The Spymaster's Lady

Fourteen

“ANNIQUE.” GREY SHOOK HER. “WE’RE IN TROUBLE. Wake up.”

She clawed through feathery blackness and came alert. She was afraid, instantly. Something bad had happened. Very bad. She heard it in his voice. The coach had begun lurching in the ruts and gullies, going fast.

“There’s a troop of men behind us,” Grey said. “Seven or eight at least. They’re keeping their distance, but it’s just a matter of time. We can’t outrun them.”

On the opposite seat, Adrian moved back and forth, quietly and swiftly. “I’m done.” He clicked something. The catch of a bag, she thought.

“They’re in mufti. They don’t ride like army. They don’t act like customs. They’re Leblanc’s,” Grey told her.

“He has tracked us?” She rubbed her face.

“Just bad luck, I think. Leblanc’s flung a net along the coast and caught us in it. We knew this might happen.” Grey was busy with small metallic sounds. She could smell gunpowder.

They would fight. They were three men, against so many.

A muffling of trees on either side caught and held the echo of the horses’ hooves. They were in deep woods then. Horsemen could not make a concerted rush upon them on a narrow path in the woods. One or two would approach from the back. Doyle, outside, would die almost immediately, with the first shots. Grey and Adrian would fight for a time, and then die. The thin panels of a coach are no defense against bullets.

She would huddle like a dog on the floor of the coach. In the end, if she was not killed by a stray bullet, they would find her and take her to Leblanc.

To cower on her knees, with so little dignity. Anger and fear congealed in her throat. Never, never had she hated her blindness more than at this minute when she was so helpless and so useless.

Grey put his hands upon her shoulders, squeezing, as if he tested her strength. He must feel her shaking. He would know how little it meant. “You’ll do.”

A brief, impersonal touch to her arm. That was Adrian. “Listen, Cub. We’re liabilities, you and I. There’s an old monastery a quarter mile ahead. We get off there.”

“We’ll deal with the men and come back for you.” Grey’s voice went stern. “Annique, don’t make a mistake. You don’t want to meet whoever’s following us.”

“You are right.” She had no friends in France who rode in packs on horseback. Only her enemies were so strong.

“There’s nothing in any direction but miles of woods and barrens and the sand. No houses and no help for you. Stay with Adrian. Don’t try to go off on your own.”

He was protecting her, even though she was an enemy agent. That was the core of Grey of the British Service. To protect. She said simply, “I will go with Adrian and take care of him as best I can. You have my promise.”

Adrian and Grey were both silent at that. They smiled to themselves, she thought. Men could be such idiots.

“You can take care of each other,” Grey said. “Here’s your monk house coming. We won’t stop. Adrian?”

“Ready.”

Adrian crouched, holding the door open. The valise he held bumped at her legs.

Grey had such strength. Without effort, he braced his legs between the two seats, to lean above her. “I want you alive. Don’t do anything stupid.

“I am not a stupid woman.”

“If you run, I’ll track you down. I’ll be damn annoyed when I find you.” He tightened his hold. “There’s been no time. Whatever you’ve done…Oh hell.” His mouth was brutal as it closed over hers. “We’ll talk about this later.”

But she did not try to talk. She went mad for him. She found his hair, laced into it, and dragged him to her. She consumed him, mouth to mouth. She fought the awkward angles of their bodies, the lurching of the carriage, and went to him. She could not get close enough.

She had one minute. Then he took her head between his hands, hard, and set the last kiss on her forehead. “That’s settled, then. I’ll be back. We’ll finish this. I’m not letting you go.”

She had wondered what it would be like if Grey once let himself reach out to take her. Now she knew. He would be vehement and direct and very certain of himself.

The carriage slowed. “Now!” Adrian called and jumped. She heard him hit the ground.

“Grey…” she said.

“Be careful.” He swung her through the open door. She tumbled into the sickening drop before she had time to feel afraid.

The road slapped her. She kept the cry of pain inside and spun, over and over. She stopped, dizzy and hurt, on slimy, cold ground. Rocks and slick mud were under her. Before she could move, Adrian’s fist tangled in her clothing. He pulled her, fast, into scratchy bushes and pushed her underneath him and collapsed on top of her.

The coach rolled away, speeding up. The sound of wheels was eaten by the trees.

“Your shoulder?” She made the smallest whisper. Had he torn his wound open?

“Good.” The words fell into her ear almost without sound.

She pressed close to the ground and lay her face into the dirt so the white of her flesh would not give them away. Adrian had also lived through battles. She heard him breathing beside her, face down, hidden.

Silence. Then the jingling of harness and the beat of hooves rose in the distance. Came closer. She could disentangle the sound of six horses, trotting one by one, in a line. After a space, three more followed. She held her breath, pretending to be soil, pretending to be rocks and bushes, until they passed.

When they were gone, she pressed her ear to the ground and waited till even the faintest thud of hooves had faded. Then she waited longer. The hum of insects returned, and the birds singing among the scrubby branches of the pine woods, and she still waited. She wished Adrian had chosen a place less inhabited by sharp sticks. And little bugs.

Nine men. Even Grey could not overcome so very many. He was going to meet his death in these cold woods.

She set her forehead against the cold earth and squeezed her eyes shut tight, for she was crying. It was over, this incident in her journey, and this man, who had torn the heart from her body. She would not meet him again or struggle with the feelings he aroused in her. She knew what Grey had said with that kiss. What he said was farewell.

