Rogue Spy (23 page)

The pleasures of old age are power and wisdom. The pleasures of youth are everything else.

A BALDONI SAYING

Violet Leyland laid the spyglass across her lap and stretched as well as the low roof of the hackney coach allowed. She straightened her legs and rolled her shoulders. “I'm not as young as I used to be.”

Lily said, “Neither of us is young,” without moving or opening her eyes. She was curled on the opposite seat with her coat rolled under her head, dozing. In a long and varied career, they'd spent many days and nights like this, on duty, on watch, taking turns sleeping.

Violet said,
“Morte magis metuenda senectus.”

“Old age is indeed more to be feared than death.” Lily sighed. “There was a time Anson would not have sent us off to mind our knitting.”

From where she sat in the hackney, Violet could see the whole length of Meeks Street and everyone who came to the door of Number Seven. It was not a perfect way to understand what was going forward at headquarters, but it would serve.

“He's protecting us,” Lily said.

“He's making sure we won't interfere in his operation.”

“That, too. Oh, look. There's Mr. Paxton just going up the
stairs,” Violet said. “I would say he looks calm, but determined. He has a forceful stride, I think. Matters must be developing.”

“He'll be in the center of it.”

“Yes.”

“Then we will follow him when he leaves,” Lily said, pleased. “I haven't followed a handsome young man for ever so long.”

“The life of the mind, dear. We have chosen the life of the mind.”

“Of course. And very satisfying it is.” Lily lay down on the seat again, making herself reasonably comfortable.

“I hate getting old,” Violet said.

“I do, too. But the alternative is worse.”

Find peace and prosperity in a house and you will find a woman ruling.

A BALDONI SAYING

The family gave her a small, pretty room at the back of the house. The clothing bundled onto the seat of the chair would fit somebody about twelve and the handwriting in the half-finished letter on the desk was the hand of a young girl.

She told them, “I don't mean to push someone—is it Maria?—from her room. I can sleep on a trundle bed somewhere.”

“For this first little time, you are guest as well as kinswoman.” Great-Aunt Fortunata herself stuffed a feather pillow into a clean pillowcase.

“Maria is beside herself with excitement to give you her room. ‘Puffed up,' as they say in English.” Aunt Grazia, comfortable and maternal, made the bed and pulled a coverlet over the top. “I sent her to the park with a clutch of children so you may bathe in peace. The house will be quieter for a while.”

“Sleep if you can,” Aunt Fortunata said. “Sleep through supper. There will be food in the kitchen even in the middle of the night.”

They keep feeding me.
“I'll be fine.” A fire the size of a spaniel dog burned in the grate, lit there as much for company as for warmth. Tea was made and set upon the table. A kettle vibrated on the hob. At the edge of the mantelpiece, little cakes were neatly stacked on a plate. There seemed nothing they would not do to welcome her here.

“The boys will be back late,” said Aunt Grazia, “clattering in, talking at the top of their voices, and starving. You need not worry about waking the household. They will do that.”

By “the boys” she meant Tonio, Giomar, and Alessandro, who'd gone out to wander the neighborhood of Semple Street in picturesque guises.

“I won't even hear them.” Her heart and mind were stretched tight as twisted string, yet she must sleep. She was so desperately tired. Maybe, in dreams, she'd see a way to close her fist around the Merchant and snatch the human bait from the trap he would set.

I renounced the lessons I learned in the Coach House. I resolved that I would not kill. I would not spy. Maybe I became too ordinary.

The curtain at the window was pulled back to show sunset, a high wooden wall, and the three large sheds in the complicated kitchen yard. The roof of the nearest shed was directly below the window, a nothing to get to. Perhaps young Maria wriggled out this window and went wandering London at night. There was a certain look of devilment in Maria's eye that argued the possibility.

Aunt Grazia held up a night shift. “You're much of a size, you and Amalia. We're making this for her trousseau, but there's plenty of time to make her another. The embroidery is not quite finished.”

“Because Lucia does not tend to her needle.” But Aunt Fortunata sounded indulgent.

Aunt Grazia draped the night shift over the back of a chair, absentmindedly stroking it smooth. “Amalia has a blue dress she will lend you for tomorrow. It will be most becoming. And for Monday, a dark green, inconspicuous and easy to run in. Would you like a gun? A second gun, I mean.”

“One cannot carry too many guns when going to meet an
enemy.” Fortunata plumped the pillow on the bed and centered it carefully. “There.”

“Let me lend you one of mine,” Grazia said. “A lovely little Austrian cuff pistol my oldest brought back from the battle of Millesimo.”

“After having been told to keep well away from the fighting.” Fortunata clucked her tongue. “Headstrong.”

“The payroll funds were simply too tempting.” Aunt Grazia laid a round ball of soap in the dish beside the towels. “She is Baldoni, after all.”

Before a great enterprise, talk the plan over with friends.

A BALDONI SAYING

“. . . not so different from the way you placed your men in Italy. Your street is an ambush in a ravine. Those houses have upper stories. That means snipers.”

Always good advice from Doyle, Pax thought. “If he wants Cami dead, he can reach out and do it. A sniper won't stop him.”

