Chapter Two
Shay counted down the seconds following Celeste’s departure, wanting to place a good amount of time between them. Safety depended on careful observations and well-planned escape routes.
McPherson would have to be warned, of course. The net was closing in day by day, but he hadn’t yet done what he’d hoped to since coming to Paris. He had passed military and political intelligence through McPherson to Wellesley, good intelligence that would inform the strategists and policy makers. But things were coming to a head now and he did not want to miss the last battles of the campaign.
Napoleon and the Grande Armée were Russia-bound and General Wellesley was moving east towards France, chasing the last of the remaining French troops under General Soult out of Spain.
He would quit Paris for the Spanish north. In disguise, he thought, and his heart sank. In all the weeks he’d been in France he had worn his uniform, as he had promised to do. Never before had he broken his promise to stay under the protection of military clothes.
Celeste Fournier was another problem. If she had come to him, then others were probably watching, too, and her vow of help was beguiling. He would like to understand why she had left Sussex so abruptly. He would like to know why she had never made contact with him, why she had slid into the Parisian underworld of subterfuge and sacrifice instead.
A small hole in the canvas allowed him to slip into the backstreet behind the restaurant and up through a series of alleyways that led to Montmartre.
McPherson’s apartment was halfway up the hill on the Rue des Abbesses and he was home, setting a substantial diamond in a gold ring.
‘The secret police and the War Office have us in sight. You will need to pack up and leave.’
Grey eyebrows shot up. ‘Cunningham implied as much when I saw him last. The White Dove warned him.’
‘The White Dove?’
‘A woman who transfers cachets for us sometimes and one who goes by so many names I have lost the truth of her real one. It is rumoured her father was murdered six years ago by the English.’
‘Where was the daughter when this happened?’
‘Here in Paris. Another lost soul of the Empire.’
Shay felt unaccountably sick. Was this Celeste he spoke of? Had she been with her father when he had been killed? Had she seen the murder?
‘Who does she work for now?’
‘Nobody and everybody. I pay her well for things pertinent to the security and success of Britain and her causes. Sometimes she slips in red herrings so even that loyalty is questionable. At heart I imagine she works for one of the clandestine and dangerous underground agencies set up by Napoleon’s less salubrious captains. Like everybody else here she needs money to survive.’
My God, such revelations turned all he had once known of Celeste on its head. Spoiled. Impetuous. Arrogant. Brittle and beautiful like her mother, but in a far more spectacular way.
Why would she come to his rooms and risk exposure? Why had she shadowed him? There was something he was missing and he could not quite put it together. The disguises she had sported each time he had seen her made no sense either, for August Fournier had been wealthy and his daughter’s gowns the veritable talk of the county. She could have retired into an elegant lifestyle with her looks and her money. She could have married anybody she’d desired and done well. Yet she plainly had not.
McPherson hadn’t finished, though, and after a moment he continued speaking. ‘The thing is that there is a certain fineness about her that one understands only by degrees. She brought me medicine when I was in bed with a bad chest last winter and only a few days ago she played a role in trying to save the lives of a family caught in the crossfire of politics.’
Now he knew it was Celeste, for she had spoken of the same blunder.
‘How?’
‘She warned them of the danger. They were about to leave Paris when they were killed.’
‘What was their crime?’
‘The father had shot a man who threatened his wife, but honour in Paris has many complex layers and most people are entangled in some way or other with government strategy. For all the freedoms Napoleon promises, he keeps a tight rein on divergent thinkers.’
‘Which Felix Dubois was?’
‘Ah, so you had heard of the fracas? The White Dove has her own thoughts on justice and if I know of her involvement, then others will, too. There were documents found in the Dubois house which heralded British sympathies. Some say they came from her hands. If she is not careful, it will be she who will feel the wrath of suspicion next, if she still lives.’
Shay swallowed and hoped the bread boy had made it to ground safely.
‘I have had word that my identity is on the verge of being discovered. Your name has been mentioned as well. Cut your losses now and come home with me to England, James, for Cunningham is already gone. We can leave on the morrow.’
The older man only shook his head. ‘To do what? There is no place left for me in Scotland now and I have been here in France for so long it has become my home.’
‘A home that is more and more unrecognisable. The causes here are as lost as Napoleon will be in a few short years and your name is certain to be found on the list of those who will be interrogated...’
