Viridian (The Hundred-Days Series Book 2) (12 page)

“Well,” Olivia offered, “no sense
dallying.” She stepped over the lip, crouched and began to pick her way down
the slope. It only took four or five steps and a growing avalanche of dirt and
stones before the inevitable happened, and she was swept along toward the
bottom. He caught momentum in her wake, ground giving faster. He ignored grit
filling the spaces beneath his fingernails, tearing his palms.

The landslide worked to their
advantage until they were perhaps eight or ten feet from the bottom. Heavy
rocks and packed detritus formed a sound base there, refusing to shift. Dragged
to a halt, they tangled in it. It gripped his legs, tumbling him first
sideways, then arse over crown. Olivia's splash spattered his face and then he
plunged into the water behind, filling his mouth and nose before he found his
feet. Its pungent, coppery stench choked him. His stomach turned and he would
have wretched then, if it weren't too bound by knots.

Steadying Olivia by a fistful of
her shift, Ty waited until her feet planted on the slippery bottom. “Still
doing all right?”

“Progressively worse each time,”
she gasped between coughs, spitting water from her mouth. “Perhaps you should
stop asking.”

Her hand in his, Ty dug boots into
a sticky clay embankment, towing her behind until they were atop a narrow dirt
road that wound along the stream's path.

“Here,” he peeled his coat off,
wringing water from the leaden wool. “Take it.”

Olivia's laugh was coarse with
irony. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

It wasn't the time or place. They
had witnessed a murder and nearly been burned alive, escaping death a
statistically improbable number of times in the past quarter of an hour. He
should have been focused on nothing but gratitude at being alive and mostly
intact. Instead, he noticed only Olivia's wet chemise plastered to every curve
of her body. He was staring, and he didn't give a damn. He drank in every inch
of a shape created to tempt a man's eye, draw his fingers, giving thanks that
he was alive to do it. The image would be burned into his mind for a long time
to come. He went on staring until she wrapped his coat around her shoulders.

In the silence stretching between
them, he realized she had stopped, coat halfway on and was watching him. At
first he thought she was waiting for something, or that she would chastise his
frankness. Her chin raised a fraction, coat forgotten, and Ty swore she was
letting
him look.

Then she shivered, flicking
droplets from her hem, and slipped into the sleeves. “We can't hire a cab,” she
glanced down, “And I've lost both shoes, so walking back to Philipe's is out of
the question.”

“We have this.” He reached out and
tugged his pistol from the dirt, seating it into his holster. “It will get us
as far as the safe house, should we run into trouble.” They very well might,
depending on the proximity and thoroughness of Elena Breunig's killer, not to
mention an array of cutpurses frequenting dark streets.

Rubbing water and leaves from her
face, Olivia groaned. “Nights like this make me question why I don't just pack
my trunk and sail back to England.”

Draping an arm around her
shoulders, Ty guided them haltingly along the pitted roadway. “You don't have
the heart to leave me here all alone.” Underneath the jest, he hoped his words
held at least a grain of truth.

“No,” she sighed, wrapping a warm
arm across his back, “I don't suppose I do.”

*           *          *

“Ow! Dammit.”

“Wait until it cools off!” He could
see a wisp of steam from Olivia's kettle trailing up above the screen shielding
her from view. He could see it all the way from the
bed
. “Cauterization
is a method of last resort, medically speaking.”

Ty was certain he'd been as eager
as Olivia to get clean. He'd also been more patient about it.

The screen jarred, rocking on a
bamboo frame. It nearly tipped, and there was a clatter. Something metal, maybe
a bowl. “I'm trying to wash the silt and ash and... whatever
this
is off
of my body. I'd prefer not to do it with lukewarm water.”

Leaving her be, he scooted farther
up the headrest, rotating the broken spectacles between his palms while doing
his damnedest to ignore everything that was happening behind the screen.
Splashing, scrubbing. After their exchange along the canal, he would quickly
lose his wits without a distraction.

