The Black Hawk

Forty-one

AFTER HE SIGNALED DOYLE AND EVERYBODY CLEARED out, he was left alone with Owl, who wasn’t in any shape to go stomping off when he asked awkward questions.

The wooden box from her shop—the one that had played host to his knives for a while—was in the top drawer of the sideboard. He brought it out and laid it on the table. You could call that a conversation piece.

She worked on her coffee in little sips, eking it out as long as she could, avoiding the moment when she’d have to come up with explanations for having three of his knives.

He wasn’t in a hurry. He fetched the silver coffeepot and poured into her cup. Added cream the way she liked it. “Two lumps?”

“Thank you.”

Enough sugar to set his teeth on edge. That hadn’t changed. “We can go to the study, if you like. There’s a sofa in there. I can let you lie down.” He handed the cup over.

“I have been lying flat for several days. It loses its appeal.”

Owl, lying flat, never lost its appeal. He didn’t point that out. He was the pattern card of discretion.

The banyan was embroidered with dragons, a gift from an old friend who dealt in cloth. One lascivious lizard curled all comfy on her left breast, tongue out, as if he were tasting her nipple through the cloth. The black dragon on the back, the one with a smile, had his pointy tail hung down so it was caressing the rounded arse underneath.

He didn’t let his mind follow that path, however much it tugged at the leash and whined.

She wrapped both hands around the little cup and sank back, boneless, in the chair, her head bowed, considering the coffee. She looked tired. Getting stabbed, poisoned, and fighting off fever had worn her down a little.

She’d primmed the sensual complexity of her hair, scraped it away from her face. Tamed it to an orderly braid to fall down her back. But it wasn’t tied up at the bottom. Maybe she hadn’t found a ribbon. Even the concerted force of her will wasn’t going to keep it from unraveling.

He stood close, breathing down onto all the bare skin at her neck. It wouldn’t intimidate her—he couldn’t think of anything right off that was likely to intimidate her—and he could catch her if she started to slip sideways.

Always a pleasure to watch Owl. He’d missed that. “You’re quiet.”

“I am thinking of the several things I must say to you. None of them is easy.”

Probably she was weighing her lies. Sorting the big ones from the small ones. Wondering what she could get away with. God, but he loved this woman. “I’m a patient man. Begin at the beginning.”

She sighed out slowly. “It is not the beginning, but it is the most recent of our encounters. You rescued me from the Cossacks. I wanted to kill you. You will remember that.”

“Vividly.”

IT was in the last days before Paris fell. Armies were scattered around the French countryside, fighting off and on. He’d been liaison to the Prussians. Napoleon put up a defense a half day south.

There was gunfire in the distance, but the front line was so mixed up, that could be anybody shooting at anybody else. The Prussians were using him to run messages back and forth and report what was happening, generally. He was so tired he hurt like one big bruise. He smelled like his horse.

Some Cossack officers he knew spotted him and called him over. They needed help interrogating a prisoner. A woman.

He ducked under the tent flap. She was sitting on an old wooden stool, bloodied, with torn clothes. She hadn’t been raped. He’d been in time to stop that.

“She fought like a tiger.” Pavlo was admiring. “Fortunately, the sergeant she stabbed wasn’t popular.”

Owl looked up and knew it was over. He watched her face break.

He said, “I know this one. She’s harmless.”

It had been a dozen years since she’d shot him on the steps in the Louvre. In all those years, all those cities, they hadn’t crossed paths often. When they did, it had been interesting.

She’d changed from the woman he’d known. She was exhausted to the edge of endurance, for one thing. Pale, with her eyes set in hollows like two big bruises and her mouth slack. She hadn’t given up though. She was calculating, planning, scheming, ready to pay any price and take any chance to get away. Behind her eyes she was . . . she was just more. Everything she’d been when he knew her twelve years before, she was more of now. More strong. More shrewd. More stubborn.

“She’s just another courier,” he said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

The papers she had on her were in one of the standard French codes—a message for Napoleon’s eyes. The attack on St. Dizier was a feint. The real drive was direct to Paris. He had no idea how she’d found that out.

He said she wasn’t worth the trouble of guarding. Said it set a bad example, shooting women. When he took her out of the tent with him, they probably thought he was marching her off for his own use.

He made her walk a mile from the Cossack camp before he stopped his horse. The road ran along the marshes around the lake.

“Your shoes,” he said.

Wordlessly, she took the clogs off and handed them over. He threw them as far as he could, in different directions, far out over the marsh.

St. Dizier was fifty miles away. Alone, unarmed, walking barefoot, even Justine wouldn’t make it to Napoleon in time. Paris would fall. It was the end.

“I will kill you for this.” She stood in the dirt of the road, her arms crossed over her breasts like she was holding her heart inside. “I will wait until you no longer expect it, and then I will kill you. Do not sleep deeply.”

SHE sat in his headquarters at Meeks Street in the Chinese dining room, wrapped in his dragons, and drank his coffee.

“That day, outside the Cossack camp. I said a great many things.” She consulted her coffee cup. “I was beyond myself.”

“I knew that.”

