Elizabeth Boyle (13 page)

If there was more to Balsac’s message Oliver would have no trouble getting it out of the man.

Slowly, she turned back to the soldier, groaning and complaining. “
Sou
for an old woman.
Sou
for an old woman’s meal.” Her voice cracked and faded as she retrieved her bundle from beneath the bench where she’d been sitting with Balsac.

The large man scowled at her. “Get out of my sight, you old turnip. I pay money only when I get something in return.” He reached for a serving girl, who, though missing her front teeth, made up for her gaping come-hither smile with a pair of ample breasts. He pulled the giggling girl onto his lap and glared back at Sophia. “If I didn’t think you were as tough as an old hen, I would cart you off to the guillotine myself. But your neck would probably dull a good blade.”

All of his companions laughed in loud agreement.

Sophia cackled right along with them. “Save those fine blades for the soft necks of the swine who deserve it.”

Like yourself
, she thought as she backed away from him and made her way toward the entrance, begging the odd
sou
from the other noisy patrons.

As she pushed open the door to leave she heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back in haste. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a tall figure rise in the corner.

Even before she saw his face her body recognized him, with a sharp ache of longing that had never been far from the surface since she’d left London.

The heady memories of being held in his arms, of being kissed, of the way his hands molded and stroked her breasts ripped past her resolve to forget him and blazed into a bonfire in her blood.

It cannot be. How could
he
be here?

His patched jacket and red cap might mark him as a
sans-culotte
, but his cocksure stance and the careless flip of his wrist as he tossed his coins on the table exposed him as a man of wealth and assurance.

No
, she thought, staring harder. It couldn’t be him. Not in Paris. Not this quickly.

For as much as her pride fooled her into believing he’d never be able to locate her in Paris, her body had longed for the sight and feel of him again.

And her dangerous passion for him hadn’t cared
if
he could find her. Just so long as he found her.

Oh, she’d known he’d follow her. His pride wouldn’t let him do anything less. Giles’s father had told her as much over one of their chess games. He’d bragged how once his son started a mission he was methodical to a fault and unrelenting in his pursuit of the truth.

His father had thought his son’s skills a blessing and a danger. Sophia now knew just how dangerous Giles could be.

The night in his study had awakened a need inside her that chased her through her sleep with wild, passionate dreams, jolting her awake and leaving her alone and empty in the dark.

She didn’t need a second glance back to decide whether or not it was Lord Trahern. Balsac had already warned her that she was being followed. No matter who it was, Sophia felt the danger of this stranger’s pursuit and knew she must quickly get as far away from the Sow’s Ear as possible.

Slipping out the door, she clutched her bundle to her chest and fled into the dark street. Looking first in the direction where she was to rejoin Emma and Oliver, Sophia turned the opposite way, heading instead for the misty alleys near the Seine.

Detouring down the first alley and then a second, Sophia’s confidence overtook her momentary panic in the tavern. Perhaps she’d allowed her anxieties to run away with her imagination.

By the time her nose wrinkled in distaste at the growing stench of the river, she would have bet what remained of the Delaney jewelry that she’d lost her pursuer.

Standing in the darkness of a narrow alley, she looked ahead to where the new Pont de la Concorde rose across the river toward the gardens of the Tuileries and the newly christened Place de la Revolution, where the crowds gathered daily to watch the condemned die.

Confidently, she stepped from the safety of the shadows to venture across the cobbled street and over the bridge. Halfway into the open square she heard the one voice able to halt her hurried footsteps.

“Running away again?” Lord Trahern said in a low, dangerous voice.

Outwardly she froze, but inside she trembled, his words ruffling down her spine.

Slowly, she turned around to face him.

When he stepped from his hiding place and into the pale moonlight, her breathing slowed. She couldn’t find the power to run as his towering black-cloaked figure loomed in front of her, his slow, even strides closing the distance between them.

Why was it that, when every bit of reason she possessed urged her to flee, all she could think of was throwing herself back into his heated embrace? She looked up at him to see if he, too, shared her traitorous response.

