A Night of Secret Surrender
Autore
Sophia James
Letto da
15,9K
Capitoli
12
Chapter One
Paris, France—June 1812
Major Summerley Shayborne opened the door to his accommodation on the Rue St Denis to find a young woman waiting inside among the evening shadows.
She wore thick glasses and her pure white hair was fastened loosely at her nape. He had not seen such a colour on anyone of her age before and so could only imagine it false.
‘I am here to warn you, monsieur.’
Shay saw the sheen of a blade in her left hand before it was slipped away out of sight.
‘Warn me of what, madame?’ He could not place her accent; the French she spoke was tinged with the cadence of one who did not belong anywhere.
‘Savary and the Ministry of Police are watching you.’ Her diction was precise as she continued talking. ‘You have held too many conversations about French military affairs on the Champs de Mars and in the coffee houses, and people are beginning to ask their questions.’
Lighting a candle, she turned away, shielding herself from the brightness. As the flame took, she allowed it to illuminate him instead, the planes of her own face left in semi-darkness.
‘It is even being inferred that you might not be an American officer at all.’
‘Who are you?’
She laughed quickly at that, though the sound held little humour and he felt a sudden slide of cold running down his back.
‘Politics here takes no prisoners. One wrong move and you will be dead. Even a charming and inquisitive foreigner is not immune to a knife quietly slipped between your ribs.’ Her stillness was amplified by the movement of flame. ‘The police bureau will be here within days, asking their questions. You are a spy, Major Shayborne, of immeasurable value to both sides, but there always comes a time when luck simply runs out.’
The shock of her words had him turning.
‘Why would you tell me this?’
‘History,’ she whispered and walked to the door, opening it with care before slipping out into the oncoming dark.
Shay did not move, rooted to the spot in sudden comprehension of what she had said.
History.
There was something familiar in the timbre of her voice beneath the accent, under the hard anger, behind the thick lenses and hidden by a false wig. A memory. Like an echo in the blood. He stood as still as he could, trying to reach out and claim it.
* * *
She moved through the roads leading to the Palais Royale with a practised ease and up through the alleyways to the Rue de Petit Champs, walking quickly but not too fast, for such speed would draw attention. It was a warm night for June, the oncoming heat of summer felt through the grates and on the cobbles and the south-facing walls. Her hand ran across the patinas of chalky sand and limestone. Ahead she saw the tavern she sometimes stopped at was alive with people. Melting into the shadows, she brought the hood of her silken cape up, the new and expensive white wig stuffed into her pocket because it was too noticeable.
She did not wish to see anyone tonight and have to explain herself. She wanted to wash. She wanted to sit on her balcony and have a glass of the smoky Pouilly-Fumé she had bought yesterday in the Marais from the Jewish shopkeeper with good contacts in the fertile, grape-bearing valleys of the Loire.
She wanted to be alone.
She should have sent someone else to warn Shayborne. She could have penned a note or whispered her message in the darkness without lighting the candle. She could have transferred her information by any number of safe and practical methods, but she had not. She had gone to see him and whispered exactly what she should have kept to herself.
History.
One word coated in shame and blood. One word that had taken her from the girl she had been to the woman she had become.
She’d shown her hand because the Police Ministry and the War Office would soon be as much on her tail as they were on Shayborne’s and because after six years on the run she had finally exhausted all options.
It would be a miracle if she was not dead before him even, this English spy who had the whole of France in an uproar after his escape in Bayonne and who, instead of turning back to Spain and safety as he’d been expected to, had made his way north to the very heart of Napoleon’s lair.
Why?
She knew the reason even as she asked it.
He was here to understand what might happen next and where the Emperor would employ his might: Russia or the Continent, the size of amassing armies. Information like that could change the course of a war and the British General, Arthur Wellesley, waited in the wings of the northern Spanish coast for a direction.
Once she might have cared more, might have turned her ear to the rumblings of the generals or the whining of the various ministries and listened well.
But there was only so much truth one could discover before the lies ate you up. Deceit had its limits and hers were almost reached, here in a city she no longer could call her own.
She’d made the mistake of entrusting sensitive documents to a courier who she now knew was playing her false and the larger part of a family had died because of it. She could not quite understand yet how this betrayal had happened. Someone else higher up had given orders for the demise of the Dubois family, but it was her name splattered all over the debacle, her reputation, her life hanging by a thread in the aftermath of murder. Those who had died had been good people, innocent people, people without knowledge of the terrible depth a festering war could be taken to, people in the wrong place at the wrong time and two of them had been children. The horror of it consumed her.
Sometimes, for no reason at all, her heart beat so fast she thought she might simply fall down with the breathlessness of it, hatred caught in her throat like a fishbone.
Swearing, she sifted through the pathways still open to her. She couldn’t go back to England even had she wanted to. She would need to disappear and become someone else entirely, but first she needed to see that what was left of the Dubois family was taken to safety. She owed them at least that and the money she’d earned from trading secrets was in a place readily accessible. It could be done.
