My Lord and Spymaster (15 page)
Read My Lord and Spymaster Online
Authors: Joanna Bourne
“Partly. And I owe you some secrets,” he opened and closed his fist, deliberately, watching himself do it, “in fair exchange.”
Fair exchange for what?
“And it’s a warning,” he said. “About me. About what I am.”
I watched you kill a man yesterday. You half killed another, just now. How many warnings do you think I need?
“I used to stand under the bridges, so hungry it clawed the side of my guts, and look up at their carriages driving by. All those fine, fat gentlemen. I hated them.” The grating sound she heard was his jaw clenching. “I stole from anyone weaker than me. I would have become a murderer in another five or six years.” The Captain’s face was all shadows. “That’s why I understand your father. We both grew up with that kind of hate. I know why he turned traitor.”
He thinks Papa would kill men for money.
She pushed away from him and sat up straight. “You don’t know anything about my father. You don’t know the first thing. He’s—”
She pushed away from him and sat up straight. “You don’t know anything about my father. You don’t know the first thing. He’s—”
“Not guilty. You have to believe that because he’s your father. ” His eyes picked up some spark of lantern light in the kitchen and glittered. “I wonder what you’re willing to do to prove it.”
Whatever he was thinking, he was wrong. And it was probably insulting. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do. Not one thing. I already—”
“Later. We’ll finish this later. Come inside and eat.” He stood up and reached down to take both her hands and pull her to her feet. “We’ll have dinner and listen to Quentin explain why the perfect social order doesn’t coddle the poor. Walk on the grass, unless you want me to carry you. This gravel will tear you to shreds if you walk around without shoes.”
Thirteen
Garnet Street, the Whitby Warehouse
“. . . ABOUT A DOZEN OF THEM. THEY CAME IN after midnight. They locked the guards in the high-value storage.” Pitney, sweating and frustrated, led the way down a row of oak barrels. Jess followed. “We didn’t know anything till the morning shift came on and found them. I sent you that note the minute I got here.”
“It’s not the guards’ fault. Not your fault either.”
“I’m supposed to be in charge here. God’s bleeding damn, Jessie.” Pitney slammed his fist down on a bale of broadloom cloth and stumped on with the familiar drag and thump. He’d taken a bullet in the knee, running Whitby cargo near Dieppe. It was old and accustomed, walking along with Pitney, limping and fuming, at her side.
Nothing had been disturbed on the open shelves of the main floor or in the transient racks next to the loading dock. This wasn’t thieves. This was His Majesty’s God-Save-the-King government. Hell of a thing when you couldn’t trust your own government. “Did they get into the safe?”
Pitney’s bald, freckled scalp was turning red the way it did when he got agitated. “They picked the lock. It’s the German safe we got last year. It came with a sheaf of guarantees.”
“If you want to get into a safe, you’ll get into it. There’s always a way. Makes it kind of pointless, really.”
"MacLeish is counting out the money, but it’s all there. The banknotes weren’t even touched. Everything else . . . Jaysus, Jess, they tossed the jewelry in a pile on my desk, just heaped up.” He glared at the shelves they were passing. “The clerks are checking inventory in the main hall. Most of the small stuff is accounted for already. We should get a new safe.”
“Least of my worries, I expect. What else?”
“They broke a few locks in high value. Trunks and crates got crowbarred open, but it looks like they didn’t take anything. MacLeish is squawking like a wet hen, wishing something had walked off so he could complain. Whatever they wanted was in your office.”
“No surprise. I should have . . . Oh, devil and blast it. Kedger.” She took off at a run. Pitney struggled behind her, swinging his stiff leg, cursing.
The door to her office stood open. Kedger was safe. Snarling and unhappy with every inch of fur on end, but safe. They hadn’t touched him.
Thank God.
She went to him and put her hands right down on the cage so he could sniff at her and know everything was fine.
She went to him and put her hands right down on the cage so he could sniff at her and know everything was fine.
“Bloody traps. We might as well not †iffhave any law in this country, the way they ignore it.” Kedger clung to the bars, upside down, furious, bristling, and red-eyed. “They scared Kedger. Sodding mudsuckers.”
