Couleuvre
The hand holding the message clenched into a fist, crumpled the perfumed paper and hurled it into the hearth fire.
How weak and powerless I am in this
whirlwind of plotting and treachery.
—Empress Marie-Louise,
second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte
London
June 1814
In the beginning, there was a single point of light. It narrowed to the tiniest tip of a needle, piercing in its intensity, cold and white as the brightest star. She went toward it, a dreamer compelled by a quest of the soul. Closer, closer she drew, the light her only guide along the inexorable journey. Closer, closer. She was almost there; soon she would be able to reach forward, to tumble into the light...
The pinprick grew and exploded into searing, shattering pain. A cry started in her chest and rose through her, emerging ragged and desperate from her mouth.
A fog of noxious sulfur corrupted the air. She could see the yellow-tinged cloud in the deadly flashes erupting all around her. The menacing whine of flying rockets screamed in her ears. A bomb soared and careened against the roof beams of the warehouse.
She stood amid hellfire and brimstone, confused yet feeling oddly unafraid. She had bruises on her body, and her wrists were burned by the rope that had bound her. Perhaps knowing she was doomed, knowing the matter of her own death was now out of her hands, banished the fear. Gripped by a peculiar, numb tranquillity, she watched a wooden crate catch fire.
Eerily beautiful flames flared with a dreamlike slowness, licking along the edges of the crate and then climbing to the boxes stacked above it.
A single word was stamped on the face of each box: Explosives.
Even as a sense of peril registered, she knew with a strange feeling of detachment that it was too late to run. A second later, the crates and boxes exploded, bursting outward from a force within.
She felt pain, but from a distance. The force of the explosion hurled her backward. She waited for the impact of the wall, something to stop her, but the wall had disappeared. Just for a moment she was flying, flying into the black night.
She landed against a mound of baled cotton piled in an alleyway adjacent to the warehouse. The breath left her in a whoosh. She lay still, with the pain dancing madly, like a dervish, in her head.
The fireworks soared, turning night to day, angry lightning bolts in the sky. She began to realize, with dawning wonder, that she had done the impossible. She had survived. Perhaps, after all, she might live.
If she wished to.
Then a new flash cleaved the night. A plume of fire and smoke erupted in the alley. She could feel the roar of heat in her face. The flames reached for her, golden talons stretching closer, touching off the bales, sealing off her escape route. She tasted death again, its nearness, its allure whispered in her with a breath of fire.
Still unafraid, she started to surrender. Some part of her rejoiced. It was over. At last, all over. No one had won. All was lost.
A ball of fire rolled toward her, hungry, angry. Trapped in the alley, she slid deeper and deeper into submission, welcoming the end. But some tenacious hesitancy niggled at her, some sense that she was not ready yet. Someone needed her.
She staggered to her feet, swaying, the brick wall too hot to touch. Unfinished business. Benignly she noted that the bodice of her dress had been torn and then hastily repaired with a curved dressmaker’s pin.
Unfinished business. Her mind groped for the nature of that business, but smoke filled her lungs, and thoughts skittered away.
Concentrate, she told herself, closing her eyes. And she began to open up, to let in the unthinkable, and it almost surfaced. Then her awakening sense of reason snapped shut like a closing mantrap.
“Lass!” a voice called. It sounded faint, but she realized it was because the explosions had deafened her. “Give me your hand!” the stranger yelled.
She opened her eyes. Turned toward the deep, urgent voice. Through a veil of fire she saw him, tall and broad, a fluid, racing shadow backlit by shooting stars.
“Lass,” he shouted again, “you’ve got to come away from there now, while there’s still time.”
She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could only stare as the blaze rose higher around him. He was wonderful, an archangel of shadow and light, bursting through the curtain of flame. Gloved hands snatched her up as if she were a poppet doll.
She tucked her face into the shelter of a huge shoulder. The frock coat reeked of sulfur and smoke and sweat. She felt the jarring thud of his footsteps as he ducked his head and spirited her away from the exploding building.
Shouts and whistles echoed through the streets. A brigade was already strung along down to the wharf, passing buckets frantically from the river.
He set her on her feet in the recessed doorway of a brick building, gripped her shoulders and leaned down to peer into her face. “What in God’s name were you doing there? Are you all right?”
Dust and ash clogged her throat and mouth. Her vision was blurred by cinders and tears. She could not see his features, could make out only the shape of her savior against the roaring light of the fire behind him.
“Lass!” He gave her a gentle shake.
She managed to nod, to croak, “I am not badly hurt.”
The shadow man swung off his frock coat, draped it around her shoulders. She had a swift impression of a broad chest, powerful arms. Safe. She would feel safe in those arms. She desperately needed to feel safe.
“Aye, then,” he said. “Take care you don’t—”
“Help! Help me!” The cry pierced through the bellow of flames and the crash of falling timbers. High in a tenement across the way stood a boy, just a little child, waving from a window. The roof above him had caught fire. So had the stairwell below him.
Her rescuer uttered a foreign word; it sounded like a curse. Before he even spoke or moved, she knew he would leave, and she felt an inexplicable sense of grief and yearning.
Stay with me, she wanted to plead. She longed to draw him into the light, to look at his face, to know the man who had snatched her from death.
Yet she felt no surprise when he shoved her toward a red-faced man overseeing the brigade. “Are you the watchman?” her savior asked.
“Aye, on patrol I was, and found myself in hell.”
“Look after this one,” he said, indicating her with a nod of his dark head. “I’ll go for the lad.”
“Christ,
