Sophia James: A Night Of Secret Surrender

‘There will be no negotiations for his release, then?’ Guy asked and Benet shook his head.

‘None. We can take him in for our own interrogation, though, before we dispose of him. The War Ministry is calling for his neck and Henri Clarke has grown more and more bitter with every successful reverse inflicted by Britain. The intelligence sent from the field by Shayborne has been both fastidious in its correctness and highly damaging, and it is time to call a halt on the spy’s ability to track what will happen next.’

‘Silence him for ever?’

‘As quickly as we can. Every office of authority in the city has their men out trawling and a scalp like this is a feather in the cap of any organisation who bags him. I am hoping it will be us.’

A map of Paris was brought forward and laid out, and Celeste saw that a boundary had been drawn around the arrondissement she had visited Shayborne in the night before. They were closing in. Unless he had taken notice of her warning they would catch him, for his circle of sympathetic agents in Paris could be nowhere near as numerous or as dedicated as those he was known to have fostered in Spain and Portugal.

The priests here might help him given their anger against the nationalisation of their churches, but she doubted the ordinary citizen would. Napoleon had been too clever in his promises of better living and raised working conditions. After having been left out of politics for so very long, the proletariat were clinging to the hope of betterment like limpets on a rock in a stormy sea.

Shayborne would be largely alone out there on the dangerous streets of the city, surviving by his wits and his ragtag bundle of allies. She breathed out slowly and turned to speak.

‘I have reliable sources here and here.’ Her finger touched the map. ‘It will not take long to find out if they know anything of the spy.’

‘He is still dressed as a soldier, we think. With all the military movements in the city, it would be a clever disguise.’

She frowned as this new jeopardy shimmered and Benet continued on.

‘I am guessing he would not be sporting the scarlet coat of the Eleventh Foot, but likely something more faded and subdued.’

‘The uniform of a land with sympathies to France and an axe to grind against the British, perhaps?’ Guy spoke and they all mulled this over.

‘A good point and a valid one.’ Benet signalled a man at a table to come over to join him. ‘Lambert. Find out how many of President Madison’s envoys are in Paris and what connections they have. It’s a highly sensitive area and we will have to be careful, but I want this information on my desk as soon as it comes to hand.’

A matter of hours only, then, Celeste thought. She wondered if any other intelligence services operating in Paris had made the same deductions as had been voiced here. Interrogation meant torture. If they caught Shayborne, he would suffer a nasty end which she would be powerless to prevent. As she chanced a glance at Guy Bernard, she could see a question in his eyes. She looked away.

Sometimes she hated these people with such a ferocity she thought she might simply expire from it. But at other times she felt a hint of an honour that she had long since lost sight of as she worked to protect yet another victim caught in the crossfire of changing politics. This duplicity was both her penance and her salvation.

* * *

She saw the funeral carriages as she walked home along the Seine by way of the flower markets and knew the procession to be for the Dubois family. They were leaving the city for Nantes and the rural graveyard where the slain members of the family would be interred.

The image of the dead children made her slow down and lean over, the straps of her empty bread basket falling to one side.

Un malheur ne vient jamais seul . Misfortune never arrives alone.

She thought of her sister, lost to the morbid sore throat by the age of ten, her lone white coffin in the cold family graveyard beside the south-facing wall at Langley. She thought of her mother’s madness and her father’s grief. Would it be the same here, under the warming summer breeze of France? Was there some other child who had escaped the murders to be worn into sadness by the ripples caused by betrayal, torn in half by regret and circumstance?

Alice. With her golden hair and sweetness. Biddable, pliant and even-tempered.

‘It should have been Celeste who was taken. It should have been her.’

She’d heard the words her mother had shouted in the silence of night following Alice’s death, heard them above her father’s muffled voice of reason. A tightness had formed about her heart that had been with her ever since.

Did she even still have a heart, she ruminated, or was it caught there in her chest among the thorns of fury, tangled in blood and bristles, stone replacing empathy?

Her hand went to her throat and found a pulse, too fast, too shallow and tripping into a battered rhythm.

She would save Shayborne and then leave Paris, reclaiming something of herself in the process because he was a good man, a moral man, a hero, and she had always been the exact opposite.

It was a direction, the first real truth she had had in years.

‘L’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions.’

She smiled. She would travel the path to Hell no matter what, but her intentions from now on would only be honourable. She swore it on the departed soul of her sister and on the name of the crucified Jesus.

She felt for the rosary in her pocket, the beads under her fingers providing a physical method of keeping count of the number of Hail Marys she said. She had recited the whole rosary numerous times under the guidance of her most religious parents until Mary Elizabeth Fournier had jumped from her grandmother’s rooftop one snowy January morning and fallen a hundred feet to her death. Her father had told Celeste of the unfortunate manner of her mother’s death in the evening of the day on which she had lost her virginity to Summerley Shayborne.

‘Faith can guide us only so far, Celeste. Eventually it is resilience that keeps us alive. Your mother converted to Catholicism for me, but I am not certain if she truly did believe in it.’ He’d had a brandy glass in one hand, an empty bottle in the other, and his eyes were swollen red. ‘Perhaps I should never have expected it.’

Resilience .

She swallowed back anger. Her father had missed the point as certainly as had her mother. Sometimes she wondered how little they both must have loved her to have lived life as they did, her mother mired in the troughs and peaks of hysteria or melancholy and her father beset by impossible political aspirations.

She’d been caught between them and had paid a heavy price for it, like a cue ball battered by the solids and stripes into whichever corner might possibly allow a triumph over the other. Well, no one had won the game and least of all her. Her father lay in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Paris and her mother in unconsecrated ground in Sussex. As far apart in death as they had been in life. She supposed that there at least was some sort of celestial justice in such a fact.

* * *

That evening she watched Shayborne’s rooms, watched the light at the window and the shadow on the curtains. He was not alone and she wondered who would visit him this late, a puzzlement that was answered a few minutes after as the door opened and a man dressed in the sombre clothes of a priest stepped out.

The Englishman watched him depart, though he did so carefully. It was only the tiniest twitch from the curtains above that gave him away, the candlelight behind blown out now to be replaced by darkness. She wondered if she should follow him, but as the man looked neither remarkable nor familiar she stayed hidden under the protection of a plane tree, the moon filtering little light through leaves on to the street.