The Spymaster's Lady

Ten

BESIDE HIM, ON THE DRIVER’S SEAT, ANNIQUE maintained a dry and lofty silence for almost an hour. What finally broke her down was Doyle saying, in a very hurt tone, that she didn’t need to slide her arse all the way to Calais. He weren’t crowding her. The injured tone of voice and the vulgar word quite undermined her resolve. Even pressing her lips very closely together, she couldn’t keep from giggling.

“That’s better,” Doyle said, satisfied. “I was wondering if you was gonna talk to me.”

“I do not feel talkative. It is the being kidnapped, you comprehend.”

“We’ve irritated you, have we?”

“You have. And I do not like to be so high up.” The driver’s perch was unpadded and far, far from the ground. It lurched frighteningly over every bump. She could not see the ruts and potholes coming, so she must hold on tight and brace her feet continually on the upcurved footrest. Her fingers had permanently taken the shape of the railing at the side of the seat. She would be unspeakably sore and weary by day’s end, which was without doubt why she was up here. She would be in no condition to escape tonight. Grey had, as the English put it, fixed her wagon.

The coach jolted madly. She tightened her grip. “It is unsteady, this coach.”

“I ain’t going ter let you fall off.” Doyle had such a wonderful accent. No one but a Frenchman born would have dared to speak French so vilely. “Been to a bit of trouble getting hold of you, after all. You know much about horses, miss?”

She had located Monsieur Doyle in the vast storehouse of her memory. He had many names. Her mother pointed him out to her, long ago in Vienna, and told her to avoid him, as he was tough and tenacious as a badger and probably the best field agent alive.

“Not so much,” she said.

“Then we’ll put you to work, and I can get some rest. You just…That’s right. You just take this.”

He handed her something. Then she worked out that she was holding the reins and the horses were jogging along with nothing controlling them whatsoever but her hands on thin strands of leather.

She’d spent a lifetime dealing with the unexpected. She gripped the reins as if they were ropes to a ship and she was in water in mid-Atlantic. “Nom de Dieu.”

“You don’t want to go choking up on the reins like that. Makes them horses nervous. What you wants to do is hold them bits of leather nice and loose like. Should really be in one hand, o’ course, but let’s us start out with the both of ’em, just at first. What you do…” He put his arm around her, taking both her hands. “No, loosen your fingers up there, and let me show you. What you do is…This gets threaded through here, see.”

“Would you take these back? Please.”

He shifted the straps in her hands till they intertwined with her fingers. “This one over here,” he twitched it in her grip, “goes to the left. That there’s a bad-tempered devil on the left. Nancy, I calls him, on account of him not being what you might call complete in his privates. Old Nan’s a great one for nipping at you when he wants yer attention. Now, suppose you was wanting to turn him to the left—not saying you does now, but if you was wishful to—you’d just pull nice and firm on this strap here. You feel that?”

“Doyle.” She kept a firm hold on the abject terror the thought of these horses running away roused inside her. “It has possibly escaped your notice, but I am blind as a rock.”

“Yes, miss. This other line here, the one you gots lying across your palm like—”

“Being blind, Monsieur Doyle, is not merely a lack of appreciation for the delightful blue sky and the field we are passing. It means I cannot do some practical small tasks. Like drive horses. This is a fact most self-evident that I tell you.”

“Lord love you, miss, you don’t have to see to hold on to these reins. Why, half the time I’m driving along with me eyes closed, just napping. The horses does all the work. The tricky part is remembering which of them lines is which, just in case somebody should climb up and ask you about it.”

She clutched the pieces of leather till her fingers ached. This was not the small, creaky wagon of the Rom and a single, placid Rom horse, which was the only thing she had ever driven in her life. “I most extremely do not think this is a good idea.”

“Best way for you to get around, miss. Driving. If you don’t mind me advising you. Nothing like a pony cart for tooling around the country and no reason you shouldn’t drive as well as any of them ladies in England. Why, from what I’ve seen, a full half of ’em driving must be as blind as you are, begging your pardon for bringing it up and all.”

“You are a man of the most remarkable cold blood, Monsieur Doyle. Mon Dieu, but your reputation is fully deserved.”

