The Spy's Reward (21 page)

His answer dismayed her, and it must have shown in her face, because he returned to his contemplation of the door handle. “There is no going on from that particular place on the map, is there?” he said in a low voice. “I burned the proverbial bridge instead of the real one.”

“I don't think Mrs. Hart is indifferent to you,” she said cautiously. “From what I saw last week.”

“Oh, she told me herself that she finds me attractive and engaging.” His eyes glittered. “Also that I am unscrupulous, immoral, and personally responsible for the death of every soldier whose commander makes use of the information I supply to the army.”

There was no use telling Meyer that a self-contained woman like Abigail Hart would never have said half of those things if she had not been afraid of her own feelings for the villain of her speech. He would not believe it, and in any case, it would not solve his problem.

“I do not have much in the way of advice to offer you,” she said. “I do think that if you try to court her openly, she will reject you. For one thing, she is very reserved. For another, you violated her trust, and pursuit will seem like a threat rather than a compliment.”

“You recommend patience, then.”

“Yes, you must let her come to you.”

He shook his head. “She will never do so.”

“Nathan,” she said, exasperated, “she already
did
do so. She accepted the book from Anthony, did she not? When she decided to return it, she came in person rather than sending it with a footman. And in the end she changed her mind and kept it! You can hardly expect more, at this stage. In time she will understand why you acted as you did.”

“No, I don't believe she will ever understand. Her principles are too rigid to accommodate a suitor of dubious virtue—spies falling decidedly on the dubious end of the scale.”

She said sharply, “Abigail Hart is hardly in a position to criticize the virtue of others.”

He stiffened. “What do you mean by that?”

So, he had not known. Eli had not known either. The Harts kept their family secrets very well guarded. The divorce had been obtained as quickly as possible, and Abigail had retired to live in seclusion with a companion. “Mrs. Hart comes by that title not once, but twice. She was married first to the older brother, Paul. When he died within a year or so of their wedding, she begged Aaron Hart to follow the ancient practice in the case of childless widows and offer her marriage.”

“But no one observes that practice any longer!” he said, startled. “Not for centuries! The brother always refuses to make the offer, and the widow goes through the ceremony of spitting on him, and both are free.”

“She went to her rabbi. She argued that Paul was a pious and wealthy man and deserved to have an heir. If she married Aaron, rather than someone else, our law would deem any son to be Paul's, and the boy could inherit. Somehow she persuaded him. I believe the Harts supported her request, and they are a powerful family.”

“And then her second husband died? Diana's father?” He clearly did not understand how this story supported her accusation. Levirate marriage was frowned upon, but if the rabbi gave permission it could hardly be called immoral. “No, I remember now. There was a divorce. But I cannot think Mrs. Hart was at fault there.”

“You may judge for yourself who was at fault,” she said. “Aaron Hart found her in their bedroom with another man.”

23

Anthony had been in Belgium for a week and had never been so bored, or so exhausted. The new troops were being drilled for hours every day, often under the amused eyes of loafing veterans. If you were bone-weary, it only made it worse to look up from your seventh attempt to form square and see a half dozen old soldiers sitting nearby, smoking pipes and making acerbic comments in voices just soft enough to pass for conversation rather than shouted insult. And on top of the drills, Anthony was serving as a messenger. His colonel had discovered that Anthony spoke German and sent him regularly to the German-speaking officers of the Duke of Brunswick with queries. He had even been dispatched with messages to the Prussians, who were fifteen miles away. After thirty miles on horseback Anthony was barely able to walk before finally collapsing onto his bedroll.

It was tiring, too, to feel constantly as though he did not belong. His fellow soldiers were suspicious of both his religion and his wealth. He had thought that the latter, at least, would not be all that noticeable, but the first time he put on his glasses, one of the corporals had peered at him and said incredulously, “Are those gold?” Which, of course, they were. The corporal had proceeded to empty out Anthony's entire kit, commenting on the luxurious nature of all the personal items, and ridiculing him in particular for bringing several books with him, which, as the corporal correctly pointed out, were adding at least five pounds to the weight he carried. The one thing that saved him from complete ostracism was the story of his journey through France. The other men in his battalion boasted of him to less-fortunate regiments. How many English soldiers could claim to have been a mere seven miles from Bonaparte when he had landed again in France? Or to have crossed the Alps ahead of his army?