‘If I knew from the start just how it would end, I still would not have changed a thing, Shay.’
‘Because you believed in Napoleon’s promises?’
‘No. The cause I believed in is long since dead. What I want now is justice for all those good souls who perished along the way, those who cry out for vengeance and who believe in equity and truth.’
‘The fight is no longer yours, James. It’s too dangerous for a start...’
A heavy knocking downstairs had them both standing and they moved towards the back of the room in unison. They had practised for this, expected it for weeks now, ever since Napoleon had abandoned Paris, leaving the political chaos in the city behind him. There were so many factions seeking power in the vacuum of all that was left.
‘You first.’ Although the older man protested, Shay pushed him through the small opening and lowered the platform with its thick rope gurney. The crash of splintered timber alerted him to the fact that his enemy was close, as did the sound of feet pounding up the creaky staircase.
As he heard the gurney hit the ground with McPherson safely away, Shay knew his own chance of escape had run out so he turned, raising the stool beside him like a shield, a thick twist of rope in the other hand.
They weren’t in uniform, a fact that told him the military was not involved. They were also not at all conciliatory. He might have managed something if they had allowed him words, but there were five of them altogether and when the gun fired at close range he felt the bite of it in his right thigh. A coldness spread quickly, his sight blurring. He wondered if the bullet might have hit a major artery or the bone for he could not feel his leg any more. Weakness crawled into his head and his limbs. Then there was nothing.
* * *
He came awake in a room and discovered he was bound to a chair. Tightly bound. Two men sat in front of him. One had just thrown a pail of cold water over his head and the shock of it brought him back to consciousness.
‘Who are you?’
‘Captain John Barton of the American Regiment of Infantry and one of President Madison’s envoys.’
‘Liar. You are Major Summerley Shayborne of the Eleventh Foot and you have worked for General Wellesley as an intelligence officer in Spain for these past two years.’
‘I don’t know who you are speaking of.’
‘Do you not, Major?’
There was a slight kerfuffle and there materialised before him the face of one of the soldiers who had accompanied him across Spain after his capture by the French Dragoons in the north-west provinces.
‘The Englishman’s hair is darker now, sir, but his attitude is exactly the same. It is him, I am sure of it.’
‘Thank you, Private. That will be all.’
A hard fist glanced across his mouth, tight with fury, the smack of it coinciding with pain. A dislocation of the jaw perhaps. He shook his vision clear.
The second blow jabbed a soft spot in his lower back and then a third targeted the injured leg. His thigh ached like the dickens. It was a considered torture and a damned effective one.
‘Confess who you are, Major Shayborne, and we will leave you alone.’
To hang, he thought, though it did cross his mind a simple knife to the throat might also have been an option. They were in a basement room and the floor was hard-packed earth, a drain of sorts to the side. To sluice away the blood, he supposed, the mess of death easily dealt with.
‘Who are...you?’ He got the words out with some difficulty.
No one spoke. Not Savary’s men, then, for they were braggarts and would have supplied such information readily given the unequal balance of power and the obvious outcome. Not from the War Ministry either. He doubted they would treat a man in uniform like this.
One of the shadowy unit of Napoleon Bonaparte’s that James McPherson had spoken of? He’d heard of them, of course, but only in veiled reference, the layers of intelligence deep here and impenetrable. He decided to play them at their own game.
‘The Emperor will move the Grand Armée into Russia before the winter. It is his first priority and the vacuum left will allow the English to take back Spain.’
Another slam into his ear, the high squeal of sound inside the drum a direct result.
‘Joseph Bonaparte and the Marshals shall be thrown out of Madrid and then piece by piece the victories of Napoleon will dissolve into defeats.’
His mouth was hit this time and he tasted blood. At this rate, he would be dead before they meant him to be. He kept talking.
‘Wellesley will chase General Soult back to where he belongs. When the British enter France, no one will stop them for the French military effort lies in disarray. It will be a straight march up to Paris and victory.’
They were getting more and more furious and he knew that Marmont’s orders to kill him when he crossed the border all those weeks ago from Spain were still in force here.
He’d given his life’s work for England. His death would be for that country, too. It was surprising how calm he felt, how distanced. He wondered if perhaps he were already part way gone to that shadowy place between death and life he’d heard talk of on the battlefields of Europe.
