Rogue Spy (17 page)

An ordinary man may keep a promise. A ruler—never.

A BALDONI SAYING

“So you won't tell us where she is.” Lily Leyland removed her gloves and, with them, much of the vagueness of her manner. She was still a frail old woman, swallowed by the chair she'd taken beside Galba's desk—Doyle's favorite chair—but she didn't look the least silly or dithery.

Galba centered the decoded note on the desk between them. “I do not, in strict fact, know where she is.”

“I don't suppose you're trying very hard to find out,” Lily said. “If you knew where she was, you'd have to bring her to Meeks Street.”

“Which you do not wish to do.” Violet blinked at him owlishly.

“It would present you with the most appalling dilemma.” Lily dropped her gloves in her lap.

“One we hoped would never arise,” Violet murmured.

Lily said, “When I retired—forgive me for oversimplifying in the interests of brevity—I did not expect bloody revolution in France.”

“And ten years of war,” Violet added.

“
Dis aliter visum.
The gods saw it otherwise. But we're all aware that if Cami appears at Meeks Street—”

“As an enemy spy,” Violet added quickly.

“—she becomes prey of Military Intelligence. And Military Intelligence is populated by nincompoops and swine.”

“Besides, she hasn't been spying.”

“He's well aware of that,” Lily said. “Aren't you, Anson?”

“Unfortunately, I am.” Galba sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “My life would be simpler if I were dealing with a straightforward enemy agent instead of your pet.”

“Pet or no, she's not a French agent. No, dearest,” she hurried on before Violet could speak, “Anson is well aware Cami isn't selling codes to the French.”

“She's not even French,” Violet said. “She's Italian. Tuscan.”

Lily shot a sharp glare at Galba. “Did you know?”

“I had no idea. But then, I only found out she's an impostor,” Galba glanced at the clock on the mantel above the small hearth, “thirteen hours ago.”

“When she came to us . . . when that unconvincing clergyman dropped her on our doorstep—”

“He brought her all the way from Folkestone, but hadn't bothered to wash the sand out of her hair,” Violet muttered. “Or wrap her warmly. He was the most callous man. That's someone I would have enjoyed shooting.”

“Yes, dear, but we had other concerns at the time. Cami was in a high fever by the time she came to us. Of course we knew she wasn't our niece—”

“No resemblance to Hyacinth.” Violet shook her head. “Nor to the Besançons. She was so miserably unwell and so terrified, poor child. So obviously a fraud.”

“We knew, then, finally and with certainty, that Hyacinth, Jules, the baby, and our niece Camille were dead. It was a great shock.”

“A sadness we've learned to accept. This woman the blackmailer writes of . . .”

“Is an impostor. Cami shouldn't spend a minute pursuing that chimera.” Lily nodded toward the bookcase. “I've refused your tea, Anson, but I wouldn't say no to a brandy.”

Galba took three small, plain glasses from the side table. He didn't pour from the decanter on the table, though. He reached up to the high shelf and brought down the bottle that had no label on it. They waited while he poured, then lifted glasses together and gave the first sip of brandy the silence it merited.

Violet spoke first. “We didn't take Cami in without considering the matter carefully.”

“We're not sentimental simpletons,” Lily said. “That first night, when her fever rose, she began to babble in Italian. It was revealing in every way.”

Violet took another delicate sip. “A lovely dialect. Pure Tuscan.”

Galba said, “That's when you should have sent for me.”

“To do what?” Lily snorted. “Drag the North Sea for the bodies of my sister and her family? Scour France for the fanatics who killed them? Should I have given you that little girl lying in a bedroom upstairs out of her head with fever? Do you imagine you would have gleaned the least scrap of useful intelligence from a ten-year-old?”

“Of course not.”

“You would have taken all that courage and brilliance and dropped it in some orphanage.” Lily rested the glass of brandy on the arm of her chair.

“I would have found her a place in a comfortable girls' school, somewhere very far from the centers of power. Cardiff comes to mind.”

“Which would have been a great waste of an excellent codebreaker,” Lily said.

“At that time she would have been a solvable problem.” Galba took a sip of brandy and sighed. “Now she is not. Lily, you can't take in French spies like stray kittens.”

“She is not a French spy. If anything, she's a British one. Here.” Lily leaned to tap the note that lay open on the dark wood of his desk. “She is reporting to the Head of Service. I've had charge of Cami since she was a child. I know how to select and train agents. Even cocky little lordlings who think they know everything.”

“For which this little lordling will be forever grateful.”
Galba held his glass between both palms and rolled it slowly. “Your Cami isn't some child the French picked off the street. She came to you a trained spy. She's a Caché.”

“We know that.” Lily tapped her glass impatiently. “As soon as the Caché business came out, we knew that was what Cami had to be.”

“It explained so much,” Violet said. “Iniquitous to use children that way. Truly evil.”

