Authors: Charles Finch
“Thank God you did.” Lenox stood up. “Where would you have us go?”
“Neutral territory.”
“Oh?”
“I have an idea—my carriage is outside.”
“Should I trust you?” said Lenox.
Sournois glanced around the room, and saw, lying on Lenox’s desk, the ornamental dagger that the wali’s nephew had gifted to the prime minister. “Please, bring this. You may check my driver and me for weapons.”
“Very well.”
“But, sir!” said McEwan. “There’s Mr. Billings!”
Lenox, dressing now, looked down at Billings’s still body. “What do you think we should we do, McEwan?”
“He must be arrested—handed over to Mr. Carrow!”
“I quite agree. Bind his hands and legs and sit over him until I return, please. I’ll send word to the
Lucy
tonight.”
McEwan nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And have at those ginger biscuits while I’m gone, the ones Jane sent along with me. You’ve earned them.”
McEwan smiled. “Just as you say.”
Lenox went to him and looked him in the eyes. “Really, Mr. McEwan; shake my hand. I thank you, as does my family. When we return to England I will think of some way I can properly express my gratitude.”
“Thank—”
“But now I have to go.” Lenox took the dagger and nodded to Sournois.
A carriage was waiting in the shadows near the consulate, not far from the road. Feeling rather ridiculous, Lenox patted down its driver and then Sournois, and had them turn their pockets inside out.
“Are you satisfied?” said Sournois.
“Yes. Where are we going?”
“The water.”
“Can we not speak in the carriage, as we drive?”
“It will take several hours, I expect, our conversation. A carriage at this time of the evening is conspicuous, unless…”
“Yes?”
“Well, unless it carries a European gentleman bound for the pleasure boats. The floating brothels.”
“And that is where you mean to take us?”
“Yes, Mr. Lenox.”
“Very well.”
As they drove Lenox kept a hand on the dagger, but his thoughts kept wandering to Billings, to Billings’s manic face looming over his own in the half darkness. How close death had come again! If not for Sournois, for McEwan, for Butterworth—his mind was anxious and racing, still convinced of some imminent danger. He felt himself still trembling, every so often.
They came to the water soon, and found it busy and bright, a thousand lanterns from a hundred ships casting a flickering yellow warmth over the water.
There were small messenger boats, and for a few coppers Lenox asked one to take a note to the
Lucy,
which he scrawled out in great haste with pencil and paper bought from the boatman. In fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty, Carrow would receive the message that Billings was alive and in Port Said.
When this business was done Sournois hailed a pleasure bark floating nearby.
“No,” murmured Lenox. “Not this one.”
“You fear a trap?” asked the Frenchman in an urgent whisper. “Very well. We shall wait for the next one, then. But we wait separately.” He walked fifteen paces away from Lenox and lit a small cigar, his hat low and his cloak gathered up around his neck. It was chill out near the water.
The next pleasure bark passed by ten minutes later, and Sournois hailed this one with a flick of his hand in the air.
It pulled up alongside the dock and a gangway was flung out to meet them. A silent Egyptian waited on the deck.
First Sournois and then Lenox crossed onto the ship. Was he being foolish, he wondered? Or daring? He hoped it was daring.
The Egyptian held up a hand to halt them, then held up four fingers and pantomimed payment.
“I am surprised he does not speak English or French,” said Lenox, handing over the coin.
“The more expensive boats all call at this dock,” said Sournois, “and are all run by illiterate mutes. They cannot ask or answer questions. Many of the wali’s family come here, though it is forbidden them.”
The Egyptian led them into a small cabin, hung with lanterns and draped with red tapestries that cast a hedonistic crimson glow over the plain chairs and tables. Lenox, distinctly uneasy, took a seat.
After the Egyptian had gone for a few moments, he returned and beckoned them onward, through a small corridor; the ship was rocking unpleasantly, but they followed him. At the end of the hallway he pointed to two doors, then flashed ten fingers three times.
“Half an hour,” said Lenox.
