That was true, so she felt better. In Fouché’s files in Paris, Tillman was marked as untrustworthy and expendable. He had outlived his usefulness. Any French agent might reveal his name, at need. “He is an inferior sort of traitor, your Monsieur Tillman, who works only for money. He sells us British secrets, then sells French secrets to the Romanovs, and everyone’s secrets to Hapsburgs. He betrays several masters.” Her fingers were making creases in her dress, which was a bad habit, so she stopped. “There is no proof I can give you. Only the name that is in my head.”
“I’ll get the proof. Now that I have the name, I can get the proof.” Grey put an arm around her. It was not the touch of a lover but the comfortable hold of a comrade before battle. All the time his eyes kept watch through the window, seeking in every corner, as if this were indeed a journey onto a battlefield.
Galba, too, studied the street. “Nobody’s following us yet. Robert, your assessment—does Cummings dare to challenge me directly? He brought twelve uniformed boobies with him. He’s a politic, cautious man, but he is also enamored of seizing the moment. Will he take her by force? We are prepared for all eventualities but that.”
Another street passed. Grey took that long to think about it. “He intended to. That’s why he brought that gaggle of marines. He changed his mind when Annique dropped her little grenade. He can’t risk backing the wrong player. Besides, he’s afraid I’d shoot him.”
“You would.”
Grey did not need to answer. His silence was like the flatness of a polished knife.
Not far onward, they reached a church, small and old, crowded between houses, with the name St. Odran on the front gate. Sooty stone went upward in many sharp points, some with knobs on the top, and it had small, bright windows.
“We are really going to church?” They had said so, but she had not taken that at face value.
“Contact with the established religion will leave no outward scars.” Galba collected his hat from the seat beside him.
She walked through the church door between two men, armed to the teeth, and saw, almost at once, Adrian in the back row, looking like a tomcat at a tea party so little was he suited to this place.
“You will kill me with bafflement, you,” she whispered to Grey.
“Look reverent,” he advised, and he left her to sit beside Galba. He went somewhere behind her. After that, she felt him watching her most of the time.
Galba sat imperturbably through the long, incomprehensible service. He was transformed, as soon as he entered, into the very portrait of a prosperous city merchant, a shade cunning and foxlike, but fitting wholly into this assemblage of petty bourgeois. He had about him an air of conscious self-satisfaction, as if he were a proud grandfather taking his pretty young granddaughter to church.
So she played the pretty young granddaughter, as she had played so many roles, and held an English prayer book when he handed it to her. After searching her memory, she concluded this was entirely the first church service she had ever attended. She stood and sat and knelt with everyone else and tried to relate these activities to what was happening at the front of the church and failed.
While she was sitting and the man in black talked at great length, she paged slowly through the Book of Common Prayer and put it in her memory, for one never knows what will become useful. She felt bewildered through all of this, without pause, until finally they stood and chanted and everyone except them started to leave. Grey joined them. After a few minutes, they were the only ones in the tiny church.
The minister finished shaking hands at the door of the church and bustled to see them. He greeted “Mr. Galba” and “Mr. Grey” and then took her hand.
“This is Miss Jones,” Galba said. Such names, the British Service chose. It had struck her from time to time that the men of this Service had a peculiar sense of humor.
The clergyman smiled upon her benignly. “I married your mother, you know. You want to see the entries, I understand. I’ve put them out in the vestry. Do follow me.”
She was completely on the other side of the church, walking in a puzzled daze, before she realized that the old man in black was not claiming to be some husband of her mother, but rather the clergyman presiding at a marriage.
Maman had married someone? She was not completely amazed, except that it had happened in England. But her mother had done many interesting things in her life, so one more was not impossible, even in England.
A vestry turned out to be a small room. One came to it through a narrow door set between stone columns and, once there, found it dusty and full of cabinets. On the table a large book had been laid open. It filled the entire table.
“Mr. Galba tells me your mother passed away recently. Allow me to offer my condolences. I remember her well, though she wasn’t one of my regular parishioners. A most beautiful young woman. You have a great look of her, by the way. This is the record.”
He pointed to one line. In the dim light that came through the diamond-shaped panes, she saw that on September 3, 1781, Lucille Alicia Griffith had married Peter Daffyd Jones.
There are not so many Lucille Alicias in the world. It appeared that, indeed, her mother had been married to someone.
“The christening.” The minister lifted one huge page, turned it, and trailed his index finger down the entries. “Here. This is it.” Small, neat, spidery script, a bit faded, read, Anne Katherine Jones.
She had been christened. How odd. Galba took the minister away and talked to him.
“Do you accept this as authentic?” Grey asked her.
“What?” She had not thought of that. She drew her fingers across the page. The powdery slickness under her fingertips told of undisturbed inks. No trace of discontinuity. No telltale roughness. The colors were properly faded, and they matched. The binding was untouched. The smell, old. “It is real. I just don’t understand.”
“Not a forgery. Not a substitution. You accept this as genuine.”
She nodded. “I was in England as a child. I remember it, just on the edges of rememberings. But I did not know I was born here, in London. Why would I be born in England?”
“We all get born someplace. Let’s get out of here.”
Outside, Adrian waited, his back against the wall, watching everything with the impartial, carnivorous attention of a hawk. He passed a few words to Grey.
“One scuffle in the churchyard,” Grey said to Galba as they got into the coach.
Galba held his gun across his lap on this trip back. Grey kept his at his side, resting on the seat. The coach skirted Booth Square to take a different route home. She felt the presence of men out on the streets, shadowing the coach on all sides, protecting her. She had a sense of moving in an ocean of events, pulled by tides she did not understand.
Meeks Street had been emptied of its assemblies of spies. She was escorted up the stairs by hard-faced men, looking serious, and Doyle, looking amiable and completely relaxed. She was so preoccupied she scarcely noticed she was walking back into her prison.
In the parlor, while they waited for Giles to unlock the door to the inner portion of the house, she said what had been on her mind since she left the church. “Peter Daffyd Jones.” Grey and Galba turned. “Has anyone told him my mother is dead?”
Grey said, “He’s dead, too, Annique. Peter Jones was your father.”
It was impossible that they did not know. This was common knowledge about her. “My father was Jean-Pierre Jauneau, called also Pierre Lalumière. He was a hero of the Revolution. He was hanged in Lyon with the other leaders of the Two Sous Rebellion when I was four.”
“Pierre Lalumière was Peter Jones. He was Welsh. Stay still a minute. I think I’ll disarm you for a while.”
She pulled back her sleeve and held out her arm so Grey could unstrap the sheath. “This makes no sense. My father was Basque, or perhaps Gascon. Do you tell me my father was Welsh? Why should he be a Welsh? Nobody is Welsh. I have never known a single person in my life who was Welsh. It is an utterly stupid thing to be.”