The ports were shut and barricaded and any traveller moving great distances was watched. Still, she could slink like a shadow through any city in Europe and once outside the limits of Paris she would not be known.
She frowned at this. She also knew that she could not leave Major Shayborne at the mercy of all those who would want to kill him. She’d been astonished when she had seen that it was indeed he as he had entered his lodgings. After all these years, she had not expected ever to lay eyes upon him again and certainly not in the heart of his enemy’s territory.
His eyes were more golden than she remembered and his face was leaner. His hair was dark-dyed, she was sure of it, but time had been kinder to him than it had been to her.
‘A shame, that,’ she whispered, knowing betrayal lined her forehead with its bitter recriminations and surprising violence.
Once, she had been beautiful, too, when she had first come here with her father from England eight years ago, but she shook away that sadness and concentrated on the pathway home. Through La Place de La Bourse and the quiet sombreness of the first arrondissement to the Rue St Berger. Here the buildings were less embellished and less grand and the streets were narrower. A dog barked and she stood still a moment, waiting for it to cease, pausing for the breeze to blow between them before creeping more silently up the circular steps. Another set of stairs and the doorway to her room was before her. She checked the lock and saw the fine, unbroken strand of hair still attached to it. The light dust she had scattered on her step was unmarked, too, and so slipping in the key she went inside.
The darkness. The silence. Closing her eyes in relief, she retraced her journey the way she always did, every single night of her return.
No one had followed her. The shadows from the lanterns had remained unbroken and the narrow arches of Les Halles, with the circular Halle aux Blés at its western edge, had been empty of threat. The smaller throughways had held no detected dangers, nor had the brighter Rue de Louvre.
This was her home now, this small part of Paris, and she knew it like the back of her hand—every face, every stone, every sound of every moving entity. Such knowledge afforded her protection and brought with it an inevitable isolation, but she was used to being alone.
Inside her rooms there was very little. It was how she liked it. It was how she had lived for all those weeks and months and years since her father had been murdered. It was the way she had survived after being thrown into chaos.
History.
She should not have whispered such a word, but underneath it was another truth that had wound across a shallow vanity and shown itself. She’d seen the flicker of it in his eyes.
In her dreams she’d known it, too.
What could Shayborne do with such information anyway, for he had only a matter of days to leave? Celeste held her breath with the shock of seeing him. None save Jules, her contact in the War Office, had figured out just who he was yet, but it was only a matter of making connections and those agents trying to find Shayborne would see all that they had missed.
She’d paid Jules well to buy his silence for forty-eight hours, but realistically she could expect no more than twenty-four. Such a secret was worth a small fortune and the agent would be weighing allegiances against cold, hard cash. Perhaps even twelve hours might be asking too much?
McPherson was a suspect, too, the old Scottish jeweller trawling to ascertain the truth of Napoleon’s movements in a way that did not raise suspicion at first...
Put them together and anyone would have him, Lord Summerley Anthony William Shayborne. Summer. She had called him that. The name rolled across her tongue and she swallowed away the taste of it. He was no longer hers. They had both been dealt hands that had torn them apart for ever, changing them beyond recognition from the innocents they’d once been.
Opening the curtain, she slipped out on to the balcony, making certain to stay against the wall. She seldom stood in the open any more for it was dangerous to be caught in the light. There was always something firm at her back, something solid and thick and protective.
With care, she undid her cloak and loosened the ties of her bodice, letting the night caress her skin. Her nipples stood proud at their release and she laid her head back and closed her eyes.
Remembering.
The feel of him against her, his care and his heat, taut and solid. She had thought of these things after her father had died and she had been taken. Then, only the memory of Shayborne’s goodness and honour had saved her, for the way he had said her name in the night under the softer stars of Sussex had felt like music and the feel of him inside her like a song. She’d always sensed the danger in him, too, honed by a civic duty, but crouching close. The violence and the stillness, side by side, a heady combination that had drawn her to him. He was a man who might triumph over every obstacle thrown his way and live.
‘Notre Père, qui est aux cieux...’
The age-old words of the Lord’s Prayer soothed her and she fumbled in her pocket for her father’s rosary, fingers sliding over polished amber with easy practice.
Lying with Summer was one action she had never regretted, not then and not now. She could remember the girl she’d been, the innocence as well as the arrogance. Did all young, beautiful women behave in such a dreadfully entitled fashion, or was it just her? Well, no longer, at least.
She looked down and saw the scars on her left wrist, pale white and faded. One finger traced the lines, the numbness there still surprising. This was who she had become, this damaged person who understood the true extent of terror and who had survived. Just.
She wished she had not cut her hair so short. The bluntness of the shorn ends made it prickle around her face.
Lifting up the glass of fine Pouilly-Fumé, she swallowed the lot and helped herself to another, her anxieties lessening.
* * *
Shay closed the curtains before lighting two other candles and placing them on each side of the mantel.
