My Lord and Spymaster (36 page)
Read My Lord and Spymaster Online
Authors: Joanna Bourne
This wasn’t Paris. It wasn’t so usual to see a couple locked together like this in London town. They got stares and giggles from people walking by. And the hell with them. He kissed her a while, and it just got better and better.
Then they stopped kissing and sat there breathing deep at each other, and she outlined his lips with her fingertips. It was as if she were worshipping the flesh and bone of him.
“You picked a silly place for this, Sebastian.” He could see in her eyes she was letting herself fall in love with him. She was about three-quarters deep so far and sinking fast. He wondered if she knew. Almost too late for her to stop. It had been too late for him for a long time.
“This is a fine place.” His hand was on her thigh. She picked out soft fabric for her dresses. Like so much about her, you couldn’t tell how good it was till you looked at it closely. You didn’t know even then, unless you were canny as hell, the way she was. “Beautiful view, for one thing.”
<ë”She looked him full in the face. “I like it.” There was no man alive who deserved what was in her eyes, least of all him. But he’d take it all. This was Jess. He could no more let her go than he could stop from breathing.
He cupped the back of her head, into that hair all gold and brown, and fitted her close to him and held her strong and comforting till her body stopped quivering. The whole noisy world stretched out on every side, and he had the most important part of it right in his hands.
“Who do you belong to, Jess?” he asked, real quiet.
“I belong to myself.”
“Good. That’s a start. Do you have a shilling on you?”
She looked up at him. “Yes.”
“Hand it over.”
She fumbled in a pocket among the farthings and pence and picked one out. Not as new and shiny as the one he’d given for her, but a perfectly workable shilling.
“There,” he said. “You’ve bought your soul back. Take better care of it next time.” He tucked the shilling away safe in his watch pocket.
She said, “Don’t spend it all on sausages.”
Twenty-six
Kennett House
FLORA’S BABY WAS FINE, BUT HE WAS STARTING to get hungry. They were getting a little goat’s milk down him in the kitchen, but Eunice wouldn’t let them get a wet nurse in. She just kept sending him back up to Flora, who left him in the cradle.
Flora wasn’t doing well at all. She’d been lying all day, staring, answering direct questions, but otherwise not saying much. She ignored the baby.
Eunice evidently thought Jess might help. Anyhow, she’d sent her up to sit with Flora as soon as she got home from the warehouse.
There was a chair by Flora’s bed. Jess sat there and put her feet up on the rung of the chair and looked out the window and tugged at a strand of hair. So many people were expecting her to find an answer tomorrow. Maybe she wouldn’t find anything. Maybe she wouldn’t like the answer she found. She closed her eyes, feeling hollow.
“You ran away from Lazarus. No one does that.” It was about the first thing Flora had said to anyone, just on her own.
“It’s complicated.” She went back to pulling hair through her fingers. She wasn’t feeling terribly talkative, herself, right then.
“I heard about you. From when you were Hand. Jess the Hand.”
She shrugged. The baby was making weak sounds in the cradle, like a kitten or something. They sounded like that the first couple weeks. “That was years back.”
“You tunneled into a bank once, and everybody almost drowned when it started to rain. They still laugh about that.”
“Always rains in this town. I’d go about it different if I was doing it now.” People had been patting the woman’s hand all day long and encouraging her to talk. Maybe a little quiet was what she needed.
Flora sat up in bed. She was older than Jess had thought. Twenty-six or twenty-eight. Eunice had put her in a huge white cotton nightgown that buttoned up the front with about sixty little buttons. Her hair was scraped hard back from her face, and she looked exhausted. But she was beautiful. Lazarus always picked pretty girls to play with.
“He was always telling Twist how you did everything better. He said you could plan a caper so it ran like a gold watch.”
“That’s just him talking. Me, he used to tell about this kid named Hawker. Before my time. Seemed Hawker could do anything but walk on water.”
