A Night Of Secret Surrender

‘Are you turned traitor, ma chérie?’ His greeting dripped with sarcasm. ‘After the Dubois fiasco it is being whispered that you are working for the English.’

‘That implies I might care more about the outcome than I do, Guy.’ She threw this back, this certain truth, for two could play at this game and she knew he had never been in it out of loyalty to France. They were both for hire, to anyone who might pay them well, and this was their strength as well as their weakness. When she saw him relax, her fingers slid away from the blade in her pocket and she breathed out.

She needed to know his intentions, needed to understand just what he might do next and, although it might have been wiser to run, a quieter voice inside ordered patience. Without his connection to the inner sanctums of the agencies, she would have been dead years ago. He had saved her so many times in those first, terrible eighteen months that she could not but be grateful. Napoleon’s Paris was not a city easy to exist in alone and a young woman of gentle birth like herself could not have made it through the first week if he had not been there.

She had learnt things. From him. She had learnt to survive and to flourish. She had risen from the ashes of shame to be reshaped into the flesh of the living, a knife in her hand and hatred in her heart. Guy had taught her how to hone it, how to use it, how to live with the vengeance tempered. She was a thousand different women now in every way that counted. The self that had barely been alive after her father’s death was gone. There were too many hurts to want to remember, too many ripped-away pieces that had stopped her being whole.

So when his hand came down across her own she did not pull away. There was good reason in the pretence of it, after all, even for the small time left to them. A front. A necessary deceit. A way to navigate the sticky path of espionage and not be dead.

‘You are too alone now, Brigitte. I no longer recognise anything about you, about who you were.’

Once, she had liked Guy Bernard, liked his passion and his energy for a better France, until she saw that there was no morality beneath his desires and until she understood other things as well.

He was dangerous and he drank too much. Before the first year of their marriage was over she had pulled away from the intimacy. They had continued with the charade of it all for another six months for the sake of the jobs they did. Together they were a formidable team and if Guy heard something that she had not, then he made certain she knew of it, and vice versa. The newly invented Mademoiselle Brigitte Guerin was a woman fashioned from smoke and mirrors, after all. Guy had lifted the identity card from a dead whore in the back streets of the Marais because the deceased girl was about the same age as she was and had enough of the same features—hair, eyes, height—to get away with sharing a casual description on the livret. Such a paper was enough to allow marriage, to be legal again, to have a history and thus a present and a future; a name change to weave a further ring of protection around the dubious centre of her truth. There was too little trust in Paris to be an outsider for long.

Brigitte Guerin filled the gap nicely and her father’s mistakes could not be traced back to it. Guy Bernard’s street savvy had afforded her protection and he’d never uttered her birth name again. But politics and the shifting tides of France’s fortune had drawn them apart, his anger becoming more and more pronounced and his moods so melancholy she had been able to stand it no longer.

Striking out on her own, she’d taken all the skills that her husband had taught her, skills that crept into her bones even as they made them hollow. He’d followed her for a time, trying to insist he’d change, but she had never allowed him the chance and so he had moved on as well—to other women, some no more than mere girls. She knew deep down that in any other life she’d have barely glanced at him.

‘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 and laid out, and Celeste saw that a boundary had been drawn around the arrondissement she had visited Shayborne in the night before. They were closing in. Unless he had taken notice of her warning they would catch him, for his circle of sympathetic agents in Paris could be nowhere near as numerous or as dedicated as those he was known to have fostered in Spain and Portugal.

The priests here might help him given their anger against the nationalisation of their churches, but she doubted the ordinary citizen would. Napoleon had been too clever in his promises of better living and raised working conditions. After having been left out of politics for so very long, the proletariat were clinging to the hope of betterment like limpets on a rock in a stormy sea.

Shayborne would be largely alone out there on the dangerous streets of the city, surviving by his wits and his ragtag bundle of allies. She breathed out slowly and turned to speak.

‘I have reliable sources here and here.’ Her finger touched the map. ‘It will not take long to find out if they know anything of the spy.’

‘He is still dressed as a soldier, we think. With all the military movements in the city, it would be a clever disguise.’

She frowned as this new jeopardy shimmered and Benet continued on.

‘I am guessing he would not be sporting the scarlet coat of the Eleventh Foot, but likely something more faded and subdued.’

‘The uniform of a land with sympathies to France and an axe to grind against the British, perhaps?’ Guy spoke and they all mulled this over.

