“You should dye your hair darker,” she said.
“I will in a bit, when I get back to Meeks Street.”
“My cousin Maria would have done it for you. She’s good at things like that.” After a minute she added, “You’re safe with my family.”
He made a noncommittal noise.
Perhaps he had a point. She’d eaten the piccolo convivio with her family, reveling in cheeses, fine olives, and bread pulled quickly from the iron pan on the coals of the hearth. But she’d taken her wine from the bottle Pax drank from and made sure nobody slipped anything in his soup.
She trusted her family implicitly. She simply didn’t trust them with Pax.
She said, “It’s only for these next two days. After that you won’t have to meet them again. When I finish dealing with the Merchant, I intend to run from England like a scalded cat.”
“To a desert island with coconuts?”
“To Tuscany.” She supposed she was happy to be going home. The thought of leaving England—and Pax—was a squirming bundle of worries and hopes and fears. She didn’t even try to sort it out. She just carried it around with her and took it out now and then to shake her head over it.
Here was another hat shop. The sixteenth hat shop. She was keeping count. “Two minutes,” she said and accepted the sketchbook from his hand and ducked inside.
Pax watched her through the plate glass window while she opened his sketchbook to the milliner’s assistant, the milliner, and two women from the back of the shop. He’d drawn Camille Besançon’s hat right down to the last cherry from her description.
But—No. Not their work. No one had seen one like it. No one knew who’d made it. Sorry.
They were also unacquainted with the Merchant and the Merchant’s henchman when she flipped over the next page and the next and showed those sketches.
Back on the street, she shrugged. “I wish they wouldn’t try to sell me bonnets. I’d never noticed how many hideous hats there are in London. She says there’s a milliner’s in the next street.”
“We’ll head that way, then.”
They walked on, side-by-side, studying every face they passed. She said, “There are more hat shops in Soho than I would have guessed.”
“It always seems that way, whatever you’re looking for. I once carried a bit of cake around Vienna, trying to find who made it. Lots of pastry shops in Vienna.”
“If this is being a spy, I’m glad I gave up the work. It’s boring.”
“This is being a spy,” Pax said.
He was a spy, honed by years in the mountains of her homeland, killing men and avoiding the French army. He looked particularly harmless when carrying a sketchbook.
She’d have Pax with her when she went to meet the Merchant. The knot in her stomach loosened a little, remembering that.
There were plenty of Frenchmen to look at in Soho, men washed ashore by the Revolution and the wars. Old Frenchmen wearing wigs and shabby brocade coats from the Old Regime. Young Frenchmen wearing the sober black and long hair of the French radicals. None of them were the Frenchmen she needed, however.
“The man has to be in Soho.” She wasn’t trying to convince Pax. She was coercing the world into doing her bidding. “Soho is close to Semple Street. Close enough to the church in Fetter Lane. Everything fits. Everything about Soho makes sense.”
“A good reason for him to be elsewhere.”
“I know.” She felt grumpy about this truth.
They turned the corner, both of them taking the opportunity to assess the streets in every direction. They were still being followed by the street rats who belonged to Lazarus. One of her cousins—young Lucia—had attached herself to them when they left the Baldoni kitchen. It was considered good training for the young to follow a friendly family member about the streets. The dark-haired man, Pax’s friend, brought up the rear, insolent and open about it.
Pax took the sketchbook into the next tavern while she inspected the tiny shop window next door. Behind dusty glass, it displayed many shades of silk thread. She thought about the supply needs of a small band of murderous Frenchmen based in Soho. It made a sort of grid pattern in her mind, relating importance and frequency. Wine was near the top left. A hat with cherries on it was relegated to the bottom right. Small corners of speculation and conclusion filled her brain. Pax, in the taverns, had more chance of success than she did.
From time to time she half turned to the street, taking inventory of the pack that kept an eye on her, studying the faces of men going past.
She was seen in return.
A man driving a one-horse cart suddenly dropped the reins, vaulted down to the street, and ran. She caught the flash of movement but not one single impression of his face. If he’d kept driving and looked away from her, she wouldn’t have noticed him at all.
Too short and stocky to be the Merchant. It had to be one of his French minions. Someone who’d seen her and knew her.
She dove into the street, offending the horses of an oncoming carriage, already startled by the Merchant’s henchman running under their noses, already clattering and snorting, dancing in the traces. A man on horseback skittered sideways and snarled words she didn’t catch.
She dodged all that. Followed an outraged shout ahead of her, wove past one dark coat and another. Her quarry looked back over his shoulder and now she recognized him. It was the man of large ears and poorly cropped hair that she’d tracked from one Soho tavern to another. The man the Merchant had set to following her.
A second chance at him. A second chance at everything he knew if she could catch him, bring him down, question him.
Thirty feet ahead, he shoved a woman aside. Her companion—a stocky, pugnacious middle-aged fellow—objected. Grabbed him. The two men grappled back and forth across the pavement. Then the henchman kicked out and hit groin. Broke loose and plunged ahead.
She ran after him, dodging the idiots who blocked her way. Too many of them—
Somebody yelled, “He’s got a gun!”
Men scrambled back. A space opened in front of her. The Frenchman held a pistol in his outstretched hand. Raised it.
Hard muscle crashed into her. Knocked her sideways, stumbling, off balance. The pistol fired with a huge crack and a flash of light.
For an instant, everything was eerily silent.
Pax’s body crushed her to a rough brick wall. His strength, his miraculous speed, had knocked her out of the line of the bullet.
His face, hard and angry, was inches away. He ran his hands over her, roughly, fast, up and down both her sides. Over the back of her neck. Looked at his hands and didn’t see blood.
One sharp nod and he was gone, running in a long stride, bent low, a spear cast through the confusion, unstoppable, headed straight for the Frenchman.
Who saw him coming, threw away the useless pistol, and drew a knife. Swung to meet Pax in a wide-legged defensive stance.
He’d have done better to run. None of these people had ever seen Pax on the sparring field of the Coach House.
Pax didn’t meet the Frenchman head-on. At the last moment of the headlong charge, Pax flipped his knife to a reverse grip, flashed past on the right, avoided a strike, and slashed the inside of the man’s forearm.
Classic Pax. That was a permanent disarm, if done right.
The Frenchman gasped and dropped his knife.
The kill stroke for that attack was an immediate upward jab to the right kidney. But Pax just raked across the jacket as he went by, leaving it slit and hanging, the shirt exposed, and a line of bleeding red across the man’s back.
From everywhere, all at once, men closed together in a circle and started shouting. One could count on the enthusiasm of the Englishman for a fight. Any fight.