“An’ what would a nice young lady like you know about my reputation? When you gets to England, you just go out and get yerself a little cart, a pony cart, and you finds a pony with some sense to him, like this pair has. He’ll take you round as pretty as you please without you do more than set your hands around the reins just like yer doing there.”

“Get…a cart. A cart. But yes, I shall certainly do that if I ever go to England.”

“Now, miss, don’t go on like that. You knows we’re taking you to England with us. Going there just as fast as can be. Getting closer with every mile.” He shifted the straps lightly in her hands, steering the horses past some object in the road. “The sooner you stop fighting Grey about that, the easier it’ll be on all of us. Makin’ us all mortal edgy, you are, not knowin’ if you’re going to kill him tonight or not.”

“Yes. Or no. Whichever it is.” His arms were around her in a friendly way, but he’d let go of the reins again and left her with the whole carriage and these horses who might at any minute do anything at all. “Would you take these lines back, Doyle? Because I, of a certainty, do not want them.”

“You just ease up on the reins a little, the horses’ll walk right along and take us with ’em just fine. Holding on tight just distracts ’em.”

“Lean back and go along most nicely, is your suggestion. Doubtless I am to do the same with all that Monsieur Grey intends for me. It is a very masculine way to advise me.”

“Exactly, miss. And while these horses is walking so nice in the direction of the coast, what you gots to do, if you’ll pardon me saying so, is learn Hinglish.”

“Hinglish?” The meaning penetrated. “Oh. Anglais. But no. I do not just immediately plan to go to England, as it happens.”

“Well, miss, that’s just where you’re going, if you’ll forgive the contradiction. So we’ll teach you Hinglish. Ain’t hard. Me youngest girl—she’s just three—speaks it a fair treat.”

It was easier staying on the box with Doyle’s arm around her. It was even easier when he took the reins and held them, a little way above where her hands were, “Jest to show you how it’s done, miss,” and she could stop being terrified witless.

“Now take them.” He must have made some gesture and realized an instant later she couldn’t see it. “Them horses. In Hinglish we say, ‘Them ’osses is slugs.’”

“Them is…But that is a terrible thing to call horses. Unless the English are fond of slugs, which is possible.”

“Nah. Them’s the buggers gets in the lettuce and crawls all over and eats it. Me wife, Maggie—I tell you about me Maggie yet?—she’s a little spitfire, she is, and mortal proud o’ that garden of ours. Me Maggie ’ates slugs. Sets out saucers of beer to lure ’em in and lets ’em die happy like. Goes against the grain, somehow, drownin’ ’em in good beer.”

She waited for her lips to stop twitching. Her mother had told her Doyle graduated from Cambridge. With honors. “I would agree, though I have never killed slugs. It is still a very strange thing to call horses.”

She was learning that a better class of ‘osses’ were ‘rum prads’ and the Hinglish word for coach was ‘bangup rattler,’ when he took the reins from her and pulled to a halt.

The tenseness of her body must have shown how afraid she was. Doyle said at once, “Nothing to be worried about, miss. Jest looking for a place to stop for a bit. Might be here.”

She felt a sense of humid openness and heard wind and the sound of a stream and humming flies. Birds sang in the distance. They were in the middle of fields then, away from any village, and there was a woods not far. They would operate upon the poor Adrian in the country where his outcries could not be heard.

“This is a good place?” The door of the coach swung open. She heard Grey jump to the ground and walk along the road.

“Might be.” Doyle’s voice was accompanied by a noise that puzzled her, till she identified it as someone scratching an unshaven chin. “What we got here…There’s a couple or three rocks by the road, piled up casual like. That might be Gypsy work. We been following one of their trails a ways now—them scraps of cloth they tie in the trees up about level with a wagon top. So this rock likely means one of their campsites. Maybe back there in that bit o’ woods.”

They were both waiting for her to speak. The British spies, one and all of them, knew a great deal more about her than she liked. “What do they look like, Monsieur Doyle, these rocks of yours?”

