They stopped and looked at her. Grey said, “You didn’t know?”
Soulier said carefully, “For weeks now. Did you not hear? The last day of July. He died peacefully in his sleep, my child. His years were fulfilled. We were—”
Gunfire cracked. A shock. Heat stung her cheek. She was on the floor, flat on her face, with no memory of throwing herself there. Gunpowder hung in the air. She had not been hit. She felt no pain, only cold and fear.
Frantic scuffling. The thud and grunt of men fighting. A chair clattered. The pistol bounced across the floor.
Soulier was on his feet, his cane revealed as a thin sword blade. His guards stood in front of him, shielding him.
Leblanc pulled his knife. In a blur of speed, Grey wheeled and kicked and connected. La savate. She had not known Grey was a savateur. Leblanc staggered and screamed and launched himself upon Grey, stabbing.
They went down together. A lamp fell. Dishes crashed to the floor. She could not throw her knife into the tangle of two men wrestling. The guards, idiots, did nothing.
It was a fight of lightning swiftness, a fight of cats in an alley. Leblanc raised steel that glittered like ice. Struck. Grey caught his arm. The blade sawed back and forth and flipped, end over end, to clatter at Soulier’s feet. Grey’s fist struck. Leblanc collapsed, bloody, on the floor.
She knelt, gasping, the knife she had not used still in her hand. Grey was not hurt. Not hurt. Not one tiny bit hurt. He was safe.
The guards ran forward, not sure which man to hold. Soulier’s voice came calmly. “Assist Leblanc to rise, Yves. Just so. Continue to assist him. Monsieur Grey, I am inexpressibly grateful. Annique, my very dear…you are not injured? I see you are not.”
She got to her feet, shaking so badly she searched for something to support her. The scratch on her cheek…She wiped at it with the back of her hand. A nothing. When she turned to look, behind her on the yellow silk panel of the wall, the bullet made a neat, round puncture, black at the edges.
Leblanc hung heavily in an implacable hold. He looked…diminished. He was only a thin, ugly man in rumpled clothing, bleeding from his nose. Not the important spy of France. Not the bogeyman of her childhood.
Her voice came as if from far away. “Vauban is dead. I did not know.”
Grey came up behind her. “I would have told you. I thought you knew.”
There was a humming in her ears. So strange. She felt as if she were floating. Because she knew everything. She could see it all. So obvious. “Vauban dies. And it was a week, not more, that Maman’s coach falls unbelievably from a high cliff. I was to ride out with her that day.”
“My God,” Grey muttered.
Behind her eyes, fire pulsed. She faced Leblanc. “Was I so hard to kill you must take Maman as well? Or did you think I had shared the secret with her?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Leblanc’s gaze slid away. His pupils jerked in tiny twitches. He was guilty. Guilty and afraid.
He killed Maman. The world went blood red. She dropped her knife and went for him with her bare hands.
He gagged as her hands closed on his throat. She would tear him apart. Rip his flesh to pieces. She fought the guards who pulled Leblanc away. She fought Grey when he held her arms behind her back and did not let her sink her claws into Leblanc.
“Arrête, chérie.” Soulier’s voice reached her.
“I will kill him.” She kicked Grey, who kept her from Leblanc. “I will kill him fifty times. Murderer! Assassin. Animal!” She would shred him to bits.
“She lies. Do not listen to her. It is all lies.”
“So far, she merely promises to kill you,” Soulier said. “I am almost inclined to allow it. But we will hear what she has to say first. Calm her, Monsieur Grey. She will hurt herself.”
She would wipe this piece of filth from the universe. She would grind him to suet. “Son of a maggot. Murderer.”
“Annique, stop.” Grey’s strength closed around her, and she could not move. “Tell me.”
The smell of Grey, the steadiness of him, filled her senses. Fury trickled away. She was empty. She slumped against him, chilled and sick, panting for air.
Vauban was dead. He would never again fold together the pages of her report and nod, all gruff, and say, “Good work,” in front of everyone. He would never pour water in her wine as if she were still a child. Never. Never. Never again for Vauban. For Maman. Everything was gone. Tears burned in her eyes, and the pain choked her. Grey held her to him so she was hidden.
Soulier said, “Child, there is no time for this. Set it aside.”
She clung one minute to Grey’s jacket. The rage had passed, leaving her hollow. It was as if her heart and mind had been scooped out of her altogether. She was nothing but a cold wind wrapped in a woman’s skin.
She tried to push away from Grey and found herself still held—warmly, carefully, firmly. He did not let her go. He turned her within his arms so that she faced Soulier. It seemed she would have the comfort of his body whether she wished for it or not.
“I am composed,” she said.
“Good. I must deal with Leblanc,” Soulier said. “Give me the truth of this matter.”
Truth. How strange that she could tell the simple truth in this company. There was no old man in his stone house in Normandy, depending upon her silence. Vauban was dead. Nothing could hurt him.
She said, “Vauban stole the Albion plans,” and she watched the words stab to the heart of Soulier.
“That is impossible.”
Behind her, Grey stiffened, deep in his muscles.
“He stole them to pass to the British. Not for the money. It was never for the money.” She could not clear the lump from her throat. “It was…With gold as payment, even a small amount of gold, no one would suspect Vauban.”
“No one would believe that of him.” Soulier sank heavily into the chair. “He conceived a faultless operation. As always.”
“He planned for months, alone, in secret.” Her feelings were chaotic, even after so many months. “I think…I think Vauban went a little mad when his sons died in Egypt.”
Soulier looked away, his lips tight. “Other men have lost sons.”
“His sons died for nothing. Napoleon sailed home to hold parades and put sphinxes upon the feet of his tables. Émile and Philippe died in the fever and stink of Cairo, deserted by the man who led them there. They died for a Corsican’s vanity, Vauban said.”
How could Soulier not understand? He had been Vauban’s friend. How could he look like that, shocked and condemning? “He was old and tired and sick. He lived his whole life in the service of France. He lost everything in the Terror—his home, his family, his wife.”
“My child, I was there. I know.”
“Only his boys were left. Then Napoleon threw their lives away on a grandiose whim to rule the East.”
She shook herself free of Grey and began to pace the room. She could not stay still. The Frenchmen, Soulier’s agents, followed her with their eyes, waiting for what she would say. Soulier’s pain whipped at her with silent lashes.
She steadied her voice. “And now Napoleon planned another vast expedition. To England. That is why Vauban stole the plans. He said Napoleon had betrayed the Revolution.”
Soulier passed his hand over his forehead. “Always, he was the dreamer among us. The idealist. But this…”
“There would be no more pointless battles overseas, Vauban said. No more French armies abandoned. He would prevent it.”
Soulier lifted his eyes to her. “You were under his orders, Annique. If he told you to help him in this…”
Did he think Vauban would lay that upon her? “But no. He told me nothing. He brought me to Bruges to run the small errands, as always. To watch for the British. But Leblanc…”
Leblanc fought the men who held him, knowing what she would say next. Hatred washed over her in tides. She took shaking, hot breaths before she could speak. “Leblanc’s small worm in the Military Intelligence of England, Tillman, told Leblanc where the British would deliver the gold. The Englishmen were betrayed, first, by an English.”