Beneath a Silent Moon (10 page)

"Look at this." Simon pointed to a dark red splotch at the top of one of the sheets that Charles had taken to be a blood spatter. Now he saw a matching spot at the bottom of the paper. A red wax seal, snapped in two when the papers were opened. He turned the page over and folded it, bringing the two halves of the seal back together, and held it to the light of the lamp. It appeared to be some sort of castle.

"Probably from a signet ring," Charles said. "But it's not a crest I've ever seen."

"The Elsinore League?" Simon asked.

"Very likely."

David stared down at the writing on the two papers. "It looks as though it's a good thing I still have my dictionaries of ancient Greek."

"The Greek's just an added flourish." Charles ran his finger over a line of text. "It's numbers, written out in word form in ancient Greek with a few extra letters thrown in to confuse matters. The trick is going to be turning the numbers into words. We'll need a pen and ink and rather a lot of paper."

To turn the two blood-spattered pages of ancient Greek into a sequence of numbers was time consuming but not difficult. Charles studied the results. "They've only used numbers between one and fifty, so this isn't some sort of
Grand Chiffre
, where we'd need multiple messages before we had a prayer of breaking it. Assuming the original message was written in English or French, the most commonly occurring number should translate to 'e.' Which looks to be forty-two. Mel?"

"Right." His wife had already drawn up a chair beside him and was sketching out the beginnings of a table.

It took a little over an hour—during which time Charles wondered more than once that the cipher was not more complex—to decode the two papers Francisco had given them. In the end, the plain text lay before them, in Mélanie's swift, slanted hand.

The first message read:

Remember the past is never dead, only temporarily buried. And I can resurrect it whenever I wish.

And the second, which had been written in a different hand:

We have no choice but to eliminate the evidence.

"The first sounds like a blackmail threat," Simon said. "And the second could be an order to kill the blackmailer."

"Francisco told us they had to be stopped before they killed again," Mélanie said. She was perched on the edge of the Pembroke table, her fingers smeared with ink. "The question is, what on earth is this past that the Elsinore League fear could be resurrected?"

Charles smoothed the edges of the papers. "We can only hope Francisco shared some of the secrets with Manon. In any case, we have to find her at Le Lion d'Or at seven and warn her. She's in danger herself."

"And you?" David asked.

"We weren't followed from Somerset Place, but if the assassin knows who we are, someone might be watching our house."

"I don't suppose there's a chance you'll let mere civilians help you," Simon said.

Charles and Mélanie exchanged glances. "As a matter of fact," Charles said, "we can't make our plan work without you."

The rhythm of French assailed Charles's ears as he and Mélanie stepped into the smoky, dimly lit interior of Le Lion d'Or. For a moment the swift, musical pattern of speech swept him back to their days in Paris. Mélanie's gaze darted about the crowd, but he felt her almost palpably relax, as though the sounds took her home.

He caught a phrase or two in Spanish, one in Viennese German, and finally an English-speaking voice, from a corpulent man at a table by the fire giving his order in a voice three times louder than necessary, as though that would make the waiter—who very likely spoke fluent English—understand better.

Even the smells were different. Coffee that was strong but not bitter. Creamy cheese. Meat and vegetables soaked in butter rather than lard.

The coffeehouse was crowded with an assortment of emigres. Actors and musicians who earned their keep at the nearby theaters, no doubt, writers and journalists scribbling in notebooks, and some men in leather aprons who were probably taking a quick break from the bustle of the market.

Fewer women were present, but there was a mix of actresses and shapely ankled opera dancers, flower sellers with baskets on the floor beside them, and some women who probably sold not flowers or fruit but their own bodies.

"Charles." Mélanie tugged at his sleeve and nodded toward the far corner, away from the light of the fire. Even in the shadows, the woman's hair gleamed guinea bright.

They started forward. When they were a half dozen steps away, Manon's head jerked up. For a moment she stared at them. Then she sprang to her feet, tipped over her chair, and bolted across the room.

She was fast, but Charles had glimpsed her intention in the flicker of her gaze. He sprang forward and caught her by the back of her cloak. "It's all right, Manon. We're here to help you."

"
Help
." She gave an incredulous laugh. With a wrench of torn wool, she pulled out of his grasp.

She didn't so much as look at the door. She made straight for the windows. Charles ran after her, skidded on the floorboards, and nearly fell.

Manon knocked over a bench, pushed aside a man reading a newspaper, and jumped atop a table to window height. Without hesitation, she hurled herself at the window, breaking the latch on the casement.

A cry went up from the coffeehouse, half amazement, half admiration. Charles was already atop the table. He shouldered through the broken casement and sprang down after Manon into the empty yard beyond.

Charles landed on the hard-packed ground with a thud. Manon was halfway across the yard, her faded blue skirts billowing about her. Charles ran after, dodging round barrels and slop buckets and piles of refuse. He was still a half dozen paces behind as he stumbled into Maiden Lane and then rounded the corner into Southampton Street.

