Rogue Spy

Thirty-three

A house like Daisy’s didn’t attract much general notice. The neighbors deplored it and were avidly curious, but did no more than grumble. Daisy did her shopping for the house up and down these streets close by and confined the noise in the evening to a dull roar. When they weren’t working, her women looked like anyone else. They didn’t go onto the streets without hat and gloves, respectably dressed. The watchman and the beadle got their accustomed bribes. Lazarus collected his pence. Everyone knew she had powerful protectors. The house was tolerated.

Hawker followed Daisy up the stairs to the second floor, along walls painted pale yellow. There was soft carpet underfoot and a statue of goddesses getting up to some naughtiness at the turn of the stairs.

“I’ll show the sketches to the rest of the girls, but they haven’t been here,” Daisy said.

“Wouldn’t think so. They’re what we might call unappreciative of the finer things in life. Not your style.”

“Which is an excellent style, these days.” Daisy ran her hand along the banister. “Véronique will ask here and there, with the sketches. The Frenchwomen in the trade have their own little society, close as inkle weavers.”

“That’s companionable.” He climbed a bit more. “You got a new girl.”

“Sally. She’s going to be Selene in the house.”

“Who left?”

“Annie. She’s gone back to the wilds of Ireland to marry into the gentry. ‘To marry above myself,’ as she put it.” At the turning of the stair, Daisy looked over her shoulder to grin. “God help the man she has in her sights.”

“Poor cove don’t ’ave a chance.”

He checked for worn carpet, for handprints on the wall, chips in the mopboard, the smell of cabbage or stale perfume. Not that he needed to worry. Everything at Daisy’s, from door knocker to attic, was prime, clean, orderly, and sweet. The whores, too.

“She’ll make a good wife,” Daisy said.

“She’s had lots of practice, anyway.”

“I like the woman Paxton brought. Interesting to talk to. She said she’d send us her cousins, which is not what we hear from most of the guests.”

He made one of those noises that don’t mean anything in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Cami Leyland. She was another of those deadly women who could turn on a man at any moment. Pax wasn’t seeing that.

Daisy’s room was at the end of the hall and locked, because she wasn’t an idiot. She found the key, opened it. When they were inside and less apt to be overheard, she said, “You move like something’s broken. Your ribs? Or something wrong with your arm?”

Trust Daisy to see that. “Nothing much.” He eased his coat off and let it drop on the table beside the door, the way he always did. There was a pair of those fussy china dogs she set such store by on the table, yapping at each other for all time to come.

She said, “Show me.”

“I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”

“Then stop using those black knives of yours to shave. Show me.”

“It’s practically healed.” Because she wouldn’t let him be till she saw the wound, he untied his cravat and began unwinding.

“Let me do that.” She brushed his hands away and took over. She didn’t stop at the cravat. The waistcoat was next to go, unbuttoned down from the top. Took only a second and she was pulling that off. Daisy had lots of practice undressing men.

Three buttons at the neck and she had his shirt open. Push the shirt aside and the bullet wound was revealed in all its ugly glory.

Not a sound from her, but her face froze.

“I told you it weren’t much. A professional hazard, you might say. And it’s healing.” He’d taken a long inspection in the mirror this morning when he unbandaged and tossed out the wrappings for good. The swelling and pinkness on his chest was about gone. There was none of that disgusting exudate everybody kept deploring. Its absence was fine with him. He owned a coin-sized red mark with some scar radiating out, like a little red sun. “I feel very manly and professional. All my cohorts have impressive scars. Now I do, too.”

Daisy left her hand on his collarbone, not touching the wound but lifting the shirt away from his skin so she could see. “I can see it hurts you from the way you move.”

“Tortures of the damned, that’s what I’m suffering. I’m just being stoical.”

As usual, Daisy ignored most of what he said. “Is this all?”

“You don’t think this is enough? I come back with an actual bullet wound—this is me first bullet wound, by the way. It’s a good one, as these things go. Something I can show off without being indelicate. I like to think it’s artistic.” It was an identifying mark he could have done without.

“What happened?”

“Well, I got shot, diddin I? One bullet. Lost a piece of skin and a couple pints of blood. Oh, and a waistcoat. I’ve been having bad luck with my wardrobe lately.”

