Read My Lord and Spymaster Online
Authors: Joanna Bourne
My Lord and Spymaster (35 page)
“Those aren’t sparrows, are they?” she said.
“Those are swallows, Jess.”
She was still being a servant girl or a pickpocket or some other Cockney thing inside. She sat on the ledge and drew her knees up close, letting her chin rest on the back of her forearm. This time, when she lifted the violets up and smelled them, her lips curved. “Swallows,” she said, memorizing. “What do you do with violets after someone gives them to you?”
He took the violets from her hands and slipped the string off the stems and let the flowers loose in her lap. “You enjoy them.”
She grinned at that, happy and relaxed for a change. That wouldn’t last long. Not with what they had to say to each other.
He pulled the oranges out of his pockets and tossed one to her. She caught it neatly and broke into it with her thumbnail and began to peel it, looking at him with her usual level regard.
“Do you know, you can do the same thing my father can. Bargain with people. Make them do what you want. I mean, look at me . . .” She held up her hands, with the orange and orange peel, and wordlessly indicated her lap, filled with violets. “I have three thousand and six things to do today and I’m already late. Why am I sitting here eating oranges with you?”
“No breakfast?”
She shook her head. “Sheer persuasiveness on your part.”
She was so beautiful sitting there. He’d have to be made out of stone like that lion behind her not to be aroused by her. She was taking such delight eating that orange. She’d picked up one of the violets and was staring into it. He could see her discovering all the separate streaks of color in the heart and the oblong dots there. If they’d been in the middle of a field somewhere, with all the time in the world, she’d have told him about it, as if it were the first time in history anyone had noticed what a violet looked like. He’d have showed her there were just as many things to discover in her own body as in the heart of any flower.
“Tell me why you went to see Lazarus.”
The brightness of her closed up, like a flower closing. Her mouth got obstinate. She was beautiful when she was soft, looking at flowers and smiling. He liked her like this, too. Mulish.
“What did you ask Lazarus for? You came all that way and you risked your neck. What was it?”
She didn’t want to say. At last, she shrugged. “Sailing dates. Lazarus keeps records of all that. Everybody who pays the pence gets writ down. It’s all there—names, ships, dates.”
Every ship, large and small, paid the pence to Lazarus, from the schooners anchored in the Pool of London to the coal barges in Stepney. “He keeps records?”
“Of course. He’d get stole blind otherwise. There’s just nobody honëjusordest.” She brooded on that. “I’m not saying he keeps banker’s records. Every couple of months they toss them in a back room. Some get lost. But he has accounts going back years.”
And that was the last, missing piece. Lazarus kept the records nobody else did, the listing of all the ships in London. Amazing. That was why she’d walked back into the padding ken and bargained with that monster. “Get word to Lazarus. Tell him to send them to the Admiralty tomorrow. You’ll find out for sure whether I’m Cinq, then.”
“Guess so.” Her eyes were gold, like old coins, when she looked at him.
“I wish you believed me today.”
“That’s the trouble. I do believe you.” An organ grinder a few streets away was endlessly repeating a short, discordant tune. Jess looked away and plucked at the fabric of her dress. “Feels like betraying Papa, when I trust you this much.” She still had a lapful of flowers, but it seemed she didn’t want them there any longer. She began picking them up and letting them fall, one by one, into the river. “I’ll know tomorrow, won’t I?”
They sat and watched the river about three barges’ worth, saying nothing. There was a coy, unreliable southwest wind winding past them and a high tide, just turning after the slack. Far downriver, near the Tower, amid a forest of tall masts, a square stern brig upped anchor and let the tide pick her up. They’d dropped the foresail to catch wind enough to maneuver. Without a glass it was too far away for him to read her name.
Jess broke the silence. “Lazarus would have found some way to keep me if you hadn’t come. I like to think he wouldn’t have, but . . .” She shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “He’s strong. And the old life tempts me. It wouldn’t have been easy to get away from him a second time. I owe you myself.”