“I didn’t let him out last night. He was . . .” Pitney absently picked at the bandage on his index finger, “. . . cross. Jess, your father don’t like you swearing.”
“What? Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Pitney. I’ll watch that.”
Kedger started up a long, impassioned aria about the previous evening, full of squeaks and snarls and threats of ferret vendetta.
“I couldn’t agree more, Kedge. All that and then some.” She slipped the bar and opened the cage door. He looped back and forth, wriggling under her fingers. “That’s my fine boy. Finest ferret in the city.”
She knew who’d invaded in her office in the dead of night. Mr. Bloody Adrian Hawkhurst of the bloody British Service and Captain Bloody Sebastian Kennett. They just waltzed across town and ambushed her guards and ransacked her office when the fancy struck. Pirate waters, she was in lately. Always something new and unpleasant on the horizon.
Kedger scrambled up her arm to cling to her shoulder and continue his complaints from there.
She found the soft place behind his ear and scratched it. “Sorry you didn’t get to bite anybody. My advice is, stick to rats. You take a chunk out of the British Service, it’s going to disagree with you, sooner or later.”
Pitney said, “This is why they came. They spent their time looking here.”
He was right. Her office had been searched to the bone, then put back to rights. More than put back. All her clutter was tidied up. Every pile of notes was lined up, square-cornered and exact. Next to the samovar, the six cups were stacked, upside down in a pyramid, nice as ninepence.
They’d made themselves cups of tea and cleaned up afterward. Neat bastards.
She picked up the top cup, the one painted with jasmine flowers. This was the one she always used. She ran her finger around the rim.
Pitney cleared his throat. “You sure it’s the British Service?”
“Who else?” She put the cup back. She’d leave them stacked this way for a while so she’d get angry every time she looked at them. “It’s Adrian Hawkhurst who did this with the cups. It’s Sebastian Kennett who left my papers shipshape and Bristol fashion.”
The Captain had said, “I owe you some secrets in fair exchange. ” He’d sat next to her on that bench last night and talked to her easy and friendly and thanked her for helping Eunice. He’d put his arm around her and kept her warm. All the time he was thinking how he’d break into her warehouse. It just didn’t pay to trust anybody, did it?
Kedger curled around her neck, touching up under her hair with cold little nosings. He knew how scared she was.
Pitney said, “Why, Jess? The Service don’t have to sneak ‹ ha scaround at night, wearing masks.”
“It’s some game they’re playing. The British Service against the Whitbys.” She put herself into her chair, the one Papa bought her in Milan, with the arms carved into lion heads. “Them against Military Intelligence. Them against the Foreign Office. They like their games.”
The wood on her desktop was smooth and cool. A big, rich desk. A merchant’s desk. So much work she’d done here. She’d felt important. These last years, she’d pretended to be more than a scruffy thief from Whitechapel.
Hubris
, the Greeks called it. Bad things happened to folks who engaged in hubris, according to her governess.
Hubris
, the Greeks called it. Bad things happened to folks who engaged in hubris, according to her governess.
She never changed inside. She was still a thief. It was always just a matter of time till the beaks came for her. “We’re losing the game, in case you wondered.”
“They can’t—”
“They can do anything they damn well want to. Look at this.” Every drawer in her desk was open, just a crack, so they made a little set of steps. “They could pry these drawers out in two minutes. Instead they go picking the locks and take an hour over it. A mind like that just strikes fear into sensible people.”
Inside the drawers, everything was neat as a bishop’s wig. Nothing missing.
No. Take that back. One bit of inventory was unaccounted for. The sack of lemon drops she kept hid behind the cash-box was gone. They’d helped themselves. If that wasn’t rampant abuse of power, she didn’t know what was.
In the back of the bottom drawer was a bundle of dark clothes and a lumpy, black burlap bag. In a couple small ways, the lumps were shaped different than when she last handled it. They’d pawed through her old burgling bag. All these years, nobody touched her burgling tools but her. Nobody. “They’re making some point with all this. I hate it when people get subtle with me. I’m not good at subtle.”
