Rogue Spy

Thirty-one

“You took it from me. You stole it. Everybody saw that. Theft. Outright theft.” That was the man whose cane she’d borrowed. He talked at her from one side, then tap-tapped around to the other side and said much the same thing there.

A very dead man lay in the road. Pax stood behind her, his arms wrapped around her. He was wonderfully solid and she let herself lean back against him just the smallest amount. She would rather have been with him somewhere they weren’t looking at dead people.

Far down the street, some merciful souls had taken the horses to the street pump to wash them clean. The driver sat on the steps of a house a dozen yards away, his head in his hands. Every once in a while he’d get up and go into the alley to the side and empty his stomach.

She hoped Cousin Lucia had left. She didn’t see the girl anywhere in the circle of avid faces. Lazarus’s apprentice thieves were at the front, showing an intense, professional curiosity.

Pax’s friend, the angry, dark-haired one, knelt and searched the corpse from his hair to the soles of his boots, efficiently and with no sign of distaste. His findings—a handful of coins and two keys—were piled on the pavement at his side. The dead man hadn’t carried a scrap of paper. There was no maker’s mark in the hat that lay, brim upward, next to him.

“A careful man,” she said quietly. “He never put anything in his pockets.”

“Carry nothing when you’re working,” Pax said, quoting the Tuteurs at the Coach House.

“My family has a similar motto. We say, ‘Everything in your pocket gossips about you.’”

“You have an interesting family.”

“Thank you. We pride ourselves on our collected wisdom.” She leaned more strongly against him. She shook in her muscles, fine little trembles that came and went. Just the tiniest shaking. It was from being shot at, she thought.

“I’ll report you.” The man she’d deprived of the use of his cane, for a very few minutes, brandished it in her face. “I’ll have you arrested. There’s a Justice of the Peace here.”

At the edge of all great events, there will be some fool who has no idea what’s going on. Who makes a nuisance of himself and gets in everyone’s way. She kept her eyes on the grim, careful search of the body and said, “If you don’t put that stick away, I’ll ram it up your posterior till it comes out your nose.”

She continued to not look at him. After a minute, heels, interspersed by the tap of his cane, clicked away rapidly.

Pax hadn’t released his arms from around her. She felt his amusement playing back and forth in his muscles.

“I’d better look at the body,” she said. “Your friend knows what he’s doing with the dead, but I might see something.”

“The more eyes, the better.” He tucked her arm through his as if they were strolling across a park. Where they went, however, was to the corpse.

She knelt beside the limp bundle on the pavement, careful to keep her skirts out of the widening pool of blood. The man’s eyes were open and staring. That was the worst part of those dead by violence. The eyes were always open and always empty.

“I suppose you can improve your sketch,” she said to Pax, “now that you have the model in front of you.”

“I can.”

She didn’t really look at the body for a while, though her eyes were pointed in that direction. Her mind seemed stuck in place, like a wagon spinning its wheels in deep mud. Finally, stupidly, she said, “At least we killed the right man.”

“He needed it,” Pax said. “He worked for the Merchant. See anything?”

Only death. This sort of thing was what she escaped when she chose the quiet life of Brodemere. Pax’s friend rolled the body to this side and that to unbutton clothing and methodically go through pockets.

She put out a hand. “Stop.”

He glared at her.

“On the trouser leg. There.” She pointed. “What is it?”

“Stable dirt.” He dismissed her.

She pinched some up. Smelled it. “Sawdust . . . wood shavings. Oak maybe. It needs an expert.”

Annoyance flickered in the young face and was gone, leaving a sort of dark amusement. “Maybe he visited a coffin maker. He’ll need one.” Pax’s friend plucked out a new handkerchief—he seemed to have several—spread it on his open hand, and brushed shavings and wood dust into it. “I would have come to that part of him in a bit. See anything else?”

She shook her head and stood up. “I’ll look at the wagon.”

Someone had led the Frenchman’s horse and cart out of the middle of the road, where he’d abandoned them. She ran her hand over the horse’s back. This was a piebald horse, short legged and unlovely, matched with a sturdy, short cart. Everything utilitarian and well cared for, from the wheels to the hooves of the horses. This was a jobbing cart from a reliable yard. When she made a circuit of it she found, burned into the wood on the back right side, the words McCarthy, Nibb Lane, Soho.

“Six streets that way.” Pax indicated with a little jerk of his head.

“The Merchant is in Soho.”

“Or he wants to make us think he’s here.”

“Then he’s succeeded. I think he’s in Soho.”

