A Night Of Secret Surrender

‘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.

* * *