A Night Of Secret Surrender

Martin Blanc’s hand came beneath her elbow as he shepherded her out, past a group of men busy around a map on the table. Out on the street she led him into the doorway of an empty shop, her hands pressing down on the side of his neck with just the right amount of force. Her father had shown her this defence and she had never forgotten the teaching. It would be precious moments before Blanc regained consciousness, though to stop him hurting himself further she pushed him back to sit against the sturdy wood of the door frame and pulled up the collar of his jacket.

‘I am sorry,’ she said quietly and then she was off, walking fast with her face against the wind.

At the chapel, she found Shayborne stepping out from the shadows, his nose dark with blood, his right eye swelling.

‘Come, but hide your face.’ She did not touch him or allow him to touch her as they traversed the streets to a part of town she seldom visited. She could not risk the other address and this one was closer anyway. She saw that he limped badly and that his face was pinched with pain under the cloak’s hood. Still he followed, doggedly. She was glad of the sudden rain shower to wash away any blood that might have splattered on the road behind him, giving them away.

Inside the apartment, she quickly sought some privacy to dry retch into a hand basin without any sound whatsoever. Killing never got any easier, but her soul had long since been damned.

‘The way of life is above for the wise that he may depart from hell beneath.’

Her father had often recited this verse from Proverbs and she believed in its message. She shook her head. There was no hope for her to rise with the angels. The most she could pray for was a quick and final end.

After rubbing herself down with a dry cloth, she looked at herself in the mirror. The blood of Guy Bernard felt as though it had soaked through her very skin, the harsh tang of iron filling her mouth, even as she swallowed. The smear of red lip grease coated the small damp towel she held.

She had always known it would come to this, one way or another.

Spare clothes were neatly folded in a wicker basket and she donned them with haste, stuffing the gown she wore back where the others had lain. A hat, boots and a belt followed. The pistol she slid into a leather pouch and attached her knife beside it, the blade cleaned and readied for the next time. Armed well, just as she liked it.

Rubbing boot polish into her hands and cheeks, she bent to scrape her nails against the rough plaster on the floor. Success lay in the detail and she had been brought up for years on the stories of the demise of the French aristocracy and their unblemished hands as they had marched to the guillotine for a final reckoning.

She felt more confident now, the tremors inside quietened. This was her world and it had been for a long time. There was just one last job to do.

* * *

The woman who had disappeared into the room to one side of the passageway was nothing like the dirty lad with the ancient eyes who came out of it.

‘Your father lived here?’

‘Yes. He rented a house in the centre of Paris when we first arrived back, but this was his secret place, you understand, the hidden part of him that few saw. He wanted it as a place to escape, I think, somewhere he would be most unlikely to run into anyone he knew.’

‘Because he was delving into the dangerous politics of a failing Empire?’

‘And he was drinking heavily.’ These words were said with less certainty. ‘The sentence for bitterness and broken dreams. He met my mother here in Paris and then spent years back in Sussex. Perhaps he did not truly fit in any more.’

Looking around, he could see all the signs of August Fournier. The books. The pipe. The furniture in the French style. The violin. As well as half-a-dozen old and dusty bottles of various wines and spirits.

‘Did you come here with him?’

She shook her head. ‘After he died I kept it on only as a sanctuary to hide in should I ever need it.’

‘Because you understood by then the danger of what your father had led you into?’

‘In his defence, he truly believed Napoleon would make the world a better place.’

‘And has it, for you, I mean?’

Real anger found its way through the careful indifference and Shay was glad for it.

‘You know nothing of who I am now, Major, and if you are indeed one of the lucky few whose morals have never been tested, then you are fortunate.’

‘You are saying yours were?’

‘I am saying that you have to get out of this city before every agent of every intelligence group in Paris tracks you down. I pray what is said of you is a truth.’

His eyebrows raised up. ‘What is said of me?’

‘You are the wiliest of all of France’s enemies and you can disappear into the very edge of air in the time it takes to draw breath.’

