make certain this was not the messenger from Crow. Then she would slip away out the back door and leave them to occupy themselves with looting.

In the courtyard, voices separated into a deep, heavy rumble and answers, lighter and higher. Two men, at least.

They could be chance travelers, looking for a dry spot to spend the night. They could be philosophers or scholars, knights-errant, pilgrims, heroes in disguise, wandering minstrels. They might be veritable princes among men, bent upon good works, full of benevolence.

She had become skeptical of benevolence.

The high bushes of the lane were hazy under the desultory scatter of raindrops. They emerged. A tall man, dressed like a prosperous tradesman but brown as a farmer, strode ahead. His servant boy lagged behind, struggling with a pair of donkeys.

The big man stopped in the center of the courtyard and stood with his back to her, his head tilted to look up at the streaked black and gray facade of the chateau. He was not a man of fashion, certainly, but he was no shabby vagabond. He dressed substantially and practically, outfitted for hard travel with a plain coat and high boots. His hands, heavy and motionless, hooked into the waist of his trousers. His wide-legged stance was calm and meditative.

He could have been a soldier, surveying a captured city, preparing to raze it and salt the earth, or a builder, inspecting the blocks of a fallen Roman villa, calculating tonnage, planning to buy and transport the marble. As she watched, he pulled his hat off and slapped it against his thigh. There was decision in that motion. The whisper of great force, held easily in check.

I do not like this at all.

He carried no sign to say he was Crow’s messenger. A red ribbon with a knot in it, any bit of red cloth, knotted, would be enough. He was only a stranger in her domain, pointless and useless to her.

You have no business here. Go away.

He did not, of course. He set his hat back, low over his forehead, and flipped the collar of his coat up. He turned slowly, taking in the dairy house and the coach house, working his way around. At this distance, she couldn’t make out his features. Weak, gray light slid across his face, drawing a suggestion of high, flat cheekbones, a jaw dark with stubble, a jutting nose. His hair was brown and hung raggedly on his neck.

If he had inhabited a fairy tale he would have been the giant, not the prince. Giants are more chancy to deal with than princes.

This was what came of clinging to the stones of the chateau like damp moss. She had not gone to seek danger on the Paris road, so danger had come to her, stalking her right to her own doorstep. She was like the man who ran away from Death, all the way from Baghdad to Samarkand. Death found him anyway, because it was his fate.

The stranger surveyed his way around the outbuildings. When he came to the stable, for an instant he seemed to look directly at her. The force of his concentration grabbed her breath and twisted it in her lungs. Knowing she was invisible, knowing she was wrapped in shadow, she froze.

His attention moved on. To the stone wall that hid the fishpond garden. To the tall iron grille of that garden, standing open. To the kitchen plantings beyond, with that gate left open as well. Perhaps there was some unwritten rule that mobs and looters did not close doors after themselves.

The servant boy tied the donkeys to a post, swearing a staccato chain of annoyance. A trick of wind blew the words to her. “Donkey feet in butter. Donkey en croûte. Donkey soup. You just wait.”

He spoke with a Gascon accent. He looked Gascon also, dark haired, with the smooth, dark skin of the south of France. He was a servant many miles from home.

Master and servant were occupied with their own business. She could slip out the back door of the stable and crawl in the direction of the garden shed, pretending to be something unnoticeable. A hedgehog perhaps. Or she could wait. This pair might gawk at the chateau for a dozen moments, then leave for a warm fire and dry, comfortable beds in the village. She could climb to the stable loft and watch from there. There was always the chance they might call out and identify themselves with one of the passwords.

Or she could stand here like an idiot. She was a battlefield of possibilities.

The big man said, “There’s broken glass all over. Watch your feet. And don’t bring the donkeys in.” A Breton voice. This was a man from the oldest, the least civilized, province of France.

He didn’t start poking through the ruins. He stood and thought a great deal about what he was seeing. She did not wish to deal with a man who came here with more in his mind than straightforward looting.


WILLIAM Doyle, British spy, stood in the French rain and thought about destruction.

Decorum and Dulce balked at the gate. Laid their ears back and refused to set hoof on the open gravel in the courtyard. They didn’t like the stink of burning. They smelled death, maybe. Something they didn’t like, anyway.

Wise as cats, those beasts. The boy hadn’t learned to appreciate them.

There weren’t any remains lying about in an obvious way. No bodies hanging from the trees like ripe fruit. Always the possibility somebody was tucked away in a corner, dead.

Dulce snaked out to bite Hawker. Missed him by a hair. The boy was getting downright nimble, wasn’t he?

“Rutting bastard of a—” Hawker dodged, “sodomite monk.”

He learned that one from me. I am just a shining example to youth. The boy had come to him speaking some French. He was improving the lad’s vocabulary.

The donkeys were what he’d call a pointed lesson in how to deal with a problem you couldn’t out talk and couldn’t stab in the jugular. Sometimes it was a real pleasure to educate the lad.

Hawker hanked the reins up with a last jerk, looking like he knew what he was about, which was a tribute to his acting skills. “I’m going to boil your entrails down and make goddamn donkey glue.”

“When yer through chatting with the livestock, maybe we can reconnoiter a bit. Take the back garden, down to that shed. Then go round the west side.” He did a slice and circle, saying the same thing in hand-talk. After this, the gesture would be enough. Hawker learned the first time.

The boy stuck to the wet grass where it was quiet and let the boxwood hedge screen him from sight, taking city skills and applying them. He was beginning to move like a countryman.

They had Chateau de Fleurignac to themselves. No Jacobin radicals waved official papers. No servants clacked buckets at the well or broke dishes in the kitchen. No chickens underfoot. No horses in the stable. Not even a dog came out to discuss meum et tuum with trespassers.

No sign of the mad, old Marquis de Fleurignac or his daughter.

In the tavern in Voisemont, they said the old man had escaped before the Jacobins came to arrest him and drag him back to Paris, to the guillotine. He’d driven away in a coach and four, his pockets stuffed with jewels. He’d been seen going north to join the armies attacking France.

Another contingent claimed he’d been spirited away by one of the fraternities of heroes and fools who flipped a finger at the Revolution and rescued aristos. He was hid in the false bottom of a wagon, joggling along the road to the coast.

Then there was a lively group that said the marquis had been trapped in the fire. Oh, yes. They’d seen him with their own eyes, beating at the windows to get out. Burning like a torch. He was buried under eight feet of ashes with a fortune in gold clutched in his charred, bony fists. All a man had to do was dig him up.

Himself, he thought de Fleurignac had never been at the chateau. De Fleurignac was a city man. He’d gone to ground where he felt safe. Paris. That’s where he’d find him and his damned list.

But De Fleurignac’s daughter had been here. In the tavern there was complete agreement she’d been in the house when the Jacobins came. Nobody speculated on what had become of her. They passed quick glances back and forth and said nothing. Always interesting, what people didn’t talk about.

He looked around, writing his report in his head.

Chateau de Fleurignac was the size of his father’s house, Bengeat Court. It was the same age as Bengeat, too. Sixteenth century. Built with the local granite they’d been passing in every field all the way from the coast. The roof had caved in unevenly when the timbers went, making a gray hunchback of a ruin. Every window was topped with a fan of black soot.