The Spymaster's Lady

Thirteen

TIME CRAWLED OVER HER AND AROUND HER. SHE floated in endless swirling waters. When the heavy, dark weight of them receded, she was sitting up with a man’s arm around her.

“Drink this.” It was Grey who said that, and what she was to drink was coffee. Very sweet coffee.

“I do not take so much sugar.” She shook her head, annoyed and barely awake. “It is too much. Really.” But she drank it because he put it to her lips and kept offering it to her until it was gone. Then he held her close to his chest as she spiraled into the blackness. It was like falling down into him.

Darkness gave way to the velvet times when she was full of mindless contentment and did ordinary things, but nothing was important in the least. She walked or stood or sat, and Grey was nearby, telling her what to do, guiding her through the moments of spinning bewilderment. Then she would lie down and sleep, in a bed or on the ground, wherever he had put her.

Once, she lay with the softness of a bed beneath her. Grey’s body sprawled beside her, sleeping. The bed was warm with him, and his arm lay across her, heavy and relaxed. Desire uncoiled in her. Her skin stretched tight over a thousand humming feathers. She turned to him and slid herself against him, and it burned. Between her legs it burned and sang, and she pressed and pressed herself against him.

He woke. “Easy, Annique. You’re dreaming. Don’t…” He set her away from him. “No.” It was a whisper in her ear. “You’re beautiful, Fox Cub. Sleep now. Just sleep.” But she held tight to him, wrapped around him. She felt, suddenly, an ecstasy that broke her into a thousand fragments. She cried out and fell, slowly, all the thousand pieces of her, into the warm, drugged ocean the opium had prepared for her.

Then she was in the coach, tucked against Grey’s side, warm sunlight on her face. The click click of wheels and the jiggle and thump of the road had been with her a long time. Grey held her and stroked slowly down her back. It would be nice if he did that more. She slipped down to nestle into his lap. Now he would stroke her everywhere.

He ran his fingers softly across her forehead and into her hair. It was not enough. She rolled, inviting his hand across her belly.

“Like a cat,” she heard him murmur.

Adrian’s voice came softly, nearby. “She wants it. Opium hits some of ’em like that. She’s going to make some man deliriously happy, one day.”

“Not you,” Grey said.

“Unfortunately, no. But then, it’s not my flag she’s running up the mast, is it?”

Grey gave a deep growl. The vibration buzzed through him and into her skin. She rubbed her cheek against him and breathed him in. Through the rough fabric of his trousers, the muscles and the bones of his thighs emerged into her mind like rocks from sand. It felt wonderful, touching him.

I should not be doing this. It was a faint voice, far beneath the dark waters of her mind.

“She’s hurting.” Adrian’s light words drifted across her, words with no meaning. “Why don’t you give her a touch or two and let her fall asleep happy? She won’t remember.”

“Why don’t I kick you out in the nearest cornfield and let you walk home.”

“I can look the other way.”

“Shut up, Adrian.”

“Your sort always makes it complicated. She’s coming out again.”

“Blast. You’re right.” The universe shifted. She was sitting up. She heard Grey say, “Make it a half dose. Or less. Less than that.”

There was a glass to drink, very bitter. She did not want to take it, because they were giving her opium, but it was drunk before she woke up enough to fight. Then Grey let her lie down in his lap again.

“Go back to sleep.” He rearranged her on the seat. She curled around his hand, trying to pull it between her legs, for the touch of him. It kept slipping away.

“Sleep. That’s what you want. Nothing else.”

She fell down into the darkness. The words fell in after her, melting on her skin like snowflakes.

HER face was wet, which confused her utterly. She was in the coach, and Grey was slapping her. Why was she so wet?

“I wish you would not do that.” She tried to fight his hands off. “It is not at all necessary and very impolite.”

“Wake up.” He slapped her again. It was not painful exactly, but it was not a light tap on the cheek either.

“I am awake.” She took hold of his wrist so he could not strike her again. Everything was confused inside her brain, as if it were foggy in there. This was Grey. Grey was in the coach with her and wanted her to wake up. Where were they? She could not at all remember. “You do not need to keep hitting me. I am awake.”

“Good. I need you to be awake. Annique, the gendarmes are going to stop the coach. No, don’t you dare go to sleep on me. You’re going to stay awake and talk to them. Can you do that?”