“One great lump of a fellow, sorta roundish. That’s in the middle. Then there’s three in a line, running…Lemme show you.” He tucked the reins somewhere and took her left hand and spread it back against his knee and made dots on her palm, showing her how the rocks sat, each with the other. “And then a flat one off here past your little finger, oh, a good foot or so to the right. Don’t know whether that one’s in the flock, or just a stray. Ain’t no twigs or feathers or twists o’ grass anyplace. Just the stones.”

“You have read such signs before.” They had found a Rom campsite, beyond doubt.

“The patrin? Seen ’em here and there, miss. Can’t say I read ’em.”

“Wagon tracks,” Grey called from the fields to their right. “They’re one in the other, dead center in line. Gypsy.”

If Rom were encamped here, they would help her. They would not want to become involved in a quarrel of the gaje but neither would they like to see a woman who spoke Romany in the clutches of such men as these. If she lied ever so small an amount…

Doyle cleared his throat. “They’re not here. Them threads o’ cloth been there a while. Months. An’ the wheel tracks is old. We got the place to ourselves.”

They saw too much, these two. She would have much preferred to deal with fools. “You are right about the patrin, the signs. There is a camp not far from here. A safe place. It will be higher on that stream we passed, higher than the road, so the water flows clean. The Rom are careful in this.”

After a little discussion of the countryside, she directed the coach, not to a closest patch of wood which beguiled them, but up a long track that led into thickets and seemed to them less promising. She knew at once when they reached the clearing that was the Rom’s safe haven. The smell of old campfires hung in the air. The herbs crushed under the coach wheels were the ones the Rom leave behind in their favored camps. Wild garlic, fennel, and mint grew here.

“It’s a good place you’ve found us.” Grey swung her down from her high place on the coach. “This is what we need. You have Gypsy blood in you, Annique?”

“Not from my mother’s side, I am almost sure.” She could smell his shirt, the starch and the vetiver-scented water that was ironed into it, which was wholly a French custom and not a British scent at all. They had such meticulous technique, these agents. “I do not know enough about my father to say—he died when I was four—but I think he was Basque. He spoke with my mother sometimes in a language I have never heard anywhere else.”

He did not touch her, but something in her body reached out and greeted his body as if the two were old friends who had not seen one another for a long time. She did not like it that her body chatted to his in this fashion. She cleared her throat. “They were Revolutionaries, you understand. In those days, the radicals did not speak so much of where they came from and their families. It was not safe.”

“I’d have called you a Celt, myself, with those blue eyes. A Breton, maybe. Stay here a minute.” Twigs crackled under his boots as he walked into the brush.

She opened herself to a sense of the clearing around her, as she did with new places. Sun warmed her skin. The stream was not so close as to bring a feeling of damp and coolness, but its voice was loud and comforting. The coach jogged behind her as Doyle released the second horse from its harness. He took both horses, hooves clopping on the leaves, in the direction of the water. The air was thick with the pollen of the trees, filled with old smells of charcoal and tobacco and the pomade the women wore in their hair. It was all familiar. This was a camp like the ones of her childhood. This was a home place of the Rom.

Life had been simpler when she lived among the Kalderesh. If Maman had never come to take her back, perhaps she would have made a life among them. By this time she would have a black-haired baby to dote upon and a swaggering young husband, instead of a kidnapper who was carrying her toward an intricate and unpleasant interrogation in London.

Grey came toward her. “Take this.” He set a stick against her palm, a good sturdy one. She would call it a sort of quarterstaff, though she had never held a quarterstaff, as they did not figure heavily in one’s daily life. But her father had told her stories of Robin Hood. This was exactly what Little John was accustomed to hitting the sheriff of Nottingham over the head with. Scaled down to her size, of course.

“This is very fine. Thank you.” Possibly she might give Grey a whack with it at some time. “Will you take the bullet out of Adrian?”

His voice was tense. “That’s what we’re here for.”

“I see.” Never could she stop herself saying that. “You have much experience, perhaps, from the army?”

“None whatsoever. I’m going to unpack. Don’t pick this time to wander off.”

He was not pleased to be doing this piece of field surgery. He was worried sick. She could hear it in every step he took from the coach to the center of the glade, carrying things. That was where he would work, where Doyle was laying a fire.

