The Spymaster's Lady

Thirty-two

SHE COULD NOT GUESS HOW MUCH TIME PASSED. She did not hear Galba go out. When she looked up again, she was alone with Grey.

He stood by the window, lifting the curtain with the back of his fingers to stare into the street. She made some sound or changed her breathing, and he turned toward her. She saw then what was in his eyes. He would have rolled England up by the corners and moved it to Greenland, if that would have helped. He would have done that for her.

She had become pitiable. She had never been the clever Fox Cub. She had been the dog to fetch secrets to Maman. She had felt so smug in her cleverness all those years, but she had always been the dupe. All her life, the dupe.

Blood beat like drums within her ears. The world pulsed red at the edges. “Lies.” The chair scraped behind her and toppled and crashed as she pushed it aside. She pounded her fists down. “Lies and lies and lies!”

Her mother’s file lay on the table. She took it with both hands and threw it across the room. Papers disgorged in midair and flapped and scattered. “Nothing but lies!” She swept her father’s file from the table with the back of her hand. It spread out in a long, smooth line across the rug—pages and pages of his upright, precise writing.

That left her file. She ripped the cover in half. Everything emptied out across the table. Reports that should have gone to Paris. Her letters. The letters she had written Maman. Dieu. The silly, loving, trusting words she had written…all her little secrets. Everyone here had read them.

Dozens and dozens and dozens of letters, written in little minutes on the edge of battlefields, creased from being carried next to her skin. Paper dirty because she had scavenged it from the garbage, paper stolen from the officers’ tents, paper bought when she had no money for food. All those letters filled with the careful, rounded script of an obedient child.

She grabbed them and tore again and again and again till they fell out of her hands, between her fingers, small, small pieces that fluttered like leaves. Scraps fell with lines of writing turned in every direction. And she knew every word. That was the pain of it. She knew them all. With each falling scrap, in a little flash, she remembered where she had been when she wrote it.

…moved the gun emplacements to Liège. Twelve eighteen-pounders and thirty of the lesser kind, the sixand four-pounders. They are short of ammunition for the greater guns. I counted…

I am lonely here, Chère Maman, and hope for one small visit, if you…

The Chasseurs have been released toward Santo Spirito, leaving under cover of the snow flurries with…

…so I have shoes again. There was a brief encounter with the dogs that eat the dead upon the battlefield, but…

…for the 157 horses held by heavy cavalry and light horse artillery. The commissary strength is 59 pack mules in theory, but of these, at least a third will founder if we are forced to retreat as seems…

I am feeding one of the cats that lives in the ruins of the innyard. It has white patches…

Paper curled in her fists. Her hands shook.

Grey said nothing and did not try to stop her. She could destroy every file in this room, and Grey would not stop her. None of it, none of it, made the least difference.

The fools had left cup, plate, saucer upon the table. They exploded, one after the other one, when she threw them upon the floor. They were not so smart, these English.

“I hope they were expensive dishes.” She looked at the pieces and the crumbs and the spots of coffee all across the rug and the spoon lying on its side. Her head ached horribly.

“Very expensive. Crown Derby.”

“I would feel better if I killed someone. I am almost sure of it. You are stupid to leave knives all over this room.” She had held her hand back from murder for her whole life, but it was never too late to start. “After I finished stabbing you, I could burn this house down. It would not be so hard. I could burn all your thousands of files you love so passionately.”

“Start with these.” He pointed at the limp, desolate heaps of paper on the floor. “I’ll help.”

She would not cry again. Probably she would never cry again in all her life. She wanted to hold Grey and fall to pieces in his arms like a weakling, but assuredly, she also wished to kill him.

The hearthrug had a hundred little holes in it where sparks had fallen for many years. “My father was a great man.”

“A very great man,” Grey said. “We argued about him at Harrow, in the common room at night. What he wrote. What he and the others did in Lyon. I was halfway a Revolutionary from reading him.”

