She could go? Now? Le Comte de Caviglione would keep his promise free of question and all consequence? Or was she to be taken somewhere else?
‘I would thank you for keeping your word, sir …’
She broke off when a bejewelled hand was raised, as if her appreciation was of absolutely no interest to him.
‘Are these items yours?’ He gestured towards a serving girl who had walked in behind the old man carrying her cape, boots, hat and purse.
A great wave of redness surged into Eleanor’s face as all attention settled upon her, for, with the tumbled bed linen and the scent of brandy and sex, the room held no mystery as to what had happened there. Servants talked with as much fervour and detail as did any daily broadsheet and the contents of her bag would give extra clues again.
Could she even begin to hope that the letter was still inside? That the promise she had given to her grandfather might still be honoured?
The older servant stepped forwards with her possessions. ‘These items were left in the blue salon, mademoiselle.’
‘Thank you.’ Reaching up, Eleanor fastened her hat. With no mirror the task was more difficult than she had anticipated and the wig made it harder again. Still, with a bonnet in place and the warm cape around her shoulders, hiding the mismatched assortment of articles beneath, Eleanor felt … braver. She pulled on her boots in less than a moment and, pretending to pick up something off the floor, extracted the letter as the Comte conversed with his man.
‘Milne will see you into a carriage. The driver has been instructed to take you where you would wish to be set down.’
Hardly daring to believe that the promise of freedom was so very close, she followed the old man out even as the Comte de Caviglione turned towards the window, dismissing her in the way of a man who, after using a whore for a night, is pleased to see the back of her come the morning.
Tucking her grandfather’s sealed envelope into the folds of the tumbled sheets as she passed the bed, she saw that the dawning sun had bathed the Comte’s hair in silver.
Cristo watched as the carriage pulled away on the driveway below, the white pebbles caught in the eddy of the wheels reminding him of another place, another home and far from here.
His hands fisted at his sides and emptiness was a taste in his mouth, sour and lonely. He longed for a greener land and a house that sat in the cleft of a hill with oaks at its back and roses in the gardens.
Falder.
The name echoed in the corners of regret; shaking his head, he turned to the hearth, leaning down for the kindling in a box near the fire. The simple task of catching sparks calmed him, made the fear he could feel rolling in his stomach more distant.
When he had finished he reached for the leather pouch in the hidden drawer of his armoire and sent the previous week by The Committee.
Secrets helped. Codes demanded single-mindedness and logic, searching for a pattern amongst the random lines of alphabet and numbers. Conradus’s book and Scovell’s principles made it easy and his interest quickened. His cipher wheel sat on the desk at hand.
Hours lay before him to be used up in concentration and attention. No sleep. No dreams. No lying in the grey of morning and wondering how the hell he had come to such a pass.
The bold scent of the girl lingered though, distracting him. Making him hungry. Again. For her warmth and the feel of flesh. Unspoiled.
He picked up his pen and dipped the quill into ink, blotting it before setting the nib onto paper. Her locket lay on the table before him, the chain of gold thin and delicate. He remembered the look of it around her neck, fragile and pale, the skin almost translucent.
He traced the certain shape of it in his mind. There had been a time when he had not known anything of dying and killing, a time when the sound of death had been impossible to describe. He could not lie to himself that those who had met their Maker because of him all had perished for the greater good or for the Golden Rule. Intelligence was a game that changed as the seasons did, and greed had as much sway as loyalty. To king or to country.
Not to family. He had long since been cured of that.
The columns on his desk refocused. Page seventy-five, column C, the fourth word down. A message began to form in the mass of chaos, though a capital letter threw him. The calibration had been changed and then changed again, the common combinations no longer locked into pattern. Transposing always had a point, though, and he looked for a letter that appeared the most frequently.
R. He had it. Substituted for an E. Now he just had to find the system.
He had been eighteen when he had started out on the dangerous road of espionage. A boy disenchanted with his family and alone at Cambridge. Easy pickings for Sir Roderick Smitherton, a professor who had been supplying the cream of the latest crop of undergraduates for years to the Foreign Office; Cristo had topped the new intake in every subject, his skill at languages sealing the bargain.
When he started it had been like a game, the Power Politics of Europe under the fear-spell of the memory of Napoleon, a man who had won an empire by his skill of manoeuvre.
Cristo had arrived in Paris the son of a Frenchwoman and the bequest of her château had given him a place to live. His father’s liaison and his mother’s shame had had a few points to recommend it, at least, and he had set up a spy ring that worked inside a restless Paris where priests and prostitutes had become the mainstay of his intelligence.
He liked the hunt, those few hours that came between months of blinding boredom, for in them he found forgetfulness of everything, his life held in a reckless balance that was only the responsibility of others.
Pull the trigger and end it all.
He wondered at the resilience of the human condition every time his hands reached their own conclusion and reacted, the whirr of a bullet or the sharp, quick pull of a knife. Often in the moonlight and in the hidden corners of this city in spaces where people held secrets that might bring down a nation by a whisper of breath or a clink of coinage. Always counting. Not the lives that might fall on the toss of a dice or the shake of a head. Not that. Counting only the cost of what it took to stay in the game and one step ahead. And alive!
He pulled out a cheroot from the silver tin he kept in his top drawer and tapped the end against the fine mahogany of his desk. Wrong and right depended on one’s point of view, though he suspected that his own moral compass had long since been tarnished by expediency, and the misguided idea that he might have once made a difference was only a distant memory in the dark labyrinth that was his life.
The code before him blurred into nothingness and he stood and crossed to the window.
His carriage had not yet returned and he wondered where it was that ‘Jeanne’ had wanted to be taken. He should have gone, of course, just to make certain that she arrived safely and that the destination was noted.
‘Mon Dieu!’ The words were loud against the silence and his breath frosted the glass. With an unusual sense of poignancy he wrote a J in the mist and rubbed it out just as quickly, the regret in him surfacing.
He could find her again. Or he could lose her for ever, in the wilderness of mirrors and shadows where nothing was fixed.
Only
