He headed for the discreet screen in the corner of the dining room that hid the pisspots from view, but the warm tidal reek of the urine of numerous lobster-eaters hit him in the face and he veered away, going out through the open French doors into the fresh air of the garden. It had been raining, but the downpour had stopped, and water dripped from every tree and shrub.
He felt as though there had been an iron band round his chest that broke as he left the house, and he breathed deep, refreshing gulps of cool, rain-washed air. His face felt hot, and he swiped a hand through the wet leaves of a hydrangea bush and wiped cold water over his face.
“John,” said a voice behind him. He stiffened, but didn’t turn around.
“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
There was a faint snort in reply.
“I daresay,” said Percy, in his normal English accent. “And I can’t say I blame you. But I’m afraid you’ll have to, you know.”
“No, I won’t.” John turned, meaning to push past Percy and go back inside, but Percy seized his arm.
“Not so fast,” he said. “Buttercup.”
John’s spinal column reacted much faster than his conscious mind. Both stomach and balls contracted with a force that made him gasp, before his mind managed to inform him that the bloody man really had just used his nom de guerre. The very secret code name under which he had labored—for three mortal years—in London’s Black Chamber.
He became aware that he was staring at Percy with his mouth open, and closed it. Percy smiled, a little tremulously. The façade of the arrogant, elegant Frenchman had dropped away, and it truly was Percy. His dark curls were hidden under the smooth, powdered wig, but the eyes were as they’d always been—dark, soft, and holding promise. Of various kinds.
“Don’t tell me,” John said, surprised that his own voice sounded normal. “Monsieur Citròn?”
“Yes.”
Percy’s voice was husky, though John couldn’t have said with what emotion. Humor, fear, excitement, lust …? The last thought made him shake off Percy’s grasp and take a step back.
“How bloody long did you know?” he demanded. “Monsieur Citròn” had been his opposite number, in France’s equivalent to the Black Chamber. All countries had one, though the names varied. The underground hive where worker bees gathered the pollen of intelligence, grain by grain, and painstakingly turned it into honey—or poison.
Percy shrugged.
“I’d been working for the Secret du Roi for about two years, before they gave you to me. It took me another six months to discover who you really were.”
Not for the first time, John wished he had Jamie Fraser’s ability to make glottal noises that made clear his state of mind without the nuisance of finding words. But he was an Englishman, and therefore found some.
“Are you working for Hirondelle now?” he demanded. The Secret du Roi—Louis XV’s private spy ring—had not quite perished with the death of the King, but in the manner of such things had quietly been absorbed into a more officially recognized body. He had himself escaped the clutches of Hubert Bowles, head of London’s Black Chamber, some years ago, and had left the world of official secrets behind with the relieved sense of one being fished out of a noisome bog on the end of a rope.
Percy raised one shoulder briefly, smiling.
“If I were still true to La Belle France—and her masters—you couldn’t tell whether I was telling you the truth about that or not, could you?”
John’s heart was beginning to slow down, but that “if” sped it up like a kicked horse. He didn’t reply at once, though. He took time to look Percy up and down, deliberately.
“It’s not quite like leprosy, you know,” Percy said, bearing this scrutiny with visible amusement. “Treason doesn’t show that easily.”
“The devil it doesn’t,” John said, but more for something to say than because it was true. “Are you actually telling me that you have—or are about to,” he added, with a hard look to Percy’s very expensive Parisian finery, “part company with your ‘special interests’ in France?” Including whoever you were working for in the Black Chamber? I wonder.
“Yes. I haven’t done it quite yet, because—” He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder, and John gave a short laugh.
“Wise of you,” he said. “So you’re wanting to prepare a soft landing on this side before you jump. And you thought you’d start with me?” There was enough spin on that question as to take the skin off Percy’s hand if he tried to catch it.
He didn’t catch it and he didn’t duck, either. Just stood and let it pass, regarding Grey with his soft, dark eyes.
“You saved my life, John,” he said quietly, looking at him. “Thank you for that; I hadn’t the chance to say so at the time.”
John flipped a hand dismissively, though his chest had tightened at Percy’s words. He’d suppressed everything at the time and he didn’t want it back now, twenty years later. Any of it.
“Yes. Well …” He turned slightly; Percy was standing between him and the terrace with the French doors.
“So I thought that you might possibly be willing to do me a much less dangerous favor.”
“Think again,” John advised him briefly, and, stepping round his erstwhile lover, walked rapidly away.
He heard nothing behind him; no protest, no offers, no calling of his name. At the open French doors, he glanced involuntarily behind him.
Percy was standing by the hydrangea bush. Smiling at him.
46
By the Dawn’s Early Light
THE SUN WAS WELL above the horizon when William came ambling slowly down Oglethorpe Street toward his father’s house. He’d had a long, fascinating—and very enlightening—conversation with Christopher Preston, about the Crown’s treatment of prisoners, prisoner-help societies, prison hulks … and Ardsmuir Prison. In the fullness of time, he might need to have a talk with Lord John. But not just … this … minute.
He wasn’t drunk, but wasn’t yet quite sober, either. One of his pockets sagged heavily and jingled when he touched it. He had a vague memory of playing cards with Preston and some friends of his—at least this experience seemed to have ended better than the last time he’d got blind drunk, ended up penniless, and … met Jane again.
Jane.
He hadn’t meant to call her to mind, but there she was, vivid, drawn on the surface of his mind with a sharp-pointed quill. The first time he’d met her—and the second. The shine of her hair and the smell of her body, close in the dark.
He stopped and leaned heavily on the iron fence surrounding a neighbor’s front garden. The scent of flowers and new-turned soil was fresh as the morning air on his face, the breath of the distant river and its marshes soothing, with its sense of flowing water, soft black silt, and lurking alligators.
The unexpected thought of alligators made him laugh, and he rubbed a hand over his rasping whiskers, shook his head, and turned in to Papa’s gate. He sniffed the air expectantly, but he was early; he could smell smoke from the kitchen fire, but no bacon. Voices, though … He wandered round the side of the house, intending to see whether he might charm Moira the cook into giving him a bit of toasted bread or some cheese to ease the pangs of starvation ’til something more substantial was ready.