Into The Fire (37 page)

Patrice shakes his head. ‘Better than me. And he has resources we can only dream of. He pretty much knows everything that happens, to anyone, anywhere. The trick is to know the right questions to ask.’

‘Is that as scary as it sounds?’

‘Technically, we’re on the same side, and they should be keeping us fed with information so we can do our bit in the war against terrorism. So no, you don’t need to be scared. Unless Christelle wins control of the police, in which case you’d better get used to the view …’ His long fingers frame an oblong around his eyes.

She laughs. ‘Iraq?’

‘Probably safer than anywhere in Western Europe. Or the US. Or Canada. Or Australia. Norway might be OK, for a bit.’

He isn’t entirely joking. Picaut covers her face with her hands. ‘So Iain Holloway downloaded my father’s paper—’

‘Which said that if the record of her life had been accurately assessed, it would demonstrate that the Maid was a fully trained knight, but nobody in the fifteenth century could handle that, so they passed her off as a miracle.’ Patrice is watching her closely. ‘Do you think he was right?’

‘He was my father. I was listening to this before I could walk. So, yes, I think he was right. I can argue the details if you want, but that’s not the point. What matters is that it sounds as if Iain Holloway believed it. He came to France. He spent time at the basilica. And he died. The priest swore the Church didn’t light the fire, so—’

‘I’m not sure that narrows the field much. Who sent death threats to your dad?’

‘Troy Cordier. Or at least, one of his staff. They weren’t serious. Cordier might be a political shark, but he wouldn’t burn Orléans.’

‘Somebody is doing their best, though, and neither of us thinks it’s Cheb Yasine.’ He shuffles sideways until he is opposite her, the soles of his feet pressing lightly on hers. ‘And closer to home, somebody outed you to the press. Someone on the inside knew you’d gone there and told them.’

‘Ducat.’ She has already thought about this. ‘He hates the Bressards, and this is his way of usurping their agenda.’

‘He doesn’t hate them enough to damage you. He’s a fan.’

‘Ducat?’ She laughs. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Who else does he share his press conferences with? Ever?’

‘You’re not old enough to know what Ducat’s ever done.’

‘I’m old enough to have watched his archived newsreels.’

‘You watched Ducat’s newsreels? Patrice, when do you get time for that?’

He shrugs, not quite loosely. They are too close, suddenly, and there is too little air. Picaut stands. There’s nowhere to go but out into the hallway and that feels too exposed, too close to the baying press. She makes a circuit of the room. It takes no time, and doesn’t help.

Patrice crosses his legs, checks the texts on his phone. Only when she comes back does he look up.

‘You OK?’

‘Fine.’ She sits down. ‘If not Ducat, then who?’

Patrice says, ‘My first thought was Rollo, but he’s as desperate to get Yasine under wraps as Garonne is. So now I’m thinking it’s more likely Rémi.’

‘Rémi from Drugs?’

‘That very one.’

‘Because I’m pissing in his coffee?’

His nod is halfway to a shake. ‘He’s a vindictive fucker at the best of times and Garonne didn’t help, throwing all the Maid stuff back in his face. And now you’ve been to see Cheb Yasine, who is his personal territory.’ He leans back and laces his hands behind his head. The figure on his T-shirt
is
a woman. She stretches out now, across his ribs, endlessly reaching for an overhanging rock. ‘And Rémi doesn’t care about you the way Rollo and Garonne do.’

This is the second time he’s spoken of someone else’s care for her, or lack of it, and his gaze has a new quality to it. Or perhaps she is just seeing it differently.

Somewhere deep inside, a switch flips over and makes sense of the world, even as it wreaks havoc with her stability. Her breathing grows tight. Her palms flash hot and then cold. She fights a need to get up and walk out.

Patrice pulls a face. ‘Now you’re not OK.’

‘Patrice, how old are you?’

His brow twists. ‘Twenty-nine. You?’

‘Not quite old enough to be your mother. Not legally, anyway.’

Patrice shakes his head. ‘You were nine when I was born.’ And at her look, ‘Your date of birth’s on your wiki page.’

‘I have a
wiki page
?’ Her shock is real, and it shatters the moment. She wonders if it was meant to.

