Viridian (The Hundred-Days Series Book 2) Page 5

  Olivia stayed hunched over the table, calico bandanna tied to her face like a fashionable highwayman. She shook her head at something, not him, and frowned. “Wonder about what?” she murmured through the cloth.

  He rose, taking the journal and a writing tray fanned with papers, moving to a sofa across from her and dropping to the cushions. Its frame creaked under his sudden impact, dust stars exploding up from the blue and gold damask upholstery.

  Sweeping a hand at the cloud, he tapped a page. “Just what a strange life he leads. His entire existence is waiting on someone else.”

  “Servants do that,” she murmured. “They wait on you.”

  “No. No,” he argued. “I mean actually waiting. Foot-tapping, yawn-inducing waiting.”

  There was a pop, then an alchemical whoosh, and all conversation paused.

  Olivia's table would have gotten her burned for witchcraft in another century. A nicked wooden pestle, two white stone mortars, and a silver tray of some powder in an unnatural shade of sickly green were neatly arranged to one side.

  Directly before her sat a collection of bottles which would have fit perfectly in a museum: a squat, square, red glass bottle; a blue, steep-shouldered one; the last one pink and nearly oval. They all bore some sort of silver charm. Red, a snarling hound. Blue, a winged demon nearly as tall as the container. Pink, a tangle of interlaced hearts pierced by tiny knives.

  He tensed, watching her tip some green powder onto the table cloth with a tiny silver spatula. Pinching a glass pipette, she added a single drop from the blue bottle. Ty flinched at foam, then smoke. He glanced from the concoction to Olivia's face for reassurance. A deepening vee to her brows was not reassuring.

  Poof! A small column of flame shot up and began licking at the cloth. He was half out of his seat by the time she finished smacking it out with a much-abused leather glove.

  Sighing, she got up and opened the door, fanning it a moment against the acrid, metallic stink. Falling back into her chair, she tugged her mask down, looking defeated. “What were you saying?”

  “God woman, I have no idea. I'm too preoccupied trying not to inhale. And wondering if you'll burn the house down while I sleep.”

  That coaxed a smile. “You're quite safe. For now.” She picked up one of his papers. “Now tell me again what you were saying. You have my undivided attention.”

  He leaned forward and laid the journal in her lap. “Beltran. What a strange life he leads.”

  She nodded slowly, taking the book and turning it over in her hands. “He has no family. His wife was killed in the massacre. Did you know that?”

  Of course, her own past was as tangled as Beltran’s with the monarchy and revolution. Her information made sense. Something in Beltran's writing left the impression of a man who was going through the motions because he had nothing else. It was a suspicion he’d had about Olivia too, from time to time. “No,” he answered finally. “I don't believe I knew a thing about him, except what he keeps in his log.” He tapped the journal still cradled on her lap. “He dusts and reads and takes his meals. Checks the locks and the flues. Comes and goes three times a week, and to where? Where does he go?”

  Olivia shrugged. “I suppose I'd never thought about that. Not any of it.”

  He met her wide eyes. “He may be France's most loyal subject.”

  She leaned in, interest piqued. “How so?”

  “What he does is trivial, really. Solitary by its nature and tedious as hell.”

  She nodded, seeming to understand. “But he has done it faithfully, every week for years.”

  “So he has, and why?” He smacked a balled fist into his palm, emphasizing an earlier point. “Because he is waiting. Maintaining his little square of France, keeping it tidy for his king. Only a man truly confident of victory would wash sheets every month for no one.”

  Olivia laughed, but she stared past him, thoughtful. “He may be the most dangerous man in France. Think of all he's seen.” She swept a hand around them, “All of the damning evidence to which he has access.”

  He winked. “Loyalty, Dimples.”

  Olivia cocked her head, catching his breath with a smile. “You mean the opportunity to throw someone off the garden wall, and refraining?”

  He laughed, throwing up his hands in defense. “No. I mean choking them with a powder instead of your fingers.”

  “Hm.” Her smiled brightened, then she scowled. “That sounds more like self-discipline.”