He was tired of Paris, tired of its subterfuge and its darkness. He’d realised who his visitor was within minutes of her leaving.
Celeste Fournier. It had been eight years since he had seen her last in England. She’d been lauded for her beauty by all who had met her, but it was the broken pieces that he had loved the most, the vulnerable parts she’d hidden under a smile.
Loved? Too strong a word perhaps, though at eighteen the heart was inclined to excess.
Another knock at the door had him turning. Could she have come back? Unlocking the bolts, he found Richard Cunningham on his step and shut the door quickly behind him, Celeste’s recent warning ringing in his head.
‘You look like you have seen a ghost, Rick?’
‘Perhaps I have.’ The newcomer could not quite keep the worry from his words as he crossed over to the table and helped himself to a drink. Brandy and his best bottle. Cunningham’s taste was impeccable even under duress.
‘There are problems afoot, Shay. A fracas yesterday has ripped apart the private world of Parisian intelligence and each office is blaming the others in their various bids for more power. As a result, it is now every man for himself and a dagger in the back is a very real concern.’
‘You are speaking of the murder of the Dubois family?’
‘You’ve heard of it, then? From whom?’ His friend’s dark eyes widened. ‘Word on the street has it that Napoleon’s agencies are exterminating anyone who fails to agree with the Emperor’s vision for France. That includes the families of those who might have the temerity to criticise a regime that many know is tainted. They were said to be in receipt of incriminating documents, papers which raised questions about their loyalty to France. Napoleon has gone mad with his greed for power!’
‘Threads,’ Shay returned, ‘threads bound and winding into the foolish hope of greatness. Conquer Russia and nobody will be able to stop Bonaparte from ruling the world.’
‘It will be winter that brings him to his knees, mark my words. There are thousands and thousands of miles between here and Moscow.’
‘So you are leaving? Getting out?’ Shay’s eyes dropped to a bag near the door.
‘I am. Tonight. Come with me. It’s the only option that makes sense.’
Fifteen minutes ago Shay thought he might have done just that. A quarter of an hour ago, he might have packed his bag summarily and left the city, his reports completed, his duties done.
But now he shook his head. ‘There is something I still have to finish.’
He thought of Celeste. He thought of her gift to him in the hay barn at Langley, the winter sun slanting through the dirty glass of a cracked window. Long limbed, perfect and sad.
‘Does James McPherson know of the danger?’ There were others to be considered, too.
‘If he doesn’t, the channels of his intelligence are failing him. It’s over here, don’t you see? There is nothing left that could make a difference to the outcome of a war that defies every tenet of sense. If the Little General wants to cut his own throat, then who are we to hang around and bathe in the blood of it?’
‘Which way are you headed?’
‘To the coast in the north. There are fishermen whom I wager would place gold above the sway of politics if given the chance and will transport me across the channel.’
‘Then I wish you good luck and God speed.’
‘You won’t come?’
‘I think you will have a better chance of safety without me. My cover here has been blown. I heard of this today.’
‘God. Then why the hell are you staying?’
‘It’s just for a little while. I will leave tomorrow night.’
‘Find another uniform, then. I’ve heard rumours that every American envoy of President Madison will be searched.’
‘I have already heard that warning, but thank you.’
‘There’s a brandy waiting for you in a London pub when you make it home.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
‘You’re a hero, Shay, in Spain and in England, but be mindful that you only live once.’
‘And die once?’
‘That, too.’
When he was gone, Shay crossed the room and finished the cognac that Cunningham had poured himself. Blowing out the candles, he opened the curtains and sat to watch the moon’s outline barely visible against the tufts of gathering cloud.
One more day and it would be over. His war. Intelligence. Freedom. He could not even imagine going home to Luxford and being content.
* * *
Guy Bernard was waiting for her early the next morning as Celeste sidled into the busy marketplace at Les Halles, bread and buns in the basket on her back. If she’d been paying more attention, she could have simply avoided him, but as they’d come nearly face-to-face she had no way of pushing past. The colour in his cheeks was high and there was a certain set to his shoulders that she recognised.
‘Are you turned traitor, ma chérie?’ His greeting dripped with sarcasm. ‘After the Dubois fiasco it is being whispered that you are working for the English.’
‘That implies I might care more about the outcome than I do, Guy.’ She threw this back, this certain truth, for two could play at this game and she knew he had never been in it out of loyalty to France. They were both for hire, to anyone who might pay them well, and this was their strength as well as their weakness. When she saw him relax, her fingers slid away from the blade in her pocket and she breathed out.
She needed to know his intentions, needed to understand just what he might do next and, although it might have been wiser to run, a quieter voice inside ordered patience. Without his connection to the inner sanctums of the agencies, she would have been dead years ago. He had saved her so many times in those first, terrible eighteen months that she could not but be grateful. Napoleon’s Paris was not a city easy to exist in alone and a young woman of gentle birth like herself could not have made it through the first week if he had not been there.
