Chapter 7: : Chapter 6

Charles caught Francisco beneath the arms before he could collapse on the ground and take Mélanie with him. A second gunshot ricocheted off the paving stones. A sliver of rock hit him in the leg. He dragged Francisco into the shadows of the staircase. Mélanie followed.

Charles sank to his knees, supporting his wounded friend. His hands were sticky with the blood spurting from the wound in Francisco’s back. Mélanie gave him her shawl and he bunched it up against the wound, but Francisco shook his head.

‘ ‘Not so deep as a well.’ Isn’t that what you’d say, Fraser? ‘ ‘Tis enough, ’twill serve.’ All too damn well.’

‘Don’t try to talk,’ Charles said. He could feel the blood leaching through the cashmere of Mélanie’s shawl.

‘Have to.’ Francisco’s voice shook with insistence. ‘Not much time. Manon. Covent Garden—find her—before they do. Promise.’

‘Of course,’ Mélanie said. She was holding Francisco’s hand.

‘Le Lion d’Or—in the morning—seven o’clock. Said I’d meet her.’

Mélanie glanced at Charles. Le Lion d’Or was a coffeehouse near Covent Garden. ‘We’ll be there.’ She leaned forward and brushed her lips over Francisco’s own.

Francisco released her hand and reached up toward his neck. His arm collapsed on the paving stones as though he didn’t have the strength to lift it. He gave a hoarse curse.

Mélanie unknotted his neckcloth with quick, gentle fingers and pushed back his shirt collar. She reached inside his shirt, carefully so as not to brush against his wound, and drew out a handful of papers.

Francisco’s eyes glinted in the shadows, coin-bright with relief. ‘Important.’

‘We’ll take good care of them,’ Charles said. Blood seeped between his fingers, and he could feel the spreading chill in his friend’s body.

‘Listen.’ Francisco grabbed hold of Charles’s neckcloth and pulled his face close to his own. ‘Els—’ The word was swallowed by a cough. Blood dripped from his mouth.

‘Else? Something else?’ Charles said.

‘Elsinore. League.’

‘Elsinore League?’

‘Have to stop them.’ Charles’s shirt collar bit into his skin under the force of Francisco’s grip. ‘Before they kill again.’

Charles searched his friend’s pain-twisted face. ‘But—’

‘It all comes down to honor…’ Francisco’s grip on Charles’s neckcloth tightened like a vise, then went slack. His head fell back against Charles’s arm. The brilliant, reckless light fled from his eyes.

Charles put his fingers to Francisco’s throat and then to his wrist, but he felt no pulse. He looked up at Mélanie. Her eyes were like dark glass. She nodded.

Charles looked beyond the shadows to where moonlight slanted against the paving stones and swept over the stairs above them in a cool, all-too-bright wash. No sound save for the lapping of the water, but old instincts, honed in the Spanish mountains, told him they were being watched.

He lowered Francisco’s body to the paving stones. ‘I’ll draw the sniper’s fire. He’ll have to reload. That should give us at least thirty seconds to get to the top of the stairs.’

Mélanie touched her fingers to her lips and brushed them over Francisco’s forehead. Charles closed his friend’s eyes and squeezed Francisco’s cold hand for the final time.

He stepped into the light, angling his body so it made the smallest possible target, then sprang back just as a bullet struck the stone where he had been standing. He caught Mélanie by the wrist and they raced up the stairs, shoes scrabbling over the crumbling stone. As they reached the top of the stairs, a bullet whizzed by his shoulder, so close he could feel the vibration through his coat. He fell back against the wall at the top of the stairs, shielding Mélanie with his body.

‘That wasn’t thirty seconds,’ she said.

‘No. Whoever he is, he has a rifleman’s skill at reloading.’

They inched along the wall and rounded the corner. Out of range of the sniper. The moonlight picked out the gates of Somerset Place. They ran toward them. A whistle sounded from behind, where the gunman must still lurk. The report of a rifle echoed through the cold air in front of them. Pain stabbed through his left arm.

He kept running through the gates into the bustle of the Strand before he stopped to lean against the wall of a shuttered shop and draw a breath. ‘My apologies. I didn’t reckon on a second gunman. Weren’t you saying it would feel like old times if you could dig a bullet out of me?’

‘Don’t overdramatize, Charles, the shot only winged you.’ Mélanie pushed back his greatcoat. ‘At this rate I’m going to run out of handkerchiefs,’ she said, knotting one round his arm. ‘Try not to move it too much.’

