The Spymaster's Lady

Twenty-four

HE CLOSED THE DOOR SOFTLY BEHIND HIM. Anaique slept on the couch in the study, wrapped in a white Turkish robe—his damp, sweet, vulnerable, and deadly French agent, exhausted from making love with him.

Miraculously and at last, she was his. He could solve everything else, now that he’d got that right. He wanted to grin like a fool and caper around the halls. Pity a Head of Section couldn’t do that.

“There’s nineteen beds in this house,” Doyle was waiting for him, leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest, his ugly face set in lines of amusement, “if you count the cots in back of the kitchen. None of ’em’s good enough for you. You do it in the bathtub. God’s cat.”

That was the trouble, living with spies. They figured out every damn thing. No privacy. “We need to get her some clothes. I can’t keep her in a bathrobe.”

“Maggie’ll bring over some bits and pieces. They’re close enough in size.”

“Except Annique is what I’d call plum-size, very tasteful and understated.” Adrian came up, light on his feet. He wore his gentleman’s togs—charcoal jacket, dove-colored waistcoat, ruby stickpin in his cravat. He didn’t look like a man who’d had a bullet picked out of him ten days ago. “Maggie, on the other hand, is more—”

“And you, me lad, can stop right there,” Doyle said.

Grey needed a look at Tacitus and Montaigne. One final confirmation. They’d be on the shelves in the library. He started upstairs. “Where’s Giles?”

“I sent him to mop up.” Doyle allowed a short, innocent pause. “Seems the bathroom’s an inch deep in water somehow.”

“Send him to the office when he’s done. I shot a man in Kent. We have to notify a magistrate.”

“This spree of lawlessness you’ve embarked upon…” Adrian trailed them upstairs, shaking his head. “Fletch sends his compliments and suggests you return his nag. I take it the beast is tied outside.”

“Right. More work for Giles. And remind Ferguson to serve coffee at dinner, not tea. Annique doesn’t like tea. I’m glad you two made it out of France.”

“I’m glad she didn’t crack your skull on the way up from Dover,” Doyle said equitably. “For one thing, you can sort this mess that piled up while you were depopulating the countryside. First off, Military Intelligence knows we got Annique. They want her.”

“They can go to hell.”

“With bells on. However, Colonel Reams has invited himself to dinner. A conference, he calls it.”

“Then I’ll tell him to go to hell myself.”’

Doyle and Adrian followed Grey down the hall and into the big front room. Sun poured through the curtains, glinting off the collection of blades Service agents had hung up on racks over the years. Big leather chairs faced the fireplace. The Times lay open on one table, a deck of cards and a long clay pipe on another. Hundreds of books were jammed and stacked in bookcases that covered two walls.

Grey said, “I need Montaigne and Tacitus.”

“Who are…?” Adrian said.

“A Frenchman and one of them Romans, respectively.” Doyle wandered to the shelves beside the fireplace. “Dead a good while, which makes me wonder why I’m looking for them. Now Montaigne…when last seen he was somewhere around here.” He stretched a spatulate hand across books. “Try over there for Tacitus. Bound in red, if I remember. Fletch told us about Annique’s eyes. There’s a doctor with a cartload of degrees wants a look at her. His report’s on your desk. The good news is that it’s probably permanent. And some news that’s not so good. Leblanc’s in England.”

“We met. He tried to knife Annique in an alley in Dover.”

“Old news then. He brought twenty men across the Channel, give or take. The military’s been rounding ’em up along the south coast since Monday, which is how they found out about Annique.”

“Soulier’s spitting tacks, bless his devious French heart.” Adrian propped himself on the arm of a chair and pulled out an eight-inch throwing knife and began to pare his nails. “Leblanc has come to our fair shores without orders and without reporting to Soulier. Much fluttering in the dovecotes of French intelligence.”

“An’ wouldn’t it be nice if Soulier killed Leblanc for us.” Doyle worked his way down the shelf. “No love lost there.”

“You can pass this along—Leblanc’s wounded, upper right arm. Henri Bréval’s cut across the knuckles. I may have cracked his collarbone. The rest is Annique’s work.”

“Lethal chit,” Adrian said. “And you’ve brought her here to wreak havoc upon Service personnel. How exciting.”

Doyle grunted, looking amused.