When the door suddenly opened, he was brought sharply back into the moment, the pain skewering through lethargy and dislodging the mucus and blood from his breathing passages. With shock, he saw it was Celeste Fournier who’d walked in, dressed in a harlot’s gown, her hair the red of blood, fire and betrayal, and falling in a curling mass down to her waist. There were bruises around her mouth and a bandage encircling the fingers of her right hand.
‘Benet told me to come in and identify the prisoner.’ Her eyes met his own, but there was no warmth or recognition in them, no compassion for his wounds. Only distrust and fury. They were not blue at all, he suddenly thought, but the pale purple of storm clouds over mountains. The skin on both her cheeks was drawn into hollow pits and her lips were rouged and full and sensual. The colour had bled across her teeth. He looked away.
‘You know the English bastard?’ The tall bearded man stood now.
‘I met him once a long time ago, unfortunately. It is indeed him. I would know him anywhere.’
Her glance raked across him and then down to take in the dark blood marking his trousers at the thigh. Adept at reading people, all Shay could see in her face was disgust, underpinned by a certain distance.
‘You are sure? You would swear your life by it, Brigitte?’
She stepped closer and regarded him. ‘Marmont wants him dead. Benet wants information. Either way, Shayborne will not leave this room alive. It’s up to you how much you make him tell you, Guy. I would probably use the blade. Here.’ She gestured lewdly to his crotch. ‘Even heroes have their vanities, I should imagine.’
Her head tipped up to the man standing next to her, an overt and shocking sensuality in her expression. The bodice she wore was partly opened and very revealing and she made no effort at all towards modesty. There was something else there, too, a subservience, he might name it, drawn across the edge of lust. She looked like a prostitute about to satisfy a client’s needs in the back corner of the harsh streets around Les Halles.
He could smell a perfume on her that was neither expensive nor subtle. Beneath that was the sharp tang of fresh sweat.
‘Perhaps I could make him talk, Guy, if you wish to leave me with him for a few moments. Reparation, if you like, for my foolishness.’
Shay heard the laugh of his interrogator and saw his hands slip into the silk bodice of her flimsy dress, large fingers cupping one breast.
‘I am pleased to see that you have come to your senses, ma chérie. I wish I’d thrashed you more often over the years if this was all it took. You were always a quick learner.’
When he leaned forward to take a pink-tipped nipple in his mouth, Celeste Fournier raised her fingers to his hair as if to gather him in. Then all Shay saw was blood. Even as the dark-haired man began to fall, she had taken the other down, too, with the heavy punch of steel from the butt of her upturned knife. Within five seconds his own bindings were cut.
‘Can you stand?’
He nodded, because if he couldn’t they were both dead. He had no idea who was outside the room as he’d been brought into it unconscious.
‘Follow me, then. We haven’t much time.’
She did not open the door she’d come through, but took him deeper into the basement, prising off a vent of some sort and telling him to slip through it.
‘Crawl along until you find the second opening on the left. There is a ladder a hundred yards down which goes to the street. Wait for me inside the vestibule of the church Saint Eugenie on Rue de Richer. There is a brown cloak there hanging on the peg nearest the door. Wear it. Do not show yourself to anyone. If I fail to come within twenty minutes, leave the city and travel east. They will expect you to make for the safety of Spain and every road will be watched. Do not visit the jeweller James McPherson. He is already gone.’
‘And you. How will you get out?’
She pulled down one strap of her bodice and smiled. ‘As easily as I got in.’
He swore even as she showed him a small glass vial strapped to the inside of her leg. Her skin was white like ivory, her thighs smooth and slender. ‘If you are caught, it would be wise to fight to the death before they take you. There will be no second chances.’
And with that she replaced the grille so the bars were between them, dividing the light. She used her knife to screw the grate back into place and Shay noted blood seeping through the bandage at her wrist.
* * *
Guy Bernard was a threat as well as a bully and Celeste trod lightly past his inert body. She could not be sorry it had come to this, for her debts to him had long since been discharged in full, and more. The other man, one of Guy’s younger accomplices, was someone she had never liked, though she was confident she hadn’t killed him. When he awoke he would talk, but it was too late any more for caution and she no longer held the taste for brutality.
She rubbed her cheeks hard with her hands and breathed deeply to try to take away the tremors, her tongue coming to the split in her lip. The pulse in her throat beat wildly, but there was nothing she could do about that save summon the strength to cope. If she looked even vaguely guilty, she would never get through the next room alive.
