It was, in fact, the generally held view that Hawkes owed Brundage his life.
Alas, Hawkes was unable to buy his way out of prison altogether, and the French rebuffed formal attempts to ransom him. It seemed it wasn’t every day they caught a near legendary English spymaster. They wanted to keep him for a few years. Perhaps beat him now and again for his temerity.
Verdun, the prison depot where he was at first taken, had been just barely tolerable, verging on civilized.
Bitche, where he’d been taken after an escape attempt, was a violent, soul-annihilating fortress.
Brundage had proposed to pay him three-quarters of the fortune he’d lost if he found his fiancée.
So he also suspected the immense sum Brundage was offering to pay him to find his fiancée was intended to forever put paid to certain things.
Such as suspicion. Curiosity. Initiative. Memory.
Reflected in that ridiculous mirror in flattering firelight, the two of them looked much the way they had before Hawkes’s arrest: the Fifth Earl of Brundage and Mr. Christian Hawkes—sucha dashing pair. Both so handsome, so brilliant, so competent.
But Hawkes, the son of a merchant, had begun his career in the army blacking the boots of men much like Brundage. He’d swiftly soared to the rank of lieutenant, whereupon he was recruited by the Alien Office in England and charged with tracking down and arresting poisonous little cadres of would-be revolutionaries and recruiting agents and informers, in the process honing some of the filthier tools of his trade—deceit and subterfuge and pantomime, bribery and brutality and blackmail—as well as the more prosaic ones, like managing vast budgets and unpredictable humans. Such were his gifts and triumphs that during the war the home secretary sent him to Switzerland and to Spain, under the guise of serving as chargé d’affaires for the Earl of Brundage, who’d been appointed ambassador to Spain. In actuality, to do what he’d already done in England: establish and oversee a vast mesh of intelligence sources—agents, informers, provocateurs—in support of efforts to quash Bonaparte.
And if initially Brundage occasionally failed to disguise that he viewed Hawkes’s work as distasteful, if necessary, and considered him little more than a peasant shellacked in exquisite manners, it was of no consequence to Hawkes. And if Hawkes’s patience once or twice frayed to such transparency that Brundage glimpsed how Hawkes saw him—pompous, scarcely adequate at his job, someone to be tolerated, rather than revered—they were both, by nature, diplomats. Their interactions were garnished with civility and humor. Brundage was secure in his supremacy afforded by his ancient title, position, and fine looks.
Until the evening the earl first entered a ballroom alongside Hawkes, and feminine eyes lit on both.
But it was to Hawkes they returned.
And it was on Hawkes they remained.
Things were different between them from then on.
Brundage was nearly invisible when Hawkes was in the room. There was nothing the earl could do about the way Hawkes infiltrated imaginations. His charm was like contraband whiskey: potent, addictive, sometimes scathing, a subversive pleasure. When he laughed, his crystalline blue eyes lit like the sun breaking through clouds. When he was furious, he could freeze a man’s gizzards with a single glance. His successes were lauded in newspapers in London. The word “hero” was bandied about. His failures were few, and confidential.
And while Hawkes’s morals could fairly be said to be flexible and situational, they were wrapped around an unshakably honorable core. Everything he did was in the name of service to his country.
If he’d been less of a gentleman, or possessed of less hubris, he might have realized before it was too late that Brundage’s handsome, noble skin was, in fact, stretched over a core of pure rot.
Brundage was heavier and ruddier now. Hawkes was thinner. His prison pallor emphasized the hard, elegant facets of his face and shadows haunted hollows beneath his cheekbones. His coat fit him just a little too loosely. This, absurdly, maddened him. He’d always been so meticulous about his tailoring.
“Has Lady Aurelie any family still alive? Friends she might be inclined to visit?” he asked.
“Her oldest brother, Louis, died over a decade ago. One brother—Edouard—emigrated to Boston some years back. The Bourbons might be on the throne once again, but she was raised quite apart from any French relatives and as of now they are still strangers to her—shehas only lately lived in Paris. Her guardian is currently on his wedding journey in Spain and planned to return to Paris for our nuptials, as it was assumed we would live here for a time. He was overjoyed at our engagement.”
Pleased that he would finally be shed of his duty to his ward, Hawkes thought. From the sound of things. Though he could be commended, of a certainty, for taking in three children.
“And I believe you are already acquainted with her guardian, Hawkes. Jacques Le Clerc. He was the chargé d’affaires for the Spanish ambassador.”
“Yes. Of course. I remember Le Clerc. I in fact attended a few assemblies at his residence in Spain when I worked for the Home Office.”
Odd to think of the missing girl being somewhere present while he was there, charming guests, mining for secrets. A pity he couldn’t go back in time to warn her about Brundage.
“Does Lady Aurelie have any distinctive mannerisms or distinguishing physical characteristics not evident in this miniature?” Her likeness was still cupped in the palm of his hand. “Freckles, a limp, a hump, dimples, crooked or missing teeth? Is she a great strapping lass, a wee thing?”
Brundage eyed him sardonically. “She has all of her teeth, and they are the proverbial pearls. She has, er, lovely brown hair and blue eyes. Not like... yours.” He made the word “yours” sound vaguely disturbing. “A darker blue. Lots of...” he cleared his throat “...fetching black lashes.”
Hawkes had produced a little pencil and a scrap of paper from inside his coat. “...not... like... mine...” he murmured, as he wrote.
“And she’s not a slip of a girl—her head reachesto about here.” Brundage laid the blade of his hand against his throat, just beneath his handsome square chin, which gleamed like that vast mirror from a fresh shave.
Hawkes bent his head over his foolscap. “So that means she’ll reach to about... here,” Hawkes said, absently, applying the blade of his own hand against his collarbone, and pretended to take a note, “...on me.”
He was savoring being a bastard the way he was savoring the cheroot. More than all of the other things that Brundage resented about Hawkes—which was everything—his two inches of superior height probably chafed the most.
