She shook her head and stood up. “I’ll look at the wagon.”
Someone had led the Frenchman’s horse and cart out of the middle of the road, where he’d abandoned them. She ran her hand over the horse’s back. This was a piebald horse, short legged and unlovely, matched with a sturdy, short cart. Everything utilitarian and well cared for, from the wheels to the hooves of the horses. This was a jobbing cart from a reliable yard. When she made a circuit of it she found, burned into the wood on the back right side, the words McCarthy, Nibb Lane, Soho.
“Six streets that way.” Pax indicated with a little jerk of his head.
“The Merchant is in Soho.”
“Or he wants to make us think he’s here.”
“Then he’s succeeded. I think he’s in Soho.”
The little horse was of a placid, urbane disposition, calm in place and incurious. She went over the harness, which was wholly ordinary and recently cleaned. The horseshoes held the usual collection of city detritus. They’d been cleaned recently. “He hires a small cart, not a coach. He needs to shift something he won’t carry in a coach. Something dirty. Something bulky. Secret. Stolen. Something that attracts attention.”
“A body,” Pax contributed.
Was Camille Besançon already murdered, and her body disposed of? “Or a prisoner, bound and gagged.”
Pax might have turned the pages in her mind and read them. “He has no reason to kill that woman before the meeting.” Pax squatted beside the front wheel and took out a two-inch magnifier. “He plans ahead. He leaves people alive while there’s any possible use for them.”
They worked in tandem, silently, for a few minutes. She said, “There’s nothing by the driver’s seat. Not a speck. Not a crumb.”
She looked at every crevice of the frame and springs while he went over the four wheels. After a while, she said, “I haven’t killed very many men. Those people in the Coach House were the first. And then, one man who came to Brodemere. And now the Frenchman.”
Pax said, “You didn’t kill this man. Those horses did.”
“I’ve also never been shot at.” A tarp covered the surface of the little wagon. She took a corner and waited for Pax to take the other. “I don’t think I like it.”
“Getting hit is worse.”
“Strangely, that is no comfort at all.” She nodded and they pulled the tarp back, uncovering the bed of the cart.
She knew the smell. Would have recognized it earlier if a whiff of it hadn’t already been floating in the air.
Pax said, “Gunpowder.” He was not informing her. He confirmed what they’d both realized.
“Guns?” She shook her head slowly. “An attack on something? A riot?” Twenty years ago, the Gordon Riots had torn the town apart, threatened the rich and powerful.
“Not riot.” The dark-haired man, Pax’s friend, came up behind her. “If the French were brewing civil insurrection, we’d have heard about it. We have well-paid informers. Informers on informers.” He asked Pax, “You want to see a collection of dull coinage? No? Can’t say I blame you.” He tucked away a bulky handkerchief. “And that is the delicate odor of gunpowder.”
“We noticed,” Pax said dryly. “Cami, this is Hawker. Hawk, this is Cami.”
She ignored the introduction, as did Mr. Hawker. She’d heard of Hawker from the Fluffy Aunts’ gossip. She could only hope he knew far less about her than she did about him.
The planking of the wagon was gray-brown, dry, and clean. She paced two steps sideways, watching the light on the wood’s surface. She said, “Not guns.”
Pax was looking at the same thing. “No oil.”
Guns live in a light film of oil, or they rust. Everywhere they’re stored, they leave smears of gun oil. Even wrapped in burlap, they’d leave the distinctive smell of the oil behind. None of that here.
She swept her fingers into the crevice between boards and came away with coarse black powder under her nails. She smelled it, rubbed it between her fingers, and confirmed what she did not want to know.
“Gunpowder,” Pax said. “A wagonload.”
The young man, Hawker, murmured, “We are in big trouble.”
This was suddenly no longer a spy game played with secrets and codes. The lives to be lost were no longer counted in twos or threes.
In the dust at the side of the wagon, she made out a curved mark, most of it already brushed away. Then another curve next to it. Wordlessly, she followed the lines with her fingers.
“Kegs,” Pax said.
“Kegs. Kegs and kegs of gunpowder.” She felt sick in the pit of her stomach. “They must have been lined up all the way down the cart. You could blow up Parliament with this much powder. Or a dozen ships in harbor. Or London Bridge.” Or anything you wanted. Who would die? Where? When? How many lives?
“Ten or twelve kegs. God help us,” Pax’s friend said.
“Sixteen.” She counted out the places with her hand, showing him.
“You can’t just buy this much.” Hawker peeled the last of the canvas back, careful not to disturb the dust, doing the same thing she had, studying the faint circles left behind and the thin trace of powder. “We have a traitor somewhere in military supplies.”
“It’s naval stores or artillery.” She tested the texture between thumb and forefinger. “Not for guns. There’s a different feel to this. Larger grit. This is for cannons.”
Hawker glared at her. “Of course you’d learn that, out in Brodemere, between studying Babylonian and German.”
She said, “I don’t actually speak Babylonian. No one does. I learned the distinctions of gunpowder when I was eleven or so.”
“Cachés,” Hawker said in disgust. “Gunpowder and sawdust. Probably Babylonian, too. I’m going to Daisy’s.”
Pax said, “We’ll join you. I have to make sketches.” He waved two men out of the crowd and talked to them, fast, with gestures that said it was about moving the wagon somewhere.
Someday, there would come a point at which her life could become no more dangerous and complicated. She hadn’t arrived there yet, apparently.
Thirty-two
A man ruled by old hatreds is like a tree nourished upon stone.
Pax said, “Have you ever been to a whorehouse?”
They’d come to a big, solid house that fronted on one of the narrow passageways in which Soho abounded. Hawker, who had stalked the whole way, ten paces ahead, ignoring them, trotted up the stairs, knocked, and was admitted. The maid who answered the door, a neat black woman of middle years, waited patiently for them to catch up.
Cami climbed the stairs beside Pax. “I find myself desperately wishing I could claim to have been a frequent visitor to brothels instead of bookshops and botanical gardens and bootmakers and that nice man in Terne Street who sells magical herbs. I’m perfectly certain female British Service agents spend more time in brothels than in hat shops.”
“I’ll have to think about that.” As they entered, Pax got not only smiles from the black woman keeping the door but a kiss on the cheek and whispers of welcome that were not meant for Cami to hear. He was obviously much at home.
He said to the woman, “Give us a few minutes. We’ll come upstairs.”
They were left alone in a long, luxurious hall scattered with Persian carpets. The sideboard held an explosion of expensive lilies, roses, and irises arranged in a red Chinese vase. On the landing above, a naked bronze nymph was caught in the act of covering breast and pubis from public view.
She’d do better to just put some clothes on.
Pax had bedded the women here. Some of them. All of them? She pictured him upstairs in some . . . would there be vulgar, red-velvet coverlets? She could almost see his large hands, sensitive, assessing, responsive, on a woman’s white flesh.
It would be easier to chat with the Merchant than to face these smug women who knew the secrets of Pax’s body. She would be very cool and—