  No. Self-discipline was ignoring the curve of her cheek, the vague pout to her bottom lip. Self-discipline was how, when she looked at him and smiled, he could stare without blinking until the tension became a physical pull, but didn't. The feel of his hands, his lips on Olivia hadn't diminished with the passage of time.

  He jerked his gaze away, flicking at the papers in his writing tray for distraction.

  “Any success?” she asked, pointing to the mess.

  Olivia meant his foray into hidden writing in correspondence. He had spent the past two days mixing rose oil, waxes, potato starch, all manner of things, looking for some concoction that could be concealed, then revealed on demand. Thus far his luck had been thin. “Juice from lemons mixed with gin was the most promising. Unfortunately, I kept drinking my research.” He chuckled at her not-so-disapproving eye roll. “The only definite conclusion is that a great deal more study is warranted.”

  “I could not agree more.” She leveled a heavy pat to his leg and stood up. Producing a key from a deep pocket of her apron, she unlocked a tantalus on the mantle and pulled free one of its decanters. Popping out the stopper, she thrust the bottle into his hand, perching beside him.

  Sniffing the fumes wafting up from its open neck, Ty coughed and shook his head. “Miss Fletcher, it's barely three in the afternoon.”

  “Then we'll sip it.” She snatched the container back, putting the lie to her words with a deep swig. A peculiar look crossed her face, color burning her cheeks. For a moment she struggled, and Ty wondered if he should help, slap her on the back. She coughed at last, a long, raspy sound that might have been a lung deflating. She pressed the back of her wrist to her lips. “Whoo! It's Russian. Pace yourself.”

  “The same holds true for their women.” Jerking the bottle back, he set it on her worktable and scowled. “'Pace yourself'. Was that for my benefit, or yours?”

  “Very amusing,” she choked out, leaning forward to reclaim the spirits. He caught her with an arm and she frowned, falling back onto the sofa. Someone had to get ahold of her, though he wasn’t sure of being equal to the task.

  “I wonder, where did you pick up all these bad habits?” he mused, pushing the bottle farther away with the toe of his boot.

  She snorted, looking unrepentant. “My uncle can enlighten you.”

  He was well enough acquainted with Lord Portsmouth to know that the man would not indulge some of Olivia's more risqué behaviors. “I doubt you inherited a taste for vodka from your uncle.”

  “You are correct,” she slurred with a heavy nod. “He thoroughly discouraged it, along with many other things. If you would like a running tally of my vices, he is your man.”

  “You'll get no sympathy from me. I know for a fact the two of you get on just fine.” In his bare synopsis of Olivia, Grayfield had focused on Portsmouth's devotion to his niece and how they'd kept one another company through dark times.

  She stared down at her hands, voice thin and wistful. “We do now. Not so much in the beginning. Not,” she admitted, “that it was his fault.”

  “His wife had already died when you arrived, if I recall correctly.” Precisely how Olivia's uncle had come to claim her was a mystery. He'd also learned from Grayfield that Portsmouth had barely spared his niece from the guillotine. Olivia's parents had not been as lucky, victims of the mob.

  “Mm. She died the year before. His wife and sister in short order; Edward was so happy to have me, I think. To have some family left. The poor man had no idea what he was in for.”
<
br />   A widowed, middle-aged man and a teen-aged girl named Olivia sounded like a recipe for bedlam. “You were an obedient child, by your own telling. Was it really so bad?”

  Olivia nodded slowly, staring back into her past. “I was not a child anymore when my uncle came for me. Not in any sense of the word. A fourteen-year-old girl is a terrifying thing already. After imprisonment in La Force...” She trailed off, head shaking. “When I first came to England, I couldn't sleep in a bed. I tried never to stand with my back to a room, always pressed against a wall. For weeks, I needed to have my door locked, from the outside, to feel safe.” She pressed a hand to her chest, breathing faster a moment. “The sound of horse hooves outside, growing closer? To this day I still get goose flesh.”

