Buch lesen: «A Night Of Secret Surrender»

Chapter One

Paris, France—June 1812

Major Summerley Shayborne opened the door to his accommodation on the Rue St Denis to find a young woman waiting inside among the evening shadows.

She wore thick glasses and her pure white hair was fastened loosely at her nape. He had not seen such a colour on anyone of her age before and so could only imagine it false.

‘I am here to warn you, monsieur.’

Shay saw the sheen of a blade in her left hand before it was slipped away out of sight.

‘Warn me of what, madame?’ He could not place her accent; the French she spoke was tinged with the cadence of one who did not belong anywhere.

‘Savary and the Ministry of Police are watching you.’ Her diction was precise as she continued talking. ‘You have held too many conversations about French military affairs on the Champs de Mars and in the coffee houses, and people are beginning to ask their questions.’

Lighting a candle, she turned away, shielding herself from the brightness. As the flame took, she allowed it to illuminate him instead, the planes of her own face left in semi-darkness.

‘It is even being inferred that you might not be an American officer at all.’

‘Who are you?’

She laughed quickly at that, though the sound held little humour and he felt a sudden slide of cold running down his back.

‘Politics here takes no prisoners. One wrong move and you will be dead. Even a charming and inquisitive foreigner is not immune to a knife quietly slipped between your ribs.’ Her stillness was amplified by the movement of flame. ‘The police bureau will be here within days, asking their questions. You are a spy, Major Shayborne, of immeasurable value to both sides, but there always comes a time when luck simply runs out.’

The shock of her words had him turning.

‘Why would you tell me this?’

‘History,’ she whispered and walked to the door, opening it with care before slipping out into the oncoming dark.

Shay did not move, rooted to the spot in sudden comprehension of what she had said.

History.

There was something familiar in the timbre of her voice beneath the accent, under the hard anger, behind the thick lenses and hidden by a false wig. A memory. Like an echo in the blood. He stood as still as he could, trying to reach out and claim it.

* * *

She moved through the roads leading to the Palais Royale with a practised ease and up through the alleyways to the Rue de Petit Champs, walking quickly but not too fast, for such speed would draw attention. It was a warm night for June, the oncoming heat of summer felt through the grates and on the cobbles and the south-facing walls. Her hand ran across the patinas of chalky sand and limestone. Ahead she saw the tavern she sometimes stopped at was alive with people. Melting into the shadows, she brought the hood of her silken cape up, the new and expensive white wig stuffed into her pocket because it was too noticeable.

She did not wish to see anyone tonight and have to explain herself. She wanted to wash. She wanted to sit on her balcony and have a glass of the smoky Pouilly-Fumé she had bought yesterday in the Marais from the Jewish shopkeeper with good contacts in the fertile, grape-bearing valleys of the Loire.

She wanted to be alone.

She should have sent someone else to warn Shayborne. She could have penned a note or whispered her message in the darkness without lighting the candle. She could have transferred her information by any number of safe and practical methods, but she had not. She had gone to see him and whispered exactly what she should have kept to herself.

History.

One word coated in shame and blood. One word that had taken her from the girl she had been to the woman she had become.

She’d shown her hand because the Police Ministry and the War Office would soon be as much on her tail as they were on Shayborne’s and because after six years on the run she had finally exhausted all options.

It would be a miracle if she was not dead before him even, this English spy who had the whole of France in an uproar after his escape in Bayonne and who, instead of turning back to Spain and safety as he’d been expected to, had made his way north to the very heart of Napoleon’s lair.

Why?

She knew the reason even as she asked it.

He was here to understand what might happen next and where the Emperor would employ his might: Russia or the Continent, the size of amassing armies. Information like that could change the course of a war and the British General, Arthur Wellesley, waited in the wings of the northern Spanish coast for a direction.

Once she might have cared more, might have turned her ear to the rumblings of the generals or the whining of the various ministries and listened well.

But there was only so much truth one could discover before the lies ate you up. Deceit had its limits and hers were almost reached, here in a city she no longer could call her own.

She’d made the mistake of entrusting sensitive documents to a courier who she now knew was playing her false and the larger part of a family had died because of it. She could not quite understand yet how this betrayal had happened. Someone else higher up had given orders for the demise of the Dubois family, but it was her name splattered all over the debacle, her reputation, her life hanging by a thread in the aftermath of murder. Those who had died had been good people, innocent people, people without knowledge of the terrible depth a festering war could be taken to, people in the wrong place at the wrong time and two of them had been children. The horror of it consumed her.

Sometimes, for no reason at all, her heart beat so fast she thought she might simply fall down with the breathlessness of it, hatred caught in her throat like a fishbone.