The mist condensed into a cold drizzle. There was nothing to be gained by staying where she was. She had Adrian to care for, sick and weak, and as much a fool as most men, for all he was very deadly. If she did not stay with him, he would probably die. She said, “It is time to move. I am cold.”

“Me, too.”

“Can you walk? No, give me that. Are you bleeding?”

“Not much.”

She touched his shirt. He told the truth. “Which way? Can you walk?”

“I can walk as far as I have to.”

She took the bag from him. It was heavy enough to contain half a dozen weapons and no doubt did. These English went about armed to the teeth. Adrian put his arm across her shoulder to guide her around the many ruts and to steady himself. It was smoother going when they left the road and entered the old courtyard of the monastery. Their coming disturbed birds and sent them upward in a flurry of wings. That would be uncomfortable for these small birds in this rain.

“The chapel still has a roof on it. We’ll go there,” Adrian said. “Straight ahead.”

The odor of fire clung to this place. Perhaps the Revolutionaries had burned the monks out a decade ago. Or the monastery might have been destroyed in the War of the Vendée, by one side or the other. Once the soldiers were gone, it was not easy to tell which side had burned what.

But no one had bothered to torch the chapel. She pushed the door open and heard the echoes of an enclosure within, with no rain falling. The windows must be broken, though, from the draft of cold air that blew in her face. When she walked forward, her feet kicked aside rubble, dry pieces of wood that had probably been chairs and carved statues. That would make tinder to start the fire.

“There’s shelter at the back,” Adrian said.

There was a space between the altar and the wall of the church where the wind did not reach. She left him there, sitting on the stones, wrapped in his coat. He had no strength to waste, so she did not argue when he told her he would do this thing or that. She just ignored him and did them herself.

It was not easy in her darkness to do those things needed to make a camp, but it was not impossible, either. In her youth, she had pitched camps in many uncomfortable places. The rubble on the chapel floor yielded stones for a cosh and the long stick she needed. Outside was a huge, wet tangle, thorny as a jungle, where the monks once had a garden. On the paths still paved she made her way between the burned timbers and fallen walls. There was bracken in the corners, dry enough to bring in to sleep upon, and enough charred wood to make a dozen bonfires. She even located an apple tree. No blackberries though. The birds must have eaten them all.

There was not the faintest suspicion of fighting in the distance. Whatever had become of Grey, it had been done silently or very far away. She indulged herself, crying as she worked in the rain in this empty garden.

In the end, she dried her face upon her sleeve and finished the tasks she must do, carrying firewood and bracken. She was muddy and very wet by the time she finished, but at least it did not rain inside the chapel. She knelt against the altar, which was marble from the soapy feel of it, and set the small cosh she had prepared next to her knee. She would make a fire. Even before she was blind, she had learned to make fire in the dark.

“It is melancholy, this. I do not have an English spy’s liking for such places.” Wood shavings caught fire in the shelter of the curve of her hand. She fed in tinder—dry scraps that might have been some carved angel, ages old. Someone had stomped it to small pieces, none longer than a finger, but she could make out the shape of wings.

She lay the angel bit by bit into the fire, feeling the delicate, dry lightness, the old paint and gilding upon the surface. “Do they have any chance at all, do you think?”

Adrian sat on the piled bracken, his back to the wall. “They’re very wily. Very experienced. I don’t think the man breathes who can find that pair in this weather in wild country. Grey’s half deer when he’s in the woods.”

“The rain is lucky for us, then.” She balanced slender shards of the wood onto the fire, not burning herself. There is a trick to it, which she well knew. “I can hear the sea outside, if I listen carefully. It is a mile from here, no more. There, that has our fire going nicely.”

“I could do all that.”

“Of a certainty. But my hands like to be busy. I shall set a trap for rabbits in a while. I smell them back there in the old garden.”

“Leave it, unless you’re starving. You’re already wet clean through. There’s a cloak in that bag, one of mine that I brought for you. It’ll keep you warm tonight.”

“It shall keep us both warm. With this fire, I shall be dry soon. Where is that bag of yours? I shall have a look at that, if you please.”

“There’s a loaded pistol on top.”

“Even if I could not smell it I would know there would be a loaded pistol on top of any bag you carried.”

The bracken rustled at her.

“It is not being a spy that makes you so stupid,” she told him. “It is being a man. Now me, I have been playing what you English call the Game for…oh, a dozen years perhaps. Ah. The catch works thusly. I see.” She set the bag open. “In all those years, I have had a loaded gun in my hands precisely three times. And to make it three I must count this. I shall give this silly gun to you, to hide under your pillow.”

“You may put it down very gently right there.”

“You do not trust me with it only because my eyes do not work, though I am unspeakably clever.” She shook her head. “Alas. There is any amount of human folly, do you not think? So this is the cloak you speak of. But it is very nice. It shall go on top of us. You shall put your coat underneath, and we shall have less of this admirable vegetable poking at us.”

“You’re a remarkable woman, Fox Cub.”

“I am, although you do not yet know it, because you have never tasted one of my omelets. Mon Dieu, but you carry many useful things with you. And knives. It is a good knife, this.”

“I like it.”

She touched her way through the last things in the bag. There was a coil of fine-woven silk rope, thin, but strong enough to hold a man’s weight. It was light and smooth as flowing water, and there were yards and yards of it. “Adrian, I will tell you…we are much alike, we two.” She ran the rope reverently through her fingers. “Even though you carry that noisy pistol with the powder that is certainly wet already. This rope…I shall set such a snare with this. You shall help me.”

“Rabbits, Annique?”

She laughed. “But no. Weasels.”