At the rustic table, between coffee cup and a basket of rolls, Adrian lounged on his elbows, looking like he’d had a hard night of it, drinking. Annique kept her eyes downcast, looking slightly abstracted. She had a way of sweeping her fingers out before her when she reached for things, a slow, graceful gesture without hesitation or clumsiness. Adrian didn’t look wounded. Annique didn’t look blind.
“Grand, ain’t they?” Doyle gave no sign he was looking at them, but, of course, he was. He worked his way along the reins, slipping them back and forth in the terrets, laying them grain side up, checking for wear. “Professionals. It’s a pure pleasure watching ’em work. Wish we could recruit her. I could use that girl, even blind as a bat.”
The wind had kicked up a bit, tugging tree shadows back and forth across the terrace. Annique smiled down into her coffee like it was a treat Adrian had invented just for her. That smile was like a stroke down his groin. Madness. He wanted to stomp across the courtyard and drag the girl upstairs and show her why she shouldn’t go smiling like that in public.
He made himself stop watching her. “Tell me about Annique Villiers. There’s no folder on her in London for some reason.”
“Odd. Well, they don’t use her against the British. What do you want to know? She’s Pierre Lalumière’s natural daughter, for one thing.”
“Lalumière? The one who wrote The Ten Questions?”
“And Natural Justice and the Law, and Essays on Equality, and the rest.” Doyle gave that a chance to sink in.
Pierre Lalumière. He’d read every word that man had ever written. At Harrow, they’d sat up late in the common room, arguing passionately about those books. He’d come away half a revolutionary, reading Lalumière.
“The mother used a couple names. Lucille Villiers. Lucille Van Clef. She and Lalumière popped up out of nowhere about twenty years ago, working for the radicals. Lots of the old radicals were discreet about their origins. The king’s justice had a way of falling on the whole family, back in those days.” Doyle began checking harness, running his fingers inside every strap that touched the horse. “Lalumière got hung one night in Lyon, and Lucille ended up working for the French Secret Police. Arguably the most beautiful woman in Europe. I could give you a list of men she slept with.”
“And Annique?”
“Annique.” Doyle sucked at his teeth. “Well. Been in the Game all her life. Raised by the Secret Police, really. Started at seven or eight, running errands for Soulier, back when he was Section Chief for the south of Europe. Couple years later they sent her out as a field observer. That’s when they dressed her up like a boy. She was one of Vauban’s inner circle, one of his five or six special ones. That’s how good she is.” He wiped his hands against his jacket. “I ran into her a few times in Vienna. Lovely thing, of course, but it’s more than that. You’d notice her if she was plain as a rug. She’s about twice as alive as anyone else. You can see it in her even now.”
Adrian was adding hot milk to her coffee, handing her a roll, unobtrusively doing those things that were hardest for a blind woman to do without betraying herself.
“Thick as inkle weavers,” Doyle said. “Pretty, ain’t it?”
“Hawker’s a good interrogator.” He kept annoyance out of his voice. “Women like him. We can use that.”
“Might work. She’s young and scared, for all she’s a professional. She’s going to be looking for someone to talk to.” Doyle flicked a look at him. “Hawker ain’t gonna lay a finger on a woman of yours. He’s just bedeviling you.”
Damn the pair of them. “I’m putting Annique up next to you on the box. She has sense enough not to jump from up there. If you can get an arm around her…Her back muscles wind up a little before she attacks. Gives you some warning.”
“Right.”
“Try to get her to talk to you. Be nice.”
“I like being the nice one.” Doyle screwed his seamed and evil face into an innocent expression. “Wonder what they’re saying.”
“…ABOUT two o’clock on your plate,” Adrian was saying. “They have the first horse hitched. That looks like the last bags going up on top. We have five or six minutes.”
“I will eat with dispatch, then.” She kept her eyes down, directed to her hands. That had been the very first trick she taught herself. She pointed her eyes to her hands so her gaze did not wander about, staring at nothing, telling the whole world she was blind. Her hands she kept carefully beside her plate. She had burned herself already this morning, encountering the coffeepot. She did not wish to do so again.
The roll was indeed at two o’clock on her plate. She broke it into three neat pieces and ate deliberately, spacing the bites out. It had been a hard trip from Marseilles, and her stomach was not yet used to enough food.
“You have sense enough to eat slowly.” Adrian approved. “You’ve been hungry before.”
“You, too, I think.”
“I was starving pretty much all the time till I got old enough to steal for a living.” He chuckled. “Maybe I’d be a great walking mountain like Grey if I’d got fed regular.”
“Almost certainly. You will sit back in the chair more, Adrian. If you wish to faint, do not knock my cup of coffee into my lap doing it.”
The table told her of his movement. “Bouquets of womanly sympathy. Would you love me if I had Grey’s muscles and walked around towering over all these Frenchmen? I wouldn’t be half the agent I am if I had his height. Too conspicuous.”
“I find myself not in the least sympathetic to the problems of being an English spy in France. I would not waste my love on such as you, in any case. You should eat something, especially if that man is to remove bullets from you today, as you say.”
“I don’t think food will help. Disconcerting when your surgeon dreads the procedure more than you do. When were you hungry, Annique? The Terror?”
She chewed and swallowed. It was harmless enough to speak of this. “At that time, yes, but not in Paris. I was living with the Rom, the Kalderash, for those years. That life is hard in the winter, if the times are troubled.”
“Stolen by the Gypsies, were you?”
“That is a very false story, as you must know, being the so-intelligent spy that you are. The Rom never steal children, having many of their own, since they know as well as anyone how to make babies. It is not a matter of great difficulty, in case you wondered.”
“I’ve heard that. I wouldn’t try to hide that roll if I were you. No place for it under those clothes, delightful as they are.”
“It is that this dress is not decent then,” she said darkly. “I suspected as much.”
“It’s charming. Leave the roll next to the plate, please, and refrain from pilfering crusts in my presence. Roussel’s over there handing up baskets to the coach. Enough food for a small army. One benefit of getting kidnapped by Grey, Fox Cub—you’ll eat well so long as we manage to hold on to you.”
“I will eat well for some time then.” She had room in her stomach for a last sip of coffee or a bite more bread. Not both. She chose the coffee. She did love coffee.
“IMBÉCILE.” JACQUES LEBLANC SPREAD THE MAP flat, fingering across the roads of Normandy. “You waste my time with your whining.”
“She is in Paris,” Henri said sullenly. “They are on foot, without food, without money. The boy is wounded…”
“The boy is certainly dead. They abandoned him long since in some alleyway.” Leblanc unrolled the map further. “By now they have horses. Even a carriage perhaps.”
“The Englishman will go to ground. If Annique escapes him, she will go to her friends in Paris. Why would she—”
“She has friends everywhere. Be silent.” Leblanc set two inches of Normandy shoreline between thumb and index finger. “This is the stronghold of smuggling. The path to England. Together or apart, injured or well, they must come here.”