The Black Hawk

Forty

JUSTINE WAS DETERMINED TO ARISE AND COME TO breakfast. She was entirely weary of meeting men in bed when she was wearing no clothing.

She came downstairs, holding the rail. Séverine went before her, ready to throw her body down to cushion any fall. Surely no child wavering onto its feet for the first time was ever so closely watched.

The banyan robe she wore slithered under her feet when not persuaded otherwise. Silk brocade lipped about her bare legs, too heavy to cling. The crimson of it was a shout, a strident trumpet of a color. One could imagine confronting the emperor of China in such a garment. It was Hawker’s and smelled faintly of tobacco, sandalwood, and black powder.

At the bottom of the stairs, the carpet was chilly under the arch of her foot. Three doors were open into the hall and a light wind blew through. At the back of the house, men’s voices rumbled. She would head in that direction. If anyone was talking, it was probably Hawker.

Séverine said, “Catch your breath. Sit for a minute.” She gave other prudent advice.

“When I sit down, I will not want to stand up again. I am weak as pudding.” Ah, the beauty of great truths. They can be stated so concisely.

It was not so long a journey from the front of the house to the back. She set her right hand upon the wall from time to time and rested because there was no one to impress and she would need all her strength to deal with the men who awaited her at the end of the hall.

Séverine opened the door into a small, perfect dining room with Chinese wallpaper, graceful mahogany furniture, and quite a nice collection of English spies. A mound of untidy gray fur occupied a square of sunlight on the rug. This was the huge dog that visited her room several times a day, sniffed at her, and departed, grave and silent as a physician. The table held breakfast dishes and stacks of notes, folded newspapers, a teapot and cups, and a pair of black knives.

“. . . the witness statements. So far, we’ve talked to—” Doyle swung around in his chair.

Hawker, at the head of the table, looked up.

Silence. She took two . . . three . . . slow breaths and walked through the door to discuss various matters with the British Service.

Hawker was in shirtsleeves. He wore stark white linen of the finest quality, a cream waistcoat, and the impassive containment of a Byzantine icon. He was even thinner than he had been long ago.

He said to Séverine, “You had to bring her, didn’t you? I do not understand why nobody ever says ‘no’ to this woman.”

Séverine said, “She can faint as easily downstairs in company as upstairs alone. At worst she will topple over and bloody her nose. At best, one of you can catch her.” She went around the table to kiss Doyle on the cheek in a daughterly manner.

“And ain’t that a wonderful prospect for a man trying to enjoy his breakfast in peace.” Doyle had chosen to be scarred and unshaven today. It would suit his peculiar sense of humor to sit in this exquisite room in the rough, patched clothing of the barely respectable poor.

On the other side of the table, Paxton was a pale, ascetic scholar this morning, wearing shabby black. He had spectacularly proven his loyalty to England many years ago and paid full price for the right to sit among them. It was legend in the circles of spies, how greatly he had redeemed himself from suspicion.

The last man she also knew, though she had never exactly met him. He was the ingenious, insouciant agent known as Fletcher. She knew him only by sight, having avoided a closer introduction.

They had been discussing important matters. All the signs were there—the interrupted gesture, the bodies leaned across the table, the papers and coffee cups pushed aside carelessly. They were wondering, rather obviously, what she had overheard out there in the hall.

Everywhere, she met with suspicion. She, who was an honest shopkeeper. One may retire from spying, but not from one’s reputation.

Hawker pushed his chair back from the table and strode over to circle her. “Sit.”

“I am hardly in need of advice to—”

“Sit the bloody hell down.” He was the sleek animal who flashed from stillness into attack. He did that now. Without pause, without seeming to hurry, all in one long glide of intention, he scooped her up and deposited her in the chair. “Before you fall over.”

He used not one feather of force beyond what was needed to take her off balance, to support her as she sank back.

She allowed this because she did, in fact, wish to sit down. The determination that had kept her going packed up its tent and deserted. Little spots swirled before her eyes. She would not faint, but the fringes of this possibility were distracting.