She pushed the heels of her hands against her temples. Gendarmes. She was in France. Grey…Grey was the English spy. Leblanc was chasing her, hungry for her death. He had set the gendarmes after her.

She couldn’t think. “Gendarmes?”

Grey switched to German. “Can you be Bavarian? We have to speak German. Can you do that?”

Terror peeled the layers of sleep off her. This was not Grey. This clipped, precise, intellectual voice. This German voice. Beside her in the coach was a man with Grey’s shape and his smell and his warmth and his clothing…who was not Grey.

“Annique. Wake up and talk to me. Now.”

She put her hand to his mouth and felt his breath move with the words. The feeling of Grey was there, the shape of his lips, the stubble of his cheek, his smell. But it wasn’t his voice.

“What is it?” His words, but not his voice. Grey, speaking German.

It was horrible and bewildering to hear a different voice come from Grey’s mouth. It was inconceivably wrong. She was alone in the dark and she had lost the familiarity of his voice.

“No. I am awake now.” She shook her head.

She should not have shaken her head. It made her dizzy, and she could not think. His voice has changed. That is all. He is still Grey. She heard the ominous jangling that was armed men—leather and horse bits and guns slung across shoulders. Dreams and unreality clung to everything. She must wake up. He is still Grey. Do not panic like a silly schoolgirl.

Grey knew what must be done. He was the still point in chaos. She would do what he said, and trust him, and think later. “I will speak German.” That was the easy part. She matched her accent to his. To a village she had lived in, a little farther east, midway between Munich and Salzburg. The lilting speech of hills and green valleys.

“Only German from now on, Annique. Your name is Adelina Grau. I’m your husband Karl. We’ve been married six months. Adrian is your brother, Fritz Adler. Your twin brother. You come from Grafing. I’m a professor at the University of Munich, going to London to give a series of lectures at the Royal Academy.” He slipped something onto her finger. A ring. It was too large for her, with a smooth cabochon stone. Adrian had been wearing that. She knew its feel. She turned it inward so the gold of the ring appeared a plain wedding band.

“Adelina. Karl. My brother, Fritz.” A hundred times she had done this. A hundred stories. A hundred different people she had been. Already she was trying to think in German. She could do all that was required of her. “The driver?”

“Blast. Yes. Josef Heilig. He’s worked for me for ten years.”

“Josef,” she repeated. Grey was holding her upright in the seat as if he were afraid she would collapse. She would not, not in the middle of her work. Never in all her years had she given way when there was work to do.

The coach rolled to a stop with much jangling of harness and Doyle telling the horses Germanic things. Grey started huffing away, complaining. She should probably have asked what he was a professor of, but it did not matter. If anyone questioned her, or even looked at her closely, they were lost anyway.

“They are naturally officious, the French,” Grey said in his crisp, citified accent. “It was not this bad in the old days. I tell you, Fritz, the French have changed, and not for the better. No one in Paris appreciates my work. Here’s another crew of dolts in uniforms, come to impede our progress.” All the time, his arm surrounded her, infusing her with the stubborn, indomitable strength of his.

When they were stopped, Grey gave her shoulder a last squeeze and flung the door of the carriage open. “Gentlemen, how may I help you?” His French was now Parisian, heavily accented with German, and he did not sound like Grey in that voice either.

Adrian touched her arm, letting her know where he was so she had one less thing to worry about. “We’ll only stop a minute. Karl will take care of it, Adelina.” His German was every bit as flawless as her own, the accent close enough. He spoke low, into her ear, “Trust him. He’ll pull us out of this. He never fails.”

Adrian was feeling better, she thought. His voice was strong. The arm that steadied her wasn’t hot with fever. He was like a tough, wild animal, this one. He would live, if it happened the gendarmes did not kill them all. She wished saving Adrian’s life was not such an ephemeral achievement.

Adrian continued in a whisper. A German whisper. “They’re not suspicious. This looks like a routine document check. Seven men. Local troops, all of them with the weapons slung. Slouching in the saddle. Bored. We’re safe enough unless they spot something. Nobody’s going to offend Bavarians right now. They’ve just finished lunch, looks like. They’ll be in a good mood.”

How many times she had done this, assessing soldiers, holding out forged papers with a confident smile? In her Vauban days she had been part of a team like this. She remembered how it felt, five or six of them becoming a single organism, depending on each other’s wit and skill. The old feeling came back to her now. She could sense Doyle, up on the box, and Adrian, beside her. All their attention was centered upon Grey as he strolled toward the soldiers. They waited to take their cue from him.