Martin Blanc looked up from his desk and then down again, but not before she’d seen him take in her disarray. With a practised start she fumbled with the silk.
‘Interrogation makes Guy imagine every woman wants to bed with him. It is a fault he needs to address, I think, for it is becoming tiresome.’
At that he stood and walked across to her just as she knew he would. Breathing in hard, she sniffed and wiped her eyes with the fabric in her sleeve. She had allowed Blanc small liberties before when she wanted information. This time all she needed was distraction.
‘Guy said the English Major is proving difficult and I had no desire to stay and watch his violence. He also said to tell you that it might take a while to gain information and that he does not wish to be disturbed again until he calls.’ With a small shake she clutched at the side of the table. ‘Perhaps I should go outside and get some air? Could you take me?’ Her cloak was on the chair and she shrugged into it, glad for its covering.
Martin Blanc’s hand came beneath her elbow as he shepherded her out, past a group of men busy around a map on the table. Out on the street she led him into the doorway of an empty shop, her hands pressing down on the side of his neck with just the right amount of force. Her father had shown her this defence and she had never forgotten the teaching. It would be precious moments before Blanc regained consciousness, though to stop him hurting himself further she pushed him back to sit against the sturdy wood of the door frame and pulled up the collar of his jacket.
‘I am sorry,’ she said quietly and then she was off, walking fast with her face against the wind.
At the chapel, she found Shayborne stepping out from the shadows, his nose dark with blood, his right eye swelling.
‘Come, but hide your face.’ She did not touch him or allow him to touch her as they traversed the streets to a part of town she seldom visited. She could not risk the other address and this one was closer anyway. She saw that he limped badly and that his face was pinched with pain under the cloak’s hood. Still he followed, doggedly. She was glad of the sudden rain shower to wash away any blood that might have splattered on the road behind him, giving them away.
Inside the apartment, she quickly sought some privacy to dry retch into a hand basin without any sound whatsoever. Killing never got any easier, but her soul had long since been damned.
‘The way of life is above for the wise that he may depart from hell beneath.’
Her father had often recited this verse from Proverbs and she believed in its message. She shook her head. There was no hope for her to rise with the angels. The most she could pray for was a quick and final end.
After rubbing herself down with a dry cloth, she looked at herself in the mirror. The blood of Guy Bernard felt as though it had soaked through her very skin, the harsh tang of iron filling her mouth, even as she swallowed. The smear of red lip grease coated the small damp towel she held.
She had always known it would come to this, one way or another.
Spare clothes were neatly folded in a wicker basket and she donned them with haste, stuffing the gown she wore back where the others had lain. A hat, boots and a belt followed. The pistol she slid into a leather pouch and attached her knife beside it, the blade cleaned and readied for the next time. Armed well, just as she liked it.
Rubbing boot polish into her hands and cheeks, she bent to scrape her nails against the rough plaster on the floor. Success lay in the detail and she had been brought up for years on the stories of the demise of the French aristocracy and their unblemished hands as they had marched to the guillotine for a final reckoning.
She felt more confident now, the tremors inside quietened. This was her world and it had been for a long time. There was just one last job to do.
* * *
The woman who had disappeared into the room to one side of the passageway was nothing like the dirty lad with the ancient eyes who came out of it.
‘Your father lived here?’
‘Yes. He rented a house in the centre of Paris when we first arrived back, but this was his secret place, you understand, the hidden part of him that few saw. He wanted it as a place to escape, I think, somewhere he would be most unlikely to run into anyone he knew.’
‘Because he was delving into the dangerous politics of a failing Empire?’
‘And he was drinking heavily.’ These words were said with less certainty. ‘The sentence for bitterness and broken dreams. He met my mother here in Paris and then spent years back in Sussex. Perhaps he did not truly fit in any more.’
Looking around, he could see all the signs of August Fournier. The books. The pipe. The furniture in the French style. The violin. As well as half-a-dozen old and dusty bottles of various wines and spirits.
‘Did you come here with him?’
She shook her head. ‘After he died I kept it on only as a sanctuary to hide in should I ever need it.’
‘Because you understood by then the danger of what your father had led you into?’
‘In his defence, he truly believed Napoleon would make the world a better place.’
