India Black and the Widow of Windsor (3 page)

The last of the party to leave sidled furtively to Mrs. LeBlanc’s side. “Most convincing, madam. You remembered every detail. Well done.” The voice was a soft Scottish burr. A handful of coins cascaded into Mrs. LeBlanc’s outstretched hand. “Remember, not a word to anyone, or you may find yourself back on a ship to Louisiana, Miss Gooch.”

“I
ndia,” French hissed, “at last I have you where I want you.”

His face was inches from mine. I could feel his breath through the mask, hot with lust, and his eyes were aflame with it. There was a sharp pain in my left breast, I was sweating buckets, and my knees felt as though they could give way at any time. I had never seen French like this, and it worried me.

But only for a moment. I’ve found myself in a bad patch or two, and if I do say so myself (and if I won’t, who will?), I’m at my best when the chips are down. The options in this situation were the usual ones available to a woman physically threatened by a man: attack (my preferred method but not always the wisest), submission (only if every other option had turned tail and fled over the hill) and deceit. Now there’s a world of possibilities in the latter, and so I turned my mind to how best to practice that glib and oily art (as old Willie Shakespeare put it). It didn’t take long for me to decide on an approach. French is as predictable as a vicar’s afternoon appointment with the sherry bottle.

I gave him a look of maidenly meekness. “Ow,” I said. “You’re hurting me.”

French sprang away as though I’d produced a viper from my pocket. “Oh, I say. I didn’t mean to injure you.”

You can always count on the English gentleman in French, at least until he sniffs out that you’ve been relying on his good manners to take advantage of him. Then, he can be a right brute. The moment when French discovered that I had been pulling his leg was looming on the horizon like a Malay pirate ship, so I dropped my act and went in for the kill.

His foil hung at his side. I gathered my strength and lunged toward him in a perfectly executed
flèche
, my arm thrusting forward and the button that covered the point of my foil slamming into French’s fencing jacket at the breastbone. The blade of the foil bent wildly and skittered off French’s chest as my momentum carried me along the fencing strip, but as I passed him, I let out a great whoop of victory. A touch for India!

“That’s a touch,” I cried when I’d halted my headlong rush and turned back to face him. I ripped off my mask and pushed my hair from my face.

“Oof.” French was recumbent on the strip, cradling his sternum and breathing raggedly. “That wasn’t a touch; that was a bloody ambush.” He pushed himself to a sitting position and regarded me reproachfully. “That was underhanded, even for you, India. You misled me, and when I dropped my guard, you attacked.”

“You’re the one who said that fencing was in part the art of deception.”

French probed his chest for an entry wound. “Within accepted conventions, it is.”

“That’s ridiculous. How can you deceive someone if you have to follow rules about how to deceive him?”

French ignored my question, as he no doubt knew there was no adequate response to it.

“That maneuver of yours would be frowned upon at L’Ecole d’Escrime Français
.
In fact, you’d be tossed out of every
salle d’armes
in France.”

“Well, I learned the art of self-defense at L’Ecole d’Boulevards d’London
.
‘Needs must’ is the school motto. And if you don’t know how to wallop a gent in the bollocks, you can’t graduate.” I tossed my mask to one side and wiped the sweat from my face. “Really, French, I do appreciate your interest in my personal safety, but I’ve done alright on my own up to now. To be honest”—and surprisingly, in this case, I was—“I’m not sure fencing is for me. A well-aimed kick in the testicles is more my style. And if the situation requires it, I’m a fine shot with my revolver.”

I carried my .442 Webley British Bulldog with me whenever I traveled at night or into any of the more questionable districts of London. I’d used it on several occasions, including a few weeks ago when I had cut down a sabre-wielding Terek Cossack guard from the Russian Embassy who had been about to filet me while French had been occupied wrestling with Major Ivanov, the tsar’s agent in Britain. I opened my mouth to point out how very effective my Bulldog had proved against the Cossack’s great killing sword, the
shashka
, but French was glaring at me as he got stiffly to his feet.

