A Night Of Secret Surrender. Sophia James

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      Alice. With her golden hair and sweetness. Biddable, pliant and even-tempered.

       ‘It should have been Celeste who was taken. It should have been her.’

      She’d heard the words her mother had shouted in the silence of night following Alice’s death, heard them above her father’s muffled voice of reason. A tightness had formed about her heart that had been with her ever since.

      Did she even still have a heart, she ruminated, or was it caught there in her chest among the thorns of fury, tangled in blood and bristles, stone replacing empathy?

      Her hand went to her throat and found a pulse, too fast, too shallow and tripping into a battered rhythm.

      She would save Shayborne and then leave Paris, reclaiming something of herself in the process because he was a good man, a moral man, a hero, and she had always been the exact opposite.

      It was a direction, the first real truth she had had in years.

       ‘L’enfer est pavé de bonnes intentions.’

      She smiled. She would travel the path to Hell no matter what, but her intentions from now on would only be honourable. She swore it on the departed soul of her sister and on the name of the crucified Jesus.

      She felt for the rosary in her pocket, the beads under her fingers providing a physical method of keeping count of the number of Hail Marys she said. She had recited the whole rosary numerous times under the guidance of her most religious parents until Mary Elizabeth Fournier had jumped from her grandmother’s rooftop one snowy January morning and fallen a hundred feet to her death. Her father had told Celeste of the unfortunate manner of her mother’s death in the evening of the day on which she had lost her virginity to Summerley Shayborne.

      ‘Faith can guide us only so far, Celeste. Eventually it is resilience that keeps us alive. Your mother converted to Catholicism for me, but I am not certain if she truly did believe in it.’ He’d had a brandy glass in one hand, an empty bottle in the other, and his eyes were swollen red. ‘Perhaps I should never have expected it.’

      Resilience.

      She swallowed back anger. Her father had missed the point as certainly as had her mother. Sometimes she wondered how little they both must have loved her to have lived life as they did, her mother mired in the troughs and peaks of hysteria or melancholy and her father beset by impossible political aspirations.

      She’d been caught between them and had paid a heavy price for it, like a cue ball battered by the solids and stripes into whichever corner might possibly allow a triumph over the other. Well, no one had won the game and least of all her. Her father lay in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of Paris and her mother in unconsecrated ground in Sussex. As far apart in death as they had been in life. She supposed that there at least was some sort of celestial justice in such a fact.

      * * *

      That evening she watched Shayborne’s rooms, watched the light at the window and the shadow on the curtains. He was not alone and she wondered who would visit him this late, a puzzlement that was answered a few minutes after as the door opened and a man dressed in the sombre clothes of a priest stepped out.

      The Englishman watched him depart, though he did so carefully. It was only the tiniest twitch from the curtains above that gave him away, the candlelight behind blown out now to be replaced by darkness. She wondered if she should follow him, but as the man looked neither remarkable nor familiar she stayed hidden under the protection of a plane tree, the moon filtering little light through leaves on to the street.

      Just as she was about to go she saw another figure, his shadow eating up the glow from a lamp above him and with a shock she knew it to be Guy Bernard. He did not hide or melt into the darkness as she did, but stood there like a threat.

      An impasse, then, between the three of them. Guy could not know for certain that the English major was anywhere near, otherwise Celeste knew he would have acted brutally and without hesitation.

      A suspicion, then. A rumour. The first of all the truths that would come. There were fifty apartments in this block and another hundred in the one opposite. People lived close here and it would protect him. It was why Shayborne had chosen it, she supposed, with its heaving, teeming population and its high percentages of itinerant tenants. Nobody would look twice at a newcomer here for they arrived in Paris all the time, especially those in uniform.

      Laying her head back against the dappled trunk, she closed her eyes, her body melting into the shadows inseparable from the tree, and when the first light of dawn rose in the east she saw that she was alone.

      * * *

      Fifteen minutes after the bells of Saint Leu rang out the hour of seven, she followed Shayborne, far behind and away from his sight. She wanted to see who he met and where he went. She wanted to understand his purpose.

      She had always shadowed people. It was a big part of her job and she was good at it. No one ever looked back and neither did he. Shayborne strode the city streets as if there was no doubt in his mind that he was safe. He did not act like a man on the run or one who sought the protection of invisibility. He stood so far out that he simply fitted in, a soldier returned from the ghastliness of war and wanting to exist here in the small peace of what was left. He had changed his uniform and she was glad of it, for he wore a dark blue jacket over the grey trousers now.

      * * *

      It was only later Celeste discovered that he had known she was there from the start. He’d left markers and doubled back and then under the canopy of the café, Les Trois Garçons, a hand snaked out and caught at her wrist, dragging her in. Behind striped canvas. Completely out of sight. In a pocket of warm air that held only the two of them.

      She did not scream or fight. Her knife was close and her knee was ready, but she’d known it was him from the very first touch.

      ‘Your disguise is hard to fault, Mademoiselle Fournier.’

      She smiled because to do anything else would be churlish and small.

      ‘But a bread vendor with the luxury of wasting time is noteworthy and the moon last night was bright.’

      ‘When did you know it was me?’

      ‘A minute after you gave me your warning in my rooms under your wig of whiteness. If you hadn’t wanted me to know you, you would not have come.’

      She looked at him then directly. In the daylight, his golden eyes were still beautiful, but they were now every bit as distrustful as her own. No longer a boy but a man, hard, hewed by war and suffering.

      ‘There is not much time left for you in Paris, monsieur, for your friend the jeweller will have a visit before the morrow’s end and it will be much easier for them to find you after that. They already have the arrondissement your apartment is in under surveillance.’

      ‘Do you work for Savary or Clarke?’

      ‘A disappointing question, Major. Try again.’

      ‘You are a lone player trading off the secrets of war to the highest bidders.’

      ‘Warmer.’ She did not look away at all.

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