Sournois removed a purse and counted out several pieces of silver. Then he pointed out to the sea, and flashed ten fingers ten times. Finally he pointed at the room they had come from, and beyond it the dock, and shook his head firmly.
The Egyptian grinned and nodded, and then left them, apparently, to their own devices.
“The women will be in that room, waiting for us to choose among them,” said Sournois. “I will speak to them. Wait in the smoking room, just there. Then we may converse.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
When Sournois came back into the room, Lenox asked him a question before he had even closed the door, hoping to catch the Frenchman off guard. “The British spies who died on French soil—does your government have more than a list of eight names?”
Sournois smiled and came to the small table, where he sat down. From an inner pocket of his jacket he produced a gold flask inlaid with three rubies. “My father was a modest man—a
petit fonctionnaire
, yes?—but when I received my offer to join the government, a very prestigious office, you understand, he took several months’ salary and commissioned this flask for me, as a present. Before I betray his pride I must have a drink, must I not?”
The dagger was in Lenox’s pocket, and he kept a hand around the hilt. He nodded. “Very well.”
There were glasses on a stand near the bed, and Sournois poured two glasses of dark liquid. Lenox hesitated until the other man drank his off, and then followed suit. It was a liqueur that tasted of apples, very strong.
“Thank you for drinking with me,” said Sournois. “Now, your question.”
“The eight names.”
Again Sournois reached into his pocket. “Here is the letter I received on the subject. Your officials may inspect the stamps and signatures for authenticity. You see, of course, that I have removed my name and offices from the document.”
Lenox took the pages and put them in his own breast pocket. “And?”
“My government killed your men, yes. What’s more, we have a list of sixty-five other gentlemen we know to be in the secret employ of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. Should any of them set foot in France, their lives would be forfeit.”
Lenox’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “Sixty-five,” he repeated. Remarkable news that: It meant that if this trip achieved nothing else, it had protected these men.
“The money you have paid me, perhaps it will buy their safety back. That is some comfort—to spare unnecessary suffering, all the pink-cheeked English girls who would have lost their fathers.” Sournois laughed, and took a sip straight from his flask.
“Does this mean war?”
“At the moment my government is fiercely protective of its rights. You fear war, I know, but so do we. What would you do if you discovered French spies in London and Manchester?”
“I cannot say.”
“You would not hear, whether or not you are in Parliament, I venture to say.”
“Perhaps not. But are your fleets readying themselves? Your armies?”
“Of course. They can scarcely do otherwise, can they? And yet, we may buy peace yet, you and I.”
“What do you mean?”
Sournois drank again. “Are you curious about my finger?”
“No.”
“Most men are. This same father, who gave me the flask, took my finger away.”
“How?”
“When I was nineteen I was a handsome boy, and the daughter of a great merchant in my hometown, Lille, wanted to marry me. But I had a different idea. She was plump and had … like this, you see,” he said, pulling his mustache. “Hair. So I ran off with my true love, a postman’s daughter. Penniless.”
“Your father took your finger for it?”
“When we returned to Lille he took me out for a glass of wine. He was already drunk, you understand. Our conversation began amiably enough, but when we began to discuss my marriage he grew angry, very angry. Violent. I stood, and he pushed me back into a bookshelf. There was a sword on the shelf, his father’s sword, a man who fought with Napoleon, and the sword took my finger off—
fftt
—just below the knuckle. Cleanly. Do you know why I tell you this story?”
The ship bobbed in the water gently, and from the next room there was a burst of women’s laughter. Lenox’s grip on the hilt of the dagger tightened again, his unease back. “Why?”
“It is more intelligent to marry for money than love, Mr. Lenox. Our countries must share a financial interest.”
Lenox understood. “You mean Egypt. The Suez.”
Sournois nodded. “Precisely. Egypt. The Suez.”
Neither man spoke for a moment, and then Lenox said. “Very well. There are more questions.”
“Of course.”
