Joanna Bourne - The Spymaster’s Lady

Never before had she operated on someone she knew. It was of a horribleness unimaginable. She would avoid this in the future.

“I got that.” Doyle set her hands aside. Took over. He discarded the soaked bandages, twitched a clean one into place.

Adrian groaned and tried to roll. Grey, who thought everyone should do as he commanded, told him to hold still. Told him how to breathe. Again and again, told him how to breathe. It was most odd.

“We going to close this?” Doyle asked. “I got a hot iron. I can do it.”

“No fire. He will stop bleeding soon.” She wiped her sticky palms on her skirt. Adrian’s blood. “We will let it drain, as the great Ambroise Paré taught. There is less of…of infection that way. No stitches, unless it bleeds and bleeds. Then one or two small ones to hold the edges together tomorrow.”

“Lean on Grey, why don’t you. He ain’t busy,” Doyle said.

“I am fine.” She started to push her hair back from her face, remembered what was on her hands, and stopped. She took various deep, helpful breaths. “We are wise in this, we French. Paré taught that such wounds, we leave open…to heal from within…”

Grey abandoned his endless, one-sided conversation with Adrian and abruptly stood to walk around. When he returned, he put a cold cloth to her forehead.

“You should not let me touch you.” But she rested her cheek on his thigh in an intimacy which seemed wholly natural at the moment. The ground still wished to tilt under her. “I am entirely gruesome with blood. I have ruined this dress, though it was probably not decent in any case. But I do not have a great number. One must be provident.”

He used the cloth to wash her cheeks, then folded it and held it on the back of her neck.

“You are doing this so I will not faint. I never faint.”

“That’s good. I’m sorry about the dress.” He was apologizing for several things at once. She became certain the dresses he had given her were improper. “Thank you for saving Adrian’s life.”

“This was not so bad. Once I took fifty-two pieces of metal out of a man and he lived. An Austrian sergeant. He melted them down to make a paperweight, I heard.”

“Sounds like a good idea.” Grey was thinking a number of things. She could almost hear thoughts humming and clinking inside him. “Annique…I would have killed him.”

“Almost certainly. The second tiny piece was close to the axillary artery. I felt it pulsing. Will you let me go free, since I have spared you from killing your friend?”

He did not hesitate. “No.”

He was unreasonable, right to the soles of his shoes. “Then I will go wash blood off me and not sit here at your feet in this spineless fashion.” She put her legs underneath herself and stood up, which she would probably have managed even without Grey’s assistance. He put the useful stick in her hold and it supported her very handily without the help of any Englishman. She did not feel at all like fainting.

“Your bag’s on the far side of the fire,” Doyle said. “It’s…No. More to the right. That’s got it. There’s soap and a towel on that rock. Yes. There.”

“I am well provided for, then. I shall take these and go wash myself in privacy. Monsieur Grey may again talk to his Adrian with great tediousness. Certainly he has nothing of interest to say to me.”

“No, miss,” Doyle said pacifically. These English spies spent much of their spare time laughing at her.

“You will press down upon those bandages until the bleeding stops. As you well know.”

“Yes, miss.”

She batted away at the small bushes with her stick and found where the path descended to the stream. “And put a blanket upon him.”

She was angry with herself. Stupid, stupid woman that she was, she wanted to stay with Grey and allow him to coddle her. He was destroying her, that one, with his kindness and his strong arms that held her and felt so full of caring, while he continued to be, inside, utterly ruthless.

He tempted her. He was a trap in every part of him. It would be so treacherously easy to place herself into his hands. But she did not trust him in the least. She had not yet lost her mind. Not quite.

When she came to the water it was pleasant, and warmer than she expected, which relieved her feelings somewhat. So did the deep silence on every side. As she worked her way downstream to find the bathing place for women, she reflected that these were thick woods around her everywhere. One could hide in them very well, at night, when one was escaping.

“WELL, that weren’t so bad, then,” Doyle said when she’d gone down the path and couldn’t overhear. “Not like Adrian’s a bloody Austrian sergeant with fifty-two pieces of lead in his gut.”

“Name of God, Will, how long did she take?”

“Two minutes. Three, tops. I can see why those army surgeons put her to work. Jerked that bullet out like a plum in a Christmas pudding.”