‘Right.’ He tugged his greatcoat over his shoulders and winced at the stab of pain. ‘If we have to do any brawling I’ll leave it to you.’

Even the boldest assassin should know better than to risk gunfire in the crowded precincts of the Strand, but he cast a cautious glance up and down the street. Then he wrapped his good arm round Mélanie and they made their way back through the crowds toward Tavistock Street, taking two detours to ensure they weren’t followed.

Randall was waiting where they had left him with the carriage. He jumped down from the box at their approach, let down the steps, and opened the door, his face schooled not to ask questions. Bless the man. He was getting a taste of life in the Fraser household sooner than Charles had bargained. ‘Don’t move the carriage yet,’ Charles said. ‘We may not be going home directly.’ He unhooked one of the carriage lamps and climbed in after Mélanie.

Harsh breathing filled the carriage as he closed the door. He couldn’t separate Mélanie’s breath from his own. He put his hand over his face and realized he was shaking.

Mélanie reached up and wrapped her fingers round his own. ‘I thought we’d seen the last of our friends killed.’ She drew his hand down to the seat between them. ‘I keep remembering Francisco tossing Colin up on his shoulders. Those bastards.’

‘Quite. The question would seem to be which particular bastards this time.’ He drew a breath, suppressed the impulse to smash something, and steadied his grip on the lamp. ‘Let’s look at the papers.’

Mélanie pulled the papers from the bodice of her gown. Two sheets of foolscap, spattered with blood but mostly legible. Two sets of writing, one neat and even, the other a flowing scrawl. Neither appeared to be Francisco’s hand. Especially as Charles didn’t think his friend had been familiar with ancient Greek.

‘Your Greek’s better than mine,’ Mélanie said, ‘but it looks like a code.’

‘It is.’ Charles peered at the letters in the flickering lamplight while he did automatic calculations.

‘We can’t go home before we meet Francisco’s friend,’ Mélanie said. ‘They may be watching the house.’

Charles opened the carriage door and handed the lamp to Randall. ‘The Albany.’

‘David and Simon will think we’re mad,’ Mélanie said as they pulled away from the curb.

‘David and Simon have been convinced I’m mad for years. But we can trust them.’ David had shared rooms with Simon Tanner since they came down from Oxford. Unofficially, they shared a great deal more, a circumstance to which David’s family turned a blind eye, though maintaining the polite fiction grew more difficult as the years passed without David marrying and producing an heir to the earldom he would one day inherit.

‘Charles, this is London,’ Mélanie said. ‘Not Burgos or Salamanca or Vitoria in the middle of the war, with the British and the French and God knows how many Spanish factions at each other’s throats. A sniper killed one of our friends and shot at us in the middle of the city in peacetime.’

And not just any city. The city that was now home. The city he’d brought his wife and children to, thinking it was safe. God help him, last night he’d actually relished the call of adventure. Guilt welled up on his tongue, sour as spoiled milk. ‘And the sniper had a second gunman in place in case they lost their quarry,’ he said. ‘Which argues money. And power.’

‘And desperation. Whatever they were trying to conceal was worth considerable risk. To themselves as well as us.’

He stared at the yellow glow of the streetlamps through the carriage window. ‘If I’d known—’

‘We couldn’t have done anything differently, Charles. Francisco chose the meeting place. Unless we’ve both lost any instinct for avoiding pursuit, we weren’t followed. Someone must have followed him. Or got wind of it some other way.’

‘Save your cosseting for the children, Mel.’ Her sweet reasonableness grated on the guilty, dark core inside him, rubbing raw places he had never let her glimpse. ‘I’m old enough to live with my mistakes.’

She drew a breath that had a harsh rasp to it. ‘If there’s blame to go round, I’m just as much to blame as you.’

‘No sense in wallowing.’ He locked his hands together. ‘They didn’t just want Francisco. They wanted whatever he might have told us. Whatever’s in those papers.’

Mélanie turned her head to look at him. ‘Do the words Elsinore League mean anything to you?’

‘Other than echoes of a corrupt court in Renaissance Denmark? No.’

Randall turned the carriage into the forecourt of the Albany. Charles had had bachelor chambers in the Palladian building himself in a brief interval between Oxford and Lisbon. The sight of the brown-brick walls slapped him in the face with the memory of one of his greatest failures. He swallowed the bitterness and handed Mélanie from the carriage.

Simon Tanner opened the door of his and David’s flat, evening coat rumpled, neckcloth gone, shirt open at the neck. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said, steadying his grip on the lamp he carried. ‘I knew things had been quiet for too long. What is it this time, politics or family?’