She had not yet made her decision. She walked for a while, tapping with her useful staff, finding the old fire rings, coming to understand how the wagons lined up in this place. It had the feel of a rich camp. There would be, in those flowery fields beyond the wood, berries and many rabbits, even hedgehogs, if one were lucky. Her feet crunched the old shells of beechnuts. One would eat well here without stealing chickens.

The ground sloped gradually toward the stream. Anywhere she stood, that slope and sound of water told her where she was. It was comforting, that small certainty.

Once, she tripped, because she was thinking hard, and a tree root had been more clever than she was. She did not hurt herself badly. To fall from time to time is part of being blind. One must be philosophic.

On the highest side of the clearing were blackberry bushes, which she found by impaling herself upon the thorns. She ate a few and made her decision and went to listen to Doyle and Grey getting Adrian prepared.

“…repaint the attic rooms the last week of November.”

“…files into storage in the basement…”

“…everlasting whitewash. There’s a lack of imagination that…”

They spoke of inconsequential things. A thousand times she had listened to men before battles, talking just this way. Grey’s voice held nothing but calm confidence. Most certainly, to hear him, one would think he had taken several pounds of metal out of men in the last month, without exception a great success at it. Adrian had an almost French courage, as she had thought before. In his light words, she could hear his resolution to trust Grey, to put his life in those hands. In some time and place, Grey had earned the confidence of that cynical, knowing boy.

It would be a great pity if she had brought Adrian out of Leblanc’s cellar and all this long way to die.

Most likely he would. Grey had not the least idea how to remove bullets. If she were entirely loyal to France she would be glad, for of Adrian she had heard some few things that told her he was a master at spying and a formidable enemy to her Republic.

Metal clattered. Doyle was setting the instruments in place, there, on the ground. She had decided to be disloyal to France in this matter.

“Grey, I would talk to you,” she said.

“Later.”

“Now.” She walked off.

Tiens. This was the test of him, was it not? If he did not trust her to know what was important, he would not trust her with Adrian’s life.

Ten paces downhill, she stopped. His steps followed her.

“I don’t have time for this, Annique.”

“I can take the bullet out of him.”

She was treated to one Grey’s long silences. Then he said, “I shouldn’t be surprised. You were with the armies, weren’t you? Where did you learn to take bullets out of people? Milan?”

“And Millesimo and Bassano and Roveredo and…and elsewhere.” So many battlefields. “The safest place in battle, if one is dressed as a young boy, is in the medical tents. If I am busy mopping up repulsive liquids, no one hands me a gun and expects me to kill people.”

“I see.” Such a dry tone. She knew this about Grey. He had been an infantry major before they took him for the British Service. He would know about medical tents and the aftermath of battles.

“I came at first to clean, in those hospitals. When I was there…Grey, there was not one of those orderlies who could be trusted to sew up a pillowcase, let alone a belly. I am clever with my hands. It was not long before the surgeons knew me. By Rivoli they did not even look up when I came in, just pointed where they wanted me to start working. I have taken much shrapnel out of men, little pieces the surgeons had no time to hunt for. And when times became desperate, many bullets.”

“Many bullets.” She felt his breath on her face.

“I do not need eyes. Not for this.” She did not know why she was trying so hard to convince him. Perhaps she could not save Adrian. Perhaps it was his inescapable fate to die when the bullet was removed. But it should not be for Grey to have his hands on his friend and feel the life leaking out. She could spare him that. “It is not a matter of looking, you understand. In digging out bullets, when one must cut away at the flesh, there is much blood. One cannot see. It is always necessary to go by touch, to feel within the skin and use a probe to find the path entered upon.”

“Do it.”

“I have much experience in—”

“I said, do it.” He walked away without another word of discussion or question. She did not always understand Grey.

In the center of the clearing they had spread blankets upon the ground. There, Doyle had disgorged his selection of medical instruments. While she listened to Grey explain the change of plans—not once, for a minute, did his voice show any doubt as to her skill—she knelt and took stock of the fierce assemblage of metal. What dozens of instruments. Most, she swiftly tossed back into the leather bag. She kept only the smallest of the clamps and forceps and one pair of scissors and one little razor-sharp knife. This was enough for what she must do.

