The Black Hawk (4 page)

“That’s the general idea. Yes.”

Four

THERE WERE NOT MANY PLACES FOUR TRAITORS could meet. Their long association and their shared past were secrets held close as the fingers of their hands. At first, that caution was the order of the man who brought them to England so many years ago. After he died—after he was killed—it became their own wise and suspicious practice. Now it was habit.

The man dressed as an executioner said, “He’s almost six, isn’t he? And he’s big for his age.”

“He’s old enough to have his own pony, of course.” One of the women spoke. She wore the extravagant dress and blank, uncanny mask of the Carnevale of Venice. “I was hoping for a more . . . ponylike pony.”

Two men and two women stood in a curtained alcove outside the ballroom. They were a little patch of French bindweed planted in the garden of England. They committed treason by breathing. But it was old treason. They were a conspiracy with the juice long since dried up.

Till the blackmail. Till the murders.

Violins, flutes, and a cello played. Fairies and pirates, shepherdesses and English kings skipped and bobbed a Scotch reel up and down the ballroom.

The woman in the Carnevale mask said, “I spoil him. We always spoil the youngest.” She folded and unfolded her fan. “He looks so small up on that brute of a pony.”

The woman dressed as Cleopatra looked away, bored. She had no children.

“He’s named it Palisade. What kind of a name is Palisade for a pony? That’s a wall isn’t it?”

“The defensive wall of a fort. Good name. Strong.” The compact, heavily muscled man wore the tabard and armor of a medieval Knight Templar. Underneath, he looked like the soldier he had been.

The Humphreys’ masquerade ball was always held the first week of May. It was one of the traditions of the Season. But Sir George was only a baronet and Lady Humphrey’s father was in shipping. The Humphreys cast a wider net than they might have liked. The company was less exclusive, the dancing more boisterous, the manners a shade less refined. Young squires from Yorkshire, who’d somehow missed making a splash in the ton all Season, paraded the fringes of the ballroom and thought themselves devilish fine fellows. Mamas brought awkward daughters, who would not be officially out till next year, to commit their first, inevitable gaucheries in anonymity.

French spies met behind the potted plants.

Carnevale Mask said, “I don’t want a strong pony. I want a docile one. It’s eating its head off, trying to grow. I catch a very sneaky look in its eye sometimes.”

The four talked and waited, half hidden by a heavy expanse of blue curtain. They spoke of the weather, scandal, politics, of a pony eating its head off in a stable near Hampstead village. They sipped punch. When it was clear no one lingered to overhear, they fell silent.

The one dressed as Cleopatra spoke first. “The surgeon left at five. They sent a boy to the apothecary. She must still be alive.”

“That was damnable work.” A fierce whisper from Carnevale Mask.

“Damnably stupid too. We’re all lucky he wasn’t caught.” Cleopatra’s face was hidden by a mask of feathers and beaten gold. She wore a black wig. Her arms were heavy with wide gold bands. “Or she wasn’t caught.”

The Knight Templar said, “Stabbed in the middle of Braddy Square, for God’s sake. It can’t be one of us. None of us would take that chance.”

“And yet, he succeeded,” Cleopatra said. “It was genius, in its way. The rain hid everything. He struck on the doorstep of Meeks Street and escaped. I’d call that bold, not stupid.”

The executioner said, “He condemned all of us to disaster. The British Service won’t forgive this. They won’t forget.”

“Maybe it’s a damn coincidence,” the knight said gruffly.

“The town’s full of sneak thieves. It could be—”

Cleopatra cut in, “I received my letter. I was told to be in the bookstore in Hart Street, waiting for the magistrate’s men. Ready to give evidence.” She let that sink in. “We all gave the same description. We implicated the same man. We all followed orders.”

The executioner said, “One of us held the knife. When she dies, it’s our murder.”

“Only one of us is guilty. Only one.” The woman of the Carnevale mask gripped her fan like a weapon.

“One murderer.” Cleopatra’s jewelry, the gold and the gilt, chimed as she lifted her glass and drank. “But three of us willing to lie and send a man to the gallows. Is there a hotter hell reserved for the murderer?” A sly look. “Will you save me a seat by the fire, Amy?”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You’d say that if you had the knife stuffed in your corset. Shall we take it in turns, protesting our innocence?”