Lately, life just teetered from disaster to disaster, didn’t it? Enough to make a clam dizzy.
She wished, right to the pit of her belly, that she was still a kid, out in a fishing smack with Pitney, pulling in bales of smuggled lace, keeping an eye out for the Customs. Someplace ordinary, doing something simple.
In the middle drawer, her correspondence was sorted out by size. “They got into the letters from France. That’s a dozen men they can send to the guillotine any Wednesday morning they’re feeling bored. I should have burned this lot as soon as I read it.”
“You couldn’t expect the Service to show up,” Pitney said.
“I should have. Lots of things I should have thought about. It’s never bad luck. Always bad decisions.” Lazarus told her that a hundred times. Too late, now, to remember. She started sorting the letters out, picking the ones that had men’s lives in them. “Will you shovel these into the stove for me? I held on to to them, thinking there might be something I missed. All I’ve done is put more necks on the chopping block.”
“I’ll do it.” Pitney took off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up. The ‹lee”
Kedger slipped down to her desk and sniffed at the letters. He grabbed a quill and launched off and plopped to the floor with a little grunt. He didn’t make any sound on the rug, but she heard him skittering as soon as he hit the bare boards. He took the quill under the bookcase to devour it.
“It’s time for you to leave England.” Pitney rocked the cage back into place, one edge, then the other, bit by bit. He had practice moving awkward loads, all those years smuggling with Papa. “Time to cut anchor, Jess, and run.”
“It’s too late for that.”
THE porter at the front door of Whitby Trading offered him an errand boy as a guide, but Sebastian shook his head and walked by. He knew the way. He took the main staircase upward and walked a long corridor permeated with the smell of spices. On the right, arches gaped open to the lower floor, with ropes hanging and winches and a sheer fall to the receiving area twenty feet below. There were hundreds of yards of storage down there in the main warehouse, and this was only one of their buildings. Whitby’s was a huge operation.
Jess was the prize at the center of this maze. He passed empty rooms and an errand boy in a hurry. No one challenged him. Not a guard in sight, and the clerks were out on the main floor, checking inventory. Anyone could walk in, wrap a woman up in a rug, and make off with her. They didn’t protect Jess worth a damn in this place.
He didn’t keep a warehouse in London. His cargo sold out of rented space at the docks. His agent—Eaton Expediters—kept two desks for him and dealt with the customs paperwork and his invoices. Kennett Shipping was lean still and growing. Someday he’d have what Whitby had here.
The main clerks’ room was thirty feet long, high-ceilinged, lined with account books and cluttered with files. Jess’s office was at the far end. A wide pair of plate-glass windows let her keep an eye on the clerks. On the other side of her office another window looked down into the warehouse below. Nothing moved at Whitby’s she didn’t know about. This was the heart of the kingdom.
She was in her office. She sagged at her desk like a jib sail with the wind spilled out. He headed for her, past rows of desks punctuated with quills and ink bottles.
She wasn’t entirely unprotected. The man with her—it was the Whitby London manager, Pitney—stopped rearranging the ferret cage and came around to the desk so his burly body partly shielded her from view, giving her some privacy. It looked like he was in the habit of taking care of her. A small point, but telling.
She wore sober dark green today. Her wheat-colored hair was pulled back ruthlessly from her face, leaving it ascetic and pure as a Byzantine icon. There wasn’t a way he’d seen her—not stark naked, not muffled head to foot—that she didn’t make him hungry for her. He took one look at her down the long stretch of the office and got stiff as a boy in his first brothel. Stupidest muscle in the body. Distracting as hell. He stopped, halfway down the room, and calculated costs of replacing rope on the
Lively Dancer
for a minute, till he’d put jack back in the box.
Lively Dancer
for a minute, till he’d put jack back in the box.
Coming closer, he could see she’d left the cups stacked up beside the brass samovar, cobalt blue, blood red, and canary yellow. On the shelves all around the room, the lines of ledgers showed gaps, like missing teeth. That was where the lads from the British Service had helped themselves to her account books.
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