“How many goddamned battles was she in, to learn that? What the hell kind of mother sends a child to an army camp to spy? How old was she? Eleven? Twelve?”

“About the same age we put the Hawker to work.”

“Hawker wasn’t a child. He was never a child.”

“I don’t suppose Annique was either. From what I hear, she was there when they hanged her father. She’d have been about four.” Doyle blotted Adrian’s chest with clean bandages. “He’s not even leaking blood much. Get that blanket, will you? You going to do more of that talk-talk to make him sleep?”

“Every hour for a while. What the devil am I going to do with that woman?”

“Now, that I wouldn’t care to speculate on. Spread your bedding over there a ways so you don’t disturb Adrian when you do it.”

“Very funny. I’ll reconnoiter up the ridge and keep an eye on her so she doesn’t sneak off. Call me if the boy wakes up. She’s going to run for it tonight, isn’t she?”

“All these woods and fields to hide in…yes. Hit you over the head with a rock first, I think.” Doyle picked up the bits of lead that had been pulled out of Adrian, looked at them soberly, and put them safe in his pocket. “Hawk will want these.”

“Good idea.” Grey stared down the path she’d just taken. “She’s already planning. I can feel her doing it. I don’t think I can stop her. She is so ferociously competent.”

“Be like trying to hold this one,” Doyle gestured at Adrian, “when he wanted to run.”

“You’re saying it’s not possible.”

“Not easy. Not outside of Meeks Street.”

Even if he tied her up, she’d find some way to get loose. “Leblanc’s on our heels. If she gets away from us, he’ll find her.”

“Or Fouché might get to her first and pop her into a brothel. If she’s lucky.” Doyle began wiping the instruments and laying them back in the bag.

There was only one damned thing to do. “Put some food together. She’ll be hungry, once she cleans up. And Will…”

Doyle looked up.

“Give her opium in the coffee.”

Doyle bound a new pad of bandages on Adrian.

“You have something to say?”

“It’ll work. She likes coffee.” Doyle took the blanket and spread it over Adrian, easing the boy into a more comfortable position. “It had to come to this. I’ll keep the dose low as I can. Go watch her.”

DOYLE HAD CONSTRUCTED AN OMELET OF FRESH eggs and butter from the inn’s basket and chanterelle mushrooms from the woods. He was a good cook, Monsieur Doyle. But then, she thought, he did many things well besides pretending to be a coach driver. Grey sat next to her on the blanket, close but not touching. She felt his eyes on her though, continually. She considered escape plans for the evening.

“That innkeeper took a fancy to you,” Doyle told her. “We got a pot of cream for your coffee, because you liked it so much this morning.”

“I have a great allure for innkeepers, always.” She set her plate down on the blanket beside her and picked up the coffee again. “They sense in me, you comprehend, a great cook, which is unbearably attractive to them. You are also that, I find. A cook. This is an excellent omelet for being made over the fire, which is most tricky to do. I would not care to attempt it.”

She did not mention the coffee, which was not as good as his omelet, being strong and very bitter. It was possible the events of the day had disrupted him, and he would do better this evening. Or maybe it was that he was not French and therefore incapable of understanding coffee properly.

“You want one of them rolls like you had for breakfast?” Doyle said. “Not too tired to eat are you?”

“But no. It is a nothing, this taking bullets out of English spies.”

She doubted the dress she wore now was more decent than the one she had ruined. Grey told her it was green and covered everything it should. Doyle said it was the color of curled baby oak leaves and so entirely respectable she looked like a matron of forty years. She was not yet so foolish as to believe the words of either of these English.

When she had eaten as much of the omelet and some of the bread as she could fit into her, she settled against a tree and sighed in deep contentment and sipped coffee. It was relaxing, this, not to feel angry or afraid for a short time. She had learned many years ago to grab at any small moment of peace that presented itself. “Do you know, Grey, I like this place. It feels very old. Many, many of my people have been here.”

“The Gypsies?”

“Yes. The Rom. I should not call them my people since I am no longer part of them. I cannot go back. Not anymore. There is no place among the wagons for a woman such as me.” She hurt piercingly for a minute before she shook her head and put the thought away. “This camp, I think, is of great antiquity. The Rom must have been coming here as long as long. Hundreds of years maybe. That lovely stream…Rom would come a long way to camp here.”