The Queer Principles of Kit Webb
Page 4
Bugger that. It would have been nice to just do one last job. To once more see the look on a gentleman’s face when he realized there were some things out of his control, and to feel, however briefly, the dark satisfaction of revenge. He missed the rest of it, too—the thrill of making an escape, lying low, disposing of their haul.
“I see we’re back to sulking,” Betty said. “I hope you’re enjoying your penance, because I’m not.”
Kit let out a frustrated huff. “Only you, Betty, would see a man trying to do his best for once in his life and think there had to be some twisted explanation for it.”
“Only you, Christopher, would have his head so far up his arse to think that this”—she gestured around the shop with the rag—“was the first time you did your best.”
He pointedly ignored her and resumed tidying up the shop, all the while wondering how he had been brought to a point where he was so thoroughly bossed around by a woman ten years his junior, and also wondering how he’d even begin to get on without her.
After walking Betty home, his leg was in a right state. He turned down her mother’s invitation to stay for supper, then ignored her brother’s shouted invitation to meet at the corner tavern for a pint. Instead, he turned into a lane, as he always did, and leaned against the wall to rest. After a year of this routine, he thought there might be a Kit-shaped indentation in the bricks. He knocked his fist into the side of his right leg, which sometimes made his hip remember that it had a purpose. Gingerly he put some weight on it and, when he didn’t crumple to the ground, called it a success and returned to the street.
Sometimes on his way home he stopped at the baths and soaked his miserable leg, and sometimes he stopped at an eating house, and sometimes he ran into someone he knew and had a chat. Sometimes, when he was really in the mood for misery, he stopped by the stables where he put Bridget up and gave her an apple. But most of the time he went home, hauled himself up the stairs, and read by the light of a candle until he fell asleep.
At some point in the last year, Kit’s world had compressed to the span between his coffeehouse and Betty’s house, with increasingly infrequent forays into the wider world. After spending most of his adulthood stalking his quarry and running from the law, flying back and forth across the countryside as he saw fit, he felt every inch of his imprisonment.
Maybe Betty was right and he was punishing himself—for Rob’s death, for years of unrepentant theft, for not being able to thieve anymore. It didn’t make sense, but in Kit’s experience, not a lot of things that happened in a person’s mind really did. Maybe he was hobbling around one tiny corner of London because he wanted to feel like rubbish; if so, he was doing a fine job of it.
He tried to remember the last time he had gone anywhere outside his usual circuit—two weeks ago he visited the cobbler to have his boots mended, then returned a few days later to pick them up. Before that? In September he went to the apothecary when a spate of damp weather aggravated his leg and he needed a new tin of salve.
When he got home, he hauled himself up the stairs and collapsed into bed, not even bothering to take off his boots. The boots could wait until it hurt a little less to move. So could supper. So could everything that wasn’t staring at the ceiling and watching a spider weave a cobweb in the corner.
He wondered what Percy did of an evening. Surely, he didn’t mope around whatever fine house he lived in. Kit bet that Percy dressed even more absurdly than he did during the daytime, and then spent the night dancing and flirting with ladies. And probably doing a fair bit more than flirting with men. Those remarks he had made, those looks he had given Kit—they didn’t leave much room for doubt about Percy’s preferences. He didn’t make any kind of secret about it.
That thought was enough to ruin what had been shaping up to be a fine little fantasy. The only reason Percy was able to ogle other men in broad daylight without getting hit, arrested, or flat-out murdered was that he was rich. He wondered if rich men took their wigs off while fucking, and then got very annoyed with his prick for not finding wigs sufficiently unattractive. His prick didn’t understand anything. Bringing himself off to an aristocrat in a goddamn wig would be a humiliating end to a foul day.
He dragged himself out of bed, lest his thoughts and hands wander, and crossed the landing to his office to balance his books.
Chapter 7
Percy decided that it was high time to put the screws to the highwayman. It had been days since their last encounter, and besides, the errand would get him out of Clare House, fill a few hours, and bring his father one step closer to public ruination, so all in all, a morning well spent.
He took extra care with his toilette. It was a bleak and dismal day, so he chose yellow. It was not, he would concede, his best color, but one of the many advantages of beauty was that he could wear the ugliest conceivable color and still look better than almost everybody. He had Collins button him into his jonquil silk waistcoat and the saffron-colored coat that was positively stiff with gold embroidery. A lesser man might find yellow breeches to be a bridge too far, but Percy was not a lesser man.
He sailed into the coffeehouse with the maximum possible to-do only to find the place bursting with patrons. The weather was grim, so it stood to reason that these commoners would wish for a more hospitable environment than whatever hovels they undoubtedly hailed from. But he was disappointed to realize the table he occupied on his previous visits—at least those visits he had made as himself, rather than in his boring spy clothes—now seated four men in depressing black coats.
But he could hardly leave, not after sweeping into the place as he had done, so he settled himself at the end of a bench at the long central table, adjusting his coat around him. He could feel Webb’s gaze. He looked up, meeting the highwayman’s eye.
