The Spymaster's Lady

Twenty

IN THE LIGHT OF THE THIN NEW MOON, ROBERT groomed the horse Harding. He brushed his way with care and thoroughness from mane to withers to rump and tail. From bite to kick, as it were. She thought the horse Harding liked it. He looked smug.

“You are indulgent to that horse.” She watched the outline of him against a gray sky. “He has done no work whatsoever except to walk a little.”

“I like taking care of animals.”

She supposed a life surrounded by fishes and smuggled brandy would not allow time to care for livestock. “Is he from your home, the horse Harding? Perhaps one that your brother bred, who is so fond of horses?”

“Spence? No, Harding isn’t one of his. I picked Harding up in Dover. Spence would like him though. If I brought him home, he’d try to win him in one of his card games. He’d cheat, most likely, since it’s just family.”

“It must be interesting to have brothers and sisters. I have often thought so.”

For four long days Robert had laid his whole history out before her, like a gift. It was as if he’d waited all his life for the chance to tell his story to a grubby French spy walking on the dusty roads in Kent. She knew now of the house in Somerset where he had grown up, where his mother and father and the older brother Spence and a young sister still lived.

She could picture it, that huge old farmhouse with the horses in the stable and the chickens his mother was proud of, who each had names and were of a special breed from Constantinople and not at all like other chickens. Robert had, she knew now, a house of his own called Tydings where an aunt looked after him, and another brother in the army and three other sisters, younger than he was, but married, who did not live at home.

It was a joy and a burden to know all this. She would remember it when they parted and it would make her infinitely sad.

They were encamped far back from the road, deep in the stubble of harvested fields. She turned the embers with a pointed stick. She had built such clean, invisible fires a thousand times. There was little smoke. No sparks flew into the night to show where they were.

Robert finished with his pampering of Harding and came to sit beside the fire with her. “That’s a pretty tune. What is it?”

“What? Oh. I had not realized I was humming. It is a children’s song.” She sat back on her heels. “Let me think…In English it would go, ‘Let the gutters flow with the blood of the aristocrats. Let us wash our hands in their entrails. Let all who stand against the voice of the people perish like rats.’ There is much more of it.”

“Good God.”

“Most exactly. It is a pretty tune, though. It is sad that my voice is like a jackdaw, as many people have told me. We used to sing that one, jumping rope. ‘The fat aristos shall perish, one and two. The traitors shall die, three, four.’ We were all without exception bloodthirsty when I was six. That was the year we took the Bastille. It is strange to know all those boys I played with are in the army now, or dead.”

“An interesting time.”

“It was to stand at the pivot of history, to be in Paris in those days. Dreams were as solid as the stones of the street. A thousand possibilities. That is what you English do not understand. We French will not stop until the whole world is conquered for the Revolution. Napoleon puts his harness upon those dreams and drives them for his own purposes. You do not know at all what you are up against.”

“You think the peace won’t last?”

She knew the peace would not last. The Albion plans set a date for the invasion. She knew the very road troops of the Grande Armée would march upon. Some of them, a third part of the army, would murder and pillage their way down this one. “It is Napoleon’s passion to conquer, not to rule. There will be no peace.” The fire made a comfortable hiss and sputter as she flipped ember after ember. She had seen houses and villages burned till they were just this. Embers. “He prepares again for war, even as we sit here.”

“Maybe he’ll pick some other country to invade, one with less water around it and a smaller navy.”

“And a better climate.” It had rained upon them today for a time. And yesterday as well. She did not like to be wet so continually.

“One of those Roman writers said something about the rain in England. Deformed by rain…something like that.” It had surprised her at first that Robert Fordham, smuggler and yeoman’s son from Somerset, should have the education he did. Perhaps he read much when he was at sea.

“That is Tacitus. He said the sky in this country is deformed by clouds and frequent rains, but the cold is never extremely rigorous. I do not suppose matters have changed much in a thousand years. Certainly there is still rain.”

