The Spy's Reward (15 page)

It was at this unfortunate moment that Meyer appeared in the doorway. His gaze sought her out at once, and she saw, with a queer pang, that he was wearing an expression she knew well. She had last seen that combination of exhaustion and guilt on the face of Paul's doctor the night her first husband had died. That initial sympathetic impulse might have prevailed; she might not have lost her composure so completely—if only he had not bowed.

“Mrs. Hart,” he said.

She was sick of gallantry. She was sick of lies. She was sick of being terrified and ignorant. She walked over to Meyer and slapped him across the face so hard that her hand stung. “You despicable, cowardly sneak!” she said contemptuously.

There were cries of horror from both of the Frenchmen, exclamations, calls for brandy and smelling salts and handkerchiefs, because, of course, she had collapsed, sobbing onto the nearest chair. Madame was overwrought. It was perfectly understandable. Madame should calm herself, all was well.

Madame calmed herself. But all was not well. They found, from heaven knows where, a carriage. She rode in lonely splendor back towards Corps, with an honor guard of three French soldiers. Meyer rode in front, to lead the way. At the top of the lane which led to the farmhouse, one of the soldiers helped her out. They escorted her, very solemnly, to the gate of the farmyard, and then huddled in low-voiced conversation with Meyer for a few minutes. She looked longingly at the house. Diana was in there. She wanted to see her daughter. It seemed incredible that everyone here had been asleep, while she had been bowed to and madamed by half of Napoleon's advance force.

Now the soldiers were leaving, and Meyer was leading his horse into the barn. There was a mule as well; she had not even noticed it before. His shoulders were set in a rigid line, as though he were holding himself straight by sheer force of will. He turned in the doorway. “I will sleep in the barn,” he said. “I am sure you would prefer that.”

She nodded.

Rodrigo came hurrying out with a lantern. When he saw her standing there he nearly dropped it. “You were not in the house?” he said, horrified. He turned to Meyer. “She was with you? Señor, are you mad?”

“Monsieur Doucet invited her to a soirée in Pont-Haut,” said Meyer. He was looking off into the distance. Whatever he saw did not seem to appeal to him. He grimaced and continued through the doorway.

The servant turned to her. “Did he blow up the bridge?”

“He soaked the powder,” she said. “I think that means the answer is no.”

“What it means,” he said, “is that the answer was going to be yes, but someone or something changed it to no.”

She suspected that someone was the elegant, charming Raoul Doucet. Perhaps he was only charming to ladies. And the something was her. No wonder they had all been so deferential in Pont-Haut.

16

After an hour Meyer gave up on sleeping. After another half hour he found that the contented snuffles and grunts of the animals in the barn were inspiring him with bitter reflections on the happiness he might have found as, say, an ox. So he got up, put on his coat, and went outside.

The sky had cleared, and it was much colder, the air so still that every tiny sound rang out sharply. There would be frost on the ground in the morning. He went over to the stone wall which separated the sheepfold from the rest of the fields behind the barn and sat down. After a few minutes his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and the stars overhead began to assemble themselves into familiar patterns. To the east, the jagged edges of the mountains were blocking off the bottom sections of late-rising constellations. Between the mountains and the stars and his conscience he was feeling very, very small.

When he heard footsteps heading towards the barn he assumed it was Rodrigo.

“Over here,” he called in Spanish.

The footsteps turned, shuffled in his direction. Those were not Rodrigo's footsteps.

“I cannot see very well,” she said hesitantly. She was a dark form, only barely distinguishable from the silent house behind her.

For the second time that night, he took out his tinderbox, lit his candle from it, and jammed it into a crack in a rock. He suspected that this interview was going to be almost as painful as the one the candle had witnessed under the bridge.

“Oh.” She came closer. “It is you. I thought perhaps it was your servant.”

He got up. “I will go back to the barn.”

“No, I came to find you. I need to speak with you.” She sat down, carefully pulling her cloak away from the candle.

“I cannot imagine why you would ever want to see me again, let alone speak to me.”

“Curiosity,” she said. “Frustration. There are so many unanswered questions. And I owe you an apology.”

He gave a short laugh. “If you owe me one, I owe you fifty. Unless you want to be here until dawn, I suggest we pass over the apologies and proceed to the questions.”

“I am apologizing not only for your sake, but for mine. I am ashamed that I struck you. I do not approve of violence.”

“Then you most assuredly will not approve of me.”

“What
are
you?” she burst out. “What were you doing at that bridge? Where do you go every night? Why do you lie to everyone? You are such an accomplished liar that last night you even persuaded me to do it for you! You let me tell my story of the smuggled gold and never said one word to contradict me! If your nephew had not accidentally revealed the true story, I would have gone on believing my own fabrication for years!”

