Pax had said, “I am no part of him.”
Different men had been poured into the same vessel—one clean, one unclean. They were nothing alike, Pax and his father, not in the least grain or particular.
She said, “What are you going to do with the code?”
His eyelids drooped. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“I have to know what I’m risking. I have to know whether they’ll trace this back to me.”
Something ugly curled behind his eyes. His voice held condescending amusement. “I promise they’ll never know it was you.”
He lies. To a Baldoni.
The Merchant was one of those who protected his great lie with many small lies. He lied with the exact opposite of the truth instead of a slight twisting of it. He promised most when he was about to betray. A Baldoni five-year-old would be ashamed to lie so badly.
She furrowed her brow as if she were thinking furiously. “Are the Leylands involved? I can be traced to them.”
“This is nothing to do with the Leylands. The code won’t be connected to them at all.” He scarcely bothered to hide the mockery, he was so certain of her stupidity. “We won’t use it in England.”
Lies. The truth is the opposite. The kegs of gunpowder were in London so his operation was in London. What connected the Mandarin Code, kegs of gunpowder, Camille Besançon, Semple Street, and her? How did they intersect?
“You’ll take this code overseas?” she said.
“I leave for Austria at once. This is nothing to do with England.” With his mouth, with the muscles of his face, with his skilled voice, the Merchant conveyed reassurance. Not with his eyes, though. Never with his eyes. “I promise you will escape harm.”
He plans to kill me. Fear and anger shivered through her. Why hadn’t he already done it? What was he waiting for?
The Baldoni said, To know the purpose of a lie, look at the results of it.
The Merchant’s lies had brought her to Semple Street. So far, they’d accomplished nothing else. Maybe the Merchant wanted her here.
She kept her hands still, not giving the signal. Up and down the street, she was watched through field glasses and gunsights. Two dozen men waited to move in.
He’s stalling for time. Something’s going to happen.
She could sense Pax as if he stood beside her, his finger on the trigger, his eyes on the Merchant, in his belly the ice-cold hatred of a lifelong vendetta.
Don’t kill him, Pax. Not yet. Not yet.
A rider passed, sitting his horse in a sloppy, preoccupied manner. In the house behind her, a baby had been crying for a while. That continued. And down the street, out of sight, a wagon, or maybe a carriage, approached. Four well-paced horses, light on their feet. A coach, then. The noise of their hooves slowed as they approached.
“This gets us nowhere.” The Merchant blew out an impatient breath. “One of us must yield. Come. Look at the woman and be convinced.” He turned on his heel, abruptly, and pulled open the door of his coach.
She could see a human form bundled on the bench seat of the landau, tied hand and foot, gagged.
He said, “Behold the offspring of the counterrevolutionary Jules Besançon, traitor to France, and the Englishwoman Hyacinth Leyland. Poisoned fruit of those poisoned blossoms.”
He leaned inside and fumbled about in the dimness. The stairs flipped down. He drew back.
She said, “I see a woman. Not necessarily Camille Besançon.”
The Merchant flicked his cheroot away, into the gutter. “Question her. Satisfy yourself of her bona fides. I’ll wait at the corner and give you privacy.” He motioned in that direction.
“And the Mandarin Code?”
He’d already turned his back on her and taken the first steps away. He didn’t pause. He just said, “Later.”
The coach she’d heard approaching pulled up outside Number Twenty-nine, the house opposite Fifty-six.
With the arrogance of the servants of the very rich, the coachman stopped in the middle of the road, directly beside the smaller landau. Between them, they did a fine job of blocking Semple Street altogether.
It was a big, rich, well-shined coach with a crest on the door and a team of four black horses. A ridiculously expensive coach for this neighborhood. A coach with a guard next to the driver and a footman behind.
“You there.” The coachman waggled his long coach whip at Carlo. “You there! Move up. Move along. Nobody can get past with you blocking the road.”
She couldn’t see the man inside the coach. Didn’t know who he was. But she knew the kind of man he had to be. Somebody important.
“Damn. Oh, damn.” She understood everything. Saw it all, beginning to end.
It was already too late for her.
She raised her hand into her hair—that was the signal to close in and take the Merchant—and screamed out, “Carlo, run!” and scrambled into the Merchant’s carriage, where she would die.
Fifty
Life obeys no plans.
Pax pushed off from the wall, running. Before he saw Cami’s signal. Before the bloody Merchant took off down the length of the street. Before he knew why.
Cami clambered into the coach. A thousand alarm bells rang in his mind. He could feel death hovering over her like a vulture, claws stretched out.
Hawker snapped, “It’s Addington.”
The Prime Minister. The big black coach had the Prime Minister in it? That was the Merchant’s target. Assassination and the chaos that would follow Death.
He yelled, “Get him out of here,” in Hawker’s direction and dove through the door of the landau.
A woman, bound, gagged, thrashing, was tied flat to one seat. Cami crouched on the floor of the coach, prying at a hasp on the other seat.
“The gunpowder,” Cami snarled. “It’s here. That’s what he did with the kegs. He lit a fuse and it’s gone under the seat. I can’t get to it.”
The seats were built for storage. Lift the lid to toss a coat or blanket in. This one was locked. A blackened string of fuse hung over the edge of the seat and disappeared underneath.
“Back!” He pointed the pistol.
Cami threw herself over the wriggling woman on the seat, giving what protection she could in case the slug went wild in the coach.
The crack of the gun slapped his ears. The bullet hit the lock and ricocheted out the door.
It didn’t hit Cami. Didn’t hit Cami.
The coach shuddered, tilted up, and tried to throw him to the floor. The horse shrieked. Nobody’s holding the horse. We’re going to go over.
No time to think about that. He’d hit the padlock dead center, shattering the mechanism. In the rocking coach, he reversed the pistol, grabbed the hot barrel, and slammed the butt down, once, twice. The bar snapped open.
The landau thumped down level again. Somebody had hold of the horse. Not Hawker. Hawker was on the street, yelling and throwing rocks. Addington’s coach clattered away to the squeal of horses and the shouts of the coachman.
He threw back the seat and the cushions. The space below was filled with kegs and the smell of gunpowder. The smell of a fuse burning.
Behind him, Cami cut the woman’s feet free, flapped the door open, and pushed her, yammering and limp, out into the street. “Run, you idiot.”
A fuse was nailed to the wood on the underside of the seat, back and forth, back and forth, then down into the keg at the end. A jagged point of flame raced along the course of it. He couldn’t pull the fuse out of the keg. When he tried to pinch the flame out, it just raced between his fingers.
He spat on his fingers and tried again. Again. Searing hot pain and no effect on the white tip of fire. Nothing stopped it. Sparks flashed and fell on the kegs, any one of them hot enough to set everything off.