She had learnt things. From him. She had learnt to survive and to flourish. She had risen from the ashes of shame to be reshaped into the flesh of the living, a knife in her hand and hatred in her heart. Guy had taught her how to hone it, how to use it, how to live with the vengeance tempered. She was a thousand different women now in every way that counted. The self that had barely been alive after her father’s death was gone. There were too many hurts to want to remember, too many ripped-away pieces that had stopped her being whole.
So when his hand came down across her own she did not pull away. There was good reason in the pretence of it, after all, even for the small time left to them. A front. A necessary deceit. A way to navigate the sticky path of espionage and not be dead.
‘You are too alone now, Brigitte. I no longer recognise anything about you, about who you were.’
Once, she had liked Guy Bernard, liked his passion and his energy for a better France, until she saw that there was no morality beneath his desires and until she understood other things as well.
He was dangerous and he drank too much. Before the first year of their marriage was over she had pulled away from the intimacy. They had continued with the charade of it all for another six months for the sake of the jobs they did. Together they were a formidable team and if Guy heard something that she had not, then he made certain she knew of it, and vice versa. The newly invented Mademoiselle Brigitte Guerin was a woman fashioned from smoke and mirrors, after all. Guy had lifted the identity card from a dead whore in the back streets of the Marais because the deceased girl was about the same age as she was and had enough of the same features—hair, eyes, height—to get away with sharing a casual description on the livret. Such a paper was enough to allow marriage, to be legal again, to have a history and thus a present and a future; a name change to weave a further ring of protection around the dubious centre of her truth. There was too little trust in Paris to be an outsider for long.
Brigitte Guerin filled the gap nicely and her father’s mistakes could not be traced back to it. Guy Bernard’s street savvy had afforded her protection and he’d never uttered her birth name again. But politics and the shifting tides of France’s fortune had drawn them apart, his anger becoming more and more pronounced and his moods so melancholy she had been able to stand it no longer.
Striking out on her own, she’d taken all the skills that her husband had taught her, skills that crept into her bones even as they made them hollow. He’d followed her for a time, trying to insist he’d change, but she had never allowed him the chance and so he had moved on as well—to other women, some no more than mere girls. She knew deep down that in any other life she’d have barely glanced at him.
‘Who are you this morning?’ His eyes flickered across her trousers and jacket, taking in the bread she carried. ‘The baker boy? The minion of the markets?’ He snatched a roll and bit into it, the crumbs falling and catching in his scraggly dark beard. ‘Benet wants you to come in and explain what went wrong with the Dubois. He thinks your loyalty is now in question.’
She stood back and tipped her head up at him. ‘And yours isn’t? Louis Dubois was seven and a half and Madeline Dubois not yet five.’
He swore, using the guttural expletives of the rural west, a hangover from his far-off youth. A mistake, she thought, that would show any halfwit agent who you truly were. Or had once been.
‘They were not supposed to have been there.’
‘And you think that is an excuse?’
As if realising his slip, he returned to matters of business. ‘The English spy, Major Shayborne, is in the city. If you can bring in a prize like that, Benet might trust you again.’
‘You speak of the soldier who is Wellesley’s master of intelligence?’ She liked the sheer amount of surprise she was able to inject into her query.
‘Exactly the same. He broke the parole he had given in Bayonne, though in truth he could have escaped any time during the journey across Spain and been back safe in the arms of the Spanish guerrillas. One might wonder why he should do this? Such a question could lend more credence to the story of the Englishman being in the city to take a look around at the military capacity of the Grande Armée. Numbers. Direction of travel. The manner of weaponry and any hint of future plans. When we capture him, he’ll be hanged summarily and secretly, that much is certain, for there is too much of the martyr in him to allow anyone the outcry of it otherwise.’
Celeste had found all this out already. Guy Bernard was telling her nothing she did not know, though what he left out was revealing in itself.
They had not discovered the link with James McPherson. They did not know of the American connection either, for she was certain Guy would have mentioned such a thing.
Where was the information coming in from, then? She couldn’t ask him. People were on her tail, too; she’d seen them twice today watching from a distance. Strangers. Agents from the Secret Police or the War Office? Or maybe from the Garde Municipal de Paris?
The whirlpool was falling inwards, catching them all with its increasing speed. Facts. Conjectures. Secrets. Napoleon’s newest push into Russia had created divisions and it would not be long before everything spun out of control. She should leave Summer Shayborne to his fate, good or bad. He was a man who had taken his chances and come out on top thus far. Luck did not last for ever—she knew that better than anyone. But although her head told her to run from Paris, her feet would not follow.
Foolish sentiment or a prescient warning? Get too close to a case and you could lose perspective. It was the very first learned law of espionage.
Her teeth bit down on her bottom lip in worry and Guy Bernard smiled, misinterpreting the signs. ‘Move back in with me, Brigitte. Together we could manage to ward them all off, just as we did before. I can protect you.’
‘Oh, I think we are long past such a promise. Besides, who’s to say I am not now enjoying my own benefactors?’
