“WELL, that weren’t so bad, then,” Doyle said when she’d gone down the path and couldn’t overhear. “Not like Adrian’s a bloody Austrian sergeant with fifty-two pieces of lead in his gut.”
“Name of God, Will, how long did she take?”
“Two minutes. Three, tops. I can see why those army surgeons put her to work. Jerked that bullet out like a plum in a Christmas pudding.”
“How many goddamned battles was she in, to learn that? What the hell kind of mother sends a child to an army camp to spy? How old was she? Eleven? Twelve?”
“About the same age we put the Hawker to work.”
“Hawker wasn’t a child. He was never a child.”
“I don’t suppose Annique was either. From what I hear, she was there when they hanged her father. She’d have been about four.” Doyle blotted Adrian’s chest with clean bandages. “He’s not even leaking blood much. Get that blanket, will you? You going to do more of that talk-talk to make him sleep?”
“Every hour for a while. What the devil am I going to do with that woman?”
“Now, that I wouldn’t care to speculate on. Spread your bedding over there a ways so you don’t disturb Adrian when you do it.”
“Very funny. I’ll reconnoiter up the ridge and keep an eye on her so she doesn’t sneak off. Call me if the boy wakes up. She’s going to run for it tonight, isn’t she?”
“All these woods and fields to hide in…yes. Hit you over the head with a rock first, I think.” Doyle picked up the bits of lead that had been pulled out of Adrian, looked at them soberly, and put them safe in his pocket. “Hawk will want these.”
“Good idea.” Grey stared down the path she’d just taken. “She’s already planning. I can feel her doing it. I don’t think I can stop her. She is so ferociously competent.”
“Be like trying to hold this one,” Doyle gestured at Adrian, “when he wanted to run.”
“You’re saying it’s not possible.”
“Not easy. Not outside of Meeks Street.”
Even if he tied her up, she’d find some way to get loose. “Leblanc’s on our heels. If she gets away from us, he’ll find her.”
“Or Fouché might get to her first and pop her into a brothel. If she’s lucky.” Doyle began wiping the instruments and laying them back in the bag.
There was only one damned thing to do. “Put some food together. She’ll be hungry, once she cleans up. And Will…”
Doyle looked up.
“Give her opium in the coffee.”
Doyle bound a new pad of bandages on Adrian.
“You have something to say?”
“It’ll work. She likes coffee.” Doyle took the blanket and spread it over Adrian, easing the boy into a more comfortable position. “It had to come to this. I’ll keep the dose low as I can. Go watch her.”
Eleven
DOYLE HAD CONSTRUCTED AN OMELET OF FRESH eggs and butter from the inn’s basket and chanterelle mushrooms from the woods. He was a good cook, Monsieur Doyle. But then, she thought, he did many things well besides pretending to be a coach driver. Grey sat next to her on the blanket, close but not touching. She felt his eyes on her though, continually. She considered escape plans for the evening.
“That innkeeper took a fancy to you,” Doyle told her. “We got a pot of cream for your coffee, because you liked it so much this morning.”
“I have a great allure for innkeepers, always.” She set her plate down on the blanket beside her and picked up the coffee again. “They sense in me, you comprehend, a great cook, which is unbearably attractive to them. You are also that, I find. A cook. This is an excellent omelet for being made over the fire, which is most tricky to do. I would not care to attempt it.”
She did not mention the coffee, which was not as good as his omelet, being strong and very bitter. It was possible the events of the day had disrupted him, and he would do better this evening. Or maybe it was that he was not French and therefore incapable of understanding coffee properly.
“You want one of them rolls like you had for breakfast?” Doyle said. “Not too tired to eat are you?”
“But no. It is a nothing, this taking bullets out of English spies.”
She doubted the dress she wore now was more decent than the one she had ruined. Grey told her it was green and covered everything it should. Doyle said it was the color of curled baby oak leaves and so entirely respectable she looked like a matron of forty years. She was not yet so foolish as to believe the words of either of these English.
When she had eaten as much of the omelet and some of the bread as she could fit into her, she settled against a tree and sighed in deep contentment and sipped coffee. It was relaxing, this, not to feel angry or afraid for a short time. She had learned many years ago to grab at any small moment of peace that presented itself. “Do you know, Grey, I like this place. It feels very old. Many, many of my people have been here.”
“The Gypsies?”
“Yes. The Rom. I should not call them my people since I am no longer part of them. I cannot go back. Not anymore. There is no place among the wagons for a woman such as me.” She hurt piercingly for a minute before she shook her head and put the thought away. “This camp, I think, is of great antiquity. The Rom must have been coming here as long as long. Hundreds of years maybe. That lovely stream…Rom would come a long way to camp here.”
“You enjoyed that.”
He was in a peculiar mood. He stayed close, intent upon her. It was as if he waited for something. He had finished his own meal and was drinking red wine with a complex woody smell. He had not yet offered her any.
“I enjoyed it most immensely. To wash…This is the first time in a month I have felt completely clean. It is one of the great pleasures of life, to be clean after one has been dirty so long. I went to the pool downstream. It is not broad, but deep, and the bottom is clean sand. They swim there, the women and children, I am sure. Farther down there will be rocks to wash clothes upon.”
“Cold though, I imagine.”
“I do not mind. I wished never to come out again, but I realized it is impossible to spend one’s life in a forest pool, however pleasant. It is lovely soap Doyle gave me. What is it made with? Lavender?”
“I’m not sure. He stole it someplace.”
“Of course. How silly of me.” She drank coffee again. It seemed odd to sit beside Grey and talk of everyday things, as if they were old friends. She would not have expected it.
“You liked being with the Gypsies?”
“Oh yes. Maybe it was being young, I do not know. When I was one of them it was the only time in my life I was completely happy. I would wake up in forests like this or in fields full of crickets—you can just hear the crickets here, Grey, if you listen—and there was the whole day ahead with nothing at all that must be done at any time. Nothing whatsoever. Everything came to one in great naturalness, gathering sticks for the fire and the horses to water and always the fields and woods to search for food. Or, in town, dancing and begging. I was not much good at dancing, I shall tell you, despite certain lies I have told. But Grey…you cannot imagine what a juggler I was.”
A pause. “A good one, I suppose.”
“Doyle will have told you about my juggling, since I am sure he knows the entire story of my life. I was incomparable, I must tell you. I was even better with throwing the knife. Even now, without seeing, I could aim for that little bird singing up in the tree there—I do not know the proper French name for him. The Rom would call him bardroi chiriclo.”
“That’s a greenfinch, Annique.”
“Ah, now I shall know. Well, even now, with the proper knife, I think I could hit that bird one time in ten, if I wished to eat finches, which I do not. One must be very hungry to eat finches.”