Garrett Investigates - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,37
whether their ancestors had originated in the province of Île-de-France or in the Sahel of Tunis.
Over the decades, Mary had numbered more than two or three among her court.
She had found, over those same decades, that she had little use for men, and Frenchmen less than most. She had no need of them, and she found it distasteful to coddle their egos and debase herself before their expectations. It was also possible, if she were honest, that her work as a private detective before the War had exposed her to a little too much human nature. Especially since she had so often been working for those same women of the demimonde, and the subjects bringing them grief had so often been those same Gallic cockerels.
She supposed it hadn’t been much of a stretch for those who had recruited her to the Resistance to know that she would be a safe choice. Her race, her associates, and her supernatural nature had all argued in her favor. She believed she’d been an asset. She’d even done her share of recruiting—and now, for Paris, for her fallen comrades, she would perform this one last task as a secret soldier before taking her retirement.
When she reached the Seine, she descended. Another night she might have mingled with the sparse foot traffic across the Pont au Change, but this evening brought only drilling Prussians to the bridge. They lined the road before the occupied Préfecture de police on the Île de la Cité beyond; a display of force that demonstrated only how insecure the Prussians knew their position to be.
So Mary crossed the river below the lip of the bridge, in the shadows on the span, on the strength of her fingertips and balance. Beyond, she scaled a wall and took to the rooftops again. It amused her to leap silently the cramped medieval width of the Rue de Lutéce over the heads of the enemy. Even if they saw her, they had no hope
of pursuit.
And they never saw her.
She did not need to descend again. The route she followed led to the Pont Saint-Michel, a bridge even more cramped and medieval than the Rue de Lutéce. If the Rue Saint-Denis was one of Paris’ most ancient roads, the Pont Saint-Michel was one of its first bridges, and the broad stone thoroughfare had only been replaced once. Alone of the bridges of Paris, it still held its two rows of medieval houses, blocking the view of the water on either side—unless you were lucky enough to dwell in one.
“Lucky,” perhaps, being a relative term, as some of them were unplumbed even now, and there were said to be no colder houses in Paris. Comfort, however, was not an issue for everyone. These houses leaned together like spinster aunts, their wattle-and-daub walls stained tea-brown between the timbers. The walls bowed and bulged with a weight of years that Mary, still in her first century, found somewhat incomprehensible—and oppressive to contemplate.
On the fifth sharply peaked roof from the Île de la Cité, Mary stopped. There were no trees here, but the dark and chill cloaked her. After glancing both ways to be sure she was unobserved, she lowered herself from the roof-edge to a narrow balcony overhanging the river. Her feet touched lightly; she turned to knock on the frame of the curtained window beyond. The frame, because she was haunted by a vision of the ancient leading between the tiny diamond-shaped panes shredding at the first tap.
She didn’t actually need to rap. The curtains twitched back at the first sound, and the opposite casement swung wide. There were no candles or lamps within to silhouette the woman who held the window open, but Mary’s eyes gathered starlight like a cat’s. She saw a round, pleasant face like an egg in a nest of red curls, and the white shift with its low, ruffled neckline—a nightgown far from warm enough for the season.
Not that this woman could any more feel a chill than Mary could. Which was only one of the reasons that Mary had brought her, too, into the resistance. Another of Paris’s resident expats who would fight for her past that last breath.
“Mary,” Alice Marjorie said, in her gentle Scottish burr. “Come in before you catch your death, my dear.”
***
A candle did burn, but in the front room, where its light would be seen lighting the curtains with a warm glow from the street. For Mary and for Alice, this was light enough.
Before the war,