Read Chapter 18: The Widow’s Home

The camp was a different beast at night. Not the camp Moreau had left that morning—orderly rows of tents, cooking fires laid out in neat grids, the low murmur of men who still believed in something. No. This was a wounded animal, shifting in the dark, its eyes gleaming with suspicion.

He limped through the gap between the supply wagons, one hand pressed to the binding at his side where the surgeon had done what he could with needle and thread. The wound had been clean enough—a ball through the meat of his hip, missing bone by the width of a finger—but the walk from the ridge had opened it twice, and the linen was dark with seepage.

Lantern light spilled from the quartermaster's tent ahead. Moreau recognized the silhouette inside before he reached the flap: Sergeant Lacombe, his adjutant, bent over a map with a tin cup of something steaming at his elbow.

Lacombe looked up as Moreau ducked through the opening. His eyes went to the bloodied side, then to Moreau's face, and he set down the cup.

"Captain. You should be with the surgeon."

"The surgeon has men who will live. I need you to listen." Moreau eased himself onto the camp stool, biting back a grunt. The canvas walls of the tent fluttered in a gust of wind, and somewhere beyond them, a man laughed—too loud, too brittle. The sound died quickly.

"I was at the ridge," Lacombe said, his voice careful. "I saw the men come back without you. They said you chased a ghost into the trees."

"Not a ghost. A woman." Moreau pulled the flask from his belt, uncorked it, and drank. The brandy burned going down, and for a moment the pain in his side receded to a dull, distant throb. "She killed General Vasseur. Put a ball through his chest from two hundred yards, I'd say, and then vanished into the treeline like she knew the ground better than we do."

Lacombe's jaw tightened. "The general. God. The men will hear of this by dawn."

"They'll hear worse." Moreau set down the flask. "Before he died, Vasseur spoke. Three words. 'Crow is in the city.'"

"Brussels?"

"He didn't say. But he said *city*, not camp. And the only city within a day's march is Brussels." Moreau leaned forward, the canvas chair creaking beneath him. "Le Corbeau. The Crow. That's the name behind all of this—the stolen gold, the forged orders, the ambush at the mill. Vasseur knew it. And whoever killed him didn't want him telling me."

Lacombe was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "You want me to go to Brussels."

"I want you to find a man who calls himself a crow. Or a woman." Moreau thought of the sniper's face—the brief glimpse he'd caught before she'd turned and fled, the way she'd moved through the underbrush with a hunter's confidence. "Someone who moves money and men through the shadows. Someone who could arrange for a Prussian patrol to guard a windmill full of French gold."

"That could be half the nobles in Brussels, Captain. The city is crawling with spies from every army in Europe."

"Then start with the bankers." Moreau reached into his coat and produced the scrap of paper he'd taken from Lefebvre's tent—the fragment with the partial watermark. He smoothed it on the table between them. "This paper was made in Belgium. The printer's mark is cut off, but there's a pattern here—a crown above a shield. That's the mark of the House of Mercier."

Lacombe picked up the scrap, turning it toward the lantern light. "Mercier. They handle the accounts for half the nobility in the Low Countries."

"They also have a branch office in Brussels, just off the Grand Place. If someone was paying for the gold's transport, paying off a Prussian patrol, funding a conspiracy—the money would have to move through a house like that." Moreau tapped the paper. "Start there. Ask about large withdrawals in the past two weeks. Ask about anyone who paid in gold coin rather than paper."

"And if the banker is part of it?"

"Then he'll send word to his master, and you'll follow the message." Moreau sat back, exhaustion pressing down on him like a physical weight. "I'm not asking you to arrest anyone, Lacombe. I'm asking you to look. Find the crow's nest. Come back and tell me where it is."

Lacombe folded the paper carefully and tucked it into his inner pocket. "And you? You can barely stand."

"I'll be here. Recuperating, as you so delicately put it." Moreau gestured toward the tent flap. "Go now. Take one of the fast horses from the supply line—the chestnut mare, she's the strongest. If anyone asks where you're going, you're carrying dispatches to the artillery park at Genappe."

"The provost haven't been asking questions. Not since you killed Finch."

Moreau felt the ghost of that moment—the man's throat under his hands, the struggle, the map slipping away into the dark. Finch was dead, but the map was gone, and with it any direct route to the gold.

"I killed Finch because he was part of this. The provost know it, even if they can't prove it." He paused. "You haven't asked me about the gold."

"The gold can wait." Lacombe stood, squaring his shoulders. "You're still breathing. That's the important thing."

"There are men outside this tent who would disagree with you."

Lacombe's face flickered—something unreadable passing behind his eyes. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it. Finally, he said, "I've heard the talk, Captain. I won't repeat it."

"Repeat it anyway."