He certainly had one. Facing the frames
toward him, he pinched each bent earpiece tightly. The glasses held an answer,
a clue; they practically hummed with it. Ty felt certain that he could perceive
what it might be, with enough concentration.

Olivia stepped out at last, clad in
a disappointingly shapeless white dressing gown. Toweling damp curls with a
bath sheet, she raised her chin at the spectacles. “Any ideas?”

He exhaled his frustration. “No,
not yet. But I feel as though I've seen them before.” He turned them over one
last time before stowing them in the bedside table drawer. “I have no idea
where.”

Tucking up on the bed, her back
half facing him, Olivia sat quiet a moment. “I've been mulling something over,
something that's bothered me all night.”

“What's that?”

Slender fingers went to her throat.
“She was hung.
Hung
.”

Gruesome, but Ty wasn't certain he
grasped her point.

Olivia glanced at him over her
shoulder. “Who gets hung?” She waved a finger between them.

“Spies?”

“
Traitors
,” she corrected.

It hadn't occurred to him. That
Elena Breunig died as a result of her profession was never in question. He'd
been too focused on the spectacles to consider any deeper meaning, but Olivia's
suspicion made sense. Whoever had come in behind her, he hadn't simply stabbed
or strangled her. Hanging Elena was an act that would likely never be
discovered owing to the blaze, and that seemed symbolic. Not ordinarily a man
for coincidences, Ty considered the spectacles again and was silent.

He watched Olivia, toweling her
hair. A spreading stain over her left shoulder blade caught his attention.
“Have you taken stock of your wounds?”

She craned her head, trying for a
glimpse of whatever he'd seen. “No, why?”

“Here,” He scooted behind her,
cradling her hips inside his thighs, and unlaced the back of her dress. He
worked quickly, willing it to feel like a chore and failing. She sat quietly,
accepting his attentions without protest.

Folding out both halves of the
bodice, Ty exposed her shoulders. Cuts laced her flesh in every direction from
her neck to the smooth plain between her shoulder blades.

A jagged tear nearly as long as his
pinkie finger bit across tender flesh above her armpit. Claiming the towel from
her hand, he pressed it to the cut, catching blood pooling at its edge.

“How bad is it?” She was asking if
it needed stitches.

“Nothing that won't heal on its
own,” he promised, hopeful but not certain what he said was true.

“Any others?”

He swallowed. “Shall I check?”
No.
Say no.
It had been a long night and, like his nerves, his will was
fraying.

Olivia nodded, reaching back and
gathering hair out of his way. Her neck was long, graceful, its gentle curve
teasing his fingers. French milled soap caught his nose; the floral, expensive
sort.

He tugged two more loops into her
laces, then stopped himself. It was obvious where her wounds ended. He couldn't
in good conscience undress her further. What was it about Olivia that made him
forget himself? He had discipline in spades until their fingers touched, until
he caught her eyes on him across a room. Matters weren't helped by her being
witty and whip-smart, sweet and a touch mercenary.

It was just the work forcing them
together, to rely on each other. That was all. They'd started out on intimate
footing, and nights like tonight...

He leaned in, pressing his forehead
to Olivia's damp shoulder. She inhaled sharply and relaxed beneath his weight.

“You have to be careful, Olivia. So
very careful. Whoever he is, he's bold. Cunning.” The man who'd killed Elena
Breunig had known what she was, had punished her for it. He might discover the
truth about Olivia, too.

Olivia reached back and grasped his
sleeve. “I'm not frightened. My Fox is cunning, too.”

CHAPTER NINE

Olivia pressed her back against the
damp stone arch at the mouth of the alley, ignoring the rotten layer cake
making up so much of the city. Painted wooden shop fronts topped with dirty
plaster two and three floors overhead, windows peering down like sad eyes,
bearing witness to so much suffering. None of them were the same size, even on
the same building. Balconies, pediments, and even the width of the cobblestone
lanes meandered without intent, patched together since medieval times and
struggling, like its residents, to keep up.