“Speaking of our lethal chit.” Adrian inspected his nails. “I ask myself…Why the tub? She’s agile as a little eel, of course, but you don’t want to go taking the first poke at a virgin in a couple feet of water. Makes ’em nervous. With a virgin, what you do is pick a flat spot. Dry, for one thing. Soft, if you can manage it. Then you—”

“I can do without your expert advice on deflowering virgins.” Grey felt his face get hot. “This isn’t a topic for discussion.”

Doyle slid a lazy glance. “You been told off, lad.”

“And…” an edge came into Adrian’s voice, “…you don’t leave the girl to sleep it off alone. You stick around to be there when she wakes up.”

“God’s chickens,” Doyle muttered.

Hawker didn’t like the way he was treating Annique. Fair enough. He didn’t like it much, himself. “She needs to dig away at the bars for a while to convince herself I’ve got her trapped. Then she’ll take some time getting used to the idea. She won’t want me there while she does it.”

“And you don’t get kicked in the guts if she gets testy,” Adrian said dryly.

“That, too.” Mostly, he wouldn’t be tempted to make love with her again while she was still sore.

Tacitus was on the bottom shelf, bound in red, in three volumes. It was in Volume One. When he paged through, the passage leaped out at him. “…deformed by clouds and frequent rains, but the cold is never extremely rigorous.” She’d got it right, word for word. That was the positive proof, if he needed it. But he already knew what he dragged into Meeks Street this morning. He slid the book back into the shelf. “We lock up the house, double-lock it. Every key turned.”

“Already done,” Doyle said, “the minute she walked in.”

This might be the safest place in England. It still wasn’t safe enough, not for what Annique was carrying. “Leblanc has men and money. He wants her dead. How does he get to her?”

Hawker’s knife stilled. “There’s the old standby…snipers.”

Doyle moved along the shelf, checking titles. “We put on extra guards. We watch the neighborhood. She stays away from windows.”

“Then there’s setting the place on fire. Land mines in the garden. Rockets.”

Rockets. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “How hard is it to get rockets in London?”

“Not easy,” Doyle said. “Could be done.”

“Artillery through the front door. Prussic acid in the next shipment of coffee beans.” The knife disappeared into Hawker’s sleeve. He pushed himself to his feet and started pacing the Bokhara rug. “Satchel bomb over the wall. Cobras down the chimney. Poison darts. Tunneling in from the basement. Armed thugs at the back door. Your standard mysterious package delivery.”

No one more inventive than the Hawker. “You can’t get cobras in England, for God’s sake. Talk to Ferguson about the food, though. That’s a possibility.”

“I know where to get cobras,” Adrian said.

“You would.” Doyle pulled out a book. “And here’s our old friend Montaigne. Why are we looking at Montaigne?”

“I want a reference. The man at Delphos who could tell eggs apart. Where is it?”

“Crikey. Well, you picked one I know. ‘Essay on Experience.’ About in the middle. I had to copy it out once, at Eton. Forget what I did to earn that particular punishment.”

“You’re looking up one of Annique’s clever sayings?” Adrian had taken himself over to the window. He was studying Meeks Street, probably working out ways to kill somebody.

“One of mine.”

“Here it is.” Doyle read, “‘…yet there have been men, particularly one at Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell which had laid it.’ Is that what you want? Why are we interested in French philosophy?”

“She knows that line.”

“She’s an educated woman. I suppose she—”

“I offered her three words, and she came back with the rest. I picked a bit out of Tacitus about the weather, obscure as hell. She knew that one, too. I’ll bet I could open any of these books, anywhere, and she’d recite the page for me. She has them by heart. When did she do that?”

Doyle flipped the pages under his thumb and closed the book and set it down. “It shouldn’t be. You’re right.”

“She’s been traipsing around Europe, following armies. When did she go to school and sit down and learn these books word for word?”

“She didn’t. I should have seen this.” Doyle looked disgusted with himself. “She has one of those trick memories. I’ve heard about them. Never actually met one.”

Adrian slammed the wall with the flat of his hand. “Maps. She told me she had maps in her head. I wasn’t listening.”

“That’s why they sent a ten-year-old into army camps.” Doyle’s eyes narrowed over a hard expression. His oldest girl was ten. “They couldn’t pass up the chance to use that trick memory. They dressed her as a boy and put her to work in those hellholes the first minute she could survive on her own.”

She’d survived. What was it like to live like that, remembering every freezing night, every forced march, every death? Never forgetting. No wonder she filled her brain with philosophers. “She’s carrying it all,” he circled his hands as if he were holding her, the smooth forehead, the soft, dark hair, “inside her head.”