He stood for a long minute looking down at her before he let go. His hold imprinted into her shoulders a sense of the solidity of the banyan’s embroidery. Where he held her, the silk remained warm.

The body has memories deeper than thought. Her body remembered him.

He lifted one of the chairs that waited at the wall and brought it to the table so he could sit and glare at her, close and familiar. “Too much to hope you’d spend the day flat in bed.” He turned to Séverine. “Too much to expect you’d keep her there.”

Séverine made herself comfortable in the chair at the end of the table. “I can’t stop her, you know. If you want her in bed, keep her there yourself.”

Hawker ignored that. “She’s the color of new cheese and she’s shaking when she moves.” He directed an order to the dark, sullen spy girl in training. “Get her some of that catlap we keep feeding her.”

In the long three years apart, she had forgotten the many ways in which he annoyed her. She said, “Coffee. Very strong. I do not wish to drink bouillon in the dawn, and I detest tea.’Awker, we must talk.”

“Right. That’s the first thing I said when you fell across my doorstep, bleeding. I said to myself, ‘I must talk to this woman.’”

“I did not mean to be stabbed. It is not my fault. In any case, you have discovered most of what I came to tell you. There are two murders.”

“With my knife in their gullet. When it’s my knives, I like to be the one who puts ’em into people.”

“You must contain your disappointment.” Black knives lay on the table, close enough that she could have laid hand on them. “Those are the knives?”

He leaned to the side and tapped one, then the other. “Gravois. Patelin. This,” he drew from his arm sheath, “is the one that almost finished you.”

He spun the knife and caught it, very close to her, all a cold breath of motion that whispered across her skin. He held it out, cutting edge toward her, on the palm of his hand. His eyes were dark, cool, and considering. For the time it took to breathe twice, they were quite, quite still, with the knife between them.

He reversed the knife and set the hilt into her hand. “You didn’t know it’s poisoned. I wondered about that.”

“Poison.” She set that morsel of knowledge aside with the rest she had gathered. “I looked upon the corpse of Patelin, but there was no such indication. A little poison is irrelevant when one’s heart has been pierced.” She became very careful with the knife. “It was poison, then, that almost introduced me to Monsieur Death.”

“You were shaking hands with him. It’s a nasty poison, as these things go. Slow.”

When had she ever seen his knives that they were not immaculate? Doyle, without asking, passed a small magnifying glass to her so she could examine it. The dark smears were her blood. The white film would be poison. She read the history of her stabbing.

His knives had always seemed heavy for their size, as if the savage elegance of design added weight. This was one of the knives she had kept in the box in her shop. Almost certainly, one of those three. She had taken them out and held them sometimes, at night, wondering why she kept them.

She returned it to him, being careful of everyone’s skin. “I hope you have not been buttering toast with that.”

“I have treated it with circumspection. Nothing more dangerous than sharp objects with poison on them.”

She must explain those knives to him. His plate was within easy reach. She selected a strip of bacon he had not yet attended to.

He said, “Should you be eating that?”

“We will find out.” The bacon was good. Salty. Her stomach accepted the offering with caution. “I am weary of lying in bed and no one brings me anything to eat.”

“She gave her porridge to the dog,” Séverine said.

“Who ate it with relish. He is large and strong and will survive an encounter with boiled cereal grains. I may not. It is foolish to survive stabbing and poison and then slowly starve to death on consommé and possets.” She found the most comfortable spot in the chair and pulled the banyan across her legs and tucked them under her. Hawker watched with great attention. The other men turned their eyes away. Really, she was covered from head to foot like a beldame. The color of the robe would set fire to loose tinder, but one could not fault it for concealment.

“We need to talk to you, anyway. You’re the puzzle piece.” Paxton accepted a cup of tea from Séverine with a shade of surprise, as if he had not realized he wanted it. Like everyone else in this room, he looked exhausted. “When we find out why you got stabbed, we’ll know who did it.”