A gutter split the roadway in two,
bearing a trickle of stinking filth as it had over the last four hundred years.
She took a deep breath through her mouth and tried not to smell it. The odor
was bad enough, but the idea was worse. It had been a vessel for terror, for
suffering. A commoner, even in death, could not escape his king; his blood ran
to the sewer mingled with the blood of nobles, aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie
alike.

The blood of my parents
.

Slipping a little farther down the
wall, Olivia closed her eyes, tipping back her head, and pushed away the
memory. She hadn't seen it happen. From inside the prison hall, she had only
heard it. Her father, throwing off his guards, dashing behind like a madman as
her beautiful mother, brown locks hacked into tufts, linen gown dark with
filth, was dragged from the room. Joseph Fouche had waved his gendarmes back,
letting her father pass outside. How absolutely naive she had been, believing
Fouche was allowing Jules to save her mother, and for believing that he
could
.

From outside, his shouts had been
the clearest, telling the crowd to do what they must to him, and that surely
they would not harm a lady. An empty bluff that had been proved wrong a
thousand times since the Reign of Terror.

Fouche had gone on scrawling
something in his wide, black canvas ledger, Death balancing his accounts
without so much as a twitch to show he was aware of the exchange on the street.
Mother's begging grew more desperate and sounded above the crowd, then her
screams. Those sounds were quickly swallowed by a more hateful noise:
cheering
. An enthusiastic roar from the mob, signaling some of their blood
lust had been sated. There were more screams; her mother was still alive as her
lover was beaten, impaled. Reliving it over a decade, it was hard to tell
anymore what was true and what she'd imagined. She'd been told later that her
mother hadn't outlived her father by much. There was a kind of small mercy in
it, if the rumor was true.

Drawing another breath to push down
bloodstained memories, Olivia stood away from the wall, not wanting to touch
any part of the hateful city.

Adjusting the curls of her red wig,
she looked for a distraction, smoothing the mauve silk of her expensive but
out-of-fashion gown. She needed to be ready when he arrived. Poking two fingers
into her reticule, she checked the face of Ty's borrowed watch. Two minutes to
noon; it was nearly time.

She caught sight of a gentleman at
the far end of the alley, five streets down. He wore a polished beaver top hat,
wide shoulders testing the lapels of his dove gray coat. His walking stick
stabbed the cobblestones, driving forward and back in spite of his easy,
graceful gait. She often watched Ty, but she rarely
looked
at him. They
studied one another constantly; expression, body language, discrete signals.
Probably not since their first or second encounter had she
stopped
to
really take him in. And why not? She was at a loss to answer her own question.
Looking at Ty was a pleasure for the eyes, as much as touching him was for lips
or fingers. It was a rare thing, a man who required her to look up in order to
meet his eyes. His blue eyes were an innocent, deceptive shade. His long arms
and legs made him agile, while riding and boxing filled him out. Ty was
imposing, but with an athletic grace.
Looking
at him was definitely a
pleasure; absently, she vowed to do it more often.

A spy was required to be proficient
at all sorts of things, but every agent had their hallmark, a signature. Ty's
was an ability to charm even a marble statue. She hated to admit that it
frequently worked on her as well as any mark. He had a way of making her feel
as though they were the only two people in the world, and she was the most
important half. Always toeing the line, pushing a boundary, softening his
offenses with a smile that hypnotized her into forgiveness, even approval. All
the while with a look in his eyes that practically had her begging for more.
Now and then he left her wondering where danger truly lay: with their enemies,
or each other.

The recovery of Talleyrand's
letters had been tabled for nearly a week while they'd sorted through events at
the mansion, ear to the ground for clues as well as danger. Once they were in
agreement with Philipe that they hadn't been discovered, it was back to
business as usual. Not that fleecing Talleyrand would be simple. He was shrewd
by nature and cautious by necessity, thanks to Fouche's constant threats. His
primary and unflagging weakness was being a hedonist. Good food, expensive
wine, fine suits, and women in endless supply. She and Ty had conspired to
supply him just such a temptation.

