“Earlier I was irked when she tried to blind you. Now that she’s aimed gunfire in my direction it has become my own personal ire.” Reaching the end of his chosen path, Hawk turned and paced back. “Why here? Why this place?”
Doyle rolled the ivory toothpick between his fingers. “A friend nearby? Somebody in trouble goes to a friend.”
“This quarter’s crawling with Frenchmen,” Hawk said. “Émigrés, spies, royalists, the scaff and raff of the Revolution.”
But it didn’t feel right. “That’s not why she’s here.” He ran his sleeve across his face, feeling the grate of leather over his eyelids, smelling the rain. “She’s on her own. She wouldn’t drag a friend into this business. It’s treason.”
“Treason’s a hanging affair.” No way to tell what Doyle was thinking.
Was Doyle warning him not to pull Hawker down with him when the reckoning came? No need. He wouldn’t let Hawk do anything stupid.
Hawker paced, digging a trench in his ten or twelve feet of the pavement, arguing with himself. “Not hiding with a friend, then. Not the church. Nobody’s going to hide in St. Paul’s, it being full of churchmen. Who knows when one of them will take a notion to ring bells or start praying? She’s not crouching in somebody’s coal shed because we have determined she planned this all out in advance. Lodgings?” Hawk answered himself immediately. “We might find her that way. She’d be remembered. She’s pretty. Always a nuisance, being pretty.”
“You’d know,” Doyle said.
Hawker ignored that. “She doesn’t know the city.” Hawker had the Cockney’s sense of superiority over people born in the hinterlands outside the sound of Bow bells. “She’ll know bits and parts of it. She’ll have favorite streets. That’s what she led you through. That’s where she’s hid herself.”
“And she’s near Fisher’s Alley.” Doyle plied the toothpick awhile. “There’s a chance I can narrow this a little. A while back I heard dogs barking up and down Paternoster Row, not far from the market. I didn’t get there in time to pin it down.”
“You think that was her.” Possible. Very possible. Nothing so discreet as nighttime breaking and entering.
“Dogs. The curse of an honest thief.” Hawk went back to pacing and discussing matters with himself. They could set flame to a pile of trash, yell “Fire!” up and down the street, and catch the woman when she came running out. They could set the dogs barking again and try to recognize a particular yap . . .
The fog skirted back under a forward line of wind. A streetlight showed the name over a shop. Morrison Bookseller. What had Hawker said? She’d know some streets well. “You come to Paternoster Row for books. Half the booksellers in London are here.”
Hawker, being Hawker, had to say, “She’s a dedicated reader. She wants a nice novel to lull her to sleep. We’ll find her burgling one of the bookshops along Paternoster.”
“When I was chasing Vérité, we kept passing bookshops. She knows the streets with bookshops.”
“What else?” Doyle watched him.
Vérité, with her head bent over a slate in the schoolroom at the Coach House, scratching out codes, counting under her breath. Vérité filling her long bench with papers full of numbers, letters, charts. “She’s a codebreaker, the best they’d ever seen at the Coach House. Back in France they got excited about that and trained her. They would have placed her where she could get hold of codes.”
“Books. Code. Book codes,” Doyle muttered.
Hawker, still now, pulled at his lower lip. “Bookshop. Get out of the rain in a bookshop. Fine. Good.” Behind his eyes, he was like a tiger pacing. That alert and impatient. “Which bookshop?”
“I know where she has to be.” He’d added everything together, clicked the last puzzle piece into place. “She said she’s called Cami. That has to be Camille. She used one of the old Leyland codes in the letter she sent to Meeks Street.”
Doyle saw it in an instant. “Great gibbering frogs. Camille Leyland.”
“They didn’t slip her into the home of some general or Foreign Office drone, hoping she’d come across a code once in a while. They were more ambitious. She went to the top codebreakers in England. The Leylands.”
Doyle said, “They put her right under my nose.”
“Couilles du diable,” Hawker whispered.
“She played me for a fool,” Doyle said.
“Consistently and with panache,” Hawk said. “She comes from France. She miraculously washes ashore in a shipwreck. She just happens to be the Leylands’ niece. It was always too much of a coincidence. Why didn’t I see that?” Hawker kicked at something in the street.
“Because I told you she was genuine.” Doyle grimaced. “A hundred witnesses saw the girl stagger ashore. She was half-drowned and bruised head to foot from tumbling on the rocks. When I questioned her, I saw a little girl, shaking with fever, letter perfect, and innocent as a rose. I believed her.”
The Tuteurs were meticulous when they made a placement. His own story had been just as good. “You could have talked to her for a week and never caught her in a lie. At the Coach House we were trained to resist interrogation.” He stepped off the pavement into the street. “You can’t imagine how well we were trained.”
Hawker fell into step beside him. “You know where she is.”
“I know where a Leyland would be and she’s been a Leyland for the last decade.” Vérité had become Cami. He knew where a Cami would be.
Doyle, with no break in the appearance of good-natured indolence, was at his other side. “She was ten years old. Even the French didn’t send ten-year-old Cachés.”
“She was twelve and scrawny as a twig.”
“She didn’t sell secrets.” Hawk found another rock on the street to kick. “We’d have spotted her the first time we lost a Leyland code. What the hell has she been doing all these years if she’s not selling English secrets?”
Hiding. “If that bastard gets his hands on her, she’ll spill every code she’s ever seen. Every secret she’s read. He could make stones talk.” They’d reached the top of Paternoster Row, looking down the line of streetlamps. “That’s what the bastard’s after. The Leyland codes. She’s gone to ground at—”
“Braid’s Bookshop,” Doyle said. “Specializing in the literature of France, Germany, and Italy. The Leylands shop there when they come to town.”
“They shop everywhere,” Hawker said. “When I was doorkeeper at Meeks Street they used to send me all over town, looking for some Greek commentary on horseradishes.”
Doyle said, “But Braid’s for the code books. Cheap editions printed in Paris or Vienna. Inconspicuous. Replacements available everywhere. And the owner’s apartment at Braid’s is empty.”
They were walking away from the streetlamp, stepping on their shadows. None of them made any noise except the soft words, back and forth.
“Now, that I didn’t know,” Hawk said.
“You been in France.” Doyle loosened up his coat, making it just that one bit easier to get to his gun. “The finer points of life in this great metropolis have escaped your attention. The old man’s wife died . . . it must be six months ago. He moved in with his daughter and I don’t think they’ve rented out the upstairs. They hadn’t last time I went by.”
They stopped, together, at the alley that ran behind the houses on this side of the street. Braid’s was six houses ahead, marked by a glow of light in the shop window. Wind reshaped the mist, revealing the street for twenty yards, then taking it back again. They were all getting wet.
“I love unoccupied premises.” Hawk patted his chest, checking knives, following Doyle’s example. “As the professional milling cove among us, I suggest we call in Stillwater and McAllister to watch the shop. You, Pax, and I go in the back way. We—”
“I go in alone.”
A long pause.
“You want to do that?” Doyle asked. “She’s already attacked you once.”