Swearing, she sifted through the pathways still open to her. She couldn’t go back to England even had she wanted to. She would need to disappear and become someone else entirely, but first she needed to see that what was left of the Dubois family was taken to safety. She owed them at least that and the money she’d earned from trading secrets was in a place readily accessible. It could be done.

The ports were shut and barricaded and any traveller moving great distances was watched. Still, she could slink like a shadow through any city in Europe and once outside the limits of Paris she would not be known.

She frowned at this. She also knew that she could not leave Major Shayborne at the mercy of all those who would want to kill him. She’d been astonished when she had seen that it was indeed he as he had entered his lodgings. After all these years, she had not expected ever to lay eyes upon him again and certainly not in the heart of his enemy’s territory.

His eyes were more golden than she remembered and his face was leaner. His hair was dark-dyed, she was sure of it, but time had been kinder to him than it had been to her.

‘A shame, that,’ she whispered, knowing betrayal lined her forehead with its bitter recriminations and surprising violence.

Once, she had been beautiful, too, when she had first come here with her father from England eight years ago, but she shook away that sadness and concentrated on the pathway home. Through La Place de La Bourse and the quiet sombreness of the first arrondissement to the Rue St Berger. Here the buildings were less embellished and less grand and the streets were narrower. A dog barked and she stood still a moment, waiting for it to cease, pausing for the breeze to blow between them before creeping more silently up the circular steps. Another set of stairs and the doorway to her room was before her. She checked the lock and saw the fine, unbroken strand of hair still attached to it. The light dust she had scattered on her step was unmarked, too, and so slipping in the key she went inside.

The darkness. The silence. Closing her eyes in relief, she retraced her journey the way she always did, every single night of her return.

No one had followed her. The shadows from the lanterns had remained unbroken and the narrow arches of Les Halles, with the circular Halle aux Blés at its western edge, had been empty of threat. The smaller throughways had held no detected dangers, nor had the brighter Rue de Louvre.

This was her home now, this small part of Paris, and she knew it like the back of her hand—every face, every stone, every sound of every moving entity. Such knowledge afforded her protection and brought with it an inevitable isolation, but she was used to being alone.

Inside her rooms there was very little. It was how she liked it. It was how she had lived for all those weeks and months and years since her father had been murdered. It was the way she had survived after being thrown into chaos.

History.

She should not have whispered such a word, but underneath it was another truth that had wound across a shallow vanity and shown itself. She’d seen the flicker of it in his eyes.

In her dreams she’d known it, too.

What could Shayborne do with such information anyway, for he had only a matter of days to leave? Celeste held her breath with the shock of seeing him. None save Jules, her contact in the War Office, had figured out just who he was yet, but it was only a matter of making connections and those agents trying to find Shayborne would see all that they had missed.

She’d paid Jules well to buy his silence for forty-eight hours, but realistically she could expect no more than twenty-four. Such a secret was worth a small fortune and the agent would be weighing allegiances against cold, hard cash. Perhaps even twelve hours might be asking too much?

McPherson was a suspect, too, the old Scottish jeweller trawling to ascertain the truth of Napoleon’s movements in a way that did not raise suspicion at first...

Put them together and anyone would have him, Lord Summerley Anthony William Shayborne. Summer. She had called him that. The name rolled across her tongue and she swallowed away the taste of it. He was no longer hers. They had both been dealt hands that had torn them apart for ever, changing them beyond recognition from the innocents they’d once been.

Opening the curtain, she slipped out on to the balcony, making certain to stay against the wall. She seldom stood in the open any more for it was dangerous to be caught in the light. There was always something firm at her back, something solid and thick and protective.

With care, she undid her cloak and loosened the ties of her bodice, letting the night caress her skin. Her nipples stood proud at their release and she laid her head back and closed her eyes.

Remembering.

The feel of him against her, his care and his heat, taut and solid. She had thought of these things after her father had died and she had been taken. Then, only the memory of Shayborne’s goodness and honour had saved her, for the way he had said her name in the night under the softer stars of Sussex had felt like music and the feel of him inside her like a song. She’d always sensed the danger in him, too, honed by a civic duty, but crouching close. The violence and the stillness, side by side, a heady combination that had drawn her to him. He was a man who might triumph over every obstacle thrown his way and live.

‘Notre Père, qui est aux cieux...’

The age-old words of the Lord’s Prayer soothed her and she fumbled in her pocket for her father’s rosary, fingers sliding over polished amber with easy practice.

Lying with Summer was one action she had never regretted, not then and not now. She could remember the girl she’d been, the innocence as well as the arrogance. Did all young, beautiful women behave in such a dreadfully entitled fashion, or was it just her? Well, no longer, at least.

She looked down and saw the scars on her left wrist, pale white and faded. One finger traced the lines, the numbness there still surprising. This was who she had become, this damaged person who understood the true extent of terror and who had survived. Just.