“What happened?” She held his shoulder lightly and waited.

He’d been interrogated by experts, but Daisy had ’em all beat. She could always get him to talk.

“It was her,” he said. “My Frenchwoman. She shot me.”

He felt tired suddenly. It hit him every once in a while.

Daisy looked at him for a bit and didn’t say anything. She made him sit on the bed so she could take off his boots. When she’d done that, she pushed at him some more till he was flat on the bed, still in his clothes.

“I don’t have all that much time,” he said. “There’s evil men to chase up and down Soho this afternoon. You’ve seen the sketches. And I’ll have bodies to get rid of, most likely. Pax has only accounted for one so far, but the day is young.”

She pulled a blanket over some of him. When she took the robe she wore up over her head, she didn’t have a stitch on underneath it. She got into bed and she was there with him, warm and soft, and she held him. She hadn’t said a word.

After a minute, he rolled over and pulled her in so they were facing—more than facing—so close there wasn’t any space at all. He grabbed handfuls of her hair and put his head down into it. His breath broke into chunks, cold and sharp, like ice, and fought its way in and out of his chest. There was no way anyone could tell his eyes were leaking.

A long while passed. Daisy stroked the back of his head and down his back. He hid his face in her hair and let himself shake. He could do that because this was Daisy. She knew him from the beginning, from before they joined Lazarus’s gang, back when they curled up together in corners and kept each other from freezing.

At last, she said, “So you won’t go back to your Frenchwoman. Your Justine.”

“No.”

“That’s the end of it, then.”

It wasn’t even the end. It was what came after the end. Not the cliff edge, but the sound you made when you hit the bottom.

“You want one of the girls?” Daisy said.

Damn. He hadn’t planned to snuffle, not even in front of Daisy. “I got—” He lifted himself up on his elbow so he could wipe his nose on his sleeve. “I got the prettiest girl in the house in bed with me already.”

“Do you want a girl to fuck?” she said.

Trust Daisy. Trust Daisy to know the right thing to say. “No.” He flopped back and looked up at the ceiling. “God, no.”

“I thought you might make an exception today.”

“Fucking’s the last thing I need, even if I’d do it here, which I don’t.”

“You want to get drunk? There’s gin in the cupboard. Or brandy.”

One last swipe of his arm across his face. “Not that, either.”

They lay side by side looking at the ceiling as if it might do something interesting. A nice enough piece of plasterwork. A central medallion with scrolls and wreaths looping around. When he bought the house, Daisy wanted to give this room to the best of her girls to impress the customers. He’d had to argue her into taking it for herself.

They’d come a long way from picking pockets on the street, him and Daisy, with Daisy being his stall, bumping into the pigeons to give him that opportune moment.

She filled up her room with little china dogs. Stupid things. Sometimes he brought one back from a mission. He’d been crossing the border once near Salzburg and the guards found one of those bloody dogs wrapped up in his shirts and about laughed themselves silly. Laughed so much they missed the papers hidden in the false bottom of the trunk.

Vienna had been a good operation. He and Justine had—

No point in remembering. He said, “It was her duty to put a bullet in me, her being French and all. I don’t blame her.”

“How nice for her.”

“She didn’t enjoy doing it. Give her that much.” It was a while before he could think of anything else worth saying. He said, “It hurts.”

“So I imagine.”

“Not this.” He tapped his chest where he had his handsome new bullet scar.

“I know.”

Funny how he couldn’t even laugh at the china dogs. Usually they cheered him right up. “And here’s Pax downstairs doing the same thing. Got himself involved with a woman who’ll turn into a cobra and bite him, given the least inducement.”

“Seems nice enough,” Daisy said.

“They do. Women like that. I was looking right at Justine when she shot me and I didn’t think she’d do it.”

“You still love her.”

“Hell, no.”

“Yes, you do. You used to be smarter than that.”

Him and Pax. Both stupid. “I’ll stop doing it pretty soon.” He rolled over on his stomach, being careful with his shoulder. If he broke it open, he’d start bleeding and ruin Daisy’s bedcovers. “So. Give me some advice, then. If you were French and mad as a rabid dog and wanted to blow up a bit of London, what would you pick?”