Nineteen
“I WILL SLIT HER THROAT.” HENRI’S FACE WAS marbled into an ugly map of bruises. His hand, on the tabletop, was swathed in white cloth.
“Ass! Do you think the English have no ears?” Leblanc glanced around. Fishermen stuffed themselves with onions and fried fish. At a table in the corner, a woman drank gin. No one was listening. “You will get your chance soon enough.”
“First, I will deal with him. I will gut him like a mackerel and leave him flopping in his blood.”
“As you did before?”
“No one reported this English spy was in Dover. How was I to expect—”
“Cease! You whine like a dog.” Leblanc hunched over his watered rum. His arm ached unbearably. He was in England, wallowing in this dockside filth, in danger. He might be stopped and questioned at any moment by stupid, clumsy British authorities. Annique had escaped him. This was Henri’s fault, every bit. “She goes to Soulier, in London, to tell him lies about me. He has been her objective all along. I am sure of it.”
“But she does not carry the papers. We could have stayed in France, if it is papers you want.” Henri doubtless thought he was clever.
“Forget the papers. What is important is that she dies. She must not reach Soulier.”
“We are in his territory. When he hears what we have done…”
“She is my agent, assigned to me. I can do what I like with an outlaw who crosses the Channel without my orders.” Leblanc finished the glass in one swallow. What he would not give for an hour in privacy with that bitch. One hour. “I have sent word to Fouché what she does. When the Directeur of the Secret Police supports me, I do not give a fart for Soulier. Faugh. Who can drink this?”
“There is brandy.” Henri looked for the serving maid.
“It is all pig wash. Rum, gin, beer, brandy—they are horse piss in this stink of a country. You will take six of the men and go east, along the coast. Send the others west. She is squatting by the fire in some fisherman’s hut, thinking she has outsmarted me.”
“Why would she hide in some small village where everyone peers and spies and chatters? She will go to London. To Soulier. When he learns we are in England—”
“Enough.” Leblanc slammed the empty glass on the table.
One fisherman, and then another and another, shot looks in their direction. The whore at the corner table hastily dropped a coin by her mug and left. Even the innkeeper eyed them with suspicion.
Leblanc held rage behind clenched teeth. He could not order these scum hauled into the street and beaten. He, Jacques Leblanc, friend of Fouché, had no power here. Everything…everything…was in ruins. He had lost any chance of the Albion plans. That bitch whore, Annique, would run to Soulier and complain. He should have killed her, her and Vauban, too, there in the inn at Bruges.
Henri would not cease. “I only say that we must watch the road to London—”
“I am not a fool, Bréval. I, myself, will watch the coaching inn to see if she takes the stage to London. You will search the coast. And you will not concern yourself with papers.”
The Albion plans were lost. The payment that should have been his—lost. His very life was threatened. Annique had many sins to pay for.
Any minute, she would learn of the death of Vauban. She must not reach Soulier and babble in his ear. “She is to be killed on sight. They need not be gentle.” Let her suffer a lifetime of pain in every second it took her to die.
“Soulier is fond of her. He will be furious.”
“When she is a corpse, it does not matter what Soulier is fond of.”
Twenty
IN THE LIGHT OF THE THIN NEW MOON, ROBERT groomed the horse Harding. He brushed his way with care and thoroughness from mane to withers to rump and tail. From bite to kick, as it were. She thought the horse Harding liked it. He looked smug.
“You are indulgent to that horse.” She watched the outline of him against a gray sky. “He has done no work whatsoever except to walk a little.”
“I like taking care of animals.”
She supposed a life surrounded by fishes and smuggled brandy would not allow time to care for livestock. “Is he from your home, the horse Harding? Perhaps one that your brother bred, who is so fond of horses?”
“Spence? No, Harding isn’t one of his. I picked Harding up in Dover. Spence would like him though. If I brought him home, he’d try to win him in one of his card games. He’d cheat, most likely, since it’s just family.”
“It must be interesting to have brothers and sisters. I have often thought so.”
For four long days Robert had laid his whole history out before her, like a gift. It was as if he’d waited all his life for the chance to tell his story to a grubby French spy walking on the dusty roads in Kent. She knew now of the house in Somerset where he had grown up, where his mother and father and the older brother Spence and a young sister still lived.
She could picture it, that huge old farmhouse with the horses in the stable and the chickens his mother was proud of, who each had names and were of a special breed from Constantinople and not at all like other chickens. Robert had, she knew now, a house of his own called Tydings where an aunt looked after him, and another brother in the army and three other sisters, younger than he was, but married, who did not live at home.
It was a joy and a burden to know all this. She would remember it when they parted and it would make her infinitely sad.
They were encamped far back from the road, deep in the stubble of harvested fields. She turned the embers with a pointed stick. She had built such clean, invisible fires a thousand times. There was little smoke. No sparks flew into the night to show where they were.
Robert finished with his pampering of Harding and came to sit beside the fire with her. “That’s a pretty tune. What is it?”
“What? Oh. I had not realized I was humming. It is a children’s song.” She sat back on her heels. “Let me think…In English it would go, ‘Let the gutters flow with the blood of the aristocrats. Let us wash our hands in their entrails. Let all who stand against the voice of the people perish like rats.’ There is much more of it.”
“Good God.”
“Most exactly. It is a pretty tune, though. It is sad that my voice is like a jackdaw, as many people have told me. We used to sing that one, jumping rope. ‘The fat aristos shall perish, one and two. The traitors shall die, three, four.’ We were all without exception bloodthirsty when I was six. That was the year we took the Bastille. It is strange to know all those boys I played with are in the army now, or dead.”
“An interesting time.”
“It was to stand at the pivot of history, to be in Paris in those days. Dreams were as solid as the stones of the street. A thousand possibilities. That is what you English do not understand. We French will not stop until the whole world is conquered for the Revolution. Napoleon puts his harness upon those dreams and drives them for his own purposes. You do not know at all what you are up against.”
“You think the peace won’t last?”
She knew the peace would not last. The Albion plans set a date for the invasion. She knew the very road troops of the Grande Armée would march upon. Some of them, a third part of the army, would murder and pillage their way down this one. “It is Napoleon’s passion to conquer, not to rule. There will be no peace.” The fire made a comfortable hiss and sputter as she flipped ember after ember. She had seen houses and villages burned till they were just this. Embers. “He prepares again for war, even as we sit here.”