Judith Ivory (7 page)

Claybourne made him wait. “Busy,” a servant had announced. Adrien checked his watch: Three minutes past eleven. Then he resumed his pacing.

It had been dark when he had left the Chiswell house. He had taken the young woman home as soon as the doctor had finished with her arm. Then he had continued on to this place. The old minister’s message had been explicit: “Come at once.”

At once, indeed. Adrien checked his watch again. It was beginning to look as though he would see the sun rise as well as set before he was home in bed. The Old Man hadn’t changed a bit.

Adrien strolled, paced, drummed his fingers on the wall. He was in a small, dust-ridden room, empty of furnishings. The remote manor house to which he’d been directed in the note was deserted. Except for the certain presence of the old intriguer. The place reeked of his sense of drama. It was one of the few indulgences of a thoroughly disciplined man. Edward Claybourne loved to lend his unofficial doings a sinister atmosphere.
It had always aggravated Adrien and, at the same time, strangely charmed him that the old statesman should add such unnecessary trappings.

Adrien had made a neat path through the dust on the floor, turned for the hundredth trip across the room, when the servant who had let him in returned.

“Here.” The servant was an unusual creature. He was huge, perhaps seven feet tall. He gestured with a small lantern toward a dark hallway. Adrien followed.

The giant and his lantern led the way down a corridor to light coming from under a door. As the door opened, Adrien was surprised to find that Claybourne had, indeed, been busy. Another man, a stranger in a hurry, brushed by him.

“I’ll be with you in a moment.” A familiar, gravelly voice spoke from the corner of the room.

But the place, not the speaker, commanded Adrien’s attention. The room was a glowing tribute to Claybourne’s mood-mania. Only the far corner of the room seemed to have any light. A fire was crackling in the hearth there, but a large desk blocked much of the radiance it might have given to the rest of the room. Two small oil lamps burned brightly on the desk. Yet their light diffused quickly. They barely illuminated a settee that sat only several feet opposite the desk. The rest of the very large room fell into a limbo of flickering darkness, with only sheet-covered lumps—presumably furniture—populating the void in occasional bursts of dim firelight. Macbeth’s witches would have been happy here: a tiny corner stage playing to a vast audience of ghosts.

The director of this little drama was behind the desk, stirring papers, not caldrons. He motioned with a handful of them.

“Sit. I’ll chew you out after I have a look at you.” Yet he continued with whatever absorbed him on the desk.

Adrien came up to the back of the settee and stared
at the other man. It was instant déjà vu to see him in this setting. Edward Claybourne. English Minister of Foreign Affairs. Old Plotter. Old Man. Adrien had last worked for him three years ago in ’89.

Adrien’s young life had had a span in it when dissoluteness, sheer excess, had threatened to claim him. Then, one propitious night, Edward Claybourne had found him—being sick into the back pond of St. James Palace. “I’ve been watching you for months,” Claybourne told him. “I know everything about you.” Claybourne knew—and more importantly could speak neutrally about—the sordid details that had led Adrien there, to that night by the pond. And Adrien had rolled over onto his back in the grass, sick at heart, sick in mind and body, and listened. “What you need,” Claybourne told him, “is a sense of direction, a sense of purpose. I can give this to you.”

Adrien had first gone to France for Claybourne eleven years ago. He was sent over as a kind of unofficial diplomat. Under the old monarchy, Adrien’s mother’s family and friends were highly placed Frenchmen—from simply being raised in their midst, Adrien was on a first-name basis with French aristocratic power. This made Adrien, from the beginning, an excellent unofficial resource for those situations that didn’t lend themselves to more formal negotiations. But, eventually, Adrien became more: Claybourne liked it best when Adrien would hobnob with the purpose of accumulating subtle influence and privileged information. And Adrien had his own reasons for rebelling against the French, the culture that had loved and reared him.