Everything smelled of fishes, for some reason, as well as old blood. She did not even want to set her hands upon these tools when they were so dirty. She sent Doyle to the running stream with soap, to clean them for her. She was feeling Rom at this moment. She would not wash them in a basin. The Rom do not wash in stagnant water.

Then she turned to touch Adrian, to know what was what with him. He had stripped to the waist. He sat on the ground while Grey cut away the bandage.

“Chère Annique, if I’d known you were going to cut into me, I’d have let you finish your coffee this morning.” He caught her hand and lifted it to his lips to kiss. It was hard to believe he was not a Gascon. “How did Grey talk you into this?”

“It was entirely the other way around. Grey fought tooth and nail for the privilege of seeking bullets in you. But I was insistent.” He would laugh on the gallows, this one. “If you have not taken the opium, you should do that. We must wait a time, you understand, after you take it. I would not have you discussing with me the price of green beans or the weather when I am working. I am easily distracted.”

Grey said, “He won’t take it.”

Adrian’s arm moved. He was shaking his head, she thought. “If I took enough to do any good, I’d be stupid for days. Leblanc’s looking for somebody wounded. Make me groggy, and I’m dead.”

“I bloody well hate it when he’s right, don’t you?” Doyle said.

“I’m always right. Annique…Fox Cub…I won’t take opium. If I drank enough brandy to knock me out, it’d probably kill me. So it’s nothing at all. Can you do this?”

“Oh yes,” she said at once. “I have hunted out bullets, often and often. I am fast as lightning, me.” Mon Dieu, could they know what it would be like? It is the stuff of nightmares to operate with no opium at all. Truly, Adrian was like her in this—the good fairies had not attended his cradle to scatter blessings upon him. “Always they run out of opium before they run out of men with holes in them. One copes.”

“Nothing like practice. Here’s this lot, clean.” Doyle started laying instruments into her hand, one at a time so she did not slice herself.

“I am in the medical tents of the losing side, generally, so we have many wounded.” She dried the scissors with a strip of bandage and clipped through the cloth, testing. They were sharp. “I have been diligently spying upon the Milanese and Austrians who lose battles with some regularity. It has been most odd, all these years, dodging so many completely French bullets.”

There was a good supply of bandages. If she needed more than this, she would have killed Adrian anyway. “If you will lie down, Monsieur Adrian, I will be able to reach you. I am not a giantess.”

She hitched herself close to Adrian, to a position where she could work. Her tools made a neat row on the blanket. She picked them up and put them down till she could find everything without thought. Then she laid a cloth across. It was better Adrian did not spend his time looking at this. Sharp, shiny metal is wearing to the soul. She lifted a stack of bandages into her lap where they would be handy. She must concentrate now and think only of what must be done.

Adrian’s upper chest was nearly hairless, with hard muscles, set rigid in pain. He flinched when she first laid hands upon him, then took a deep breath and did not react again while she examined. The skin around the site of entry was noticeably hot. The mouth of the wound was damp and smelled of infection—the ordinary kind, not the rotting, sweet sort that means death.

Doyle settled on the boy’s right, large and comforting. Grey moved to take the other side. They were not holding him down yet. Soon they would have to. She had operated without opium before.

“Monsieur Doyle, I will show you where I want your hands.”

“There’s one thing we’ll do first,” Grey said. “I’m going to talk to Adrian. It’ll take a few minutes. You get comfortable.”

Almost, she hissed in exasperation. “You have had a whole morning to talk.” Every moment they delayed made it worse. Did they think their Adrian was constructed of imperturbable courage? Did they think she was?

“We’re going to try something I saw in Vienna. It may help.” He leaned close, talking to the boy. “The way you do this, Adrian, is you just relax and listen to me. That’s how we start, remember. You listen to what I’m saying.”

It seemed she must wait until this was done. She called to her mind a picture of the blood vessels in the chest. They ran so…and so. With luck, she would avoid them.

This was her great gift, this memory of hers. Any page she had read, any street she had crossed, any face in a crowd—they all came back to her perfect and exact when she called. Other people forgot things. She did not. That was why Vauban had given her the Albion plans in the small inn in Bruges when Leblanc came to extort and threaten. She had put the plans into her memory and burned each page, one by one, as she read. Her memory was why Maman had taken her everywhere, even when she was a child. Her head was stuffed with the secrets of many nations.

