Joanna Bourne - The Spymaster’s Lady

“You have sense enough to eat slowly.” Adrian approved. “You’ve been hungry before.”

“You, too, I think.”

“I was starving pretty much all the time till I got old enough to steal for a living.” He chuckled. “Maybe I’d be a great walking mountain like Grey if I’d got fed regular.”

“Almost certainly. You will sit back in the chair more, Adrian. If you wish to faint, do not knock my cup of coffee into my lap doing it.”

The table told her of his movement. “Bouquets of womanly sympathy. Would you love me if I had Grey’s muscles and walked around towering over all these Frenchmen? I wouldn’t be half the agent I am if I had his height. Too conspicuous.”

“I find myself not in the least sympathetic to the problems of being an English spy in France. I would not waste my love on such as you, in any case. You should eat something, especially if that man is to remove bullets from you today, as you say.”

“I don’t think food will help. Disconcerting when your surgeon dreads the procedure more than you do. When were you hungry, Annique? The Terror?”

She chewed and swallowed. It was harmless enough to speak of this. “At that time, yes, but not in Paris. I was living with the Rom, the Kalderash, for those years. That life is hard in the winter, if the times are troubled.”

“Stolen by the Gypsies, were you?”

“That is a very false story, as you must know, being the so-intelligent spy that you are. The Rom never steal children, having many of their own, since they know as well as anyone how to make babies. It is not a matter of great difficulty, in case you wondered.”

“I’ve heard that. I wouldn’t try to hide that roll if I were you. No place for it under those clothes, delightful as they are.”

“It is that this dress is not decent then,” she said darkly. “I suspected as much.”

“It’s charming. Leave the roll next to the plate, please, and refrain from pilfering crusts in my presence. Roussel’s over there handing up baskets to the coach. Enough food for a small army. One benefit of getting kidnapped by Grey, Fox Cub—you’ll eat well so long as we manage to hold on to you.”

“I will eat well for some time then.” She had room in her stomach for a last sip of coffee or a bite more bread. Not both. She chose the coffee. She did love coffee.

“IMBÉCILE.” JACQUES LEBLANC SPREAD THE MAP flat, fingering across the roads of Normandy. “You waste my time with your whining.”

“She is in Paris,” Henri said sullenly. “They are on foot, without food, without money. The boy is wounded…”

“The boy is certainly dead. They abandoned him long since in some alleyway.” Leblanc unrolled the map further. “By now they have horses. Even a carriage perhaps.”

“The Englishman will go to ground. If Annique escapes him, she will go to her friends in Paris. Why would she—”

“She has friends everywhere. Be silent.” Leblanc set two inches of Normandy shoreline between thumb and index finger. “This is the stronghold of smuggling. The path to England. Together or apart, injured or well, they must come here.”

How long would it take the English spy to break Annique? Two days? Three? The Englishman was a hard brute. Even Henri was afraid of him.

This was a problem in simple logic. Allow three days for the Englishman to break the little bitch and strip the location of the Albion plans from her. Then…Leblanc walked his fingers upon the map, town to town to town. Where had the plans been hidden all these months? Paris? Rouen? Near the Channel? They could be in England itself. The girl could have taken the plans to England for safekeeping when she left Bruges. There had been enough time.

It did not matter where they were. In the end—this was the Englishman’s great weakness—in the end, the Englishman must cross the Channel. He had no choice but to go to the coast and fall into the trap laid for him.

Henri did not have enough sense to be quiet. “There is no proof she is with him. No proof she has ever left Paris. We should be searching the—”

“This is the Fox Cub, you fool, not one of your poulettes. She walked here from Marseilles, blind. Do you think she sits sucking her thumb in some corner in the Quartier Latin waiting for you? If she is not with the Englishman, she will still go to the Channel. She goes to Soulier. She thinks she will be safe with him.”

Henri said stubbornly, “I think—”

“You do not think. Faugh. I am surrounded by idiots.”

Events were escaping his control. Even now, Annique might be crawling to the Englishman, broken and begging, telling him anything he asked. Telling him about Bruges.

