The honeymoon ended up being quite nice, even given how psychologically fractured Mary felt. They took a quick hop over to Milan, picked up their rental car, and then were very much at loose ends. The original plan for this trip had involved a lot of wineries which now ruled out fifty (or sixty-six point six repeated?) percent of team Watson.

John and Mary both valued being the type of people who shrug and go with it when plans change. So they shrugged and went. Whoever wasn't driving would read out the most bizarre and peculiar things they could find in their Lonely Planet guide, and then they went and did those things. Or not, just as it pleased them.

Pregnancy, Mary found, really involved a lot of throwing up. She never quite got to the point where she was dehydrated or unable to keep food down, but she was guaranteed to be hugging the toilet bowl first thing every morning. And quite often late at night, and occasionally during the long interval between lunch and dinner. One time she had to abruptly terminate the sex because it was making her seasick. Girl on top was out for the duration.

But apart from the bouts with nausea it was wonderful. The hormonal soup bathing her brain enhanced the taste of her food, and made every touch feel like she'd just taken a very small hit of weed. There were no more portentious lucid dreams. She was out every night as soon as her head hit the pillow, and enjoyed the sleep of the just until she awakened in the morning, and when she woke up, well…

Every day began with the sensation that something amazing was about to happen. Mary hadn't felt this way in a long time. She had a clear memory of an early morning walk to school where that vague sense of the numinous had surrounded her... but that had been even before she was sixteen, and that was the most recent occasion. It must have been something that she'd lost with childhood, that feeling of routine exaltation, except now it was back. She wondered if she was somehow borrowing it from the baby.

And uneasily, she wondered if it was because she was (sort of) happy to be back to doing something that she was very very good at. Because in the interstices between good sex, exquisite food, and Roman ruins, she was working on the the first step in any mission: know your quarry.

Charles Magnussen (she learned, the first afternoon in the country, while John was sleeping off a cassoeula that had smelled so good she'd suspended vegetarianism enough to have one perfect bite) was born in 1966, in Helsingor. The son of a naval architect and a housewife, he had been an adequate if unremarkable student, and had started in media straight out of university.

There was a lot of this sort of stuff online about him, which was odd, because in her experience there were two types of very rich people. There were the ones who got the dull glossy-magazine treatment, and the other ones. The ones who really didn't want anyone to know that they had money, or how they'd got it, or what they did with it. Mary didn't imagine she was the first person whose secrets he'd threatened… she would be an unusually ambitious victim for a novice… but he acted as though he had nothing to hide.

But since she knew what she was looking for, she could find it. There was no more evidence of impropriety than you'd expect from any oligarch, but Mary could put together a picture from hints. Initial startup capital provided by people who had zero obvious reason to give Magnussen money but a great deal to lose from any public scandal. Conveniently timed damage to the reputations of competitors. An abruptly aborted inquiry into the legality of how certain information had been obtained. A whole lot of enemies who committed suicide.

A very professional blackmailer, then, and one who didn't hesitate to use his information when his demands were not met. Well enough, Mary thought. If he didn't bluff, then she wouldn't either.

Italy in the late spring was gorgeous. They drove, with many stops, on a meandering route south. The weather was practically perfect and the food was everything all the travel writers said. It was so good to be back in a country that wasn't afraid of flavor. They slept in attic flats, in countryside cottages, in guest bedrooms in little old ladies' houses. Neither of them spoke the language, although it was close enough to Portuguese and Spanish that Mary could at least make herself understood. John declined to even try and just let her handle their interactions with anyone who didn't speak English.

"I'm crap at languages," he said, "Five years of French classes and I'm still lost once the conversation gets beyond 'how much does that cost.'"

Mary asked to hear a sample of his French because she didn't quite believe that was true. He was a very intelligent man with a good memory, things which hardly anyone noticed because of his choice in best friend, but which generally correlated with a good linguist. But he was, legitimately, awful. The vocabulary was all right but the grammar and the accent made her cringe.

