Read Chapter 10: The Boy Who Disappeared

Marie’s hands were trembling around the coffee cup she had not touched. Her face, usually placid as a painted plate, was the color of old tallow. The kitchen smelled of burnt bread and the yeast of the morning’s failed batch, and for the first time in all the months Élodie had known her, Marie looked like a woman carrying a coffin.

“You said he was dangerous,” Élodie said quietly, keeping her voice low though they were alone. The fire crackled. Outside, the first evening bells of Saint-Sulpice had not yet rung. “You said you knew. Knew what, Marie?”

Marie set the cup down. Her knuckles were white. “I knew the last man who watched him. The one who asked questions, the way you do.” She looked up, and her eyes were wet and dry at once. “Lucien was my sister’s boy. He worked the stables here before I came to you. Sweet-tempered, clever with horses. He had no father, so I looked after him.”

Élodie’s chest tightened. “Marie. What happened to him?”

“He vanished.” The words came out flat, as if she had practiced them. “A month ago. He was seen speaking to an Englishman at the corner of the Rue du Bac, by the fountain with the broken lion. A tall man, fair-haired, with a scar at his jaw.” She touched her own jaw, absent. “The description spread through the market because of the coat he wore—green wool, brass buttons. Uncommon for a Parisian.”

Green wool. Brass buttons. Élodie saw Ashworth at the café, his coat draped over the chair, the precise way he folded it. She saw him turning his wrist over the flame of a candle as he burned the paper bearing Lefèvre’s name. Her stomach turned.

“He was seen with Lucien the evening before the boy disappeared,” Marie went on. “The baker’s boy remembered because Lucien had bought a sugared roll and given it to the Englishman—politeness, you see, Lucien was always polite. They walked together toward the water. The next morning, Lucien’s mother found his bed unslept in. His boots were still by the door.”

“Did you go to the police?” Élodie asked, though she knew the answer before Marie shook her head.

“The police did not want to hear of Englishmen,” Marie said. “They said the boy had run off to join a ship, that he was a deserter from his apprenticeship. They patted my hand and told me to pray.” She smiled a thin, terrible smile. “I went to the river myself. I asked the dockworkers. No one saw him board a ship. No one saw him at all after the fountain.”

Élodie stood. The heat from the stove pressed against her back. Her mind worked the way it did when she was hiding a report beneath the floorboard in her room—quick, silent, fitting pieces into gaps. Ashworth had been in Paris for six weeks, she had estimated, based on the date stamps in his correspondence. A month ago, he would have been freshly arrived. A new man needs contacts. He needs a guide, someone who knows the streets, the customs, the unguarded doors.

Lucien had known the inn. He had known the stables, the cellar, the ways in and out. And now Lucien was gone, and Marie was afraid, and Élodie had been sleeping in the room across from the man who had last spoken with him.

“Why did you not tell me this before?” Élodie asked, her voice harder than she intended.

Marie’s chin lifted. “Because you smile at him the way women smile at men they believe they can change, and I did not want to be the one to break that table glass.” She paused. “But you asked. So now you know.”

Élodie said nothing. She turned and walked out of the kitchen, through the empty common room, up the stairs. The floorboard in her room creaked as she passed it, holding the copy of the coastal map. Her report was still in Ashworth’s possession, folded in his coat pocket, proof of her betrayal.

She reached the corridor that led to his door. It was closed, as it had been since yesterday. The lock glinted. She pulled her hand back early—she had not planned to go in; she had only wanted to see the door, to measure the distance between her suspicion and her duty. The Englishman had three more days in her house, by Lefèvre’s timetable. She had two days left to find his list. And now a boy had disappeared.

She stood there, breathing slowly. The corridor smelled of wax and old wood. From below, she could hear Marie clattering pots, deliberately loud now, drowning her own fear.

Then the door opened.

Ashworth stood in the frame, his shirt untucked but his jaw freshly shaved, a towel over his shoulder. He looked at her without surprise. His gaze moved from her face to her hands—empty, frozen at her sides—and then back to her eyes.

“Élodie,” he said. That was all. The way he said her name was not a greeting. It was a door swinging shut.