‘Flattering but foolish.’ When she smiled he looked around. ‘Do you have rope here?’

‘Yes.’

‘And a Bible?’

She went to the shelf and plucked out two tomes. ‘Catholic or Anglican?’ As he took the Latin Vulgate he saw one of the nails of her left hand had been pulled right off, the bed streaked in blood.

She had never been easy to read, even as a youngster as they had traversed the countryside around Sussex. At sixteen she had let him kiss her. At seventeen she had brought him into the barn at Langley and lain down on the straw to lift her skirts in invitation. She’d worn nothing underneath, save a lacy blue garter about her thigh. The next day she had left with her father to return to France and he was sent to London with a commission to join the army. She would be twenty-five now while he was twenty-six.

Different paths. He wondered if she had thought of him ever.

She was the daughter of a wealthy man who should have been brought out for a London Season. She had no siblings still alive and her mother had been damaged somehow. He could never see that same weak will in Celeste Fournier and he could not now.

‘Do you speak the Latin?’ His voice was low.

‘Yes.’

The past between them slipped back into its place as he wound the necessities for escape out of nothing. ‘Fallaces sunt rerum species.’

‘The appearances of things are deceptive,’ she returned, and he smiled. No doubt her father had taught her, for August had been a scholar of some note. ‘We’ll leave tomorrow, mid-morning. It is the busiest time of the day.’

Gathering all that was needed, he sat on the balcony with his back against the wall, the warmth in the stone from the day gone so he felt the coolness through his shirt. No one could see them. No one overlooked this particular space and the thought crossed his mind that this would be why August Fournier had chosen such a location, hidden as it was from the world. He was glad when Celeste joined him, sitting opposite, her hands clenched around her knees so that every knuckle showed white.

‘I shan’t journey with you further, Major. They know me here and you will have a better chance of escape alone. For me to rescue you from the hawks and then feed you to the wolves would make no sense.’

He brought the cheroot he’d lit to his mouth and inhaled. It was one of her father’s that he’d found in a box on the desk. The red tip of it could be seen in the looming dark so his other hand shielded the glow, just in case.

‘Who are you? Now?’ He said this quietly, because the violence and sexual innuendo in the basement beneath the streets of Paris was still fresh in his mind, and because when he looked at her across the small distance he could not see one single part of the girl he had known all those years before.

She did not answer.

He tried another question, a distinct catch of distance in his tone. ‘You wear a wedding ring. Did you marry?’

‘The world is a hard place to be alone, Major.’

‘Is he a good man?’

‘Once I thought him so.’

‘And now?’

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the stone, a pointed refusal to answer imbued in the action. He changed the subject.

‘What colour is your hair really? I have seen it white and black and red. I remember it as a golden brown.’

Her good hand crept upwards, pulling down her hat.

‘There is much you do not know about me now, Major Shayborne, and the colour of my hair is the very least of it.’

‘Once I understood a lot, Mademoiselle Fournier.’ He stressed the mademoiselle. ‘I came the next day to find you and thank you for your generosity in the barn at Langley, but you were gone.’

* * *

Celeste felt shame cross her face. ‘My virginity was hardly a prize.’ There, she had said it, out loud. The words settled into the space between them, a truth many times heavier than the weight he had given such a gift.

But he did not let it go. ‘Sometimes I wondered...’

She turned to face him.

‘Wondered what, Major?’

‘Did you know your father would take you back to France the day after...?’

‘The day after I offered you my body? Yes.’

‘I thought you had gone because of me.’

His reply made her throat thicken and she swallowed. Now was not the time for confessions with a trail of assassins moments away from pouncing on them. If he was to live, he would have to go on without her.

‘Hardly, monsieur. There was a whole world of lovers I was yet to meet.’

The double-edged words made her feel sick. She took a deep breath and counted. One, two, three... At twenty she felt better.