Beside her was one of those strong, heavy chairs in which the room abounded. It was old and worn from spies sitting upon it. For Grey and the others, this was their refuge, their place to talk and read and forget their work. The heart of the house. These wise and terrible men had brought her here so she would be enclosed in their concern, in their most sheltered place, while they destroyed her.

She swallowed. “It is hard to believe my father was an English.”

“Welsh.”

“Do not nitpick at me. It is a difference only an English would notice, as trout are enthralled by the difference between a trout and a pickerel.”

The fire on the hearth was newly lit. They had built a fire to comfort her because they had no other help to offer. They knew she would be cold. When one’s heart is ripped entirely from the body, it leaves one quite cold.

She wrapped her arms around herself, but it was not like being held by Grey. “I was taken by Russians, once, when I was fourteen.” Talking cut like knives in her throat, but it hurt less than staying silent. “I had been betrayed, as one often is. They knew my name. One of them, when he heard it, knew whose daughter I was. All of them, all of the officers, had read Papa’s books and knew how he died. And they let me go. The interrogators had barely started on me. I was not even scarred.”

Grey was stiff with his anger at those long-ago Russians. “No scars. How nice.” He could be sarcastic sometimes.

“My life was spared, in lands far from France, because men knew my father’s name.”

He had decided she was safe to approach again. He came behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. It was warm, being held. “Your father was a brave man.”

“I was there, do you know. The day of the march. They carried no weapons. Not a pocketknife. The loom workers who were starving walked to the town hall to face men with guns, knowing that some of them might die. They asked only for the honest wage. Only that. Every French schoolboy knows the names of those who were hanged.” The lump of ice that was her stomach began to melt. “I have always been proud to be his daughter.” That had not changed. The most important truths had not changed. “He did not make that march because he was a spy for England. He did it for those men. He loved France and died for her. “

“He was a man capable of loving more than one nation.”

“My father would not have lied to me. If he had lived till I was old enough to talk with, he would not have lied to me.”

“Your father would have sent you to England when things went bad in France. Before the Revolution. You’d have been safe in a girls’ school in Bath.” He let that sink in. She would have been a schoolgirl in some provincial town. That would have been her life. It was a thought to chill the blood.

Grey knew her. He had taken her to his bed, and held her while she was vilely sick, and walked with her all the long road from the coast. He knew exactly what he said to her.

“I would not have liked a school in Bath. You are being subtle with me, and I wish you would stop. I am disgusted with cleverness. I am drowning in it.”

Wind played with the curtains and slipped under papers all over the floor, making them lift and settle like birds getting ready to sleep. One paper turned over altogether. One of her so-many letters. She had written, always, by every courier, when she was off spying. Because Maman worried. She had believed, right to her soul, that Maman worried about her.

He saw where she was looking. “Have you asked yourself why your mother lied to you?”

“To make me her puppet. To use me. You have never seen me in the field, Monsieur Spymaster. I am useful beyond measure.”

“You’re not a child, Annique. Stop acting like one. She could have told you the truth and still used you. You’d have done whatever she asked of you.”

“I do not want to hear this.”

He went on relentlessly. “She didn’t have to lie to you. She could have told you the truth when you were eight. You’d have been even more useful to her. Think about it. Why did she lie?”

“I hate you.” That, at least, required no thinking. That, she could have done in her sleep.

“She lied to you, so you didn’t have to lie. She gave you René Didier and the house in the Quartier Latin. She gave you learning to cook in Françoise Gaudier’s kitchen. She gave you being one of Vauban’s people. She gave you those years.”

She closed her eyes. Grey made no demands, not even that she speak. It was possible to stand and absorb these thoughts and consider what her life would have been if Maman had told her the truth.

She had seen clever ceramics from Dresden, painted and glazed to look like apples and lettuces and cauliflowers. Wholesome and edible to the eye, cold as skeletons to touch. She would have been like that, if she had grown up playing a double role.

“Maman was wise,” she whispered at last, “and very alone. I had not realized how alone.” She looked around the room. “I should pick up the papers.”

“Leave it for Adrian to clean up. He wants to slay dragons for you. Come downstairs.”

“No. Take me to your bed. I need you.”