The Mask of Night

I hope this finds you safely returned to Spain. I fear that with everything we went through, I never properly expressed my thanks. There is so much that must remain unspoken. But please, please believe that I will never forget what you have done for me. Despite the circumstances, I am glad we had the chance to become friends.

Hortense Bonaparte to Mélanie Lescaut,

1 November 1811

Charles slammed into the floorboards and heard Roth hit the ground. By the time he pushed himself to his feet, their assailant was climbing through the open window at the end of the passage. They reached the window in time to see a greatcoated figure dart out of the alley into Rosemary Lane. Too late to give chase. He’d be lost in the crowd and they hadn’t seen enough to identify him.

Roth leaned against the wall, handkerchief pressed to his nose which was streaming blood. “I don’t know whether to be relieved or sorry that Mrs. Fraser didn’t accompany us.”

“Relieved because she didn’t see the two of us bested by a single man or sorry because if she’d been here it might not have happened?”

“Precisely.”

“Are you all right?” Hapgood’s voice came up the stairwell followed shortly by Hapgood himself. The cat trotted behind him.

“There was someone in Montford’s room,” Charles said. “You didn’t know he was there?”

“If I had known of it, surely I’d either have warned you or attempted to delay you, assuming I was the man’s confederate. He escaped?”

“Out the window,” Charles said. “Not our most shining moment.”

“Are you injured?” Hapgood asked with unexpected crispness.

“Only bruises and a bloody nose,” Roth said, voice muffled by the handkerchief.

“And the damage to our pride.” Charles looked out the window again. “Mud on the side of the building. That didn’t come from his escape—he jumped. So it looks as if he climbed in. I doubt he’s your confederate, Hapgood, unless you’re singularly inhospitable to your confederates. You’d better see if you think anything from taken from Montford’s room.”

Charles stepped through the open doorway into a room filled with the smell of citrus and sandalwood and some sort spice. Cloves perhaps or cardamom. Blended with a subtlety that indicated expense. A lamp had been left lit on the chest of drawers. The room was scrupulously neat save for the writing table drawer, which had been pulled from its tracks and set on the tabletop. A search by a professional, interrupted in midstream.

Hapgood entered the room after Charles and surveyed the scene. “I can’t swear to what might be missing from his personal effects. The room looks as I remember. But I was only in here once.” He glanced at the drawer that had been removed from the desk. “Do you think whoever searched the house is likely to come back? There’s a very pleasant young woman who rents the room across the hall. Sings at the King’s Theatre. Lovely voice. I don’t like to think of any harm coming to her.”

“I’d advise you to use extra caution in locking up,” Roth said. “And to warn the young lady. I can assign a patrol to keep watch on the house.”

“I’m obliged to you.” Hapgood scooped up the cat who had jumped up on the bed and was kneading the blanket. “If I can’t be of further service, I’d best return to the shop. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I do have customers every now and again.”

Charles surveyed the room, his wife’s description of St. Juste’s rooms in Paris fresh in his mind. The trunk at the foot of the bed and the shaving kit on the chest of drawers might be the same St. Juste had had then. The leather looked to be good quality but mellowed with age. “How’s your nose?” he asked Roth.

Roth took the handkerchief away from his face. “Seems to have stopped bleeding.” He stared at the bloodstained handkerchief for a moment, then stuffed it into his greatcoat pocket.

“Papers or clothes?” Charles asked.

“I’ll take the papers.” Roth struck a flint to the taper on the writing table. The clean smell and pristine white indicated beeswax rather than tallow. It had not been poverty that had sent St. Juste/Montford to Rosemary Lane.

Charles opened the doors of the wardrobe. The garments that first met his eye spoke of Mr. Montford the former-tutor-in-search-of-employment. Coats of sturdy, slightly scratchy wool, well made but several years out of date, cut for comfort more than fashion. A single greatcoat, beginning to wear through at the elbows.

‘St. Juste knew the value of dressing for a part,’ Charles said. “Anything in the writing desk?”

“A couple of letters from a Timothy Compton at Cambridge, telling Montford he’d never have been able to keep his head above water at university without the excellent preparation. St. Juste seems to have been a bit of an egotist even in his forgeries. Very adroitly done, though. There’s even a bit in Latin. Typical sort of undergraduate blather. At least what I’ve always assumed to be typical undergraduate blather.”

“Self-consciously clever and convinced one has attained great maturity? It sounds like it. Anything else?”

“Another letter from Aunt Mathilda in Shropshire detailing his cousin Susan’s lying-in and cautioning him not to catch a chill in the dreadful London damp. Pens, ink, pen knife, writing paper. I’ll try the chest of drawers.”