It was good to be part of such things again. She felt every perception stretched toward Grey.

Some of the gendarmes had dismounted to talk to him. She heard boots on the dirt of the road. In the midst of the shuffling of horses, Grey managed to sound very much the stiff, patronizing professor, a pompous man, important in his own small world. “Papers? Of course you may see our papers. Josef, hand me down the red case, the Cordoba. I see no reason for stopping travelers in the middle of—”

There was a courteous explanation from one of the gendarmes. He spoke slowly, as one does to people who have not the good fortune to be French.

Grey said, “We hardly look like smugglers, my good man. Let me tell you, we don’t have smugglers at all in Munich, and if you would only…Yes, Josef, that one.”

Adrian said quietly, “You’re too pretty, Adelina. The lieutenant’s seen you. He’s coming this way, and he’s very admiring. Trouble.”

“If Grey does not want lieutenants to look upon me, he should not put me in this dress. I must be out of the carriage so I am below his eye level. Can you do this?”

“Natürlich,” Adrian said at once. She didn’t know whether this was easy or not. It didn’t matter. The important thing was that this gendarme did not realize she was blind.

Adrian played his part skillfully, of course. They would see him being solicitous as he helped her from the carriage. They would not notice that he shielded her from view with his body and found her a place to stand where she could just touch the coach, where no one could come up behind her. It was useful, too, that young women of family were treated like idiots, so it did not seem unusual he should hover over her. He leaned upon the carriage beside her. For support, she thought. He would be weak, so soon after the bullet was dug from him. Three days, four…She did not know how long it had been.

“The subprefect in Rouen signed the laissez-passer himself,” Grey was saying. “A pleasant man. He was most interested in my calculations upon the refraction of light in liquids. I gave him a copy of a lecture I delivered at Würzburg on the subject. He sealed my documents with his own hand. It is impossible that all is not in order.”

“It is not that your papers are not in order,” the gendarme said, very patient. “There is not the travel stamp from Marley-le-Grand.”

“Travel stamp? What is this travel stamp? I was told of no travel stamps.”

A pair of boots, no doubt carrying the admiring lieutenant, came closer. She kept her eyes down to the road and put her palm flat on the middle of her belly. “I think I will be sick.” She spoke German in a firm, carrying voice. “I was better when the carriage was moving. At least there was a little wind.”

“Ah.” Adrian rose to the occasion. “Poor Adelinachen. Do you think something to drink would help?”

She shook her head decisively and the hand upon her belly subtly became the unmistakable, eons-old gesture of protection for a child beneath. There would not be one among these men who would miss the significance. French gendarmes were naturally courageous as lions, but it would be a brave lieutenant indeed who pressed attentions upon a woman in the throes of morning sickness.

“Perhaps some bread? Or a dry biscuit? I’m sure we have biscuits somewhere.” Adrian was enjoying himself. She had known men like him, admirable spies, and a great nuisance to all who must work with them.

“Do not mention food. You are making it worse. How long will they stop us, Fritz?”

France had been at war with various German speakers for the last decade. The chance someone in this troop spoke at least a little German was very good. The man most likely to do so was the lieutenant whose increasingly reluctant footsteps still approached.

“I don’t think they’ll keep us long. They will eventually realize a man doesn’t take his silly young wife with him when he goes smuggling.”

“I am not silly. I hope in England everyone does not scowl so much and ask for papers all the time.” Dizziness swept across her—the drug trying to take hold. She stumbled and steadied herself upon the panel of the coach. “I wish it were not so hot. I do feel most dreadfully sick.”

“Do not be sick upon the lieutenant, Liebling.” Adrian switched to French. “Lieutenant, if we are to be stopped here much longer, is there somewhere I can get my sister out of the sun? In her condition—”

“I deeply regret the inconvenience to Madame.” The lieutenant sounded young, she thought. Young and definitely uneasy. “It should be the smallest moment only.”

“I was not told of the need for a local travel stamp. I was not informed…Excuse me, Lieutenant.” Grey walked rapidly toward them. He need not have worried so much, she thought. She could handle this.

“Fritz, what does he say? I am not sure I can…” She kept her head down and put her hand delicately to her mouth and tried to look pale.

Adrian drawled, “Karl will be most annoyed if you are unwell again. Especially upon the lieutenant’s boots.”