‘A good point and a valid one.’ Benet signalled a man at a table to come over to join him. ‘Lambert. Find out how many of President Madison’s envoys are in Paris and what connections they have. It’s a highly sensitive area and we will have to be careful, but I want this information on my desk as soon as it comes to hand.’

A matter of hours only, then, Celeste thought. She wondered if any other intelligence services operating in Paris had made the same deductions as had been voiced here. Interrogation meant torture. If they caught Shayborne, he would suffer a nasty end which she would be powerless to prevent. As she chanced a glance at Guy Bernard, she could see a question in his eyes. She looked away.

Sometimes she hated these people with such a ferocity she thought she might simply expire from it. But at other times she felt a hint of an honour that she had long since lost sight of as she worked to protect yet another victim caught in the crossfire of changing politics. This duplicity was both her penance and her salvation.

* * *

She saw the funeral carriages as she walked home along the Seine by way of the flower markets and knew the procession to be for the Dubois family. They were leaving the city for Nantes and the rural graveyard where the slain members of the family would be interred.

The image of the dead children made her slow down and lean over, the straps of her empty bread basket falling to one side.

Un malheur ne vient jamais seul. Misfortune never arrives alone.

She thought of her sister, lost to the morbid sore throat by the age of ten, her lone white coffin in the cold family graveyard beside the south-facing wall at Langley. She thought of her mother’s madness and her father’s grief. Would it be the same here, under the warming summer breeze of France? Was there some other child who had escaped the murders to be worn into sadness by the ripples caused by betrayal, torn in half by regret and circumstance?

Alice. With her golden hair and sweetness. Biddable, pliant and even-tempered.

‘It should have been Celeste who was taken. It should have been her.’

She’d heard the words her mother had shouted in the silence of night following Alice’s death, heard them above her father’s muffled voice of reason. A tightness had formed about her heart that had been with her ever since.

Did she even still have a heart, she ruminated, or was it caught there in her chest among the thorns of fury, tangled in blood and bristles, stone replacing empathy?

Her hand went to her throat and found a pulse, too fast, too shallow and tripping into a battered rhythm.

She would save Shayborne and then leave Paris, reclaiming something of herself in the process because he was a good man, a moral man, a hero, and she had always been the exact opposite.

It was a direction, the first real truth she had had in years.

‘L’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions.’

She smiled. She would travel the path to Hell no matter what, but her intentions from now on would only be honourable. She swore it on the departed soul of her sister and on the name of the crucified Jesus.

She felt for the rosary in her pocket, the beads under her fingers providing a physical method of keeping count of the number of Hail Marys she said. She had recited the whole rosary numerous times under the guidance of her most religious parents until Mary Elizabeth Fournier had jumped from her grandmother’s rooftop one snowy January morning and fallen a hundred feet to her death. Her father had told Celeste of the unfortunate manner of her mother’s death in the evening of the day on which she had lost her virginity to Summerley Shayborne.

‘Faith can guide us only so far, Celeste. Eventually it is resilience that keeps us alive. Your mother converted to Catholicism for me, but I am not certain if she truly did believe in it.’ He’d had a brandy glass in one hand, an empty bottle in the other, and his eyes were swollen red. ‘Perhaps I should never have expected it.’

Resilience.

She swallowed back anger. Her father had missed the point as certainly as had her mother. Sometimes she wondered how little they both must have loved her to have lived life as they did, her mother mired in the troughs and peaks of hysteria or melancholy and her father beset by impossible political aspirations.

She’d been caught between them and had paid a heavy price for it, like a cue ball battered by the solids and stripes into whichever corner might possibly allow a triumph over the other. Well, no one had won the game and least of all her. Her father lay in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Paris and her mother in unconsecrated ground in Sussex. As far apart in death as they had been in life. She supposed that there at least was some sort of celestial justice in such a fact.

* * *

That evening she watched Shayborne’s rooms, watched the light at the window and the shadow on the curtains. He was not alone and she wondered who would visit him this late, a puzzlement that was answered a few minutes after as the door opened and a man dressed in the sombre clothes of a priest stepped out.

The Englishman watched him depart, though he did so carefully. It was only the tiniest twitch from the curtains above that gave him away, the candlelight behind blown out now to be replaced by darkness. She wondered if she should follow him, but as the man looked neither remarkable nor familiar she stayed hidden under the protection of a plane tree, the moon filtering little light through leaves on to the street.

