The Spymaster's Lady

you there was meant to be a pretty English schoolgirl in the city of Bath and for me some fine Italian pastry cook in Palermo. But the cradles were switched somehow, and it all ended up like this…of an impossibility beyond words.”

“Annique…”

Swiftly, softly, she leaned to him and covered his mouth and kissed him. It seemed to surprise him.

“I wish I had never met you,” she whispered. “And in all my life I will not forget lying beside you, body to body, and wanting you.”

“For God’s sake…”

She stood up and jammed the knife in a crack between two stones some distance away, where it would take him a while to get to it. “Adrian was right. I should have made love to you when I had the chance.”

She walked out of the chapel, ignoring his words behind her, which were angry in the extreme, and taking care not to trip on the bits and pieces of her trap that were strewn around the entryway.

Henri’s horse was glad to see her. It did not like being so enclosed by briars. There was less trouble than she would have thought to mount, and no one in this dead monastery would see that her dress was hiked up far beyond decency. She gave the horse its head to find a way out of the courtyard and onto the road. Then all she could do was point toward the sound of the sea, hold on to rein and mane very tightly, and kick hard. It would be dawn soon. There was enough light for a horse to see. At the water’s edge she could follow the line of surf north.

She had come a mile when the road straightened and sloped downward. Henri’s horse picked up speed.

A blow slammed her. Shock. Pain. Falling. She had an instant to know it was a tree branch, hanging over the road, that had hit her. That the horse had done this on purpose.

She fell. Cried out in fear. Her head hit the ground, and the world exploded.

Then, nothing.

The horse, having demonstrated the vicious streak that allowed Henri to buy him cheaply, gave a satisfied grunt and trotted off in the direction of St.-Pierre-le-Proche. Annique lay in a ditch by the side of the road, her face upturned into the drizzle.

SHE hurt. Tendrils of pain reached into the nothing and gave it shape and form. She was pulled unwillingly to a place where pain knifed into her. Her head, in particular, hurt.

It is better to be unconscious. That was her first thought.

Pain filled her head like fire. Like fire. Like…

That was her second thought. Between one instant and the next, she knew.

Light. Light diffused through her closed eyelids. In terror and awe, she opened her eyes and saw pale dawn in the sky. Light everywhere. Light across a whole mass of swirling clouds.

So it had happened. The doctor in Marseilles, with his unnecessary Latin, was right. The horrible bit of something in her skull had shifted off her optic nerve and was now wandering about, preparing to kill her.

She lay, getting ready to die, as the doctor had said she would.

It was entirely typical she should have a view of stubby pine trees to look at for her last minutes of life. Typical she should be stretched flat in soggy, cold mud. She tried to compose her mind to a nobility suitable for such a serious moment. What she thought upon, however, was her stupidity in trusting Henri’s horse and how uncomfortable she was and how hungry her belly felt and how radiant were those tiny drops that quivered down the needles of the pines…the drops that slid along the pine needles and fell one by one onto her face.

She waited. Minutes passed. Nothing happened, except that she became more wet.

It came to her that she was not going to die. Or at least, not just immediately. She sat up. In ordinary times, the ache in her skull would have occupied her attention to the exclusion of all else.

“But this is bizarre.” She found herself looking down at her hands, so automatically did her eyes go to where she’d rested them when she was blind. Amazing to see her own hands again. To see this dress she wore—pale green, smudged with dirt. To see…

She could see. She was no longer the blind, ridiculous worm. She was herself. She was Annique, the Fox Cub. Spy extraordinaire. “I can…see.” She felt hollow with amazement, a shell containing only joy. “I can do anything.” She scrambled to her feet. She wanted to dance. To fly.

The ditch was full of pinecones, which had been uncomfortable to lie among. She found five of them, tightly curled, heavy, and palm-sized.

One. Two. Three. She tossed the simple circle she’d learned from Shandor, when she was eight…that first night she’d come to the Rom and been so lonely.

Catching was easy as breathing. The Two and Two. The Half Shower. The Fountain. So beautiful. She craned her neck far back, swaying to keep under her catches. Her head ached like blazes, but it did not matter in the least.

Bon Dieu, but she was stiff. There had been a time she could sometimes juggle five. Today she was happy to keep a circle of four in the simplest of patterns, a child’s juggling.

She wanted…oh, how she wanted Grey at this moment. She wanted to show him this. Her juggling. Her little art. The trick she had mastered only for the joy of it.

The pinecones were bright and happy in her hands. Nothing lost after all these empty months. Hands and eyes working together. The wonderful eyes that could see for her.

Grey would never see her juggle. Never.

She became clumsy suddenly and missed a cone, so she let the others go. They landed, left and right, hitting neatly on each other, as juggled things do.

She set her face against the tree trunk. It was the same tree that had knocked her into the ditch. In the thick, muzzy silence of the wood, her breath caught in her throat and tears slipped from her eyes. She cried, sad and unspeakably happy.

Sixteen

The coast of Northern France, near St. Grue

THE HOVEL FRONTED THE BEACH. AN OVERTURNED fishing boat flanked its door. Leblanc ignored the sobs that came through the wood shutters from inside, ignored also the girl child, held between two burly dragoons, snarling and fighting. His attention was all for the man kneeling at his feet.

“When did she leave?” he demanded.

“With the fishing fleet. At dawn.” The fisherman’s voice slurred through a cut and bleeding lip. “In the boat of the English smugglers.”

“Where do they go? What is their home port?”

“Who can say? They have many safe harbors, up and down the coast. They—”

Leblanc’s riding crop slashed the man’s face, sudden as a snake, and left a line of blood. “Where?”

“Dover. They go to Dover.” Panting, the fisherman bowed his head.

“Dover, you say?” Leblanc moved his gaze to where the girl was stretched, wriggling, between the soldiers. “Be very sure.”

“It is their place, so they have always said. I do not know if they tell me the truth. They are English.”

“It is you who must tell the truth.” Leblanc studied him another minute. “Henri!”

Henri appeared at the doorway, tucking his shirt into his trousers. “There’s nothing in the house, just some clothes she left behind. That’s all.”

“No papers?”

“None.”

Leblanc went white around the mouth. Abruptly he turned and stalked back to where the horses waited. He took reins from the trooper standing at attention. “She can see. She’s made a fool of us all.” He mounted. “Come.”

“What do you want done with these?”

Leblanc stepped into a soldier’s cupped hands and swung into the saddle. He looked from father to young daughter, and to the house where a woman wept. Then he smiled. “We will reward them, of course.” He pulled out