A Night Of Secret Surrender

‘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?

The whirlpool was falling inwards, catching them all with its increasing speed. Facts. Conjectures. Secrets. Napoleon’s newest push into Russia had created divisions and it would not be long before everything spun out of control. She should leave Summer Shayborne to his fate, good or bad. He was a man who had taken his chances and come out on top thus far. Luck did not last for ever—she knew that better than anyone. But although her head told her to run from Paris, her feet would not follow.

Foolish sentiment or a prescient warning? Get too close to a case and you could lose perspective. It was the very first learned law of espionage.

Her teeth bit down on her bottom lip in worry and Guy Bernard smiled, misinterpreting the signs. ‘Move back in with me, Brigitte. Together we could manage to ward them all off, just as we did before. I can protect you.’

‘Oh, I think we are long past such a promise. Besides, who’s to say I am not now enjoying my own benefactors?’