“You wouldn’t have worked for him again, but you might have suffered for it. And I would have come to get you out. Jess, why did you sell yourself to Lazarus?”
“I wish I could figure out how your mind works. How did we start this?” She scrubbed a hand across her face, looking perplexed. “That was a long time ago. Let’s talk about something else.”
“You’re supposed to be grateful to me. Prove it. Tell me.”
She gave that little quirk upward at the side of her mouth. There wasn’t a more expressive face in London. “You’re doing it again, Sebastian . . . getting me to do things. Sometimes you sneak them out of me artful, and sometimes you just ask. I never know which it’s going to be.”
“This time it’s just asking. I’ll be artful later.”
“It’s all very sordid. You don’t want to hear about it.”
“If I didn’t want to hear, I wouldn’t ask.”
“Oh Lord, if you want to know . . .” Twenty feet away, a seagull swooped down and scooped up one of those violets floating out to sea. A second later it dropped the flower and flew off, looking disgruntled. Jess watched, while she mulled everything over and decided to tell him. “I was real young. Eight, I guess. My father wentë Myand off to France and got himself arrested. We didn’t know that. We just knew he didn’t come back. I did my best, but the money ran out. My mother and I ended up . . . there.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, downriver, toward the worst of London’s slums. “There was a pimp who came to get my mother. I ended up killing him.”
This graceful girl in front of him, the reflective, intelligent face, the subtle, simple dress. He tried, but it was impossible to match her with any part of this—not with pimps, not with killing, not with Lazarus.
“You cannot imagine how much trouble I was in that night. He got the knife away from me and fell on the stupid thing, and I was covered with blood everywhere. He had about a million cousins. I was going to get me and Mama killed real, real bad.”
He could see her hands trembling where she had them fisted in her dress. “I knew Lazarus. Knew him face-to-face. I’d been picking pockets to feed us, and Lazarus made me pay the pence right into his hand. He does that with some of them he’s watching, though I didn’t know it then.” Her hands opened and closed again, clutching at the cotton of her skirt. “He was taking about everything I lifted, too, which isn’t like him. I don’t know what he thought we was living on.”
He snarled. He heard himself do it. She didn’t notice. She was a dozen years in the past.
“He wanted me to work for him. All the kids I knew dreamed about that—working for Lazarus. But I didn’t want any part of it. Every week, he kept talking about me being a Runner.” She sketched a motion in the air. “And I just danced away.”
Eight years old, and setting herself against Lazarus. She never had a chance.
“When I killed Lumpy—that was the pimp . . . Sebastian, do you know what it’s like when you look and look and the world has got so narrow there’s only one thing to do? I went to Lazarus for help. Only he wouldn’t let me just be a Runner. He said I had to take his shilling. He bought me. Bought my soul, he said.”
“You killed somebody for him?”
Unexpectedly, she grinned. “That was just him playing with you. He took Lumpy’s death. Made up some story and stuck a knife into the table, the way he does, and took the death as tribute. He never made me do things like that. Knew I was dead soft. Used to scold me for it.”
There was a scrap of orange peel on her skirt. She picked it off and flicked it over into the water. “I bought sausages with it. With the shilling he gave me. I was so bloody hungry.”
He thought about chopping Lazarus into fish bait. He’d use a dull knife.
“It was good with Lazarus, after I stopped fighting him.” Jess stared into the past. “That place behind Lazarus, where the boy was—that was mine. I was Hand. You don’t understand. That’s like being vizier or something. I could go anywhere. Do anything. It was wonderful.”
That, he could picture. Jess as a child, watchful and silent, sitting at the wall behind Lazarus, running his errands all over London. After she stopped fighting him, of course. What an absolute, bloody monster tëloolenhat man was.
“Hard for me at first,” she said. “Nobody’d ever run me before and I wasn’t used to it.”
Lazarus knew exactly how to control someone like Jess. He’d owned her soul, all right. “I can see it might be difficult.”
