He’s alive. He’s been alive all this time.
Rage set him shaking. Or maybe he shook with cold. And maybe I’m afraid. “I’m wet clean through. That woman kept slopping buckets over me.”
“Workmanlike job of drowning you,” Hawk agreed. “Let’s get to Meeks Street before you catch pneumonia.”
A half dozen paces to the coach. Colors jostled madly, detached from meaning. Faces floated against the gray-brown buildings. Shirts, dresses, and coats flowed and rippled white, umber, cinnabar, indigo. And, in the confusion, one streak of dull sienna brown stood still.
That exact and particular burnt sienna.
Vérité. She’d made a mistake and they had her. You know better than this, girl. Never look back. Weren’t you paying attention when they taught us that?
No reason for her to be here, except that she was worried about him. Damn Vérité.
He lowered his head so she wouldn’t see his lips move. “She’s twenty feet away. To my left at ten o’clock.”
He didn’t have to say, “Don’t turn and look at her.” He didn’t have to say who “she” was. Hawker knew.
There was too much anticipation in Hawk’s voice when he said, “I’ll follow her. We get in the coach. I’ll spill out of the coach after we start.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“You can’t see.”
“If I don’t keep up, leave me behind.” He pulled himself up, through the door, into the coach while Hawk gave instructions to the driver.
Hawk climbed in behind him, already sloughing off his own coat and reversing it. “He’ll slow down past the corner.”
“You take the lead. She knows me.”
“That goes without saying. It takes somebody who knows you well to want to kill you.”
“She wasn’t trying to kill me.” It wasn’t easy, dragging his coat on over the wet shirt.
“Could have fooled me.” Hawk pulled off his hat and tossed it over. “Switch hats. You put this on.”
“Let me tie the hair back.” He found a thin black ribbon in his pocket and hobbled his hair back in a club under the hat.
“Next time, dye your damned hair. A babe in arms could spot you at a hundred yards with your hair hanging down.”
It was too hard to explain the reasons he’d come to Meeks Street without disguises. “It’s not that bad.”
“Yes, it is.”
The coach rolled to a stop and they swung out, fast, Hawk on one side, him on the other.
Cami joined the thin outer edge of the crowd, well back from the unfolding drama. Men pushed a way behind her or in front of her and stopped to satisfy curiosity or strode on impatiently, going about their business. Glimpse by glimpse, she watched Devoir deal with the damage she’d done him.
A man—a colleague from the British Service, doubtless—jostled past her and elbowed through the onlookers, swearing at them in a ripe city voice. He was brown skinned, black haired, quick moving, and annoyed. That was another face worth adding to her memory.
Devoir staggered to his feet, dripping wet, eyes slitted against the sunlight. He moved like one of the great predators, wounded but not clumsy, like a tiger who’d fallen a long way and landed on his feet, jarred and dizzy but ready to fight. She was immeasurably glad she didn’t have to face him at this moment when his inner nature was so close to the surface.
She was one of the few dozen people on earth who knew this truth about his deadliness. His Service comrades would have seen it. Cachés who’d been in the Coach House with him knew. Maybe he had enemies who’d fought him and somehow survived. Nobody else.
The two men talked, heads together, words emphatic. They were friends, then.
In the glare of midday, Devoir stood in wet shirtsleeves and an unbuttoned vest. The linen of his shirt was almost transparent where it stuck down tight to his skin. Distinct, clearly defined muscles wrapped his arms and strapped long lines across his upper chest. He didn’t have the body of one of those hearty gentlemen who rode to the foxes or took fencing lessons and sat down to a comfortable dinner every night. She knew, in some detail, what the strength of such men looked like. Devoir was muscled like a workingman—a sailor, a soldier, a bricklayer, somebody shaped by unrelenting labor. The strength of him had been formed in days of work without respite and nights with too little sleep. He was, inside the drab, ordinary clothing, inside that tanned skin, a professional, a spy to the bone.
Devoir dried his hair with a white towel, vigorously, and talked to his friend. A hackney coach drew up to the curb. The crowd parted. The two men got in and it drove away.
Devoir would go back to whatever plans and schemes he pursued at Meeks Street. She’d go about her own business. They wouldn’t meet again. She would sink into memory. He’d call her to mind once in a while, when someone mentioned betrayal.
She knew nothing of his long-ago past, but she knew this much—before he’d been taken to the Coach House, everything weak in him had already been burned away. He must have survived terrible things to become a metal, like silver, like steel, that you could hammer upon or put through the fire, and it emerged unchanged. The Tuteurs had never broken the strength at the center of him.
She watched the hackney till it turned at the corner and was lost from sight. Then she walked briskly toward Holborn, Mr. Smith’s minion sneaking along behind, surreptitious and easy to spot. With luck, he’d never notice when she circled around and started following him.
Ten
Allies are found in unexpected places.
Pax kept his eye on what he could see of Vérité, which was a six-inch swath of her cloak, a gin bottle, and the line of her shadow on the cobblestones. She’d curled herself on the steps leading down to a cellar, holding the bottle balanced on her knee. She was perfectly unobtrusive. Perfectly patient. Sixty paces beyond that, the furtive man who’d followed her out of Fetter Lane was behind the door of a tavern.
“We could take her,” Hawk said.
“Not yet.”
“I could scoop her up all by myself.” Hawk’s eyes unfocused for a minute. That was Hawk, thinking. “I’ll walk around back and come up the street behind her. You count two hundred, then make some noise. I set a knife at her throat and talk to her persuasively till she decides to be sensible. We truss her up and tuck her in an alley, quiet and neat. Then we pick up the Frenchman.”
“You’d hurt her or she’d hurt you.”
“I don’t mind hurting her some.”
“I realize that. You don’t get to do it. And none of that would be quiet. She’s Caché.”
“Not the first Caché I’ve met.” Hawker scratched his forearm through his coat. “Not the first one I’ve fought with, if it comes to that.”
Thirty yards away, Vérité lifted her gin bottle out of his sight, pretending to take a drink, then set it back on her knee. On a grimy little street like this, anyone—man, woman, or child—could find a corner and settle down with a bottle and be ignored. Folks didn’t strike up conversations with the drunken, who tended to be belligerent and less than clean. The bottle itself was a handy weapon.
“She acts like you do,” Hawker said. “Holding a bottle of gin is one of the tricks you taught me. She stalks her target with the same . . . I guess you’d call it the same flavor.”
“We were trained by the same men.”
“At the Coach House. Almost makes me wish I’d gone to school sometime or other.”
“You didn’t miss anything.”
“Latin.”
“There’s that.” He had a sudden memory of Vérité and Guerrier out on the training field, waving the stubs of broken bottles at each other, leaping around, dancing, making faces, acting like the children they were. They’d have been ten or eleven years old. Guerrier making jokes. Vérité laughing. Everybody in a circle around them, shouting encouragement, clapping.