Adrien found out quickly that he liked this sort of work. Claybourne had been right on that count. It was a challenge. A great game—which, on his own, Adrien made into a strange kind of balance sheet, a game of double-defection: He betrayed France by giving England confidential information. And sometimes, by not
telling Claybourne the whole truth when he chose, he betrayed England. By the end, he was a trusted confidant of both countries—a courier of secrets who played off what he could find out about one country against what he knew about the other. Adrien had once or twice come very close to getting caught, in both quarters. But this was all part of the almost suicidal pattern, the total apostasy Adrien had embraced in his early and mid-twenties.

And it was all before the Bastille—before a revolution had forced Adrien to reconsider, at the wrong end of a scythe, whether he truly wanted to live or die.

Adrien had run into Claybourne last week, briefly, at a very crowded party. Other than that, he hadn’t seen the man since the night Claybourne had met his boat in Dover, the night he had bent over his stretcher with the compassionate words, “Is it revolution? Will it reach the streets of Paris? Tell me quickly, before you die.”

Presently, the Old Man looked up across the desk. The same disquieting eyes. Small, black pistol balls lost in the folds and wrinkles of an ageless face. It was uncanny. The man always looked exactly the same. Neat, compact. Even the same manner of dress, white wig included, forever frozen in some style of the ’70s.

“Well, come around. I said I want to look at you. You hardly gave me a chance at the Haverings last week.”

Adrien obeyed.

The Old Man scrutinized him, up and down. He frowned, then spoke. “They said you’d recovered completely.”

“They?”

“How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

“You look awful.”

Adrien suppressed a laugh, somewhat unsuccessfully.

“Well, you do. You must have lost two stones. And your hair. Is that the fashion?”

“No.”

“Then why did you cut it off?”

“I didn’t. The doctors did. I got used to it, I suppose.”

“Well, I don’t like it. It looks—ostentatious.”

“It was less ostentatious when I tied it with a silk ribbon?”

Claybourne seemed without a reply. He stared a moment longer, then dismissed the issue by going back to the papers on the desk. He spoke without looking up.

“Well, it’s good you’ve come. I didn’t realize you were up and about again. It is high time we were in contact—”

“My dear Minister—”

And the old face came up like a shot. “Don’t use my name or title here. And I shan’t use yours.”

“What do you want?” As to his own new French activities, Adrien had decided he would wait to see what Claybourne knew before he waded into explanations and apologies. Then he would broach the subject of the vanished Frenchwoman-spy.

“I want you to sit down.” Claybourne gestured to the settee, then went back to the papers.

He sat as indicated, having to remind himself to be patient.

During their brief encounter at the Haverings, the week before, Claybourne had tried to interest Adrien in rejoining him this side of the Channel. Telling him there was a Frenchwoman in London posing as a countess, Claybourne had suggested Adrien help locate her, “to find out what she really wanted.” Adrien had declined. But the woman Claybourne had described—“posing as a French
émigré
and planning to meet some damned Englishman who seems to be helping French
aristos escape prison”—had sounded remarkably like the woman Adrien and his little rescue group were due to meet the very next afternoon—the woman for whom they had mistaken Christina Pinn. Adrien imagined Claybourne would now want to touch on this project again. If he wanted to stay on Claybourne’s good side, Adrien would have to listen patiently, politely, before bearing down on the issue of exactly who and where this damned Frenchwoman was.

The Old Man was in no hurry. He brought forth a quill and slashed a paper here and there with ink.

“The man who just left”—he gestured to the door with the feathery end of his pen—“said no one could find you.” He added, “The dolt. Where have you been? I expected you hours ago.”

“I had an errand.”

“I said I needed to see you immediately.”

“I came as quickly as I could—”

Claybourne sniffed at that. “You and I both know you went off to some woman’s house first.” Adrien opened his mouth to explain, then thought better of it. “Bad enough,” Claybourne continued, “you still cavort like you do. But to put me second to some quick spill of a woman’s skirts—”

“Edward, why don’t you tell me about France. I am sure that is more to the point of this meeting.”

Claybourne cleared his throat. “Well.” He went back to the papers on his desk. He seemed to find something there to smile at, a little glimmer of triumph. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Pardon?” Adrien shifted on the settee, bracing himself for the worst.

“France. It is nice this time of year, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I was so delighted to hear you’d gone back again.”