‘And has it, for you, I mean?’
Real anger found its way through the careful indifference and Shay was glad for it.
‘You know nothing of who I am now, Major, and if you are indeed one of the lucky few whose morals have never been tested, then you are fortunate.’
‘You are saying yours were?’
‘I am saying that you have to get out of this city before every agent of every intelligence group in Paris tracks you down. I pray what is said of you is a truth.’
His eyebrows raised up. ‘What is said of me?’
‘You are the wiliest of all of France’s enemies and you can disappear into the very edge of air in the time it takes to draw breath.’
‘Flattering but foolish.’ When she smiled he looked around. ‘Do you have rope here?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a Bible?’
She went to the shelf and plucked out two tomes. ‘Catholic or Anglican?’ As he took the Latin Vulgate he saw one of the nails of her left hand had been pulled right off, the bed streaked in blood.
She had never been easy to read, even as a youngster as they had traversed the countryside around Sussex. At sixteen she had let him kiss her. At seventeen she had brought him into the barn at Langley and lain down on the straw to lift her skirts in invitation. She’d worn nothing underneath, save a lacy blue garter about her thigh. The next day she had left with her father to return to France and he was sent to London with a commission to join the army. She would be twenty-five now while he was twenty-six.
Different paths. He wondered if she had thought of him ever.
She was the daughter of a wealthy man who should have been brought out for a London Season. She had no siblings still alive and her mother had been damaged somehow. He could never see that same weak will in Celeste Fournier and he could not now.
‘Do you speak the Latin?’ His voice was low.
‘Yes.’
The past between them slipped back into its place as he wound the necessities for escape out of nothing. ‘Fallaces sunt rerum species.’
‘The appearances of things are deceptive,’ she returned, and he smiled. No doubt her father had taught her, for August had been a scholar of some note. ‘We’ll leave tomorrow, mid-morning. It is the busiest time of the day.’
Gathering all that was needed, he sat on the balcony with his back against the wall, the warmth in the stone from the day gone so he felt the coolness through his shirt. No one could see them. No one overlooked this particular space and the thought crossed his mind that this would be why August Fournier had chosen such a location, hidden as it was from the world. He was glad when Celeste joined him, sitting opposite, her hands clenched around her knees so that every knuckle showed white.
‘I shan’t journey with you further, Major. They know me here and you will have a better chance of escape alone. For me to rescue you from the hawks and then feed you to the wolves would make no sense.’
He brought the cheroot he’d lit to his mouth and inhaled. It was one of her father’s that he’d found in a box on the desk. The red tip of it could be seen in the looming dark so his other hand shielded the glow, just in case.
‘Who are you? Now?’ He said this quietly, because the violence and sexual innuendo in the basement beneath the streets of Paris was still fresh in his mind, and because when he looked at her across the small distance he could not see one single part of the girl he had known all those years before.
She did not answer.
He tried another question, a distinct catch of distance in his tone. ‘You wear a wedding ring. Did you marry?’
‘The world is a hard place to be alone, Major.’
‘Is he a good man?’
‘Once I thought him so.’
‘And now?’
She closed her eyes and rested her head against the stone, a pointed refusal to answer imbued in the action. He changed the subject.
‘What colour is your hair really? I have seen it white and black and red. I remember it as a golden brown.’
Her good hand crept upwards, pulling down her hat.
‘There is much you do not know about me now, Major Shayborne, and the colour of my hair is the very least of it.’
‘Once I understood a lot, Mademoiselle Fournier.’ He stressed the mademoiselle. ‘I came the next day to find you and thank you for your generosity in the barn at Langley, but you were gone.’
* * *
Celeste felt shame cross her face. ‘My virginity was hardly a prize.’ There, she had said it, out loud. The words settled into the space between them, a truth many times heavier than the weight he had given such a gift.
But he did not let it go. ‘Sometimes I wondered...’
She turned to face him.
‘Wondered what, Major?’
‘Did you know your father would take you back to France the day after...?’
‘The day after I offered you my body? Yes.’
‘I thought you had gone because of me.’
His reply made her throat thicken and she swallowed. Now was not the time for confessions with a trail of assassins moments away from pouncing on them. If he was to live, he would have to go on without her.
‘Hardly, monsieur. There was a whole world of lovers I was yet to meet.’
