“If the boy gets caught, it looks like a British operation. That undermines Patelin without pointing the finger at . . .”
“Which is what they have in mind. Blaming us.”
“. . . a chance to find out which side Soulier’s supporting in the next . . .”
The air’s so thick with intrigue nobody’s going to be able to breathe. He put jam on bread and piled the eggs on and rolled it up tight to eat. He had most of that inside him before he noticed he wasn’t doing it right. The Old Bitch had that kind of look on her face.
No eating with your hands. Just no end to the things you weren’t supposed to do. He started to lick his fingers. And stopped. You weren’t supposed to do that either, apparently. He was damned if he’d wipe jam on his togs.
“The napkin,” Doyle said.
He’d laid it on his lap, like you was supposed to, and forgot about it. So now he used it and stashed it away again.
He said, “I know what we have to do.”
That stopped the talking.
“We stop trying to guess what everybody’s up to. I meet Owl tonight, and then we know. I go find out.”
Althea sat down comfortably in the cushioned chair at the end of the table. “The problem with that, Hawker, is that this smells remarkably like a trap.”
“And I have no intention of losing my rat to a French trap,” the Old Bitch said. “I’ll send a man to watch the DuMotier girl and see what she does. You,” she looked directly at him, “will stay home.”
“You’re wrong.” It was out of his mouth before he knew he was going to say it. Stupid.
Nobody said anything just immediately. Doyle put the cork back in a little bottle of gun oil, tamping it down hard with his thumb. He didn’t seem concerned one way or the other. Noncommittal, if you went searching for the exact word.
“Explain yourself.” Lots of spiked and rusty edges in Carruthers’s voice.
“You’re going to have to root out a whole platoon of these Cachés they’ve planted in England. It’ll take you months and you’ll probably miss some. In one night, I can give you thirteen you won’t have to track down.” He glanced around. No expression on any face. “I won’t do anything stupid. If it’s not going to work, I’ll back away.”
They lounged around, waiting for him to say some damn thing or other. He didn’t know what.
He said, “You’re not risking much. Just me.”
Nothing.
So he said, “They’re kids.”
Doyle stopped scraping cinder out of the frizzen and set it down. “He should go. I would.”
“Fine then. We’ll send him into the middle of a Police Secrète power struggle,” Carruthers sounded irritated, “where he’ll be just about useless to me. He won’t see what’s going on under his nose, and there’s no time to teach him.”
That simple, that easy—he’d won his point. With the British Service he was out of his depth most of the time.
“Send someone with him,” Althea said.
“Who’d frighten her off. And I take the chance of losing two agents.”
Two agents. Carruthers said two agents. Meaning one of them was him. He missed some of what they said next while he was trying to decide how he felt about being an agent.
“. . . and more experienced,” one of the men said.
“We’ll send Paxton.” That was Althea. “He’s young enough to look unthreatening.”
Paxton. Everybody’s pet. The perfect agent. Paxton wouldn’t forget to use his damned napkin. Paxton probably didn’t slurp his tea. Probably he was no use at all on a job.
But the Old Bitch thought it was a glorious idea. “Pax will keep him out of trouble. You,” she turned to Hawker, “are walking a fine line. An agent gets to contradict me three times in his career. You’ve used one of them. You will now write a report of everything you saw and heard this morning.”
“I can’t—”
“The ink and paper are in the cupboard. Work at this table. Make two copies.”
Great. Just bloody great.
Ten
JUSTINE, WEARING TROUSERS AND SHIRT, WAS INTIMATELY entangled in this small space with the boy Hawker. His knee thrust into her ribs. Her elbow poked his belly. He remained unconcerned to the point of insult. She might have been a large dog or a sack of grain placed in his way.
“You’re squashing me.” He shoved at her buttocks as if they were melons at market. “Move.”
“Two people cannot fit here. Frankly, I do not need—”
“And keep your voice down.”
She hissed, “I am silent as the grave compared to you.”
“Like hell.”
One thin brick wall separated them from the house of the Cachés. The Tuteurs would be downstairs, playing cards or reading, but they would be alert these days, suspicious and vigilant as crows. “This is my project and I—”
“Are we going to spend all night talking, or are you going to shift your arse out of my lap?”
She was not the possessor of the body that did not fit here. Hawker created the problem. He was composed of flat and hard muscles that did not budge an inch when she pushed them. He was heavy and uncooperative as wood.
He was correct in this much—they had no time to waste. She said, “I will scrape the last bricks free. Do not remove them yet. Do not, in fact, do anything.”
“We both work,” he said.
She picked up the chisel and pushed herself away from Hawker till her backbone rubbed the splintery wood of the crossbeam. “Then do not be clumsy.”
“I’ve done this before.”
The candle of the dark lantern spread a circle of light barely six feet wide. Within that space were boards laid down to make a floor and the ribs of the rafters. Beyond was an ocean of darkness. They could not afford more light. Some crack in the eaves might gleam down to the coach yard below. Too much light would leave them blinking and blind when they entered the hallways of the Coach House.
At the far end of the attic, Hawker’s friend knelt in the dark and kept an eye on the street. He was called Pax. She had met him briefly once before, though he gave no sign he remembered that. Tonight he pushed his way into this operation to protect Hawker’s back. The spies of England did not trust her to the width of a thread.
Citoyen Pax was the first of many unforeseen difficulties. Possibly she would find some use for him.
She wiped sweaty hands on these pants she wore. She had scrambled through many attics and basements in them. They were less indecent than skirts, but skirts would be cooler.
She took up the chisel, holding the shaft slack in her fist, tapping the butt with the flat of her other hand. Softly. Carefully.
The attic ran above the workshop where men had once constructed coaches. This end—this wall under her hand—was shared between the workshop and the old house where the master coachbuilder and his apprentices had once lived.
She had plotted to free the Cachés since the first moment Madame discovered what was being done here. This was her second night of sweating and choking in the close air, chipping away at the mortar between the bricks.
Now everything was held in place only by a little plaster. The mortar was of some substandard sort. It crumbled from its brick in pea-sized morsels that she teased out with her fingers and laid into piles behind her. Each time she cleared a brick she chinked in a wedge of wood to hold everything in place.
All was precarious. All was poised to give way. A single incautious pressure, and the bricks and plaster would crash into the upstairs hall of the house.
Hawker was, indeed, deft in his work. He bent to the wall and set his forehead on it. His hair was tied back with a black ribbon. His face was grimy from crawling about in this attic and smeared with white powder from the mortar. His lips held a tight, intent grimace. He began scraping between bricks with the point of his knife.
She said, “You will ruin that blade.”
“I got lots of knives.”