When Anthony walked through the streets of Brussels, on the other hand, he suffered from the opposite problem. The city was full of English visitors. He had expected that some officers and diplomats would have their families with them; he had not expected that hundreds of wealthy aristocrats would have moved their entire households to Brussels for the summer. After six years of working in Italy and London, he had a fairly broad circle of acquaintances: clients from the bank, patrons of charities the Roth family supported. He learned quickly not to bother nodding to any of them if he spotted them in the Upper Town. Enlisted men were, like children, meant to be seen and not heard. Also like children, they were generally assumed to be nearly illiterate, and whenever he spoke German or French the reaction was astonishment or even irritation, as if some unwritten law had been violated.

It seemed likely that he had many more weeks of boredom and fatigue waiting for him. Napoleon was gathering troops on the northern border of France, but no one believed he would be ready to move before the middle of July. Anthony was not unhappy, however. He was beginning to understand that he had never truly ventured out on his own before. Growing up in London, he had been with his family constantly. He had been tutored at home, since the better schools did not accept Jewish pupils; subsequently, his father and his uncle Eli had supervised him at the bank. Even after the establishment of a branch in Italy had required Anthony to travel back and forth between London and Naples, he had always been accompanied by Battista, who was in essence a Catholic, male extension of Anthony's mother. When Anthony had sent the servant off ten days ago he had felt like a prisoner released from jail.

At the moment Anthony himself was playing servant. The Duchess of Richmond was giving a ball in her rented house near the Botanical Gardens, and Anthony's colonel, recollecting his talents as a translator, had suggested him for sentry duty: a glorified term for acting as an unpaid footman. He had now been standing at attention for three hours, watching a procession of officers in full-dress regimentals parade into the house. The music had started right after Anthony had taken up his post, but he was not sure how much dancing there would be. From what he had seen, there were ten men for every woman in the ballroom at the back of the house.

After several days of relentless drilling, it was quite pleasant to form one of the Duchess's human ornaments at the entrance to her ball. He entertained himself and his companions by guessing the nationalities of the guests before they were announced. Unlike his fellow sentries, he was hopelessly ignorant about the various uniforms; he could barely even remember, in his own regiment, which piece of braid on a jacket indicated which rank. But he astonished the others with his ability to identify the women by their clothing and hairstyle. He won several bets before his comrades realized that the odds were against them and stopped wagering. Unfortunately, once Wellington arrived, the flow of guests slowed to a trickle, and Anthony began to grow restless, wondering when he was due to be relieved.

The first hint that there was anything wrong came when a group of officers clattered up on horseback. They were not dressed for a ball. Two of them, in fact, were filthy, and their horses were stumbling with exhaustion.

“Is the Duke inside?” asked the lead rider, without dismounting.

“Yes, sir,” said the corporal in charge of the sentries.

The rider nodded to another man, who swung off his horse and handed the reins to Anthony.

“Sir! You can't go in like that!” protested the corporal belatedly as the grimy officer headed into the house. “You haven't an invitation!”

The man turned and held up a sweat-soaked packet of paper. “Urgent dispatches,” he said. “That's my invitation.” He vanished through the door.

“Why do you suppose they are here?” Anthony asked another sentry in a low voice, jerking his head at the riders. They still had not dismounted.

“God knows,” said his informant. “Could be the real thing, could be a false alarm. Before you lot came we had a message the French were going to steal around our right flank and cut off our supplies from Ostend; there was a right panic at that one.”

But the sentries closest to the street were breaking ranks and murmuring to each other, and one of the riders, overhearing Anthony's companion, leaned over and said quietly, “This is the real thing, all right. Boney crossed the border twelve hours ago. We'll be marching before dawn.”

The horse Anthony was holding sidled and backed a few paces. “Here, you!” said another mounted officer to Anthony. “Mind what you're about; he's trampling the Duchess's shrubbery.” Then he caught his breath and leaned forward in the saddle. “Anthony?” he asked incredulously.

It was Anthony's cousin James.

Anthony had known, as an abstract notion, that he might encounter his cousin. Their regiments were in the same division. But an abstract notion was one thing; James looming over him on his horse at the very moment he had learned that he was to fight tomorrow was something else. He was miserably aware that James was mounted and he was on foot, that James was an officer and he was a private, and that James had been in countless battles while he had never fired a shot at a living creature in his life.

“What are you doing here?” demanded his cousin.

“Sentry duty. Sir.”

“Don't ‘sir' me,” snapped James. He dismounted in one quick leap and handed both his horse and the one Anthony had been holding to another sentry. Then he hauled Anthony into the partially mauled shrubbery bed. “I thought you were going back to Italy,” he said.

“I changed my mind.”

His cousin raised one eyebrow. “From banker to infantryman. A dramatic transformation.”

“At least I kept my own name,” Anthony said coldly. “And my religion.”

That produced a scowl. “Does my father know about this?”