The double-edged words made her feel sick. She took a deep breath and counted. One, two, three... At twenty she felt better.
He was paler than he had been before and there were bruises on his face from Guy’s interrogation. Such wounds should not bring the sweat to his brow, though, and after years of jeopardy she was adept at recognising greater injury. Coming up on her haunches, she shifted across towards him.
‘Where are you hurt?’
When he pointed to his thigh, she saw the same dark ooze that she had noticed in the dungeon. Back then she had thought the stain had come from his bleeding nose or broken mouth.
‘A blade?’
‘No. A bullet.’
‘Is it still in there?’
His long fingers felt around his leg and she saw him flinch.
‘Probably.’
‘Come inside, then, so I can look.’
He hesitated momentarily and then pushed himself up, following her in and unbelting his trousers. The long shirt be wore was patched and patched again. By his own hand, she thought, since the stitching was poorly executed. One thing at least that he was not an expert in. That uncharitable thought had her frowning.
‘Here.’ He raised his leg, bending it at the knee, and a dark and angry hole on the top of his thigh could be easily seen. Slipping her blade from its leather, she spat on it.
‘For luck,’ she explained as she saw him looking. ‘A gypsy in Calais once told Papa and me that saliva is a way of reducing inflammation and we believed him.’ The bullet was an inch under the skin. The metal of it scraped against the steel in her knife and she knew it must pain him greatly.
‘It hit your bone and not the pathways of blood. You were lucky in such a deflection, for another inch to the side and you would not still be here.’
She twisted the blade slightly and the bullet came out, a small flattened shell of darkness, and when she observed it she could see it was still whole. Standing, she went back to the basket of clothes and ripped a good length of clean muslin from a petticoat she had stored there.
Her father had always insisted on cleanliness around an injury and the old teachings had never left her. ‘Singe your knife in boiling water or naked flame and find a fresh bandage. Do not touch the compromised flesh if you can help it either, for any dirt that gets in increases the risk of death.’
August had got such teachings from books as well as from experience, an academic who was well read and curious. A man who had married the wrong woman and lived to regret it.
Mary Elizabeth Faulkner. Celeste could barely even remember her as being any sort of mother.
She ripped at the fabric with more ferocity than she intended to and rolled the long lengths into one tidy ball. She had not the means to heat the blade. Saliva would have to do.
* * *
Shay leaned back against a leather chair as she ministered to him, her hands warm and adept. When she was finished, she knotted the fabric and stood. ‘It should have salve to calm the hurt, but I have none here.’
‘Thank you.’
His heart tripped over the pain and he bit down on fear. If it festered, he would be dead, for he could not run far on a leg that would fail him. But he said nothing of this to her as he tried to distract himself.
‘What manner of a lad are you now?’ His gesture encompassed her boy’s clothes.
He was pleased when she rose to play his game, the awkward intimacy of tending to his hurts replaced by charade.
‘My name is Laurent Roux. I am from the south. My father is ill on our smallholding outside St Etienne du Gres where we grow vegetables for the Wednesday markets at St Remy.’
‘And why are you here? In Paris? What brings you to such a bustling city, Monsieur Roux?’
* * *
She wondered at his lilting tone, the music of the high towns of Provence in his words, his accent changing just like that. Multi-lingual and clever with it. A gift, she thought. Was that how he had melded into Spain and found out all the things that would save England? The boy she had known in Sussex was now a vastly different man. Harder. Unknown. Dangerous. The darkness of his hair highlighted the gold in his eyes.
With more care, she gave an extra cover to her pretence, matching his abilities in the cadence of lesser-known dialects. ‘I came to learn the leather trade as an apprentice. But the stipend required by my master here is no longer possible and I am called home.’
‘The reality of many a lad,’ he returned, ‘and there is nothing more deceptive than a well-planned application of the truth.’
She smiled then and switched back from the musical Provençal to her more formal Parisian French. ‘And how well you play it, Major Shayborne. They hate you here, you know, for your subterfuge. You sit at the top of the list of the public enemies of Napoleon’s New France. The secret gatherer. Wellesley’s right-hand man. Those are just two of the many names attached to you here.’
