The Hunger (28 page)

John could not get his breath. His chest heaved against her weight. A low crying sounded in his throat and he could not control it. He arched his body against the pressure to fulfill her every desire, even this last most vile demand. And then the dam burst.

“B . . . Barlow,” he stuttered. “Thomas Barlow.”

Asharti ran her fingers through his hair, chuckling. “Good little suckling. Address?”

“Sixteen Albemarle Street.”

He collapsed against the stones. Betrayed! He had betrayed Barlow, and thus England.

Asharti, in the darkness, kissed his shoulder. “There, there,” she murmured. “I know how much that cost you. Delightful.” He felt the scrape of teeth. They pierced the flesh of his shoulder, but he did not jerk away from the pain. He almost relished it. What did he not deserve in retribution for his treachery? This time she dragged a furrow across his shoulder and licked at the wound. That excited her again, and she began to move her hips once more over his cock. He grunted with effort as he heaved his hips up off the stone. This time she made no effort to control his ejaculation. He spent himself in her in some twisted mixture of induced desire and despair, even as she writhed above him in her own release.

His orgasm subsided. Her throaty laugh echoed against the stone, filling the cell. “There, did I not promise you a little reward for your cooperation?” She pulled herself up. “I so enjoyed myself,” she murmured, standing. “We will talk again soon.”

John could not be sure whether the whirling blackness was inside his head or outside, but all consciousness deserted him.

Beatrix stared across the water in the growing gloom. The sharp winds off the channel between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight pulled at the heavy curls of her hair where they were pinned on top of her head. It took the strands once coiled in careful disarray at her temples and made their escape from order real. She was wearing black tonight, the better to blend into the night. A Norwich shawl covered her shoulders and was thrown across her breast to keep its pale skin from gleaming, as well as to shield her from the night wind.

The water lapping at the transport dock was overlaid with the oily filth of a port. The clean and fecund smell of the sea mingled with tar and the rotting smell of all the things tossed overboard as ships’ excrement. Across the harbor, under scudding clouds, the deformed silhouettes of the dismasted hulks rocked in the swell, menacing and melancholy. Once they were proud fighting frigates or ships of the line. Now through age or injury their fighting days were done, and they spent their last days in shameful employ.

“Which one is
Vengeance!”
Beatrix asked the small boy at her side. His father served as a guard on one of the frigates, and he had been to many and many of them, so he said.

“That ’un, there.” The urchin pointed. It was the one anchored farthest away. “Don’t nobody want Frenchies escaping,” he explained. Four miles perhaps. Too far for translocation without a middle stop and she didn’t want the attention a woman drawing alongside in a boat would provoke. What were her options?

“Certainly not,” she said. He was perhaps eight or nine, dressed respectably in nankeen breeches and a flaxen shirt
with a bandana round his neck. He wasn’t clean, but then boys his age so seldom were. His mother would want him home for dinner soon. “Has anyone ever escaped from
Vengeance?”

“No one didn’t never escape until last month,” he confided. “The TO don’t want it about, even still.”

“That someone escaped?” Beatrix felt a strange thrill of excitement.

He nodded vigorously. “It were only that bugger Rose that let it happen, says m’father. He’s a disgrace on the TO.”

“The captain of the
Vengeance
?”

“Lootenant. Ain’t no more, though. Got picked up fer counterfeitin’. Run out ’o the service.” The boy nodded in agreement with the verdict for that bugger Rose.

Interesting. A prisoner escapes from
Vengeance
, its captain is taken up for counterfeiting shortly afterward, and two prisoners are paroled. “Tell me, young man,” she said, still staring out to sea, “since you are so familiar with all the workings of the Transport Office. Is it usual for prisoners from
Vengeance
to be paroled?”

“No, in course,” he said, marveling at her ignorance. “Parole is for officers. The Frenchies on
Vengeance
ain’t officers.”

Beatrix felt in her reticule and brought out a shilling. Any more would excite too much comment, though she felt like showering guineas over the boy. “Thank you, child. You’ve been most enlightening. Run along to your dinner.”

