Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

Charlotte gave a noisy sigh. “But Dex,” she whined, “what am I to do all morning?”

“All day, poppet,” he corrected her. “I don’t think I’ll return much before dinner.”

She made another noise, conveying infinite exasperation without words. “Fine. But I think you’re being beastly. It’s our honeymoon, and all you care about is those nasty, overheated factories, and pages and pages of figures.”

“Charlotte, nothing could be further from the truth. You know you come first with me. Haven’t you noticed you always come first?”

He gave a little dig into her side and grinned when she squirmed and giggled at the double entendre. A real giggle, not the fake one she adopted for this sham persona. Funny how he could love the one and loathe the other.

“I plan to be quite put out with you, Dex,” she replied a little breathlessly. “If you’re going to the factory, then I shall take my revenge by spending the entire morning with the most expensive modiste in Paris. And I plan to order everything as a rush job, to drive up the price even more.”

So that was her grand plan. If he hadn’t known she would be spending her own money at it, he might have been concerned. Or perhaps not, as Charlotte’s taste in clothing seemed nowhere near as extravagant as that of most fashionable ladies of Dexter’s acquaintance. But she was certainly playing her part well.

“Kindly don’t bankrupt us before we even return to the Dominions. If you’re starving to death it won’t matter how well dressed you are. Will you spend the entire day there?”

“Oh no,” she reassured him. “Only the morning. Then I’ll stroll about and sightsee, and in the afternoon I think I’ll go to a museum or something like that. Perhaps a tour of important cultural sites.”

“You must be prepared to describe it all to me at dinner, all right?”

“Of course, Dex. That is if I’m over being angry with you.”

“I see. And is there no way I can appease you?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, what about . . .” He rolled toward her a bit and whispered a shocking suggestion in her ear, loving the way she tipped her head to accommodate him.

“That might work,” she admitted. “Only one way to find out.”

In the course of finding out, her gown came off again. And in the morning, though Charlotte was mortified, she found the maid who brought the breakfast tray and opened the curtains to be entirely adept at averting her eyes.

PARIS AND GENNEVILLIERS, FRANCE

CHARLOTTE FIRST NOTICED the man when she rang the bell at the modiste’s small, tucked-away shop. He had just taken a seat outside the bistro next door. He was so tall and skeletally thin that his knees knocked the underside of the table when he folded himself into the chair, and she felt a wave of pity for him.

How hard that must be for him , she thought. I should stop fussing about being so small.

Then she promptly forgot about the odd-looking fellow as she was ushered into the shop and lost herself in the world of fabric and color and style. An heiress from the Dominions, a baroness no less, might as well have been a princess to the modiste and her eager assistants. Charlotte had intended to stay for an hour and spend a fixed and rather modest amount on some specific garments she’d been needing. Instead she left four hours later, having overspent her budget by at least several hundred percent, but secure in the knowledge that no woman in the New York Dominion would be better-dressed than she by the time the seamstresses had finished and delivered their masterpieces.

He was still there. She almost didn’t notice this time, because his back was to her as she left the shop. When she walked past his table Charlotte noticed his hands, which held a newspaper in front of him. One of those hands, she realized with a start, was prosthetic. A glove—apparently dyed to match his skin—covered a structure that only peripherally resembled fingers and a thumb. His other hand held the paper gracefully, while the false hand rested like a cheap stage prop, holding the opposite edge of the page in a crude pincer grip.

Poor thing , Charlotte thought, a split second before she recognized the tall, lanky object of pity from earlier in the morning.

She forced herself to keep walking without a hitch, though her heart started to pound and a cold sweat broke out over her face.

At the corner she resisted the urge to turn and look behind her. It was a crowded street, in broad daylight; if he were to make a move, he would be unlikely to make it here.

A window display half a block down drew her to a bookstore, and she ducked inside to purchase a guidebook to the Louvre and an illustrated history of French fashions for her mother.

She didn’t see him outside the window when she approached it to leave. Perhaps her imagination had been playing tricks on her. Paris and the attendant anxiety over her impending assignment must have prompted a memory of Reginald’s lurid story—the only one of his stories that had ever been lurid—about his daring escape from the wraithlike, claw-handed agent with the curious metal device where one ear should have been.

Charlotte’s mind lingered on Reginald, wondering what he’d thought of Paris. Despite her solid intention to hate the place, she had to admit the city was fascinating and often beautiful. Had Reginald’s cover persona allowed him any time to sightsee, to marvel at Notre-Dame or wander through the Louvre? She’d never thought to ask, though she supposed in time she would have gotten around to it. If they’d had time. Mostly she’d been eager to hear his thrilling tale of intrigue, complete with horrific villain and the astonishing recovery of stolen plans for what appeared—at Reginald’s single hurried glance—to be the infamous, mythical, war-ending British doomsday device.

Without realizing it, Charlotte had strolled all the way to the Boulevard des Italiens. She was about to pull out her map when she recognized the massive edifice standing almost directly across the street from her: The Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opera.

MARTIN COULD ALMOST believe it was accidental. The woman showed no guile, no subterfuge, as she observed the Opéra from across the boulevard. Only curiosity, and a puzzled expression as though she were trying to solve a problem or recall some elusive memory.

She didn’t plan to come here , his instinct told him. He listened to that instinct, and held back to watch her.

Dubois had ordered him to stick to Murcheson, and more recently to the Makesmith Baron, as though these men were some demons sent specifically to take down his empire. The more Dubois insisted, the more Martin became determined that the woman somehow posed the greater threat.

The American agent’s face still haunted Martin’s dreams on occasion, two aspects of the same man at very different stages of his life. The first, as the young agent saw his death approaching at breakneck speed but miraculously escaped it. The second, right before he lost all ability to control his speech, at the very moment he recognized that death had finally caught up with him.

Both times he had spoken the same, single word. “Charlotte.”

Coeur de Fer had no nemesis. He was a legend to himself, a shadowy figure in the annals of international espionage. But he did have a bit of an obsession with that boy from the Dominions.

“The only one who ever got away,” he mused to himself, “though even he couldn’t avoid me forever.” Martin lost himself in the crowd as he followed Charlotte across the boulevard and up to the Palais Garnier. Despite his outlandish appearance, he was talented at fading into the background.