She stepped back. “I was coming to ask if you wanted supper. The kitchen is closed, but I can make something.”

He did not move. His eyes were pale in the dim light, the color of winter river ice. “You are a poor liar,” he said quietly. “It is one of the things I admire about you. You have not yet learned to make falsehood fit comfortably against the skin.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He reached out and pressed the door closed behind him, the latch clicking soft as a bone settling. They were alone in the corridor, no more than a stride apart. He moved toward her, not menacing, but final. A man walking across a room to close a window before the storm.

“You have been standing outside my door for two minutes,” he said. “You are breathing as if you have run a race. Your dress is smudged with ink at the wrist, from the letter you stole from the embassy that was not addressed to you.” His head tilted. “How long have you been working for Fouché?”

The name struck her like cold water. Not Lefèvre. Fouché. The Minister of Police. The spider in the Tuileries. She had never met him; she filed reports through Lefèvre, a chain of command that she had always assumed led to the prefecture. But Ashworth said the name as one does when one knows the iron beneath the wood.

“I do not work for Fouché,” she said, and her voice did not waver, though her heart knocked against her ribs like a bird in a cage.

“No?” Ashworth took another step. “Then why does the police captain who receives your reports report directly to him? I have seen Lefèvre’s paperwork, madame. I have seen the receipts for your payments, marked with the seal of the Ministry. You are a tool, Élodie. A small, sharp tool, and you have been cutting yourself all along without knowing who holds the handle.”

Her back met the wall. She had not realized she was moving. He stopped a hand’s width from her, close enough that she could smell the soap on his skin, the faint trace of coffee on his breath.

“You,” she got out. “You speak of what I do as if you have the right to judge it. You were the last man seen with my servant’s nephew before he disappeared.”

Ashworth’s face changed. Something flickered in the pale eyes—surprise, and then a deeper weight, settling like a stone dropped into still water.

“Lucien,” he said. “You know the boy’s name.”

“Marie told me.”

“Marie.” He repeated it, tasting it. Then he exhaled, long and slow, and to her shock, his shoulders dropped. He looked suddenly older, tireder, a man carrying a load he had not asked for. “I did not take the boy,” he said. “I sent him away. There is a difference, Élodie, though I understand why you would not believe me.”

“Sent him where?”

“To England. To safety.” He met her eyes. “He had watched your inn, he said, from the stables. He had seen the men the police sent. He saw you hand them letters. He came to me and told me that the English spy in the green coat—me—was the only one who might help him get out of Paris before the police silenced him the way they silenced his father.”

Élodie’s breath caught. “His father?”

“His father was a printer. He was taken in the raids of last winter. They hanged him at the Temple for distributing pamphlets the government did not like.” Ashworth’s voice was calm, low. “Lucien walked to the fountain to speak to me. He wanted passage to London, where his mother’s cousin lives. I arranged it. He is in Dover now, working in a shipyard and learning to read. I have seen the letter he sent me, written by the priest who met him at the docks. He is alive, Élodie. He is safe. And he is not coming back to Paris until your government is dead or changed.”

Élodie stared at him. The corridor was dark, the light from the single window falling across the floor between them. She wanted to believe him. She felt the want like a splinter under her skin—sharp, impossible to ignore.

But she had two days left. Lefèvre had given her a deadline. And Ashworth had given her nothing but a story delivered with the ease of a man who had practice.

“Why should I believe you?” she whispered.

“Because if I wanted you dead,” he said, “you would not be standing here asking questions.” He stepped back, breaking the circle of his presence. “You have a choice to make, madame. But you do not have much time to make it.” He reached toward his coat, hanging on the hook by his door, and pulled out a folded paper. He held it up, and she recognized her own handwriting, the neat slant of her daily reports, the betrayals she had sent down the chain to the man who knew the name Fouché.

“Your two days are almost gone,” Ashworth said. “So are mine. I leave Paris tomorrow night, with or without what I came for. If you want to know who I really am—and if you want to see, still breathing, the morning after I am gone—you will come to my room tonight, after the bells ring midnight. Come without your report. And come clean.”

He closed his door. The latch turned. Élodie stood alone in the corridor, her back to the wall, her breath slow now, and heard the sound of her own heart counting down the hours.