He stepped over Le Brochet’s back. Straddled him. Took a handful of hair and pulled his head up, throat bare. He held his knife under Le Brochet’s ear. It’d be a clean stroke in, down and across. With his sleeve rolled up, he wouldn’t even get his shirt messy. He’d be over the wall and out of Faubourg Saint-Marcel before the corpse stopped twitching.

Doyle won’t like this.

That messed up his concentration. Le Brochet started gargling, so he pressed the knife in, just a bit, to remind the man of his own mortality.

Lazarus said to kill the cove. Clean up the loose ends. Nobody disobeyed Lazarus.

Doyle wanted the names on that list. Wanted to save men slated to die. He wouldn’t mind knowing the French agents working in England either. Nobody was going to get answers out of a corpse.

Damn and rot Doyle anyway.

Le Brochet babbled, “I swear it. I was just scaring you a little. I swear to God. Sweet Saint Vincent, forgive me. I wasn’t going to kill you. Wasn’t going to lay a hand on you.”

Unlike some, Hawker didn’t get any pleasure out of men begging. That was why he was good at his job. He didn’t get distracted.

Doyle would say any damn fool can kill a man. A dog can kill a man. A little bug you can’t barely see can kill a man. “Shut yer trap. I can’t think with you yapping.”

“I got money. Jewels. Aristo stuff. The real thing. I can tell you where. Split everything with you. I wasn’t going to hurt you. I swear it. By Saint Vincent. Just having a little fun. Wasn’t going to—”

If I leave this garbage alive, Lazarus is going to break my neck in one snap. He’s going to laugh while he does it. “Let’s talk about your visit to England. Just you and me, friendly-like. You are going to tell me every man you saw. Every paper you carried. You are going to tell me every time you took a piss by the side of the road.”

It took a while. His arm got tired, holding Le Brochet’s hair.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Just a man. A gentleman. Nothing to say about him. I swear. He met me on the street. He knew me. I didn’t know him.” Le Brochet sucked in blood, his face having got cut up while they were refreshing his memory. “I run messages. Carry packages. Do it all the time. He give me the money and told me where to go. Go to Lazarus. A man named Crawford. Go to this tavern. Ask for Mr. Phineas. Hand over an envelope. Then go somewhere else and ask for Mr. Tuckahoe.”

He hadn’t noticed what they looked like. Just men. Ordinary men. Some were French—he thought. Some were English—he thought. No, he hadn’t looked at the papers he was delivering.

He remembered every girl he’d slept with in obscene detail. He hadn’t noticed a damn thing about the assassins he paid to kill men.

Waste of blood, putting it in this fool. Bigger waste letting it out. Nobody’s going to believe him if he talks about Lazarus.

Le Brochet panted, “Swear to God. I don’t remember any more.”

That was the trouble with leaving the bugger alive. You had to conduct damn, bloody conversations with him. He’d got wet and sticky with blood. For this much gore he could have just killed the cully.

Time to leave. He kicked Le Brochet in the gut, so the man didn’t have a chance to poke him with some knife he’d got hidden on his verminous body. He pulled up over the wall and took off running.

A dozen streets away, he turned a corner and found a public fountain and stopped to wash the blood off. Le Brochet was yelling death threats after him in the distance.

He had the meeting places used by French spies in England. He had some descriptions that weren’t worth much and a few passwords the French used. That was a start. Might be enough for the Service to track some of them down. Nobody could have got more.

Pretty good for a rabid weasel.

* * *

DOYLE uncocked the pistol and lowered it. There’d been one moment he’d almost used it. The boy had taken a while, deciding whether he was going to slit that Le Brochet’s throat.

It had been close.

The attic was an oven, which was why none of the tavern girls was up here plying their trade on that filthy cot in the corner. When he stayed still, behind the shutters, he could look down into the filthy tavern yard. See and not be seen. Hear everything.

The boy got the information out of Le Brochet and let him live. There wasn’t an agent in Paris who could have done a better job of it.

The tavern boiled out Le Brochet’s friends and cohorts, snarling like hornets. Hawker was long gone, over the wall, down the alley.

Time to find him and take him back to Carruthers to get yelled at and cleaned up. Time for the boy to make his first report to a Head of Section.

I’m glad I didn’t have to kill him.