His retreating footsteps thunked hollowly on the worn timbers of the quay. She glanced after him. Lights were on in the town. Men still strode along the quayside road called the Hard, but the hivelike atmosphere of a port was subsiding for the night.

She picked out a ship halfway to
Vengeance
. Then she settled down to wait behind a heap of barrels where she
was shielded from the Hard, wondering whether she was only wasting her time, and if there was any other way to find John. Around midnight she reached out to her Companion and brought its power up along her veins. The whirling life engulfed her, bringing that familiar rush of vitality. Mentally, she grabbed at that energy, calling for more, then drawing it up around her like a cloak. The energy came shrieking up the scale until the moment she popped out of space in a wrenching, ecstatic moment of pain. She reappeared upon the deck of her chosen ship, rocking in the growing night.

Gaping shock registered on the faces of two uniformed men on the deck. One was self-possessed enough to call out. She waited only to master herself, then drew up the power of her Companion again. The sailors disappeared in the whirling black. The excruciating ecstasy came again and she was standing next to the quarterdeck on
Vengeance
as the spinning blackness melted away from her. She gasped for air as the pain receded. The deck was empty except for a guard pacing the forecastle and one the quarterdeck behind her, though boisterous laughter and a voice crying, “Polton, Polton there, the bottle stands by you,” sounded from the cabin. Countless voices murmured under her feet. The shabby ship was battened down for the night. Still she could smell the stench of unwashed men wafting up from below and the making tide had not yet washed away the effluvia from the heads at the forecastle.

Why had she come? John had been here. She was certain he escaped, the only one ever to manage that. What she wanted to know was
why
he had arranged to be manacled and imprisoned on this terrible hulk. Did it have something to do with the mission he was on at this moment? He had stayed only a day in London before he was off again. Would the officers know? She didn’t think so.
They were not in on his secret, or he would never have been punished so.

She looked down at her feet, knowing that five hundred prisoners, some perhaps murderous, all desirous of escape, were down there. Some of them must have known John, or St. Siens as he called himself. Maybe one of them knew why. She took a breath. She was stronger than they were. She could see in the total darkness down there in the holds. They wouldn’t know how to kill her. She could make sure they thought her presence just a dream. But she had to admit that going down into that teaming mass of angry and frustrated men gave her pause.

She smiled. When had anything last given her pause? Nothing since the battle of Agincourt. All those thousands of French knights coming down on them screaming . . . She remembered the release of hacking about yourself with a sword, dressed in chain mail like a man. She had distinguished herself that day with strength that was more than a man’s. How long had it been since she lost herself in a purpose? She wanted something now. She wanted to know the whereabouts of John Staunton.

The guards were turning and pacing toward her. Now or never. She brought the darkness up, and popped out of space, into the teeming darkness below.

She stumbled and fell to her knees, provoking several growls and a cry of “Watch yourself, you goddamn sodomite,” in French. She scrambled to her feet. The stench almost overwhelmed her. Unwashed bodies, vomit, urine, tar, and underneath all the slightly sweet smell of sickness and approaching death. She breathed through her mouth and pinched her nose with one hand. The prisoners slept on top of each other on the floor and hanging in hammocks like rows of some kind of chrysalis, swinging with the swell.

Beatrix mastered herself, leaning against the ladder,
and drew just enough of her Companion to shower compulsion on a figure she could see through darkness which would be absolute to one not of her kind. “Tell me about St. Siens,” she whispered.

“Don’t know him,” he moaned, cracking an eyelid. “Like to know you, though.”

She tried another. “Merchant,” he whispered.

