The Forbidden Rose

Twenty-seven

HAWKER PRACTICED THE ART OF BEING INCONSPICUOUS, something with which he was already moderately familiar. It was the soft belly of the night. The time for good pickings. There was dark in the corners if you were in the mood to lurk. If you didn’t want to skulk, you could blend into the folks coming home from the cafés and the theater. Poor men walked the streets because their rooms were too hot to sleep in. Rich men, because they were looking for a woman. Anyone could be on the stroll this hour of the evening.

Back home in London, his mates would be working, breaking into a shop or lifting merchandise off some boat tied up in the Thames where the officers were careless-like.

He leaned up against a doorway, pretending to shake a pebble out of his boot. The house he had his eye on was fifty feet down Rue Honoré. Rue Saint-Honoré, they’d called it a few years back before everything in Paris got itself de-saintified.

Five men passed, each of them with something more important to do than notice him.

If he was in London right now, he’d be with Beets and Rory and Sticker and the others. When the night’s job was done they’d stop at a cookshop in St. Giles for sausages before they headed back to the padding ken to hand the goods over to Lazarus. Or if they were empty-handed, they’d end up in a tavern, drinking themselves fuddled and making up excuses.

He was still working. Still robbing houses. This time he was doing it for the British Service. Life was a funny old dame.

They put streetlamps all up and down here. Some of the householders even hung a lantern by the front door. He’d have to walk through all that bloody illumination to get where he was going.

This here . . . this was Robespierre’s house.

The most powerful man in France—as close to being the king as made no difference—lived in a nothing-special house, tucked up over a woodshop. If you wanted to see Robespierre, well . . . probably you trotted yourself around those piles of lumber and knocked on the door.

“He is one of the people.” That’s what the woman hawking newspapers said when he brought up the question of who the house belonged to. “He is ours, our Robespierre, little citoyen. He lives as we do, without bribes or favorites. He is The Incorruptible. You do well to come and see what he is.”

No guards, no three hundred men in fancy uniforms riding on horses, no big iron gates closing everybody out. No crown jewels. Seemed like the French had it right somehow.

He shrugged, doing it loose in his shoulders. Practicing. It felt natural, almost, to jerk his chin up a notch, to say no. Turn his hand over to say yes. He was picking up the knack of it. Learning to look French. Why not? Maybe it’d been a Frenchman who’d fathered him.

There was more to it than shrugs. Clothes, for instance. Doyle made him change his clothes from the skin out before they crossed the Channel. He’d cut his hair. He kept telling him how to eat and how to sit and how to walk.

Ten thousand tricks. Doyle knew them all. He’d bet Doyle could tell a Frenchman from an Englishman by the smell of his farts.

The footman who’d left Maggie’s house had headed straight here, easy as you please, and handed over a letter at that door down at the far end of the courtyard. He didn’t wait for a reply. Be interesting to know who in Maggie’s house was sending letters this time of night. Interesting to know what you put in a letter you sent to the most powerful man in France.

As to Robespierre’s house . . . Doyle would say, sometimes the direct approach is best. Just walk in.

Nobody paid attention when he sauntered through the wide passageway, into the carpenter’s yard. He faded into the space behind a pile of long boards somebody was going to find a use for, one of these days.

He’d wait a bit. An hour, just to be on the safe side.

This was a trusting household. No candles inside. Shutters closed and the window sashes thrown up. They were sleeping the Sleep of the Just in there. Probably they tired themselves out with being Incorruptible all day.

DOYLE found Talbot gone from Rue Palmier. Talbot wasn’t the most brilliant man England ever spawned, but he was a conscientious Service agent and if he was away from his post, he’d be following someone who’d slipped into or out of Hôtel de Fleurignac. Considering the hour, that was probably somebody interesting.

In the attic lookout, Doyle found the chair empty. Hawker was gone.

The promising note was that somebody—he’d guess it was Hawker—had pulled out a brush and bootblacking from the possessions scattered around the room and written a big note on the wall. SWIVE.

He wouldn’t put it past the boy to go off swiving whores, but he wasn’t going to express himself in Old English. That might be his attempt at some part of the verb suivre—to follow—and mean that Hawker was tracking somebody.

He’d brought stew meat, wrapped up in bread, for the boy. Since Hawker wasn’t in sight, he didn’t mind eating it himself.

It looked like he had the night watch. That was the great joy of the Service. You never got too senior to pull the short straw. He sat in one chair and put his feet up on the other, watching Maggie’s house.

Her room was at the back of the house, second floor. He couldn’t see the window from here. Her bedroom would be dark, this time of night. She’d be in her bed, lying on top of the covers, letting the wind run over her. She’d have a proper bed tonight and a proper linen night shift on her, but she wouldn’t be lying prim and stiff and proper. She’d be sprawled out, hugging her pillow, tucking it between her legs. She slept like a man had just finished with her. Like she was soft and satisfied and grabbing a few minutes of sleep before they started again. That was the way she always slept. He’d watched her doing it every night on the road.

That scrawny, blond man she met in the baths would be Jean-Paul Béclard, her partner in La Flèche. An old lover, obviously. A former lover, unless he missed his guess. That meant he didn’t have to track the man down and beat him up in an instructive manner.

THE noise in the city leaked away. It got quiet. It was the hour for what Lazarus would call nefarious deeds.

Hawker slipped from hiding. The courtyard was full of moon and that damned lantern light from the street out front. He kept to the edges of the yard where the shadows were. He could smell dog. There was a whuffling snore from upstairs that might be a dog sleeping. Which went to show that some dogs weren’t worth spit when it came to guarding a house.

The front door opened out of the work yard. It was ready to stand off battering rams. The window next to it was guarding the house with a pair of flimsy wood shutters closed with a latch. God, you’d think there weren’t any thieves in this city.

Take the knife out. Slip it in between the shutters. Lift the latch. He held his breath till the shutters folded back without squeaking. He swung his feet in.

For a man who was chopping off a couple hundred heads a week, Robespierre was damn unconcerned about his own safety. Upstairs, five or six snores said they slept heavy, the way honest folks do. Seemed they had an honest dog, too.

Light came in through the shutter he’d opened. Enough to see around the room. A letter lay in the middle of the dark wood table. That’d be the one the footman brought from Maggie’s house.

He nipped it up as he walked by. The door to the right let him into the kitchen, with a fire glowing on the hearth. He didn’t like to put a good knife into a fire. It played hell with keeping an edge on the blade. But sometimes you do what you don’t want to on a job. When the blade heated up he lifted the seal off the letter.

What he had was lots of scrawl in black ink. He couldn’t read it. He couldn’t read print all that well and sure as hell couldn’t read twisty French handwriting. But the signature said Victor.

Take it with him, or close it up and put it back so they wouldn’t know he’d been here?

Lazarus used to set him problems like this. He’d lay out the problem and give him the time it took to breathe in and out to think what to do. The next breath, Lazarus cuffed him halfway across the room if he hadn’t decided.

A big, square box to the side of the hearth had sheets of fine writing paper in it, screwed up long and tight. That was to light candles with or carry fire from one room to the other. The paper had writing on it.

Not just the one letter. Lots of letters.

Just made you wonder what kind of a careless household they ran. A powerful man lived here. What were the chances those papers had something interesting on them?

He stuffed papers down his shirt. All the paper spills. The letter from Victor de Fleurignac. Then he went out the window he’d come in through.

He was out of the courtyard, out into the streets. He left the Rue Honoré as soon as he could and found the smaller ways where they didn’t bother to light them, holding to the middle of the road where no one could jump him, not hurrying, walking through the dog-chewed edges of the night toward the Marais and the house with blue shutters.