Patrice grins. ‘Do you think the Bressards would let you go without? They’ve got their PR people on it round the clock. I put up a test post at two thirty yesterday morning that said you didn’t want your husband to be mayor. It lasted seventeen seconds.’

‘Christ on a bike …’

She should laugh, but she can’t. It may be that she’s forgotten how. Patrice, too, is taking care with his breathing. His air of dry amusement is a mask he’s forgotten to change. Underneath run other things she does not want to name. Her throat is parched. Her heart is too big for the cage of her ribs.

The silence lasts too long. She has to break it. ‘Patrice …’

‘I know. You don’t have to say it.’ He doesn’t move, but in the fluid place they inhabit the essence of him is backing away. His face is closing.

‘No!’ She reaches out, lays her fingers on the back of his hand. ‘Don’t go.’ Just one finger stays in contact.

He says, ‘We don’t want to make your life more complicated.’

She manages one painful laugh. ‘Is that even possible?’

‘We could walk away.’

‘Certainly we should, yes.’

He isn’t laughing. Nor, now, is she. He says, ‘On the nights when you’re not home, do you stay with Éric?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Lucky guess. Is that also “complicated”?’

‘Not in the least.’ It is safe to let go of him now, and dangerous to stay. Picaut leans back. ‘It’s one of the few things that isn’t. He has a spare bed. I use it. Used it, past tense. I’m home again now.’

He looks vulnerable, which is not how she has known him. She has no idea how she must seem to him: ravaged, probably; tattered, overtired, worn. ‘Patrice …’

He is rummaging in his laptop carrier, tearing up a sheet of dark grey paper that isn’t paper, because he peels a paler film from the back and rises, wandering round the room as he speaks. ‘There are three CCTV cameras in the walls: one up … here; one behind you … here; and one behind where I was … here.’ He sticks his patches to the wall: three dark squares, two centimetres across. ‘So now they can’t see us, but a basic rule of thumb says it’s not the ones you can see that are the problem.’ A flicker of a smile. ‘I thought you should know.’

‘Right.’ They may be blind now, but she wouldn’t have known they were there. She believes him, though. She trusts him, which is rare enough to be remarkable. She stands up. She can taste the iron-electric closeness of him. ‘Do we care?’

‘I don’t if you don’t.’ He reaches out. She meets him, palm to palm, fingers interlocked. It matters that they are equal in this. It does not matter at all who may or may not be watching.

His hands are bigger than hers, and more careful. She is careless of his T-shirt, of his jeans, of her own, when he is too slow; of his skin, of his lips; she crushes them. Their teeth clash. She wants to bite, to taste blood, and has to rein herself in.

‘Don’t.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She draws back.

‘No.’ He pulls her back to him. ‘It’s fine. Let go.’ His searching hands have reached her breasts. She can barely hear through the rushing blood in her head. His fingers are mapping her, span by span. His breath is hers. His words streak down to coil and curdle and lay waste to her sanity. ‘Don’t stop. It’s fine. Really. Trust me. It’s fine.’

It’s fine.

It’s fi—

Her phone shrieks in the gap between their breaths.

She freezes.

He curses, using words she has never heard him use. She fumbles for the phone. The message is from Lise:

F
REEDOM IN
T
HREE

Patrice reads it over her shoulder. He is standing rigid, biting his lip. His teeth make a line of even prints in the flesh. ‘I did say it was the ones you couldn’t see that were the killers.’ He is breathless. He may be laughing. She thinks he isn’t.

‘Luc wouldn’t …’

But he would, and they both know it. Patrice takes a step back. She can feel his heat, scorching. She is the one swearing now, a long stream of quiet, potent invective. He does start to laugh, not quite in control.

She catches his hand. ‘Promise you won’t switch off on me?’

His gaze searches her face. ‘If you think I could, something is badly wrong.’

She shrugs. She is older. She would like to say she has been here before, but she can’t think when. She’s been close, though, and she knows the perfidy of human reaction. ‘Anything can happen.’

‘Good.’ He kisses her hand. ‘So that’s a deal.’

They head for the door, straightening clothes, hair, faces. Light footsteps approach the other side; Lise, not Luc; she can tell them apart. But that doesn’t mean Luc isn’t watching. She leans up and kisses him, full on the lips. ‘Fuck them all. By Sunday we’ll be free of this shit.’

