Gasping, sweeping his hands in circles on the cold stone, he found his gun. Took up the dark, familiar shape.
Air knifed his throat and raked in his lungs. He grabbed the end of the pew. Pulled himself to his feet. He forced his eyes open to splinters of shattered color and indescribable pain. The doorway was an empty rectangle of agonizing light.
He staggered toward it.
They were gone. Vérité and the monster. The Merchant was out there somewhere. Alive. Loose in London. Had to find him. Had to—
Someone ran toward him, a dark shape against the light. His fingers were so clumsy it took both hands to cock the gun.
“It’s me,” Hawker said. “Don’t shoot. Where are you hit?”
“Not . . . Not hit.” He choked. He couldn’t get the words out. He pointed the gun to the ground and let it hang loose in his hand. It wasn’t doing him any good.
“Bloody hell.” Hawker pulled him forward, down the steps. Three steps. “She threw something in your eyes. Gods in hell. Your eyes.”
“Follow him. The man . . .” Words were fire and ground glass in his throat. “Go after him.”
“Right.”
The stones of the path tripped him. Hawk was under his arm, keeping him from falling.
“Water. Ten more steps. Hang on.” Hawk dragged him the last of the way, pushed him to his knees, and thrust his head into the horse trough.
He breathed water. Came up gasping. “Follow him.”
“She’s poisoned you. That bloody bitch of a woman did this to you.”
“You have to—” Coughing racked him. Twisted his lungs inside out. “The man. Go after him. Now!”
“One of my priorities has always been doing what you tell me.” Hawker raised his voice. “I need a bucket here.”
“He’s . . . French spy. Important.”
“Keeping you alive is important.”
“Kill him.” The explosion of coughing was a poker of hot iron in his lungs. He dropped the pistol, shut his arms tight around the pain in his chest, and spoke through fire and vitriol. “Find him. Kill him.”
“I’ll just do that. Kill him out of hand. Damn. And they say I’m bloodthirsty.” Hawk was talking to somebody in the crowd, giving orders. Saying, “Here’s money,” and “Take care of him.”
Hawk’s hand clasped his shoulder. “I’ll be back. If she’s blinded you, I’ll cut her fucking eyes out.”
He’ll do it. He had to say this. Had to get it out before Hawker left. “Don’t hurt her! An order. That’s an order.”
A dark shape blocked the hideously bright light. Hawk stood over him one last minute. “Hurt doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Eight
Do not consort with men who carry guns.
Cami inserted herself into the noise and confusion of Fetter Lane, slipping between stout workmen who were stolid and oblivious and nearly as good as a solid wall for concealment. The blackmailer followed her, fuming. She’d get well away from the church and its many opportunities for unpredictable violence before she talked to him.
Devoir needed—
She pushed Devoir out of her mind.
Fetter Lane was a fine noisy place to weave in and out of, smooth as a fish among waving weeds. She tossed tendrils of attention to left and right, to the traffic passing, to the laborers wheeling barrows, to men who lingered in doorways and chatted in front of shops. Under a fold of cloak, her right hand with its little knife, cum cultellulus as it were, was ready to slice or stab. She intended to be a difficult woman to hit on the head and haul away in a private carriage.
She’d given considerable thought, lately, to the business of daylight kidnapping in London. She wouldn’t attempt it on Fetter Lane, herself, but there was no reason to assume this blackmailer was equally cautious. Many things could go wrong in the next half hour. She was prey to a variety of qualms.
Her blackmailer had qualms and imperatives of his own. He caught up with her. “We’ve left a witness alive behind us. A wiser woman wouldn’t have stood in my way.”
She summoned up a Baldoni smile. “A wiser woman would have ignored your letter altogether. You write nonsense about a ‘genuine Camille’ and a code you’ve taken a fancy to. You—”
“Enough. We can’t talk in the open street.”
“On the contrary, this is a perfect place to trade confidences.”
“I did not come here to—”
She left him talking to empty air and continued toward Fleet Street. He followed, as she had known he would.
It had been a long time since she’d bamboozled a dangerous man face-to-face. She hoped she still had the knack of it. This was, after all, what she’d been born to do. To lie, befool, and cheat. If she was afraid, she’d press that fear into a small, coldly pulsing ball and set it aside from her. “Fear is meat and drink to a Baldoni. We eat fear. We thrive on it.” How often had Papà said that?
She wouldn’t think about what she’d done to Devoir.
A small boy, weighted sideways with a bucket, crossed the pavement and slopped some mess in the swale at the side of the road. A horse and rider passed on her left, trotting. The smell of cooked meat expanded from the kitchen of an inn.
She glanced back to see a man dodge horses and wagons and run to the door of the Moravian church. She could only hope he was a friend of Devoir’s and not one of the blackmailer’s confederates, taking a detour into the church with a sharp, silent knife.
She’d left Devoir easy prey.
Walk away. Don’t look back.
She matched the steps of one man, then another, hiding in the flow of the crowd. One bird in the flock. One herring in the congregation of herrings. It was a dark satisfaction to keep the blackmailer trailing after her.
He caught up. “Where do you think you’re going? I don’t plan to chase you across London.”
“Fleet Street. Just around the corner.” She didn’t pause. Didn’t bother to look at him. That would anger him, and angry men made mistakes.
Past the old inn, past half-open doors that smelled of fresh paper and held the creak of printing presses, she turned onto Fleet Street. The pamphlets and newspapers of the kingdom were printed here. Every fourth building was a bookshop. The taverns were filled with men who had ink on their hands.
She’d come here yesterday, as soon as she arrived in London, to assess possibilities and consider tactics. No actor, rehearsing a part, had ever walked the stage more carefully than she’d walked Fleet Street.
Franklin’s Bookshop set an enticing table of books just inside the front door, right beneath the big plate-glass window. She ducked into the shop to the sound of the bell above the door, walked to the far side of the table, slid her knife into the pouch beside her gun, and selected a volume at random.
The blackmailer followed. “What are you doing? Why are we here?” But he was no fool. He already knew why.
“You wish to talk in private? So do I. But I feel safer with witnesses.” . . . Even if the witnesses were the shopkeeper, absorbed in inspection of an elderly volume, and a square, sturdy woman working her way down a row of books on botany.
“You’re overly cautious.” The words were mild enough. Underneath, she heard his anger like a nail scraped across a slate.
She said, “One cannot be overly cautious.”
She lowered her eyes, as if she were reading the book she held. She could look out the wide window and see all of Fleet Street. But this time of day, no one outside could see past the reflection on the window and discover her. She’d investigated this thoroughly. “Will you give me a name to call you by?”
“I see no reason to do so.” He chose his own book. “It adds to your danger, the more you know about me.”
He must have thought she was very stupid. “So awkward to think of you as ‘that man who writes threatening letters.’”
From this carefully chosen vantage point inside Franklin’s Bookshop she could watch the corner of Fetter Lane. Anyone following her would walk just there, beside the streetlamp. Unless he’d been supremely well trained, he’d pause and look both ways on Fleet Street and betray himself utterly. Very few men were trained as she had been at the Coach House.