Anthony lost his temper. “What business is it of yours what I do or who knows of it?” he asked, nearly shouting. “In case you had forgotten, I'm two years older than you are and have double your shares in the bank! I don't care if you are a goddamned captain; I don't have to answer to you—or my uncle—for my actions. Now get out of my way; I'm on duty. You have no authority to relieve me.” Shoving past his cousin, he resumed his stance by the door, still shaking slightly with the force of his anger. When his unit was hastily dismissed and sent back to quarters to prepare to move south, he did not even look to see if James was still there.

Nothing could have endeared Anthony more to his fellow soldiers than that defiant confrontation. Their meek little banker had routed an officer—not just any officer, but a captain from their hated rivals in the 95th. The catcalls and cheerful congratulations enlivened the tedious business of packing and checking weapons and lining up for ammunition, and persisted as the company began to march south. Even Pack, the brigade's general, somehow got wind of the affair and came by to warn Anthony's lieutenant with mock solemnity that one of his men appeared to have a dangerous tendency to insubordination.

Only at the first halt did Anthony suddenly realize what was happening. He was on his way to battle.

 

 

For several days Meyer felt uncomfortable every time he saw his sister-in-law. He was unaccustomed to asking advice from anyone, at least on personal matters. On the few occasions when he had done so, it had been his daughter, Rachel, who had been his confidante. But Rachel was currently in Portsmouth waiting for her husband's regiment to return from Louisiana, and even if she had been nearby, he doubted whether he would have been willing to consult her about her potential stepmother. It had been a momentary impulse to confide in Louisa during the carriage ride, and more than once he wished the words unspoken. In his more rational moments he trusted her to keep his confidence from everyone except her husband, and he suspected that the sharp-eyed Eli would not be very surprised by what she reported. In his irrational moments, however, he pictured Louisa and Eli sharing the story with everyone in the family: the arrogant Nathan Meyer humbled at last, reduced to begging his sister-in-law for help with his wooing.

Since he had paid a high price in embarrassment for Louisa's advice, he was determined to follow it. He scrupulously avoided the neighborhood of Goodman's Fields. He no longer wandered into jewelers just in case he might see something tasteful set with emeralds. He had sent Rodrigo away in part because of his infuriatingly correct predictions; now he wrote to him in Amsterdam and recalled him from his trumped-up assignment. His servant believed Louisa to be the wisest woman in England; he would endorse her recommendation wholeheartedly and would stop Meyer from doing anything rash if his resolution faltered.

He resumed his work at the Tower. There was an uneasy truce between him and White. Both men were civil, but there was a tension there. Meyer knew the colonel well; it would be a long time before White would even consider apologizing. It might be simpler if Meyer did it first, but he delayed. If he apologized the next logical step would be to volunteer to go to Brussels. It was one thing to comply with Louisa's suggestion and wait for Abigail to soften towards him. It was another thing to be in Belgium if she finally did soften.

Late one Friday evening he was sitting in his study. For once he was at his desk instead of on the stool by the fireplace; he was reading the latest report sent by the bank couriers from Brussels. These usually arrived several days ahead of the official army reports and often included information omitted from the latter; this one, for example, reported that friction between Wellington and some of the other Allied commanders continued to create minor problems in the disposition of the forces. He felt a small twinge of guilt. Had he accepted White's assignment, he might have prevented the latest incident, which involved one of the Prussian generals.

When he heard a knock he assumed it was Eli. No one else would disturb him at this hour. He grunted a command to come in and when the door did not open he got up, exasperated, and opened it himself.

The Roths's night porter, a stout older man named Bullin, hovered uncertainly in the doorway. It must be later than Meyer had thought; Sweelinck usually stayed on duty until eleven or so. “Yes, what is it, Bullin?” he asked curtly.

“A lady to see you, Mr. Meyer,” said the porter. He looked very unhappy. Couriers arrived at the Roth house at all hours; ladies were another matter. “Says to beg your pardon, but it is very urgent.”

He knew at once who it was. At this hour, on the Sabbath, something terrible must have happened to bring her here.

“Where is she?” he demanded. Without waiting for the answer he was already headed towards the front of the house. He rounded the corner at a near-run and saw Abigail standing in the front hall, twisting her hands nervously in the folds of her pelisse. Her face was so pale he thought she was about to faint.

When she saw him, she gave a little cry, started forward, and then stopped. “Please forgive me,” she said. “I didn't know what to do—you said to ask you if I needed help—I don't know how to find her—”

He forgot all about Louisa's advice to be cautious, to take things slowly. In two strides he had caught her in his arms.