He had taken off his black sweater to groom the horse Harding and unbuttoned his shirt far down his chest and rolled up his sleeves over his forearms. He was brown, as men become who work upon the sea, with a roughness of skin from wind and salt water. In the dim yellow light of the fire, he was a dark and massive form, with the strongness of rocks and tree trunks, uncompromising and very beautiful.

Once she could have admired him, or admired the strength of his horse, and it would have been the same. She had still possessed innocence of a sort. Her time with Grey had made her wiser and infinitely more foolish. Now when she looked upon Robert Fordham, she brooded and yearned like a schoolgirl and felt the most shameful heatedness inside her.

She did not make herself turn away and gaze upon something that would disturb her less. She had become weak.

The fire developed nicely. Soon it would be useful to cook upon. “It is not right that we French should invade here.” She glanced across at Robert. “Oh, you smile, but that is not obvious if one is French. Of a certainty, you English would be better off without your foolish German princelings who spend so much public money. You should have a republic and voting by everyone.”

“Is that what Napoleon would bring us?” Robert said softly.

“That is how it would begin.” Her life would be simpler if she did not think so much. “Napoleon would make some things better here. But at a great cost. When he comes to this green island, he will burn all those pretty farmhouses we passed today.”

“You can’t stop it, Annique.”

But she could. It was her choice whether those farmhouses would burn and the plump farm women and the barefooted children burn with them. It had become her decision when Vauban set the Albion plans into her hands in that inn parlor in Bruges, six months ago.

If she betrayed the Albion plans to England, she would be a traitor. She would die for it. Vauban would be pulled from his bed to go to disgrace and death upon the guillotine. And France would be at great peril from the detailed knowledge she gave to the British. But the children in that white farmhouse would live.

Or perhaps not. She could not know. Perhaps different children, equally innocent, would die instead. This meddling in the fate of nations was a grim affair.

Even a year ago, she would have gone to London, to Soulier, and laid everything in his lap and followed his orders. But she was not a child anymore, and her answer could not be that simple.

She turned a small square coal of glowing orange over carefully on its side, giving it most considered attention and accomplishing no purpose whatsoever. She need not decide today, after all.

Robert searched into the basket he had acquired an hour ago from that very farmhouse down the road. Under the red flowered cloth that was tucked across, it contained the most lovely things—sausages and bread and small brown eggs. This was one more thing she did not know how to deal with.

She watched him investigate. “I would not have dared to ask for these foods. You are very courageous, did you know.”

“Braving the dread Kent farmer in his lair?” He spread the cloth between them. “They’re not so dangerous.”

“He might have set his dogs upon you. Me, I do not like dogs.”

“I’ll remember that.”

The hairs of his chest were gold where the firelight struck them. She imagined how it would be if she reached across to his shirt and opened the last buttons and drew it off of him. She could almost see herself doing this.

He would feel furry, with those hairs, but his skin would be of the toughness of leather. Grey had worn a leather coat. He had wrapped it about her, keeping her warm as she wandered in and out of the drug. If she lay her cheek upon Robert, he would feel like that leather, with softness that went no farther than the outermost glide across his skin. He would be hard muscle underneath, as Grey was. His hands would be like Grey’s hands, too, rough from the work he did, only great carefulness making them soft upon her. If he put his hands upon her breasts…

She closed her eyes. Her body clenched immodestly and moistened. She did not know whether she was desiring Grey or desiring Robert. She was most probably going mad.

“Bread. Sausages.” Robert took bread from the basket as he named it and laid it on the red cloth. The sausages he skewered on a forked stick. “I’ve had enough hedge berries and sour apples. It’s no life for a man.”

“Bien sûr. But you have paid that farmer. I do not have the money to buy such a meal, having only three pounds—”

“And sixpence. Yes, you told me. I have a good bit more than that.”

“You are to be felicitated. But I cannot take this food and not pay my share. And I cannot pay my share.”

“You face moral qualms.”

“They are everywhere if one goes looking for them. Though perhaps I am being silly.”

“Sounds like it to me. And eggs.” The eggs were in the bottom, in the nest of straw the farmer’s wife had made for them. “There was a man who could tell eggs apart. At Delphos.”