They stood, looking at each other, absorbing the implications.

“Do the French know what she is?” Doyle answered himself. “Not Fouché. He’d have her locked in a cage. Or dead. Probably dead. Who knows about this?”

“The mother had to know.” Adrian was pacing again, crossing between the long windows and the fireplace. “And Vauban. Both of them dead now. It’s likely Soulier knows. He picked her up and put her to work when she was half grown. What do you wager they used her as a courier—Soulier and Vauban—back and forth across France, keeping messages in her head?” He tapped his fingers as he walked, one by one, against his thumb. “Not Leblanc. He doesn’t know.”

The mother, Vauban, and Soulier. The three of them using her to pass secrets around. She was the perfect hiding place. Somebody—Vauban probably, back in Bruges, for some god-awful reason—had decided to use her to store the ultimate secret. “She has the Albion plans.”

“Will you stop that?” Adrian swung around and confronted him. “I don’t give a damn what Leblanc said. I don’t give a damn she was in Bruges. She didn’t kill our men in cold blood.”

“I agr—”

“Vauban wouldn’t send that girl out to kill under any conceivable circumstances. No chance. Not the remotest. She wouldn’t stick a knife in somebody’s throat for a pile of gold. How could you spend two weeks with her and not know that? I saw it in six minutes.”

“I agree. It isn’t in her.”

“She…You agree?”

Nice to catch Hawker off guard for a change. “I watched her not kill four men between Paris and London when they were doing their damnedest to kill her. Very convincing. There is no murder in the woman.”

“Oh. Well then.” Adrian tugged his jacket straight. “Sweet reason prevails.”

“But she is carrying the Albion plans.” He held his hand up. “No, listen to me. I’ve seen them inside her. She gave herself away fifty times, walking up from the coast. She knows the invasion route, foot by foot.” She hadn’t thought to hide that knowledge from a sailor she’d trusted, who’d saved her life, who had nothing to do with spies and secrets. “At least some of the troops will be taking the Dover Road. I watched her figure out exactly where people are going to die when Napoleon invades, which streets, which hillsides. I saw the villages burning in her eyes. She has the plans.”

Adrian was mutinous but silent.

“A heavy weight for someone like her,” Doyle said.

“It’s eating her alive. She could be that Spartan boy with a fox hid under his shirt, gnawing away.”

“We don’t have any choice, of course.” Doyle picked the stack of playing cards from the table and began shuffling them from one big hand to the other. “We take the plans from her. She’s lucky it’s us doing it and not Military Intelligence. Reams isn’t above using torture.” He spread the cards in a fan and closed them up again.

“Is that a problem?” Adrian flung it over his shoulder and started pacing again. “We haven’t misplaced the thumbscrews, have we? Myself, I like a heated knife and that thin skin between the toes. Sensitive spot on women. I always say there’s nothing a clever man can’t do with a knife.”

“You’re annoying Robert,” Doyle observed mildly.

“Duly noted.”

Annique had recruited a pair of strong protectors. Good.

No sound came from the study downstairs. She’d be awake by now, exploring the edges of the box he’d locked her in, soft-footing around the room with her robe knotted over that miraculous white body and her mind all sharp-edged and racing. She’d be scared. He couldn’t do this to her and not scare her. Even if she was just standing there, part of her would be battering against the bars, frantic to escape. It was his job to keep those bars in place.

“No force. No pain.” But they already knew that. “No threat. No coercion. We don’t even have to argue hard. She’s going to talk herself into doing what we want. Why do you think she’s in England? She’s about to give us what we want. Freely.”

Doyle turned the idea over. “She didn’t just come to hide. She didn’t come here looking for safety. She’s here to stop the French fleet from sailing.”

“Being what she is, she can’t do anything else. She’s going to weigh the damage those plans can do to France against the hell that the invasion will be. She’ll give us the plans. When it comes down to another one of Napoleon’s bloodbaths, or helping England, she’s going to go with England. Whoever gave her the plans must have known that.”

That was something else he’d find out. What the hell had happened in Bruges, that Annique ended up with the Albion plans? “I almost wish we were using coercion. Then she could hate me, instead of herself.”

“Oh, that’s deep, that is,” Hawker muttered.

Doyle said, “Waste o’ breath, warning you. Always was.”