She needed to lead him away from the truth and this was the perfect way in which to do it. Protection money was a tenet he understood and believed in. Sometimes she wondered whether it was all he had left, a shell as empty as her own.
‘Benefactors?’ He did not sound happy.
‘People here pay well for an ear to be listening in the places that count. Bankers. Men with property. If it all falls over, they need to know when to sell, or how to gain by holding on to their assets.’
‘And you share your body with these men?’ He leaned forward and took her forearm, the back of his hand brushing suggestively against the rise of her breast.
‘Whether I do is no longer any of your business, Guy. Cross me and you cross them, too, and they will not be pleased.’
She half expected retribution for such a threat and part of her might have welcomed it. An easy ending. A final peace. She wondered, as she had a thousand other times, where the truth of who she was now lay? Lying was second nature to her, as was subterfuge. Still, she was glad when he let her go.
‘The slut in you is not attractive, Brigitte.’
She tensed at such an insult. After her father’s death, any morality she had once clung to was gone. Lost in a name change and a marriage and pure plain circumstance. Indifference had probably been part of it, too. She was so fractured she barely noticed the added ruin of using intimacy to gain information. The bottom of the barrel was not as graceless as she had imagined and knowing she could not fall any further offered a kind of comfort and certainty that felt like a sanctuary.
‘Benet wants to see you.’
‘Because he thinks I can find this English Major?’
‘Wellesley’s intelligence officer is a big prize. This for that, so to speak. Reparation. Recompense. Your unquestioned loyalty to France delivered on a plate.’
‘With Shayborne as the main course?’
‘A better notion than you being served up, I would imagine.’
She smiled.
‘And after yesterday’s bungle, Brigitte, your friends may also need to find some evidence of their loyalty again.’
She almost spoke, but stopped herself. They would as soon trust a viper in a basket full of eggs.
‘I will come when I can.’
He shook his head. ‘Benet wants you there in an hour.’
‘Very well.’
She wondered if she could bring herself to kill Guy if it came to a head, even as she realised he was probably thinking the exact same thing. He had beaten her a number of times as their liaison was drawing to a close. At first she’d thought she deserved such treatment and had crawled on back for more. When he deliberately broke three of her fingers, she’d left him for good.
* * *
Mattieu Benet, the newly crowned controller of the Paris operation, was the first to meet her in the small house off the Rue du Faubourg. He looked tired, his oncoming bald patch crisscrossed with lank strands of dark hair. One of these had fallen from its place and hung on the wrong side of his parting, almost to his shoulders. She resisted the urge to step forward and put it back into place.
He got down to business without mentioning a word of the Dubois. Celeste was relieved, though the fact that he would not question her about her part in it kept her on edge.
‘The War Office of Napoleon is keen to find out whether there is any truth in the rumour that Major Summerley Shayborne, Wellesley’s chief intelligence officer, is in the city. If the Englishman is here, they are most emphatic that they do not want this to be a problem. They want a short, sharp end to any lingering political complications such a presence might entail.’
‘There will be no negotiations for his release, then?’ Guy asked and Benet shook his head.
‘None. We can take him in for our own interrogation, though, before we dispose of him. The War Ministry is calling for his neck and Henri Clarke has grown more and more bitter with every successful reverse inflicted by Britain. The intelligence sent from the field by Shayborne has been both fastidious in its correctness and highly damaging, and it is time to call a halt on the spy’s ability to track what will happen next.’
‘Silence him for ever?’
‘As quickly as we can. Every office of authority in the city has their men out trawling and a scalp like this is a feather in the cap of any organisation who bags him. I am hoping it will be us.’
A map of Paris was brought forward and laid out, and Celeste saw that a boundary had been drawn around the arrondissement she had visited Shayborne in the night before. They were closing in. Unless he had taken notice of her warning they would catch him, for his circle of sympathetic agents in Paris could be nowhere near as numerous or as dedicated as those he was known to have fostered in Spain and Portugal.
The priests here might help him given their anger against the nationalisation of their churches, but she doubted the ordinary citizen would. Napoleon had been too clever in his promises of better living and raised working conditions. After having been left out of politics for so very long, the proletariat were clinging to the hope of betterment like limpets on a rock in a stormy sea.
Shayborne would be largely alone out there on the dangerous streets of the city, surviving by his wits and his ragtag bundle of allies. She breathed out slowly and turned to speak.
‘I have reliable sources here and here.’ Her finger touched the map. ‘It will not take long to find out if they know anything of the spy.’
‘He is still dressed as a soldier, we think. With all the military movements in the city, it would be a clever disguise.’
She frowned as this new jeopardy shimmered and Benet continued on.
‘I am guessing he would not be sporting the scarlet coat of the Eleventh Foot, but likely something more faded and subdued.’
‘The uniform of a land with sympathies to France and an axe to grind against the British, perhaps?’ Guy spoke and they all mulled this over.
