Joanna Bourne: The Black Hawk

Unrepentant, condescending, Cummings shook his head.

We’ll finish this. He glanced at Doyle. At Sévie, all grim determination. At Pax’s careful detachment. At Owl, who knew what came next and approved.

Doyle’s deep, flat, matter-of-fact voice carried utter conviction. “When we take the book and the transcription to Liverpool, everything comes out. You’re ruined. But every innocent man named in that journal falls with you. You disgrace Military Intelligence. Good men worked for you in the war. They don’t deserve this.”

“How dramatic.” Cummings took a casual stand by the desk.

“You have a mother still living. You have two sons and grandchildren. You have a wife. When this comes out, you shame every one of them.” Doyle waited.

They all did.

Looked like they expected the Head of Service to say the rest of it. “This is when a gentleman goes home and has an accident cleaning his gun.” Deliberately, he walked to the desk and laid his hands down flat on it. He leaned across, close to Lord Cummings. “You have until tomorrow noon.”

Cummings laughed. Actually laughed. “You’re bluffing, Hawkhurst. You’re all bluff. I know you. I’ve watched you for years. You won’t destroy that many people to get to me. You won’t show that book to anyone.” His gaze dropped to the desk.

He’ll do it now.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Cummings scoop up the black knife. Grip the hilt. Stab down. Stab toward the hand so temptingly flat on the desktop.

He jerked out of way. Rapped up hard and broke Cummings’s hold on the knife. Caught it away from him.

He slashed Cummings across the palm, up the forearm. A long, shallow cut that opened up red.

Judge. Jury. He let the knife drop. He didn’t need it anymore. Executioner.

“You bastard.” Cummings’s eyes bulged out of his head, staring at his hand and the blood dripping across it.

“You have to be more careful, sir.” Reams was beside Cummings, pressing a handkerchief on a wound that bled sluggishly. “It’s not deep. We’ll have it stopped in a minute.”

“Get me out of here.” Cummings pulled away. He stared at his hand, trembling, wiping at the seeping blood. “I have to get out of here.”

“Let me stop the bleeding.” Reams looked around at all the men and women who watched and did nothing. “Goddammit, one of you help me.”

“Use mine.” Hawker shook his handkerchief out and handed it over to Reams.

Cummings backed away, nursing his hand, bleeding. “They saw. Everybody saw what you did.”

“They saw that you were clumsy where you pointed a knife. That’s always a mistake.”

“You’ll hang for this. I swear it. You’ll hang if it’s the last thing I do.” Cummings shrugged Reams off. “Let go of me, idiot. That’s not going to help. I’m poisoned. Poisoned. He’s killed me.” He was pale as death when he staggered toward the door. But it would be a while before he died.

HAWKER FOUND HER IN THE APARTMENT ABOVE her shop. Thompson pointed him up the stairs and said Mademoiselle had been expecting him and the door at the top was open.

Owl had thirty blue-glass bottles sitting out on a table that she was filling with something. She sat in a red brocade chair, leaning over, tapping powder from a paper down the mouth of a bottle. He stood awhile and watched. About every fifth one she’d straighten up, lean to the fire for the kettle, and fill the bottles with hot water.

He said, “Shouldn’t somebody else do this? An apothecary?”

“That would be nice, but I prefer to make my own mixtures.” After a minute, Owl said, “He is dead, then?”

“Last night, about two. I waited outside the house till I was sure.”

“And his accusations toward you?”

“I bribed the footman to give me the letter. Anything he said, they took as the ravings of a dying man.”

A mortar with a handful of green powder in it sat on the table. She pulled it to her and put it in her lap and began to grind. “I am not sorry. Perhaps there is a woman somewhere who is more forgiving than I am. I feel only relief that this is over.”

He sat down in the chair across from hers and sniffed the powder she was working with. “There was a time I could have killed three bastards like Cummings before tea and enjoyed doing it. I didn’t enjoy this. I’m getting soft.”

“Not noticeably. I would not put that vial too close to your nose.”

He set it down. “Poison?”

“We have dealt too much in poison lately. That will only make you sneeze. It is a fine antiseptic, though. That is what I am making here.” She kept grinding. “I hope his wife was not there.”

“She took off years ago.” He wondered whether to tell her, and then decided he would. “He was at it awhile, dying. Couple of hours. His sons didn’t come.”

“It is the death he intended for me.” She didn’t quite shrug. “He was an evil man. You intended this from the first hour, when I was struck by that poison. That is why you did not clear the knife.”

“Yes.”

She was doing some deep thinking, apparently, so he left her to it and began to sift powder into bottles. There were five papers already measured, so he tapped them into the next bottles in the row. He didn’t scatter much around. Either he was doing it right or she was being mannerly.

“He would have escaped justice?”

“We couldn’t show anyone that book. I’d have talked to Liverpool and Cummings would be out of Military Intelligence. Doyle would see that he had to resign from his clubs.”

“He was right, then, in saying that nothing much would happen to him. That we could not touch him.”

“Well, he’s dead, you see. So he wasn’t entirely correct.”

He helped himself to the kettle and topped the bottles up with hot water while neither of them talked for a while.

“I think the world needs people like us to destroy evil men,” she said. “It requires people who are not entirely good to do this.”

“Sounds like me.”

“That is what I was thinking.”

The grinding was going to take a while. He ran out of green powder to put in bottles, so he stood up to wander around her parlor. She had some of her knife collection up here. The kris was pretty to look at but wouldn’t throw worth a damn.

It was peaceful, being here, watching her work. A couple strands of brown hair started off at her forehead, let loose, and fell down almost straight till they made little hooks at the end. She kept brushing them off her nose and they kept coming back. Even her hair was stubborn.

It was just impossible to say how much he loved this woman. It felt like he’d been waiting his whole life to walk in a door and there would be Owl, doing something interesting.

She had a fine fire burning in the hearth, so he went over and sat down on the hearthrug and leaned against her, setting his head against her thigh, looking into the flames.

After a minute, her hand came down on his head, into his hair. She said, “I will come to live with you in your great mansion and be a lady again. I will be a DeCabrillac, and face down the world if they make accusations. I will shake out your haughty mansion like an old rag and make it comfortable to live in.”

“Funny. I was thinking I’d come to live with you here, over the shop. It’s an easy walk to Meeks Street.”

“The Head of the British Service must live somewhere grander than this little appartement . But we could come here sometimes.” She took a deep breath. “I would like to marry you, ’Awker. I have loved you for many, many years.”

“Well. That’s fine then.” He turned his face to the cloth on her lap. Beneath the dress she wore, she was energy and strength. She seduced the hell out of him.