‘Who are you this morning?’ His eyes flickered across her trousers and jacket, taking in the bread she carried. ‘The baker boy? The minion of the markets?’ He snatched a roll and bit into it, the crumbs falling and catching in his scraggly dark beard. ‘Benet wants you to come in and explain what went wrong with the Dubois. He thinks your loyalty is now in question.’
She stood back and tipped her head up at him. ‘And yours isn’t? Louis Dubois was seven and a half and Madeline Dubois not yet five.’
He swore, using the guttural expletives of the rural west, a hangover from his far-off youth. A mistake, she thought, that would show any halfwit agent who you truly were. Or had once been.
‘They were not supposed to have been there.’
‘And you think that is an excuse?’
As if realising his slip, he returned to matters of business. ‘The English spy, Major Shayborne, is in the city. If you can bring in a prize like that, Benet might trust you again.’
‘You speak of the soldier who is Wellesley’s master of intelligence?’ She liked the sheer amount of surprise she was able to inject into her query.
‘Exactly the same. He broke the parole he had given in Bayonne, though in truth he could have escaped any time during the journey across Spain and been back safe in the arms of the Spanish guerrillas. One might wonder why he should do this? Such a question could lend more credence to the story of the Englishman being in the city to take a look around at the military capacity of the Grande Armée. Numbers. Direction of travel. The manner of weaponry and any hint of future plans. When we capture him, he’ll be hanged summarily and secretly, that much is certain, for there is too much of the martyr in him to allow anyone the outcry of it otherwise.’
Celeste had found all this out already. Guy Bernard was telling her nothing she did not know, though what he left out was revealing in itself.
They had not discovered the link with James McPherson. They did not know of the American connection either, for she was certain Guy would have mentioned such a thing.
Where was the information coming in from, then? She couldn’t ask him. People were on her tail, too; she’d seen them twice today watching from a distance. Strangers. Agents from the Secret Police or the War Office? Or maybe from the Garde Municipal de Paris?
The whirlpool was falling inwards, catching them all with its increasing speed. Facts. Conjectures. Secrets. Napoleon’s newest push into Russia had created divisions and it would not be long before everything spun out of control. She should leave Summer Shayborne to his fate, good or bad. He was a man who had taken his chances and come out on top thus far. Luck did not last for ever—she knew that better than anyone. But although her head told her to run from Paris, her feet would not follow.
Foolish sentiment or a prescient warning? Get too close to a case and you could lose perspective. It was the very first learned law of espionage.
Her teeth bit down on her bottom lip in worry and Guy Bernard smiled, misinterpreting the signs. ‘Move back in with me, Brigitte. Together we could manage to ward them all off, just as we did before. I can protect you.’
‘Oh, I think we are long past such a promise. Besides, who’s to say I am not now enjoying my own benefactors?’
She needed to lead him away from the truth and this was the perfect way in which to do it. Protection money was a tenet he understood and believed in. Sometimes she wondered whether it was all he had left, a shell as empty as her own.
‘Benefactors?’ He did not sound happy.
‘People here pay well for an ear to be listening in the places that count. Bankers. Men with property. If it all falls over, they need to know when to sell, or how to gain by holding on to their assets.’
‘And you share your body with these men?’ He leaned forward and took her forearm, the back of his hand brushing suggestively against the rise of her breast.
‘Whether I do is no longer any of your business, Guy. Cross me and you cross them, too, and they will not be pleased.’
She half expected retribution for such a threat and part of her might have welcomed it. An easy ending. A final peace. She wondered, as she had a thousand other times, where the truth of who she was now lay? Lying was second nature to her, as was subterfuge. Still, she was glad when he let her go.
‘The slut in you is not attractive, Brigitte.’
She tensed at such an insult. After her father’s death, any morality she had once clung to was gone. Lost in a name change and a marriage and pure plain circumstance. Indifference had probably been part of it, too. She was so fractured she barely noticed the added ruin of using intimacy to gain information. The bottom of the barrel was not as graceless as she had imagined and knowing she could not fall any further offered a kind of comfort and certainty that felt like a sanctuary.
‘Benet wants to see you.’
‘Because he thinks I can find this English Major?’
‘Wellesley’s intelligence officer is a big prize. This for that, so to speak. Reparation. Recompense. Your unquestioned loyalty to France delivered on a plate.’
‘With Shayborne as the main course?’
‘A better notion than you being served up, I would imagine.’
She smiled.
‘And after yesterday’s bungle, Brigitte, your friends may also need to find some evidence of their loyalty again.’
She almost spoke, but stopped herself. They would as soon trust a viper in a basket full of eggs.
‘I will come when I can.’
He shook his head. ‘Benet wants you there in an hour.’
‘Very well.’
She wondered if she could bring herself to kill Guy if it came to a head, even as she realised he was probably thinking the exact same thing. He had beaten her a number of times as their liaison was drawing to a close. At first she’d thought she deserved such treatment and had crawled on back for more. When he deliberately broke three of her fingers, she’d left him for good.
* * *
Mattieu Benet, the newly crowned controller of the Paris operation, was the first to meet her in the small house off the Rue du Faubourg. He looked tired, his oncoming bald patch crisscrossed with lank strands of dark hair. One of these had fallen from its place and hung on the wrong side of his parting, almost to his shoulders. She resisted the urge to step forward and put it back into place.
He got down to business without mentioning a word of the Dubois. Celeste was relieved, though the fact that he would not question her about her part in it kept her on edge.
‘The War Office of Napoleon is keen to find out whether there is any truth in the rumour that Major Summerley Shayborne, Wellesley’s chief intelligence officer, is in the city. If the Englishman is here, they are most emphatic that they do not want this to be a problem. They want a short, sharp end to any lingering political complications such a presence might entail.’
‘There will be no negotiations for his release, then?’ Guy asked and Benet shook his head.
‘None. We can take him in for our own interrogation, though, before we dispose of him. The War Ministry is calling for his neck and Henri Clarke has grown more and more bitter with every successful reverse inflicted by Britain. The intelligence sent from the field by Shayborne has been both fastidious in its correctness and highly damaging, and it is time to call a halt on the spy’s ability to track what will happen next.’
‘Silence him for ever?’
‘As quickly as we can. Every office of authority in the city has their men out trawling and a scalp like this is a feather in the cap of any organisation who bags him. I am hoping it will be us.’
A map of Paris was brought forward