“There was an incident that convinced us she was not loyal to France. An unpleasant man showed up looking for Cami. The man the Police Secrète had put in charge of her.”

“A bumptious little man,” Violet said. “Watching the house. Interrogating the maid. Leaving notes under rocks.”

“We thought we'd have to deal with him. Fortunately, it turned out to be unnecessary.”

“Cami stabbed him,” Violet said. “Very quietly, by the hollyhocks in the back garden, during a thunderstorm.”

“Difficult for her to dispose of the body.”

“Raining, you see.”

“He looked heavy. We were tempted to go out and offer our help,” Lily said. “Fortunately, she'd arranged to have a wheelbarrow handy.”

“She put him in the millpond. With rocks and burlap bags and rope. Quite an efficient job for one so young. Though I never could bring myself to fancy fish from the millpond, after that.”

Galba closed his eyes. “I see.”

“What you should see, Anson, is that she's not a spy or a threat to England.” Violet's nose turned pink with indignation. “As if we would harbor traitors and spies under our roof.”

“The situation in France became confused shortly after that,” Lily said judiciously. “The execution of Robespierre and his followers, the suppression of several factions of the Police Secrète . . . we assumed Cami's connection with the French had been lost in the shuffle. No one else has ever shown an interest in her. Certainly Cami never approached the French.”

“She is our niece in everything but the small matter of blood,” Violet said.

Galba set his hands on the desk, making two temples of them. “Vi, much as I might like to hand her over to you and return to the status quo, you can't simply take her back to Brodemere in a handbasket. There are serious matters at stake. And a major complication.”

“Which is?” Lily raised eyebrows.

“She has attacked and seduced one of my agents.”

“Has she?” Lily said.

“It can't be much of an attack if he was in any state to be seduced afterward,” Violet observed.

Lily murmured, “It seems so unlike her.”

“The attacking or the seducing?” Violet asked.

“Neither.” Lily frowned. “But doing it to an agent. So odd of her to become involved with a Service agent while she's fleeing . . . whatever it is she's fleeing. One does not seduce agents in the middle of a desperate enterprise. l don't understand at all.” She turned to Galba. “Which agent? Not Hawker, surely. I would regret doing something violent to Hawker.”

Galba said, “Paxton.”

Lily exchanged glances with Violet.

“Matters are a bit more serious, then,” Lily said. “One expects someone more light-minded to be part of a seduction.”

“He's not at all what I expected,” Violet said. “So . . . self-contained. One sees the attraction, of course. The artistic temperament. There is that intense concentration.”

Violet discovered her glass was empty and held it out for a refill. Galba obliged. She said, “He seems a responsible young man.”

“He's an Independent Agent.” Lily pursed her lips.

“Which vouches for his usefulness.”

“He was polite when I talked to him about Moldavian. At length. That's a good sign.” Violet leaned back comfortably in the chair. “And, really, he has quite a nice body.”

Lily coughed. “That's hardly to the point.”

“That is exactly to the point, Lily.”

“When one is young, perhaps. You and I are no longer young.” She turned sharp, cynical blue eyes to Galba. “Tell us everything.”

Do not drink deeply at the table of your enemies.

A BALDONI SAYING

Pax knew London. Not as well as he knew Paris and Florence, but better than most men who'd lived here their whole lives. The carriage let them out on Carnet Street. He'd walked this street with Doyle and Hawker seven or eight years ago, Doyle talking about the history of the place, Hawker discussing the best way to break into the upper-story windows.

A few houses to the north, one of those windows opened, a small rug emerged, flapped vigorously, and retreated.

The big houses had been broken into flats when the fashionable moved farther west, to Mayfair. This was what he'd call half-shabby, a neighborhood where ambitious tradesmen climbing up the social ladder lived cheek by jowl with old gentility, slipping down. Bricks crumbled, the woodwork needed painting, but the front windows were almost painfully clean, glinting in the sun.

The Service had a file on the Baldoni that went back two hundred years. He'd be adding to that later today, if some boatmen didn't fish his body out of the Thames.

Cami let him help her out of the coach, holding on to his
shoulder longer than was necessary. She looked around and gave judgment. “They're playing the Struggling Emigrée, I think. Or the Prisoner's Wife. Something like that.”

“The Struggling Emigrée,” Bernardo said. “Your aunt Fortunata is a French widow from Nîmes with a small Rubens hanging upon her wall and no idea what it is. Fortunately, a wealthy baronet has offered to take the worthless picture off her hands, merely as a favor, from the great respect he has for her. He comes to tea and offers more money each visit.”

“The benevolence of mankind,” Cami murmured.

He pitied any baronet who wandered into this nest of Baldoni.