‘A good point and a valid one.’ Benet signalled a man at a table to come over to join him. ‘Lambert. Find out how many of President Madison’s envoys are in Paris and what connections they have. It’s a highly sensitive area and we will have to be careful, but I want this information on my desk as soon as it comes to hand.’
A matter of hours only, then, Celeste thought. She wondered if any other intelligence services operating in Paris had made the same deductions as had been voiced here. Interrogation meant torture. If they caught Shayborne, he would suffer a nasty end which she would be powerless to prevent. As she chanced a glance at Guy Bernard, she could see a question in his eyes. She looked away.
Sometimes she hated these people with such a ferocity she thought she might simply expire from it. But at other times she felt a hint of an honour that she had long since lost sight of as she worked to protect yet another victim caught in the crossfire of changing politics. This duplicity was both her penance and her salvation.
* * *
She saw the funeral carriages as she walked home along the Seine by way of the flower markets and knew the procession to be for the Dubois family. They were leaving the city for Nantes and the rural graveyard where the slain members of the family would be interred.
The image of the dead children made her slow down and lean over, the straps of her empty bread basket falling to one side.
Un malheur ne vient jamais seul. Misfortune never arrives alone.
She thought of her sister, lost to the morbid sore throat by the age of ten, her lone white coffin in the cold family graveyard beside the south-facing wall at Langley. She thought of her mother’s madness and her father’s grief. Would it be the same here, under the warming summer breeze of France? Was there some other child who had escaped the murders to be worn into sadness by the ripples caused by betrayal, torn in half by regret and circumstance?
Alice. With her golden hair and sweetness. Biddable, pliant and even-tempered.
‘It should have been Celeste who was taken. It should have been her.’
She’d heard the words her mother had shouted in the silence of night following Alice’s death, heard them above her father’s muffled voice of reason. A tightness had formed about her heart that had been with her ever since.
Did she even still have a heart, she ruminated, or was it caught there in her chest among the thorns of fury, tangled in blood and bristles, stone replacing empathy?
Her hand went to her throat and found a pulse, too fast, too shallow and tripping into a battered rhythm.
She would save Shayborne and then leave Paris, reclaiming something of herself in the process because he was a good man, a moral man, a hero, and she had always been the exact opposite.
It was a direction, the first real truth she had had in years.
‘L’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions.’
She smiled. She would travel the path to Hell no matter what, but her intentions from now on would only be honourable. She swore it on the departed soul of her sister and on the name of the crucified Jesus.
She felt for the rosary in her pocket, the beads under her fingers providing a physical method of keeping count of the number of Hail Marys she said. She had recited the whole rosary numerous times under the guidance of her most religious parents until Mary Elizabeth Fournier had jumped from her grandmother’s rooftop one snowy January morning and fallen a hundred feet to her death. Her father had told Celeste of the unfortunate manner of her mother’s death in the evening of the day on which she had lost her virginity to Summerley Shayborne.
‘Faith can guide us only so far, Celeste. Eventually it is resilience that keeps us alive. Your mother converted to Catholicism for me, but I am not certain if she truly did believe in it.’ He’d had a brandy glass in one hand, an empty bottle in the other, and his eyes were swollen red. ‘Perhaps I should never have expected it.’
Resilience.
She swallowed back anger. Her father had missed the point as certainly as had her mother. Sometimes she wondered how little they both must have loved her to have lived life as they did, her mother mired in the troughs and peaks of hysteria or melancholy and her father beset by impossible political aspirations.
She’d been caught between them and had paid a heavy price for it, like a cue ball battered by the solids and stripes into whichever corner might possibly allow a triumph over the other. Well, no one had won the game and least of all her. Her father lay in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Paris and her mother in unconsecrated ground in Sussex. As far apart in death as they had been in life. She supposed that there at least was some sort of celestial justice in such a fact.
* * *
That evening she watched Shayborne’s rooms, watched the light at the window and the shadow on the curtains. He was not alone and she wondered who would visit him this late, a puzzlement that was answered a few minutes after as the door opened and a man dressed in the sombre clothes of a priest stepped out.
The Englishman watched him depart, though he did so carefully. It was only the tiniest twitch from the curtains above that gave him away, the candlelight behind blown out now to be replaced by darkness. She wondered if she should follow him, but as the man looked neither remarkable nor familiar she stayed hidden under the protection of a plane tree, the moon filtering little light through leaves on to the street.
Just as she was about to go she saw another figure, his shadow eating up the glow from a lamp above him and with a shock she knew it to be Guy Bernard. He did not hide or melt into the darkness as she did, but stood there like a threat.
An impasse, then, between the three of them. Guy could not know for certain that the English major was anywhere near, otherwise Celeste knew he would have acted brutally and without hesitation.
A suspicion, then. A rumour. The first of all the truths that would come. There were fifty apartments in this block and another hundred in the one opposite. People lived close here and it would protect him. It was why Shayborne had chosen it, she supposed, with its heaving, teeming population and its high percentages of itinerant tenants. Nobody would look twice at a newcomer here for they arrived in Paris all the time, especially those in uniform.
