Page 16 of A Night of Secret Surrender
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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.
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He was worse by midnight and she knew beyond a doubt that she could not abandon him, his glassy eyes darker when contrasted against the red bloom in his cheeks.
‘You need to drink.’ His skin felt dry and hot, stretched close across his bones in that particular way of illness. Lighting a candle, she untied his neckcloth and loosened the fabric, an old scar she recognised there. He’d once told her his older brother had pushed him off the roof of a garden shed and he had hit the spikey branch of a lemon tree on the way down. Memories. They were both potent and impossible.
When he sipped wine from a bottle she’d opened, she encouraged him to take more for he needed to drink.
Her mind calculated the possibility of being run down here by Benet and his men. Guy had not known of this apartment and because she had seldom used the address she doubted anyone was watching the place. It might be a hideaway for a day or two, or a week if she were lucky. She pulled the thick velour curtains across the window, but did not dare to light the hearth. It was one of the ways she tracked people down, those hiding in an empty home they thought secure save for the telltale smoke curling into the sky above them. There were lots of secrets to be discovered from the rooftops of Paris and she did not intend her own to be one of them.
‘Leave me here,’ he said suddenly, the fever dreams receding for a moment and a small amount of logic returning. ‘If they find us...’