The Baldoni camped in London like a tribe of nomad raiders, taking short forays out to pillage. They were a family of long-established tradition. When north Italy hosted a shooting war, the Baldoni sent their hotheaded young men and women, their children and the old, out of range of gunfire. They scattered their next generation and their movable wealth as far as they could.

Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris . . . he'd run into Baldoni, always in inconspicuous corners, always lingering a whisper outside important events, profiting, knowing everything.

“The baronet is a connoisseur of art, you see, having made the Grand Tour.”

Bernardo Baldoni climbed the front steps and opened the door with a key. He led them along the central hall, dim and painted a dispirited green, down a flight of stairs, to a closed door at the bottom. It opened to a big kitchen, legacy of finer days when this had been somebody's mansion. This was a high-ceilinged space, well proportioned, with pale, whitewashed walls. The curtains hung in folds of five or six different whites depending on how the light came through. Polished pans hung, a line of copper, above the sideboard. Vermeer would have used this as a backdrop for jewel-colored clothing.

Cami hung back at the door for a moment, pressed against him.

There were four women inside the kitchen. Three at the table dealing with vegetables. One, dressed in black, leaning over the fire.

Bernardo said, “Look who I have brought home, at last.”

They were on their feet in an instant, staring, wondering. The oldest of the three, very old, very thin, took a step forward. “Sara?”

Bernardo pushed Cami forward. “Our Sara.”

“It cannot be.”

“How did you find her?”

“Little Sara? In England? After all this time? How could this happen?”

Baldoni closed in from every side and Cami was swept away from him in a tide of questions and exclamations.

She didn't seem to be in immediate danger from these family members. He stepped back, put his shoulders to the wall so nobody could get behind him, and watched.

They were babbling in Tuscan, the language of Florence and surroundings. He'd spent months in Tuscany so it was easy to follow.

The old woman, tiny, energetic, white haired, with a nose like a scythe, held Cami's face between her hands, looking, searching. “Truly, it is. I see Marcello in her. She has his eyes.”

“
Sia ringrazio il Cielo
. Thanks be to the saints.”

“Where have you been? Why didn't you write? One letter. If you had sent one letter . . .”

It should have been easy for him to step back and become nothing but eyes and ears to observe and evaluate. But this time he couldn't make himself detached. The cool shell he'd lived inside seemed to be permanently cracked. Cami had done that.

She was passed from woman to woman, embraced, kissed, and—yes—scolded. The matron with rolled-up sleeves and hands white with flour kept muttering, “England of all places. England! A Baldoni hiding in London. It is unnatural.”

“You should have come home. All these years.”

“We thought you were dead, along with Marcello and Giannetta.”

“
Ma abbiamo cercato dappertutto!
We looked everywhere. Everywhere! There is no corner of Paris we did not search.”

“Why didn't you come to us?”

The door slammed back. Two men strode in, alert, tense,
pistol in hand. Young men with Baldoni faces and cold Tuscan eyes. Florentine bravos, right out of the Renaissance.

Gun barrels came up, swung around. One to Cami. One to him.

He didn't twitch. Cami went just as still.

The men—barely men, men one step up from being boys—kept their attention tight on him, on Cami. Fingers ready, but not on the trigger. They were idiots to pull guns in a crowded room full of women and children, but they had either training or good instincts.

And they were just as wary of Cami as they were of him. Excellent instincts.

The old woman snapped, “
Attenti!
Be careful,
idioti
.”

“Aspetta!”
One man grabbed the other's arm.

Bernardo gestured impatiently and both guns were lowered, uncocked, and put away into deep pockets of the coats. The old woman—Aunt Fortunata—stalked over to cuff the young men and tell them they were fools. They would make Sara think they were outlaws, Bulgars, barbarians,
briganti
. They would frighten her away, tearing in here like madmen. It did not matter what they'd thought. They did not think at all.

Five or six conversations in rapid-fire Tuscan resumed as if nothing had happened. The pair hung their heads sheepishly and let themselves be poked in the waistcoat by a long skinny finger, soundly abused, and marched across to meet Cami.

A glimpse of the Baldoni at home. A year ago he'd led a gang of hotheaded boys just like these, from Lombardy and Piedmont and Tuscany, making raids on the French. He eased his fingers off the hilt of his knife but left his hand tucked casually into his jacket.

Baldoni arrived from the rest of the house, pushing past him with quick, sidelong, surreptitious inspections. A man of middle years, dressed like a well-to-do merchant. A woman carrying a baby. A younger man with ink-stained hands. Anywhere else, that would make him a clerk or accountant. Here, he was probably a forger. Two girls, thirteen or fourteen, dark-eyed and graceful as fawns. Scouting the fringes of the main
army, keeping behind a cover of skirts and chairs, were roving skirmishers, children not yet waist high. Uncle Uberto, Cousin Maria, Aunt Grazia, Cousin Amalia, another Cousin Maria—all indiscriminately related.