Just as she was about to go she saw another figure, his shadow eating up the glow from a lamp above him and with a shock she knew it to be Guy Bernard. He did not hide or melt into the darkness as she did, but stood there like a threat.

An impasse, then, between the three of them. Guy could not know for certain that the English major was anywhere near, otherwise Celeste knew he would have acted brutally and without hesitation.

A suspicion, then. A rumour. The first of all the truths that would come. There were fifty apartments in this block and another hundred in the one opposite. People lived close here and it would protect him. It was why Shayborne had chosen it, she supposed, with its heaving, teeming population and its high percentages of itinerant tenants. Nobody would look twice at a newcomer here for they arrived in Paris all the time, especially those in uniform.

Laying her head back against the dappled trunk, she closed her eyes, her body melting into the shadows inseparable from the tree, and when the first light of dawn rose in the east she saw that she was alone.

* * *

Fifteen minutes after the bells of Saint Leu rang out the hour of seven, she followed Shayborne, far behind and away from his sight. She wanted to see who he met and where he went. She wanted to understand his purpose.

She had always shadowed people. It was a big part of her job and she was good at it. No one ever looked back and neither did he. Shayborne strode the city streets as if there was no doubt in his mind that he was safe. He did not act like a man on the run or one who sought the protection of invisibility. He stood so far out that he simply fitted in, a soldier returned from the ghastliness of war and wanting to exist here in the small peace of what was left. He had changed his uniform and she was glad of it, for he wore a dark blue jacket over the grey trousers now.

* * *

It was only later Celeste discovered that he had known she was there from the start. He’d left markers and doubled back and then under the canopy of the café, Les Trois Garçons, a hand snaked out and caught at her wrist, dragging her in. Behind striped canvas. Completely out of sight. In a pocket of warm air that held only the two of them.

She did not scream or fight. Her knife was close and her knee was ready, but she’d known it was him from the very first touch.

‘Your disguise is hard to fault, Mademoiselle Fournier.’

She smiled because to do anything else would be churlish and small.

‘But a bread vendor with the luxury of wasting time is noteworthy and the moon last night was bright.’

‘When did you know it was me?’

‘A minute after you gave me your warning in my rooms under your wig of whiteness. If you hadn’t wanted me to know you, you would not have come.’

She looked at him then directly. In the daylight, his golden eyes were still beautiful, but they were now every bit as distrustful as her own. No longer a boy but a man, hard, hewed by war and suffering.

‘There is not much time left for you in Paris, monsieur, for your friend the jeweller will have a visit before the morrow’s end and it will be much easier for them to find you after that. They already have the arrondissement your apartment is in under surveillance.’

‘Do you work for Savary or Clarke?’

‘A disappointing question, Major. Try again.’

‘You are a lone player trading off the secrets of war to the highest bidders.’

‘Warmer.’ She did not look away at all.

‘Then you play a dangerous game and one that will kill you in the end.’

‘And you think I would care?’

There was darkness in his glance. ‘Your father might?’

‘He is long dead.’

‘How?’

‘War carries many casualties.’ She did not like the waver in her tone so she coughed to hide it. But Shayborne had heard it, she could tell that he had.

‘Your father should not have brought you back to France in the first place.’

‘No?’

‘I told him it was suicide, but he did not listen. Europe was descending into chaos and there was no safe road for any traveller. A simpleton could have worked that out.’

‘We are French, Major, and our time in England was at an end. We came home.’ The hardness in her words covered over the anger.

* * *

‘Home to danger and tumult? Home to a rising political anarchy?’

Hell, Shay thought, could the English girl he had known been entirely lost under the cold French woman she’d become? The black scrawny wig of a baker boy shouldn’t suit her, but it did and her whole demeanour was more than convincing. Celeste Fournier had always been good at hiding who she was, even as a seventeen-year-old.

‘Perhaps such travel was as dangerous as your choice of work, Major? You broke a parole to General Marmont in Bayonne and nobody was pleased. Is the word given by a gentleman such a trifling thing, then?’

‘The French were going to hang me.’

‘In uniform?’ Disbelief lay in her query.

‘Not everyone adheres to the rules of warfare. Those soldiers who accompanied me across Spain might not have done the deed themselves, but on the border I was to be handed over to Savary’s thugs on Marmont’s orders. I had heard it said there were instructions to see that I did not live to cause another problem.’ He looked across the street. ‘That man over there reading the paper. Do you know him? I have seen him before.’