He’d taken a risk, leaving his street rat to deal with Le Brochet. It could have been a mistake. Could have been the kind of mistake that makes a man leave the Service.

I hope you’re worth it, boy.

Twenty-three

THE BATHS WERE RESPECTABLE, OF COURSE. THE most proper woman might come here. But also, no one would be amazed to find improper activities. It was a fine place for secrets. Marguerite had met Jean-Paul here more times than she could count.

Boots shuffled in the corridor outside. A man’s boots, not the clogs of the maidservants. There was the smallest scratch on the door.

She said, “Enter.”

The high windows and the transom above the door were open to let out the steam of the bath. But no one could linger to eavesdrop in the hall or in the garden below and not be seen by Olivie. All the rooms nearby would be kept empty.

He opened the door. Familiar, reliable, dear Jean-Paul. Olivie would have told her instantly if he’d been arrested. Marguerite had known he was safe, but it was still a great joy to see him with her own eyes. All the way across Normandy, she’d been afraid for him.

When she ran to embrace him, he held her briefly and strongly and then pushed her away. “I wish you’d wear clothes.”

“But I am.” She was wrapped in the heavy, white linen robe of the bath. Perfectly decent. It covered her to her ankles. She wore less on the street. “Do you know, I did not expect you to grow up to be a prude. It is marriage, I think, that destroyed your sense of humor. You became very serious after you married and had children.”

“I became older. Much, much older.” Jean-Paul sighed and turned and closed the door behind him. “If there were churches in the city, instead of Temples of Reason, I’d light fifty candles in gratitude. Marguerite, when I heard the chateau burned, I thought you were dead.”

“I was not even toasted, except a very little upon the palms of my hands, which have now healed. When I was at Bertille’s house she put butter upon them, which she claims is a sovereign remedy. It makes one sticky, however.”

“Gabrièlle cried for two days. I would very much like to shake you until your teeth rattle.”

I am glad to see you, too, Jean-Paul. “I thought I would come to Paris and it would be too late. You would be arrested. Or dead. I feared for you.”

“And I was sick with worry, knowing you were on the road, alone.” He reached to her, to touch his knuckles, once, to the back of her hand. “I find you pink and well washed and happy. Naturally, I’m infuriated.”

“Oh, naturally. I would like to hit you a little, too, just to relieve my feelings.”

He stripped out of his jacket, setting the scene of elegant depravity in the afternoon, in case anyone should come. Because he was Jean-Paul, he arranged his coat carefully upon the back of a chair. It was a habit to drive one insane.

He was strong and slender, of course. To be a chief botanist of the Jardin des Plantes was to move heavy exotic plant specimens all day long. He was—he had always been—beautiful to look upon, blond and fine-featured, though he was deeply scarred upon his back, of course. Uncle Arnault had done that to him when he had caught them together. Still, if she had come to the baths for dalliance, she would certainly engage in it with him.

He had not been skilled in lovemaking when they were fifteen. Probably he improved later. She had never known quite how to ask that question of Gabrièlle.

His waistcoat followed his jacket to the chair. “We have nothing but rumors here. What happened in Normandy?”

“What did not happen? The chateau burned. That is first.”

“I hoped that wasn’t true.”

“It is wholly gone. Invading Visigoths could not have wrought a more thorough destruction. The servants are safe. The mayor will care for them. I have sent money.”

He paused with his hand on the back of the chair. “You’ve lost your writings. Your records. Your books. I am so sorry.”

“I have copies of most of it, here in Paris.”

“Not all,” he said.

“Not all.” He knew what she had lost. Jean-Paul had gone with her to peasant huts to listen to the old women tell stories. He’d taken her seriously, when everyone else laughed. “I remember some of it almost word for word. I have already started rewriting my notes.”

He slipped free the knot at his throat. “I’ll help, if I can. I don’t have your memory.” He held the ends of his cravat, half undone, and looked at her. “When the men came to the chateau, to burn it, did they . . . Did anyone . . .”

“I was not hurt.”

“You would say that, but—”

“I will intervene before you ask in plain words what will embarrass us both. No harm came to me. Not in the least. Wren was there, you know, and we fought like Amazons. Truly. Wren will tell you about it someday. Make her dwell particularly upon the moment where I slashed the man with a letter opener. I was intrepid and resolute beyond measure.”