They couldn't arrive at the corner
together. Some might call it paranoia, but she preferred 'practicality,’ If by
any chance the thousand-eyed beast of Paris' intelligence ministry were
watching, that would be a novice mistake. And so they had taken turns for days,
setting Ty's watch by the cathedral bells. They’d observed foot traffic at
mid-day, noting how punctual their mark was. After that, it was simply a matter
of arranging a meeting.

Ty stormed at her now, dodging
rickety wheelbarrows and heaps of debris shrouded in tarps, shouldering past
the common folk. She nearly applauded. An actor could not have done so well,
haughty lift of his nose and an inconvenienced stomp to his stride. He was
every bit the aristocratic, wearied lover.

Between the crowd's murmur and her
wide bonnet, there was no catching ambient sounds from the lane behind her. Ty
lifted the walking stick, tapping it forward twice, signaling that their target
approached from the opposite direction.

Stopping in front of her, close
enough to look intimate but far enough to be overheard, Ty tucked the stick
under his arm. Passersby parted like a stream of water, flowing past them on
each side.

“Why did you ask me here?”

She was impressed; his French was flawless.
Pressing both hands to her belly, she cast glances around them. “I'm with
child.”

The information snapped curious
heads their way, slowing a few pairs of feet.

Disgust twisted Ty's handsome
features. “Are you certain?”

She nodded slowly. “Entirely
certain.”

“Is it
mine
?” His voice
raised on the last word, his sneer convincing enough that a hand itched to slap
him before she checked the impulse.

“Of course it's yours!” she
shouted, closing the small distance between them.

Ty smirked, raking eyes over her
from the ground up. “So it's mine. What do expect me to do about it?”

“To help! I need money. My aunt is
in Lyons.” She tightened her throat, drew out the words to hint at threatening
tears.

“Money! You do this, and now you
want
money
?” He shouted the last word in her face as Talleyrand passed.
Their mark had arrived.

Ty's walking stick struck beside
her head a second later, pinging sharply off of the stones. Flinching, she
jerked her face away.

He raised it again. “I ought to
beat the insolence from you, along with that bastard seed!”

She held her breath. Now was the
moment of truth.

A hand grabbed the shaft from
behind, jerking it and spinning Ty, who offered no resistance.

She exhaled.

“Monsieur. It sounds as though the
lady has had too much of your attention already.” Talleyrand gave the stick a
sharp yank, pulling it from Ty's grip. His wide mouth turned down more than
usual, exaggerated by the upturn of his prominent nose. With a free hand he
removed his boat shaped hat, revealing a frizzed shock of silvery hair. He came
forward two or three steps, hobbling on his club foot.

Ty adopted a boorish pose, loosely
crossing his arms and smirking. “Why should I heed anything
you
have to
say?”

Talleyrand's smile was demure, and
he ducked his head. “Oh, there is perhaps not much to intimidate a man such as
you. Not physically.” He raised his eyes again, and the smile faded, mouth
stretched to a flinty line. Born, she guessed, from a lifetime of suffering for
his defect. “I do not need to strike and hit, as you do. I do not fear your
blows.” He threw the stick back to Ty for emphasis. “Obviously you are too
ignorant, and do not appreciate to whom you speak. I will enlighten you: my
right arm is the gendarmes; my left, the courts. You would be wise to leave me,
and the lady, in peace.”

Talleyrand was no hero. Olivia was
not converted to believing it, not for minute. He and the emperor had been a
dangerous pair long ago, enough to leave a stain on the statesman's hands that
was not easily washed away. He was, however, playing along beautifully to their
tune.

Ty snapped his hat farther onto his
head, sniffing. “Nothing could be more agreeable than leaving you
both
where you stand.” He strode past without another look, east down the alley,
dissolving into the crowd.