‘Politics, as best we can tell.’ Mélanie stepped into the shadowy entrance hall and smiled at David, who stood behind Simon, as meticulously dressed as if he was at the start of the evening rather than the end of it.

‘Sorry for the late hour,’ Charles said, ‘but we have to be at Covent Garden at seven and it isn’t safe for us to go home first.’

David’s gaze swept over them as they moved into the light of the entryway. ‘My God, what have you done to yourselves?’

‘Grown careless in our old age,’ Charles said.

‘But—’

Mélanie glanced down at her gown. ‘Most of the blood isn’t ours.’

David regarded Charles with the misgivings of one who’d known him since boyhood. ‘You’re hurt.’

‘No,’ said Charles.

‘Yes,’ said Mélanie, ‘but it’s not serious. I need lint and alcohol, a good light, and someone to make Charles hold still.’

David went down the corridor in search of medical supplies while Simon led the way to the book-strewn sitting room. He went straight to the drinks table and poured two whiskies. ‘We just got back ourselves,’ he said. ‘I dragged David to the Tavistock to make sure the actors weren’t mangling my dialogue too atrociously and then we had a late supper at the Piazza.’ He pressed the whiskies into Charles’s and Mélanie’s hands. ‘Wait till David returns for the story. No sense in telling it twice.’

Charles curved his fingers round the glass, relieved to find that his hands had stopped shaking. Mélanie took a long swallow and drew a breath. She was several shades paler than usual. In the light from the tapers on the Pembroke table, he saw splashes of blood on the lace at the neck of her gown. He could feel the weight of Francisco’s body in his arms, smell the sickly stench of blood, sense the chill of dying flesh. If the gunmen had been a few inches off with any of their shots, it might have been Mélanie who bled to death in his arms. He set his whisky down before he could smash yet another glass.

Mélanie pulled Francisco’s papers from her bodice and set them on the table. Charles took a step toward the table, but at the same moment David returned to the room, a medical supply box in his hands.

Mélanie set down her glass. ‘Take off your coat, Charles.’

He complied, because it took less time than arguing with her. While she cut away his shirtsleeve and cleaned and bound the wound, he gave David and Simon an account of the evening’s events. When he finished, David stared at him as though he had just announced foreign troops had invaded English soil. ‘Charles, you have to go to Bow Street with this.’

‘With what? A story about mysterious warnings and coded papers and secret organizations that sounds as though it’s straight out of a gothic novel? Any Bow Street Runner worth his salt would laugh in our faces. And assuming a runner did take it seriously and began asking questions, how far do you think he’d get among the polite world?’

‘This isn’t a game, Charles. You could have been killed. Mélanie could have been killed.’

‘Christ, don’t you think I know that?’ Charles glanced at Mélanie and drew a breath. ‘I’m sorry. But I know the stakes, David. Believe me. If I thought I could safely turn this over to Bow Street, I would.’

David returned Charles’s gaze. Twenty years of shared history hung between them. Sipping scalding cups of chocolate and pouring over dog-eared books during late-night discussions at Harrow. Pressing iced towels to bloody noses after unequal rights. Drinking cheap wine in an Oxford tavern, drunk on ideas. Sobbing with a raw despair one dared reveal to no one else.

‘Damn you,’ David said. ‘You always end arguments by asking me to trust you.’

‘Do you?’ Charles said.

‘Far more than is good for me. Or you, I sometimes think.’

‘Were they trying to kill you as well or just scare you?’ Simon asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Charles said. ‘We didn’t give them many clear shots. But they were certainly prepared to use lethal force. A few inches off and any of those bullets could have killed either of us.’ He glanced down at Mélanie, who was snipping off a length of lint, and fought an urge to touch her for reassurance. She’d look at him as though he were mad. ‘Knot the bandage and stop fussing, Mel. I want to look at Francisco’s papers.’

‘You’d find it dreadfully inconvenient to develop gangrene, Charles.’ Mélanie set down the scissors. ‘Try to keep your arm elevated.’

Charles moved aside a playbill and a sheaf of papers that appeared to be notes for Simon’s latest play, and spread Francisco’s papers out on the table.

‘Look at this.’ Simon pointed to a dark red splotch at the top of one of the sheets that Charles had taken to be a blood spatter. Now he saw a matching spot at the bottom of the paper. A red wax seal, snapped in two when the papers were opened. He turned the page over and folded it, bringing the two halves of the seal back together, and held it to the light of the lamp. It appeared to be some sort of castle.