“I swear, I didn’t—”

“We are all so very good at lying,” Cleopatra said. “Swear, if it makes you feel better.”

The Templar held his hand up, silencing. He wore a chain mail hood and mask the color of steel. His armor was rings of silvered tin, bright and mobile as fish scale. When he moved, metal clicked against metal like the gears of a clock. “What do we know?”

“Military Intelligence saw nothing.” Cleopatra rolled the wineglass back and forth between her hands, gazing down into it. She was the most discreet of expensive courtesans. One of her men held a position high in Military Intelligence. “Their man who watches Meeks Street didn’t like the rain and had taken himself off to a tavern. They have heard only rumor. No one’s made the connection between Meeks Street and the killings. Do you know the name of the man we’ve been accusing?”

“Don’t.” The Templar spoke sharply. “We know. All of us know.”

“It is the Head of the British Service. The Black Hawk.”

“And that is why we will fall.” The executioner leaned on his ax, head bowed, gripping the two-sided head. “Justine DuMotier and the Black Hawk were lovers once. When she dies, he’ll hunt us down like dogs.” He raised his eyes, going from one to the other. “Perhaps he should. Gravois and Patelin deserved what they got. DuMotier didn’t.”

“She was Police Secrète. Like them.” Cleopatra shrugged.

“Like us.” Under the mask, under the helm, the Templar’s mouth drew a grim line. “She was a soldier fighting for what she believed in. She shouldn’t die like this.”

“We tell ourselves we have no choice.” Carnevale Mask followed one bright figure through the pattern of the dance. Her oldest daughter. “They’ve won, you know. We’ve become the monsters they tried to make us. We—”

A man dressed as Henry VIII paused at the curtains to the alcove and peered in. Cleopatra wore thin folds of pleated linen. Her pale body with its gilded nipples was clearly displayed beneath. She had become wealthy selling that beauty. Henry VIII gave a long, appreciative, lip-licking smile.

The executioner lifted his ax and tested the edge. Henry VIII decided to stroll onward.

When he was gone, Cleopatra said, “It’s too late. It’s always been too late. What can we do?”

The executioner said softly, “We can stop.”

They held a long conversation with their eyes. Four French spies, pretending to be the grandson of an earl, the widow of a baron, the bluff military gentleman, the notorious courtesan.

“I will stop this. Here and now,” the executioner said. “For me, this is the end. When the next letter comes, I’ll ignore it.”

“The end.” Carnevale Mask still watched her daughter. “No more. Whatever it costs.”

The Knight Templar bowed his head.

“Justine DuMotier will be the last to die.” Cleopatra went back to watching the dancers.

“If she dies,” Amy said.

Cleopatra said, “We were well taught. That knife will have been poisoned. She won’t live through the night.”

“I can’t believe one of us did this.”

“I believe it very easily,” Cleopatra said. “We’ve all killed. Even you, sweet Amy. And you always used a knife.”

Five

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS BEFORE

July 1794

Paris

JUSTINE HAD TOLD THE BOY TO MEET HER AT THE guillotine. It was not because she was bloodthirsty—indeed, she was not—but because they would be inconspicuous here.

She was dressed as a housemaid today, in honest blue serge, white apron, and a plain fichu. In this, she became indistinguishable as the tenth ant in a line of ants. She held her basket to her chest and leaned on the wall that marked the boundary between La Place de la Révolution and the Tuileries Gardens.

She was too young to pretend to the august status of lady’s maid. A thirteen-year-old must be a housemaid, no more than that. But a housemaid was exactly what a respectable woman would take with her when she went to an assignation in the Tuileries Gardens. A housemaid could be left to stand in a corner of La Place de la Révolution, bored and resigned, while her mistress played fast and loose with her marriage vows.

So the housemaid assumed her appropriate expression of boredom and resignation and waited. Hawker would find her easily. She was still when everyone else was in motion. Nothing is more apparent to the eye.