So the night went. Toward dawn she was down in the orlop deck. Time was running out. She knew much about John’s stay here. Combing about among the sleepy prisoners and whispering her compelling questions to their dreams, she heard he took the blame for a friend’s act of defiance and paid with a flogging and time spent in someplace called the Hole. She heard about singing “La Marseillaise” and the fever that nearly killed him. No wonder he lost weight. She heard his plan to have a painter named Garneray engrave banknotes to set the prisoners up again when the lieutenant threw their belongings overboard. She felt the prisoners’ immense satisfaction when Rose was arrested right on board the ship for counterfeiting. They were sure John had arranged it. She did not doubt it. She heard of his escape, naked, in an empty provisions cask with a bribed boatman. Some thought the boatman had betrayed him, some that he had been thrown into freezing sea and drowned or that he had been picked up by the Transport Office, naked as he was. They were afraid to believe he had actually made it. At the same time they wanted him to know their current state; that the new captain did not allow the guards to take a cut of what the prisoners earned, that the Hole had been sealed up and floggings were banned, that things were better, however bad they might still be.

She realized he had given them hope, a sense that they could affect their destiny. She squirmed her way among the prisoners, beginning to stir then stopped. She woke one and whispered, “You heard from a guard that St. Siens
made it back to France. He escaped.” The sailor would embellish it and tell the others. It was a small enough gift.

She sighed. She must go. Though she knew much more of John, she had not found anyone who knew why he had imprisoned himself in this dreadful place, or where he was now. He would not have engineered an escape without completing his purpose, not if he was the man she was beginning to believe he was.

But what was his purpose? Had completing it sent him on another mission? Where? Another night of questioning seemed pointless. Where to turn? Wait. Many prisoners mentioned that the men who had been paroled, Garneray and Reynard, were John’s closest associates. Might they not know his purpose? And Younger had paroled them, and so knew where they might be found.

She needed a bath, and some sleep. Then it was time to visit Mr. Younger again.

Beatrix slid through the streets of Fareham in the darkness, dressed again in black. Down the High toward the east side of Portsmouth Bay, then left into a small court. Reynard had been paroled to live with an older couple whose neat house lay at the end of the tiny circle, according to Mr. Younger. In return for their promise not to try to escape or aid the enemy, officers were allowed to live among the populace until the end of the war or until they were exchanged. The small, whitewashed building with the flower boxes was quite a contrast with the hulks.

No lights offered from the house. She drew the darkness and reappeared just inside the red wooden door to the street. It was harder this time, the sixth time tonight. She was exhausted. Translocating took its toll. As the whirling black dissipated around her she saw that she was in a tiny front hall. She tiptoed up the creaky wooden stairs to the bedrooms above. The first door she opened
held a snoring man and a heavy woman in nightcaps. Beatrix closed the door quietly. The next door held an ancient crone, no doubt the mother of one of the couple. Finally, in a tiny room at the back of the house under the eaves, a man sat up in bed looking straight at her.

“Who are you?” he whispered. “What do you want?”

“A friend of St. Siens’,” she said and drew her Companion up. Best get this over quickly and be gone. She felt her eyes go red as she stepped forward. “I have questions.” She seated herself on the edge of the bed near the foot, out of his reach. Though his name was synonymous with the fox, he was a bear of a man. His nightshirt collar lay open, revealing a chest full of matted black hair. His eyes went vague in the darkness.

Now that she was here she hardly knew how to begin. “You knew St. Siens on the hulks?”

“Yes.” He whispered just as she did.

“Who was he?”

“A merchant and, I think, a spy for the emperor,” the big man said.

That was new. But if John was a spy, it wasn’t for Bonaparte. She tapped her finger to her lips. “Was there another reason he was there?”

Reynard frowned, thinking. “Not that I know of.”

Dead end. Perhaps this man knew nothing. Or perhaps she just wasn’t asking the right question. Should she start with the end? “Why did he need to escape so badly?”

“He had important information for the emperor’s cause.” The man talked in a monotone, as if reciting. “Dupré knew who it should be delivered to. Neither trusted the other enough to share their secrets. They agreed to escape, each with their piece of knowledge. But Dupré was sick. They had to escape before he got worse.”

Dupré? She had heard nothing about any Dupré in her questioning of prisoners last night. And only one prisoner escaped, according to the boy. “Did they make it?”

Reynard shook his head, sadly. “Dupré was killed by a guard.”

Here. It was here somewhere. “Then . . . then how could St. Siens deliver the information?”