Joanna Bourne: The Black Hawk

Another voice. “The house is secure.” A man’s face, grim and scarred, looked down at her and went away. William Doyle.

Then Hawker was telling someone to knock on the doors on Meeks Street. Did anybody see anything?

Under it all, the mutter of the surgeon. “Don’t you slip away on me, you bastard . . . And here’s the bugger causing all the problems. Little bleeder going at it like hell for no reason. I need to—Will you people hold the damn woman still!”

There was a pattern of greater pain and lesser pain. The surgeon set stitches, talking to himself as he worked on her arm. It was predictable in its dreadful bite and pull. She counted. Put a number on each second. Stepped from one second to the next. She could get through ten seconds. Start again. Ten more.

“Nice musculature. Healthy and no fat on her. I suppose she’s one of yours.” It was the surgeon’s voice.

“Yes. Keep her alive,” Hawker said.

Someone said, “Doyle is . . .” and a murmur after that. Someone said, “It’s coming down in buckets,” and then, “. . . found it under . . .”

“I’ll look at it later.” Hawker’s voice.

More voices. She did not listen. Soft darkness, most perfectly solid, crowded in from all sides like so many insistent black pillows. She had slept in a bed with black velvet pillows in Vienna.

A clangor of pain struck and she was being lifted. Corners of the room spun by, confusing and dizzying.

The surgeon said, “You know what to do. Watch her. Make sure it doesn’t start bleeding again. Put her to bed and keep her there.”

“I shall devote myself to that goal,” from Hawker.

“You are barbarians.” She did not say they were crétins and clumsy idiots because she was a marvel of tact and endurance. “I am naked. Deal with this.”

She was being carried upstairs past the large mirror in the hall. Past the line of maps in frames. After so many years, Hawker’s arms were still as comforting as bread and milk. Familiar as the rumble of thunder.

I have never forgotten.

He was not tall or massive. Not a walking mountain of threat like William Doyle. Hawker was the menace of a thin, sharp blade. He was strong in the deep fibers of his body. Tough as steel in the sinew and bone and straps of lean muscle.

Behind them, at the bottom of the stairs, she heard William Doyle say to someone, “She’s too old for you, lad. She was too old for the likes of you when she was twelve.”

One of the young men of this household had looked upon her nakedness and become interested. Her last, thin thread of consciousness found this amusing.

ADRIAN HAWKHURST, KNIGHT COMPANION OF THE Order of the Bath, former thief, master pickpocket from the rookeries of St. Giles, Head of the British Intelligence Service, stood beside Justine’s bed, watching her breathe. He could trap air in a bubble. Whistle it out a wooden reed. Wave it around with a fan. He couldn’t push air in and out of her lungs. He couldn’t do a thing to keep her alive.

Doyle said, “Did you ever go into that shop of hers and talk to her?”

“No.”

“I wondered,” Doyle said.

“She wasn’t a threat with Napoleon gone. She was nobody the Service had to watch.”

“You kept an eye on her,” Doyle said. “Her and her shop.”

“Yes.”

Justine was naked under the covers, pale and vulnerable. Bricks, hot from the oven, wrapped in flannel, were tucked up and down the bed, keeping the chill out. He’d laid her down inside that barricade. When he pulled the blanket up over her, she didn’t move.

She’d have a new scar when she healed. That made five. He knew the story of every one. He’d kissed them all.

She’d always been pale as the moon. Skin you could almost see through. He used to lie beside her in the candlelight and trace the line of a vein up her arm to the pulse in her throat, then down to the mound of her breast. Or he’d follow one thin track up her leg to the silky, soft nest he never got tired of playing in. She was opaque now, as if the light in her had retreated to the core of her. It was gathered up there, keeping the chill out, keeping her life’s heat in.

Fate carries a sting in her tail. He’d wanted Justine back in his bed. Now she was. But look at the price of it.

Doyle came up beside him. “Luke says she has a good chance.”

“It’s his job to say that.”

“He’s too busy to lie.”

“Friends will always find time to lie to you. A heartwarming thought in a cynical world.” He set his knuckles against her cheek. Skin fluent as running water, sleek as air. He felt the vibration inside from her blood pulsing.

Even after all these years, he’d still wake up in the middle of the night, hard as a rock from dreaming about her. He’d never stopped being hungry for this woman. “I wanted her back, and here she is. Fate’s a perverse bitch.”

“Always.” Doyle slipped his hand inside the blanket, to Justine’s shoulder, testing the temperature. “She’ll make it. She’s hard to kill.”

“Many have tried.”

Her hair spread everywhere on the pillow. Light-brown hair, honey hair, so golden and rich it looked edible. He knew how it felt, wrapped around his fingers. Knew how her breasts fitted into his hands. He knew the weight and shape and strength of her legs when they drew him into her.

A long time ago, she’d shot him. They’d been friends, and then lovers, and then enemies. Spies, serving different sides of the war.

The war was over, this last year or two. Sometimes, he walked outside the shop she kept and looked in. Sometimes, he found a spot outside and watched for a while, just to see what she looked like these days.

The last time they’d exchanged words, she’d promised to kill him. He hadn’t expected her on his doorstep, half-dead, running from an enemy of her own.

I have the most dangerous woman in London in my bed.

Downstairs and distant, the front door to Meeks Street opened and closed again. He couldn’t hear what his men were saying in the study, just the front door and the sound of rain coming down, urgent and hectic, like it meant business.

“Pax traced the blood trail to Braddy Square. That’s where it happened.” Doyle reached inside his jacket and drew a knife from an inner pocket and passed it over. “He found this, lying in a pool of blood.”

“Justine’s.” A black knife with a flat hilt. Deep hatch marks on the grip for fighting. Balanced perfectly for throwing. “I gave her this.” Razor sharp, of course. Justine knew how to respect a blade. “It’s been a clever and useful piece of cutlery today. It’s drawn blood.” He looked past the knife, down into Justine’s face. “You cut him, Owl. Good work.”

He remembered putting this knife in her hand. Saying, “You shouldn’t walk around without one.” Gods. They’d both been kids.

“She’s carried it awhile,” Doyle said.

“A long time.” He could feel that in the steel—the years she’d kept it close to her skin. Why had she held on to it? “Now all we need to do is find a Londoner walking around with a slice cut in him.”

“Which don’t narrow the field as much as I’d like. And he might not be English. Could be the Prussians or Austrians are still irritated with her.” Doyle scratched the stubble on his cheek. “Or the French.”

“Given the length and ingenuity of her career, there are Swedes and South Sea cannibals annoyed at her.”

She’d kept his knife all these years.

He slid Justine’s blade, still with the dried blood on it, under her pillow, putting the hilt to the left. That was the way she’d kept it at night, back when he knew her well. Maybe she’d thrash in her sleep and feel it under there and be reassured. Maybe she’d reach for it in her dreams and use it to hold death off.