His fingers picked at a hole in the leather chair where the stuffing was coming through. ‘I am only the shadow of many others. Spain has a dozen factions of organised resistance and all of them are fed by a thousand, thousand watching eyes and ears. The priest. The tavern owner. The woman who sells flowers on the busy streets of a city. The farm boy who passes armies as he takes his milk into the village. A lighthouse keeper who sees ships where they should not be.’ His face looked tired as he spoke, the last beams of the dusk fading into the flat grey of night. Such a light hid things, Celeste thought, and was glad of it as she answered.
‘Many in Paris believe that the Emperor will sweep away all poverty and disease. Her citizens are certain he will bring a kinder life and a truer way of working and for such hopes they are willing to make any sacrifice required.’
‘And you believe this, too?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Bonaparte’s intentions are difficult to define and he is all the more powerful because of it. A peacemaker who pursues confrontation. In truth, he is not what he once was a few years ago when I would have laid my life down for his dreams and died a martyr.’
‘Like your father did by coming back to France?’
‘It wasn’t quite that simple. Papa had doubts and they grew...’ She stopped.
Until they killed him. Until the tentacles of corruption surrounded us both and reeled us in. Like fish on a hook with our mouths wide open.
‘Did you harbour the same doubts?’
She shook her head. ‘It was always survival for me. I sold secrets for money. I took my skills into the marketplace of greed and I lived.’
‘By hiding?’ He looked around the room and she saw it through his eyes, meagre and shabby. ‘By living in the dark? By never gathering things around you that might make you waver?’
She shook her head more violently than she had meant to. ‘The girl you once knew died with my father. I have been Brigitte Guerin for many years, Major. I am not the person I was.’
‘Who stays the same, Celeste? Who has that luxury in these times?’ His tone was as flat as her own. ‘Who taught you to use a knife?’
What, not who, she thought, and stood so that she could breathe more easily and so the hate that ran through her in waves of nausea did not spill out as words she could never take back.
‘We should sleep.’
He nodded and turned his face upwards, eyes shut against the moonlight. A strong face with the swell of the battering still around his eyes and mouth. She hoped this would not give him away when he left here, but then she thought if anyone might manage to escape, surely it would be him. She would leave as soon as she was sure he slumbered, slip into the shadows of Paris as she had always done, unencumbered, and disappear.
She wished she could stay, even as she sat there watching him, but there were things he could not know, things she dared not tell him.
Who stays the same in these times?
Once she might have thought goodness would win out over evil, that a just regime could easily shatter a corrupt one. That was only until the blacks and whites had all turned into greys and she had understood the true nature of what was left.
There was no one to help her now. She liked it that way. No recriminations. No honesty. Nothing that would make Major Summerley Shayborne look at her in disgust or pity, because nearly everyone who knew her secret was dead and she wanted to keep it that way.
* * *
He was worse by midnight and she knew beyond a doubt that she could not abandon him, his glassy eyes darker when contrasted against the red bloom in his cheeks.
‘You need to drink.’ His skin felt dry and hot, stretched close across his bones in that particular way of illness. Lighting a candle, she untied his neckcloth and loosened the fabric, an old scar she recognised there. He’d once told her his older brother had pushed him off the roof of a garden shed and he had hit the spikey branch of a lemon tree on the way down. Memories. They were both potent and impossible.
When he sipped wine from a bottle she’d opened, she encouraged him to take more for he needed to drink.
Her mind calculated the possibility of being run down here by Benet and his men. Guy had not known of this apartment and because she had seldom used the address she doubted anyone was watching the place. It might be a hideaway for a day or two, or a week if she were lucky. She pulled the thick velour curtains across the window, but did not dare to light the hearth. It was one of the ways she tracked people down, those hiding in an empty home they thought secure save for the telltale smoke curling into the sky above them. There were lots of secrets to be discovered from the rooftops of Paris and she did not intend her own to be one of them.
‘Leave me here,’ he said suddenly, the fever dreams receding for a moment and a small amount of logic returning. ‘If they find us...’
‘It is safe for a while—’
He interrupted her.
‘Who were they? Those who took me?’
‘Les Chevaliers. They report directly to the more shadowy members of Napoleon’s staff.’
‘The knights? And you are a part of that?’
When she did not answer he tried to sit up, holding his head in his hands as he came to his knees.
‘The bearded man in the dungeon...?’
‘Guy Bernard. He was my husband.’