He was trying to distract her. He would discover that did not work. “The story is from Montaigne. It goes, ‘He never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell which had laid it.’ I am not sure I believe that. But then, I do not know any hens with such intimacy. Montaigne does not help me to know what to do about this food, though he was very wise, of course. I have already taken whelks from you. I am not accustomed to being fed by strange men.”

“Do you think I’m trying to seduce you with boiled eggs?” He picked one and offered it to her, holding it up in three fingers.

“Do not be the fool.” She suddenly felt very cross. She took the egg from him, and his fingers did not touch hers, not one tiniest bit. She could have been a cloud of vapor for all the interest he took. “You are not in the least trying to seduce me, you.”

“No.” He smiled. He was perfectly friendly, and he did not desire her in the least. It was a great annoyance. “Lovely Annique, if you were camped out here with your Gypsies…” She had told him that part of her life, since he had told her about growing up on his farm in Somerset. “…would you sneak over to that nice farmer’s henhouse and steal some of his eggs tonight?”

“Not eggs. The Rom do not eat such things. Did you know you can tell a cooked egg from a raw one when you juggle them?” She tossed the egg in the air and caught it a few times. She had showed Robert her juggling while they walked. It had impressed him, she thought. “The chickens should be nervous.”

“Then pretend you’re stealing this food from me. That settles your moral qualms.”

“You make the specious argument. But it is a complex one.” She cracked the egg upon the side of the basket and threw the shells into the fire.

“Here, thieve some bread from me, too. It’s a good fire. Learn that from the Gypsies?”

“I do not think I ever made fires at all when I was Rom, or had anything to do with them much. The women do not like children poking their fires, getting ashes in the food. This trick…” She circled her stick around the hole she’d dug into the ground which contained the fire and kept it below eye level and invisible in the night. “This I learned from an old soldier in the Tyrol. For all I know he is still out there in the army, surviving. He was almost unkillable himself, but I do not think he was much good at fighting. He avoided it most remarkably for a man in uniform. He did not like to kill people, he told me.”

“Did you kill any, when you were being a soldier?” He glanced up from roasting sausages and, as it was so often, his expression was unreadable.

“Do you know, I don’t think I ever killed anybody at all, except doing surgery on them.” She stirred at the fire. “Some men I was angry at may have died eventually, because I put knife wounds in them, but that is a thing one can do nothing to prevent. There is altogether too much killing in this world, I think.”

“I have to agree with that.”

“That was the last thing of importance my father told me before they hanged him. That killing is the stupid answer, not the wise one. I have found it to be true.”

“You’ve never killed?” His eyes were sharp upon her, searching, weighing.

“Never that I know.” She looked at him, over the fire. “But I will tell you something that is not so pretty about me, Robert. That man, the first one who attacked me…I cut the tendon at his thumb. It does not mend, such a wound. He will not use his right hand again to hold a knife or for anything else. Not ever in his life. I am not a nice person, me.”

“Perhaps his next victim would disagree with you. There, you’ve set me one of your moral conundrums. Have a sausage while I think about it.” He held it out to her on the end of the stick so she could wrap bread around it and pull it off. This was as close as he would come to her.

He would not touch her. He had not spoken of a wife, but it was most probable he had one and was being faithful to her. She was a lucky woman, his wife.

She had learned Robert Fordham by heart in these days they had walked so far together. She knew the path of every wrinkle across his forehead. There was a curved, faint scar on his left hand from some fishhook he had treated carelessly. She knew, right to the center of her, how he moved. She could not breathe sometimes when he twisted to look behind them on the road, and his muscles danced like poetry.

This was the gift her memory held for her. She had Robert inside her now, even the lines of the palms of his hands. She would not forget him. “We will be in London tomorrow.”

“Before noon, if we keep up this pace. Were you planning to spend the night under a bridge?”

“There, or in an alley. I will not sleep much. My small business will take only a few days. Then I will leave quickly. A city is not kind to a woman alone and without money.”