This was a good spot for enemy spies to meet. From a hundred yards away Hawker could look across La Place de la Révolution and assure himself she was quite alone. The chattering stream of humanity that flowed through the square would allow him concealment as he approached. Beyond, to her right, the tight, milling anarchy of the arcade and shops of the Rue de Rivoli offered a dozen paths of escape. Her good intentions would be clear, even to an English spy of limited experience.

Or perhaps not. She would not trust herself if she were an English spy.

She frowned, working that out, and kept watch for him.

In the center of La Place de la Révolution stood the guillotine. The boards of the platform were dull brown. The stones to the right-hand side were nastily, thickly black where corpses had been rolled into waiting carts. But each morning at dawn men washed the instrument and whetted the blade suspended above the chopping block. The edge of the national razor gleamed silver.

There would be no work for the machinery of death today. For the first time in months, no heads rolled. Robespierre was three days dead, and everything had changed. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was the end of the Terror.

The citizens of Paris, who were toughened to the most horrendous sights, treated the empty guillotine as one more festival. They came in their dozens and crossed the vast, impressive spaces of the Place to gawk and circle about the platform, poking one another and pointing. Men carried their young children on their shoulders. When they passed nearby she could hear them saying, “Look, son. That is where the tyrant Robespierre died. I saw it myself, with these eyes. He wore a bloody bandage over his cheek and he screamed when they tore it off.”

She did not care that this was a great moment of history. Her sister was not yet four—the age of those children being shown this “history”—and she would not have taken Séverine anywhere near this abattoir for any reason under the sun.

Hawker settled to the wall beside her, his arms folded, his eyes on the guillotine. “So that’s where they did him. Robespierre.”

Hawker was not there . . . and then he was. Close enough to touch. She had not been aware of his approach. How annoying. If he had been a fellow member of the Secret Police, she would have asked him to teach her this trick of becoming part of the crowd, invisible. But he was not Secret Police. Not yet.

She would try to recruit him. He was young—her own age, no older—and he would be impressionable.

They shared the wall companionably. She said, “You did not come to see the great man die? That was incurious of you, Citoyen ’Awker.”

“Doyle kept me busy. I don’t know why he bothered. It’s not like I’ve never seen a man die.”

Madame had done the same—set tasks to keep her away from La Place de la Révolution. “I am sorry you missed the spectacle.”

“There’ll be others.” He leaned with his shoulders against the stone and his arms folded. When he shrugged, it was a ripple of his whole body. “No shortage of deaths here lately.”

“Comme tu dis.”

His hair fell across his forehead, black and straight as poured ink. He was always pushing it away as an annoyance, casually, without thought, the way an animal might toss back its mane. He was a good-looking boy in a dark, exotic fashion.

He said, “I suppose you’re keeping busy lately.”

It was an oblique reference to her many activities. “I am.”

“How’s the sprat?”

Because she had involved herself with British spies, they now knew more of her than she wished. Hawker knew the most. He had met Séverine. “She does very well. You should not wear that waistcoat.”

He frowned at her. “I like it.”

“I had supposed so, since you are wearing it, but it does not go with what you are pretending to be, which is a tradesman’s son. Unless you wish to portray that you have no taste at all.”

“I might be.” A minute later, “No stripes, huh?”

“Not stripes of that color. It is vulgar.”

“Thanks for pointing that out. Sometimes, when I’m talking to you, I get a revelation as to why certain folks meet a grisly end.”

They had met one week ago. She had learned much about him and surmised more. He was the most novice of British spies, an ingenious boy who learned with frightening speed. He was of the lowest class of English. He had very little patience. She had not seen him show fear. He possessed a dozen rare skills, some of which she needed very badly. This was what she knew of him.

In the same time, she had allowed him to learn almost nothing about her. He knew she was one of the great, secret smuggling chain that slipped refugees out of France, saving them from that very guillotine. He might not know she was also of the French Secret Police.

Pigeons strutted up and down the platform of the guillotine, self-important as sentries. Bold boys climbed and dodged up and over and around the steps where Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, Lavoisier, and Herbert had walked to death, and before them, the king and queen. Every few minutes, a bored soldier would come over and chase the boys away. The pigeons scattered. In a while new examples of both returned.