“Do not,” he said, in a warning tone, “blather on about how effective your Bulldog was against the Cossack. If I hear one more word from you about that, I’m going to be ill. I am well aware that in most cases, it is more advantageous to hold a gun in your hand than a sword. However, there may be times when you don’t have your Bulldog on your person, and you find yourself threatened by an assailant with a knife or a club or even a sword. The object of teaching you how to fence is to provide you with an additional means of self-defense if, at some time in the future, you should find yourself wishing you hadn’t left your revolver on the fireplace mantle. I should think you would be glad to learn a few new tricks to protect yourself, given your, ah . . . profession.”

Dear French. Always so solicitous of my feelings, except when he isn’t. My profession, as he so delicately referred to it, is in fact prostitution. I am the abbess of Lotus House in St. Alban’s Street, an elegant and luxurious establishment catering to the upper echelons of the civil service, minor aristocracy and our brave military lads (officers only, of course). The whores I employ are attractive, clean and generally devoid of any ambition other than getting their hands on the next bottle of gin. I feed them well and keep a doctor on retainer to ensure the girls don’t provide anything to the customers that they shouldn’t. I run a tight ship and am justifiably proud of my services and my reputation, which has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. I’m not in the first rank of brothels just yet, but give me a year or two and the old abbesses will have to step aside or get shoved out of the way.

No doubt you are wondering how the madam of a brothel came to be learning the art of fencing from a handsome British blue blood with blue-black hair and arrogant grey eyes. Surprisingly, our relationship was not of a business nature, unless you could call French’s attempt at blackmailing me not long ago (enterprising as it was) “business.” It’s like this, you see. One of my regular customers, a spaniel-faced cove named Archibald Latham, expired on the premises of Lotus House not long ago. Naturally, I had to dispose of the body before any of the other madams got wind of the situation, or they would have made my life a living hell, spreading the word that the bints at Lotus House were a bloodthirsty lot and Latham had been killed for the contents of his pocket. As it turned out, Latham had passed over the River Jordan due to natural causes, probably as a result of the stress and strain of his work at the War Office. On the day he died at Lotus House, he was carrying a memo containing vital information about the state of the British military.

Russia and Britain had been rattling sabres at each other over Russia’s threat to attack the Ottoman Empire, ostensibly to assist their Serbian cousins who were being put to the sword by the Sublime Porte’s rascally military irregulars, but in truth because Tsar Alexander II was a bit sulky over not possessing a warm water port for the Russian navy. Naturally, the British government didn’t want the Russian bear anywhere in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, where it might come roaring out of its den and cut off British access to the Suez Canal and the route to India. In consequence, the British government had been trying to intimidate the Russians with talk of the number of British Tommies champing at the bit to have a go at the Russians again, just a few decades after the debacle of the Crimean War. I know, hard to credit, but you know how these diplomats are: they fancy themselves as master strategists, just because they’ve gone to public school and read a little Cicero.

Normally, I’d have shoved Latham’s papers in the fireplace and put a match to them, just to get rid of any evidence that the old goat had been in my establishment, but in this case I didn’t have the chance. Russian agents had been shadowing Latham and took the opportunity his death presented to spirit away the case containing the War Office memo, a memo, which, you’ve no doubt realized by now, contained an accurate depiction of the strength of the British Army, which was just about large enough to repel an attack on Penzance by the combined forces of Norway and Sweden.

Apparently, the Russians weren’t the only ones interested in my spaniel-faced friend. French (in his role as agent for the British prime minister) had also turned up, demanding the case, just as I and my assistant Vincent were preparing to deposit Latham’s body somewhere along the Thames. When I couldn’t produce the cursed case, French (setting aside his usual courtly instincts) had coerced me into helping him recover the memo, informing me just how easy it would be to remove Lotus House from my ownership if I did not.