‘
TELL ME ABOUT
the old king. What was he like?’ The king in heaven. The king who ordered you to help his son. He didn’t know that his son would turn against you? Or did he know, but not care? Kings are notoriously single-minded in their drive to power.

‘Kind. Always kind.’ They are riding side by side, the Maid and Brother Tomas, who is acknowledged now as her sole confessor, her physician, her companion as she rides south to assault the enemies of the king’s advisers.

Her devil-horse accepts him, after a fashion; he can ride at its withers almost without concern that it will snake its head round and rip his ear from his skull, or his fingers from his hand.

Few others can come this close unless they are armoured knights, and there are none of those in this cavalcade. This in itself is a testament to the king’s intent: he has sent neither arms for a long siege nor armour for a quick victory. Nevertheless, he has sent an army of sorts, and the Maid is riding as she did in the spring, in her white plate, with an axe in her left hand and a new blade in her right, gift of Yolande of Aragon. Things are not as they were, but they are close enough.

And here, under the squally sky, with the wind shredding the words half-formed, they can speak as they have not been able to since the wagon out of la Chapelle, without the risk that a servant lies in the roof space, listening, or a steward dallies behind a curtain.

He knows he is privileged. She may not trust him, but what harm can he do that is not already done? She thinks he has told Bedford and no amount of denying on his part will change this. But no arrest has come, no charge of heresy or treason, and she is relaxing, day by day, so that he can inch towards the question that haunts his nights and his days: Who are you? Whence do you come? Why did the King of France choose to teach you, above all the others: not his son, not his cousin’s children, not the sons of lords who clustered round him?

Why you?

Cautiously, then. ‘When did the king teach you to ride?’

‘When I was young. I was not one of the royal children. I did not have the tutors or the jewels, the fine foods and the silks. But I was not kept from the king’s company as they were. Did you know that he once asked Charles, who is now king, when he had last seen his mother? The answer was, three months before, and I would doubt if he had seen his father any more often.

‘Me, the king could see every day, if he chose, and he did. He took me on his horse and rode out into the country. I was a girl, and a bastard, and he was king; why should he not do with me as he pleased?’

A girl, and a bastard. So we have that much in common, our bastardy. She looks ahead, but she is not watching the ruts on the path, or the thorns that line it; her horse is taking her and she is letting it and she asks her questions of a ghost. If it answers, Tomas cannot hear it.

He feels on the edge of discovery, and is afraid that if he once pushes her in the wrong direction, he will find he has closed for ever a door that he should like open. This is a courtship of the mind. Never has his wooing been so delicate, or so slow.

Carefully, when she seems more present, he asks, ‘Do you remember it, the riding? He must have taught you well.’

‘No. I have tried to, but … no. Not the early days. Not the first time or even the second.’ She runs a hand along her mount’s flank. ‘Rouen,’ she says, slowly. ‘I remember Rouen. I was eight years old, and it was raining. It did not always rain in Rouen, but of all the times in my childhood, this was the last, and the one I remember: Rouen, rain and the end of innocence.’

‘The day of Agincourt?’

‘Yes.’ She is startled, a little. ‘How did you know?’

‘Claudine told me. You were fighting in the yard. You and Jean de Belleville, and the priest Huguet. Then Matthieu and Claudine came, and d’Alençon who was four years old. And then the angel came, the king’s daughter. And then the king himself.’

‘The angel? Claudine called her that?’ She smiles. ‘He took me to ride Poseidon, the best horse he had ever bred. This one’s grandfather.’ Once more, her gloved hand soothes the devil-horse. It lifts lighter on its feet. ‘I fell off so many times. I thought I had broken every bone in my body. I thought I would never walk again. But I learned that day what it was, really, to listen with my bones to the feet of the horse as it moved. I learned … and then the messenger came, and the king never knew that I had learned it.’

‘The messenger?’

‘From Agincourt.’

She is gone. If he speaks now, he will break something precious. He holds silent.

She says, ‘He had a cap on his head with a feather in it, which was the mark of a message from the Duc d’Orléans, who led our army. The king didn’t see him at first; he was watching me ride, laughing. Then he did, and all the laughter fell away. It was the first time I had seen him thus. We knew that a great battle had been fought for the honour of France, but for over an hour, I had forgotten. The king, of course, had not. He walked to the man as he might have done to his own execution.