Laying her head back against the dappled trunk, she closed her eyes, her body melting into the shadows inseparable from the tree, and when the first light of dawn rose in the east she saw that she was alone.
* * *
Fifteen minutes after the bells of Saint Leu rang out the hour of seven, she followed Shayborne, far behind and away from his sight. She wanted to see who he met and where he went. She wanted to understand his purpose.
She had always shadowed people. It was a big part of her job and she was good at it. No one ever looked back and neither did he. Shayborne strode the city streets as if there was no doubt in his mind that he was safe. He did not act like a man on the run or one who sought the protection of invisibility. He stood so far out that he simply fitted in, a soldier returned from the ghastliness of war and wanting to exist here in the small peace of what was left. He had changed his uniform and she was glad of it, for he wore a dark blue jacket over the grey trousers now.
* * *
It was only later Celeste discovered that he had known she was there from the start. He’d left markers and doubled back and then under the canopy of the café, Les Trois Garçons, a hand snaked out and caught at her wrist, dragging her in. Behind striped canvas. Completely out of sight. In a pocket of warm air that held only the two of them.
She did not scream or fight. Her knife was close and her knee was ready, but she’d known it was him from the very first touch.
‘Your disguise is hard to fault, Mademoiselle Fournier.’
She smiled because to do anything else would be churlish and small.
‘But a bread vendor with the luxury of wasting time is noteworthy and the moon last night was bright.’
‘When did you know it was me?’
‘A minute after you gave me your warning in my rooms under your wig of whiteness. If you hadn’t wanted me to know you, you would not have come.’
She looked at him then directly. In the daylight, his golden eyes were still beautiful, but they were now every bit as distrustful as her own. No longer a boy but a man, hard, hewed by war and suffering.
‘There is not much time left for you in Paris, monsieur, for your friend the jeweller will have a visit before the morrow’s end and it will be much easier for them to find you after that. They already have the arrondissement your apartment is in under surveillance.’
‘Do you work for Savary or Clarke?’
‘A disappointing question, Major. Try again.’
‘You are a lone player trading off the secrets of war to the highest bidders.’
‘Warmer.’ She did not look away at all.
‘Then you play a dangerous game and one that will kill you in the end.’
‘And you think I would care?’
There was darkness in his glance. ‘Your father might?’
‘He is long dead.’
‘How?’
‘War carries many casualties.’ She did not like the waver in her tone so she coughed to hide it. But Shayborne had heard it, she could tell that he had.
‘Your father should not have brought you back to France in the first place.’
‘No?’
‘I told him it was suicide, but he did not listen. Europe was descending into chaos and there was no safe road for any traveller. A simpleton could have worked that out.’
‘We are French, Major, and our time in England was at an end. We came home.’ The hardness in her words covered over the anger.
* * *
‘Home to danger and tumult? Home to a rising political anarchy?’
Hell, Shay thought, could the English girl he had known been entirely lost under the cold French woman she’d become? The black scrawny wig of a baker boy shouldn’t suit her, but it did and her whole demeanour was more than convincing. Celeste Fournier had always been good at hiding who she was, even as a seventeen-year-old.
‘Perhaps such travel was as dangerous as your choice of work, Major? You broke a parole to General Marmont in Bayonne and nobody was pleased. Is the word given by a gentleman such a trifling thing, then?’
‘The French were going to hang me.’
‘In uniform?’ Disbelief lay in her query.
‘Not everyone adheres to the rules of warfare. Those soldiers who accompanied me across Spain might not have done the deed themselves, but on the border I was to be handed over to Savary’s thugs on Marmont’s orders. I had heard it said there were instructions to see that I did not live to cause another problem.’ He looked across the street. ‘That man over there reading the paper. Do you know him? I have seen him before.’
‘At a guess, I would say he is one of the Minister of Police’s. I recognise the arrogance and the incompetence. You are right before his eyes and he does not see you because it is me he has in his sights.’
‘Why you?’
The sharpness of his observations made her give him the truth. ‘A few days ago I tried to help a French family who had strong ties with England and it did not go well at all.’
The crouching danger of Paris at war, Shay thought, and no end in sight. ‘So you are under scrutiny for it?’
‘Any mistake can be your last here, now that trust has gone.’
‘Trust.’
‘Everyone says that Napoleon will triumph, but nobody truly believes it any more. By my calculations his empire will be diminishing by the end of next year. I am sure you have heard of his pretensions to capture Moscow.’
He smiled and tipped his head. ‘Come to Spain with me, then. We could leave tonight.’
‘I’m no longer the Celeste Fournier you once knew, Major, and I’d be safer alone.’
‘How can it be safer to be taken to the Military Police and named as a spy?’
‘There are worse things than an honourable death in this life.’
‘And would it be such an honourable death when they find out you have warned me and allowed me to escape? Such a person could not hope for lenience.’
