Joanna Bourne: The Black Hawk

All four sides were open. Up top, over his head, the roof had a beam across it from corner to corner, thick as a tree trunk. That’s where the bell had been. You could see the grooves where it used to fit. The wood floor was scraped up where they’d dragged the bell across. They’d have taken it off to melt down for cannons. There was a square in the floor where the bell ropes must have come up. Big enough to fall through. Somebody’d set three boards across the space.

Owl put her basket on the stone sill and leaned over, showing off a pretty, rounded arse. He didn’t take any notice of that, since she was a French agent and didn’t like being touched anyway. But when she was grown up a little, she was going to drive some man mad.

She pointed southeast. “They are outside. You will see them.” She’d brought field glasses in her basket. “Take this.”

What she handed over was a nice sturdy set of optics, standard issue for the English military. It was just a wonder and a mystery how the French got their hands on so much British equipment, wasn’t it?

He wasted forty seconds thinking how much money a man earned smuggling and being wistful about it. But he was a spy now, not a member of the criminal classes, and he was reforming himself, so there was no point in thinking about profits from smuggling.

He shook hair out of his eyes. “What am I looking at?”

“That street. The long wall. You see it? The gate is green.”

He was good with maps. “Rue de la Planche.”

“It is. Do not boast to me. Look at it.”

He adjusted the optics, set his elbows on the ledge to keep the view steady, and followed where she was pointing. Swung past. Came back again and found it. Adjusted the glasses. And he had it.

That was another exercise Doyle kept setting him—using glasses just like these and finding his target fast as blazes. “A house. Green shutters on the windows. Iron bars. It is just a pleasure to see somebody take provident care of their possessions.”

“Go back toward that gate.”

The double doors in the long wall had gouged pale half-circles into the stone of the street, opening and closing a thousand times. The gates were closed at the moment.

“In the courtyard behind that.” She brought out another pair of glasses and stood at his shoulder, mirroring his concentration. Since he was a noticing kind of fellow, he observed she had a little white-handled gun left in the basket.

She shaded the lenses with the flat of her hand. “Good. They are all there.”

Shade the glasses from the sun and they won’t glint and give away your position. Doyle taught him that. And wasn’t it disconcerting that Owl, who probably worked for the French Secret Police, knew the same trick.

“What do you see?” she said.

The courtyard was mottled brown and gray. Cobblestone with dirt. Dark boxes and crates were stacked up everywhere. One small wagon. Two handcarts. There was a big, light-yellow pile of hay. No horses. There were fourteen . . . fifteen people.

Two men attacked a boy about half their size, whacking at him with sticks, while everybody else stood around and watched. The boy dodged and twisted like an alley dog, keeping out of reach. Just barely.

Hawker feathered at the optics, fixing on the boy, trying to bring his face in. It was tempting to lean forward, trying to see better. Doyle had cured him of that particular bad habit by clouting him on the head every time he did it.

And that was not a boy running every which way between the crates. That was a girl. She wore trousers and a loose shirt and she didn’t have any tits on her, but when she flipped around, dodging a kick, long braids fell from their mooring and swung on her back, pale as wheat. She was twelve maybe. Younger than he was.

One of the men managed to hit her a good one across the back. Then the other man moved in. She got away, scrambling up over a pile of boxes. They chased her. Once, she tripped longwise and didn’t roll away fast enough and got herself kicked in the belly.

Around the edge of the yard, a dozen boys did nothing . . . Hawker squinted into the eyepiece. No. That was probably girls and boys. Hard to tell from here.

Five minutes. Ten. Eventually it stopped. The men backed away. The girl struggled back to her feet and leaned over, arms braced on her thighs, braids falling straight down to brush the backs of her hands.

The two men motioned another kid over and began the creative process of beating the hell out of him in a purely instructive way. The girl limped to join the group lined up along the wall. It made him hurt, just looking at her.

He glanced across at Owl. “Some men take their pleasure in strange ways. Is that what you brought me here to see?”

“Yes.” She held her hand out for the field glasses, wrapped them up carefully in a checked cloth, and gave some attention to settling both pairs, and the gun, neatly in the basket. “What do you think?”

I think there’s men better dead . “She’s a nimble little thing.”

“She has been in training for a few years, I would think. She is good at fighting. Today, they are being taught that one may be hurt and hurt and hurt again and still continue. It is a valuable lesson. Those men, the Tuteurs who rule that house, repeat it frequently. Let us go. Someone might possibly look up and see us in this tower where we have no business being.”

“Who are they?” He stepped in front of Owl, blocking her way. Not touching. A man risked whatever part of his body he laid on Owl, careless-like.

She looked away from him, down into the spiral of descending dark in the opening of the trapdoor. “They are called the Cachés . The hidden ones. They are being groomed to be sent to England.”

With the last words, she went off down the stairs, as if she’d said everything that needed saying.

Since he knew a fair amount about women, he didn’t hurry. He came along slowly after her, counting steps so he didn’t trip at the bottom, hearing her footsteps in front of him. At the bottom of the steps he could see the outline of the door. Owl was blocking off some of the light at the lower edge.

If he’d been waiting there, he’d have stood off to the side so he didn’t give away where he was. Lots of tricks Owl didn’t know yet.

He took the last few steps and reached past her to spread his hand flat on the door before she opened it. “What do you want from me?”

She whispered, “We will talk outside. I—”

“We will talk here. Explain, or I walk out and leave you.”

She made some gesture he felt in the air. “You bluff. You will not walk away after what you have seen. You have no choice but to listen.”

“You’d be amazed what kind of choices I have.” He opened the door an inch.

Her fingers touched his arm. “Wait.” It was enough to stop him.

He was looking at a smooth, pretty face that didn’t belong to a child. Determined eyes. Eyes that suggested it was probably not a good idea to cross her. He didn’t know what she saw when she looked at him.

She stood and breathed on his shoulder long enough to make a warm, damp spot. Then she spoke, low and fast. “That place is called the Coach House. They made carriages there, years ago, in the work building behind the courtyard. There is a school now in the house where the master once lived.”

“A damn strange school if you ask me.”

“When one considers its purpose, it is not so strange.”

“Are we going to stand here and play guessing games? Spit it out or swallow it.”

“I am deciding what you should know.” A moment passed. “I take a great risk. In all of Paris, there are no more than a dozen people left who know the Coach House exists and what happens there.”