His dark, piercing gaze bored through her, giving no hint of the passion they’d shared.

“You may have deceived those idiots at the Sow’s Ear, but, Lady Brazen, try as you may, you cannot deceive me. Not ever again.”

Having spent most of his evening hunched over a tumbler of sour wine, Giles had been about to give up his vigil. His investigation into Webb’s death hadn’t turned up anything beyond what he already knew from Dryden’s brief missive.

Yet there were too many missing pieces to satisfy Giles, so he continued his search.

The landlady at Webb’s attic apartment had let the loft to other tenants and refused his request to search the rooms. He wasn’t about to argue with her, for she was a frowning giant of a woman who looked capable of taking on the National Guard—unarmed. Her dirty sleeves were pushed up on her fleshy forearms, her greasy hair haphazardly tucked into a red cap.

“What a horrible mess them soldiers left after taking him,” she’d complained. “I spent two days cleaning to make it real nice again.” Shrewdly assessing the opportunity, she added hastily, “He owed me for the rent, he did.”

So Giles paid her two days’ wages for her inconvenience and the three months’ back rent she claimed Webb owed.

“He didn’t have many things, some clothes that went to the poor,” she’d told Giles with a rueful shake of her head.

He knew full well the clothing had probably gone on her husband’s back. “Was there anything else?”

Her gaze fell to the pocket from where he pulled her first payment. “There might have been some scraps of papers and a pamphlet he was writing, maybe a book or two scattered about.”

With another offer of gold, Giles obtained the papers and books. “Did he have any friends? Anyone who might have known him?”

The woman tugged her black shawl tighter around her wide shoulders. “He went to the Cordeliers’ meetings near the Palais Royal. Rough lot, those ones. And there was a woman I seen him with a time or two. What do they call her?” The woman scratched her head.

Giles held up his final bribe.

The woman grinned. “La Devinette. They call her La Devinette. Up to no good, that one.”

“La Devinette,” he’d repeated.
The riddle
—a description that could as aptly be used to describe the Brazen Angel. “What does this woman look like?”

The woman looked expectantly for more payment. When none was forthcoming she offered her information freely, though not without a frown. “She’s not as tall as me,” the woman said, drawing herself up to her full height, which was nearly eye-to-eye with Giles. “She’s overly proud of her eye, or rather the lack of one. Lost it in the massacre at Champ de Mars, or so she claims. Puts a big black patch and a red wrap over her face to hide the mess. You can see her for yourself any afternoon. They’ve got her modeled in wax down at the Salon de Cire—that is, if you have any money left to pay the admission fee.” She laughed roughly, patting her now richly lined pocket.

“Was this Citizeness Devinette with him often?”

“Often enough, if that’s what you mean. Don’t see what he saw in her, but how’s a woman to know what men will itch for?” She took a deep breath and eyed Giles as if she was sizing up what might scratch him.

“But you said they only went to meetings,” he said, hoping to draw her attention back to her story.

“They went to drink at that cesspit, the Sow’s Ear. He said she was teaching him politics.” The woman snorted. “I have my own ideas on that notion. But long as they pay their rent and keep quiet with their
politics
, I don’t care.”

Giles thanked the woman for her assistance and left. He still needed to get into Webb’s apartments, but he’d have to find a way past the landlady first—though she had been of some help.

If Webb had infiltrated the radical Cordeliers Club, as the landlady implied, it could have been any of them who betrayed the young English agent, Giles reasoned.

The Cordeliers, their ascendancy to power in the newly formed Committee of Public Safety all but assured, denounced each other often. The rampant accusations and paranoia among the membership made it a dangerous place to harbor any secrets.

The only way he was going to discover if and how La Devinette was connected to Webb’s death—and how the Brazen Angel fit into this confusing puzzle—was to find the woman herself.

He knew the Brazen Angel was in Paris, for he’d found evidence of that in a pawnshop on the
Ile de la Cité
. How else could a brooch with the Delaney family crest on it arrive so quickly in Paris?

