The Spymaster's Lady

Eleven

DOYLE HAD CONSTRUCTED AN OMELET OF FRESH eggs and butter from the inn’s basket and chanterelle mushrooms from the woods. He was a good cook, Monsieur Doyle. But then, she thought, he did many things well besides pretending to be a coach driver. Grey sat next to her on the blanket, close but not touching. She felt his eyes on her though, continually. She considered escape plans for the evening.

“That innkeeper took a fancy to you,” Doyle told her. “We got a pot of cream for your coffee, because you liked it so much this morning.”

“I have a great allure for innkeepers, always.” She set her plate down on the blanket beside her and picked up the coffee again. “They sense in me, you comprehend, a great cook, which is unbearably attractive to them. You are also that, I find. A cook. This is an excellent omelet for being made over the fire, which is most tricky to do. I would not care to attempt it.”

She did not mention the coffee, which was not as good as his omelet, being strong and very bitter. It was possible the events of the day had disrupted him, and he would do better this evening. Or maybe it was that he was not French and therefore incapable of understanding coffee properly.

“You want one of them rolls like you had for breakfast?” Doyle said. “Not too tired to eat are you?”

“But no. It is a nothing, this taking bullets out of English spies.”

She doubted the dress she wore now was more decent than the one she had ruined. Grey told her it was green and covered everything it should. Doyle said it was the color of curled baby oak leaves and so entirely respectable she looked like a matron of forty years. She was not yet so foolish as to believe the words of either of these English.

When she had eaten as much of the omelet and some of the bread as she could fit into her, she settled against a tree and sighed in deep contentment and sipped coffee. It was relaxing, this, not to feel angry or afraid for a short time. She had learned many years ago to grab at any small moment of peace that presented itself. “Do you know, Grey, I like this place. It feels very old. Many, many of my people have been here.”

“The Gypsies?”

“Yes. The Rom. I should not call them my people since I am no longer part of them. I cannot go back. Not anymore. There is no place among the wagons for a woman such as me.” She hurt piercingly for a minute before she shook her head and put the thought away. “This camp, I think, is of great antiquity. The Rom must have been coming here as long as long. Hundreds of years maybe. That lovely stream…Rom would come a long way to camp here.”

“You enjoyed that.”

He was in a peculiar mood. He stayed close, intent upon her. It was as if he waited for something. He had finished his own meal and was drinking red wine with a complex woody smell. He had not yet offered her any.

“I enjoyed it most immensely. To wash…This is the first time in a month I have felt completely clean. It is one of the great pleasures of life, to be clean after one has been dirty so long. I went to the pool downstream. It is not broad, but deep, and the bottom is clean sand. They swim there, the women and children, I am sure. Farther down there will be rocks to wash clothes upon.”

“Cold though, I imagine.”

“I do not mind. I wished never to come out again, but I realized it is impossible to spend one’s life in a forest pool, however pleasant. It is lovely soap Doyle gave me. What is it made with? Lavender?”

“I’m not sure. He stole it someplace.”

“Of course. How silly of me.” She drank coffee again. It seemed odd to sit beside Grey and talk of everyday things, as if they were old friends. She would not have expected it.

“You liked being with the Gypsies?”

“Oh yes. Maybe it was being young, I do not know. When I was one of them it was the only time in my life I was completely happy. I would wake up in forests like this or in fields full of crickets—you can just hear the crickets here, Grey, if you listen—and there was the whole day ahead with nothing at all that must be done at any time. Nothing whatsoever. Everything came to one in great naturalness, gathering sticks for the fire and the horses to water and always the fields and woods to search for food. Or, in town, dancing and begging. I was not much good at dancing, I shall tell you, despite certain lies I have told. But Grey…you cannot imagine what a juggler I was.”

A pause. “A good one, I suppose.”

“Doyle will have told you about my juggling, since I am sure he knows the entire story of my life. I was incomparable, I must tell you. I was even better with throwing the knife. Even now, without seeing, I could aim for that little bird singing up in the tree there—I do not know the proper French name for him. The Rom would call him bardroi chiriclo.”

“That’s a greenfinch, Annique.”

“Ah, now I shall know. Well, even now, with the proper knife, I think I could hit that bird one time in ten, if I wished to eat finches, which I do not. One must be very hungry to eat finches.”

Doyle spoke up beside her. “You don’t like the coffee, miss? I think maybe I made it too strong.”

“No, no. It is good indeed.” She drank the last of it to the dregs and let him take the cup from her hold.

“Don’t know but what I may end up drinking coffee me-self, instead of tea, if I make many more trips over here,” Doyle said. “You going to learn to drink tea in England?”

“I drink tea now, sometimes, when my stomach does not agree with me.”

“You’re getting better. You didn’t even bother to say you’re not going to England,” Grey said.

“If you imagine I say what I am thinking, monsieur, then you are very foolish, which I do not consider at all likely.” She leaned back again against the tree.

Adrian began stirring restlessly, so Grey went to him, and she was forced to listen to another extremely boring discourse on the subject of floating and sleeping. That was strange, when he droned on and on and Adrian became quiet enough to operate upon. She would ask Grey to explain this, later, when she was not so tired. It was annoying he should keep talking when she wished nothing more than to relax and rest. But after a while, she supposed, one paid no more attention to him than to the buzz of bees or a cricket calling.

It was very warm in the clearing this afternoon. Doyle went back and forth. The sound of his boots as he cleared away dishes and mended the fire seemed as right in this camp as the birdcalls and the shuffle of the horses, tied at the edge of the clearing. All the smells, all the sounds, were as they should be.

When she was young and dressed as a boy and following armies, sometimes Vauban would come to meet her. They would sit in the fields or in woods like this and build a small fire. He brought her food when he could. She was always hungry. She would eat and report to him every tiny thing she had seen, and Vauban would praise her and give her orders. She had felt safe at such times, for an hour or two. Vauban would have protected her with his life.

Sometimes Soulier came, elegant even when he wore rags or a soldier’s uniform. Soulier smuggled her bonbons from Paris with such care they might have been secret documents. He made her laugh. Always, he had good advice for her. There was no one more cunning than Soulier.

He was in London now, Soulier, since he had become chief of all French spies in England. He played the role of the open agent, the agent that all men knew worked for the Secret Police but no one touched. It was an old agreement—who knew how old—that there should be one open agent in each capital. There must be, after all, a man the British could come to, to ransom sailors and agents and the odd soldier who had fallen into French hands, or to convey the most discreet and private messages from government to government.

Soulier must enjoy that work, as he had a taste for political games. He would enjoy also flaunting himself beneath the noses of Military Intelligence when they could not touch him.

“You are resting quietly, getting stronger. The pain is very far away.” Grey’s voice was only a murmur in the background. Something she could ignore. “You’re safe, where nothing can touch you. The pain is far away. It can’t touch you.”

She was so drained from what she’d done to Adrian, she was drowsing in the sunlight, lulled by good food inside her and Grey’s voice. He spoke in the accents of the South, which were so familiar. Her father had spoken thus. It was the language she spoke as a child. The language her dreams came in. She stretched and yawned and rearranged herself. The tree bark at her back wasn’t at all rough. Soft, in fact.

After a while, Grey’s feet came near to her and stopped. She yawned again. “You are an odd Head of Section.”

“He’s good at it,” Doyle said.

Grey folded something smooth and warm around her. It was his coat, and it smelled of him. Then she knew.

“You have given me drugs.”

“Yes, Annique,” Grey said.

It was too late to do anything about it.