She looked at him then, really seeing him for the first time in a while. “It wasn’t like that—what you’re thinking. I was . . . special. He used to just laugh at me when I cheeked him. He’d do things for me, almost anything I asked. And when I fell, he kept them looking for me till they found me. And he came and got me out. Had ’em kidnap some nob doctor to set my arm. He sat up all night, talking to me, to keep me from knowing how much I hurt.”
The man had sent her scrambling across roofs. Lazarus should be divided into many, bloody pieces.
“I was with him three years. I would have died for him.”
It was a miracle she’d survived at all.
People strolled by along the river walk. Jess straightened her dress over her knees and kept her eyes down at the printed pattern in the cloth when she said the next thing. “I have a favor to ask, since we’re just sitting here and I’m already thirty foot deep in debt. I want to give you a shilling, in exchange for that one you gave Lazarus. I want to . . . buy myself back from you. I know it sounds stupid.”
It made her uncomfortable, him owning her soul. Good.
She said, “It’s just passing a shilling piece from hand to hand. Call it superstition.”
When he didn’t say a word, she glanced up and bit her lip, wondering what he was thinking about, probably. And there she was, leaned back on the stone lion, her skirts rucked halfway up. Any other woman in London would have realized how accessible she looked.
“Do you think I own you because of that shilling?” He leaned forward. Very gently, he ran the back of one finger in a smooth line down from her neck, across her bodice. He slowed when he got to her breast, but he didn’t stop. “If I own you, I can do this.”
She got quiet. She looked down to where his hand was, not quite believing what he was doing. “For God’s sake, Sebastian. We’re in the bloody street here.”
“Somebody I own doesn’t get to object to anything I do. Remember all those years in the East. Lots of women for sale in the East.” He slipped along, headed for the crinkle of her nipple. It rose up under the fabric as he approached. He didn’t touch, just circled round, softly, with the tip of his finger. She was lovely. “Generally they cost more.”
It would be interesting to see what she did. There was a good chance she’d break his nose and heave him in the river. She could do that, if she wanted.
She batted his hand away. “Stop this. Will you stop this? There must be fifty people can see you.”
“Nobody’s looking.” He didn’t give a damn who was looking. She’d run herself snug up to tëlf v hhat stone lion. No retreat in that direction, unless it got up and walked off.
“This isn’t Paris. Nobody in this town makes love in the open but pigeons.” Her voice was all beautiful and tense with what he was doing to her. She clutched at his arm. No. Not fighting. Getting closer.
It seemed a good time to kiss her. As always, she was an intriguing combination of ignorance and some theoretical knowledge and a high level of native skill. After the first shudder, she just held on to him, getting softer and more willing every minute. With Jess you knew when she was willing, because you didn’t get your teeth knocked out.
She pulled away and licked her lips. Lovely lips, fuller than usual, from the kissing. “This is going to be a report on Adrian’s desk in an hour.”
“Should be more interesting than what he generally reads. Are you letting me do this because I bought you for a shilling, Jess? Is that why?”
Dazed eyes. Unfocused. Vulnerable. She put her hand up on his cheek, feeling the texture of him there. It was all new to her. She had no practice with the way a man feels. Her angel-faced martyr boy probably hadn’t even shaved yet.
“Forget the damned shilling,” she whispered.
Triumph streaked through him, stronger even than the lust that was running amok in his blood.
Mine. Not bought or stolen or taken. Just mine from the beginning of time. Mine even before I met her.
Mine. Not bought or stolen or taken. Just mine from the beginning of time. Mine even before I met her.
He kissed her deep, entering in slow as if he were going into her another way. She didn’t recognize that yet. There was so much for her to learn. She vibrated under his hand everywhere he touched her. “Owning’s for objects. I don’t make love to objects.”
Her mind was taking its merchandise inside and closing down the stall. Only a few thoughts left. Jess, thinking, with all the force and calculation of her damnably cunning mind, was a formidable opponent. Jess, twitching each time he caressed that sweet nubbins on her breast, was just a woman. He liked dealing with her as just a woman, once in a while. It gave both of them a rest.
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