“You’ll be wanting coffee, then,” Webb grumbled.
“Yes, I am here for coffee,” Percy said. “How observant of you. No wonder this place is such a bustling success.”
Webb wordlessly plonked a cup of coffee onto the table, causing a not insubstantial quantity to spill over the rim of the cup. Percy ignored both the spill and the coffee.
“Good God, Kit,” said the man who sat beside Percy. “You’ll soak my book if you don’t mop that up. Give me a rag, why don’t you.” Then, turning to Percy, “The place goes to ruin without Betty here to see to things. Ruin, I tell you.”
“Ruin,” Percy agreed, and apparently that was all one needed to do at a place like this to begin a conversation, because then they were off. The man told him what a grave tragedy it would have been if Kit had managed to destroy his book when here he was, mere pages from the end. And that prompted Percy to confess that he hadn’t read the book.
“You must take it!” the man cried. His name was Harper, or Harmon, or possibly even Hardcastle. He spoke with a rustic accent that sounded like so much nonsense to Percy’s ears. Also, Percy did not much care what the fellow’s name was. “Here,” said Harper or whoever he was, pressing the book into Percy’s hands.
“I couldn’t possibly,” Percy said. If Percy wished to read this book about a Tom Jones, or some such common-sounding fellow, he would order a copy bound in the same green leather as the rest of his library. He would certainly not read a book that belonged to an utter stranger and which looked like it had been read by several people with hands in various stages of dirtiness. “I don’t wish to impose on your kindness.”
“And you wouldn’t be, my good man. It’s not my book. It’s Kit’s.” Harper gestured at a wall on the far side of the room, lined with bookcases and hardly visible through the tobacco smoke.
“Is Mr. Webb running a lending library as well as a coffeehouse?” Percy asked. The mind boggled at the career choices of retired highwaymen.
“That,” said a man across the table, not looking up from a paper on which he had been furiously scribbling, “would imply that he charged.”
“I do charge!” interjected Webb, who was stomping around the table col
lecting empty cups.
“No, you don’t,” said the man across the table.
“You’re supposed to put an extra penny in the bowl.”
“Nobody does that,” Harper told Percy in confiding tones. “You just take the book and put it back when you’re done.”
“And put a fucking penny in the bowl,” said Webb. “What are you all still doing here? Don’t you have homes to go to?”
Harper left soon after, shoving the book in front of Percy as he went. Percy ignored it, preferring instead to watch Webb poke at the fire and grumble at the pot of coffee that brewed near the hearth.
Around supper time, the crowd at the coffeehouse began to thin. Percy really ought to be going as well. When he checked his watch, he discovered he had been sitting on a hard wooden bench for three hours. He had read four pages of the novel, idly listened to a debate that sounded shockingly seditious on both sides, and spent the rest of the time watching Webb.
He watched Webb sweep, add what seemed to be utterly indiscriminate and unmeasured quantities of herbs to the coffeepot, pour coffee in a way that could only be described as reluctant, shelve a pile of books in a manner that could have nothing to do with the alphabet, and tell about three dozen patrons that “Betty isn’t here, God damn you, just drink your coffee and get out.”
Percy knew nothing about shop keeping and would have been gravely insulted by anyone who suggested otherwise, but he had spent enough money at enough places to know that Webb’s manner of running his business was both eccentric and not especially likely to encourage customers to return. But still, the place had been full every time Percy had seen it.
Maybe they were all there to admire the proprietor. There was certainly a lot of him to admire. Even his scowl didn’t ruin his looks. He had the jaw to carry it off, making the scowl into a proper manly glower.
Now there were only three people left, including Percy himself, and surely it was past time for Percy to be going. He had only meant to show his face and remind Webb of what fun and intriguing criminous activities he could be engaging in instead of brewing coffee. But somehow he had whiled away the entire afternoon.
One of the remaining patrons got to his feet and made not for the door, but for the stairs. “That garret still empty, Kit?” he called when he was already on the bottom step, so he must have been fairly sure of the answer in advance.
“It’s yours.” Webb glanced up from the counter, where he was counting out the day’s earnings into neat stacks of coins. “Mrs. Kemble is on the floor below, so mind that you tread lightly. You know how she gets.”
That was the most Percy had heard Kit say that day or any other day, and it was the first time he had heard the man speak in anything other than a grumble. He had a nice voice, too—low and a bit rough. His accent was hardly polished, but neither was it rustic. He didn’t sound illiterate, and indeed, now that Percy thought about it, he had seen Webb reading books from his own library. One could put him in a respectable coat, introduce him to the concept of a hairbrush, and scrape off that stubble and he would pass for a prosperous shopkeeper, a respectable member of the middling sort—which was, Percy supposed, exactly what Webb was, felonious past notwithstanding.
“Stop staring at me like that,” Webb said when the two of them were alone in the shop. He didn’t look up from his coins.
“No, I don’t think I shall,” Percy said.
“You’ll get yourself arrested if you carry on acting like that.”