Shay was breathing fast and she could feel his warmth from where she stood, a good three feet away. She even liked the shock on his face when he was not quick enough to hide it. The sickness, she supposed, since she could not imagine a man like Major Shayborne showing her anything that he did not wish her to see.
‘I married him after Papa died because Paris is a dangerous place to be alone.’
‘And he kept you safe?’
‘For a while.’
‘And then...’
‘You saw what he was like.’
‘Hell.’ The word was sharp and angry.
‘I made a mistake with the Dubois family and it was a warning.’
‘Iniquity in the den of thieves?’
She frowned because he did not mince his words or cover the horror of it with easy excuses. She remembered that about him from before, the honesty and the humour.
‘James McPherson said there was a rumour that it was the English who killed your father.’
‘He was wrong. Papa ran foul of a faction of Frenchmen who did not wish for the Emperor to rule at all. He was fervent about the hope of victory, you see, so fervent he became careless.’
‘And you paid the price for it? McPherson named you as the White Dove. An agent who was kind enough to bring him succour when he was laid low last winter.’
She held up her left hand, the ring on her third finger glinting in the light. ‘The myths of war are things that sustain those who might otherwise suffer doubt. Surely you of all people should know the nonsense of that?’
* * *
Her words had him turning away. His friend Guillermo Garcia was dead. Lying face down in the grove of the dwarf oaks on the ridge outside Idanha a Nova where they had been caught unawares by French dragoons in the grey drizzle of an early May morning.
It was sheer bad luck that the French patrol had come around the corner just as he and Guille had broken through the cordon. His own insistence on wearing uniform had saved him from instant death, but the partisan clothes of his friend had had the opposite result.
The myths of war that sustain those who might otherwise suffer doubt.
Celeste’s words were dragged from the depths of truth. He remembered the dragoon lifting Guillermo’s head and cutting his neck open with a single brutal slice.
With only a similar small mistake he’d be in the hands of the French again, facing the very same punishment, and no myths could save him here in the beating heart of the Empire.
‘You still wear your wedding ring?’
‘It adds protection. Why would I not?’
She looked at him as she said it in a hard and direct way and he thought how seldom she smiled any more.
‘I can protect you.’ The fever burnt and his thigh throbbed, but he meant what he promised. War had changed her, but it had changed him, too.
‘I have no more need of a man’s guardianship, Major.’
‘No?’ He took the hand without the ring and turned it over. Breathing out, he tried the taste of honesty. ‘It seems to me as though you do.’
The marks of old scars ringed her wrist, surprising and reddened, the newer slash of a knife still weeping into her makeshift bandage.
She pulled away. ‘It is the end of my time here in Paris. In another city I shall be someone else entirely.’
‘Your grandmother still leaves a candle burning in your room at Langley Manor, just in case...’
‘In case I return,’ she snarled. ‘To go to court and play the lady as the marriage lines are drawn about me, the richest beau, the wealthiest suitor. I think, my lord, that it is far too late for that.’
‘You might play the role of a quiet widow just as well.’
‘I doubt that I would be credible, for the many acts of violence here have rendered me somewhat...spoilt for gentle society.’
‘Every soldier who has ever lived faces that battle when they return home.’
‘But I am not a soldier, don’t you see. I am not in it for King and country. Once I might have said it was for my papa’s sake, for family, for justice, for liberty even, but now...I am the dark shadow of war, just as you are its shining light.’
He smiled at such an analogy though he knew he should not have, so intent was she on believing it.
Once, years ago, in the home of a Spanish nobleman he had seen a portrait of a naked Venus lying recumbent on her bed as she gazed at the reflection of herself in a mirror. He remembered the painting vividly because in her face was a conceit he had so very often seen in Celeste’s.
The conceited and arrogant Miss Celeste Fournier. Every young swain within a hundred miles had spoken of her beauty then, yet it was he with whom she had chosen to lie. Unmarried, too, though he had offered her the protection of his name after and she had laughed in his face.
And here she was again, denying his guardianship, with a split lip and a swollen eye, a bandaged bloodied hand and scars easily visible at her wrist. No longer conceited, but distant and wary. A broken daughter of her father’s unwise dreams.
‘Did you ever marry?’ Her words punctured the silence.
‘Yes.’
Her glance fell down and away, the years between them filled with ghosts.
He wished he might have been able to stand up straight and tell her of it, but his head felt strange and his balance was off so he stayed still and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was gone.