Fortunately, her memory also contained anatomical charts. The upper chest is far from the worst spot to be hit in, if the bullet is not deep, which must be so, because Adrian still lived.

Grey plodded on and on with his so-necessary conversation. She did not pay attention, since it did not concern her and was very dull. He was saying, “We’ll try this for a while, the first parts, anyway, and see how it goes. It’s easy to get started. You’re going to breathe slow and listen to what I’m saying.”

“It feels stupid,” Adrian said. “I’ll try. But the gods know I feel like an idiot.”

“You’re not going to do anything stupid, Hawker. Only what you want to do. You’re the one in charge. I’m just here to help you with what you’re doing to yourself. You lie there and feel the breathing. That’s how you do it. In and out. Now in. Now out. You feel the breathing. That’s all you feel.”

Grey repeated himself in an exceedingly boring way, which gave her no very high opinion of his powers of conversation. She finished thinking about the blood vessels in the chest and sat quietly, with her hands resting in her lap, letting her thoughts drift.

“Your eyes get tired in all this sunlight. You can close them.” Having found another subject of stultifying monotony, Grey droned on and on.

The next thing she knew, somebody was shaking her. Grey.

“Yes. You. Wake up, Annique. That’s it. Wide awake. You feel fine, Annique, and you are fully awake.”

She seemed to have fallen asleep sitting up.

“Of course I am awake.” Her legs had gone numb beneath her. “I am resting while you chatter so endlessly.” She did not keep sarcasm out of her voice. “I had a difficult night.”

“You are what is called an excellent subject,” he said, incomprehensibly. “Adrian, on the other hand, is not. I saw this done a couple times in Vienna, but I’ve never tried it. There’s a man there, uses it in surgery. Let’s hope it works.”

“You are through talking to him?”

“I’ll keep talking. You ignore what I say and do what you have to. Very definitely ignore me. I don’t want you nodding off again.”

“Then hold him.”

She showed them how she wanted him pinned. Doyle held his arm down and the shoulder. Grey took the other side, leaning his full weight on top, all the time talking and talking to Adrian—something about the pain being far away on the other side of a wall. Such bizarre stuff. She would ignore it.

“Do not let him move.” Then she trusted them to do their work and did not think about it again. There were many thoughts to dismiss from her mind. Most of all she must not think of Adrian. Beneath her hands was muscle and bone and skin. Not Adrian.

She took a minute to explore the site from outside, testing the surface of the skin with her fingers. Good. That was the bullet. That lump. They had been incredibly lucky. It lay high in the chest, superficial, just below the collarbone, at the second rib, lodged against bone. The entry path was oddly slanted, as if he’d been shot by someone below him. The lead had not torn into the lung beneath.

The patient was still. Not limp—it was not like working on a man deep under an opiate—but he was most wholly and completely motionless. Good.

There was nothing more his body could say to her. She sat back on her heels and touched her way from instrument to instrument one last time. She would go in through the entry wound. That would minimize damage and clean it, too. She took up the long, slim forceps. Wordlessly, she rearranged Grey’s hold and settled herself at a new angle.

Her left hand pressed the skin above the site, over the tiny lump of the bullet. Through her palm, she mapped the plateaus and valleys of the ribs. She snicked the forceps open and closed, twice, loosening up her fingers.

Now to do it. Fast. No hesitation.

She took a deep breath and went in with the forceps. Push. Spread forceps slightly. Push. Follow the path of the bullet through muscle. All her concentration flowed to the tip of the forceps, sensing the route, nudging along bone and fascia. Warm blood streamed between her fingers.

Push. Farther. Grit on metal. Her quarry. Open. Soft, soft now. Nibble at it. The tiny, slippery hardness. Catch it. Close the forceps. Yes! She had it. Bring it out. Fast now. She could go fast now. The patient held his breath. His muscles—neck, chest, arms—like steel. Next to her, a voice gave firm orders about a wall of darkness, solid as bricks.

