A Night Of Secret Surrender

‘Wellesley will chase General Soult back to where he belongs. When the British enter France, no one will stop them for the French military effort lies in disarray. It will be a straight march up to Paris and victory.’

They were getting more and more furious and he knew that Marmont’s orders to kill him when he crossed the border all those weeks ago from Spain were still in force here.

He’d given his life’s work for England. His death would be for that country, too. It was surprising how calm he felt, how distanced. He wondered if perhaps he were already part way gone to that shadowy place between death and life he’d heard talk of on the battlefields of Europe.

When the door suddenly opened, he was brought sharply back into the moment, the pain skewering through lethargy and dislodging the mucus and blood from his breathing passages. With shock, he saw it was Celeste Fournier who’d walked in, dressed in a harlot’s gown, her hair the red of blood, fire and betrayal, and falling in a curling mass down to her waist. There were bruises around her mouth and a bandage encircling the fingers of her right hand.

‘Benet told me to come in and identify the prisoner.’ Her eyes met his own, but there was no warmth or recognition in them, no compassion for his wounds. Only distrust and fury. They were not blue at all, he suddenly thought, but the pale purple of storm clouds over mountains. The skin on both her cheeks was drawn into hollow pits and her lips were rouged and full and sensual. The colour had bled across her teeth. He looked away.

‘You know the English bastard?’ The tall bearded man stood now.

‘I met him once a long time ago, unfortunately. It is indeed him. I would know him anywhere.’

Her glance raked across him and then down to take in the dark blood marking his trousers at the thigh. Adept at reading people, all Shay could see in her face was disgust, underpinned by a certain distance.

‘You are sure? You would swear your life by it, Brigitte?’

She stepped closer and regarded him. ‘Marmont wants him dead. Benet wants information. Either way, Shayborne will not leave this room alive. It’s up to you how much you make him tell you, Guy. I would probably use the blade. Here.’ She gestured lewdly to his crotch. ‘Even heroes have their vanities, I should imagine.’

Her head tipped up to the man standing next to her, an overt and shocking sensuality in her expression. The bodice she wore was partly opened and very revealing and she made no effort at all towards modesty. There was something else there, too, a subservience, he might name it, drawn across the edge of lust. She looked like a prostitute about to satisfy a client’s needs in the back corner of the harsh streets around Les Halles.

He could smell a perfume on her that was neither expensive nor subtle. Beneath that was the sharp tang of fresh sweat.

‘Perhaps I could make him talk, Guy, if you wish to leave me with him for a few moments. Reparation, if you like, for my foolishness.’

Shay heard the laugh of his interrogator and saw his hands slip into the silk bodice of her flimsy dress, large fingers cupping one breast.

‘I am pleased to see that you have come to your senses, ma chérie. I wish I’d thrashed you more often over the years if this was all it took. You were always a quick learner.’

When he leaned forward to take a pink-tipped nipple in his mouth, Celeste Fournier raised her fingers to his hair as if to gather him in. Then all Shay saw was blood. Even as the dark-haired man began to fall, she had taken the other down, too, with the heavy punch of steel from the butt of her upturned knife. Within five seconds his own bindings were cut.

‘Can you stand?’

He nodded, because if he couldn’t they were both dead. He had no idea who was outside the room as he’d been brought into it unconscious.

‘Follow me, then. We haven’t much time.’

She did not open the door she’d come through, but took him deeper into the basement, prising off a vent of some sort and telling him to slip through it.

‘Crawl along until you find the second opening on the left. There is a ladder a hundred yards down which goes to the street. Wait for me inside the vestibule of the church Saint Eugenie on Rue de Richer. There is a brown cloak there hanging on the peg nearest the door. Wear it. Do not show yourself to anyone. If I fail to come within twenty minutes, leave the city and travel east. They will expect you to make for the safety of Spain and every road will be watched. Do not visit the jeweller James McPherson. He is already gone.’

‘And you. How will you get out?’

She pulled down one strap of her bodice and smiled. ‘As easily as I got in.’

He swore even as she showed him a small glass vial strapped to the inside of her leg. Her skin was white like ivory, her thighs smooth and slender. ‘If you are caught, it would be wise to fight to the death before they take you. There will be no second chances.’

And with that she replaced the grille so the bars were between them, dividing the light. She used her knife to screw the grate back into place and Shay noted blood seeping through the bandage at her wrist.

* * *

Guy Bernard was a threat as well as a bully and Celeste trod lightly past his inert body. She could not be sorry it had come to this, for her debts to him had long since been discharged in full, and more. The other man, one of Guy’s younger accomplices, was someone she had never liked, though she was confident she hadn’t killed him. When he awoke he would talk, but it was too late any more for caution and she no longer held the taste for brutality.

She rubbed her cheeks hard with her hands and breathed deeply to try to take away the tremors, her tongue coming to the split in her lip. The pulse in her throat beat wildly, but there was nothing she could do about that save summon the strength to cope. If she looked even vaguely guilty, she would never get through the next room alive.

Martin Blanc looked up from his desk and then down again, but not before she’d seen him take in her disarray. With a practised start she fumbled with the silk.

‘Interrogation makes Guy imagine every woman wants to bed with him. It is a fault he needs to address, I think, for it is becoming tiresome.’

At that he stood and walked across to her just as she knew he would. Breathing in hard, she sniffed and wiped her eyes with the fabric in her sleeve. She had allowed Blanc small liberties before when she wanted information. This time all she needed was distraction.

‘Guy said the English Major is proving difficult and I had no desire to stay and watch his violence. He also said to tell you that it might take a while to gain information and that he does not wish to be disturbed again until he calls.’ With a small shake she clutched at the side of the table. ‘Perhaps I should go outside and get some air? Could you take me?’ Her cloak was on the chair and she shrugged into it, glad for its covering.

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.’