For the next two hours Lenox asked all the questions that his brother had told him to, mixing in some of his own, and Sournois dutifully answered, once even producing another piece of documentary evidence. Troop numbers, strength, movement. France’s own spies within England. Information about the men who formed the French government, their martial or pacific inclinations, and private inclinations too, that might be used against them. Sournois told Lenox all of it, in between sips from his gold flask. The price paid to him must have been very steep indeed.
Again and again, however, he stressed that France did not desire war—that
he
did not desire war. Lenox remained impassive in the face of these declarations, though inwardly he agreed.
All of this information Lenox wrote in a shorthand he had used since school, and which he and his brother had both agreed would be relatively difficult to decipher should it be seen by the wrong pair of eyes.
When he had gone through all of Edmund’s questions and taken a sheaf of notes for himself, Lenox checked his watch. It was past four in the morning. His attention had been focused so firmly on this task—and on its uncertain execution—that he had pushed Billings almost entirely out of his mind. Yet he could still, if he stopped thinking for a moment, feel the knife at his throat. He took a deep breath.
“All is well?” said Sournois, looking genuinely concerned.
“Oh, quite well, thank you. Is there anything else?”
“You have had it all.”
“We will leave, then. Separately I think.”
“Of course.”
“Where do your men think you are, if they know you’re gone?”
Sournois laughed. “Here. I have been making a point of visiting the pleasure boats every evening. I am perhaps later than usual, but not much so.”
“Very well.”
Sournois stood and offered his hand. “We will not see each other again, Mr. Lenox, and yet I will scarcely be able to forget you.”
They shook hands and Sournois left. Lenox spent ten minutes tidying his notes, rewriting them in places, and then felt the boat begin to slow, and finally to stop. There was a voice on deck, and then the boat began to move again.
As he left the room he caught a glimpse of a roomful of six women, garishly painted, sipping mint tea and speaking to each other in bored voices. There were brothels in London, he knew—innumerable ones—and yet he felt shocked, to see these women, and in some measure as if Africa was responsible. Nonsense, and yet he could not persuade himself otherwise. He wanted to be back in Mayfair suddenly, and then laughed at the desire. How much pride the English took in their empire, and how little they understood its alien ways, its strange, disconcerting newness!
On deck the mute Egyptian was smoking a European cigar. He nodded when Lenox appeared and then left him alone, vanishing into one of the boat’s many small rooms.
It was still dark but a pale blue light had begun to rise on the edges of the horizon, pure and deep in color, heralding the day. There was a thin rain beating down, and from the deck Lenox caught a glimpse of Sournois, walking down the small dock where they had left him and toward a beach covered with upturned fishing boats. A great swell of some unnameable feeling—melancholy, perhaps, or homesickness, a longing for Jane—filled Lenox’s breast. He turned and stared at the lightening sky, his gaze there steady until they were back at the docks.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Though it was scarcely half past five, the docks were as busy as midday in Portsmouth. Lenox thought of what Sournois had said about the Suez as a possible broker of peace between France and England.
He hired one of the donkey carts that lingered around the wharf to fetch him back to the consul’s house.
When he arrived there were lights in every window and the noise of loud conversations within. He knocked at the door and the butler admitted him.
“Sir, your presence is requested in—”
“There you are, Lenox!” said a man behind him. It was Carrow, his face anxious. “Where in Christendom can you have been?”
Lenox froze, trying to think of a reasonable explanation. “I … didn’t McEwan tell you?”
“He did, and I asked him how could you possibly have been with friends at this hour. Where were you really?”
“McEwan was quite right. With friends.”
Carrow threw up his hands in frustration. “So a madman tries to murder you in your sleep and after escaping with your neck intact, just, you decide to visit with friends? At midnight? For five hours? One might question your judgment.”
“These friends keep late hours. Egyptians, you see. I was working on behalf of Her Majesty.”
These were the magic words apparently. “Oh.”
“In my note I asked you to send someone at eight o’clock, to fetch Billings.”
Carrow smiled grimly. “Well, you have eighteen of us.”
“Where is he?”
The butler, who looked very much like a man who had been woken at irregular intervals throughout the night, answered. “Mr. Billings is secured in the kitchens, under watch.”