Fumbling with the tail of her
shawl, Olivia dabbed at both eyes, watching him go and letting her target make
the next move.

Replacing his hat, Talleyrand made
a small bow. “Madam.” With effort he shuffled out an about-face, starting
slowly back down the lane on his original path. He carried some weight and
boasted a lame foot, but she'd observed him enough times to catch his
artificial delay.

“Monsieur! Monsieur, please,” she
pleaded, extending an arm after him.

Talleyrand turned back, face
expectant just as she'd predicted.

“You've been so kind already that
I'm ashamed to ask more. My father has left me nothing now that I am...” She
glanced at her belly, hanging her head a little more. “My aunt in Lyons is a
widow of no small fortune.” Glancing up, she batted her eyes, sniffing. “I
could repay you ten-fold, if you helped me reach her.”

He was breathing faster, tottering
closer as she spoke. Talleyrand's appetite for women was rarely sated. He was a
tempered politician of the empire, but he indulged lust equal to any of the old
monarchy. Swallowing twice, he looked her over. “A lovely creature. How can I
say no?” Closer now, Olivia caught the scent of snuff and liniment wafting from
him. “You will not even have to repay the money.”

Smiling for all she was worth, she
clasped his hands against her breasts, kissing twisted knuckles. “You are a
good man. A kind man.”

He pulled one hand free, poking up
a finger. “But I must be assured of getting...” He glanced to his fingers still
resting at her breasts, “something for my trouble, no?”

Drawing back, Olivia lost her smile,
adding a tremble to her voice. “Of course. I could not ask so much and not
offer...something.” She looked to her feet, feigning shame.

He was nodding, faster and faster,
glancing past her to the narrow corridor between two buildings. “We can settle our
debt now, my dove.” He patted the left side of his trousers.

She caught the jingle of francs
and
the crease of papers.
Perfect
. “But...where can we go for
privacy?”

Talleyrand swept his hand toward
the alley. “This will do. We need only a little time.”

A little time for him to rut
like a pig. Disgusting.

“No!” She shook her head, rocking
back a half step. “No, I couldn't!”

“Shh! Shh.” He brushed her arm with
urgent strokes, pressed her fingers with his. “You could, of course you could.
There is no shame, if we choose to enjoy each other there.”

“We should wait,” she countered,
enjoying the frustration creasing his face. “You can get us a room. And
champagne!” She clapped her hands.

Talleyrand smiled, a knowing crook
to his lips. “Your gown is out of fashion. The dye in your hair is a little...
outré
,
yes?” His smile widened, and he shook his head. “Private rooms and champagne?
We both know you are not that sort of dove.”

“Fine.” She crossed her arms,
looking sour and letting him believe he'd caught her. “I need the coin. Let's
be done with this.”

He scampered behind her into the
alley. It was dim and no breeze swept the narrow passage. Wet plaster and damp
cobblestones held onto the sewer's stink, and dank moss held tenaciously to the
stone walls. Olivia offered up sympathy for the women who spent their lives
forced to do what she was only pretending.

When she turned back, Talleyrand
was already fumbling at his trousers. “I'm quite ready. Raise your skirts for
me, quick now.”

“Wait. Let me help you.” Getting
the papers
out
would be easy. Grabbing a fistful of his waistband on
each side, Olivia bunched the fabric slowly, poking up the hidden pouch's
contents just as she and Ty had practiced. The tailor on Rue Vivienne had been
very
helpful when Ty expressed the need for some sort of hidden pocket. The
man had unknowingly shared the secret of his best customer.

Concealing the letters before
Talleyrand noticed would be more difficult. Clasping his cheek, she ran kisses
up his jaw, over his face, holding her breath against a stench of cheap
cologne. He froze at the attention, panting, then pawed at her dress. With a
free hand she stuffed the letters into her bodice, letting him believe she was
stroking his chest.