  So many things suddenly became clear, things he'd taken for granted as part of Olivia's personality. How she was always the one to turn out the lamp at night, but only after he'd prompted a few times. Her willingness to cross the street, through an inch of muck and rain water to avoid certain kinds of people, even when he was sure she did not know them. It was funny, in a sad way. Olivia the civilian was intimidated by them; Olivia the spy would never so much as flinch.

  “At first, I would leave the house by deception, sometimes in the middle of the night. Once I was caught and forbidden to go out, I left by sheer, open defiance. The market theater, the docklands. Whitechapel. I was nabbed there at sixteen for pinching a gentleman's wallet.”

  Ty feigned shock; the information didn't surprise him at all. “A pickpocket!”

  Olivia shook her head. “No! That's what the constable thought, and why he chased me. I thought the gentleman was handsome and wanted to slip my handkerchief into his coat.”

  “Outrageous. I approve of your methods.”

  “Completely outrageous.” Her smile was sly. “But can you guess the gentleman? I forgot all about him over the years, but he did not forget about me.”

  Not a clue, Ty shook his head and waited.

  “Wealthy Mister Grayfield, of Mayfair. Veteran of India and newly-minted gentleman.” She blushed at the admission, deepening the color already staining her cheeks. “I was made to apologize and ask for my handkerchief back. He was painfully amused the whole time. He studied the initials, guessing the most horrible combinations of names until I gave up and confessed who I was.”

  Knowing Ethan as he did, Ty had no trouble following her thread. “And then you truly were deep in his pocket.”

  Olivia groaned. “In the worst way. When two years passed and my uncle still had no better hand on me, Grayfield asked him to bring me to Whitehall. I'm not certain what Edward imagined his fellow agent had in mind. I think he secretly hoped that marriage was in the cards. Instead, Grayfield told my uncle that he believed I had certain talents. With some discipline and a little polish, he thought I'd fare well in the family trade.” She waved a wry hand around the room, sweeping their papers, codes, and chemicals.

  He looked her over, considering all they had been through since meeting on the comte's estate. “He wasn't wrong.”

  One side of her mouth quirked up. “Uncle Edward was not so sure. First, he just looked shocked. Then he laughed, genuinely laughed in Grayfield's face. They had been friends for some time, so there were no hard feelings, but Edward wanted to know what discipline Ethan could manage over me, which he had not.”

  “And?”

  Olivia picked at her apron. “And, he didn't love me, not as Uncle Edward did. I could have run away a hundred times and a hundred times Edward would have let me back in. With Grayfield, if I disobeyed his instructions, disregarded even the color of gloves he'd told me to wear, he sent me away. No yelling, no pleading. Just ‘Miss Fletcher, I wish you a lovely afternoon’ and he would get back in his carriage and leave.”

  “He forged a very effective weapon,” assured Ty.

  “He did, and wisely. After La Force, it's what I was used to. He was a bridge between the brutality of prison and the discipline of our profession, something I hadn't realized I needed. From Ethan, I learned to trust and to respect my uncle's love, as silly as that may sound.”

  He leaned into her. “Not silly in the least. The only people who'd loved you till that point had left you. Your uncle must have seemed no different.”

  She returned the pressure against his shoulder. “No, at least not when I first came to live with him. I was never as grateful as I should have been for him saving me. He called in so many favors, along with the Duchess d'Angouleme.”

  He whistled, surprised by the information. The Duchess Therese was the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette. A legendary, if tragic, figure, and influential. “A good friend to have.”

  “My father was indispensable to the king, and my mother, despite being English, was a favorite of the queen. A friend, and she doted on little Therese until I came along.”

  “You knew Therese, even then?”

  “I have no memory of it. I cannot recall her friendship before we were all in England years later. She was like a sister. My uncle would take me up to Hart House – they would hardly ever come to London, obviously. The attention was too much. She is the last person alive besides Uncle Edward who has stories of my mother.”

  A strange bond, one he understood, being a soldier. Death, grief, and loss; it was left to the survivors to band together, comforting, even as they pushed one another forward. He sat beside her in silence, struggling for something to say. There was nothing so momentous in his past. Friends who had fallen in battle certainly, but that hardly felt the same. Finally, he leaned down, picked up the bottle and, after a sound swig, handed it back to her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Attorney,” said Olivia.