Percy raised his eyebrows. “I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to receive counsel on being a law-abiding citizen from you.”
Webb made a noise that it took Percy a moment to realize was a laugh. Webb recovered himself immediately and scowled at Percy, as if he were cross with Percy for being amusing.
“You’re not going to tell me that a man like you minds a brush with the law,” Percy said.
Webb gave him an odd look, but still there were no offended dramatics about him not being that sort of man, how dare Percy, et cetera and so forth. The man wasn’t even blushing.
“Did you take my advice?” Webb asked.
“To stop staring at you?”
Webb looked up, exasperated. “To hire a thief.”
“I already told you why that wouldn’t work.”
“Ah, yes, because your father has guards.”
If Webb thought he could so easily get Percy to admit that his target was his father, he could guess again. “What a fool you must think me to fall for such a trick,” Percy said. “How demoralizing.” He got to his feet and walked out the door, taking the tattered first volume of Tom Jones with him and pointedly dropping a penny into the bowl, feeling Webb’s eyes on him all the while.
Chapter 8
Kit leaned heavily on his cane, looking at the familiar building. The same lace curtains fluttered in the evening air as fiddle music drifted out to the street on a breeze. He thought he might even be able to smell the women’s perfume all the way from the pavements, but that was probably his imagination.
He knocked, and the door was opened by a girl Kit hadn’t seen before. She had red hair and beneath her powder he could see a smattering of freckles on her cheeks.
“Good evening,” she said in what sounded like it was supposed to be a seductive lilt but actually came out with a bit of a nervous stammer. Kit knew the girls who were truly nervous didn’t work the door. This one, with her half-concealed freckles and her shyness and the way she moved a hand to her chest as if in an arrested effort to tug her bodice higher, was there to appeal to the sort of man who wanted to take care of a girl. Scarlett knew what she was doing, and so did this girl. He’d bet that within six months she would be set up in a cozy house by some man who was set on rescuing her. And bully for her. Kit hoped she fleeced the fellow.
“Would you tell your mistress that Kit Webb is here to see her?”
She opened her eyes wide, and he couldn’t tell whether she recognized his name or whether she did that to all the men who called at the house. He took off his hat and she showed him through a series of rooms papered in shades of rose and ivory. They passed a salon in which a handful of men clustered around a woman who played a lively tune on the harpsichord, then a room in which men and women played cards, some of the women perched on the laps of their companions.
At the end of the corridor, the girl gestured to an empty parlor and instructed Kit to wait. He sat near the fire, gingerly lowering himself onto a delicate settee. The furniture on the ground floor of Scarlett’s establishment was all constructed along similar lines—chairs that seemed just a shade too fragile, tables that were maybe half an inch too low, all designed to make men feel like huge strangers in a feminine place. When Kit had first asked Scarlett about it, he had questioned her logic—wouldn’t it make more sense to fill the house with furniture built on a more masculine scale, so as to welcome paying customers? She had simply told him that the beds were sturdy and her pockets were full.
“It really is you,” came a throaty voice from the door. “I thought Flora had to be mistaken.”
“In the flesh,” he said, rising to his feet and turning to the door.
Scarlett crossed the room and took his hands, looking up into his face. “Twelve months, Kit.” He wondered if she could see the passage of time on his skin. He thought she might have new lines on her face, maybe another strand or two of gray hair among the auburn.
“The girl who answered the door,” he said. “Flora, I think you called her. Is she your sister?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Flatterer.”
“Daughter?”
“Clean living has made your mind go soft if you think I’ll admit to having a daughter old enough to own her keep.” Which, he noticed, was not a denial. “But what brings you here? I don’t dare hope it was for the pleasure of my company.”
“Intelligence,” he said.
“The usual arrangement, then?” She sat in one of the armchairs and gestured for Kit to do the same.
“Pity,” she said. “I’ve a list as long as my arm of men I wouldn’t mind coming to harm.”
“Don’t we all,” Kit said.
“Sometimes when I hear about an especially bad one,” Scarlett said, “I think, Well, Rob would like to hear about that.”
Kit tamped down the swell of grief he felt at hearing Rob’s name. It felt unexpectedly fresh. He was used to grief, couldn’t even remember a time when he hadn’t been grieving somebody. But his parents’ deaths were half a lifetime ago, long enough for that wound to have long since scabbed over. And as for Jenny and—and everything that had followed from that, he had been too angry and tired and out of his mind with drink to remember now what it had felt like.
But he had grieved Rob while sober, and with plenty of time to go over the events of that last day again and again until the memory was frayed at the edges, blurry like a print in a book that had been handled too many times. He could hardly remember it without also seeing every moment he could have acted differently, turned back, picked a different mark, a different route, a different life entirely.
It wasn’t as if he and Rob had set out to become highwaymen, for God’s sake. Rob’s father had been a gardener at the manor; Kit’s parents owned a small tavern. They could each have followed in their fathers’ footsteps, and indeed they would have if it hadn’t been for the whims and caprices of the Duke of Clare.