She wished she had not cut her hair so short. The bluntness of the shorn ends made it prickle around her face.

Lifting up the glass of fine Pouilly-Fumé, she swallowed the lot and helped herself to another, her anxieties lessening.

* * *

Shay closed the curtains before lighting two other candles and placing them on each side of the mantel.

He was tired of Paris, tired of its subterfuge and its darkness. He’d realised who his visitor was within minutes of her leaving.

Celeste Fournier. It had been eight years since he had seen her last in England. She’d been lauded for her beauty by all who had met her, but it was the broken pieces that he had loved the most, the vulnerable parts she’d hidden under a smile.

Loved? Too strong a word perhaps, though at eighteen the heart was inclined to excess.

Another knock at the door had him turning. Could she have come back? Unlocking the bolts, he found Richard Cunningham on his step and shut the door quickly behind him, Celeste’s recent warning ringing in his head.

‘You look like you have seen a ghost, Rick?’

‘Perhaps I have.’ The newcomer could not quite keep the worry from his words as he crossed over to the table and helped himself to a drink. Brandy and his best bottle. Cunningham’s taste was impeccable even under duress.

‘There are problems afoot, Shay. A fracas yesterday has ripped apart the private world of Parisian intelligence and each office is blaming the others in their various bids for more power. As a result, it is now every man for himself and a dagger in the back is a very real concern.’

‘You are speaking of the murder of the Dubois family?’

‘You’ve heard of it, then? From whom?’ His friend’s dark eyes widened. ‘Word on the street has it that Napoleon’s agencies are exterminating anyone who fails to agree with the Emperor’s vision for France. That includes the families of those who might have the temerity to criticise a regime that many know is tainted. They were said to be in receipt of incriminating documents, papers which raised questions about their loyalty to France. Napoleon has gone mad with his greed for power!’

‘Threads,’ Shay returned, ‘threads bound and winding into the foolish hope of greatness. Conquer Russia and nobody will be able to stop Bonaparte from ruling the world.’

‘It will be winter that brings him to his knees, mark my words. There are thousands and thousands of miles between here and Moscow.’

‘So you are leaving? Getting out?’ Shay’s eyes dropped to a bag near the door.

‘I am. Tonight. Come with me. It’s the only option that makes sense.’

Fifteen minutes ago Shay thought he might have done just that. A quarter of an hour ago, he might have packed his bag summarily and left the city, his reports completed, his duties done.

But now he shook his head. ‘There is something I still have to finish.’

He thought of Celeste. He thought of her gift to him in the hay barn at Langley, the winter sun slanting through the dirty glass of a cracked window. Long limbed, perfect and sad.

‘Does James McPherson know of the danger?’ There were others to be considered, too.

‘If he doesn’t, the channels of his intelligence are failing him. It’s over here, don’t you see? There is nothing left that could make a difference to the outcome of a war that defies every tenet of sense. If the Little General wants to cut his own throat, then who are we to hang around and bathe in the blood of it?’

‘Which way are you headed?’

‘To the coast in the north. There are fishermen whom I wager would place gold above the sway of politics if given the chance and will transport me across the channel.’

‘Then I wish you good luck and God speed.’

‘You won’t come?’

‘I think you will have a better chance of safety without me. My cover here has been blown. I heard of this today.’

‘God. Then why the hell are you staying?’

‘It’s just for a little while. I will leave tomorrow night.’

‘Find another uniform, then. I’ve heard rumours that every American envoy of President Madison will be searched.’

‘I have already heard that warning, but thank you.’

‘There’s a brandy waiting for you in a London pub when you make it home.’

‘I’ll hold you to it.’

‘You’re a hero, Shay, in Spain and in England, but be mindful that you only live once.’

‘And die once?’

‘That, too.’

When he was gone, Shay crossed the room and finished the cognac that Cunningham had poured himself. Blowing out the candles, he opened the curtains and sat to watch the moon’s outline barely visible against the tufts of gathering cloud.

One more day and it would be over. His war. Intelligence. Freedom. He could not even imagine going home to Luxford and being content.

* * *

Guy Bernard was waiting for her early the next morning as Celeste sidled into the busy marketplace at Les Halles, bread and buns in the basket on her back. If she’d been paying more attention, she could have simply avoided him, but as they’d come nearly face-to-face she had no way of pushing past. The colour in his cheeks was high and there was a certain set to his shoulders that she recognised.

‘Are you turned traitor, ma chérie?’ His greeting dripped with sarcasm. ‘After the Dubois fiasco it is being whispered that you are working for the English.’