A jumble of carts and barrows clogged the street. A donkey's bray split the air. Manon plunged into the throng of costers and apple women, flower girls and greengrocers. She veered right round a donkey barrow. Charles flung himself to the left, into a narrow gap between an excursion van and a whitewashed step piled high with rhubarb and broccoli. The move gained him a pace on his quarry.

"Thief!" Charles yelled in his best Harrovian accents, with a mental apology to Francisco's friend. He couldn't protect her if he couldn't stop her. "The woman in blue."

Heads turned. Hands reached out. A man in a green-stained apron caught Manon by the arm. Manon twisted, gold hair tumbling about her face, and delivered a jab to the aproned man's ribs. The aproned man staggered backward into the arms of a stout woman wearing a head basket.

Charles lunged at Manon. Manon hurled herself toward the nearest doorway and kicked over a stack of turnips. The turnips careered into a sack of potatoes. The potatoes struck a pile of cabbages. The whole mess of vegetables spilled over the cobblestones.

Manon dodged round a bricklayer's cart. The horse pulling the cart neighed and skidded to a halt as the torrent of produce rolled into its path. The cart swung sideways, blocking the road. Bricks thudded to the ground. Someone screamed. Someone else let loose a string of invective. Charles jumped over the stream of vegetables, dropped to the cobblestones, and rolled beneath the cart.

He scrambled up from the slimy, green-stained cobblestones and fought his way through the crowd to the square. Covent Garden Market spread before him in all its tumultuous glory. He sprang up into the back of a nearby donkey barrow, amid crates of apples and bunches of carrots, tossed a coin to the startled coster, and scanned the likely avenues.

His gaze honed in on the blue dress and bright hair against the basket-hung railings of St. Paul's. Manon must have paused for a moment to get her wind back. Charles sprang down from the cart and set off at a run, dodging, twisting, pushing through the crowd. Past the chirp of the bird catcher's stand, past the whir of a knife grinder, past the sweet violet scent of a flower seller.

Manon had seen him coming and was off again, along the west side of the square, toward the Piazza. Oranges and turnips sailed overhead. People shouted. Charles banged his knee into something hard and shouldered on, not stopping to look, to wonder, to apologize. Manon started up the steps of the Piazza, a dozen paces or so ahead, with a press of people between them.

A line of coffee stalls ran beneath the shelter of the Piazza. Manon made straight for the nearest one. A knot of people were clustered about the entrance, but she didn't waste precious seconds picking her way through them. She hurled herself at the makeshift cloth wall, ripping through the sheet and tipping over the wooden clotheshorses that supported it.

Charles lunged after her, through the broken wood and torn linen, into the wreckage of the stall. The floor was strewn with spilled coffee, soggy slices of brown bread, slimy pats of butter. The steaming air was thick with the scent of chicory and angry voices. A fist slammed into his head, accompanied by a curse in Irish Gaelic. He skidded on the slick floor and grabbed hold of the nearest support. It proved to be someone's arm; he didn't look to see whose. Manon was a half dozen feet away on the opposite side of the stall, half concealed by a man in a gray coat, her escape blocked by a deal table. A knife flashed in the man in gray's hand, aimed at Manon's ribs.

Charles hurled himself forward in a desperate attempt to reach Manon before the man could stick the knife in her back. As he moved, a stream of scalding coffee caught the man in gray in the back of the neck.

The man screamed. Manon twisted away. Charles glimpsed his wife, holding a coffee can. The man in gray plunged through the white sheet of the near wall. Charles skirted a broken chair and an overturned can and ran after him into the next stall. The would-be assassin knocked over a paper screen, tipped over a can of coffee, and fought his way through the angry customers, back toward the Piazza steps.

Charles ran out the back of the stall after his quarry. He dodged round one of the pillars of the Piazza, narrowly avoiding another blow to his head. He reached the steps in time to see the man in gray make a flying leap into the back of an apple cart in the square below.

Without hesitation Charles jumped after him. It was a wild jump, but he might have made it. Yet even as he sprang forward, he felt the sole of his boot, slick with butter, slip out from under him. He had a moment to realize he did not have enough distance and to curse himself for a bloody fool. Then he crashed into the steps.

Mélanie dropped the empty coffee can and caught Manon by both arms as she twisted away from the assassin. "Please. Trust us."

Manon's blue gaze raked Mélanie's face. She jerked against Mélanie's hold. Mélanie, used to holding squirming children, tightened her grip.

The assassin raced out of the stall in a blur of movement, Charles close on his heels.

"It's simple," Mélanie said. "That man wants to kill you. We want to help you."

Manon held Mélanie with her gaze for a moment, drew a breath, and nodded. She and Mélanie ran toward the Piazza steps in time to see the man in gray jump into an apple cart and Charles crash into the steps.