Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

Unwillingly, she saw the picture he was painting. She remembered that kind of cold. The year Papa left for France and didn’t come back and there was no money at all, she’d been out in the cold at all hours, stealing a living. But even then, she hadn’t been a scavenger on the Thames, picking up what fell off the barges. A mudlark. Even at the worst, it hadn’t been that bad. I don’t want to feel sorry for the boy you were.

“My basket was about half full of coal. I’d hit on a good spot—picked up a dozen pieces within a foot of each other—and I was looking around for more. A carriage pulled up on the road. A lady got out and began walking down the bank to the river. Mad thing to do. She had a wool cloak on. I remember thinking that if I were bigger I’d go knock her on the head and take that cloak from her. Not to sell. I’d keep it to roll myself up in and sleep warm. If I could have got away with it, I’d have killed her for one night of sleeping warm. That’s what I was.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. This close to him, she felt every breath moving in and out of him. Maybe he was thinking about what he could have become. She had thoughts like that herself, sometimes. “That was Eunice?”

“That was Eunice. She walked right out onto the mud flats, sinking in and getting filthy. She staggered her way up to me and said, ‘Are you Molly Kennett’s son?’ And I said, ‘What if I am?’ She said, ‘You’re to come with me. I’ve been looking for you for a long, long time.’ ”

The last sunlight had leached out of the sky and the strongest of the stars were showing through. He had his head back, looking at them. The profile of his face was like the outline of some mountain. Granite and cliffs. But he wasn’t rock hard inside. She would have been able to deal with him if he’d been simple and hard inside.

“The lady undid the tie on her cloak and took it off and put it around me. Then she just slopped her way back to the carriage in her wet dress, not even looking behind to make sure I followed.”

She’d known Kennett was abandoned by his father after his mother died. Thrown out like garbage. She hadn’t known the rest of it. That earl, the man who was his father, should have been knocked on the head and drowned, quiet like. “Why are you telling me this? It sounds private. You’re telling me because I helped Eunice?”

“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—”

“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.”

“. . . 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.

“Bloody traps. We might as well not have 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 around 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.”