  Ty scrunched against the carriage's squabs and pulled his top hat farther down over his eyes. “You said the last one was an attorney.”

  “He was!”

  “He was not.” He rolled his head towards Olivia, who widened her eyes at his smug expression.

  “He was.” Arms crossed, she smirked. “I know of him.”

  “Oh.” Well I know a king. Nobody liked a showoff.

  Olivia doubled up laughing and went back to watching Madame Osipova's amors coming and going through their tiny carriage window. “I don't know him.”

  “Traitor!” He dug two fingers into the soft flesh above her hip and pinched until she yelped and slapped him away.

  “It's not my fault you're so easily taken in!” she said, rubbing her side. Smiling and panting, she fell back against the brown leather seats. “It's a wonder you've survived in this line of work, major.”

  “I've outlasted your efforts. That's good enough.” He settled farther back and stretched his boot into the foot well, tapping at her shoe to provoke a smile. She was determined to harass him today, and he was content to let her.

  “Hmm.” Olivia gave him a last dubious once-over and turned her attention back out the window. “She stays very busy.”

  He stifled a laugh at her earnest observation. “You don't sound impressed by her work ethic.”

  Olivia’s nose wrinkled. “I feel exhausted for her. Readying yourself for company once an afternoon is trying. Four or five times? And if you had to fully undress every time?” She shuddered. “Like Sisyphus.”

  The comparison strained his ribs. “Is it simply the fuss that you object to, or something else?”

  Her gaze was direct. “You mean the sex?”

  Her frankness caught him off guard, though it shouldn't have, knowing Olivia. He nodded, chuckling more at himself than at her. “Yes, I mean the sex.”

  “Oh.” She waved a hand. “No, not the act itself.”

  “Then what?”

  “I object to her doing, with approval and in comparatively palatial settings, what other women must do in the gutter, shunned. What is the difference? Because she has titled patrons, nicer lodgings?”

  “I'm not certain I follow.”

  “Prostitutes on the average street corner can't show their faces
at the mercantile to buy a comb. Osipova draws a crowd of hundreds every time she takes the stage. Both are whores, so what's the difference? If one woman may do as she pleases with her body, so may all women.” She shrugged. “If she wishes to give a man the use of her body for coin, and both parties leave satisfied...” Eyebrows lifted and she was silent.

  He had no idea Olivia had any opinions on the matter, let alone ones so decided, but Ty made a note to explore the issue again sometime. She was correct, however; their target of the moment enjoyed all sorts of benefits which her lower-class counterparts did not.

  Madame Alexandra Osipova, a pretty golden-haired, doe-eyed Russian ballet dancer, had been Minister Talleyrand's favorite mistress all winter. By his own accounts he believed their affair an exclusive one. The man must never have passed along her street or he would immediately have known better, by a string of rumpled, smiling men. Talleyrand's ardor might overflow, but his purse did not. Osipova took advantage of his power and influence, but she was shrewd enough to seek her income elsewhere.

  During three nights cleverly spent as back-of-house maid at the opera, Olivia had learned that Osipova's star was losing its shine. Talleyrand had trusted her with names and information, sometimes his private correspondence, knowing she would funnel it back to her Tsar while he stayed above suspicion. Correspondence of particular interest to him and Olivia, because Talleyrand was Joseph Fouche's adversary.

  If Osipova's sobbing collapse backstage a few days earlier were to be believed, Talleyrand wished to clear his things from her little confection of a townhouse and be on his way. Her conspicuous flirtation with an Austrian prince had left a bad taste in her lover's mouth.

  She had put Talleyrand off, running a campaign to change his mind with gifts and little notes, and bless her for it. She'd given Olivia enough time to cast a mold of the lacy silver key on her chatelaine before Talleyrand could collect his belongings.

  He stared at Alexandra's yellow door, considering something and how to ask it. Finally, he forged ahead, curious for Olivia’s answer. “Would you ever do it, paramour to a wealthy man?” He omitted 'men', as in Madame Osipova's case.