‘That implies I might care more about the outcome than I do, Guy.’ She threw this back, this certain truth, for two could play at this game and she knew he had never been in it out of loyalty to France. They were both for hire, to anyone who might pay them well, and this was their strength as well as their weakness. When she saw him relax, her fingers slid away from the blade in her pocket and she breathed out.

She needed to know his intentions, needed to understand just what he might do next and, although it might have been wiser to run, a quieter voice inside ordered patience. Without his connection to the inner sanctums of the agencies, she would have been dead years ago. He had saved her so many times in those first, terrible eighteen months that she could not but be grateful. Napoleon’s Paris was not a city easy to exist in alone and a young woman of gentle birth like herself could not have made it through the first week if he had not been there.

She had learnt things. From him. She had learnt to survive and to flourish. She had risen from the ashes of shame to be reshaped into the flesh of the living, a knife in her hand and hatred in her heart. Guy had taught her how to hone it, how to use it, how to live with the vengeance tempered. She was a thousand different women now in every way that counted. The self that had barely been alive after her father’s death was gone. There were too many hurts to want to remember, too many ripped-away pieces that had stopped her being whole.

So when his hand came down across her own she did not pull away. There was good reason in the pretence of it, after all, even for the small time left to them. A front. A necessary deceit. A way to navigate the sticky path of espionage and not be dead.

‘You are too alone now, Brigitte. I no longer recognise anything about you, about who you were.’

Once, she had liked Guy Bernard, liked his passion and his energy for a better France, until she saw that there was no morality beneath his desires and until she understood other things as well.

He was dangerous and he drank too much. Before the first year of their marriage was over she had pulled away from the intimacy. They had continued with the charade of it all for another six months for the sake of the jobs they did. Together they were a formidable team and if Guy heard something that she had not, then he made certain she knew of it, and vice versa. The newly invented Mademoiselle Brigitte Guerin was a woman fashioned from smoke and mirrors, after all. Guy had lifted the identity card from a dead whore in the back streets of the Marais because the deceased girl was about the same age as she was and had enough of the same features—hair, eyes, height—to get away with sharing a casual description on the livret. Such a paper was enough to allow marriage, to be legal again, to have a history and thus a present and a future; a name change to weave a further ring of protection around the dubious centre of her truth. There was too little trust in Paris to be an outsider for long.

Brigitte Guerin filled the gap nicely and her father’s mistakes could not be traced back to it. Guy Bernard’s street savvy had afforded her protection and he’d never uttered her birth name again. But politics and the shifting tides of France’s fortune had drawn them apart, his anger becoming more and more pronounced and his moods so melancholy she had been able to stand it no longer.

Striking out on her own, she’d taken all the skills that her husband had taught her, skills that crept into her bones even as they made them hollow. He’d followed her for a time, trying to insist he’d change, but she had never allowed him the chance and so he had moved on as well—to other women, some no more than mere girls. She knew deep down that in any other life she’d have barely glanced at him.

‘Who are you this morning?’ His eyes flickered across her trousers and jacket, taking in the bread she carried. ‘The baker boy? The minion of the markets?’ He snatched a roll and bit into it, the crumbs falling and catching in his scraggly dark beard. ‘Benet wants you to come in and explain what went wrong with the Dubois. He thinks your loyalty is now in question.’

She stood back and tipped her head up at him. ‘And yours isn’t? Louis Dubois was seven and a half and Madeline Dubois not yet five.’

He swore, using the guttural expletives of the rural west, a hangover from his far-off youth. A mistake, she thought, that would show any halfwit agent who you truly were. Or had once been.

‘They were not supposed to have been there.’

‘And you think that is an excuse?’

As if realising his slip, he returned to matters of business. ‘The English spy, Major Shayborne, is in the city. If you can bring in a prize like that, Benet might trust you again.’

‘You speak of the soldier who is Wellesley’s master of intelligence?’ She liked the sheer amount of surprise she was able to inject into her query.

‘Exactly the same. He broke the parole he had given in Bayonne, though in truth he could have escaped any time during the journey across Spain and been back safe in the arms of the Spanish guerrillas. One might wonder why he should do this? Such a question could lend more credence to the story of the Englishman being in the city to take a look around at the military capacity of the Grande Armée. Numbers. Direction of travel. The manner of weaponry and any hint of future plans. When we capture him, he’ll be hanged summarily and secretly, that much is certain, for there is too much of the martyr in him to allow anyone the outcry of it otherwise.’

Celeste had found all this out already. Guy Bernard was telling her nothing she did not know, though what he left out was revealing in itself.

They had not discovered the link with James McPherson. They did not know of the American connection either, for she was certain Guy would have mentioned such a thing.

Where was the information coming in from, then? She couldn’t ask him. People were on her tail, too; she’d seen them twice today watching from a distance. Strangers. Agents from the Secret Police or the War Office? Or maybe from the Garde Municipal de Paris?