He was paler than he had been before and there were bruises on his face from Guy’s interrogation. Such wounds should not bring the sweat to his brow, though, and after years of jeopardy she was adept at recognising greater injury. Coming up on her haunches, she shifted across towards him.

‘Where are you hurt?’

When he pointed to his thigh, she saw the same dark ooze that she had noticed in the dungeon. Back then she had thought the stain had come from his bleeding nose or broken mouth.

‘A blade?’

‘No. A bullet.’

‘Is it still in there?’

His long fingers felt around his leg and she saw him flinch.

‘Probably.’

‘Come inside, then, so I can look.’

He hesitated momentarily and then pushed himself up, following her in and unbelting his trousers. The long shirt be wore was patched and patched again. By his own hand, she thought, since the stitching was poorly executed. One thing at least that he was not an expert in. That uncharitable thought had her frowning.

‘Here.’ He raised his leg, bending it at the knee, and a dark and angry hole on the top of his thigh could be easily seen. Slipping her blade from its leather, she spat on it.

‘For luck,’ she explained as she saw him looking. ‘A gypsy in Calais once told Papa and me that saliva is a way of reducing inflammation and we believed him.’ The bullet was an inch under the skin. The metal of it scraped against the steel in her knife and she knew it must pain him greatly.

‘It hit your bone and not the pathways of blood. You were lucky in such a deflection, for another inch to the side and you would not still be here.’

She twisted the blade slightly and the bullet came out, a small flattened shell of darkness, and when she observed it she could see it was still whole. Standing, she went back to the basket of clothes and ripped a good length of clean muslin from a petticoat she had stored there.

Her father had always insisted on cleanliness around an injury and the old teachings had never left her. ‘Singe your knife in boiling water or naked flame and find a fresh bandage. Do not touch the compromised flesh if you can help it either, for any dirt that gets in increases the risk of death.’

August had got such teachings from books as well as from experience, an academic who was well read and curious. A man who had married the wrong woman and lived to regret it.

Mary Elizabeth Faulkner. Celeste could barely even remember her as being any sort of mother.

She ripped at the fabric with more ferocity than she intended to and rolled the long lengths into one tidy ball. She had not the means to heat the blade. Saliva would have to do.

* * *

Shay leaned back against a leather chair as she ministered to him, her hands warm and adept. When she was finished, she knotted the fabric and stood. ‘It should have salve to calm the hurt, but I have none here.’

‘Thank you.’

His heart tripped over the pain and he bit down on fear. If it festered, he would be dead, for he could not run far on a leg that would fail him. But he said nothing of this to her as he tried to distract himself.

‘What manner of a lad are you now?’ His gesture encompassed her boy’s clothes.

He was pleased when she rose to play his game, the awkward intimacy of tending to his hurts replaced by charade.

‘My name is Laurent Roux. I am from the south. My father is ill on our smallholding outside St Etienne du Gres where we grow vegetables for the Wednesday markets at St Remy.’

‘And why are you here? In Paris? What brings you to such a bustling city, Monsieur Roux?’

* * *

She wondered at his lilting tone, the music of the high towns of Provence in his words, his accent changing just like that. Multi-lingual and clever with it. A gift, she thought. Was that how he had melded into Spain and found out all the things that would save England? The boy she had known in Sussex was now a vastly different man. Harder. Unknown. Dangerous. The darkness of his hair highlighted the gold in his eyes.

With more care, she gave an extra cover to her pretence, matching his abilities in the cadence of lesser-known dialects. ‘I came to learn the leather trade as an apprentice. But the stipend required by my master here is no longer possible and I am called home.’

‘The reality of many a lad,’ he returned, ‘and there is nothing more deceptive than a well-planned application of the truth.’

She smiled then and switched back from the musical Provençal to her more formal Parisian French. ‘And how well you play it, Major Shayborne. They hate you here, you know, for your subterfuge. You sit at the top of the list of the public enemies of Napoleon’s New France. The secret gatherer. Wellesley’s right-hand man. Those are just two of the many names attached to you here.’