“I’ll show you a place I know near Covent Garden. A safe place.”

How much she wished to stay with him in his safe place near the Covent Garden. She took a bite of her sausage and chewed. “It has allspice in it, this sausage. I find English cooking interesting at times. Robert…” She was glad it was dark. There are words one can say in the dark that cannot be said when it is light. “You may not come with me into London. Early tomorrow, when we enter London, I shall send you from me, on your journey to Somerset.”

“No, you won’t.”

She sighed. “You know, do you not, that I desire you.”

“Yes.”

“I was certain you did, for I have not been concealing this very cleverly. At first, I did not perfectly recognize what had happened to me, and later it became too confusing. It is not important, you understand.”

“I know.”

“This comes to me because you have saved my life, I think. And because of a man who was with me in France. I did not tell you about him.”

“No, you didn’t.”

She ate slowly, trying to find the right words. “He was a kind of madness that struck me because I was alone and friendless and in great danger. He changed me. He left me…I suppose you would say he left me ready for you. When you saved my life in that courageous way and are so handsome and strong, I fall into a foolishness.” She thought for a while. “I came to love him in a complicated way. I still do. But I find it is not any protection against desiring other men, which is awkward and humiliating. My mind is in a state of great turmoil. You must not pay too much attention to what my stupid body is doing.”

“I won’t.”

She waited a while before she said the next thing. “I have not wanted men before. Not even one. It is a grave moral weakness to desire two men. I had not known I was this sort of person.”

“You aren’t.” His words were clipped, dry, and unsentimental. “You haven’t done anything, so you aren’t that kind of person. Forget it.”

A smuggler would see things so simply. “That is an interesting philosophy and most likely true in its way. You must go away from me, Robert. You have fulfilled your commission to your conscience when I cross the London Bridge. I do not think I can stand much more of this.”

“I’m not going to touch you. And I’m large enough to fight you off if you forget yourself.”

She did not laugh, because that would only encourage him. “If I live to be very old, perhaps to a hundred or so, I may understand this thing that is between men and women. What I do know is that touching or not touching does not matter between us. We have gone beyond that. Tomorrow we make an end. It is also not good for you to be in this state, I think.”

“‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them…’”

“‘But not for love.’ I am less sure of that than I was a week or two ago when my life was inexpressibly simpler. I do not think one dies. One may well go insane, however.”

“I’ll take my chances.” He pulled his own sausage off the stick and folded it neatly in bread. He wasn’t laughing at her exactly, but there was an amused look behind his eyes. “I’ll see you settled safe in London. We’ve come this far together, what does an extra day matter?”

He made it sound sensible. Did he know in the least how easy it was for him to convince her of anything?

“It is at times like this that I miss my mother.” It was easy also to speak simple truths to him. It was a sign of how dangerous he was to her. “It has been six…no, five weeks now since she died. I keep thinking, ‘I shall tell her this,’ or ‘I shall ask her this,’ and then I remember I shall never see her again. Maman knew all there is to know about men. She was very wise. She would tell me not to stay near to you at all, not for one hour.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Annique.”

She couldn’t help laughing, though her mouth still had sausages in it. “That is what he said to me. Almost exactly that. The man in France who was unkind to me and whom I loved in a way—he said that. You are a bit like him, did you know?”

The flames made his eyes glitter. “Am I?”

“It is that your bodies are alike. A little, anyway. He is even larger than you, I would say, and immensely strong. Though you are strong, too, of course. But you are different in spirit. He had no softness in him at all, not truly, not anywhere inside him, which is as it should be in a person in his position. He is older than you, too.”

“Older?” Robert stared at her, fascinated.

“He is very senior in his work. He must be eight or ten years older than you, I would think. He is fiercely determined, as well, though you are that yourself, a little, except that he does not go about it so nicely. Also he does not smell of fishes. That is from your sweater, you comprehend, which is a beautiful sweater and skillfully knitted but in need of washing—”

The bullet hissed by. It brushed her hair like an insect. Then the blast of sound slapped her skin.