The little horse was of a placid, urbane disposition, calm in place and incurious. She went over the harness, which was wholly ordinary and recently cleaned. The horseshoes held the usual collection of city detritus. They’d been cleaned recently. “He hires a small cart, not a coach. He needs to shift something he won’t carry in a coach. Something dirty. Something bulky. Secret. Stolen. Something that attracts attention.”

“A body,” Pax contributed.

Was Camille Besançon already murdered, and her body disposed of? “Or a prisoner, bound and gagged.”

Pax might have turned the pages in her mind and read them. “He has no reason to kill that woman before the meeting.” Pax squatted beside the front wheel and took out a two-inch magnifier. “He plans ahead. He leaves people alive while there’s any possible use for them.”

They worked in tandem, silently, for a few minutes. She said, “There’s nothing by the driver’s seat. Not a speck. Not a crumb.”

She looked at every crevice of the frame and springs while he went over the four wheels. After a while, she said, “I haven’t killed very many men. Those people in the Coach House were the first. And then, one man who came to Brodemere. And now the Frenchman.”

Pax said, “You didn’t kill this man. Those horses did.”

“I’ve also never been shot at.” A tarp covered the surface of the little wagon. She took a corner and waited for Pax to take the other. “I don’t think I like it.”

“Getting hit is worse.”

“Strangely, that is no comfort at all.” She nodded and they pulled the tarp back, uncovering the bed of the cart.

She knew the smell. Would have recognized it earlier if a whiff of it hadn’t already been floating in the air.

Pax said, “Gunpowder.” He was not informing her. He confirmed what they’d both realized.

“Guns?” She shook her head slowly. “An attack on something? A riot?” Twenty years ago, the Gordon Riots had torn the town apart, threatened the rich and powerful.

“Not riot.” The dark-haired man, Pax’s friend, came up behind her. “If the French were brewing civil insurrection, we’d have heard about it. We have well-paid informers. Informers on informers.” He asked Pax, “You want to see a collection of dull coinage? No? Can’t say I blame you.” He tucked away a bulky handkerchief. “And that is the delicate odor of gunpowder.”

“We noticed,” Pax said dryly. “Cami, this is Hawker. Hawk, this is Cami.”

She ignored the introduction, as did Mr. Hawker. She’d heard of Hawker from the Fluffy Aunts’ gossip. She could only hope he knew far less about her than she did about him.

The planking of the wagon was gray-brown, dry, and clean. She paced two steps sideways, watching the light on the wood’s surface. She said, “Not guns.”

Pax was looking at the same thing. “No oil.”

Guns live in a light film of oil, or they rust. Everywhere they’re stored, they leave smears of gun oil. Even wrapped in burlap, they’d leave the distinctive smell of the oil behind. None of that here.

She swept her fingers into the crevice between boards and came away with coarse black powder under her nails. She smelled it, rubbed it between her fingers, and confirmed what she did not want to know.

“Gunpowder,” Pax said. “A wagonload.”

The young man, Hawker, murmured, “We are in big trouble.”

This was suddenly no longer a spy game played with secrets and codes. The lives to be lost were no longer counted in twos or threes.

In the dust at the side of the wagon, she made out a curved mark, most of it already brushed away. Then another curve next to it. Wordlessly, she followed the lines with her fingers.

“Kegs,” Pax said.

“Kegs. Kegs and kegs of gunpowder.” She felt sick in the pit of her stomach. “They must have been lined up all the way down the cart. You could blow up Parliament with this much powder. Or a dozen ships in harbor. Or London Bridge.” Or anything you wanted. Who would die? Where? When? How many lives?

“Ten or twelve kegs. God help us,” Pax’s friend said.

“Sixteen.” She counted out the places with her hand, showing him.

“You can’t just buy this much.” Hawker peeled the last of the canvas back, careful not to disturb the dust, doing the same thing she had, studying the faint circles left behind and the thin trace of powder. “We have a traitor somewhere in military supplies.”

“It’s naval stores or artillery.” She tested the texture between thumb and forefinger. “Not for guns. There’s a different feel to this. Larger grit. This is for cannons.”

Hawker glared at her. “Of course you’d learn that, out in Brodemere, between studying Babylonian and German.”

She said, “I don’t actually speak Babylonian. No one does. I learned the distinctions of gunpowder when I was eleven or so.”

“Cachés,” Hawker said in disgust. “Gunpowder and sawdust. Probably Babylonian, too. I’m going to Daisy’s.”

Pax said, “We’ll join you. I have to make sketches.” He waved two men out of the crowd and talked to them, fast, with gestures that said it was about moving the wagon somewhere.

Someday, there would come a point at which her life could become no more dangerous and complicated. She hadn’t arrived there yet, apparently.