“That is my hope, certainly. I do not like puzzles that involve my death in the cold rain.” She ate in tiny bites, playing with the bacon between her teeth. Three years ago she had turned her back on the games of death and war that spies played. It seemed she was not finished with them.

She stole a second piece of bacon. The gray behemoth of a dog heaved to his feet and thudded toward her. They named him Muffin, instead of Behemoth. They would have their small jokes in this household. He sat—thump—and looked expectant.

It was an ancient policy with her to be on good terms with anything that outweighed her and had so many teeth, so she broke the bacon in two and gave him the smaller piece. He was a dog. He would not realize he had been slighted.

With surprising delicacy the dog picked bacon from her fingers and carried it away to the warm spot in the sun.

Doyle said, “We know the poison. We worked it out from what it did to you.”

“I would not wish to die of an unknown poison. It seems impersonal.”

Coffee arrived before her, brought by the dark apprentice spy girl, poured and creamed and sugared by Séverine. It was hot, giving off steam in a thin, blue cup. To sit and be alive and discuss poisoning and mayhem with experts while drinking impeccable coffee—it was enough to make one believe in Divine Providence.

“The poison’s French.” Doyle cut into his ham, getting on with the business of eating.

Or perhaps matters were not so perfect. “You must not assume every exotic deadliness is French. That is a British superstition.”

Paxton stacked notes from three piles into one. “The poison’s called la vis. The ingredients are Hindi and Spanish, but the mixture’s French. The Cachés were taught to make it.”

“They were taught all kinds of sneakiness, if you’re anything to go by.” Hawker let light run up and down the blade one last time, then set the knife between the other two. “You can make la vis in London. Or Prague or Amsterdam. All the ingredients are here. Assassination’s a portable trade.”

Three black blades lay in a row, like herrings on straw in a fish market.

Coffee was made in the French style in Meeks Street. One did not merely drink, one indulged.

She considered the knives. “I bribed the coroner’s assistant to see Patelin’s body, which is why I knew for certain it was he. At Bow Street a more substantial bribe let me see your knives, but I was not able to steal them. They are protective of their murder weapons at Bow Street. Not protective enough, obviously.”

“I run tame at Bow Street. They’re used to seeing me.” Doyle drank ale with his breakfast. One would think he studied how to be the caricature of an Englishman. “Now the knives in evidence boxes have NB written in the curlicues, instead of AH. Which is almost the same, and a perfectly natural mistake anybody could make.”

Paxton said, “We won’t fool Military Intelligence. They’ll know we switched them.”

Doyle smiled, looking evil. “So they will.”

“I wonder if they think I have some particular reason to go killing Frenchmen.” Hawker pulled at his lower lip, thinking.

It was good to be back among those who spoke so bluntly, so easily, of death and deceit. She missed this in her exile. “I visited the death scenes of Messieurs Gravois and Patelin. You would never have committed murder in those places. You would never have run from a death, drawing attention to yourself.”

“Somebody’s painting my name in big letters on these murders.” Hawker glanced at her. “Somebody with three of my knives. An enemy.”

She ran her thumb down the smooth wood of the chair arm. “Yes. An enemy.”

In so short a moment, the atmosphere changed.

She did not know quite how to explain those knives.

Doyle dropped his napkin beside his plate. “Right. I’ll leave you two to talk about that. I’m for Soho and hunting down some witness to the first stabbing. That is a neighborhood full of shy game when it comes to flushing out witnesses. Sévie, you got a nice, innocent, confiding look about you today. Come along. Maybe they’ll talk to you.”

“I am delighted to be your stalking horse.” Cup clinked into saucer. Séverine was on her feet. “See that she rests, Hawker. It is no use to nurse her back to health if you are going to badger her to death.” Séverine dropped a kiss on her cheek as she passed by. “Do not be cruel to him,” she whispered.

Fletcher muttered something about papers from the inquest and slipped out the door. The sullen apprentice spy stacked a pile of dishes in the dumbwaiter and strode after him. By that time, Paxton had already exercised his most excellent talent for vanishing.

“Are you the enemy, turning my knives against me?” Hawker said.

It became very quiet.