It was odd, though. Occasionally during his nightmares he'd talk in what she considered to be very adequate (though usually obscene or alarming) Dari. She wondered if he even was aware that he spoke the language. Mary decided not to mention it. Some wounds didn't need to be picked at.

Anyway. Step two, plan your op. Charles Magnussen lived in a beautiful house, just the sort of place Mary would have chosen if she were insanely rich, which straddled the lines between modern and contemporary styling. It had been written up in architectural journals when the original owner had completed it in 2003, and pretty much right away she had to rule out burglarizing it. She wouldn't have the time for a gradual infiltration, and a straight break-in would be challenging without a squad of assistants. Also it was so far north it was practically in Scotland and she didn't want to have to justify a lengthy absence.

Other places people kept important paperwork were with their bankers and with their attorneys. Which she supposed were possibilities, although as far as she'd ever seen items implicating one in criminal activity mostly didn't get stored with banks. They were too easily accessed by law enforcement. Magnussen's lawyers were an old-established Magic Circle firm with over a billion pounds in annual revenues, and thus were also not going to be keen on involving themselves in blackmail. So whatever documents he had on her were probably in his beautiful house or in his London office, which wouldn't exactly be a treat to burgle either.

But getting in probably wouldn't be all that hard, and so the direct approach might end up being the way to go on this one. She preferred that route anyway, and it would seem like a waste if she didn't make use of her access to his calendar.

Mary was good with computers but not that good, and so she sent an encrypted email to a nice black-hat out of St. Petersburg who she had worked with several times in the past. Twelve hours later, he responded with a:

Glad to hear from you after all this time, lisichka. I thought you'd perhaps been put in lavender.

And a price quote for two hours of dead time on the security cameras of a Canary Wharf office block that was just ridiculously low. As in less than a tenth of what she had been expecting. Either he really was glad she wasn't dead or the dark economy had collapsed sometime in the last five years. He also said that if she were interested in access to the top levels of the MI-5 archives that he could make that happen, which was actually a really tempting…

But no. She was going to do this one last time and that would be it. She didn't need to know anybody else's secrets when her own were ample to be getting along with.

Mary agreed to her hacker's price without haggling and then spent an embarrassingly long time learning what "bit-coins" were and how to get them, because that was how he wanted to be paid. The world had moved on without her, it seemed.

Back in real life, in every city they visited, John dragged Mary through galleries and museums, enchantedly holding forth on chiaroscuro and scumbling and the use of the camera obscura. She'd never seen so many old masters in her life. And so in Florence she stretched her spycraft… just a bit, just so she could evade his attention long enough to buy three prestretched canvases and a set of acrylic paints.

She surprised him with them the next day. Then he surprised her, over the next several days, by producing an amateurish but quite decent impressionist rendition of a photo of her that he had on his phone.

How did that happen? How could you spend a year and a half with a man… seven months of that actually living with him… and have no idea that somewhere inside him was all this artistic talent trying to escape? But the little square painting of herself, looking out of the window at the rainy Venetian canals, lost in her own thoughts ("You were actually sitting still for once, Mary. I had to take the opportunity") reassured her.

The woman in the painting looked soft and gentle and kind. That was how John saw her (though she hoped that the disproportionately long neck was more that he'd not had much practice painting rather than that he also saw her as part giraffe). And if he saw her that way, then surely that was a sign that she could actually be that. She could be a loving wife, and a good mother, and an upright member of society and all that stuff that she wanted to be even when it sometimes seemed like an elaborate piece of performance art. She just had to get past this little… blip.

Except. Except. Except she couldn't really turn off the sharper, more cynical Amy part of her mind anymore. And so she couldn't help noticing that John, after two weeks spent almost exclusively in her company, was getting more and more visibly bored.

And Mary didn't know who she could be that could fix that.

Author's note: lisichka=little fox. Because when Mary's hacker met her, she was a redhead. And also because he thinks she's hot as hell.