‘Probably from a signet ring,’ Charles said. ‘But it’s not a crest I’ve ever seen.’

‘The Elsinore League?’ Simon asked.

‘Very likely.’

David stared down at the writing on the two papers. ‘It looks as though it’s a good thing I still have my dictionaries of ancient Greek.’

‘The Greek’s just an added flourish.’ Charles ran his finger over a line of text. ‘It’s numbers, written out in word form in ancient Greek with a few extra letters thrown in to confuse matters. The trick is going to be turning the numbers into words. We’ll need a pen and ink and rather a lot of paper.’

To turn the two blood-spattered pages of ancient Greek into a sequence of numbers was time consuming but not difficult. Charles studied the results. ‘They’ve only used numbers between one and fifty, so this isn’t some sort of Grand Chiffre, where we’d need multiple messages before we had a prayer of breaking it. Assuming the original message was written in English or French, the most commonly occurring number should translate to ‘e.’ Which looks to be forty-two. Mel?’

‘Right.’ His wife had already drawn up a chair beside him and was sketching out the beginnings of a table.

It took a little over an hour—during which time Charles wondered more than once that the cipher was not more complex—to decode the two papers Francisco had given them. In the end, the plain text lay before them, in Mélanie’s swift, slanted hand.

The first message read:

Remember the past is never dead, only temporarily buried. And I can resurrect it whenever I wish.

And the second, which had been written in a different hand:

We have no choice but to eliminate the evidence.

‘The first sounds like a blackmail threat,’ Simon said. ‘And the second could be an order to kill the blackmailer.’

‘Francisco told us they had to be stopped before they killed again,’ Mélanie said. She was perched on the edge of the Pembroke table, her fingers smeared with ink. ‘The question is, what on earth is this past that the Elsinore League fear could be resurrected?’

Charles smoothed the edges of the papers. ‘We can only hope Francisco shared some of the secrets with Manon. In any case, we have to find her at Le Lion d’Or at seven and warn her. She’s in danger herself.’

‘And you?’ David asked.

‘We weren’t followed from Somerset Place, but if the assassin knows who we are, someone might be watching our house.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance you’ll let mere civilians help you,’ Simon said.

Charles and Mélanie exchanged glances. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Charles said, ‘we can’t make our plan work without you.’

The rhythm of French assailed Charles’s ears as he and Mélanie stepped into the smoky, dimly lit interior of Le Lion d’Or. For a moment the swift, musical pattern of speech swept him back to their days in Paris. Mélanie’s gaze darted about the crowd, but he felt her almost palpably relax, as though the sounds took her home.

He caught a phrase or two in Spanish, one in Viennese German, and finally an English-speaking voice, from a corpulent man at a table by the fire giving his order in a voice three times louder than necessary, as though that would make the waiter—who very likely spoke fluent English—understand better.

Even the smells were different. Coffee that was strong but not bitter. Creamy cheese. Meat and vegetables soaked in butter rather than lard.

The coffeehouse was crowded with an assortment of emigres. Actors and musicians who earned their keep at the nearby theaters, no doubt, writers and journalists scribbling in notebooks, and some men in leather aprons who were probably taking a quick break from the bustle of the market.

Fewer women were present, but there was a mix of actresses and shapely ankled opera dancers, flower sellers with baskets on the floor beside them, and some women who probably sold not flowers or fruit but their own bodies.

‘Charles.’ Mélanie tugged at his sleeve and nodded toward the far corner, away from the light of the fire. Even in the shadows, the woman’s hair gleamed guinea bright.

They started forward. When they were a half dozen steps away, Manon’s head jerked up. For a moment she stared at them. Then she sprang to her feet, tipped over her chair, and bolted across the room.

She was fast, but Charles had glimpsed her intention in the flicker of her gaze. He sprang forward and caught her by the back of her cloak. ‘It’s all right, Manon. We’re here to help you.’

‘Help.’ She gave an incredulous laugh. With a wrench of torn wool, she pulled out of his grasp.

She didn’t so much as look at the door. She made straight for the windows. Charles ran after her, skidded on the floorboards, and nearly fell.

Manon knocked over a bench, pushed aside a man reading a newspaper, and jumped atop a table to window height. Without hesitation, she hurled herself at the window, breaking the latch on the casement.

A cry went up from the coffeehouse, half amazement, half admiration. Charles was already atop the table. He shouldered through the broken casement and sprang down after Manon into the empty yard beyond.