Events were escaping his control. Even now, Annique might be crawling to the Englishman, broken and begging, telling him anything he asked. Telling him about Bruges.
The map crackled. He closed his fist over Normandy. This was not disaster. Not disaster. He would scoop them up like bugs. The Englishman would be stopped. Even if he spilled some story of Bruges, who would believe what an English spy said? It could be quashed, every whisper of it. Every breath that spoke of it could be stopped.
And if he had the Albion plans on him…
It would not be like Bruges, with all his work, all his planning, cheated from him. For what? A ridiculous few coins. An insult of coins.
He pressed his thumb on the city of Rouen and marked the road to the coast. “You will order patrols here, here…and here. Stop everything that moves and search it.”
“We cannot stop every—”
“Look for a blind woman, for God’s sake. That is simple enough for even you.”
The Albion plans had dissolved from Bruges like a puff of smoke. He had torn that inn apart, looking for them. This time, they would not get away, not if he had to rip them from the belly of that bitch with his own hands.
“I will order patrols.” Henri gave a terse, insolent nod. Another discourtesy he would eventually regret.
He would salvage this calamity Henri had created. He would retrieve the Albion plans. And he would shut Annique Villier’s mouth. When she was dead, he would be safe.
“Here…and across here…place the customs. Let them do some useful work for a change. Send our men here.” His fingers tented, spiderlike, above the names written into the blue wash that marked the Channel. These were the villages, tiny, fish-stinking, each with fifty huts and three dozen boats turned down on the sand. “She knows this coast from the days of the Vendée. She made allies among the smugglers, men whose names she never reported to me. This is where she will go, if she is free.” He sat back abruptly and pulled a silk handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. The room was too warm. “Unless she expects me to look for her there. Perhaps…” He frowned at the south. “If we spread the patrols…”
Henri gazed at the oil painting that hung on the gold and crimson walls of the salon, a landscape that had once belonged to the mayor of Paris. “There are many possibilities.”
He would deal with Henri. Oh, most assuredly, he would deal with this disrespect. “Go. Go yourself. Give the order that any papers she carries are to be brought to me, unopened. To me alone. Do you understand?”
“To you. Unopened. Of course.” Henri thought himself sly. If he laid eyes on the Albion plans, he would discover that he was, instead, expendable. “What of Annique?”
“Take her, if you want an Englishman’s leavings. Use her to reward the men who find her. Then bring her to me.”
“And the Englishman?”
“Kill him.”
Ten
BESIDE HIM, ON THE DRIVER’S SEAT, ANNIQUE maintained a dry and lofty silence for almost an hour. What finally broke her down was Doyle saying, in a very hurt tone, that she didn’t need to slide her arse all the way to Calais. He weren’t crowding her. The injured tone of voice and the vulgar word quite undermined her resolve. Even pressing her lips very closely together, she couldn’t keep from giggling.
“That’s better,” Doyle said, satisfied. “I was wondering if you was gonna talk to me.”
“I do not feel talkative. It is the being kidnapped, you comprehend.”
“We’ve irritated you, have we?”
“You have. And I do not like to be so high up.” The driver’s perch was unpadded and far, far from the ground. It lurched frighteningly over every bump. She could not see the ruts and potholes coming, so she must hold on tight and brace her feet continually on the upcurved footrest. Her fingers had permanently taken the shape of the railing at the side of the seat. She would be unspeakably sore and weary by day’s end, which was without doubt why she was up here. She would be in no condition to escape tonight. Grey had, as the English put it, fixed her wagon.
The coach jolted madly. She tightened her grip. “It is unsteady, this coach.”
“I ain’t going ter let you fall off.” Doyle had such a wonderful accent. No one but a Frenchman born would have dared to speak French so vilely. “Been to a bit of trouble getting hold of you, after all. You know much about horses, miss?”
She had located Monsieur Doyle in the vast storehouse of her memory. He had many names. Her mother pointed him out to her, long ago in Vienna, and told her to avoid him, as he was tough and tenacious as a badger and probably the best field agent alive.
“Not so much,” she said.
“Then we’ll put you to work, and I can get some rest. You just…That’s right. You just take this.”
He handed her something. Then she worked out that she was holding the reins and the horses were jogging along with nothing controlling them whatsoever but her hands on thin strands of leather.
She’d spent a lifetime dealing with the unexpected. She gripped the reins as if they were ropes to a ship and she was in water in mid-Atlantic. “
“You don’t want to go choking up on the reins like that. Makes them horses nervous. What you wants to do is hold them bits of leather nice and loose like. Should really be in one hand, o’ course, but let’s us start out with the both of ’em, just at first. What you do…” He put his arm around her, taking both her hands. “No, loosen your fingers up there, and let me show you. What you do is…This gets threaded through here, see.”
“Would you take these back? Please.”
He shifted the straps in her hands till they intertwined with her fingers. “This one over here,” he twitched it in her grip, “goes to the left. That there’s a bad-tempered devil on the left. Nancy, I calls him, on account of him not being what you might call complete in his privates. Old Nan’s a great one for nipping at you when he wants yer attention. Now, suppose you was wanting to turn him to the left—not saying you does now, but if you was wishful to—you’d just pull nice and firm on this strap here. You feel that?”
“Doyle.” She kept a firm hold on the abject terror the thought of these horses running away roused inside her. “It has possibly escaped your notice, but I am blind as a rock.”
“Yes, miss. This other line here, the one you gots lying across your palm like—”
“Being blind, Monsieur Doyle, is not merely a lack of appreciation for the delightful blue sky and the field we are passing. It means I cannot do some practical small tasks. Like drive horses. This is a fact most self-evident that I tell you.”
“Lord love you, miss, you don’t have to see to hold on to these reins. Why, half the time I’m driving along with me eyes closed, just napping. The horses does all the work. The tricky part is remembering which of them lines is which, just in case somebody should climb up and ask you about it.”
She clutched the pieces of leather till her fingers ached. This was not the small, creaky wagon of the Rom and a single, placid Rom horse, which was the only thing she had ever driven in her life. “I most extremely do not think this is a good idea.”
“Best way for you to get around, miss. Driving. If you don’t mind me advising you. Nothing like a pony cart for tooling around the country and no reason you shouldn’t drive as well as any of them ladies in England. Why, from what I’ve seen, a full half of ’em driving must be as blind as you are, begging your pardon for bringing it up and all.”
“You are a man of the most remarkable cold blood, Monsieur Doyle.
“An’ what would a nice young lady like you know about my reputation? When you gets to England, you just go out and get yerself a little cart, a pony cart, and you finds a pony with some sense to him, like this pair has. He’ll take you round as pretty as you please without you do more than set your hands around the reins just like yer doing there.”
