“You will hush. I strenuously advise this.” He was a capuchin monkey and wise for his breed, but he was excited. “Calm yourself. No, you do not wish to make the acquaintance of my aunt Sophie. And I am certain she does not want to meet you.”
His chittering and chirping, sharp as the complaint of an exotic bird, would bring someone to her room. “You must be still.” She gathered him up and stroked him and he quieted.
He was Madame Peltier’s Nico. Surely he had been left safe when the Peltiers fled for Geneva. There was an old nurse who cared for him. How had he come halfway across Paris and found his way to her back garden? He knew it well, of course. He had come to visit with Sylvie Peltier for many years and played in the flowerbeds while Sylvie conducted an affair with Papa. Nico was very familiar with the walls and drain spouts of Hôtel de Fleurignac.
“You have found me. You have been nimble and clever as . . . well . . . as a monkey. Wait, I will find a nut for you. Let me look. Shhh.” There were no nuts or raisins in her bedchamber, but there were anise comfits in a Limoges box on her bureau. Nico loved them.
“These cannot possibly be good for you. I have told you time and time again.” But he played upon her sympathies skillfully, and in the end she gave him three. He popped two in his mouth, one in each cheek, and became silent as an apple. He held the third tightly in the hand that was not clinging to her.
When she walked back to the window to look out at the way he’d come, his arm wrapped her neck, clinging. “You were afraid out there in the dark, alone, pauvre petit. But now you are safe. Tomorrow you will go back to your home.” He wore a red jacket, bright as cherries, with tiny gold epaulettes and the red, blue, and white cockade of the Revolution upon his chest. The jacket draped long about him, with a slit in back so his tail could move freely. “You are looking very fine, are you not? And patriotic. I do not know what it says of our life in Paris today that the sight of a monkey wearing the symbol of the Revolution seems perfectly rational.”
There were wide pockets in his jacket. In one of them was a folded note.
No sane man would use a monkey to deliver a letter.
Ah well, that left the other sort, did it not? Papa. When she took the note from Nico—poor Nico, he was reluctant to let it go—she was not surprised to see the first letter of her name written on the outside. An ornate M.
Nico abandoned her and went to search her writing desk, stepping in the cold tea and leaving monkey paw prints across the blotter.
She unfolded the sheet. It contained two words in Papa’s writing. Tuileries and money.
Papa must have released Nico into the garden and sauntered onward to—she looked at the paper again, though there was no need—the Tuileries. Papa knew she would apprehend exactly the one spot in the vast gardens. He knew she would come to him immediately.
He was mad and perfectly selfish. She disagreed with him about everything important in the world. But they understood each other completely. What a thing it was to have family.
Nico, deciding this was a night for insanity and eccentricity, ransacked the comfit box.
Twenty-seven
HAWKER PRACTICED THE ART OF BEING INCONSPICUOUS, something with which he was already moderately familiar. It was the soft belly of the night. The time for good pickings. There was dark in the corners if you were in the mood to lurk. If you didn’t want to skulk, you could blend into the folks coming home from the cafés and the theater. Poor men walked the streets because their rooms were too hot to sleep in. Rich men, because they were looking for a woman. Anyone could be on the stroll this hour of the evening.
Back home in London, his mates would be working, breaking into a shop or lifting merchandise off some boat tied up in the Thames where the officers were careless-like.
He leaned up against a doorway, pretending to shake a pebble out of his boot. The house he had his eye on was fifty feet down Rue Honoré. Rue Saint-Honoré, they’d called it a few years back before everything in Paris got itself de-saintified.
Five men passed, each of them with something more important to do than notice him.
If he was in London right now, he’d be with Beets and Rory and Sticker and the others. When the night’s job was done they’d stop at a cookshop in St. Giles for sausages before they headed back to the padding ken to hand the goods over to Lazarus. Or if they were empty-handed, they’d end up in a tavern, drinking themselves fuddled and making up excuses.
He was still working. Still robbing houses. This time he was doing it for the British Service. Life was a funny old dame.
They put streetlamps all up and down here. Some of the householders even hung a lantern by the front door. He’d have to walk through all that bloody illumination to get where he was going.
This here . . . this was Robespierre’s house.
The most powerful man in France—as close to being the king as made no difference—lived in a nothing-special house, tucked up over a woodshop. If you wanted to see Robespierre, well . . . probably you trotted yourself around those piles of lumber and knocked on the door.
“He is one of the people.” That’s what the woman hawking newspapers said when he brought up the question of who the house belonged to. “He is ours, our Robespierre, little citoyen. He lives as we do, without bribes or favorites. He is The Incorruptible. You do well to come and see what he is.”
No guards, no three hundred men in fancy uniforms riding on horses, no big iron gates closing everybody out. No crown jewels. Seemed like the French had it right somehow.
He shrugged, doing it loose in his shoulders. Practicing. It felt natural, almost, to jerk his chin up a notch, to say no. Turn his hand over to say yes. He was picking up the knack of it. Learning to look French. Why not? Maybe it’d been a Frenchman who’d fathered him.
There was more to it than shrugs. Clothes, for instance. Doyle made him change his clothes from the skin out before they crossed the Channel. He’d cut his hair. He kept telling him how to eat and how to sit and how to walk.
Ten thousand tricks. Doyle knew them all. He’d bet Doyle could tell a Frenchman from an Englishman by the smell of his farts.
The footman who’d left Maggie’s house had headed straight here, easy as you please, and handed over a letter at that door down at the far end of the courtyard. He didn’t wait for a reply. Be interesting to know who in Maggie’s house was sending letters this time of night. Interesting to know what you put in a letter you sent to the most powerful man in France.
As to Robespierre’s house . . . Doyle would say, sometimes the direct approach is best. Just walk in.
Nobody paid attention when he sauntered through the wide passageway, into the carpenter’s yard. He faded into the space behind a pile of long boards somebody was going to find a use for, one of these days.
He’d wait a bit. An hour, just to be on the safe side.
This was a trusting household. No candles inside. Shutters closed and the window sashes thrown up. They were sleeping the Sleep of the Just in there. Probably they tired themselves out with being Incorruptible all day.
DOYLE found Talbot gone from Rue Palmier. Talbot wasn’t the most brilliant man England ever spawned, but he was a conscientious Service agent and if he was away from his post, he’d be following someone who’d slipped into or out of Hôtel de Fleurignac. Considering the hour, that was probably somebody interesting.
In the attic lookout, Doyle found the chair empty. Hawker was gone.
The promising note was that somebody—he’d guess it was Hawker—had pulled out a brush and bootblacking from the possessions scattered around the room and written a big note on the wall. SWIVE.