“You were the enemy, and you destroyed our last hope.”

“It was already too late before I saw you in that tent. Everybody knew that but Napoleon. He was outnumbered. The country was sick of war. All he could do was pick the battleground where he’d lose. If you’d got through to him, he would have taken the final battle to the walls of Paris. Did you want house-to-house fighting across the Latin Quarter? Artillery fire from Montmartre?”

“I see that now. That day, I knew only that I had failed in my duty.” The past filled her face. She was a long way away. “I tried to get to Napoleon, and every step of the long way, I planned how I would kill you.”

“You were inventive about it, I imagine.”

“There has never been a man in the history of the world who was killed as ingeniously as you were, in my mind, that day. I tried so hard, and I failed. When they told me Paris had surrendered, I sat upon the floor of a farmhouse and wept.”

Nothing he could say. The war was over. “He had to be stopped.”

“I have had a long time to think about this. I do not say you are wrong. But then . . . Paris was full of foreign armies. Prussians strutted about the Champs-Élysées. The cafés were full of Austrians. Cossacks camped on the Champs de Mars. Everywhere I turned, I became sick with rage. I was forsaken and mad with grief. So I blamed you.”

“You think I don’t understand that?”

“I would have spit upon your understanding, if you had offered it to me then.” She gave a crooked smile. “I was most utterly alone. There was no place for me in the new scheme of things. Even the Police Secrète became suddenly supporters of the monarchy. Those of us who had been loyal to Napoleon found it prudent to leave France.”

“To England.”

“It is ironic that the safest place for me was here, openly among my old enemies.”

“Ironic.”

“But I lie.” She took a deep breath. “As I lay in bed this morning, I promised myself I would not do that. Habit is very strong. I came to England because you were here.” She glanced at the knives that lay in the center of the table, being decorative. “I had decided, very cold-bloodedly, that I would kill you.”

“I hope you changed your mind.” Gods, but I hope you changed your mind.

“I am being honest about complex matters. It is not easy, and you are not helpful in the least.” She always got more French when she was annoyed.

He touched her cheek. One brush with his finger. Anybody looking on would have thought it was just friendly. “We never hurt each other. We played fair. Leaving aside that one deplorable incident fifteen years ago, you never shot me.”

“I was never put in a position where it was my duty to kill you. Fortune has been kind.”

“You should thank the Service.” He grinned at her. “After you put a bullet in vital parts of my anatomy, they kept me away from you for years. Sent me to Russia while you were in Paris. Then to France when you were in Italy. To Italy, when you were in Austria. I figured it out later.”

Her face flickered like a candle with all those shifting thoughts inside. “Soulier—I became one of Soulier’s people, as you know—Soulier said nothing. But you are right. He kept us apart. I have done as much for the women who worked for me when they were enamored of someone unsuitable.”

“Nobody more unsuitable than me.”

“No one.” She negotiated terms with the robe, plucking it up over her thigh where it had slid down, her and the robe having different ideas of what should show and what shouldn’t. “I wrote letters to you, do you know? A hundred letters. I explained and explained that the gunshot was an accident. I told you that I had not meant to hit you. Leblanc struck my arm and the shot went astray.”

“Well, that’s nice to know.”

“I did not mail the letters. I would write them and burn them. If I had once sent the smallest note to you—once—I knew I would wake up the next week and hear you outside my window, asking to come in. And I would open the window. I did not stop being a fool for you, ’Awker. Not for one moment in many long years. They were right to keep us apart.”

“Wait a minute. I’m still back thinking about you opening the window and letting me in. What were you wearing?’

“Or I might have opened the window and pulled you inside and strangled you. That is not an impossibility.” She didn’t finish her coffee. She set it on the table, emphatic-like. “But I am telling you of the time after I left Paris. I went to Socchieve, in Italy, before I went to England. I was still planning to kill you, you understand.”

“Italy’s a great place for vengeance.” He remembered Socchieve. Mountains on all sides like the earth was folded in on you. Snow high up, warm if you walked an hour downhill. Cows. Austria and France had got together to do their fighting in Italy. “That was a long time ago. We never did pay the shot at that inn. Did the Austrians burn the place?”

“It had escaped their notice. It is now run by the son of the old man we met. They kept the luggage, yours and mine, because they had no liking for the Austrians and hoped we would be lucky enough to escape them. Then they continued to keep the bags. It may be they were very honest, but I think they put them in an attic and forgot.”

“One of the bags had my knives in it.”

“Which you were so proud of and insisted on throwing into the wood of the mantel. The holes are still there. They tell stories about us in that village, none of which are true. Somehow they learned you were the Black Hawk. You would not recognize yourself in those stories.”

“I was there less than a week.”

“You are credited with a slaughter of Austrians so large I am amazed any still walk the earth. I took out your knives and my tortoiseshell comb and gave the inn everything else to use as they would.

“Three of my knives.”

“Those three.” She went meditative, considering the knives on the table. “They have been troublesome.” Then she said, “It was strange to go through those bags and remember the people we had been. It was like looking at strangers.”

