“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 know 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.
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 n
ext 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 the 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?”
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.”
“You’re right about that.”
A chewing sound came from under the desk. It could have been rats, of course. “She’s left that goddamned rodent with you, hasn’t she?”
“Aye. Jess thinks I need the company. He steals things from the desk and gnaws them to bits. That’s a pencil he’s got hold of.” Whitby made a slow business of settling down at the desk again. “And nothing poisons the beggar. Now tell me without more rigmarole what you’re doing to my Jess. You’ve come a long way to see an old man if you’ve got nothing to do but brag you’ve debauched my girl.”
“The Neptune Dancer. My ship. I had friends aboard.”
“That’d be one of the ships sold out by our traitor. A Kennett ship.” Whitby sighed. “I’m sorry, man, but it’s nowt to do with me.”
“I traced two hundred pounds from the French Secret Police, to the go-between in Naples, and then to your London drawing account. You were paid by the French. There’s no doubt.”
“That’s to say, you have no doubt. Fair enough. Some of the evidence would convince me, if I didn’t know better.”
“You’re guilty as sin.”
The old man sucked on his pipe, looking thoughtful and absurdly ordinary. “Wish I’d had a few more minutes with Jess instead of a great hulking lout like you,” he said, at last. “Still, glad to have a look at you, I suppose.”
“I wanted to have a look at you, too.”
“Already had that, I should think.” Whitby poked his pipe toward a painted landscape that hung on the wall nearby. “Through yonder peep or t’other ones. I’m asking myself what Bastard Kennett is doing with my lass if he thinks I’m guilty of murder. I never heard you took revenge against women.”
“It’s nothing to do with Jess.”
“But she’s caught in the middle, isn’t she? You’re taking vengeance for an act of war, man, and that’s pure stupidity. The captain who sank your ship’s probably a likeable enough chap. You plan to gut him someday when this is all over?”
“Not him. Just Cinq.”
“More power to you, then, finding him. He might even be the villain you think he is.” Whitby took a drag on his pipe. “Or he could be an honest enough man, fighting for a cause he believes in.”
“I don’t care what he is.” Sebastian gripped the arms of the chair, feeling his breath wrench and haul inside his chest. This old man sat here puffing on his pipe, being philosophical. Fifty men on the Neptune Dancer had been robbed of all their years. They’d never be old. “In a few hours, Jess is going to give me Cinq’s name. If you’re Cinq, that’s the Furies’ own revenge. You’re going to die at the hands of your own daughter.”
He stood up. There was nothing he could say to Whitby. Nothing he could do to him. The man was twice his age and cornered up like a rat. "...and she’s going to have to live with killing you.”
“Kennett.”
He jerked around to face Whitby.
“There’s planted evidence aplenty.”
“Or proof.”
“You bought the girl. Now she’s your responsibility. If the evidence falls against me, I expect you to get her out of England. Get her safe. You owe her that much.”
Sebastian set his teeth. He nodded tightly.
“And don’t marry her. I don’t care what you feel for her. Don’t make her live with a man who hanged her father. She deserves better than that.”
What Jess deserved was a different father. “I hope you rot.” He banged on the door to be let out.
Twenty-nine
Kennett House, Mayfair
JESS WAS IN THE RAGGED GARDEN BEHIND THE Captain’s house, lying on her belly on a blanket on the ground, poking around in the grass. Eunice sent her here. She was supposed to be resting, getting ready for the work tonight.
Sun spilled down through the trees in thousands of shilling-sized drops on the grass. She picked a tiny plant with three leaves. She recognized it from the playing cards. “It’s a club.”
“It’s clover.” Claudia’s feet, in dark green leather slippers, were to her left, in the grass, an inch from touching her elbow.
“Clover.”
“It gets flowers on it. About this big.” When she looked up, Claudia was showing her with two fingers. “Purple. Shaped like balls. You are the most deplorably ignorant person I’ve ever met.”
“I just haven’t been in England much, mostly.” She tried to imagine purple flowers shaped like balls all over the grass and couldn’t. She would have noticed if something like that was going on, wouldn’t she? Life just got stranger and stranger the more you thought about it.
“You’ll get brown if you sit out in the sun,” Claudia said.
“I had a governess once who said things like that. I got brown in Egypt. Never got unbrown again, really. I didn’t care much at fourteen.” She thought for a bit. “Don’t care at twenty-one, either.”
“You’re showing your ankles.”
The pretty muslin print of her dress was kicked up to her knees. “Showing considerably more than my ankles.”
“I’d advise against attracting masculine attention in this house. But then, you consort with weasels, don’t you?” Claudia’s feet shifted. “Quentin’s waving at me from the window. I’m going inside.” And she swished away. Unaccountable woman, Claudia. She stood there for ten minutes, just heavy with something she wanted to say, and never did decide to say it.
Jess had never taken the time to have a good look at grass. Always been too busy. Now that she investigated, she found it wasn’t just grass. It was a whole town down there, like London, full of every kind of inhabitant. Clover. Ants. Bugs. Made you wonder what you were stepping on when you walked around.
She’d come out here to be alone to think. Hadn’t been alone yet. But then, did she really want to think? Probably not.
She picked out one of the plants that was velvety and tough at the same time and had blue flo
wers on it like bells. Flowers smaller than her fingernail. When she crushed the leaves, they smelled like mint.
A deep voice behind her said, “That’s horehound.” It was Sebastian.
“You have something to do on a ship someplace. I’m almost sure of it.” She didn’t look up.
“They make a cough mixture out of it.” He sat down beside her on the blanket.
She twirled the little plant in her fingers. The stem felt bumpy.
“It’s square. Look.” He took it from her and pinched off the end of the stem and showed her. “I remember Standish showing me this when I first came to live with him. I was seven or eight.”
A plant with a square stem. Why would you have a plant with a square stem? So you could pack them more closely?
“You can eat it if you like,” Sebastian said.
She rolled over on her back and looked up at the sky, biting the stem. It tasted like the red-and-white sweets they sold in shops. Sebastian came closer till he was above her, lean and intent, smiling down on her. His eyes held the knowledge of all that kissing they’d done and what she’d felt about it. He knew he could do it again to her, whenever he wanted to. Made it hard to meet his eyes.
She’d spent some of last night, when she wasn’t sleeping, wondering whether Sebastian might take it into his head to climb up those stairs and make love with her. He didn’t though.
It wouldn’t take a clever man like Sebastian more than two minutes to get her out of a nightgown. He’d slide it away and do some of those things he was so good at. It set off an odd, hot excitement in the pit of her stomach, looking up at him and thinking about him that way. She wanted to make love to him. No moral backbone at all, that was her problem. Came of all those years thieving.
“I finally tracked you down,” he said. “Too bad we’re not out at sea somewhere. One of the good things about a ship is you always know where to find people.”
My Lord and Spymaster Page 28