He’d had ten days with her. She delighted him and filled him with boundless regret that he’d never known her as a child. When she tilted her head like that, he could see his Anna in her, his wife, long dead. Her face was the face of Peter Jones. The passionate warrior. The dreamer. She had Lucille’s charm, all of it, and made it distinctly her own. But her brain—that cool, amused, assessing brain—that came from him. She and Robert would have formidable children.
“Check, Annique.”
He was coming to understand her moderately well, his Lucille’s daughter. It had puzzled him, at first, that she could be such an effective agent and yet so unguarded, so open and direct. In ten days, his spontaneous, unstudied, frank granddaughter never slipped up, not once, in all that chatter.
“So.” He did not intend to let her sit brooding about Robert. “We were talking about the nature of secrets, were we not?”
“Yes.” She slid her knight into his trap.
He didn’t immediately fall upon it. It would be more instructive if she had time to apprehend her mistake before he moved. “We agreed, did we not, that secrets are intangible, but commodities? That they may be bought or sold or stolen? They may be owned?”
“Certainly they may be owned.” There. That flick of an eyelash. She had realized her knight was doomed. She was probably beginning to suspect her bishop was the next to go. He would teach this woman to play chess yet. “We are agreed upon it. I wish my conversations with you did not consist of me agreeing with things you have said and then concluding things I do not at all want to believe.”
She was so strictly disciplined under that frivolity. Not once did she glance to the front of the house. There were no signs even he could detect that her whole spirit was poised, waiting for the carriage to return.
Robert and the others were taking a long time. The negotiations with Lazarus must be more difficult than expected.
“If a secret may be owned, it can change ownership,” he said.
“Oh, surely. Secrets are most promiscuous. I have eloped with a few myself, in my time.” With a thoroughly French shrug, she accepted the loss of her knight and sent her queen to cunningly waylay his bishop.
“Can they also remain faithful? Do my cuff links remain mine, though resting in Robert’s dresser drawer?” He moved a knight. “The drawer does not own the secrets.”
“Hah. You say, in effect, the secrets in my head do not belong to me. I disagree.” She scooped up his bishop, muttering, “This does me no good whatsoever. You merely toy with me, I think.”
“So I do.” He moved a pawn. “Check.”
“But where? You do not…Oh.” She bit her lip. “I think that is cheating. You have not moved your rook for such a long time I forgot him altogether.” She set her finger on the queen. “I see clearly how to escape this trap so it is probably more subtle than is believable. Grandpère, my head is not a dresser drawer. I do not care who has put the secrets into it or who needs them. They are mine now. I will decide.” She moved the queen.
He set the last pawn into place. “Exactly. They are no longer French secrets. They are yours. You must dispose of them according to your own conscience. That is checkmate in three moves.”
She glared at the board. It took her a minute to work the moves out, twice that long for her invincible stubbornness to admit she was beaten. She gave an exclamation of disgust and stood up. “I do not know why I continue to play chess with you, since I never win.”
“You play because I ask you to, Annique.”
He set the white king and queen, side by side, into their velvet-lined nests in the box, then the red queen and king. It was always a pleasure to touch these old chessmen. His Annique picked a rook, a bishop, and a pawn from the table and began to juggle. The pieces hovered before her like hummingbirds while her hands flew in circles around them.
He stopped, fascinated. The girl was such an odd compendium of talents. She used just the tips of her fingers, soft as the wind.
“I am teaching Adrian to juggle.” Her attention was all on the chessmen; absorbed, unselfconscious, cat-quick. “It will help him with his throwing knives and also amuse him. Doyle will not learn. It does not accord with his persona, he says, though not in those words. Grey has not the time, since you work him without mercy at all hours of the day and night.”
“Is it hard to do that? Juggle with the different shapes?”
She caught them. One. Two. Three. Then tossed the bishop by itself so it spun in the air. “But they are the same, these pieces. There is a weight inside—small stones, perhaps, from the feel of it—and it is alike for all. One juggles the center of balance.” She set the three pieces down in a row on the edge of the board so he could put them away.
He should have brought this child to England ten years ago. What Lucille had done to her, what he’d allowed, was nothing short of criminal. It was one more regret among many he lived with. “Find the center of balance and everything falls into your hand.”
“That is one way to think of it. I must tell you, though, that I am not so easily manipulated as these chessmen you use so well.” She gave her street urchin grin. “Do you know the small thing I missed most when I was blind?”
He put the red bishop, rook, and pawn each into its place in the box and closed the lid. “Juggling?”
“Juggling, too.” She was looking past him, out the window. “I missed pigeons. I could hear them everywhere, but I could not see them. I am very fond of pigeons. I admire of them that they are large and yet they do not continually bully the sparrows. They also keep their tongues within their teeth and do not argue politics at one continually through the day and night. Do not be the natural historian and tell me pigeons do not have teeth.”
“I would argue instead that pigeons do not have politics.” Now he must choose something else to distract her till Robert and the others returned. They were on a small errand, this business with the criminals of the rookeries of East London. But he’d lost agents doing small errands. And Marguerite was with them. “To the piano, Annique. It is time for your practice.” He pulled the cord for Giles to come and unlock doors.
“They do not know, any of them, the hideous things you do to prisoners in this house.” Her eyes danced when she said that. She was comfortable with him, feeling at home here in even these few days. His granddaughter was a woman of strong, uncomplicated loyalties. She was binding herself to him and his organization and to England every hour. In another week, or even a few days, it would be done.
Giles was another lure. The two of them walked ahead of him down the hall toward the front parlor, heads together, murmuring. She was enchanted to have a blood relative her own age, a cousin. She listened endlessly to the dullest family gossip, marveling that all these people should be related to her.
She’d already forged an unbreakable bond with Robert. His daughter and his granddaughter had both chosen remarkable men to love. The Griffith line was safe.
But not its music. That had been misplaced along the way. He followed her into the parlor to find her standing, outlined by the sunlight of the front windows, scowling mutinously at the piano.
She was beautiful as the dawn, of course. One of those troublesome women born to drive men mad. That old devil Fouché was right in one thing—it was high time this agent exchanged boys’ clothes and the battlefield for the salon and politics. She was too valuable to waste on the military side. “You will wish to portray a young woman of good family someday. You should have learned to play the piano badly years ago. I don’t know what your mother was thinking of.”
“I am not musical, me.”
“Neither are the young ladies of good family. They worship at the shrine of Euterpe, but they hear her not.”