"The men are saying the army marched here to fight a battle that's already lost. That the Emperor left us to rot in this Belgian mud while he sits in Paris, dreaming of glory that's never coming." Lacombe's voice dropped. "There was a sergeant from the 6th Light earlier. A man named Perrin. He was talking to a group of gunners near the cookfire, saying we should take what's left of the supplies and march for Paris ourselves. Fight for something that's still worth dying for."

Moreau closed his eyes. The brandy was wearing off, and the wound at his side was beginning to throb in earnest. Paris. The word was a knife twist in an old wound. He'd been twenty years old when he'd first marched behind the Emperor's eagles, fresh-faced and full of fire. He'd believed in the glory, the destiny, the great French dream that would remake Europe.

That was a lifetime ago. He'd buried too many men since then, counted too many dead, wrote too many letters to widows and mothers in villages he'd never see again.

"I'll talk to Sergeant Perrin," he said. "Tomorrow. When I can stand without seeing double."

"He might not listen. He's not a bad man, Captain—just a tired one. And tired men do desperate things."

"Then I'll find a way to make him less tired." Moreau hauled himself to his feet, steadying himself against the table. "Go. Brussels is four hours' ride. I want you back by mid-morning with something I can use."

Lacombe nodded once, sharply, and slipped out through the tent flap. Moreau listened to his footsteps fade into the dark, then stood alone in the lamplight, one hand pressed against the wound, listening to the sounds of a camp that was slowly coming apart at the seams.

He'd thought, when he'd taken the quartermaster's post, that he'd be safe from the worst of it—the mud and blood and chaos of the field. He'd been a fool. There was no safe post in an army marching toward its end. The gold was gone, the men were muttering mutiny, and somewhere in Brussels, a man called Crow was counting his winnings.

Moreau reached into his coat and pulled out the other piece of evidence—the canvas scrap with the fingerprint transferred onto it. He'd examined it a hundred times in the past day, tracing the whorls and ridges with his thumb. It had come from Lefebvre's tent, from a map that should never have existed. In the right light, he could almost imagine the shape of the hand that had pressed it there.

Capitaine Renard. The name sat in his gut like a stone. They'd served together for four years—shared campfires, traded rations, watched each other's backs through the mud of a hundred marches. Renard was solid. Reliable. A man you trusted to hold the flank when the firing started.

But the fingerprint didn't lie. And the Countess de Vancy had named him.

Moreau folded the canvas and tucked it away. He would deal with Renard when he had to. For now, there was a more immediate problem.

He stepped out of the tent into the cold night air, and walked slowly toward the cookfires where the men had gathered. The wind had picked up, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and the distant, thin sound of a flute playing something mournful and old.

As he approached, the conversation died. Faces turned toward him—hollow-eyed in the firelight, mouths set in hard lines. He looked for the sergeant from the 6th Light, the one Lacombe had named, and found him sitting apart from the others, a bread crust in his hand, studying it as if it held some answer to a question he hadn't yet learned to ask.

Moreau sat down on an overturned barrel beside him. Neither man spoke for a moment. The fire crackled and spat.

"They say the Emperor's gold is gone," Perrin said at last, not looking up. "Stolen by English spies or French traitors, depending on who you believe."

"It's gone," Moreau said. "But I'm going to find it."

Perrin finally raised his head. His eyes were older than the rest of his face—the eyes of a man who'd seen too much and believed in too little.

"Even if you find it," he said, "what will it matter? We're a hundred miles from home, facing an army that outnumbers us, and the Emperor is a ghost in Paris playing at soldier." He broke the bread in his hands, crumbs falling into the mud between his boots. "The men are talking about marching on Paris. Taking what's left of the treasury and watching the old man dance his last dance."

Moreau looked into the fire. The flames twisted and turned, gold and red and reaching up into the dark.

"You ever fought at his side, Sergeant? When the cannon were thundering and the cavalry were breaking and you thought the world was ending?"

Perrin shook his head. "I joined in '12. After Moscow. I saw what was left of the Grand Army, sir. Frozen men and broken horses. He led them into that."

"He led them into everything." Moreau's voice was quiet, almost thoughtful. "That's what he does. He leads. And sometimes the men who follow him don't come home." He turned to look at the sergeant directly. "But that's not a reason to throw down our arms and wander back to Paris with our tails between our legs. That's not a reason to become the very thing we've been fighting against."

Perrin was silent. The fire crackled between them.

"Find the gold," Moreau said. "That was my order. That's what I'm going to do. And when I do, the men will have their pay, and they'll have their pride, and they'll have a reason to stand their ground when the English come." He pushed himself up, the wound in his side sending a spike of pain through him. "You want to march on Paris, Sergeant Perrin, you'll have to go through me first."

He walked back to his tent without looking back, and collapsed onto his cot with his boots still on, the canvas evidence folded in his coat, the name Renard burning in his mind like a coal.

Brussels was four hours' ride away. Lacombe would be there by midnight.

And somewhere in the dark, Le Corbeau was laughing.