The Spymaster's Lady

“Get…a cart. A cart. But yes, I shall certainly do that if I ever go to England.”

“Now, miss, don’t go on like that. You knows we’re taking you to England with us. Going there just as fast as can be. Getting closer with every mile.” He shifted the straps lightly in her hands, steering the horses past some object in the road. “The sooner you stop fighting Grey about that, the easier it’ll be on all of us. Makin’ us all mortal edgy, you are, not knowin’ if you’re going to kill him tonight or not.”

“Yes. Or no. Whichever it is.” His arms were around her in a friendly way, but he’d let go of the reins again and left her with the whole carriage and these horses who might at any minute do anything at all. “Would you take these lines back, Doyle? Because I, of a certainty, do not want them.”

“You just ease up on the reins a little, the horses’ll walk right along and take us with ’em just fine. Holding on tight just distracts ’em.”

“Lean back and go along most nicely, is your suggestion. Doubtless I am to do the same with all that Monsieur Grey intends for me. It is a very masculine way to advise me.”

“Exactly, miss. And while these horses is walking so nice in the direction of the coast, what you gots to do, if you’ll pardon me saying so, is learn Hinglish.”

“Hinglish?” The meaning penetrated. “Oh. Anglais. But no. I do not just immediately plan to go to England, as it happens.”

“Well, miss, that’s just where you’re going, if you’ll forgive the contradiction. So we’ll teach you Hinglish. Ain’t hard. Me youngest girl—she’s just three—speaks it a fair treat.”

It was easier staying on the box with Doyle’s arm around her. It was even easier when he took the reins and held them, a little way above where her hands were, “Jest to show you how it’s done, miss,” and she could stop being terrified witless.

“Now take them.” He must have made some gesture and realized an instant later she couldn’t see it. “Them horses. In Hinglish we say, ‘Them ’osses is slugs.’”

“Them is…But that is a terrible thing to call horses. Unless the English are fond of slugs, which is possible.”

“Nah. Them’s the buggers gets in the lettuce and crawls all over and eats it. Me wife, Maggie—I tell you about me Maggie yet?—she’s a little spitfire, she is, and mortal proud o’ that garden of ours. Me Maggie ’ates slugs. Sets out saucers of beer to lure ’em in and lets ’em die happy like. Goes against the grain, somehow, drownin’ ’em in good beer.”

She waited for her lips to stop twitching. Her mother had told her Doyle graduated from Cambridge. With honors. “I would agree, though I have never killed slugs. It is still a very strange thing to call horses.”

She was learning that a better class of ‘osses’ were ‘rum prads’ and the Hinglish word for coach was ‘bangup rattler,’ when he took the reins from her and pulled to a halt.

The tenseness of her body must have shown how afraid she was. Doyle said at once, “Nothing to be worried about, miss. Jest looking for a place to stop for a bit. Might be here.”

She felt a sense of humid openness and heard wind and the sound of a stream and humming flies. Birds sang in the distance. They were in the middle of fields then, away from any village, and there was a woods not far. They would operate upon the poor Adrian in the country where his outcries could not be heard.

“This is a good place?” The door of the coach swung open. She heard Grey jump to the ground and walk along the road.

“Might be.” Doyle’s voice was accompanied by a noise that puzzled her, till she identified it as someone scratching an unshaven chin. “What we got here…There’s a couple or three rocks by the road, piled up casual like. That might be Gypsy work. We been following one of their trails a ways now—them scraps of cloth they tie in the trees up about level with a wagon top. So this rock likely means one of their campsites. Maybe back there in that bit o’ woods.”

They were both waiting for her to speak. The British spies, one and all of them, knew a great deal more about her than she liked. “What do they look like, Monsieur Doyle, these rocks of yours?”

“One great lump of a fellow, sorta roundish. That’s in the middle. Then there’s three in a line, running… Lemme show you.” He tucked the reins somewhere and took her left hand and spread it back against his knee and made dots on her palm, showing her how the rocks sat, each with the other. “And then a flat one off here past your little finger, oh, a good foot or so to the right. Don’t know whether that one’s in the flock, or just a stray. Ain’t no twigs or feathers or twists o’ grass anyplace. Just the stones.”

“You have read such signs before.” They had found a Rom campsite, beyond doubt.

“The patrin? Seen ’em here and there, miss. Can’t say I read ’em.”

“Wagon tracks,” Grey called from the fields to their right. “They’re one in the other, dead center in line. Gypsy.”

If Rom were encamped here, they would help her. They would not want to become involved in a quarrel of the gaje but neither would they like to see a woman who spoke Romany in the clutches of such men as these. If she lied ever so small an amount…

Doyle cleared his throat. “They’re not here. Them threads o’ cloth been there a while. Months. An’ the wheel tracks is old. We got the place to ourselves.”

They saw too much, these two. She would have much preferred to deal with fools. “You are right about the patrin, the signs. There is a camp not far from here. A safe place. It will be higher on that stream we passed, higher than the road, so the water flows clean. The Rom are careful in this.”

After a little discussion of the countryside, she directed the coach, not to a closest patch of wood which beguiled them, but up a long track that led into thickets and seemed to them less promising. She knew at once when they reached the clearing that was the Rom’s safe haven. The smell of old campfires hung in the air. The herbs crushed under the coach wheels were the ones the Rom leave behind in their favored camps. Wild garlic, fennel, and mint grew here.

“It’s a good place you’ve found us.” Grey swung her down from her high place on the coach. “This is what we need. You have Gypsy blood in you, Annique?”

“Not from my mother’s side, I am almost sure.” She could smell his shirt, the starch and the vetiver-scented water that was ironed into it, which was wholly a French custom and not a British scent at all. They had such meticulous technique, these agents. “I do not know enough about my father to say—he died when I was four—but I think he was Basque. He spoke with my mother sometimes in a language I have never heard anywhere else.”

He did not touch her, but something in her body reached out and greeted his body as if the two were old friends who had not seen one another for a long time. She did not like it that her body chatted to his in this fashion. She cleared her throat. “They were Revolutionaries, you understand. In those days, the radicals did not speak so much of where they came from and their families. It was not safe.”

“I’d have called you a Celt, myself, with those blue eyes. A Breton, maybe. Stay here a minute.” Twigs crackled under his boots as he walked into the brush.

She opened herself to a sense of the clearing around her, as she did with new places. Sun warmed her skin. The stream was not so close as to bring a feeling of damp and coolness, but its voice was loud and comforting. The coach jogged behind her as Doyle released the second horse from its harness. He took both horses, hooves clopping on the leaves, in the direction of the water. The air was thick with the pollen of the trees, filled with old smells of charcoal and tobacco and the pomade the women wore in their hair. It was all familiar. This was a camp like the ones of her childhood. This was a home place of the Rom.

Life had been simpler when she lived among the Kalderesh. If Maman had never come to take her back, perhaps she would have made a life among them. By this time she would have a black-haired baby to dote upon and a swaggering young husband, instead of a kidnapper who was carrying her toward an intricate and unpleasant interrogation in London.

Grey came toward her. “Take this.” He set a stick against her palm, a good sturdy one. She would call it a sort of quarterstaff, though she had never held a quarterstaff, as they did not figure heavily in one’s daily life. But her father had told her stories of Robin Hood. This was exactly what Little John was accustomed to hitting the sheriff of Nottingham over the head with. Scaled down to her size, of course.

“This is very fine. Thank you.” Possibly she might give Grey a whack with it at some time. “Will you take the bullet out of Adrian?”

His voice was tense. “That’s what we’re here for.”

“I see.” Never could she stop herself saying that. “You have much experience, perhaps, from the army?”