His fingers picked at a hole in the leather chair where the stuffing was coming through. ‘I am only the shadow of many others. Spain has a dozen factions of organised resistance and all of them are fed by a thousand, thousand watching eyes and ears. The priest. The tavern owner. The woman who sells flowers on the busy streets of a city. The farm boy who passes armies as he takes his milk into the village. A lighthouse keeper who sees ships where they should not be.’ His face looked tired as he spoke, the last beams of the dusk fading into the flat grey of night. Such a light hid things, Celeste thought, and was glad of it as she answered.

‘Many in Paris believe that the Emperor will sweep away all poverty and disease. Her citizens are certain he will bring a kinder life and a truer way of working and for such hopes they are willing to make any sacrifice required.’

‘And you believe this, too?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Bonaparte’s intentions are difficult to define and he is all the more powerful because of it. A peacemaker who pursues confrontation. In truth, he is not what he once was a few years ago when I would have laid my life down for his dreams and died a martyr.’

‘Like your father did by coming back to France?’

‘It wasn’t quite that simple. Papa had doubts and they grew...’ She stopped.

Until they killed him. Until the tentacles of corruption surrounded us both and reeled us in. Like fish on a hook with our mouths wide open.

‘Did you harbour the same doubts?’

She shook her head. ‘It was always survival for me. I sold secrets for money. I took my skills into the marketplace of greed and I lived.’

‘By hiding?’ He looked around the room and she saw it through his eyes, meagre and shabby. ‘By living in the dark? By never gathering things around you that might make you waver?’

She shook her head more violently than she had meant to. ‘The girl you once knew died with my father. I have been Brigitte Guerin for many years, Major. I am not the person I was.’

‘Who stays the same, Celeste? Who has that luxury in these times?’ His tone was as flat as her own. ‘Who taught you to use a knife?’

What, not who, she thought, and stood so that she could breathe more easily and so the hate that ran through her in waves of nausea did not spill out as words she could never take back.

‘We should sleep.’

He nodded and turned his face upwards, eyes shut against the moonlight. A strong face with the swell of the battering still around his eyes and mouth. She hoped this would not give him away when he left here, but then she thought if anyone might manage to escape, surely it would be him. She would leave as soon as she was sure he slumbered, slip into the shadows of Paris as she had always done, unencumbered, and disappear.

She wished she could stay, even as she sat there watching him, but there were things he could not know, things she dared not tell him.

Who stays the same in these times?

Once she might have thought goodness would win out over evil, that a just regime could easily shatter a corrupt one. That was only until the blacks and whites had all turned into greys and she had understood the true nature of what was left.

There was no one to help her now. She liked it that way. No recriminations. No honesty. Nothing that would make Major Summerley Shayborne look at her in disgust or pity, because nearly everyone who knew her secret was dead and she wanted to keep it that way.

* * *

He was worse by midnight and she knew beyond a doubt that she could not abandon him, his glassy eyes darker when contrasted against the red bloom in his cheeks.

‘You need to drink.’ His skin felt dry and hot, stretched close across his bones in that particular way of illness. Lighting a candle, she untied his neckcloth and loosened the fabric, an old scar she recognised there. He’d once told her his older brother had pushed him off the roof of a garden shed and he had hit the spikey branch of a lemon tree on the way down. Memories. They were both potent and impossible.

When he sipped wine from a bottle she’d opened, she encouraged him to take more for he needed to drink.

Her mind calculated the possibility of being run down here by Benet and his men. Guy had not known of this apartment and because she had seldom used the address she doubted anyone was watching the place. It might be a hideaway for a day or two, or a week if she were lucky. She pulled the thick velour curtains across the window, but did not dare to light the hearth. It was one of the ways she tracked people down, those hiding in an empty home they thought secure save for the telltale smoke curling into the sky above them. There were lots of secrets to be discovered from the rooftops of Paris and she did not intend her own to be one of them.

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