She dropped the ball in the palm of her hand and rolled it. The lead was flat with impact against the rib. It wasn’t smooth. A chunk was missing. She must return. She made a single, unbroken motion of it, testing the bullet, going back in.

The missing piece would have been chipped off by the impact with the rib. She must go deep to look for it. Slide in. Keep to the path. Deeper. The patient gasped. Jerked. Go loose on the forceps, ride the movement lest she jab at him. Not her job to keep him still. Think about the metal.

He was still. Good. At the rib, delicate as a fencer, she probed. Blood vessels all up and down the ribs. Between them. She was searching for a grain of hardness where it should not be. Smooth, soft strokes. Soft…soft.

Deep on the lateral surface of the first rib, she found the brittle nub of bullet. The placement! Mon Dieu, the placement. It was as bad as could be. The forceps pulsed in her hand. The artery. Close. Deadly close.

“Do not breathe,” she ordered. The muscles beneath her hand were stone. Quivering. The fragment rested directly against the artery. It pulsed. He must not move. Not move. She eased forward. No pressure. She must take it without the least pressure.

She closed the forceps and gently took hold and gently, gently brought the last of the bullet out. She fitted one piece of metal with the other. There was nothing missing.

“It is done.” She laid the forceps onto the blanket, took bandages from her lap, and pressed them to the wound.

“My God,” Doyle muttered.

The patient panted fast and shallow, hissing out through his teeth, an animal sound.

“Finished. Right.” Grey sounded as shaken as she felt. “That’s the worst of it, Hawker. Now we’re going to build a wall between you and the pain. A big, dark wall. Thick darkness. The pain’s on one side, you’re on the other. Breathe in. Slow. Breathe out.”

She herself had not breathed for a while, obviously. The ground swayed under her, which was an unmistakable sign.

Adrian—he was Adrian again to her—was losing blood. It soaked through the layers she held. Sluggishly, thank the bon Dieu. She had not nicked the artery. She had not killed him. This was not the hot rush of bleeding that meant death.

Never before had she operated on someone she knew. It was of a horribleness unimaginable. She would avoid this in the future.

“I got that.” Doyle set her hands aside. Took over. He discarded the soaked bandages, twitched a clean one into place.

Adrian groaned and tried to roll. Grey, who thought everyone should do as he commanded, told him to hold still. Told him how to breathe. Again and again, told him how to breathe. It was most odd.

“We going to close this?” Doyle asked. “I got a hot iron. I can do it.”

“No fire. He will stop bleeding soon.” She wiped her sticky palms on her skirt. Adrian’s blood. “We will let it drain, as the great Ambroise Paré taught. There is less of…of infection that way. No stitches, unless it bleeds and bleeds. Then one or two small ones to hold the edges together tomorrow.”

“Lean on Grey, why don’t you. He ain’t busy,” Doyle said.

“I am fine.” She started to push her hair back from her face, remembered what was on her hands, and stopped. She took various deep, helpful breaths. “We are wise in this, we French. Paré taught that such wounds, we leave open…to heal from within…”

Grey abandoned his endless, one-sided conversation with Adrian and abruptly stood to walk around. When he returned, he put a cold cloth to her forehead.

“You should not let me touch you.” But she rested her cheek on his thigh in an intimacy which seemed wholly natural at the moment. The ground still wished to tilt under her. “I am entirely gruesome with blood. I have ruined this dress, though it was probably not decent in any case. But I do not have a great number. One must be provident.”

He used the cloth to wash her cheeks, then folded it and held it on the back of her neck.

“You are doing this so I will not faint. I never faint.”

“That’s good. I’m sorry about the dress.” He was apologizing for several things at once. She became certain the dresses he had given her were improper. “Thank you for saving Adrian’s life.”

“This was not so bad. Once I took fifty-two pieces of metal out of a man and he lived. An Austrian sergeant. He melted them down to make a paperweight, I heard.”

“Sounds like a good idea.” Grey was thinking a number of things. She could almost hear thoughts humming and clinking inside him. “Annique…I would have killed him.”

“Almost certainly. The second tiny piece was close to the axillary artery. I felt it pulsing. Will you let me go free, since I have spared you from killing your friend?”

