So it had happened. The doctor in Marseilles, with his unnecessary Latin, was right. The horrible bit of something in her skull had shifted off her optic nerve and was now wandering about, preparing to kill her.
She lay, getting ready to die, as the doctor had said she would.
It was entirely typical she should have a view of stubby pine trees to look at for her last minutes of life. Typical she should be stretched flat in soggy, cold mud. She tried to compose her mind to a nobility suitable for such a serious moment. What she thought upon, however, was her stupidity in trusting Henri’s horse and how uncomfortable she was and how hungry her belly felt and how radiant were those tiny drops that quivered down the needles of the pines…the drops that slid along the pine needles and fell one by one onto her face.
She waited. Minutes passed. Nothing happened, except that she became more wet.
It came to her that she was not going to die. Or at least, not just immediately. She sat up. In ordinary times, the ache in her skull would have occupied her attention to the exclusion of all else.
“But this is bizarre.” She found herself looking down at her hands, so automatically did her eyes go to where she’d rested them when she was blind. Amazing to see her own hands again. To see this dress she wore—pale green, smudged with dirt. To see…
She could see. She was no longer the blind, ridiculous worm. She was herself. She was Annique, the Fox Cub. Spy extraordinaire. “I can…see.” She felt hollow with amazement, a shell containing only joy. “I can do anything.” She scrambled to her feet. She wanted to dance. To fly.
The ditch was full of pinecones, which had been uncomfortable to lie among. She found five of them, tightly curled, heavy, and palm-sized.
One. Two. Three. She tossed the simple circle she’d learned from Shandor, when she was eight…that first night she’d come to the Rom and been so lonely.
Catching was easy as breathing. The Two and Two. The Half Shower. The Fountain. So beautiful. She craned her neck far back, swaying to keep under her catches. Her head ached like blazes, but it did not matter in the least.
Bon Dieu, but she was stiff. There had been a time she could sometimes juggle five. Today she was happy to keep a circle of four in the simplest of patterns, a child’s juggling.
She wanted…oh, how she wanted Grey at this moment. She wanted to show him this. Her juggling. Her little art. The trick she had mastered only for the joy of it.
The pinecones were bright and happy in her hands. Nothing lost after all these empty months. Hands and eyes working together. The wonderful eyes that could see for her.
Grey would never see her juggle. Never.
She became clumsy suddenly and missed a cone, so she let the others go. They landed, left and right, hitting neatly on each other, as juggled things do.
She set her face against the tree trunk. It was the same tree that had knocked her into the ditch. In the thick, muzzy silence of the wood, her breath caught in her throat and tears slipped from her eyes. She cried, sad and unspeakably happy.
Sixteen
THE HOVEL FRONTED THE BEACH. AN OVERTURNED fishing boat flanked its door. Leblanc ignored the sobs that came through the wood shutters from inside, ignored also the girl child, held between two burly dragoons, snarling and fighting. His attention was all for the man kneeling at his feet.
“When did she leave?” he demanded.
“With the fishing fleet. At dawn.” The fisherman’s voice slurred through a cut and bleeding lip. “In the boat of the English smugglers.”
“Where do they go? What is their home port?”
“Who can say? They have many safe harbors, up and down the coast. They—”
Leblanc’s riding crop slashed the man’s face, sudden as a snake, and left a line of blood. “Where?”
“Dover. They go to Dover.” Panting, the fisherman bowed his head.
“Dover, you say?” Leblanc moved his gaze to where the girl was stretched, wriggling, between the soldiers. “Be very sure.”
“It is their place, so they have always said. I do not know if they tell me the truth. They are English.”
“It is you who must tell the truth.” Leblanc studied him another minute. “Henri!”
Henri appeared at the doorway, tucking his shirt into his trousers. “There’s nothing in the house, just some clothes she left behind. That’s all.”
“No papers?”
“None.”
Leblanc went white around the mouth. Abruptly he turned and stalked back to where the horses waited. He took reins from the trooper standing at attention. “She can see. She’s made a fool of us all.” He mounted. “Come.”
“What do you want done with these?”
Leblanc stepped into a soldier’s cupped hands and swung into the saddle. He looked from father to young daughter, and to the house where a woman wept. Then he smiled. “We will reward them, of course.” He pulled out coins and tossed them. “They have been helpful. See that the other villagers know of this.” His horse kicked up sand. The dragoons rode across the coins, following him.
The fisherman watched them out of sight.
“You told them.” His daughter collapsed to the ground, crying, now that the troopers were gone.
“Someone would have told them, in the end, after they hurt more women.” He stooped like an old man and began to gather up the coins, running his fingers into the sand to find any buried deep by hooves. “Help me with this. Your eyes are better than mine.”
“You betrayed Annique.”
“Do you think she would expect us to fight him?” He did not meet her eyes. “It was what she told me to do, if that man should come here. She made me promise.”
“If he finds her—”
“He will not.” He brushed dirt off the coins and put them into his pocket and turned to the house. “Stay here and look for the money. I must go to your mother.” He stopped at the doorway. “He will not find Annique. She is the Fox Cub. And she made me promise.”
Seventeen
AT TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, ANNIQUE and a great many flopping halibut came ashore at Dover. She wore the second-best dress of a French fisherman’s daughter and a pair of sturdy boots. A shawl, knitted from the wool of the kindly-faced black sheep of the salt marshes, wrapped her shoulders. Adrian’s knife was strapped to her thigh under her dress.
She had eaten bread and cheese in mid-Channel, in the rocking darkness, with the smugglers. It was always interesting to talk to men of what they did for a livelihood, and now she knew more about hiding casks of brandy than she had known before. They waved at her now in a friendly fashion as she left, even Thadeus, the oldest, who had been dubious of her when she came aboard.
She stood on the quay amid piles of flounder and mussels and felt a moment of complete happiness. England. It was very beautiful, England. She had admired its white cliffs, riding in, with the sails behind her.
The noisy town of Dover stretched above her with its stone houses stacked one upon the other up the hill and the castle above everything. Around her, gray green water washed the pilings, splashing tiny explosions of light, spinning bubbles of silver and snow white. In baskets of fish, the scales shone in iridescent ripples.
After months of darkness, brightness assailed her on every side. Color whirled and danced around her till she was dizzy. She was drunk with it. The line of stark shadow on a white stone wall cut like a shout. A crimson dress in the doorway of a tavern dazzled. Sometimes she could barely think, her head was so full of color and shape. She was lost in this riot of light, struck dumb by the beauty of a gull hovering over a sparkle of water. Never, never would she take the light for granted.