Cami folded in seamlessly among them, as if she'd always been there. As if she'd returned from a routine mission to cheat the good folk of Birmingham or Bristol and everyone was glad to see her back. As if they'd saved her a chair by the fire.

This was family. Unshakable bonds and unquestioning acceptance. He'd never had family, but he knew it when he saw it.

This was what she'd lost when the Tuteurs brought her to the Coach House and made a spy of her. She'd slept on the mat next to his in the long attic dormitory the Cachés shared. Most of them cried when they first came. Not Vérité. Night after night he'd seen her lying in the dark with her eyes open and her face empty, not crying at all.

Emotional reunions didn't change the fact they'd misplaced a nine-year-old girl. He wouldn't let them just reach out and snatch her back.

Bernardo Baldoni planned to do exactly that.

Cami was having the dramatis personae explained to her at length. “. . . the son of your cousin Catarina. She married an Albini, Geragio Albini, who was the great-grandson of Alrigo Baldoni, your great-grandfather's cousin. Catarina is also a cousin on your mother's side through the Targioni.”

Cami kept saying, “Yes,” and “I see,” looking dazed and pleased.

The noise rose, echoing off plaster walls and the stone floor. Uberto—called “uncle” by everyone, but apparently a distant cousin—retrieved wine bottles from a cabinet in the far corner. One of the Marias brought glasses. The pair of shy young girls shook out a white linen cloth together and pulled it across the table. A happy family scene. What made it ironic was that any of these laughing, gesticulating Baldoni might kill him, if they came up with a marginally sufficient reason. He was counting the women in that, right down to those two doe-eyed girls.

Nobody looked at him directly, which said exactly how much everybody was watching him.

“. . . your cousin Emilio's wife's niece, Maria-Angiola. The one from Pisa . . .”

The two men who'd come in carrying guns had transformed into smiling, charming, handsome dandies. “Is it really you? The Sara who was lost? I'm your cousin Antonio.”

“Antonio?” Cami blinked up at him. “Tonio? You used to chase me with frogs.”

“I was toughening you up, like a good Baldoni woman.”

That was a Baldoni to keep an eye on. “Cousin Tonio.” Dark, lean, no more than twenty. But older men detoured around him, deferred to him, watched him. He was important in this family.

He threw an arm across the shoulder of the man at his right. “This fool is my baby brother, Giomar. He was this tall—like this—the size of Nicolo over there—when you left. He won't remember you at all.”

“I remember her. When we had sweet rolls on Sundays she'd give me the raisins out of hers.”

“. . . Catarina's mother was Baldoni. That was Luisa, the daughter of Jacobino Baldoni, your great-great-uncle. Luisa ran off with a Frenchman, but her second marriage, after they dealt with the Frenchman, was to a Rossi.”

“. . . counterfeit ducats from the Grisons into France. Everybody knows how it's done. But, no, they decide to be clever . . .”

“A good wine. Very nice. I'll bring up another bottle.”

“She is the picture of Giannetta. The image of her.”

“. . . idiots decided they'd save money by not bribing the . . .”

“The mortadella from Prato. That one.”

The kitchen was lit with expressive faces, warmed with bright dresses, punctuated with the impact of ink black hair pulled into a knot at the nape of the neck, plaited in a long dark river of a braid, or tousled in curls. They all had the tawny gold skin of Filippino Lippi angels. The young ones even looked like angels. They must find that useful.

Cami was so unmistakably one of them. Her features, her
skin, her hair were Florentine as any Renaissance Medici.
I'm supposed to see faces. Why didn't I see that?

“. . . so I'm playing banker. Me!” Cousin Antonio threw his hands up, protesting, in the easy athletic gesture of a fighter. “A banker. I wear dull coats and pontificate on the pound sterling and the volatility of India bonds.”

Cami murmured something.

“. . . one of Old Paolo's schemes. We were going to abandon it, but there it sat, making money. Every year, more and more money. We can't give it up just because it's legitimate.”

The band of children seethed underfoot, aided by three—no, four—dogs. A baby howled. No one paused in the crowded dance of bodies going to and fro. They touched in passing, put an arm around a cousin—everybody seemed to be a cousin—handed the baby back and forth.

This was how Baldoni lived when they weren't playing roles, in this din, this confusion, this breathing in each other's breath. Nothing could be further from the cold expectations of the house he'd grown up in.

“I do this in my office”—Antonio made a motion of moving stacks of coin—“and suddenly money is in the Austrian branch. Then I charge as if I'd shipped gold in a pouch, with a fee and bribes for every border.”

“We will make
ribollita
from yesterday's soup and chicken
alla cacciatore
.”

“The real profit comes from changing currencies. When we buy and sell it's like coins falling down from the sky.” Antonio shook his head. “There has to be something wrong with that being legal.”

Bernardo Baldoni came across the room toward him, carrying a glass in each hand, and offered him one.