The Purple Gentian rose easily to his feet and brushed off his hands. “Marston reeks of brandy. We can haul him over to the Latin Quarter and dump him behind a tavern. He’ll fit right in with the other drunks passed out in the gutter.”

“That should work.” Amy’s voice was unusually subdued as she joined the Purple Gentian in peering down at Marston’s collapsed form. Stretched out on the dirt as he was, arms limp, hands limper, the bulk of the man still made Amy’s flesh crawl. She took some comfort in the crooked angle of his nose, a sign that she had been able to protect herself, at least somewhat.

The Gentian had circled round to Marston’s head, and was hauling the man’s limp torso upright, long sleeves protecting his arms from the scratchy gold braid on Marston’s jacket. Watching anxiously to make sure Marston’s eyes didn’t roll open, Amy took wary hold of Marston’s boots.

They set off in silence down the path, between the row of silent trees, the Purple Gentian backing up with long strides that took two of Amy’s shorter steps to match.

Amy gazed longingly at the tall, dark figure walking backwards in confident strides. If she asked, he would stop. And then she could bury her face in his chest and wrap her arms around his waist and let his strength support her. It was so terribly tempting. All she had to do was ask.

All she had to do was scuttle her pride.

Amy determinedly turned her thoughts to the quandary of filching the Swiss gold out from under the noses of Bonaparte’s agents. And if she jumped nervously when a man with gold embroidery on his cloak swaggered past them into the gardens, well, the Purple Gentian made no comment. Amy glanced swiftly at the burden hanging between them, just to make sure Marston was still there, unconscious, limp, and harmless. Momentarily reassured, she returned to considering the benefits and drawbacks of gunpowder, though she still flinched every time the leaves around them rustled with the passage of a human body.

Much to Amy’s relief, the gardens finally gave way to the busy streets of the Latin Quarter. Shouts and laughter spilled from brightly lit tavern windows, making Amy blink at the sudden glare; the sour reek of spilled spirits caused her to scrunch up her nose.

Through one window, a group of students was pounding out a bawdy ballad in Latin, punctuating their verses with swigs from a giant jug of Bordeaux. The group of sailors in the inn across the way was doing its best to outsing the students with an equally bawdy sea chanty. Just in front of them, a man reeled through a door into the street, nearly barreling into the Purple Gentian before collapsing in the gutter. In the open doorway, a massive woman in a soiled kerchief brushed her hands in the universal gesture of good riddance.

No one gave Richard and Amy a second look.

Amy could only conclude that hooded men and disheveled women bearing unconscious bodies weren’t as unusual an occurrence as one would suppose.

Speaking softly under the cover of all of the merriment going on about them, the Purple Gentian leaned across Marston’s unconscious body, and murmured to Amy, “Once we dispose of our cargo in a manner befitting him, I’ll take you home.”

“Cargo,” Amy repeated. Keeping a firm grasp on Marston’s feet, she hissed, “There’s something I have to—”

“This looks like a promising alley, don’t you think?” the Gentian interrupted, peering into a cul-de-sac between two noisy taverns. One man already occupied part of the gutter, arms flung wide, and one boot missing. “Let’s drop him right over there, shall we? We’ll even provide fitting company for him,” the Gentian added with a chuckle.

Right. Now was probably not the best of times to relay Bonaparte’s plans for invading England, Amy consoled herself. Certainly not over the body of a member of Bonaparte’s military, unconscious though he certainly seemed to be. Could Marston merely be pretending to be unconscious, waiting for them to let go to wreak his revenge? Amy winced as she remembered the sound of the Gentian’s boot connecting with Marston’s chin and quickly discarded the possibility that Marston might be feigning oblivion. The man would have to have a head of steel not to be unconscious. Nonetheless, it probably wouldn’t hurt to wait until they were in a less populated area before relaying her monumental information to the Gentian.

Amy hastily let go of Marston’s feet as the Purple Gentian unceremoniously dumped Marston into a liquid that Amy hoped was spilled wine. Marston’s body landed with a satisfying thump.

Brushing his hands together with the air of a man who considers a job well done, Richard took one last look at the crumpled figure in the gutter. Marston had begun snoring noisily, his mouth flopping open. His gaudy coat was smeared with dirt and mottled with blood. Between the state of his attire and his coarse expression, he looked like nothing more than a servant who had gone brawling in his master’s clothes. All he needed to complete the scene was an empty bottle in his limp hand.