‘And I would not expect it.’
His finger ran across the soft flesh at her throat. ‘Your heart is beating too fast to plead indifference, though your father’s tutelage in the art of theatre adds a certain truth to your charade. It must fool many.’
‘I am not like you, Major Shayborne. My morality is questionable at the best of times and if you believe otherwise you will be disappointed. Meet me tomorrow under the front arch of Les Halles if you want my help to leave the city. At five in the morning. Do not bring luggage. It is your last and final choice. If you aren’t there, I shall not see you again. Bonne chance.’
Anger sliced through him and he bit down on a reply, but she’d pulled away and was already gone.
Like smoke. There one moment and gone the next. He wondered how she did that, but reasoned the street was suddenly full of pedestrians and she had only been waiting for them to draw near so that she might depart unnoticed. His eyes scanned the road.
Yes, there she was a good hundred yards away, sliding into the alley behind a cart selling fish. His gaze didn’t linger, though, because other eyes might well be watching and even a little security was better than nothing.
She’d looked smaller than he remembered and a hell of a lot thinner. And there had been a line of scars circling the sensitive skin above her left wrist. He wondered why.
* * *
He had ruffled her calm, she thought, and left her on edge. No one had spoken to her so honestly since her father had died, and the pull to return to England was stronger than she had imagined it might have been.
A safe place. A quiet and beautiful sanctuary. Shaking her head, she turned away into the shadows, causing her to miss the telltale sign of someone hiding.
More than one, she corrected a few seconds later when Guy Bernard and Pierre Alan held her between them, arms splayed across the uneven stone of the wall, the black wig tugged off and thrown down, trampled into the dust.
‘Benet has reconsidered your part in the Dubois debacle and has sent us to deliver both a warning and a counsel.’ Guy spoke, his voice softly furious, even as his fist slammed into her unprotected stomach, the air viciously expelled from her windpipe, leaving her retching for breath.
‘Your other interests are to desist immediately and any further contact with the English shall be taken as treason on your behalf and you will be accorded the appropriate treatment. You are to be made an example of as a message to others, let it be known that there can be no question of loyalty in these difficult times. A tutelage in humility, if you like, and one that reinforces that even the best of us are not immune to answering to the might of France.’ Her face was next, the careful punch of a fist bruising her mouth and shaking her front teeth.
For a moment, she saw stars about her, the earth tilting and the warmth of blood running down her chin to drip unheeded on to the rough homespun of her trousers.
‘Benet wants to make sure that you realise if there is another incident of such a nature, you will be dead. Do you understand? There will be no further clemency.’
Alan’s knife was out now and the slice across the skin on her right hand cut deep into the flesh between her thumb and forefinger.
‘Do you understand?’ Pierre Alan repeated, menace clearly audible.
‘Yes,’ she breathed out, feeling the spin of terror. Another few moments of this and she would not make it home, the weakness of shock consuming her former bravado.
‘Look at me.’ It was Guy’s voice now, its personal intonation alerting her to a new degradation on its way even as his lips came down hard across her own. One hand curled about her throat, holding her there as the other wormed under her shirt and squeezed her left breast.
She saw his intent and the horror of her past resurfaced, moving like wraiths under her skin before the world blackened about the edges and she was falling, her blood slick on the coping stones as her feet went from beneath her.
* * *
When she woke she still wore all her clothes and was relieved that he had not followed through on the threat implicit in his assault. Leaning over to one side, she was tidily sick, the contents of her stomach soaking her trousers and running across the bleached stone.
Her nose streamed, her hand smarted and one of her front teeth felt loosened. A lucky escape. A fortunate evasion. The ache in her breast left her dizzy as she fumbled with the buttons on her shirt. He had pinched her there, next to the nipple, pinched her so hard the skin had dimpled and left a red mark.
But nothing was broken. Nothing would be permanent save for the scars inside. Benet knew his business and Guy was a competent servant. If not for her hope of helping Shayborne, she would have been well bent into submission now, too scared to think for herself, let alone act.
They could find her whenever and wherever they wanted and next time she would die. Less cleanly than Benet had directed, she imagined, the rush of lust in Guy’s face unhidden. If he had been there alone without Pierre Alan looking on, she wondered if he could have controlled himself. She was certain he would not have.
A crossroad dressed as a warning. The play of men against a woman. No one knew the true and personal ramifications of what had been threatened, save her.
She sat back and took her hat in her hand, hiding the injuries with it as others hurried past. For this moment she could not walk, fright having frozen her into incapacity. Passers-by would see a drunk perhaps, a youth who could not hold his liquor, a working boy with little sense or intellect and no hope.
Breathe, she instructed herself firmly and began to find air, small gulps at first and then greater ones. The tight alarm in her chest loosened and her teeth let go of the soft flesh inside her mouth.
‘Papa,’ she whispered when her voice was back, hating the need she could hear in the single word and the tears that stung the cut across one edge of her cheek.
