Rogue Spy

Twenty

No man, as John Donne points out, is an island, but some of them are very slender peninsulas. Cami had felt like a stretched and thin extension of the great continent of mankind since she’d cut herself off from the Fluffy Aunts to adventure upon the lonely business of rescue and, quite possibly, murder. Maybe that was why Paxton could wrap her so quickly in so many strands of old friendship and new obligation. Because she had made herself so alone.

How would she free herself of him when this was over?

She walked, listening for any sound behind her. The last small mists of the drizzle had disappeared an hour ago. Here and there a piece of the night sky opened up above the city, holding a moon. Sometimes she could have counted the bricks in the wall she was passing and the moon reflected in every pane of glass. Sometimes the details were frankly obscure.

She felt vulnerable under the sky in this huge, ugly city, driven from her bookshop lair like a fox from its earth. Predators grow fat on animals turned out of their accustomed places. London was full of predators.

A little wind pushed at her back like an encouraging kitten.

She should be safe enough. Men who wanted to hurt and terrify women would take their custom to Seven Dials and amuse themselves with impunity among a rich selection of prostitutes. The tethered lambs under the streetlamps were her best assurance of safety. And she was close to Bow Street. Men didn’t like to cudgel and rob right on the doorstep of the magistrate’s office. Really, she was as safe as any woman out on the night streets of London could expect to be.

Besides, she was armed. Extensively so.

She watched the night alertly and wondered what to do about Pax.

Because of Pax, she was damp, weary, and free, instead of dry, warm, and imprisoned. He’d lied to his friends for her. He’d stabbed himself in that coldly accurate way and used his blood to paint more lies inside that bookshop. He’d bled for her. She might have fallen into the middle of an Elizabethan stage drama.

Now she owed a blood debt and must find a way to repay it. What could be more traditional? More Baldoni?

Maybe Englishwomen didn’t think that way, but the women of Tuscany did. In all the years that lay between this night in London and her Italian childhood she had never become anything else but Baldoni.

Pax seemed to have become as Italian as she was. He hunted this Mr. Smith, this blackmailer, with a determination like cold iron. Hated with the poignancy of needles of ice. Pursued with the ferocity of Nemesis. Whatever this Mr. Smith had done, Pax would avenge. The Baldoni understood vengeance.

She took a left turn and a right, avoiding men not yet in sight who did not sound entirely sober. Carriages rolled past, taking the fashionable home after the ball, after the opera, after a light, select supper, after the assignation with a secret lover. A more prosaic wagon clanked along a side street, heading the same direction she was, but slower.

Blackmore Street crossed Drury Lane. Ahead of her, two women carried heavy baskets and chatted companionably. She was getting close to the market. To the north, not close, a night watchman woke everybody up, telling them it was three o’clock on a cloudy Saturday morning. “All’s well,” he said.

All was well. The Fluffy Aunts slept safe in their flowered bedrooms in the cottage in Brodemere. In a day or two, when Meeks Street sent word, they’d learn what had become of her. They might even be glad the impostor was out of their house. With luck, their niece, their blood kin, would be under their roof in a week or two. That would balance the scales.

Nothing is more important than family. No one knows this better than the woman who has none.

Avoiding chummy little knots of gentlemen strolling from ballroom to brothel, she came at last, by roundabout ways, to Covent Garden.

At three in the morning London’s great market buzzed like a hive of bees. Yellow light licked faces bent over the fires lit on the cobblestones. Yellow lanterns hung from the poles that lifted the awnings over the stalls. Under the smell of greenery and apples, rotten vegetables and garden dirt, the night smelled of those oil lamps. There were less pleasant smells, too, though some of the worst had been washed away by the rain.

It was yesterday’s rain now. She’d walked her way into tomorrow, a day that inherited a number of old problems and would grow a fine crop of new.

She would meet Paxton today at noon in the square outside Gunter’s. Whenever she tried to think about the logical reasons for doing this, she thought instead about long fingers gentle on her face, persuading her mouth upward for the glide of his tongue into her. Thought of the brush of white hair on her cheeks, smooth as silk. He’d kissed her with the care and attention usually given to the creation of a work of art. Kissed her as if he had all the time in the world. As if that were the most important event of this sharp-edged and dangerous night.

That was not a foolish reason to trust him. Men reveal themselves at such moments.

Besides, if she didn’t meet Pax at noon, he’d tear London apart looking for her. And he might be useful. Perhaps his plans to destroy Mr. Smith and hers to rescue the niece of the Fluffy Aunts could bump along comfortably, side by side, on the same road.

She entered the market and almost immediately nipped back to let a handcart roll past. Thus she did not get knocked to the stones, bruised and dirty. It was a reminder that “Any worthwhile enterprise is filled with hazard.” She heard that wisdom inside her head in Tuscan. The English would perhaps say, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” but that lacked the flavor of the Italian.