Charles carried the lamp over to the trunk. He lifted the lid to release a faint scent of lavender. Clean, starched shirts, neckcloths, drawers with frayed seams. Waistcoats that were beginning to fade, one with cracked buttons, another with a torn lining. The trunk did not seem as deep as one might expect. Charles ran his fingers over the lining. The bottom snapped away.

In the hidden compartment beneath were the possessions of Julien St. Juste, agent for hire. Coats of cassimere and superfine, a greatcoat of merino wool with a velvet collar. “Our friend’s been in Paris, and recently, judging by the cut of his coats and the lack of wear,’ Charles said.

Beneath the clothes he found a box containing spirit gum and false moustaches, side whiskers, and beards. Crimson silk cords. He stared at them for a moment, images of his wife impossible to ignore.

He turned his attention to a collection of medals belonging to several foreign countries, probably forgeries but too expert for him to be sure in the meager lamp light. A pistol and powder bag. Knives of varying lengths. Pouches containing a variety of dried powders. One seemed to be some sort of opium derivative. The other two were odorless. He pocketed them for Mélanie to examine.

Something lay coiled in the corner beneath the bags. A length of ribbon in peacock blue silk, torn at one end. For a moment, the blood stilled in his veins. He ripped a seam in the side of my gown and tore off one of the knots of ribbon. That didn’t necessarily prove it had come from the gown Mélanie had worn in Paris ten years ago. She’d said St. Juste had been fond of blue and from all accounts he’d had a list of paramours to rival Don Giovanni’s. And yet— He held the ribbon to the lamp. He saw Mélanie the night he’d proposed to her in Lisbon, her hand gripping the metal balcony railing, the peacock blue stuff of her gown catching the light of the moon. Mélanie was clever about remaking her dresses. He’d lay odds the gown she’d worn in Lisbon was the one from Paris three years before. He could see it clearly. The sparkling beads round the square neck. The drape of fabric across the bodice. The knots of ribbon at the shoulders. One no doubt replaced after St. Juste had ripped off the original.

He coiled the ribbon back up and put it in his pocket with the powders. The ribbon and its implications could be examined later. Still no sign of papers. He ran his fingers over the lining of the false bottom and at last felt a telltale crinkle. He tugged at the silk lining and it came away in his fingers, loosely tacked to the frame of the trunk. Too loosely. Had the man whose search they’d interrupted been here before them?

If so, he hadn’t taken his discoveries with him. Beneath the lining was a stack of papers. “If you’re finished with the chest of drawers, come take a look at these,” Charles said, carrying the papers and the lamp over to the writing desk.

“So far my most interesting discovery is a bottle of excellent cognac.” Roth joined him at the writing desk. The loose sheets of paper were creased as though they’d been much folded. Charles spread the first out. A jumble of characters met his gaze, block capitals grouped together with the odd number thrown in.

‘Can you break it?’ Roth asked. This was not the first time he and Charles had examined a code together.

‘Not without a great deal of work.” Charles flipped through the pages. More coded symbols, written in at least four different hands. ‘And I suspect it’s a book code, which means we’ve precious little chance of breaking it without the book or books.’

‘There are a few books here—Latin and Greek mostly. The sort a tutor might have.’

‘We’d best take them with us.” Charles continued to flip through the papers. All were in code, until at the bottom he found what appeared to be a laundry list—shirts, handkerchiefs, sheets, pillowcases—written in yet another hand, fastened with a metal clip to several more sheets of paper. The laundry list had been torn four ways across and then glued together.

‘What the devil—’ Roth said.

‘Rescued from a waste basket,’ Charles said. ‘Spies are constantly sorting through debris. In Vienna, agents for almost every country spent hours piecing together the contents of diplomatic wastebaskets. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to decode papers that turned out to be no more than a bill from the bootmaker’s or a menu for a dinner party. But if St. Juste saved this—’

He removed the clip, carefully, so as not to damage the glued pieces, and examined the papers beneath. The contents of the laundry list had been copied onto the first paper. Beside it were a series of jottings which Charles recognized as the notes of someone struggling to decipher a code. A rough table was sketched on the next paper. On the third paper, each line of the laundry list had been transformed into a place name and date. Lancaster, 3 November; Long Eaton, 11 November; Nottingham, 8 December; Clitheroe, 14 December; Rochdale, 22 December.

‘Apparently St. Juste decoded this,’ Charles said. ‘And thought it important. The question is why?’