Flora twisted her hands in the quilts. “They’re very kind here. But they don’t understand. I have done such things. You know the kind of things I had to do.”
“Nobody’ll know if you don’t tell them.”
“There are whole pieces of myself I can’t find anymore. I became . . . I cannot believe what I have become.”
“You get over some of it, I think. You don’t go back to what you were.”
“You understand, don’t you? The rest of them just say I can do whatever I want and not to worry. But you understand.” Flora lay down and looked at the ceiling again. “I can’t go home.”
“Up to you, really. You can be whatever you want to when you don’t have anything to lose.”
That made Flora look thoughtful. She wondered if she’d said the right thing, then decided in the long run it probably didn’t matter what she said. Flora would work it out for herself. Everybody did.
She sat beside Flora for a while, planning what she’d do tomorrow. She’d use the cargo manifests, if she had to. It depended how much information Sebastian had managed to find for her.
A maid pushed through the door, carrying a tray. It was fish stew. That meant it was time for her own lunch.
The baby was lying in the cradle, waving his hands around, looking fairly unhappy as she walked by. “Better make some arrangement for this one if you don’t want him. Another couple hours, and he’ll start getting scared, all alone, when it gets dark.” She thought that covered it.
Either that worked or something else did. Anyway, Flora fed the baby, and they fell asleep in bed together that night.
Twenty-seven
Garnet Street
“TRY TO KEEP THE STACKS IN ORDER. THEY’RE sorted and I köarnnow where everything is. Nine-tenths of my problem tomorrow’s going to be finding things.”
"MacLeish brought boxes. Over there.” Pitney didn’t look happy. She could see he was worried right to his guts about Papa. It hunched his shoulders and put another twenty years on his face.
“Everything on my desk. The rest of the ledgers, too.”
By this time tomorrow she’d know what ships carried treason across the Channel. Papa would be home and safe the day after. She had to believe that. “Put the files in the wagon tonight and set a guard sitting on top. It goes to the Admiralty about three tomorrow afternoon. They’ll have a room clear for us.”
The Whitby warehouse was deserted. Nobody left but her and Pitney and three guards patrolling downstairs. Empty.
“This is damned dangerous. Jess, you should talk to Josiah.”
“No point in it. I already know what he’d say. I don’t want to have to go against his orders.” Kedger’s cage was empty. She checked the food bowl and water dish. Both full. There was a pile of notes she’d left on top of the cage. She picked them up, tapping them neat. “Everything in my desk drawers, too. There’s notes I may need. Ships sighted. Ships not sighted where they should be. There could be one line in there that makes the difference.”
“Jess, they can hang you with any page in those books. You trust them too much.”
“Could be. It’s too late to stop, though.”
“It’s not too late to leave England.” Pitney looked sick. He was brave as a tiger when it came to facing the Revenue cutters. Papa getting arrested shook the order of his universe. He’d be all right when Papa was cleared.
She took one last look round at all her charts and lists. All her letters and reports. All her planning. “I’m going to know Cinq’s name tomorrow. I can do this. I can really do this. You would not believe how much paper they’ve pulled together for me to sieve.”
“Think about what you’re doing.” Pitney took the papers from her like he was getting an order for his own execution. “There has to be another way.”
That was the problem with life. Sometimes there wasn’t.
Twenty-eight
IT WAS SHORT OF NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING when Sebastian rang the bell at Meeks Street. Doyle met him and unlocked the door to the study and let him in to see the old man.
Whitby was writing letters. He had three pages in a neat row to the side of the desk, drying. The Service would look those over before they went out, just as they opened the mail before they handed it over to him. The
Times
was folded and laid aside with a bright red apple holding it down.
Times
was folded and laid aside with a bright red apple holding it down.
He had French silk brocade swathed around his middle today, cream and crimson stripes. Expensive fabric for a waistcoat, but he could afford it.
“Ah.” Whitby looked him over without getting up. “A new face.”
