The Spymaster's Lady

Eighteen

GREY CAUGHT UP WITH FLETCH WELL OUTSIDE Dover on an open, uphill stretch of the Canterbury Road. The sea was a flat, blue line on the horizon. Fletch had hitched a ride in a vegetable cart, keeping a good ways back, curled up in the cabbage leaves with a pocket spyglass. Imaginative man, Fletcher.

It was Fletch’s horse under him. No point in being Head of Section if you couldn’t borrow a horse now and then.

He pantomimed scissors as he passed the wagon, cutting Fletch loose from following Annique. Being the peaceable man he was, he ignored Fletch’s return gesture. Fletch would get his bloody horse back, eventually. He clucked the gelding to a brisk walk.

He saw the moment she spotted him. Awareness slid across the distant figure, like the stillness of a deer scenting its stalker. Half a second, and she relaxed, just as subtly. She’d figured out who he had to be. She did it all without turning back to look. A hell of an agent, Annique Villiers.

When he came up level with her, she said, “You are following me.”

“No, I’m not. I’m right beside you.” He dismounted and strolled along, holding the reins.

He’d never been more impressed by her. In that dull homespun, with the shawl pulled up over her head, she blended into the brown and dun countryside like a quail. She’d become a dusty farm woman. A man could ride right past and never get a glimpse of her beauty.

“That is sophistry, Robert Fordham. Why are you following me?”

“To protect you. Until you get to London.”

“The problem is that I talk too much.” She sighed and kept walking, looking straight ahead. “If I would keep my mouth closed, I would not get in these situations. You are all that is kind, monsieur, but I do not need your protection.”

She’d called him “monsieur” in France. He didn’t want to rouse those memories. “Robert.”

“Robert,” she agreed readily. With every minute that passed, to her every sense, he was becoming “Robert.” He was becoming familiar. Soon it’d be impossible for her to see him as anything but Robert. “Robert…” His name, in her mouth, was a caress with a long, warm roll of the r at both ends. “I have played dangerous games all my life, and no one has succeeded in killing me yet, not even Monsieur Leblanc, who is strenuous and resolved. I would very much rather you left me alone.”

Never in this world. “No.”

“No? That is all you will say? Eh bien, if I talked as little as you do, I would be in considerably less trouble.”

She stopped to pick one stalk from the long grasses that grew beside the road, carefully selecting it from among the others. She started off again, peeled away at the stem with a thumbnail. “I will explain something, Mr. Fordham. I am beyond measure grateful to you for saving my life, but I will not sleep with you.”

He’d had a taste of this devastating directness while he held her prisoner in France. “I didn’t ask you to. Are you always this blunt?”

She shrugged. “It is this English. It is impossible to be subtle and beautiful in this language, which is not delicate like French. Besides, I have spoken almost no English since I was a little child. Only read it.” She gestured with the grass stem. “I must say this, even if I am indelicate. I will not lie with you, Robert. You waste your time…unless it is your pleasure to hurt someone and force them.”

“I don’t hurt women.” That was a lie. He’d hit Annique hard enough to leave her doubled over, gasping. He had an ironic truth to give her though. “I’m not going to touch you.”

“Then I do not understand why you are here.”

“There are three men trying to kill you.”

“Many more than three, Robert.” She thought about that for a hundred yards, nibbling on grass, glancing at him keenly once in a while. “Do you know, I believe you are sincere. But it is not necessary. I am the old hand at this.” She took the grass stem out of her mouth and rolled it back and forth between her fingers. The fluffy head on the end went whirling out and out like some child’s toy. “You are…Oh, you are very tall and strong and brave and a good fighter. But these are entirely committed and evil men who pursue me. It is my own acts which have set them after me, not any concerns of yours. I would not like to see you get hurt.”

The idiot woman was worried about a husky brute of a man, instead of taking care of herself. “I don’t get hurt easily. May I give you a ride? Harding here…” He had no idea what Fletch called the horse. His Latin teacher at Harrow had been named Harding. “…would be happy to carry you.”

“You have not listened at all to what I say. I will tell you that England is an even stranger place than I had heard. I do not believe Englishmen toss aside all their concerns to walk to London with some woman they have met in an alley. It is not reasonable.”

Tricky, this business of lying to Annique.

“You remind me of someone I knew once. A woman.” He hoped the hesitation sounded like looking at old memories instead of inventing as he went along. “Not in England. She was French. I treated her badly, and I can’t go back and undo it.” That was close to the truth. What he’d already done to Annique ate at him like acid. Maybe regret came through in his voice. “It’s too late.”

“‘But that was long ago and in another country,’” she quoted softly, “‘and, anyway, the wench is dead.’” She darted another shrewd glance at his face. “I wondered why you studied me so strangely back there in the town.”

“You look like her.”

“I do not want to look like someone else. I have troubles enough of my own without a…a doppelgänger making more for me.”

Maybe it wasn’t convincing. He waited, remembering to keep his breath even. Making himself look at the horse, at the ground. Men telling lies like to look you in the face.

“I have made mistakes,” she said after a long time, “which haunt me at night and which I cannot erase.” She ran her thumbnail down the long stem of grass, frowning. “You saved my life. All the same, I cannot believe—”

“I was leaving Dover tomorrow.” Rational, logical Annique. Give her a practical, sensible reason, and it would convince her. “Headed home for a visit. To Somerset. I have to go through London anyway. I’d be glad of the company.”

He made himself stop there. When it came to lies, as Hawker always said, “Don’t embellish.”

“Ah. It is not so big a change, that, to leave one day early. To you it would seem like fate, perhaps, when I am presented under your nose. I am not inclined to believe such things myself, but I know many people who do.”

She looked out over the fields, thinking abstruse, clever Annique thoughts.

Take it on trust, Annique, just this once. Believe me. Lead me to the Albion plans. Make it easy for both of us.

Then she nodded. “I will travel with you to London, if this is what you must do to clean yourself of the past. I owe you that much. But Robert…you would be wiser to return to your ship and your family and forget this woman who has long since made her peace with God.”

“If I get you safely to London, that’s enough. That’s what I have to do.”

She must have caught the determination in his words, but it didn’t frighten her. Good. He was damned sick of frightening her.

“Bon. We will travel together then, till London. I will be grateful for the company.”

She turned her face to the north, to the length of road, measuring distances under the sky. He was seeing the real Annique Villiers at last. This was what she’d been for all those years, trailing across Europe in the raggle-taggle tail of the army, in boy’s clothing, nibbling something plucked from a field. A pair of larks sprang up from the field beside them and flew a complex pattern toward a stand of trees. She brightened, gazing after them, delighting in the moment, squirreling another memory away inside her.

“I will like England.” She started walking again. “I have been here only four hours, and already I have met three men trying to kill me and one who bought me whelks. For better or worse, this is not a country that ignores me.”