So that was why she had been looking for him last night. She had wanted a second round of explanations.

“Have you no respect for the truth? Don't you trust anyone?”

“Trust does not pay in my line of work,” he said. “I am a spy. Your smuggling theory was not so far off. I smuggle information rather than gold, that is all. Occasionally I also sabotage enemy communications. Blow up bridges, for example.”

“And which side do you—spy for?” She said the word as though it was a disease. “Or are you for hire, like a mercenary soldier?”

His jaw tightened. “I take no pay for my work. And I report to Lord Wellington. Or, more precisely, to two colonels who supervise his intelligence officers. One based in London, one in the field.”

“Did they order you to blow up the bridge, then?”

That would be an easy way to excuse himself. She had approved of his violent ways, after all, when he was supposedly honoring a commitment from the bank. He could tell her he had pledged himself to Wellington's service, had tried to obey orders without revealing himself to his innocent traveling companions.

“No,” he said after a long pause. “It was my decision to try to stay with Napoleon's forces, even after I became responsible for you and your daughter and my nephew. I was angry at first that you had arrived to complicate my self-appointed mission. But I was perfectly ready to make use of you. I deliberately goaded you into choosing what I thought—correctly—would be Bonaparte's route. I rode out every night and sent off dispatches noting the enemy's position and troop strength, knowing that I was far less conspicuous with women in my party. I risked your lives, as well as mine, by attacking the bridge. I lied to you, to all of you—even to my nephew, even to Rodrigo. I cannot blame any of it on my colonel, or on Wellington. I can communicate with them, but they cannot reach me until I arrive in a large city.”

“The pigeons,” she said slowly. “You let your nephew tell that lie for you.”

“Well, I did let him use one of the birds,” he said. “There was a price.”

“And what was the price you paid for my convenient tale of smuggled gold?”

“I didn't kiss you,” he said in a low voice. “That was the price.”

“Yes, and that is another thing,” she said, outraged. “How can you suppose I would ever let you marry Diana when you looked at me in such a—a disrespectful fashion?”

He stood up and jerked her to her feet. “And how can
you
suppose that I want to marry your daughter?” He was suddenly furious. “Are you blind? Was your husband a stick? Can you not recognize desire when you see it? If I didn't kiss you last night, it was because I
do
respect you.” He seized her chin and tilted it up. “Look at me.” He stared down at her, holding her eyes with his own. The candle lit her from below and sent shadows racing up into the hood of her cloak. “Look at my face, and tell me I want to marry Diana. Look at my face and tell me I have some frivolous habit of kissing every female who sits next to me on a sofa after dinner.” He pushed off her hood, and her hair spilled out over her shoulders. “Don't you realize that every time you come out with one of those damned caps on I want to tear it off?”

She put her hand up and touched her bare head. Her mouth made a small
O
, as if the world had suddenly tilted slightly, and she was no longer sure which direction was up.

And somehow one moment he was telling himself that he should let her go, should step back, and the next moment he had pulled her straight up against his body and was kissing her so fiercely that he thought he might never breathe again. They were hot, scorching kisses; he was in a fever, he branded her mouth, her throat, her shoulder; he was desperate to take as much as he could in these few minutes. He had thought she would push him away, or at least stiffen. Instead, after the first stunned instant she yielded. Her body softened, sank towards him; her face tilted upward. He found himself sitting on the wall; she had tumbled down into his arms, and he was pulling her dress off her shoulder, sliding his hand down the side of her breast. She was not going to stop him, he realized, incredulous. He would have to find a small remnant of sanity somewhere all on his own.

Training yourself to be ruthless had its disadvantages. You could not tell yourself that you had no self-control. He drew back, breathing hard. She was still on his lap.

“Was that disrespectful enough for you?” he said harshly. “Have I thoroughly disqualified myself as a candidate for your daughter's hand? Or should I take you into the barn right now and continue?”

She gave a choked cry and pushed herself off his lap.

“Do you know why I didn't kiss you last night?” he said. “Because I knew that later, when you found out how I had tricked you, you would hate me. But after what happened in Pont-Haut, of course, I have nothing further to lose.”

With shaking hands she pushed her hair back under her hood. She sat for a moment, struggling to calm her breathing. “I suppose now you will tell me you want to marry me.”

“I would not insult you by pretending that I have any hopes in that direction at all. Depraved as I am, I draw the line at asking women to marry me when they find me morally repugnant. When they despise me and everything I stand for.”