Sebastian took his time crossing the room. He set his knuckles down on the wood of the desk and bent over, face-to-face, level with the man. “What the hell kind of father are you?”
“Not a good one, I’m afraid.” Whitby leaned back and rubbed the side of his nose. “You’re a friend of Jess, then.”
His hands closed into fists. The urge to hurt this old man was strong. Whitby let Jess grow up in the worst slums of the East End. Let her fall prey to men like Lazarus. When he got himself into trouble, she went out climbing roofs and accosting strangers in the street, and he didn’t put a stop to it. “She’s living in my house.”
“Then you’re Bastard Kennett.” Whitby indicated the chair. “Sit down.” His face was all bland good nature. “Nobody tells me anything. What’s my Jess been up to?”
“Romping through my halls in her dressing gown, searching my private papers. Did you tell her to do that?”
“No. You don’t have to loom over me like the dome of Saint Paul’s to ask.”
“What I’d like to do is break your neck.”
“In a few weeks, you can watch Jack Ketch do that. You and half London.” Under bushy eyebrows, hard, shrewd eyes studied him. “It’s a nice little company, Kennett Shipping.”
“Whitby’s Trading is a nice company, too. Mostly Jess’s work, isn’t it?”
“Almost all of it. Not many men canny enough to believe that. Sit down and tell me what Jess is doing.”
“Rifling through my shipping records. Picking the lock on my strongbox. You made her into a first-rate thief.”
“Not my doing.”
“The devil it wasn’t. Where were you when Jess was learning to pick locks?”
“Here and there.” Whitby’s mouth set flat. He pushed back in his chair and opened a drawer in the desk. The cheap clay pipe he took out was white and new looking. “I know summat of your aunt, Lady Eunice. We met once—she won’t remember, but I do. She has a name in London. My Jess is safe with her.” The next drawer down, he found a tin of tobacco and shoved up the lid with his thumb. “Safe as she’s likely to be anywhere. What’s Jess to you?”
“She’s mine.” He sat in the chair by the desk and stretched his legs out.
The brown eyes went opaque. For an instant, Whitby looked every inch as dangerous as his reputation. Then it passed, and he was a tun-bellied old merchant in a striped waistcoat, filling his pipe. “Mr. Pitney tells me you claimed my girl in front of Lazarus. They’re saying you bought her.”
“So I did.” That was what he’d come to tell Whitby. To see the man’s face when he said it.
“I wouldn’t try enforcing that.” Whitby began packing tƒ€egan pache bowl of his pipe. Tobacco grains scattered across the papers on the desk. Whitby wasn’t as calm as he pretended. “Has claws, my Jess does. She thinks you’re the spy, Kennett.”
“She’s risked her life trying to prove you’re not. I hope it was worth it.”
The old man stood up. He wasn’t well. His clothes had been tailored for the man before he’d taken off a stone or two. But he moved like a piece of granite getting up and walking around. Heavy. Dangerous. Solid. Whitby didn’t bend to get a coal from the fire. He sat down on his haunches, like a man who’d grown up without much furniture.
He made a lengthy business about picking the coal up with a pair of thin sticks and lighting the pipe and getting it to draw. He glanced up. Whitby had Jess’s eyes—steady, brown, self-possessed, unafraid. It was disconcerting to see Jess’s eyes looking out at him from this man’s face.
“Maybe she’s risking her neck to prove it’s not
you
. Did you think of that, Kennett? We’re two men letting a woman do the dangerous work.” He pushed at his knees and stood. “I’m locked up in this cage. What’s your excuse?”
you
. Did you think of that, Kennett? We’re two men letting a woman do the dangerous work.” He pushed at his knees and stood. “I’m locked up in this cage. What’s your excuse?”
He pushed anger away. “A disinclination to clap the woman in irons. I doubt anything less would work.”
“Happen tha’s reet.” Whitby pulled the decanter from a nook in the bookcase and poured one glass. “They keep a damned mediocre port for me. I’d offer you some, but I doubt you’d drink with me.”
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