Read Chapter 21: The Criminal's Face

The name came to him from a dead man’s lips, whispered in the last ragged breath of a French colonel whose throat had been opened by a saber an hour before dawn. Captain Julien Moreau. Harrow had carved the name into his memory the way a prisoner carves days into a cell wall, and now, as the first cannonade of the battle rolled across the ridge like distant thunder, he had a face to go with it.

Moreau was not hard to find. In the chaos of the morning, Harrow moved through the fog of war with the terrible advantage of knowing exactly what was coming. He had watched this battle a hundred times from the comfort of a lecture hall, and now he watched it with blood in his mouth and mud up to his knees. He spotted Moreau at the edge of the Hougoumont wood, a lean figure in a cavalryman’s coat too fine for the rank he wore, moving against the tide of men retreating from the first assault.

Harrow followed.

The problem was that Moreau always seemed to know where to step. He slipped through pockets of smoke like a fish through reeds, never where Harrow’s eyes expected him to be a moment later. Three times Harrow closed the distance, and three times Moreau vanished into the press of bodies, leaving only the impression of his passage—a turned coat, a dropped glove, a whispered order that scattered the men around him like leaves before a wind.

By noon, Harrow’s lungs burned and his boots had begun to split at the seams. He found Moreau’s trail at last on the slope below the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, where the French had begun their second assault. A young scout lay crumpled against a hedge, his chest a ruin of blood and bone, but his hand still clutched a folded slip of paper. Harrow pried it loose and read it twice before the meaning sank in.

*The wine is ready. The Duke drinks at four. Ensure the messenger does not arrive. —M.*

Harrow’s blood went cold despite the heat of the day. Poison. Not a bullet, not a bayonet. Poison in Wellington’s wine, and a messenger dispatched to stop it. He looked up at the ridge where the British command post sat, a modest farmhouse with its back to the sky, and he began to run.

The distance between the French lines and the British ridge was a no-man’s-land of screaming horses and falling men, and Harrow crossed it like a man crossing a frozen river that might crack beneath him at any step. He reached the British positions at the Hautmont farm, gasping, his coat a tattered mess of mud and powder burns, and he seized the arm of the first redcoat he found.

“I need to see the Duke,” he said. “There’s a plot. Poison. His wine.”

The redcoat looked at him with the flat, exhausted eyes of a man who had been fighting since dawn. “You’re French,” he said.

Harrow looked down. His coat, borrowed from a corpse two days ago, had the dark blue wool of a French infantryman. The mud had caked it into something unrecognizable, but the collar was wrong, the cut was wrong, and the redcoat had already drawn his bayonet.

“I’m not—” Harrow started.

“Spy,” the redcoat shouted. “French spy!”

They took him before he could finish the sentence. Three of them, rough hands and rougher words, dragging him past the farmhouse where Wellington was even now sitting down to his dinner. Harrow caught a glimpse of the Duke through the window—the hawk nose, the thin lips, the calm, unreadable gaze of a man who had never lost a battle and did not intend to start now. Harrow screamed something about the wine, but the sound was swallowed by the distant roar of cannon, and the redcoats threw him into the cellar of a ruined barn and slammed the door.

The darkness was absolute. Harrow lay on his back in the straw, his wrists bound with rope that bit into his flesh, and he listened to the battle rattle on above him like the machinery of a vast and indifferent clock. The fourth hour came and went. The fifth. He heard the thunder of cavalry charges and the shriek of shells, and he thought of the ring still pressed into his palm, small and hard and cold, a promise from a dying man that he had not yet fulfilled.

He thought of Moreau’s face, finally glimpsed from a distance of fifty yards: a sharp jaw, a scar that split one eyebrow, eyes the color of a winter sea. He had a face now, and a name, and a plan. The poison was not the point. It was the messenger. Whoever was coming to warn Wellington had to die before they reached the command post, and Moreau was the man sent to make sure of it.

And then, at the sixth hour, the shell struck.

The sound was not a sound so much as a sudden absence of everything else—a white light that ate the world, a pressure that crushed the air from Harrow’s lungs before the noise even arrived. The barn’s roof lifted off its beams and sailed away into the smoke. The walls burst outward. He felt himself lifted, thrown, spun through a sky full of splinters and fire, and then the ground came up to meet him and the world went dark.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing in the orchard again.

The smell of apples was thick and sweet in the morning air. The sun was low over the eastern ridge, still climbing toward the unholy hour of noon. The battle had not yet begun. The cannons were silent. The dead were not yet dead. Harrow pressed his hand to his chest and felt the ring there, solid as a heartbeat, and he let out a long, shaking breath.

He had a name now. A face. A plan to unravel.

But as he turned to walk toward the farmhouse, he saw something that stopped him cold. Leaning against the orchard wall, watching him with those winter-sea eyes and a half-smile on a scarred mouth, was Captain Julien Moreau.

“You keep dying,” Moreau said. “I wondered when you’d stop.”

Harrow’s hand went to his empty holster. “You know about the loop.”

“I know about a great many things.” Moreau pushed off the wall and took a step closer. He was unarmed, or appeared to be, but his calm was worse than any weapon. “Do you know who sent me to watch the farmhouse at dawn? Do you know who told the Count to trust you?”

“The note in Brussels,” Harrow said. “You wrote it.”

Moreau laughed—a short, sharp sound like a pistol shot. “No. I don’t write. I deliver. That’s what I do, Captain. I deliver messages that end lives and end wars. And I’m here to deliver one to you.”

He reached into his coat and drew out a folded piece of paper, cream-colored and sealed with a smear of red wax. He tossed it at Harrow’s feet.

“From the man in Paris,” Moreau said. “The one who speaks of cycles and repetitions. He wants you to know that you are not the first to wear that ring.”

Before Harrow could stoop to pick it up, Moreau turned and walked into the orchard mist, and was gone.