She stood up, eyes flashing. “You expect me to protest, to say that of course I do not
despise
you. That is a very strong word, after all. But it is the right one. I do not dislike you. You are in fact a very attractive man; what just happened proves that I am not indifferent to you. But I find you unethical. Unscrupulous. It is all a game to you, isn't it? To all of you! General Cambronne, who admires you profoundly! Monsieur Doucet, the so-charming, so-elegant courtier, who bows to me while he is taking me hostage! You send off your reports, in some cipher, I am sure, attached to your pigeons. And then there is a battle, and thousands of people die, or have their legs shot off, or go deaf from cannon fire. You killed those men, as surely as if you shot them down with your own rifle! And then you go off and play more games, and congratulate yourself on how clever you are, and when you meet the other players, like Cambronne, you bow and smile and tell each other that it was ‘very well contrived' and your opponent is ‘a fine gentleman' and ‘we are civilized people.' I suppose I will be obliged to put up with your company until we reach Grenoble. If you have any sense of decency whatsoever, you will keep your hypocritical courtesies to yourself. I want no compliments from a man with so much blood on his hands.”

He had risen as well. He felt hollow. It
was
almost a game to him. He was no innocent—he knew what the reports he wrote would mean. He had made choices to save these ten people, and sacrifice those eight. He had blown up bridges with dozens of men on them. He had spiked guns so that they exploded in some youngster's face the next time they were fired.

He had told himself that in the long run, he was saving lives. That he hated killing and did it only when necessary and even then with extreme reluctance. That England was right and France was wrong. That he deserved to play God, because he was willing to risk his own life, over and over again. What he rarely admitted, even to himself, was that he enjoyed his work far more than any man with a conscience should. “Game” might be the wrong word—addiction would be closer—but she was right. It was not patriotism that motivated him.

He walked away from her and leaned against the wall. “Do you know how I became a spy?” he asked over his shoulder. “No, of course not. Until today you thought I was a very dedicated banker.”

He didn't wait for her to answer. “My wife died. We had married very young, so that even though she was barely thirty when she died, we had been together for over a dozen years. I had been working for the bank, as you know. I traveled frequently. I had a gift for languages; I already spoke German and English and Portuguese, I then acquired French and Italian and some Spanish as well. I only had to hear them spoken and I could reproduce the accents and phrases of the native speakers as though I had been living in the country for years. We were happy, or so I believed—Miriam with me and the children, I with her and my work. And then I came home one day from one of my business trips, and Miriam was ill, and within a week she was dead. Four months later, Spain invaded Portugal at Napoleon's instigation, and I quit the bank and went to work as an unofficial British intelligence courier in Portugal.

“My family was horrified. They were even more horrified when I took my two young children with me to Spain a few years later. They told everyone I had gone mad with grief, that I was courting death, hoping to join my wife. But do you know what had really happened?” He turned around.

She had moved quite close to him. She gave a tiny shake of her head.

No, she didn't know. No one knew. He had let his family tell this lie for him.

“I did grieve for my wife. I loved her. I missed her. But the reason I became a spy was not grief. It was fear. I watched a healthy, beautiful woman die of a fever in the space of six days, and I told myself it could happen to me. I did not want to die a banker. I loved traveling. I loved being in strange places, speaking new languages, seeing if I could fool people into thinking I was one of them. I loved the idea of pretending, and wearing disguises, and learning to move silently, and carrying knives in my boot. I was a banker who wanted to be a pirate, and the war gave me my chance. So you see, you are right to condemn me. I am a chess player. And the pieces on my board are armies and fleets and bands of partisans. They die, and somehow I survive. I survive, and I go on to the next match and play again. You said it yourself. I find danger attractive.”

“Perhaps I do, too,” she said in a low voice.

He remembered her face, alive and eager, as she took in the view of the mountains from the top of the Col Bayard. If he could go back, if he could take her aside there, with the mountains as his witnesses, and explain it all, would things have been different?

Probably not. Even the Alps could not excuse him to Abigail Hart. She had standards, and he did not meet them.

He straightened up. “Do you have any more questions?”

“No.” Then, “Wait. Yes. One more. General Cambronne said that he owed you a great debt. What did he mean?”

He shuddered. Orgon was not a pleasant memory. The screaming mob, seeded with hired cutthroats; the dazed former emperor, hustled away in disguise. “Last April, when Napoleon was on his way to Elba, I learned of a French royalist plot to assassinate him. I warned Cambronne and helped him get Napoleon away safely.”

“But—I don't understand. Why would you do that?”

He used her terms. “The rules of the game. He was under British protection. We were responsible for his safety. We had signed a treaty.”

“You were responsible for our safety,” she said. Her face was bleak. “Mine and Diana's. But I had not signed a treaty, had I?” She lifted her chin. “Good night, Mr. Meyer. Thank you for answering my questions.”