“I see that now. That day, I knew only that I had failed in my duty.” The past filled her face. She was a long way away. “I tried to get to Napoleon, and every step of the long way, I planned how I would kill you.”
“You were inventive about it, I imagine.”
“There has never been a man in the history of the world who was killed as ingeniously as you were, in my mind, that day. I tried so hard, and I failed. When they told me Paris had surrendered, I sat upon the floor of a farmhouse and wept.”
Nothing he could say. The war was over. “He had to be stopped.”
“I have had a long time to think about this. I do not say you are wrong. But then . . . Paris was full of foreign armies. Prussians strutted about the Champs-Élysées. The cafés were full of Austrians. Cossacks camped on the Champs de Mars. Everywhere I turned, I became sick with rage. I was forsaken and mad with grief. So I blamed you.”
“You think I don’t understand that?”
“I would have spit upon your understanding, if you had offered it to me then.” She gave a crooked smile. “I was most utterly alone. There was no place for me in the new scheme of things. Even the Police Secrète became suddenly supporters of the monarchy. Those of us who had been loyal to Napoleon found it prudent to leave France.”
“To England.”
“It is ironic that the safest place for me was here, openly among my old enemies.”
“Ironic.”
“But I lie.” She took a deep breath. “As I lay in bed this morning, I promised myself I would not do that. Habit is very strong. I came to England because you were here.” She glanced at the knives that lay in the center of the table, being decorative. “I had decided, very cold-bloodedly, that I would kill you.”
“I hope you changed your mind.” Gods, but I hope you changed your mind.
“I am being honest about complex matters. It is not easy, and you are not helpful in the least.” She always got more French when she was annoyed.
He touched her cheek. One brush with his finger. Anybody looking on would have thought it was just friendly. “We never hurt each other. We played fair. Leaving aside that one deplorable incident fifteen years ago, you never shot me.”
“I was never put in a position where it was my duty to kill you. Fortune has been kind.”
“You should thank the Service.” He grinned at her. “After you put a bullet in vital parts of my anatomy, they kept me away from you for years. Sent me to Russia while you were in Paris. Then to France when you were in Italy. To Italy, when you were in Austria. I figured it out later.”
Her face flickered like a candle with all those shifting thoughts inside. “Soulier—I became one of Soulier’s people, as you know—Soulier said nothing. But you are right. He kept us apart. I have done as much for the women who worked for me when they were enamored of someone unsuitable.”
“Nobody more unsuitable than me.”
“No one.” She negotiated terms with the robe, plucking it up over her thigh where it had slid down, her and the robe having different ideas of what should show and what shouldn’t. “I wrote letters to you, do you know? A hundred letters. I explained and explained that the gunshot was an accident. I told you that I had not meant to hit you. Leblanc struck my arm and the shot went astray.”
“Well, that’s nice to know.”
“I did not mail the letters. I would write them and burn them. If I had once sent the smallest note to you—once—I knew I would wake up the next week and hear you outside my window, asking to come in. And I would open the window. I did not stop being a fool for you, ’Awker. Not for one moment in many long years. They were right to keep us apart.”
“Wait a minute. I’m still back thinking about you opening the window and letting me in. What were you wearing?’
“Or I might have opened the window and pulled you inside and strangled you. That is not an impossibility.” She didn’t finish her coffee. She set it on the table, emphatic-like. “But I am telling you of the time after I left Paris. I went to Socchieve, in Italy, before I went to England. I was still planning to kill you, you understand.”
“Italy’s a great place for vengeance.” He remembered Socchieve. Mountains on all sides like the earth was folded in on you. Snow high up, warm if you walked an hour downhill. Cows. Austria and France had got together to do their fighting in Italy. “That was a long time ago. We never did pay the shot at that inn. Did the Austrians burn the place?”
“It had escaped their notice. It is now run by the son of the old man we met. They kept the luggage, yours and mine, because they had no liking for the Austrians and hoped we would be lucky enough to escape them. Then they continued to keep the bags. It may be they were very honest, but I think they put them in an attic and forgot.”
“One of the bags had my knives in it.”
“Which you were so proud of and insisted on throwing into the wood of the mantel. The holes are still there. They tell stories about us in that village, none of which are true. Somehow they learned you were the Black Hawk. You would not recognize yourself in those stories.”
“I was there less than a week.”
“You are credited with a slaughter of Austrians so large I am amazed any still walk the earth. I took out your knives and my tortoiseshell comb and gave the inn everything else to use as they would.
“Three of my knives.”
“Those three.” She went meditative, considering the knives on the table. “They have been troublesome.” Then she said, “It was strange to go through those bags and remember the people we had been. It was like looking at strangers.”
They’d made love in a high meadow. Not a flat foot of ground anywhere, just straggly grass and wildflowers. He put his coat down and they crushed flowers underneath them. The smell wrapped his senses till he couldn’t think.
Sometime, in between kisses, he said he loved her. She said, “Don’t.”
Afterward, the sun set and the snow on the mountain peaks turned red and they went off to spy on the Austrian camp. He’d been eighteen. He didn’t know what year he was born, so maybe nineteen.
That was a long time ago, as Owl pointed out, and they were different people now. He was talking to a woman who had run major parts of the Police Secrète, not a young girl with her hair down over her breast and yellow wildflower pollen brushed on her skin.
“On the way to England, I had time to think. I found myself leaving old parts of my life behind me, discarded in the mountains, or floating on the sea. It was as if I were unpacking heavy trunks and tossing out things I no longer needed. I had ceased to be a spy for France. The France I had known was gone forever.” She pulled her braid forward, over her shoulder, and took to rummaging in the little curves and valleys of it.
Her hair was darker than it had been in that mountain village. He remembered holding a handful of her hair to his face, feeling it with the skin of his nose and his lips, smelling it, when they made love.
“When I came to England, I no longer hated you. I brought no dark purposes with me from the past.”
He believed her. He’d interrogated his share of men and women. They didn’t lie with their eyes looking inward. They didn’t lay out their souls and dissect them on the table in front of him, the way Owl was doing.
She rubbed her arm where the bandage was. The lines at the corners of her mouth said it hurt and she was ignoring that. “I remade myself yet again. I opened my shop, Voyages, and became a dealer in maps and optical instruments and dried fruit. I am the best at what I do. Perhaps the best in the world.”
“I’ve seen your shop. Impressive.”
She leaned forward, into a long ray of sun. The fine hair that sprang up at her temples, small and unruly, caught the light just right, and everything glinted in fifty or a hundred sparks. “Men come to me—even famous men—when they are determined to risk their lives in dangerous places. I sell them what they must have to survive. I send them out prepared, as I once sent my agents out to do their work.”