The more substantial stalls on the far side of Covent Garden were closed and shuttered, but the long tables in the middle of the square were busy. Men and women were purposeful there, unloading baskets from wagons, stacking beets and apples. She made her way through the crowd, jostled by wicker baskets, pushed aside with a brusque, “Watch it, girl,” from men who rigged their awnings in the dark, ready to shelter vegetables from a sun that wouldn’t come up for another two hours.

She’d come to Covent Garden to send a message and required a particular sort of messenger to carry it. Not the hackney driver yawning and scratching on his seat behind the horses, there at the door of a brothel. Not that laborer hunched under a sackful of turnips. Not the farmer with a load of cabbage. Her man or woman belonged to the market itself.

The water pump was across the square, just south of the church, neatly placed in front of the watch house. She pumped and caught the stream in her hands, so cold it made her hands numb. It was a shock when she burrowed into it and washed face, neck, ears, and up and down both arms. It was ice cold to drink. Good water, tasting of iron.

Nearby, two girls sat cross-legged on the curb, skirts drawn up over their knees, washing watercress in a bucket. Another, this one older, tied the leaves into plump, practiced little bundles and arranged them in rows in the flat basket at her side.

Children of the market. Natives of this dangerous jungle, sweet-faced and hard-eyed. They’d know.

She wandered casually toward them, not meeting eyes but just looking out over the square. She held her hand, thumb and index finger making an L, in the shadow of her cloak so that only those three girls could see. She said, “I want to buy a service,” as if she were asking about green beans. The words had been the unvarying formula of request for more years than anyone could count.

The L was for Lazarus. Magistrates and bailiffs enforced the law of the land elsewhere. In Covent Garden the King of Thieves ruled. Through the rookeries of St. Giles, along the docks of Wapping, even in considerably more respectable places, no barrow wheeled, no booth hawked its wares, no prostitute inveigled a customer into her room upstairs without paying a pence to Lazarus. To the ruler of London’s own horrific underworld. He was threat and brutality and a kind of rough justice.

One watercress girl looked at another. Eyes shifted to an old woman twenty paces away.

That was all the direction needed, a nod being as good as a wink.

The watch house was surrounded by a low wall and iron railings with spikes on top. It was well lanterned down the walk to the door and inside the windows. At this hour it was quiet as the grave. Nothing less than riot would open that door and call out the watch.

She’d send her message to Lazarus within spitting distance of the watch station. Her world was compounded of irony and discomfort this fine morning.

The woman sat on the little wall, wearing shabby black, her back to the rails and the light. She held a basket of apples in her lap. This time the signal of introduction brought no reaction, except that the woman took an apple out of her basket and began to polish it on her skirt. That went on for perhaps half an apple before she said, “Wotcher want?”

“I need to buy a service. Can you send the message?”

“Mebbe.”

So. She’d found the first link in the chain, one of the legion of street sellers, pickpockets, peddlers, and beggars who occupied the fringes of Lazarus’s realm.

“Wot service?” The woman spat on the apple, regarded it dispassionately, and polished some more. Not a woman spendthrift with her words, the apple seller.

“You don’t need to know.” She gave another hand sign, then, this one old and powerful. Baldoni are taught such secrets in the cradle. “Can you pass a message to a man who understands that?”

Can I even use that sign? Is it forbidden to someone running from a sworn vendetta?

The woman finished the fine polishing of the apple, set it in a basket, and chose the next. “Might be I could. Might not.” Her expression was compounded of slyness and greed.

“If you have work more important than carrying my message . . .” She held up a shilling. “I’ll find another messenger and leave you in peace.”

“I’ll send it. I’ll send it. Didn’t say I wouldn’t.” The apple seller made a grab for the coin.

The shilling stayed in hand. “Here’s my message. ‘The old man in the red castle asks a favor.’”

“‘Man in a castle arsks a favor.’”

“‘The old man in the red castle.’ Then say, ‘I need four trustworthy and discreet men for three days.’”

“Keep going on, don’cha? I ain’t the bloody post office.”

“Twenty words.” Because she was tired, her mind started turning the words into the simplest of substitution ciphers . . . URW HGCKN . . . before she stopped herself. “That’s not heavy as messages go. Say it back to me.”

“You want four men and they keep their gob shut.”

“That’s not the message.”

The apple seller fingered across the basket, apple to apple, with a surprisingly delicate touch and repeated the message, word for word, without flaw or hesitation, catching the original accent and intonation. “I don’t forgit things.” She smiled sarcastically. “And I don’t go to that part of town in the dark. After it gits light, then I’ll carry it.”

“Good enough.” She flipped the coin and watched it disappear into layers of rags. “Where can I sit for three or four hours, out of sight?”

The Coach House taught many lessons. Nobody died of being tired was one. One can sleep sitting up was another. Even three hours of sleep would improve this coming day no end.

The rags rearranged themselves. Another apple came out of the basket to be shined against the skirt. “I’m not a bloody inn. Try the man what sells beets and carrots up that way. Fowler, his name is.”

“Where should I wait for a reply? And how long?”

“Dunno. Go where you please. They’ll find you when they wants you.”