Read Chapter 17: The Border Crossing

The border post at Mons loomed out of the grey dawn like a stone jaw. Élise pressed herself into the shadow of a hay cart, watching the British and Prussian uniforms mingle at the checkpoint—an uneasy alliance of conquerors guarding the road into France. Her breath fogged in the cold; she counted the soldiers. Eight. Two officers. A dog.

Behind her, hooves struck mud. She turned, heart seizing, and saw Ashworth—haggard, heavy-lidded, dressed in a rough farmer’s coat he must have stolen from a washing line. He reined in a gelding with a lather of sweat on its flanks, and in his hand, he held a second horse’s lead.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m arrested,” he replied, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “I assume you have a way through.”

She didn’t ask how he’d escaped his guards. She didn’t want to know. She only pulled Étienne’s token from her bodice—a battered brass crucifix worn smooth at the edges, tied with a strip of soiled ribbon. Ashworth’s eyes fixed on it.

“Where did you get that?”

“A deserter who knew my brother. He said this opens the secret pass.”

Ashworth studied her with that assessing soldier’s gaze. But there was no time for assessment. A shout rose from the checkpoint; a Prussian officer pointed in their direction. The dog barked.

“Follow me,” Élise said, and turned her horse toward the woods beside the post.

The token opened a rabbit trail, barely wide enough for a single rider, that twisted through birch and tangled briar. At the heart of the woods, a stone cottage hunched against a hillside. The door was shut, but smoke rose from the chimney. Élise knocked with the pattern Étienne had taught her—three quick, one long, two quick. The door creaked open to reveal an old woman with skin like cracked leather and eyes sharp as thorns.

The old woman looked at the token, then at Élise, then at Ashworth’s bare wrists where his shackles had abraded the skin raw. She spat into the dirt.

“You bring a British soldier through my door?”

“He’s not British,” Élise said, and heard herself lie, though she wasn’t certain it was a lie. “He’s French. From the Emperor’s cavalry.”

The old woman’s gaze ran over Ashworth’s height, his bearing, the way he stood with weight on his right leg like a man waiting for a command. She grunted, apparently satisfied, and waved them to a stone trapdoor behind the hearth.

“Crawl. Keep low for half a kilometre. The tunnel exits in a dry streambed on the French side. If the Prussians catch you, I never saw you.”

The tunnel was worse than anything Élise had imagined. Cold mud soaked through the knees of her dress; roots scraped her neck; at one point, she heard the distant tread of boots overhead and stopped breathing entirely until the sound faded. Ashworth’s breathing behind her was steady, controlled. She could almost hear him counting each yard.

When the tunnel ended, they emerged into crouched daylight beside a rushing stream that had carved its way through low hills. They were in France. The border signal post stood mere feet from them, and on the road a hundred metres back, Élise could see the checkpoint still in operation. A Prussian officer was gesturing wildly toward the woods they had just left.

“Move,” Ashworth said, and they did, scrambling into the nearest treeline and urging their exhausted mounts forward once again.

They rode until noon, when the horses were blown and Élise’s vision swam from a fever she had tried to ignore for two days. The gunfire caught them in a narrow valley between two ridgelines. A bullet tore past her ear, clipping the leather of her cap, snapping her head around with its whistle.

Ashworth swore. He reached for her reins and dragged her horse behind a jutting rock. Three Prussian soldiers had crested the ridge behind them, rifles raised. More were coming—she saw the glint of lance tips beyond the rise.

“This way,” Ashworth shouted, and hauled her down a steep embankment where a dark gash opened in the stone: a cave mouth, nearly hidden by a curtain of ivy and fallen rock. He shoved her inside and turned to fire two shots from a pistol she hadn’t seen him draw. A Prussian soldier cried out. A shot ricocheted off the cave mouth, singing its shriek into the dark.

Ashworth stumbled backwards as another shot hit him in the shoulder. He crashed onto the cave’s gravel floor, the pistol skittering out of reach. Élise heard the shouts of the Prussians scrambling down the embankment at a run, and she grabbed the pistol on pure instinct, raising it with both hands toward the cave mouth.

A shadow appeared. She fired. The shadow fell.

Silence—except for the ringing in her ears and Ashworth’s harsh, wet breathing behind her.

Élise dragged him further into the cave, where the light failed and the cold stone pressed close. She could smell his blood, warm and metallic, and she tore strips from her skirts to bind the wound. The bullet had passed through the meat of his shoulder, missing bone by a finger’s width. He could bleed out slowly or recover. She’d seem enough men bleed to know which was more likely.

“Are they following?” she asked.

“Can’t—” he rasped. “Can’t hear over your heart.”

He laughed, a broken sound that turned into a cough. She pressed the pad tight against the wound, and he hissed, his free hand jerking up and seizing hers.

“Who are you really?” he asked.

The question stunned her that he would dare ask it while bleeding on the floor of a cave, with Prussian patrols somewhere above them.

“Whomever I claim to be,” she said coldly.

“Your hands. You hold a scalpel with a surgeon’s certainty, but you fire a pistol like you spent a childhood at target practice. No English nurse. And no simple nurse from any hospital either.” He looked at her with terrible clarity through the dim. “The Comtesse de Villiers. That’s not real. The hospital name’s not real.”

“You have no room to demand truth from me.” She finished tying the bandage. “Who are you?”

A long silence stretched. The whistle of a Prussian officer’s signal-knife came from somewhere above them, and Élise pressed herself flat against the cave wall, trying to make herself part of the rock. When Ashworth spoke again, his voice was softer, cracked open.

“My name is Whitmore. Captain Andrew Whitmore of the Royal Engineers.”

The name fell between them like a stone in still water. Élise’s hands stilled over the bandage. She stared at him. “Ashworth is dead?”

“Ashworth is dead. He was my brother-in-law.” Whitmore’s eyes were dark, but the bleeding had made them feverish. “He married my sister. In Spain—she was sent north, to France, with her husband’s regiment. My commander told me he died at Waterloo. But the letters I found said otherwise. Said he deserted, defected to the French, betrayed secrets to the Emperor’s men. My sister went with him. I came to find her. To stop her from revealing what she knows.”

“What does she know?”

“Papers. A map. Château Laurent.” He said the name like a wound. “The same chateau you were tracking. The same agent you’re chasing. And you—you told me your brother disappeared. But I saw you with a French token. A French spy’s token. You knew the signal pattern for the border crossing.”

He reached out with his good hand and grabbed her wrist. His grip was weaker now, but refused to let go.

“I’m dying,” he said—and there was no dramatics in it, only the clipped assessment of a soldier making calculations. “I’ve maybe an hour before the fever takes me proper. So if you mean to kill me and take the papers, do it now. But if you mean to cross this country in one piece, you’re going to need what I know. And I’m going to need to know you’re not delivering me to your master.”

Élise looked at his hand on her wrist, at the blood seeping through her torn skirts, at the mouth of the cave where dusk was deepening.

“I’m not a nurse,” she admitted. “And I’m not a spy’s daughter. I am the daughter of Émile Delacroix, who was once the Emperor’s most trusted mapmaker. My brother, André, disappeared after Waterloo, and I came to find his body and carry him home. But I also found evidence my father kept his own secrets—secrets worth killing for.”

She looked him in the eye.

“And your sister is not the only one who knows the name of Château Laurent.”