He did not hesitate. “No.”

He was unreasonable, right to the soles of his shoes. “Then I will go wash blood off me and not sit here at your feet in this spineless fashion.” She put her legs underneath herself and stood up, which she would probably have managed even without Grey’s assistance. He put the useful stick in her hold and it supported her very handily without the help of any Englishman. She did not feel at all like fainting.

“Your bag’s on the far side of the fire,” Doyle said. “It’s…No. More to the right. That’s got it. There’s soap and a towel on that rock. Yes. There.”

“I am well provided for, then. I shall take these and go wash myself in privacy. Monsieur Grey may again talk to his Adrian with great tediousness. Certainly he has nothing of interest to say to me.”

“No, miss,” Doyle said pacifically. These English spies spent much of their spare time laughing at her.

“You will press down upon those bandages until the bleeding stops. As you well know.”

“Yes, miss.”

She batted away at the small bushes with her stick and found where the path descended to the stream. “And put a blanket upon him.”

She was angry with herself. Stupid, stupid woman that she was, she wanted to stay with Grey and allow him to coddle her. He was destroying her, that one, with his kindness and his strong arms that held her and felt so full of caring, while he continued to be, inside, utterly ruthless.

He tempted her. He was a trap in every part of him. It would be so treacherously easy to place herself into his hands. But she did not trust him in the least. She had not yet lost her mind. Not quite.

When she came to the water it was pleasant, and warmer than she expected, which relieved her feelings somewhat. So did the deep silence on every side. As she worked her way downstream to find the bathing place for women, she reflected that these were thick woods around her everywhere. One could hide in them very well, at night, when one was escaping.

“WELL, that weren’t so bad, then,” Doyle said when she’d gone down the path and couldn’t overhear. “Not like Adrian’s a bloody Austrian sergeant with fifty-two pieces of lead in his gut.”

“Name of God, Will, how long did she take?”

“Two minutes. Three, tops. I can see why those army surgeons put her to work. Jerked that bullet out like a plum in a Christmas pudding.”

“How many goddamned battles was she in, to learn that? What the hell kind of mother sends a child to an army camp to spy? How old was she? Eleven? Twelve?”

“About the same age we put the Hawker to work.”

“Hawker wasn’t a child. He was never a child.”

“I don’t suppose Annique was either. From what I hear, she was there when they hanged her father. She’d have been about four.” Doyle blotted Adrian’s chest with clean bandages. “He’s not even leaking blood much. Get that blanket, will you? You going to do more of that talk-talk to make him sleep?”

“Every hour for a while. What the devil am I going to do with that woman?”

“Now, that I wouldn’t care to speculate on. Spread your bedding over there a ways so you don’t disturb Adrian when you do it.”

“Very funny. I’ll reconnoiter up the ridge and keep an eye on her so she doesn’t sneak off. Call me if the boy wakes up. She’s going to run for it tonight, isn’t she?”

“All these woods and fields to hide in…yes. Hit you over the head with a rock first, I think.” Doyle picked up the bits of lead that had been pulled out of Adrian, looked at them soberly, and put them safe in his pocket. “Hawk will want these.”

“Good idea.” Grey stared down the path she’d just taken. “She’s already planning. I can feel her doing it. I don’t think I can stop her. She is so ferociously competent.”

“Be like trying to hold this one,” Doyle gestured at Adrian, “when he wanted to run.”

“You’re saying it’s not possible.”

“Not easy. Not outside of Meeks Street.”

Even if he tied her up, she’d find some way to get loose. “Leblanc’s on our heels. If she gets away from us, he’ll find her.”

“Or Fouché might get to her first and pop her into a brothel. If she’s lucky.” Doyle began wiping the instruments and laying them back in the bag.

There was only one damned thing to do. “Put some food together. She’ll be hungry, once she cleans up. And Will…”

Doyle looked up.

“Give her opium in the coffee.”

Doyle bound a new pad of bandages on Adrian.

“You have something to say?”

“It’ll work. She likes coffee.” Doyle took the blanket and spread it over Adrian, easing the boy into a more comfortable position. “It had to come to this. I’ll keep the dose low as I can. Go watch her.”