Mélanie descended the steps of the St. Ives house, the image of her first meeting with Oliver and Isobel Lydgate imprinted on her memory. A sun-splashed parlor, Isobel with their daughter in her arms, Oliver with their son on his shoulders. She had known a shock of unfamiliar longing at Isobel and Oliver’s easy camaraderie, Isobel’s complete assurance of who she was and where she belonged. Only a fortnight ago she had gone with Isobel to choose hangings for the masquerade, sat in Isobel’s sitting room writing out cards of invitation, poured over menus spread out on her gilded escritoire. Last week they had gone to the dressmaker together for a final fitting of their gowns. Last night she had stood beside Isobel in the cold garden, looking down at the floating form of the dead man who was probably Isobel’s lover. And never guessed.

She stopped, gripping her skirt taut against the wind, and glanced at the watch pinned to the bodice of her pelisse. Only a quarter hour until her meeting with Hortense. She cut through a mews and a garden with a conveniently unlatched gate, doubled back along Charles Street to make sure she wasn’t being followed, and then made her way along Piccadilly and into Hyde Park through the Stanhope Gate.

Three o’clock was well after the crush of morning riders and before the late afternoon promenade. On a gray, drizzly day, the park was almost deserted. She zigzagged along the gravel paths to the Grosvenor Gate. A slate blue carriage with a pair of bays was drawn up just inside the gate. Mélanie waited until a brewer’s dray blocked the view from across the street and then approached the carriage.

The coachman sprang down and lowered the steps. As he opened the carriage door, Hortense leaned forward, the veil thrown back from her high-crowned bonnet. ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘I knew I could depend upon you.’

The coachman handed Mélanie into the carriage and closed the door, encasing them in the smell of supple, oiled leather and the soft glow of the interior lamps.

The carriage creaked as the coachman swung onto the box and gave the horses their office. ‘I told him to drive round so we’ll attract less notice,’ Hortense said.

‘You’ve remembered.’

‘I may be an amateur compared to you, but I’m not a novice at intrigue any more.” Hortense gripped her gloved hands tight together. ‘Have you learned anything?’

‘A number of things, though it’s difficult to make sense of them. Hortense, when did you last hear from Raoul?’

Hortense’s blue eyes widened. ‘At Christmas. He sent a gift for the boys. He always does. Is M. O’Rourke—’

‘Apparently he was at the ball.’

‘You saw him?’

‘No. The popular theory is that he was there to meet St. Juste. They appear to have been working together.’

‘Mon Dieu, to do what?’

‘We don’t know. Raoul’s got links to revolutionaries in Ireland, to those who opposed the monarchy in Spain, to former Bonapartists in France—’

‘Oh, no.” Hortense inched back against the squabs. ‘If I knew of any plot— Dear God, I’m not sure I would tell you. But I don’t know of any such thing, Mélanie. I swear it. Do you believe me?’

‘Very nearly.’

Hortense gave a quick smile. ‘Thank you. From you, that’s quite an admission of trust.’

‘But just because you haven’t heard of a Bonapartist plot doesn’t mean there isn’t one,’ Mélanie said.

‘M. O’Roarke hasn’t contacted you?’

‘Not since last autumn.” Mélanie shifted her position, trying to get a better view of Hortense’s face in the dimly lit carriage. ‘Before all hell broke loose last night you were going to tell me what brought you to England.’

Hortense plucked at her skirt. The fabric had a sheen that caught the lamplight, while her face remained in shadow. ‘Julien St. Juste came to see me in Arenberg two months ago.’

Mélanie stared across the carriage at the friend—a far older friend than Isobel Lydgate—she had just said she trusted. ‘What?‘

‘Don’t look at me like that, Mélanie, I lied to you last night about having seen him, but it’s not what you’re thinking.’

‘Go on.’

‘I hadn’t heard from him since Maman died, and that was only a brief note of sympathy—written in code on the flyleaf of a book. But two months ago I was walking in the garden and he suddenly appeared beside me, dressed as a gardener, with gray hair and a beard and I’d swear a good three inches off his height. He said he’d come to warn me.’

‘About?’

Hortense lifted her gaze to Mélanie’s face. Even in the shadows, her eyes were haunted. ‘He said he was about to embark on a mission that might prove more dangerous than usual, and he felt impelled to clear his conscience first. I know it’s absurd to think of St. Juste having a conscience, but the way he said it I found myself believing him.’

‘He had that knack. Clear his conscience about what?’

‘He’d undertaken assignments for the British. You know that. He always worked for the highest bidder. Apparently during one of these assignments, certain papers had fallen into the hands of a Lord Carfax. He’s—’

‘England’s spymaster. Papers about what?’ Mélanie asked, though from the fear in Hortense’s eyes she was quite certain she knew.

‘About Saint-Maurice-en-Valais eight years ago,’ Hortense said.