Suddenly Brundage leaned so abruptly forward Hawkes held his breath. “Do you remember Therese d’Artois?”
Every muscle in Hawkes’s body tensed with the effort not to rear backward.
“How can one forget Therese d’Artois?” Hawkes mimicked Brundage’s confiding hush.
“Aurelie’s mouth. Reminds me of hers. It... rather inflames a man’s imagination.”
“Ah.” Hawkes’s smile was small and taut.
He did not want to imagine any part of Brundage inflamed.
Therese d’Artois had been a courtesan living in Spain. Brundage had tried and failed to maneuver her into his bed. She’d invited Hawkes into hers a few times, and only a dead man would decline that invitation.
He supposed Therese might still be a courtesan. Only three years had passed.
Prison played hell with time, if one let it: telescoped it, froze it, dissolved the boundaries between momentsuntil they pooled like hot candle wax. He’d used the long days and nights in his cell to reconstruct the average day of his life, from the moment he woke, in terms of colors and senses, recalling moments as though they were jewels he’d hoarded. The minute changes of color and light in the sky as the sun rose and then fell, from nacre to that black purple of midnight. The scrape of a perfectly sharp straight razor against his soapy jaw. The trickle of coffee into a fine china cup, the chime of a spoon against its side stirring in the sugar.
The satiny heft of a woman’s breasts in his palms, her hot breath gusting in the crook of his neck when he moved in her.
Sounds and sensations and sequences.
He’d tried pain, too, as a means to distract: he remembered every stab of the needle that had driven the ink of his tattoo—a dagger beneath his arm—into his skin.
These things were the counterpoint to another indelible sequence of events that had occurred prior to his arrest. If he’d dwelt upon them in prison, he would have gone mad. But they beat inside him like a second heart. Like ceaseless drums of war.
Ironically, it had begun with glinting objects in Brundage’s residence.
The subtle proliferation of things like vases and silver waistcoat buttons. A rumor that Brundage’s gambling debts had been repaid. A mysterious charity listed in Brundage’s budget books called the Society for the Relief of English Prisoners of War, which swelled and shrank about the same time. General Blackmore’s—now the Duke of Valkirk’s—stunning, rare defeat at Dos Montañas in Spain. Hawkes hadsurreptitiously pursued a burgeoning dark suspicion linking all of these things to a conclusion that took even his jaded breath away.
Treason.
Even an earl could be hanged for treason.
Hawkes had been steps away from proving it when he’d been captured.
Brundage was the only other English person who’d known where and with whom Hawkes would be the day he was arrested in Cherbourg.
Which could, of course, be a coincidence.
It wasn’t.
But it could be.
Hawkes didn’t know what he could prove now, if anything. He wasn’t certain he ought to try. Likely Brundage was confident he couldn’t prove anything, either. A different man would find it wisest to put it behind him, retire to the seashore, put on some weight, cast about for a boring government job he could sleepwalk through until he died.
And yet.
Like a wolf freed from a trap who knows only to run right back into the forest, here he was again with Brundage.
“Aurelie in fact makes Therese d’Artois seem almost plain,” Brundage expounded. He shook his head slowly in wondering reminiscence. “The competition for a mere glance from her, Hawkes, when she walked into a ballroom... sometimes nearly came to blows. But...” He hiked and let drop one shoulder in feigned humility. Astonishingly, she saw me and the feeling was mutual. I wanted her in my bed the moment I saw her.”
He paused.
Hawkes said nothing.
“You know how it is with some women,” Brundage continued, relentlessly. He paused. “I expect after years in prison you’d be in a hurry to get one.”
He studied Hawkes, his eyes glinting.