Richard glowered at the fallen body. “How could you think I was Marston?”

“Vanity, thy name is man?”

“Objecting to being compared to that”—the Gentian jerked a finger over his shoulder at Marston as he took Amy by the arm and steered her towards the river—“is not vanity. It’s simple self-respect.”

“The comparison made sense at the time,” mused Amy. “No! No, I didn’t mean it that way,” she hastily amended, as the Purple Gentian gave every sign of boiling over like an offended volcano. Taking care to emphasize that she found Marston in no way comparable to the Gentian, Amy explained the series of deductions that had led her to believe Marston must be he.

“After all, there he was in the courtyard, wearing a black cloak just like yours. What else was I to think?” she finished.

“It does make a certain amount of sense,” the Gentian admitted grudgingly, as they trudged down stone steps onto a pier to wait for one of the small boats that ferried passengers along the Seine for a fee. “Though why you couldn’t tell the difference—”

“I had only met him once, and briefly, at that. And when I found the information . . .”

The Purple Gentian’s eyes narrowed. “The information that was so vitally important that you had to set up an assignation in the middle of the night?”

Amy cast him a sidelong glance. “Do we really have to go into all that again?”

“Yes.” The Gentian crossed his arms across his chest.

“You may change your mind when you hear what I have to tell you.”

Even through his cloak and mask, the Purple Gentian radiated skepticism.

“All right, then. If you really don’t want to hear about Bonaparte’s plans for the invasion of England . . .”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“About what?” The Purple Gentian yanked Amy over to the side of the quay with such force that her cloak rippled out behind her like a pennant on a windy day.

“Bonaparte’s plans! They were under his blotter on his desk.”

Richard’s memory momentarily clicked back to that afternoon, to Amy, flustered, running into him as she raced out of . . . Bonaparte’s study. He’d been so delighted by the opportunity that her running into him had afforded him, so focused on flirting with her, that it had never occurred to him to wonder why she was scurrying through that particular anteroom.

“He plans to land a force of one hundred seventy thousand men with twenty-four hundred ships,” Amy whispered urgently. “But Mme Bonaparte has emptied the treasury, so he can’t do it until gold enough to finance the expedition arrives.”

“So that’s it!” That was what Murat had been about to say. Nothing could be done until the gold arrived. Richard could have kicked himself. After six years of close contact with the Bonapartes, six years of listening to Bonaparte rant about his wife’s extravagance, you’d think he could have put two and two together. “Does he have the money?”

“That’s the splendid thing!” Amy hugged the Gentian’s arm in her glee. “He’s arranged for a loan—as if he intends to pay it back—from Swiss bankers. It’s due to come in by carriage to a Paris warehouse the night of the thirtieth. Don’t you see, it’s perfect! If we can just—”

“Intercept the gold before it reaches Bonaparte. . . ,” the Purple Gentian continued for her, grinning broadly.

“We can stop the invasion of England and topple the government!”

“Shhhh!”

“Oh, sorry.” Amy bit her lip. “I got a bit carried away. But can’t you just see it? When that gold doesn’t arrive . . .”

“But how do we keep it from arriving?” The Gentian paced in a little circle around the quay. Amy watched in appreciation, enjoying the way the cape swished about his booted legs as he walked, the way his jaw shifted as he thought through plans. Most of all, she basked in that thoughtless “we.”

The Gentian whirled with a particularly satisfying swish. “How many men will be guarding it?”

“The letter didn’t say,” Amy admitted. “Fouché just wrote that it would be heavily guarded, whatever that means.”

“Stealth, rather than force,” muttered the Gentian, resuming his circles.

“What about a smaller version of the Trojan Horse?”

“A smaller what?”

Perching herself on a piling, Amy explained, “In Greek mythology, the Trojan Horse was a—”

The Gentian flapped his cape at her. “Stop! I know the story. You want to intercept the Swiss gold with a small wooden horse?”

“Not exactly.” Amy swung her legs back and forth as she expounded, her heels hitting the wood block with a series of dull thuds. “But you could send a delivery of barrels or something to the warehouse—barrels of something they might want—and when they haul them inside, we can leap out and seize the gold.”