A Night Of Secret Surrender

She needed to lead him away from the truth and this was the perfect way in which to do it. Protection money was a tenet he understood and believed in. Sometimes she wondered whether it was all he had left, a shell as empty as her own.

‘Benefactors?’ He did not sound happy.

‘People here pay well for an ear to be listening in the places that count. Bankers. Men with property. If it all falls over, they need to know when to sell, or how to gain by holding on to their assets.’

‘And you share your body with these men?’ He leaned forward and took her forearm, the back of his hand brushing suggestively against the rise of her breast.

‘Whether I do is no longer any of your business, Guy. Cross me and you cross them, too, and they will not be pleased.’

She half expected retribution for such a threat and part of her might have welcomed it. An easy ending. A final peace. She wondered, as she had a thousand other times, where the truth of who she was now lay? Lying was second nature to her, as was subterfuge. Still, she was glad when he let her go.

‘The slut in you is not attractive, Brigitte.’

She tensed at such an insult. After her father’s death, any morality she had once clung to was gone. Lost in a name change and a marriage and pure plain circumstance. Indifference had probably been part of it, too. She was so fractured she barely noticed the added ruin of using intimacy to gain information. The bottom of the barrel was not as graceless as she had imagined and knowing she could not fall any further offered a kind of comfort and certainty that felt like a sanctuary.

‘Benet wants to see you.’

‘Because he thinks I can find this English Major?’

‘Wellesley’s intelligence officer is a big prize. This for that, so to speak. Reparation. Recompense. Your unquestioned loyalty to France delivered on a plate.’

‘With Shayborne as the main course?’

‘A better notion than you being served up, I would imagine.’

She smiled.

‘And after yesterday’s bungle, Brigitte, your friends may also need to find some evidence of their loyalty again.’

She almost spoke, but stopped herself. They would as soon trust a viper in a basket full of eggs.

‘I will come when I can.’

He shook his head. ‘Benet wants you there in an hour.’

‘Very well.’

She wondered if she could bring herself to kill Guy if it came to a head, even as she realised he was probably thinking the exact same thing. He had beaten her a number of times as their liaison was drawing to a close. At first she’d thought she deserved such treatment and had crawled on back for more. When he deliberately broke three of her fingers, she’d left him for good.

* * *

Mattieu Benet, the newly crowned controller of the Paris operation, was the first to meet her in the small house off the Rue du Faubourg. He looked tired, his oncoming bald patch crisscrossed with lank strands of dark hair. One of these had fallen from its place and hung on the wrong side of his parting, almost to his shoulders. She resisted the urge to step forward and put it back into place.

He got down to business without mentioning a word of the Dubois. Celeste was relieved, though the fact that he would not question her about her part in it kept her on edge.

‘The War Office of Napoleon is keen to find out whether there is any truth in the rumour that Major Summerley Shayborne, Wellesley’s chief intelligence officer, is in the city. If the Englishman is here, they are most emphatic that they do not want this to be a problem. They want a short, sharp end to any lingering political complications such a presence might entail.’

‘There will be no negotiations for his release, then?’ Guy asked and Benet shook his head.

‘None. We can take him in for our own interrogation, though, before we dispose of him. The War Ministry is calling for his neck and Henri Clarke has grown more and more bitter with every successful reverse inflicted by Britain. The intelligence sent from the field by Shayborne has been both fastidious in its correctness and highly damaging, and it is time to call a halt on the spy’s ability to track what will happen next.’

‘Silence him for ever?’

‘As quickly as we can. Every office of authority in the city has their men out trawling and a scalp like this is a feather in the cap of any organisation who bags him. I am hoping it will be us.’

A map of Paris was brought forward and laid out, and Celeste saw that a boundary had been drawn around the arrondissement she had visited Shayborne in the night before. They were closing in. Unless he had taken notice of her warning they would catch him, for his circle of sympathetic agents in Paris could be nowhere near as numerous or as dedicated as those he was known to have fostered in Spain and Portugal.

The priests here might help him given their anger against the nationalisation of their churches, but she doubted the ordinary citizen would. Napoleon had been too clever in his promises of better living and raised working conditions. After having been left out of politics for so very long, the proletariat were clinging to the hope of betterment like limpets on a rock in a stormy sea.

Shayborne would be largely alone out there on the dangerous streets of the city, surviving by his wits and his ragtag bundle of allies. She breathed out slowly and turned to speak.

‘I have reliable sources here and here.’ Her finger touched the map. ‘It will not take long to find out if they know anything of the spy.’

‘He is still dressed as a soldier, we think. With all the military movements in the city, it would be a clever disguise.’

She frowned as this new jeopardy shimmered and Benet continued on.

‘I am guessing he would not be sporting the scarlet coat of the Eleventh Foot, but likely something more faded and subdued.’

‘The uniform of a land with sympathies to France and an axe to grind against the British, perhaps?’ Guy spoke and they all mulled this over.

‘A good point and a valid one.’ Benet signalled a man at a table to come over to join him. ‘Lambert. Find out how many of President Madison’s envoys are in Paris and what connections they have. It’s a highly sensitive area and we will have to be careful, but I want this information on my desk as soon as it comes to hand.’

A matter of hours only, then, Celeste thought. She wondered if any other intelligence services operating in Paris had made the same deductions as had been voiced here. Interrogation meant torture. If they caught Shayborne, he would suffer a nasty end which she would be powerless to prevent. As she chanced a glance at Guy Bernard, she could see a question in his eyes. She looked away.

Sometimes she hated these people with such a ferocity she thought she might simply expire from it. But at other times she felt a hint of an honour that she had long since lost sight of as she worked to protect yet another victim caught in the crossfire of changing politics. This duplicity was both her penance and her salvation.

* * *

She saw the funeral carriages as she walked home along the Seine by way of the flower markets and knew the procession to be for the Dubois family. They were leaving the city for Nantes and the rural graveyard where the slain members of the family would be interred.

The image of the dead children made her slow down and lean over, the straps of her empty bread basket falling to one side.

Un malheur ne vient jamais seul. Misfortune never arrives alone.

She thought of her sister, lost to the morbid sore throat by the age of ten, her lone white coffin in the cold family graveyard beside the south-facing wall at Langley. She thought of her mother’s madness and her father’s grief. Would it be the same here, under the warming summer breeze of France? Was there some other child who had escaped the murders to be worn into sadness by the ripples caused by betrayal, torn in half by regret and circumstance?

Alice. With her golden hair and sweetness. Biddable, pliant and even-tempered.

‘It should have been Celeste who was taken. It should have been her.’

She’d heard the words her mother had shouted in the silence of night following Alice’s death, heard them above her father’s muffled voice of reason. A tightness had formed about her heart that had been with her ever since.

Did she even still have a heart, she ruminated, or was it caught there in her chest among the thorns of fury, tangled in blood and bristles, stone replacing empathy?

Her hand went to her throat and found a pulse, too fast, too shallow and tripping into a battered rhythm.

She would save Shayborne and then leave Paris, reclaiming something of herself in the process because he was a good man, a moral man, a hero, and she had always been the exact opposite.