“Stop that.” He didn’t look up. He meant, stop searching the shelves, which he had somehow noticed her doing.
There probably wasn’t anything to find anyway. She hugged herself close and awaited events. Was it a good sign that no one else from the British Service had popped in? Could Pax possibly be working alone? “How did you find me?”
“I asked the pigeons.” He located the wire in the hem of her skirt and drew it out.
“That’s not a weapon. Merely useful. And it’s the end of your discoveries. I don’t expect you to believe me, though.”
“I don’t.”
She was chilly with nothing but her shift between her and the night. Her nipples had drawn up tight, making little peaks against the linen. Cold and a bit painful. Also immodest. She covered up as well as she could. It was silly to think of modesty and impossible not to.
He’d finished investigating her rolled dress and moved on to the pockets, showing no interest in breasts. “You have a penknife.” It hit the pile of knives and metal darts with a musical chink.
“I’d forgotten that. Can’t think why. You never know when you’ll have to penknife somebody to death.” She could, in fact, kill someone with it if she had to. As Pax knew. “My father used to say the most deadly weapon is the human mind. I agree in principle, but I’d rather face a hundred philosophers than even one gun.”
Pax was silent in response, a silence she’d call hostile and problematic.
“Nice set of lockpicks.” He added them to the pile. “So. You weren’t quite disarmed.”
“Picklocks aren’t weapons.”
“You could poke my eyes out.”
“I don’t need little iron sticks to do that.” She’d use her thumbs, as they’d been taught. They’d learned those lessons, the two of them sitting side by side, cross-legged in the dirt, in the courtyard of the Coach House.
“I hope that completes the arsenal. I’m going to be irritated if I search you and find something else.” He pushed her clothes away and uncoiled upward and came toward her.
He was fast. There was nowhere to retreat. He pushed her back against the shelves, his arm across her chest like an iron bar. Lines of wood dug in, up and down her spine.
He snapped, “What does he want?”
“Who?”
“Try again.” His arm pushed the breath out of her. “What . . . does . . . he . . . want?”
Smith. He meant Smith. “I don’t know.”
“Keep lying and this will be a very short conversation. We’ll finish it at Meeks Street.”
“Wait.” Her voice wavered at the edges. She steadied it. “Just . . . wait.”
“Where is he? Why is he in London? What game are you two playing?”
“No game. I’d rather stuff live rats in my shift than play games with that man. I’ve seen him precisely once. We didn’t exchange addresses.”
“Why did you meet him?”
His back was to the door and all the light. His face was hidden, utterly. She spoke to darkness and she told the truth. “About a week ago, I got a letter, a nasty little missive full of threats and blackmail. I came to London to meet the blackmailer. When you walked into that church, I thought it was you.”
“Really?” The word fell like ice, arctic cold.
“For six seconds. Acquit me of more stupidity than that. If you wanted something from me, you wouldn’t write letters. You’d track me down to a storeroom at the back of a bookstore and bark questions into my face. You’d half choke me while you were doing it.”
He stopped pushing his arm into her chest and took her shoulders instead, shaping his hands to get well acquainted. “What’s he doing in London? What does he want?”
This was not, perhaps, the moment to explain how much she knew about England’s secret codes. So she said, “I have no idea.”
Pax’s thumbs twitched in the delicate indentation where collarbone met the bones of the shoulder. They’d been taught how to torture captives, starting there, where unbearable pain lay just below the surface. Their teachers had made sure they experienced that pain.
She felt him carefully, deliberately, loosen his grip and slide his hands downward to manacle her arms.
“Here’s good advice,” he said. “Don’t trust that man. Don’t believe anything he promises. And don’t lie to me.”
She could feel anger inside him, like the dark orange coal in a hearth that flares into fire unexpectedly, all at once. She knew him in this mood. In the Coach House, Devoir used to sit up at night, staring into the dark, brooding, radiating this kind of tightly wrapped rage.
He’d never let it loose. She wondered if he’d do so now. “Let’s talk first. You can hurt me later, if you still want to.”
“I’m not hurting you. I’m not even making you nervous.”
“I beg to differ.” Held this way, she couldn’t shrug, but he’d feel the twitch.
Somewhere in the long years, Pax had become tall. She hadn’t needed to look so far up to talk to him when they were children. He’d been thin then. Now he had the stripped-down frame of someone who’d pushed himself relentlessly, too hard and too long.
What did it say of a man that his hands were callused from fingertip to palm? That his forearms were wire-hard muscle under the skin? She read years of self-discipline in his body where it weighed, honed and hard, against her. There was no hint of compromise anywhere in the compendium of him.
She’d fought Devoir on the practice field when they were children. He was stronger. She was faster. Sometimes he won. Sometimes she did. They’d slap the ground and stand up and begin again. If they fought now, she wouldn’t win without hurting him badly. She might not win even then.
London was filled with amiable fools. It was a pity one of them hadn’t waylaid her. “This is pointless. You don’t have to extract information from me like a toothdrawer pulling teeth. Everything important is in that letter I sent to Meeks Street. Read it.”
“It’s in code.”
“Decipher it.” When the Fluffy Aunts came, they’d have it worked out in ten minutes. She wriggled inside his hold, against his body. “I haven’t been benign to you recently, but if I promise to be inoffensive for five or six minutes, will you give me enough space to scratch my nose?”
“Bear the discomfort.”
Supportez l’inconfort. C’est votre sacrifice à la Révolution. She remembered cold days, hungry nights. Hours in the bare training field, hurting with a dozen kinds of pain, body and mind. The Tuteurs said, “Bear the discomfort. It’s your sacrifice to the Revolution.”
In those days, Devoir had been a rock of strength for all of them, endlessly strong, endlessly patient. She missed him. This stranger was no substitute.
Paxton—most definitely he was Paxton, not Devoir—wrapped himself the whole length of her body, reading the tension of her muscle, ready to predict any attack before she made the first twitch. He was nicely graded force, intelligently applied. One must applaud.
But any man on earth can be persuaded. A judicious mixture of lies and truth could work wonders. “You’re expecting great revelations. I’d rather you didn’t.”
He made a disbelieving exhalation between his teeth. That eloquent, familiar noise. That was Devoir’s comment on so many of life’s small happenings.
His grip loosened slightly. There was room to breathe.
She said, “I will spill out everything I know in your lap in the hope you will lose interest in me. Shall I tell you the man you seek favors a British gun? A Mortimer, I think. He sounds like an Englishman and dresses like one, but he’s probably French. Police Secrète would be my guess. He knows too much about the Coach House for him to be anything else. He calls himself Smith.”