The lieutenant understood German. He stepped back hastily. Then Grey was in front of her, so the gendarme could not see her face, and Adrian made some remark, taking the lieutenant’s attention further away. It was a great pleasure to work this way with these clever men. It was like children playing, keeping the ball always in the air. The lieutenant did not have a chance against them.

“I was not informed of the need for a regional pass stamp upon our passports.” Grey spoke with fussy precision, shielding Annique behind him. “I was assured by my embassy in Paris they had acquired all the necessary permissions prior to our departure. Again, in Rouen, it was not made clear—”

“Yes. Yes. The stamp. It is a mere formality.” The lieutenant’s voice said he would much rather deal with Grey than with the young wife, enceinte, and a danger to his uniform no less than his dignity, however pretty she was to look upon. “You must correct this oversight at the mayor’s office in Dorterre. That is all. It is a difficult time for your wife to travel, non?”

“Difficult?” Grey paused long enough to seem puzzled. “No, no, you misunderstand. She is young and strong, Adelina. Her condition is the most natural thing in the world. Women dramatize themselves at this time.” He switched to German. “You will be better now, Adelina. No more getting sick, you understand?”

She gave her best young hausfrau nod. “Ja, Karl.” Her skin was cold and seemed to fit her badly. She did feel sick. Sometimes she surprised even herself how well she could act. “If I could perhaps sit down for a few minutes. I am not—”

“No, Adelina. It is not good for you to indulge yourself. Exercise is what is needed. A gentle walk beside the carriage for the next mile or so will make you feel much better.”

The lieutenant cleared his throat. “There’s an inn at the next village. I know it myself. A most pleasant, respectable place. Madame could repose herself there until the heat of the day passes.”

Having talked herself into it, she was now feeling decidedly unwell. “Karl, I feel so very—”

“Nonsense. I have made myself knowledgeable in this matter.” Grey sounded insufferably complacent. All the while, his grip steadied her, unwavering, iron-hard, and full of comfort. “This is a perfectly natural process and should not cause the least discomfort. Mares do not become sick. Cats do not become sick. There is no reason for women to do so. I have explained this, Adelina. There is a monograph by my friend Herr Professor Liebermann on this subject which I will read to…Adelina, what are you doing?”

She broke free and groped her way along the carriage wheel, to double over, fists pressed across her stomach, and be sick with nothing in her. She had not eaten or drunk anything for a while, it seemed. This did not stop her from being abominably ill.

“I…we will not detain you further.” The lieutenant sounded about fifteen years old and appalled. He retreated in haste. The whole lot of them, in fact—men, horses, and musketry—seemed glad to quit the area immediately.

Hooves clattered on the roadway. Grey, still being Bavarian, scolded, “Adelina, if you would simply concentrate your mind, you would not be sick. You must think of other things.” He hid her from their view. Gently, he lifted her hair away from her face and held her upright, which was more than she could manage for herself.

“Fox Cub, that was one hell of a convincing performance.” Adrian sounded exhausted. He spoke German still. So wise, they were. The cadence of a language carries farther than the words. One of the gendarmes might linger to listen and hear their voices change if they started speaking French.

“It’s that poison we’re feeding her. Adrian, get me…Good.” Grey patted a wet cloth on her face. “Finished?”

She simply nodded. It was not that it was too hard to speak German. It was that she wanted to die.

“Drink this.” Grey set something to her lips.

Not again. She knocked the glass aside and heard it shatter on the ground. She was too weak and dizzy to run. She could only put her back against the coach and cover her mouth with her arm. It would do her no good. There was no fight within her.

“Goddammit, Annique, there was nothing in that but water.”

Adrian was lazily amused, as always. “He’s telling the truth. This whole area’s swarming with armed Frenchmen. We can’t clutter up the coach with unconscious females.”

“He’s not trying to drug you,” said Doyle, up on top of the coach.

“He leaves that to you, Herr Doyle. You are a sheep-swiving, swine-dog traitor, that is what you are.” German is a lovely language for cursing.

“Now, miss, a nice young lady like you shouldn’t even know them words. You folks going to mill around here for the next hour, chatting? Let me know so I can turn the horses loose.”

“We’re leaving.” Grey switched back to French. “Adrian, get in the coach before you keel over.”

“Ever obedient to your command, oh Exalted One.” The coach dipped as Adrian climbed inside.