The map crackled. He closed his fist over Normandy. This was not disaster. Not disaster. He would scoop them up like bugs. The Englishman would be stopped. Even if he spilled some story of Bruges, who would believe what an English spy said? It could be quashed, every whisper of it. Every breath that spoke of it could be stopped.

And if he had the Albion plans on him…ventre bleu, but there was no limit to the gold a clever man could get for those plans.

It would not be like Bruges, with all his work, all his planning, cheated from him. For what? A ridiculous few coins. An insult of coins.

He pressed his thumb on the city of Rouen and marked the road to the coast. “You will order patrols here, here…and here. Stop everything that moves and search it.”

“We cannot stop every—”

“Look for a blind woman, for God’s sake. That is simple enough for even you.”

The Albion plans had dissolved from Bruges like a puff of smoke. He had torn that inn apart, looking for them. This time, they would not get away, not if he had to rip them from the belly of that bitch with his own hands.

“I will order patrols.” Henri gave a terse, insolent nod. Another discourtesy he would eventually regret.

He would salvage this calamity Henri had created. He would retrieve the Albion plans. And he would shut Annique Villier’s mouth. When she was dead, he would be safe.

“Here…and across here…place the customs. Let them do some useful work for a change. Send our men here.” His fingers tented, spiderlike, above the names written into the blue wash that marked the Channel. These were the villages, tiny, fish-stinking, each with fifty huts and three dozen boats turned down on the sand. “She knows this coast from the days of the Vendée. She made allies among the smugglers, men whose names she never reported to me. This is where she will go, if she is free.” He sat back abruptly and pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The room was too warm. “Unless she expects me to look for her there. Perhaps…” He frowned at the south. “If we spread the patrols…”

Henri gazed at the oil painting that hung on the gold and crimson walls of the salon, a landscape that had once belonged to the mayor of Paris. “There are many possibilities.”

He would deal with Henri. Oh, most assuredly, he would deal with this disrespect. “Go. Go yourself. Give the order that any papers she carries are to be brought to me, unopened. To me alone. Do you understand?”

“To you. Unopened. Of course.” Henri thought himself sly. If he laid eyes on the Albion plans, he would discover that he was, instead, expendable. “What of Annique?”

“Take her, if you want an Englishman’s leavings. Use her to reward the men who find her. Then bring her to me.”

“And the Englishman?”

“Kill him.”

BESIDE HIM, ON THE DRIVER’S SEAT, ANNIQUE maintained a dry and lofty silence for almost an hour. What finally broke her down was Doyle saying, in a very hurt tone, that she didn’t need to slide her arse all the way to Calais. He weren’t crowding her. The injured tone of voice and the vulgar word quite undermined her resolve. Even pressing her lips very closely together, she couldn’t keep from giggling.

“That’s better,” Doyle said, satisfied. “I was wondering if you was gonna talk to me.”

“I do not feel talkative. It is the being kidnapped, you comprehend.”

“We’ve irritated you, have we?”

“You have. And I do not like to be so high up.” The driver’s perch was unpadded and far, far from the ground. It lurched frighteningly over every bump. She could not see the ruts and potholes coming, so she must hold on tight and brace her feet continually on the upcurved footrest. Her fingers had permanently taken the shape of the railing at the side of the seat. She would be unspeakably sore and weary by day’s end, which was without doubt why she was up here. She would be in no condition to escape tonight. Grey had, as the English put it, fixed her wagon.

The coach jolted madly. She tightened her grip. “It is unsteady, this coach.”

“I ain’t going ter let you fall off.” Doyle had such a wonderful accent. No one but a Frenchman born would have dared to speak French so vilely. “Been to a bit of trouble getting hold of you, after all. You know much about horses, miss?”

She had located Monsieur Doyle in the vast storehouse of her memory. He had many names. Her mother pointed him out to her, long ago in Vienna, and told her to avoid him, as he was tough and tenacious as a badger and probably the best field agent alive.

“Not so much,” she said.

“Then we’ll put you to work, and I can get some rest. You just…That’s right. You just take this.”

He handed her something. Then she worked out that she was holding the reins and the horses were jogging along with nothing controlling them whatsoever but her hands on thin strands of leather.