“You were?” That wasn’t the impression he had gotten the week before.

“Absolutely. I never thought you’d set foot on French soil after that incident in ’89.” He paused. “But then, you have relatives there.”

“Dead ones.”

Claybourne looked up. He set his quill down and sat back in the chair. “And one slightly foolish living one.”

“Ah.” Something made sense at least. A little.

Adrien’s grandfather, despite all efforts, could not be induced to leave the country where he was born. It was unfortunate. But Adrien half understood. The man was very old. His memory failed him at times. The familiar was his anchor to reality, to life itself. He
couldn’t
leave France.

“All right,” Adrien responded. “I have one. But he is not exactly the sort that would do your schemes any good.”

“Indeed.”

“He’s been ill.”

It was the first out-and-out lie. Something was cautioning Adrien. He could feel the old man’s mind pulling with all its energy at something so tangibly that he could almost imagine a vacuum being created in the room.

In reality, the door had opened. Several puffs of dust and cobwebs had rolled across the floor. And, Adrien noted, the colossus servant had entered.

The Old Man pushed away from the desk as he rose. He was not prone to pacing, yet he did two short tours to the fire and back before he caught himself. Hands behind him, he turned to face Adrien.

“Your going back on your own meant I could ask something of you. That, and of course seeing that you are so fit again. I want to send you into France. Old times.”

Adrien laughed. “Old times there are gone for good. They’ve hanged or decapitated most of the people I ever knew.”

“But there is a just cause—”

“I’m not much moved by causes. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Ah, yes.” The old mind seemed to reminisce. “‘All ideals drawing life from their own opposition.’ Am I right? Heraclitus, I believe.”

Adrien dropped his eyes. “I was very young when we started, Edward.”

“Yes.” Claybourne laughed. “The grim cynic of age twenty-three. Though you were an idealist of sorts.” He paused. Then he began afresh. “So. If you don’t want to appear idealistic now, perhaps a little revenge. French politics all but murdered you. Wouldn’t you like a little of your own back?”

“Not particularly. If I have any complaints, they are against fate, history.”

Claybourne laughed. “Still philosophical.” He shrugged. “But I think I can ignite your curiosity, as I always have.”

“I’m really not going to begin again, Edward. If this is the point of this meeting.”

The old minister turned his back, holding his hands out to the fire. “There must be something,” he spoke softly into the hearth, “that could convince you to venture, for just a short time, from your safe life?”

“No.”

Adrien received a quick look over the Old Man’s shoulder. It seemed a forewarning, a last chance to come along peacefully. He knew he was about to be pressured in some way. He wondered, briefly, if the giant at the door would be part of it.

He made a vague gesture in that direction. “Are my arms to be broken for me if I don’t comply?”

The Old Man looked genuinely surprised. “Gregory?” He frowned. “No. Gregory is here for
my
protection. And, of course, I wouldn’t want you to leave until I’ve had my say.”

“Are you going to need protection?”

The old minister turned slightly, cocking his old head in an obscurely amused manner. “Yes,” he announced, “I think I may.”

He made a deliberate show of turning to Adrien, as if now braved for a fuller confrontation. “Your life is safe,” he said, “but your grandfather leads a very dangerous life, don’t you think?”

“My grandfather is blessed with political acumen and blind luck. He’s in an absurdly safe position for a former nobleman in France.”

“His luck could change.”

“Could it?”

“I have it on the best authority.”

There was a brief moment before Adrien could ask, “What are you implying?”

The Old Man raised his brow and left the threat unspoken. He seemed to be savoring some better secret. Then, like a child in the knowledge of how secrets are most wonderful—in the telling—he went to the desk and dug into a side drawer. He produced a carved box. A humidor that Adrien recognized.

“Cigar?”

“No, thank you.”

“Give it up?”

“How did you get that?” The box belonged to the French grandfather.

“It was by his bed. But we’ll put it back. I promise.”

Adrien watched, puzzled at the foolish pranks of the English statesman. If this was more melodramatic “fun,” he found it to be in exceedingly poor taste.