“Sniper fire from our side closes off an escape route. Traps the Merchant in that canyon of a street,” Doyle said.

“Good point.”
If I let him live that long.

Deep midnight and the smell of the Thames. Pervasive damp and the rustle and slap of water against the pilings. Doyle and Hawker didn't hurry in this stroll along the nighttime docks of London, down to the ship that was supposed to take him to Italy. They were lax and lackadaisical guards. It was clear they expected him to escape before they got to the
Pretty Mary
.

“Complication with fighting in a city, though,” Doyle went on, “is you got civilians popping out of every doorway, just asking to be taken hostage.”

Cami would be a hostage the minute she stepped out onto the pavement. No comfort to know she'd be armed.

“Or they're leaning out the windows trying to get themselves shot.” Hawker had helped himself to a handful of gravel a few streets back, stealing it out of a potted plant on somebody's front steps. He'd been shying it, stone by stone, into the street as they walked along, hearing it skip and clatter, watching it when there was light enough from some lamp in a window. “I don't know why they do that. If you asked a hundred citizens of London, ‘What should you do when people start shooting off guns?' not one of them would say, ‘Go stand at the window and pretend to be a pheasant.'”

The last house they passed was a tavern with a light at the door and noise inside, even at midnight. The inns and public houses were busy all night at the docks, working to the change of the tides instead of the time of day.

The dock was dark, the uneven succession of long planks treacherous underfoot. Down at the end, an open boat was being loaded by three men under the light of a single lantern. Baskets of bread, more baskets—those might be eggs—and what looked like milk cans. The pile to the right was probably his luggage.

On the Thames, every ship on the water was slung with lanterns to keep thieves at bay. Light repeated in the water, rippling, broken into pieces. The
Pretty Mary
was one of those ships.

Doyle said, “You could just go to Italy and simplify matters immensely. I hear the light's good for artists.”

“It's good light.”

“I'm not new at this business. I'll take the Merchant for you.” Doyle was in outline against the river. “I'll take him alive because we need him for questioning. But he will die. It's just a squabble over who gets to kill him.”

“He's worried about the woman,” Hawker said.

“I know that.” Doyle watched the loading at the end of the dock. “We all know she's walking into a trap. Whether she lives depends on what the Merchant wants and whether we can get to her in time.” He turned back. “When she walks onto Semple Street, I have as good a chance of keeping her alive as you do.”

Hawk said, “He's not listening. He's thinking about taking
a dive into that dirty river when he's about halfway between here and that boat out there.”

“Ship,” Doyle corrected. “The big ones are ships. The small ones are boats. Pax, I can't promise to keep her alive or get her safe out of England. I can't promise to keep her out of prison. She's a spy and I don't know what she's done—”

“The difference is, he doesn't care what she's done,” Hawk said.

“But if it's possible, I'll keep her alive and loose on the streets,” Doyle said. “I have influence and I'll use it for her. Will you go to Italy and spy on the French and Austrians and leave her to me?”

They already knew his answer. He gave it anyway. “No.”

“You're disobeying direct orders. You know that.”

“I don't have any choice.”

Waves slapped the mud under the dock. A metallic cold rose up from the expanse of water. Even if these two didn't force the issue, even if they let him walk away, he knew he'd be walking away from the Service.

“I hope you're not expecting me to tie him up and haul him out to that ship.” Hawker still had a few pieces of gravel held in reserve. He skidded one out across the water and listened to it splash. “He'd stab me, being in thrall to that devil bitch of his.”

Might as well make it clear. “There are two of you. I can't win without hurting you. And I'll fight. I don't think you're willing to hurt me.”

“We're not going to do it that way,” Doyle said.

“Good.” Hawk threw his last piece of gravel and waited for a splash. “Because I'm bloody well not pulling a knife on Pax. Last time I did he almost gutted me.”

“I sliced your forearm. One cut,” he said.

“It is only by my supernatural agility that I escaped that encounter alive. Now I'm going to wander down the nearest alley to relieve myself against a wall, leaving Pax to disappear into the cool of the evening or take ship to Italy, whichever strikes his fancy. Mr. Doyle, if you want to stand between Pax and his murderous woman, I leave you to it.”

A dark chuckle. Doyle said, “I'm not that stupid.”

Hawker became silence and darkness, walking away.

Galba sent Doyle and Adrian to put him on the ship because he knew they wouldn't force the issue. Galba had left him the choice—obey or disobey—and all the consequences.

He called, “Hawk.” He felt, rather than saw or heard, Hawker pause.

“Hmm?”

“I'll be at the Baldoni's, off and on, starting in the morning. It's not my operation—”

“It's your operation,” Doyle said. “I'll send Hawker over about noon. Tell him what you need from the Service and I'll see you have it.” He paused. “You will get me the Merchant. He killed an old friend of mine.”

It was like flame, the unwavering, burning cold inside him. “I will bring him down.”

Hawk had become invisible. The trailing edge of his voice drifted back. “Galba's going to kill me for this.”

Doyle aimed his reply in that direction. “Cheer up, lad. Likely somebody'll beat him to it.”