They’d made love in a high meadow. Not a flat foot of ground anywhere, just straggly grass and wildflowers. He put his coat down and they crushed flowers underneath them. The smell wrapped his senses till he couldn’t think.

Sometime, in between kisses, he said he loved her. She said, “Don’t.”

Afterward, the sun set and the snow on the mountain peaks turned red and they went off to spy on the Austrian camp. He’d been eighteen. He didn’t know what year he was born, so maybe nineteen.

That was a long time ago, as Owl pointed out, and they were different people now. He was talking to a woman who had run major parts of the Police Secrète, not a young girl with her hair down over her breast and yellow wildflower pollen brushed on her skin.

“On the way to England, I had time to think. I found myself leaving old parts of my life behind me, discarded in the mountains, or floating on the sea. It was as if I were unpacking heavy trunks and tossing out things I no longer needed. I had ceased to be a spy for France. The France I had known was gone forever.” She pulled her braid forward, over her shoulder, and took to rummaging in the little curves and valleys of it.

Her hair was darker than it had been in that mountain village. He remembered holding a handful of her hair to his face, feeling it with the skin of his nose and his lips, smelling it, when they made love.

“When I came to England, I no longer hated you. I brought no dark purposes with me from the past.”

He believed her. He’d interrogated his share of men and women. They didn’t lie with their eyes looking inward. They didn’t lay out their souls and dissect them on the table in front of him, the way Owl was doing.

She rubbed her arm where the bandage was. The lines at the corners of her mouth said it hurt and she was ignoring that. “I remade myself yet again. I opened my shop, Voyages, and became a dealer in maps and optical instruments and dried fruit. I am the best at what I do. Perhaps the best in the world.”

“I’ve seen your shop. Impressive.”

She leaned forward, into a long ray of sun. The fine hair that sprang up at her temples, small and unruly, caught the light just right, and everything glinted in fifty or a hundred sparks. “Men come to me—even famous men—when they are determined to risk their lives in dangerous places. I sell them what they must have to survive. I send them out prepared, as I once sent my agents out to do their work.”

“Military Intelligence comes to you.” More irony. Military Intelligence, outfitted by a former French spy.

“But the British Service do not. Not ever. They know about the little weakness you had for me once, ’Awker, and they keep their distance.” For an instant that amused her and she smiled. But she clouded over the next minute. “This is important. This is what I have to tell you. You know that I mount weapons upon the left wall of my shop. You will have seen them. Some are for sale. Some only for display because they are interesting. Men like to look at weapons. Three years ago, that first day I opened the door or my shop, while Thompson and Chetri were polishing the windows one last time, I put your knives on the wall.”

“Ah.” Now this he hadn’t known.

“I told myself they were a sort of trophy. Or a challenge. Or a memory of the past. I do not know. I think I expected you to walk in one morning and claim them back and we would talk . . . But you did not come. After a few weeks, I took them down and put them away.”

“I was in France. Owl, I was in France for months.”

“I learned that later.” The banyan had a thick, red brocaded belt. She untied the knot and pulled the belt closer about her and tied it again. “I knew when you came to England. You walked by the shop sometimes. But you never came in.” She added another knot. “It was because of the words I said outside of Paris. I have told more lies than any woman you will meet in your life. Not one of my lies has been as bitter to me as the truth that I told that day.”

“Owl—”

“I should have returned your knives to you at that time. I did not know quite how. There is nothing more embarrassing than importunity from a lover of long ago.”

“I should have opened the damn door and walked in. I almost did, a few times.” He’d been stupid. And a coward.

“There was no reason for you to do so. What we felt for one another was gone. You had become Head of the British Intelligence Service. You were Sir Adrian, no longer the ’Awker I had once known. You had made yourself rich. I was the discredited spy of a fallen empire.”

She was going paler as she talked, probably getting ready to pitch forward in a faint. He wasn’t going to let this go on much longer.

“You think any of that mattered?”

“You did not come to me.”

“I made a mistake,” he said.

“We have both made more mistakes in our life than it is possible to count.” She smiled wryly, and she was Justine DuMotier, French spymaster, the woman who’d routed some of his best operations. “That is past. We will concentrate upon the present. I read of a stabbing, a Frenchman. It was some time ago, now. I did not take particular notice, since I am no longer in the business of watching and analyzing such matters. Then the next stabbing came. Another Frenchman, and there was mention of a black knife.” Her eyes were very clear, very fierce, when they met his. “I have not forgotten my old skills. I did not need to see those knives at Bow Street. I knew at once.”

“So you came to me.”

“Not immediately. I went first to look upon Patelin’s corpse, laid out in the back room of a tavern, and to see the place where he was killed. Then I visited Bow Street and bribed my way into the evidence room to see the knives. Perhaps that was where your enemies picked up my trail and began following. Or perhaps they were watching Voyages. Mr. Thompson has said for months he feels eyes upon us. Somewhere, between Voyages and Meeks Street, they acted.”

“Used that third knife on you.”

“One man, very young, but already with experience. I had a glimpse of the side of his face. The knives that were stolen from me were used to attack you.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, being careful, because that was the arm that hurt her. “Used against you, actually.”

“It is the same thing.”