The Spymaster's Lady

Twenty-one

REFLEX THREW HER FLAT TO THE GROUND. SHE scrambled away. There were no trees. No brush. The field was flat and without shelter. No place to hide. Nothing but darkness to protect her. She heard Robert roll away from the light of the fire.

A man rose out of the black and silent fields, silhouetted against the stars. The first gun had missed. He tucked it into his belt and traded the second pistol to his right hand and raised it.

She scuttled backwards. Spears of wheat stubble tore her skin. Her knife was under her skirt. Couldn’t get to it.

The barrel of the pistol followed her. He took careful and deliberate aim.

No chance to run. She rolled sideways. Fought the cloth of her skirt. Too slow. Too slow. For everyone, there is a last time, when they are too slow. Finally she held her knife. Drew back. Picked her target. Threw.

The explosion of the gun cracked the night. There was a flash of light. She sucked in a breath. She could not feel where she had been hit. Perhaps it was as they said, that dying did not hurt.

No. She was a fool, entirely. The man had missed a second time. Unless he was a walking arsenal, he was without guns for the moment. Her hands were wiser than she was. Already they scrabbled and dug for a rock. Found one. She pushed herself up from the ground, cradling it for the throw, straining to see.

The dark figure crumpled and folded in upon himself. He fell with the clumsiness of something from which the spirit has already departed. She was quite sure, when she went to look, that she would find him dead.

Robert ran past her, a pistol in his hand. She had not known until just this minute that he had a gun with him. He ran like water flowing, absolutely silent, to where the man lay on the ground. He bent and picked up the man’s head by the hair and then let it flop limply back.

He straightened up and looked toward her. “You’re not hurt?”

“The bullet did not touch me. Is he dead?”

“Very.” He cleaned his hand by rubbing it on the ground, then went to take one of the sticks from the fire. When he waved it back and forth, it flamed up brightly. He walked back to hold it over the rag doll thing lying on the field stubble. When he knelt, he stuck it into the ground to give him light.

“You don’t have to look at this,” he said.

But she kept walking forward. “The men Leblanc has sent to kill me…Some of them I have known since I was a little child. So I must see.” The dead man was small and dark, about thirty, and he had been shot directly through the center of the forehead. She did not think it was a merely lucky shot.

“Do you know him?” he asked quietly.

“He is entirely a stranger to me.” She looked away.

This man was gone from the circles of the world. He would do nothing, ever again, for good or evil. A final and sickening end to all he might have been. She should not care. In the aftermath of battles she had seen many dead men lying upon the ground in just this way, all of them more worthy than this assassin of women. But never had she become used to death. Never.

Robert knelt and inspected her knife where it emerged from the corpse. “You missed by five or six inches. Not surprising, given the—” He paused. Then his breath hissed out through his teeth. “You didn’t miss. This is exactly where you hit Leblanc.”

“At the insertion of the deltoid. It disables the arm, you see.”

“Annique,” he said in a strange, tight voice. “When someone has a gun pointed at you, you aim for the throat. Not his arm, not his knuckles, not his bloody toenails. His throat. Do you understand that?”

“But of course.” It was not the time to argue with him. Instead, she faced into the night and did not watch while he retrieved her knife and cleaned it on the dead man’s shirt. He did not offer the knife back to her, which was a delicate consideration on his part.

He muttered as he emptied out the pockets of the dead man. “Nothing. Nothing. Roll of string, tobacco pouch, house key.” One would think he killed men every day, he was so cool about this searching of them. Certainly, smugglers were desperate and violent men. “Another key. English money. French money. Gribeauval pistols. Those are first quality. The jacket’s French. His shirt, too. He’s someone who followed you from France.”

“But, of course. I have offended the English, certainly, but not yet sufficiently so they will kill me.”

“He’s not going to tell us anything else. Pack up. Leblanc may have ten more men lurking out there in the dark.” He was already up and striding away, untying Harding’s halter.

It took her two minutes, no more, to be ready, because she had left places in a hurry on many occasions. Since her blindness, also, she had the habit of neatness and always remembering where each small object had been put. She was ready when Robert mounted and rode forward and reached his arm down to her to draw her up into the saddle before him.

It was fortunate she was small. Harding could carry them for some time, though it could not be comfortable for him. “I did not know you had a gun. Where was it?”

“In my coat pocket. A cuff pistol by Manton. I didn’t show it to you because I didn’t want to frighten you.” Harding picked his way through the rough, plowed fields. Then they were on the road and could pick up speed.

The night was clear, with the curve of the moon in the east. It gave light enough that the trees drew long shadows across the road. Above them were ten million stars.

“Will they hang us, if they catch us?” They hanged men in England for stealing bread. Certainly they hanged them for killing people.

“No.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I am sure. That, you don’t have to worry about, Annique.”

He sat straight and stiff in the saddle. Perhaps, like her, he was still sickened and awed by the presence of death. Perhaps he had his ears tuned for the sound of hoofbeats behind, which would mean they were being followed.

“Will the farmers come to look because of the shots? Or will they be afraid?”

“They won’t be afraid. They’ll think it was someone poaching deer.”

He was right. This was England. Safe, peaceful England, where no one would think shots meant murder in the darkness.

He shifted the reins. “They won’t find him till morning. We’ll be long gone.”

They trotted, jolting painfully. Finally, they slowed to a walk and she could let go of Harding’s mane, which was a relief to both of them she was sure. She leaned against Robert’s chest. His arms went tight about her, as if he feared she would suddenly disappear from between them.

“Thank you for protecting me,” she said. “I am sorry you had to kill him, even if you are accustomed. It is drastic, to kill a man.”

“I didn’t mind. I haven’t taken very good care of you, have I? If he had carried more accurate guns, you’d be dead. I’m sorry.”

“It is the contrary, mon ami. You have saved my life twice now. That woman you feel such guilt about—the one in France long ago. Upon her behalf I will tell you that the account is closed. You may sleep well at nights.”

“Not yet.”

So stubborn a man. This one would always shoulder his responsibility and that of another dozen men as well. His band of smugglers was lucky in its leader. “As you wish. I am not wise enough to be your conscience, so I will not try.” She yawned. Now that she had stopped shaking with fear, she was sleepy. “To me you seem a good enough man for most ordinary uses.”

He shifted in the saddle, moving her to be easy against him. He was getting used to holding her, she thought. He smelled of the gun he had fired, and of fishes, of course. If she had married a fisherman and gone to live in his village, instead of becoming a spy, it might have been like this for her, riding home from some journey together. Except that she would have washed his sweater more carefully so he did not smell so much of his profession.

“My mother was right.”

“Was she?”

She felt the immense strength that was Robert behind her and on every side of her. Safe as houses—that was what the English would say. She yawned. There was no hurry to speak. What she had to say was not, after all, so earth-shattering a bit of wisdom. “She said that the bodies of all men are alike in the darkness. I did not quite believe her, but I find she was correct. This is remarkably like being held by that man in France. Why is it only Kent?”

His hold tightened further. “Why is what only Kent?”

“The others are Yorkshire or Cheshire or Wiltshire or something shire. Why is it not Kentshire?”

“They can’t all be shires.”

“Oh. That accounts for it.”

She could hear his breath move and his heart beating. He pulled his coat around her more so she would be warm. He had saved her life, and she was very tired. She let herself pretend, just for this little time and in the secrecy of her mind, that she was married to Robert and they were going home together.