It turned out to be quite a ride. Along the way, I met that dear old queen (Disraeli, not Victoria), swanked away the evening at a ball at the Russian Embassy and found myself in the middle of an extended pursuit of the Russian agents and the stolen memo through the snowy English countryside, culminating in a crossing of the English Channel that still leaves me nauseous when I think about it. (It was during this adventure that I had dispatched the Cossack guard with my beloved Bulldog.) Well, there’s much more to the story of course, but I don’t see why I should tell it to you here. I’ve written it all down as the first volume of my memoirs, to be published just as soon as French stops trying to teach me to fence and I can find a publisher willing to suspend disbelief at the prospect of a prostitute riding to the rescue of Her Majesty’s government. If you want to know how things turned out, you’ll just have to fork over a few bob at your local bookseller’s.

“I’m always glad to learn a new trick,” I said (not pointing out that I’d also turned a few in my time), “but I don’t see the point of learning
this
trick. I mean, it’s all very well for a bunch of poncy poofs to prance up and down a painted rectangle on the floor, flicking each other with this poor excuse for a sword, but when I’m in trouble, I’m usually in need of more than a French vocabulary and a keen sense of fair play.”

French sighed, vexed at my stupidity. “It is not a ‘painted rectangle’; it is a piste. And fencing is not just ‘prancing about,’ as you so ignorantly portray it. The object of fencing is to thrust your sword into your opponent without allowing him to touch you. This requires an exquisite and exacting combination of strength, timing, precision, quickness of mind, and resolution. It requires subterfuge, cunning and sleight of hand.”

“I believe I possess all of those characteristics in abundance. Don’t forget, I’ve had to live by my wits all these years, and I’ve managed to do so without any knowledge whatsoever of a
dessus
.” I pushed a hank of wet hair from my eyes and contemplated myself in the mirror along the wall. My raven black hair lay in sodden streamers around my face, and my creamy English complexion (kept so at no little expense by creams and unguents, and the denial of any indulgence in opium) was flushed with heat and shining with perspiration.

“Besides,” I said, “I’m sweating like a whore at Evensong, and these clothes are hideous.” The long, quilted jacket was made for a man, and consequently strained to bursting over my ample bosom and fit entirely too tightly around my hips. I looked as though I were about to be carted off to Bethlem Royal Hospital for a fortnight’s cure.

“Never mind how you look, India. Why do women always worry about how they look? We’re fencing, for God’s sake, not having tea with the Queen. Now put your mask back on and let’s begin again. And this time, please try to control the point of your foil. The object is not to slash with the foil but to use your hand to manipulate the point to touch your opponent in the target area.”

“Why can’t I just lop off his arm and be done with it?”

“Damnation, India. The reason beginners learn to fence with the foil is so that they will grasp the importance of controlling the point of the blade. Control of the point is everything. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you could benefit a great deal by learning a modicum of self-control.”

“Oh, don’t get sniffy, squire,” I said, but I put on my mask.

There was no arguing with French when he was in this mood, and I had found that our fencing practice had at least one unexpected and delightful side effect: my figure (despite my buxom appearance) was growing lithe and strong. I was so strong now, in fact, that I could slice my cook Mrs. Drinkwater’s Dundee cake with one hand and a dull knife. This was a considerable accomplishment, since Mrs. Drinkwater, when she wasn’t swilling the cooking sherry or passed out on the deal table in the kitchen, was capable of producing baked goods that a prison gang couldn’t break with pickaxes.

French pushed his mask on securely and raised the point of his foil at me. “Now, please assume the correct stance.”

Resignedly, I placed my feet at right angles to one another, bent my knees slightly, lifted my own foil in my right hand and put out the left arm to balance my sword arm.

“Excellent,” said French.

“Well, this part’s not so bloody difficult, is it? It’s all that other twaddle that’s confusing. And why can’t we speak English? I mean, why can’t you just say ‘put your feet together,’ instead of ‘
rassemblement
’?”

“Your accent is atrocious.”

“It’s odd, but I can’t recall having had the advantage of an education at Eton and Oxford.”

“Never mind,” French said soothingly. “Once you can execute a
redoublement
with speed and accuracy, I shall attempt to teach you how to pronounce the word correctly.”