Delphine Dryden - Gossamer Wing

“Three minutes,” offered the agent.

She shook her head. “You’re still not taking me seriously, are you? I don’t want to have to shoot you, but I will not let you board that ship, sir. Don’t try my patience. You’re in no position to negotiate.”

“Murcheson will see you hanged if you’re wrong, Lady Hardison.”

“My father is more frightening than Murcheson, trust me.”

The noise of a hatch creaking open alerted Charlotte even before the agents’ amazed glances did, and she had to resist the urge to turn her head to see whether it was Dexter or Martin standing on the deck of the ship.

“I’m all right. I’m coming down,” Dexter called out. “Please don’t shoot.”

As the wave of relief struck her, Charlotte’s hand began to tremble. She forced herself to breathe steadily and stay focused on the agents in front of her as Dexter spoke again.

“Mr. Martin is coming with me,” he told them. “Please, ah, don’t shoot him either. I’ve given him my word he won’t be hurt. Charlotte, what’s going on down there?”

“Have you been harmed, Lord Hardison?” the lead agent called. His hand twitched down as though he were thinking of reaching for his gun, then snapped back up again when Charlotte made a warning noise.

“No, not really,” Dexter said. “Have you?”

With a feeble smile, Charlotte replied, “I haven’t shot anyone yet. These gentlemen are rather set on killing Mr. Martin, though. Shall I keep them from doing that?”

“I suppose so. We’re coming down, but this gangplank will take me a moment. I’ll have to do it myself, Monsieur Martin is in no shape to help,” Dexter explained as he started turning the giant crank to extend and lower the gangplank to the dock. From the corner of her eye, Charlotte could see the mechanism working.

Then there was a moment of silence, and she backed up even more to put the gangplank between herself and the agents, so she could see Dexter. He stood at the top with an arm braced around his slender, pale, black-suited companion.

“All right. Don’t shoot,” Dexter warned them again, though the agents made no move toward their weapons. “He’s dying already, anyway, so there would really be no point.”

Dying? Charlotte watched them descend, the sight confirming Dexter’s words. Martin was obviously sick unto death, his breath a rasping wheeze, his legs barely able to support his trembling body. As they approached the circle of watery light provided by the dock’s single lamp, Charlotte could see that Coeur de Fer was flushed an unnatural pink, and drenched with sweat.

“Dear God. You can lower your weapon now, Lady Hardison,” the agent in charge said as Dexter stopped by a piling and lowered Martin to sit on the rough stump. “Your husband is right, there would be no point to shooting this man. He’s done for. Stand down, gentlemen.”

Charlotte considered him for a moment, then cocked her pistol back and flicked the safety on before tucking it back into its holster. She turned to Dexter, who was still bending over the crumpled husk of a man he’d half-carried off the ship.

“He has a story to tell,” he explained, straightening to look at the agents and Charlotte.

Coeur de Fer nodded, then took a breath and began. “Seven years ago, I sold my soul . . .”

THE AGENTS HAD gathered around Coeur de Fer, straining to hear his voice, one of them writing it all down in a notebook he’d procured from somewhere. From time to time in the narrative, one or another of them would exclaim as another years-old mystery was resolved.

Murder and sabotage, callous cruelty and greed. If half what Martin said were true, Dubois was a monster indeed, even worse than the sort Murcheson had suspected him of being. And Coeur de Fer had been his creature, trapped into service by his own ambition and poor choices.

“Simone Vernier probably had all the information she needed to have Dubois strung up. If she had only lived long enough to report . . .” The British agent’s voice trailed off as he considered what might have happened had Dubois received the justice he’d deserved back then, when he really had been committing deliberate treason, actively conspiring against the ruling faction of the French government in hopes of derailing the treaty process.

“Ah, but if she had, she would have probably also gotten those notes to our superiors, and if that had happened the French might never have come to the negotiating table with the British,” Martin countered. “Who ever knows about these things? That was one of Dubois’s mistakes, thinking he could predict the outcome of such complicated plans.”

An ambulance siren sounded in the distance, approaching rapidly. Martin reached out, clutching Dexter’s forearm. “My mother is Marie-Terese Imbert. She lives in Bayeux. See that she gets my remains, at least the metal. I am worth far more dead than alive, and I should like to be some good to her after all these years.”

“I will,” Dexter assured him.

A fit of coughing and retching overwhelmed Martin, and he could barely speak by the time he regained what little breath was left to him.

“I was Jean-Michel Imbert once,” he whispered. He swayed on his post, and Dexter leaned in to support him again. “My greatest regret was letting my mother think I had died. But I couldn’t let her know what I had become.”

Dexter thought of his own mother, several years widowed but nevertheless peaceful and happy, and extravagantly proud of her son. She had cried at his wedding. That had been his great regret, lying to his mother about Charlotte and the marriage, but he’d known she would forgive him after the fact and be proud of him for serving the Crown so selflessly. He was struck by how fortunate he was, and how ridiculous it was that he took his luck for granted most of the time.

“Perhaps you’ll last long enough to talk to her yourself,” he comforted Martin, but the other man shook his head.

“Thank you, my friend,” he whispered. Dexter could barely hear him. “You’ve rid me of the poison after all.”

As the attendants swarmed down from the ambulance and muscled the nearly dead Jacques Martin into a gurney, Dexter stepped away and walked toward Charlotte. She stood several yards from the frantically active scene, staring at Martin. Dexter couldn’t read her expression, but she was so beautiful it made his breath catch in his throat.

Her hair fell over her shoulder in a loose plait, stray curls catching the rays of the cheap floodlight in a halo around her head. The white jacket she wore was fastened up tight against the chill. She wore holsters on both thighs, a pistol in one and a wicked knife in the other, and on the whole she gave the appearance of a dangerous but angelic child. A fierce guardian spirit. A creature of myth.

Too good to be true , he told himself. Too good to be true for me .

“You forgive him, and I can’t,” she greeted him. She didn’t sound angry, just puzzled and exhausted.

Dexter stopped short a few feet away from her. “What makes you say I forgive him?” He wasn’t so sure, himself, that he’d forgiven anything. The man had nearly killed them both, by his own hand or by proxy. He’d chased them, and then drugged and kidnapped Dexter. Charlotte had lost her husband to the man. It would take a great deal to forgive all that.

“Maybe not forgive. But you pity him. I was so frightened when I realized he’d taken you, but all the time you felt for him. I still see a monster.”

“Dubois was the monster. Martin did terrible things,” Dexter said, “but in his own mind he didn’t have much choice.”

“We always have a choice.”

After an awkward silence, Dexter cleared his throat. “This wasn’t quite the greeting I expected. And not the one I’d planned. Thank you for coming to my rescue, Charlotte.”