To further his search he took the landlady’s advice, joining the hordes flocking to the Salon de Cire to view Dr. Curtius’s wax creations. There, side by side in realistic tableau, stood the infamous and despised in a revolving display of France’s political scene.

He’d silently filed past the wax version of La Devinette, a menacing Valkyrie of a woman, with her tilted
bonnet rouge
and a short sword raised over her head. Just as the landlady had described, the right side of La Devinette’s face was hidden with a black patch and a red binding.

He stopped a few feet away and turned back to look at the statue one more time. From this angle he found himself staring into the passionate sapphire gaze of the Brazen Angel.

Though he’d never seen her face unmasked, he knew the curve of her cheeks, the fullness of her lips, which now mocked him from beneath a small sign that read,
La Devinette
.

So he’d spent the last three nights at the Sow’s Ear, drinking sour wine and listening to the fanatical speeches and radical songs of the local
sans-culottes
who made up the Cordeliers Club in the roughneck Croix Rouge section of the Left Bank.

Giles knew he’d been there too long when he found himself humming
La Marseillaise
. Having concluded the money spent for the landlady’s information had been offered in vain, he was about to continue his search elsewhere when his attention fell on a brief disturbance with an old hag.

Like the rest of the occupants of the Sow’s Ear, he hadn’t been inclined to give her a second look—until a flash of blue caught his eye.

Despite the elaborate makeup, the ragged clothing, and the twisted voice, it was her eyes, sparkling with rage as she’d scrambled to her feet, that had stopped him.

This fire he knew, having felt its heat and seen those sapphire depths blaze with passion.

Such vibrancy couldn’t belong to a woman whose bones and haggard flesh looked older than the foundation of Notre Dame.

He shook his head in amazement that no one else in the room saw through her veneer. Why, she even mocked the
Fédérés
to their faces by begging coins from them. He clenched his teeth in anger at her for taking such risks.

He told himself he didn’t care what she did, it was just a professional issue. A good agent never took such outrageous chances. That was, assuming she was an agent.

Parading herself before the
ton
in the Parkers’ ballroom was one thing, but these pandering antics were insane, he thought, watching in amazement as a young soldier actually dropped a coin into her outstretched hand.

Giles wanted to laugh as much as he wanted to rattle some sense into her foolish and reckless disregard for subtlety. A good agent would use some degree of caution.

Her display raced headlong toward suicide.

Watching her make her way toward the door, he’d quickly tossed coins on the table to cover the price of his wine. He was of no mind to let her slip past him once again. But when he got outside he found the narrow street empty.

“Damn,” he’d cursed.

Even as the words burst from his lips, he spotted the flap of a brown cape whipping around a corner.

And he was off without a moment’s hesitation.

It had been a demanding chase though the narrow alleys and dark streets of the Croix Rouge and Fontaine de Grenelle sections. As they drew nearer the Seine the main streets widened, allowing a sliver of moonlight to filter down to the cobblestones.

Now, wary and curious, he found himself face to face with the Brazen Angel’s latest incarnation. Wary of the treachery she represented, and curious to strip away her camouflage to see if the same woman of fire kindled beneath.

His gaze sought to look beyond her layers of deception, yet her clever disguise once again concealed her true features, leaving him with his only solid memories of her— those of her satin touch and heady kisses.

He moved toward her slowly, sure any quick motion would frighten her away. He wouldn’t put it past the woman to be able to command the very air and elements to help her disappear before his eyes.

“Have you nothing to say, Lady Brazen?” he asked her in French.

“It is obvious, citizen, you have mistaken me for another,” she said, continuing her charade in the cracked voice of an old woman. “For it has been nigh on forty,
non
, fifty-some years since someone called me ‘brazen.’ But perhaps that is what you like, eh? A woman of some maturity, of some experience?”

He had to admit the coarse manners and country costume were perfect, right down to the large wart on her chin—so perfect that he started to doubt his earlier conviction that this could be the beautiful woman whose body so easily breached his defenses two weeks earlier in his study.