Doyle spoke up beside her. “You don’t like the coffee, miss? I think maybe I made it too strong.”
“No, no. It is good indeed.” She drank the last of it to the dregs and let him take the cup from her hold.
“Don’t know but what I may end up drinking coffee me-self, instead of tea, if I make many more trips over here,” Doyle said. “You going to learn to drink tea in England?”
“I drink tea now, sometimes, when my stomach does not agree with me.”
“You’re getting better. You didn’t even bother to say you’re not going to England,” Grey said.
“If you imagine I say what I am thinking, monsieur, then you are very foolish, which I do not consider at all likely.” She leaned back again against the tree.
Adrian began stirring restlessly, so Grey went to him, and she was forced to listen to another extremely boring discourse on the subject of floating and sleeping. That was strange, when he droned on and on and Adrian became quiet enough to operate upon. She would ask Grey to explain this, later, when she was not so tired. It was annoying he should keep talking when she wished nothing more than to relax and rest. But after a while, she supposed, one paid no more attention to him than to the buzz of bees or a cricket calling.
It was very warm in the clearing this afternoon. Doyle went back and forth. The sound of his boots as he cleared away dishes and mended the fire seemed as right in this camp as the birdcalls and the shuffle of the horses, tied at the edge of the clearing. All the smells, all the sounds, were as they should be.
When she was young and dressed as a boy and following armies, sometimes Vauban would come to meet her. They would sit in the fields or in woods like this and build a small fire. He brought her food when he could. She was always hungry. She would eat and report to him every tiny thing she had seen, and Vauban would praise her and give her orders. She had felt safe at such times, for an hour or two. Vauban would have protected her with his life.
Sometimes Soulier came, elegant even when he wore rags or a soldier’s uniform. Soulier smuggled her bonbons from Paris with such care they might have been secret documents. He made her laugh. Always, he had good advice for her. There was no one more cunning than Soulier.
He was in London now, Soulier, since he had become chief of all French spies in England. He played the role of the open agent, the agent that all men knew worked for the Secret Police but no one touched. It was an old agreement—who knew how old—that there should be one open agent in each capital. There must be, after all, a man the British could come to, to ransom sailors and agents and the odd soldier who had fallen into French hands, or to convey the most discreet and private messages from government to government.
Soulier must enjoy that work, as he had a taste for political games. He would enjoy also flaunting himself beneath the noses of Military Intelligence when they could not touch him.
“You are resting quietly, getting stronger. The pain is very far away.” Grey’s voice was only a murmur in the background. Something she could ignore. “You’re safe, where nothing can touch you. The pain is far away. It can’t touch you.”
She was so drained from what she’d done to Adrian, she was drowsing in the sunlight, lulled by good food inside her and Grey’s voice. He spoke in the accents of the South, which were so familiar. Her father had spoken thus. It was the language she spoke as a child. The language her dreams came in. She stretched and yawned and rearranged herself. The tree bark at her back wasn’t at all rough. Soft, in fact.
After a while, Grey’s feet came near to her and stopped. She yawned again. “You are an odd Head of Section.”
“He’s good at it,” Doyle said.
Grey folded something smooth and warm around her. It was his coat, and it smelled of him. Then she knew.
“You have given me drugs.”
“Yes, Annique,” Grey said.
It was too late to do anything about it.
Twelve
“DO NOT GIVE ME FAMILY PARTIES OF DUTCH, with their three children and a grandmother.” One hand on the reins, the other clenching a rolled list, Leblanc sat stiff in the saddle. “Or schoolgirls. Or two old men who tune pianos. This is useless.”
“These have passed today. No one else.” The corporal of militia stood stolidly.
“I tell you again, you are looking for a blind woman. Young, dark-haired. Very lovely. It is inconceivable no one would notice. There will be a man with her. Tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes.”
“There may be another with them. A young man, wounded,” Henri added.
Leblanc scowled him to silence. “Forget the others. We have to find the blind girl. She will come this way. She must.”
Henri’s mount crept forward, planning to take a bite out of the corporal. Henri kneed it back into line. “Or they may strike south.”
“She won’t. She knows every foot of this coast. And it’s the best route to England.” Leblanc tore the list he had been offered into pieces. They fluttered to the ground and danced in the wind around the hooves of his horses. “How is she slipping past the patrols? How? Damn these peasants. Someone’s helping her.”
“No blind women came by my post,” the corporal said stolidly.
Leblanc squinted across the barrens of pine and sand toward the slice of slate-colored sea. “That village?”
The corporal said, “Pointe Venteuse, sir.”
“It has an inn?”
“Oui, monsieur, a fine one. Madame Dumare is—”
“You will take your men, Corporal, and you will go through every house in that wretched village. You will go through every hedge and outhouse and cow byre searching for that woman. Then you will search them again. You will do this until I tell you to stop.”
“But—”
“Perhaps next time I will not hear so much of Dutch families. I will be at the inn. Henri…”
Resigned, Henri spurred forward.
“Let us make a lesson here. Pick two or three women and bring them to the inn for questioning. If the inn is indeed fine, I will spend the night there.”
So. It was to be one of those nights. Henri shrugged and motioned four of the troop to fall in behind him. Husbands and fathers would object. They would object more tomorrow, when they saw what was done with the girls.
“Dark-haired,” Leblanc called after him. “I want them dark-haired. And young.”
Thirteen
TIME CRAWLED OVER HER AND AROUND HER. SHE floated in endless swirling waters. When the heavy, dark weight of them receded, she was sitting up with a man’s arm around her.
“Drink this.” It was Grey who said that, and what she was to drink was coffee. Very sweet coffee.
“I do not take so much sugar.” She shook her head, annoyed and barely awake. “It is too much. Really.” But she drank it because he put it to her lips and kept offering it to her until it was gone. Then he held her close to his chest as she spiraled into the blackness. It was like falling down into him.
Darkness gave way to the velvet times when she was full of mindless contentment and did ordinary things, but nothing was important in the least. She walked or stood or sat, and Grey was nearby, telling her what to do, guiding her through the moments of spinning bewilderment. Then she would lie down and sleep, in a bed or on the ground, wherever he had put her.
Once, she lay with the softness of a bed beneath her. Grey’s body sprawled beside her, sleeping. The bed was warm with him, and his arm lay across her, heavy and relaxed. Desire uncoiled in her. Her skin stretched tight over a thousand humming feathers. She turned to him and slid herself against him, and it burned. Between her legs it burned and sang, and she pressed and pressed herself against him.
He woke. “Easy, Annique. You’re dreaming. Don’t…” He set her away from him. “No.” It was a whisper in her ear. “You’re beautiful, Fox Cub. Sleep now. Just sleep.” But she held tight to him, wrapped around him. She felt, suddenly, an ecstasy that broke her into a thousand fragments. She cried out and fell, slowly, all the thousand pieces of her, into the warm, drugged ocean the opium had prepared for her.