Grey came close. “Annique…” He molded her fingers around a cup. He poured, and the cup got heavy and cold. “It’s water. Just water. God knows you don’t have any reason to trust me, but I wish you’d drink it.”

The reality of her helplessness closed in around her. They were such clever men, these three—hard and experienced and quite ruthless. Grey was the most dangerous of all. He made her believe he wanted to be kind. Every moment it was a fight to remember he was her enemy.

Perhaps he forgot also, sometimes. It was doubtless easier for the victor to ignore the realities.

She said, “I must drink, sooner or later. I have no choice.” The cup held clean water with no taste but that of a metal flask. She drank what he had given her.

His hand on her cheek was like a flower falling onto her. “The first time, when I drugged you, it was wrong. I should have told you. I should have let you fight me. I made a mistake.”

That soft touch. He had done that before. Memories were beginning to rise like bubbles to the surface of her mind. “I remember. I was lying beside you on a blanket. I wanted to touch you. I wanted—”

“It’s time we left.”

But she remembered. She had pressed herself against him and opened her legs and throbbed with mindless pleasure. “What did I do when I was asleep? What did I do with you?”

“You dreamed. The drug takes some women that way. It means nothing.”

Were they dreams, the heat and the hunger and the shamelessness? The drug takes some women that way. In the midst of many turmoils, she must add one more. She became wanton when she slept with the drug. Even her body betrayed her to these English. Truly, it did not seem fair.

“I remember. Almost.”

The hand slipped into her hair and held her. “Nothing happened. I’d tell you if we did anything.”

She had done nothing? She remembered the smell of him under her nostrils and crying out without any restraint and twisting, twisting herself upon him. “I do not think it was a dream. I was wearing one of your shirts. I wanted it off. I wanted…”

The wanting escaped out of her memory and swept across her. In the turn of a moment, her skin was avid for him. She had never known that skin could be hungry for the touch of another skin. She turned to nuzzle his wrist. To taste him. She did not notice she was doing it till he jerked his hand away.

He breathed harshly. “Let’s get you into the coach. You don’t want this. You just think you do. You’re drugged to the eyeballs.” Now he sounded exasperated. “And you’re falling asleep standing up.”

“Grey, we have to go.” That was Doyle.

Certainly he heard all of this, and Adrian, too, inside the coach. She might as well have been stripped naked, considering the privacy she had among these men. “I do not want you. And I am not asleep.”

“Then I won’t need to lift you into the coach. You can climb up yourself. That’s right. I’ve got you. Adrian, don’t try to help. You’re going to rip your shoulder apart.”

But Adrian carried her onto the seat anyway. It could not be good for him. She would scold him when she was awake. Grey put his arm around her. “Where are we?”

“Less than an hour from Dorterre.”

“Ah. I was here two years ago.” She tried to bring to her mind a map of this coastal region, but the image shimmered and melted away. She was not used to memories that did that. “I was in the smuggler villages. Hiding.”

Grey settled her close. “Good place for it. What were you hiding from, two years ago?”

“The Vendée uprising. The last one. It was…very bad. I could not believe French soldiers would do such things to French women and children. And I had been given such orders…” Confusion swirled in her mind. Fragments of pain. Memories. “I disobeyed my orders. I would not spy on those poor people, so I ran away and hid. Everyone was very angry with me.” She rubbed her face against her arm. “I talk with this drug. I will have to remember that.”

“Those aren’t state secrets, Fox Cub. The whole world knows what Napoleon did in the Vendée.”

“I should not say so much, anyway, when my head is not clear. Did you know you do not sound at all like yourself when you speak German? It startled me altogether for a moment. It is as if there is suddenly another person in the carriage. Do not do it again.”

“I’ll try not to. Why don’t you go to sleep.”

And she was falling into sleep once more. Had he given her more of the drug, or was she being dragged down by what she already carried within her?

“I remember what we have done together. I am almost sure it was not decent.” But she let him comb her hair back with his fingers and tuck a blanket around her and arrange her at ease along the seat. “I will decide what to do about it when I am awake. Perhaps I will try to strangle you once more. Though you have the most beautiful body imaginable. Like a large animal.”

Adrian murmured, “What complex and interesting nights you two must have.”

“Shut up,” Grey said.

When she was almost asleep, Grey pulled her against his chest, cradling her possessively. Her body was used to it. She fitted against him as if there were a place there formed especially for her.