“Ma’am, if you please, a half-pound of flour and the heel of that cheese – yes, that small slice.”
“The apple cider vinegar, yes, just a half cup, thank you, and oh dear, those small wormy apples – no, no – you won’t sell those. I can take them and it would make your display look ever so much more attractive.”
She was getting for free almost as much as she paid for. At first Yvienne couldn’t see how Mathilde was going to make a meal of any of it – she bought only tiny quantities. But when Yvienne overheard Mathilde get into a conversation with one of the stall keepers over the quality of the fine taste that the dried mushrooms imparted to any dish, with the stall keeper enthusiastically handing over three small eggs and urging her to report back as to the dish’s success, she understood. Mathilde was buying the most tasteful and aromatic foodstuffs, the better to turn the basic boiled meat and plain potatoes and porridge they had into something lovely.
While Mathilde went at the market with the skill of a professional housekeeper, Yvienne became aware that she kept glimpsing a figure in a buff coat and dark trousers off to her side. It finally impinged on her consciousness enough that she angled herself around the edge of one booth so she could look behind her. She picked up a greenish-yellow orange to smell it, looking up over the fruit like a coquette, and casually looked over her shoulder.
There. The same figure. He slipped outside her line of sight.
That was deliberate.
The back of her neck prickled. If he had not tried to be stealthy, she wouldn’t have given him a moment’s notice. He looked like half the men in the market, what little she could see of him. Yvienne made her decision, and dropped the orange. It rolled under the booth.
“Oh, dear,” she said to no one, and ducked down to retrieve it. She waited a moment and stood straight up, looking in the direction she expected him to be. The man stared back at her and then walked off in the stiff-legged way people do when they’re trying not to run.
Chapter Eleven
Yvienne pushed through the crowd and followed him. She spared a thought for Mathilde but she knew the girl could take care of herself. Her world narrowed to the man she followed and at the same time she did her best to heighten the rest of her senses so she could take in as much information as possible.
Her bonnet got in her way. She stripped it while on the move, leaving it on top of a barrel. The shawl was her next victim – and she had a pang of regret because it was one of the last beautiful things she owned from her old life, but she thought with grim determination that she could always buy more shawls, once she took back her House. This man who was following her, and who she had put on the run, could be the first step toward that redemption.
Now she dropped back but she could still see him in the crowd, his passage like a ship’s prow running through the sea. He didn’t look back, as he concentrated on putting distance between them. If he reached the street, she would lose him, so she began to calculate where he might come out.
Her love of maps helped; she might have been a sheltered child but she knew the streets of Port Saint Frey as well as anyone who lived high above them could. The market stood in the center of a wheel of streets that terminated in Market Place. The man was heading toward the Esplanade, which led along the harbor itself. He could take his choice of Barrel Street or Souzeran or Cathedral Boulevard in this direction.
He took a turn to the left and she angled toward him. It had become more crowded, and she gave up all gentility and pushed and jostled, throwing her elbows with the best of them, ignoring angry cries and insults. Dimly she heard someone laugh behind her and say coarsely, “Run, Johnny, yer girl’s on yer tail!” and only hoped the man hadn’t heard.
For a heart-stopping moment she thought she lost him, then turned and there he was. He had stopped at the edge of the market, scanning the crowd for her. She remembered how she had first noticed him because of his stealth; instead of ducking or hiding, she stood still and pretended deep interest in a collection of garlic braids, keeping sight of him in her peripheral vision.
He scanned again, and then to her great relief, he merely put his hands in his pockets and sauntered away without a care in the world.
Idiot, she thought, and dropped in behind him, staying as far back as she could. She felt a rush of power. Now she was the stalker. He went down Barrel Street, the crooked little back way leading between tall tenements and old buildings, with some of the oldest mercantile names in the city picked out in gilt that had faded in the cold and damp sea air. This had once been the heart of Port Saint Frey, but the stone buildings had become so weathered that the fine carvings were just dirty lumps of marble, the lovely detailing that had made the buildings proud no longer visible. Yvienne slowed, awed at the history that stood before her, and then with a start remembered what she was doing.
Unease pricked her. The man was up ahead, but there wasn’t a crowd anymore. There were only the two of them on the street. If he looked back…
She was the idiot. She had been a lamb led to slaughter. She realized her danger at the same time that two men came out of the alleys between buildings and stopped in front of her.
“Well, look what we have here,” one
