coins and tossed them. “They have been helpful. See that the other villagers know of this.” His horse kicked up sand. The dragoons rode across the coins, following him.
The fisherman watched them out of sight.
“You told them.” His daughter collapsed to the ground, crying, now that the troopers were gone.
“Someone would have told them, in the end, after they hurt more women.” He stooped like an old man and began to gather up the coins, running his fingers into the sand to find any buried deep by hooves. “Help me with this. Your eyes are better than mine.”
“You betrayed Annique.”
“Do you think she would expect us to fight him?” He did not meet her eyes. “It was what she told me to do, if that man should come here. She made me promise.”
“If he finds her—”
“He will not.” He brushed dirt off the coins and put them into his pocket and turned to the house. “Stay here and look for the money. I must go to your mother.” He stopped at the doorway. “He will not find Annique. She is the Fox Cub. And she made me promise.”
Seventeen
AT TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, ANNIQUE and a great many flopping halibut came ashore at Dover. She wore the second-best dress of a French fisherman’s daughter and a pair of sturdy boots. A shawl, knitted from the wool of the kindly-faced black sheep of the salt marshes, wrapped her shoulders. Adrian’s knife was strapped to her thigh under her dress.
She had eaten bread and cheese in mid-Channel, in the rocking darkness, with the smugglers. It was always interesting to talk to men of what they did for a livelihood, and now she knew more about hiding casks of brandy than she had known before. They waved at her now in a friendly fashion as she left, even Thadeus, the oldest, who had been dubious of her when she came aboard.
She stood on the quay amid piles of flounder and mussels and felt a moment of complete happiness. England. It was very beautiful, England. She had admired its white cliffs, riding in, with the sails behind her.
The noisy town of Dover stretched above her with its stone houses stacked one upon the other up the hill and the castle above everything. Around her, gray green water washed the pilings, splashing tiny explosions of light, spinning bubbles of silver and snow white. In baskets of fish, the scales shone in iridescent ripples.
After months of darkness, brightness assailed her on every side. Color whirled and danced around her till she was dizzy. She was drunk with it. The line of stark shadow on a white stone wall cut like a shout. A crimson dress in the doorway of a tavern dazzled. Sometimes she could barely think, her head was so full of color and shape. She was lost in this riot of light, struck dumb by the beauty of a gull hovering over a sparkle of water. Never, never would she take the light for granted.
This was to be her new country, this England.
She had three pounds, sixpence, in English money hidden under her shift, her negotiations with the smugglers having consumed the rest of Henri’s valuables. She had no luggage and no roof to shelter her tonight. The thought came to her that in nineteen years of life, not one material object—not a scrap of paper, not a comb, not a gilt trinket—had succeeded in clinging to her. When she walked away from the wooden quay she might have been Aphrodite, rising newborn and naked from the sea. She would start with nothing. It had all been stripped away.
She had been a spy for as long as she could remember. That was over. Whatever she did with the Albion plans, she would spy no more for France.
This was her last turn at the Game. She would go to London and find safety with Soulier and make her choice. In a week, or two weeks, she would make her decision about these Albion plans that would try the patience of a paving stone, and perhaps give them to the British after all. Then she would slip away from Soulier and drop into England like a spoonful of water into the ocean. The deadly men who hunted her, both English and French, would never find her.
She would seek out an obscure place and become plain and simple Anne, perfectly ordinary Anne, and take up work which did not decide the fate of nations. She would, perhaps, keep a cat. It would be restful, such a life.
The rocks lining the wharf made a complex landscape of terraces, escarpments, crags, and valleys. They looked most exactly like the rocks of France, which was a philosophic truth of some depth, probably. As she walked the track up from the docks, she saw that in one of the wood shacks, someone had put yellow flowers in a blue jug on their windowsill. Flowers yellow as bright silk. Yellow as sunrise. It was her welcome to England.
Dover city was a seaport like any other, a place of strong smells and many prostitutes. She did not wish to linger here and, in any case, she must go to London and meddle with great affairs.
She had met a man, once, who juggled balls of fire. The secret, he told her, was to keep them in the air and never truly touch them. That way, they did not burn the fingers.
The Albion plans were like that to her. She could not take one decision and hold it in her hands without being burned, but must keep them all in the air.
To give to the English a few dates and tides and routes was useless. The French would learn of this—the Military Intelligence was a most perfect sieve of secrets—and change the dates and invade anyway. Or the English would be uncharacteristically stealthy and lay an ambush to welcome the invasion. That was not a satisfactory outcome. She could, of course, pass to the English the great compendium of the plans. The French would not dare to invade then…but so much knowledge would turn the course of many battles for years to come. She would stop the invasion, at the cost of many French lives.
If she did nothing, of course, this town of fish and harlots would be a pile of rubble in the spring. There would be no brave yellow flowers in any window, nor any glass in them, nor any hand to set the blue vase upon the windowsill.
She could have named countless statesmen and scholars who would have known exactly what to do in this situation without thinking at all. It was a great pity the Albion plans had not landed in their laps.
Perhaps answers would occur to her while she walked to London. Montaigne, who was both wise and a Frenchman, had said that traveling produces a marvelous clarity of judgment. This had not yet occurred, but it still might, since there were many miles to London. She would buy a loaf of bread to carry with her when she left Dover. It is a false economy to starve oneself when one must walk a long distance.
She was in the vegetable market near the docks, admiring oranges—they were so perfectly round, with the shallow dimples and a color strong enough to warm the hands; she had never appreciated oranges before—when she noticed the squint-eyed man beside a pyramid of apples, watching her. When she wandered away to visit vegetable marrows and onions, he followed. Such interest.
She had been careless, sauntering around this town. If she had still been a spy, under orders, she would have realized sooner she was being followed.
She ducked under the red and white striped awning of a stall and dodged staid matrons and baskets full of cabbages.
Out of the market, then, and away from these many eyes. She found small streets. She had not yet seen any part of Dover that was beautiful, but this section was distinctly unlovely. She ran hard now, taking left and right at random in this twisting maze of narrow lanes. The squint-eyed man, who must be French for the speed of his feet and his cleverness, was still behind her. Gaining on her.
She could not avoid a confrontation. Better to choose her own ground for it than to stumble into some blind alley.
