Paris, 1820
Hawkes held a smoldering cheroot in one hand and the miniature
of the Earl of Brundage’s missing fiancée in the other.
He saw a pale oval face nimbused in dark curls. Light eyes. Head
coyly tipped. She could be any pretty girl anywhere. He’d
never once seen a miniature of a homely girl, or, say, of one
scowling and shaking her fist, which would have at least made
for a change. It could probably be ascribed to the tyranny of
commerce—no artist wanted to risk offending a paying customer
with accuracy. No one knew better than Hawkes that the biggest
lie people tell themselves is that they prefer to know the truth.
“I would like you to do that . . . thing you do so well,”
Brundage had said when he’d handed it to him.
Hawkes knew the unspoken word was “filthy.”
“It was painted when Aurelie was sixteen, I’m told,”
Brundage said. “She is now twenty-one. She of course looks
considerably more mature now. But I fear it’s the only one
in existence.”
“I imagine commissioning larger portraits was not among her
remaining family’s priorities,” Hawkes said absently.
The orgy of aristocrat killing known as the French Revolution
had divested the girl’s parents—members of the Condé
family of the French House of Bourbon—of their fortunes and
their heads when she was three years old. She’d been in the
care of a guardian
since. Somehow she’d wound up engaged to Brundage.
Lucky, lucky girl.
The wedding was meant to be a month from now here in Paris, or
so Brundage had just told him. And yet Lady Aurelie, who he’d
learned lived a stone’s throw away in rented lodgings with
her guardian, failed to turn up for Tuesday tea as had been her
custom with Brundage and hadn’t been seen since. That was
four days ago.
Hawkes didn’t lift his head from her miniature just yet.
The glints in the anteroom in which they sat—glaze on porcelain,
gilt on chair legs, the silvered surface of an outlandishly large
mirror—were like the stars one sees after a blow to the head.
He’d been released from prison less than a week ago. He somehow
hadn’t fully anticipated the sensory assault of freedom.
He’d received Brundage’s message two days ago: “I
need your help, and will pay handsomely for it.”
Brundage must have weighed all of his options and concluded only
Hawkes could do what he needed done. And Hawkes knew that meant
Brundage must be desperate, indeed.
The opportunity to witness this was what finally made him agree
to meet him.
The heat thrown off by the huge fire eased the ache in his shoulder.
This perversely filled him with a quiet, subterranean fury. That
ache was a souvenir of the only time he’d been unable to
fight back. Which was the only way anyone had ever gotten the
better of him.
He would rather endure another three years in prison than reveal
any weakness to the man in front of him. Brundage, he was certain,
would love to see evidence of a broken man.
“I was, of course, going to have her sit for a portrait once
we were married,” Brundage said.
Brundage had always been fond of the words “I” and “my.”
He liked to own; he liked to lord.
Hawkes looked up, finally. “The mirror is new, isn’t
it?” he said idly. “I don’t remember seeing it
in your office or home.”
Brundage smiled sympathetically. “I imagine it would seem
new to you. I acquired it last year.”
“Handsome piece,” Hawkes said admiringly. “Must
have cost the earth.”
Brundage hesitated, as he’d been compelled
to do after nearly everything Hawkes had said so far this evening.
“Playing deep again?” Hawkes suggested into the silence
with a sympathetic smile, on a bit of a hush, to imply he was
jesting.
He wasn’t. It had been a secret—from everyone except
Hawkes, from whom almost nothing was a secret—that the upright
Brundage recklessly wagered staggering amounts, accruing staggering
unpaid debts.
Debt which had magically disappeared before the war was over.
Another secret Hawkes had learned.
Brundage’s smile was small and did not reach his eyes. “I’ve
been fortunate in my investments, thanks to good advice from my
accounting firm.”
“Well. You always did know how to increase your fortunes,”
Hawkes agreed warmly.
Which caused another almost infinitesimal silence.
Hawkes had so far spent the evening making casual statements that
could be interpreted any number of ways, all of them calculated
to unsettle Brundage.
Hawkes was nearly destitute. He’d been obliged to surrender
the entirety of his own hard-won fortune to French authorities
before he went to prison—it was either that, or face execution
by firing squad. After all, “justice” was really another
word for commerce, something every man at the mercy of it eventually
learns. Brundage himself had skillfully negotiated these terms.
It was, in fact, the generally held view that Hawkes owed Brundage
his life.
Alas, Hawkes was unable to buy his way out of prison altogether,
and the French rebuffed formal attempts to ransom him.
It seemed it wasn’t every day they caught a
near legendary English spymaster.
~end of excerpt~
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