The wood on her desktop was smooth and cool. A big, rich desk. A merchant’s desk. So much work she’d done here. She’d felt important. These last years, she’d pretended to be more than a scruffy thief from Whitechapel. Hubris, the Greeks called it. Bad things happened to folks who engaged in hubris, according to her governess.

She never changed inside. She was still a thief. It was always just a matter of time till the beaks came for her. “We’re losing the game, in case you wondered.”

“They can’t—”

“They can do anything they damn well want to. Look at this.” Every drawer in her desk was open, just a crack, so they made a little set of steps. “They could pry these drawers out in two minutes. Instead they go picking the locks and take an hour over it. A mind like that just strikes fear into sensible people.”

Inside the drawers, everything was neat as a bishop’s wig. Nothing missing.

No. Take that back. One bit of inventory was unaccounted for. The sack of lemon drops she kept hid behind the cash-box was gone. They’d helped themselves. If that wasn’t rampant abuse of power, she didn’t know what was.

In the back of the bottom drawer was a bundle of dark clothes and a lumpy, black burlap bag. In a couple small ways, the lumps were shaped different than when she last handled it. They’d pawed through her old burgling bag. All these years, nobody touched her burgling tools but her. Nobody. “They’re making some point with all this. I hate it when people get subtle with me. I’m not good at subtle.”

Lately, life just teetered from disaster to disaster, didn’t it? Enough to make a clam dizzy.

She wished, right to the pit of her belly, that she was still a kid, out in a fishing smack with Pitney, pulling in bales of smuggled lace, keeping an eye out for the Customs. Someplace ordinary, doing something simple.

In the middle drawer, her correspondence was sorted out by size. “They got into the letters from France. That’s a dozen men they can send to the guillotine any Wednesday morning they’re feeling bored. I should have burned this lot as soon as I read it.”

“You couldn’t expect the Service to show up,” Pitney said.

“I should have. Lots of things I should have thought about. It’s never bad luck. Always bad decisions.” Lazarus told her that a hundred times. Too late, now, to remember. She started sorting the letters out, picking the ones that had men’s lives in them. “Will you shovel these into the stove for me? I held on to to them, thinking there might be something I missed. All I’ve done is put more necks on the chopping block.”

“I’ll do it.” Pitney took off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up.

Kedger slipped down to her desk and sniffed at the letters. He grabbed a quill and launched off and plopped to the floor with a little grunt. He didn’t make any sound on the rug, but she heard him skittering as soon as he hit the bare boards. He took the quill under the bookcase to devour it.

“It’s time for you to leave England.” Pitney rocked the cage back into place, one edge, then the other, bit by bit. He had practice moving awkward loads, all those years smuggling with Papa. “Time to cut anchor, Jess, and run.”

“It’s too late for that.”


THE porter at the front door of Whitby Trading offered him an errand boy as a guide, but Sebastian shook his head and walked by. He knew the way. He took the main staircase upward and walked a long corridor permeated with the smell of spices. On the right, arches gaped open to the lower floor, with ropes hanging and winches and a sheer fall to the receiving area twenty feet below. There were hundreds of yards of storage down there in the main warehouse, and this was only one of their buildings. Whitby’s was a huge operation.

Jess was the prize at the center of this maze. He passed empty rooms and an errand boy in a hurry. No one challenged him. Not a guard in sight, and the clerks were out on the main floor, checking inventory. Anyone could walk in, wrap a woman up in a rug, and make off with her. They didn’t protect Jess worth a damn in this place.

He didn’t keep a warehouse in London. His cargo sold out of rented space at the docks. His agent—Eaton Expediters—kept two desks for him and dealt with the customs paperwork and his invoices. Kennett Shipping was lean still and growing. Someday he’d have what Whitby had here.

The main clerks’ room was thirty feet long, high-ceilinged, lined with account books and cluttered with files. Jess’s office was at the far end. A wide pair of plate-glass windows let her keep an eye on the clerks. On the other side of her office another window looked down into the warehouse below. Nothing moved at Whitby’s she didn’t know about. This was the heart of the kingdom.

She was in her office. She sagged at her desk like a jib sail with the wind spilled out. He headed for her, past rows of desks punctuated with quills and ink bottles.

She wasn’t entirely unprotected. The man with her—it was the Whitby London manager, Pitney—stopped rearranging the ferret cage and came around to the desk so his burly body partly shielded her from view, giving her some privacy. It looked like he was in the habit of taking care of her. A small point, but telling.

She wore sober dark green today. Her wheat-colored hair was pulled back ruthlessly from her face, leaving it ascetic and pure as a Byzantine icon. There wasn’t a way he’d seen her—not stark naked, not muffled head to foot—that she didn’t make him hungry for her. He took one look at her down the long stretch of the office and got stiff as a boy in his first brothel. Stupidest muscle in the body. Distracting as hell. He stopped, halfway down the room, and calculated costs of replacing rope on the Lively Dancer for a minute, till he’d put jack back in the box.

Coming closer, he could see she’d left the cups stacked up beside the brass samovar, cobalt blue, blood red, and canary yellow. On the shelves all around the room, the lines of ledgers showed gaps, like missing teeth. That was where the lads from the British Service had helped themselves to her account books.

She’d left her door a crack open and he could hear her talking. That was careless of her. Taking it slow, acting as if he belonged here, he came up close and stopped, still as a tree, and listened.

“I don’t even know what they’re looking for.” Jess sounded tired and subdued, not like herself. “They have enough proof to hang Papa three or four times over. They don’t need more.”

“Josiah’s a rich man. He’ll buy his way out. They won’t—”

“It’s not Papa they’re after.” When she lifted her head, her face looked fragile as blown glass. The bruise on her cheek stood out starkly. “It’s me. They want me to take the drop right next to Papa.”

“For God’s sake, Jessie.”

“It’s easier for them if I’m scared. They want me to panic and make mistakes.”

“I can have you offshore with the tide. You can wait this out in Amsterdam.”

“They aren’t going to let me go. They got men following me, making sure I don’t wriggle out of the net.” He saw the shrug, a quick rise and drop of her shoulders. Her voice dropped so low he could barely hear her. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t leave Papa. They should know that. Funny, in a way. I never thought the English would be so hungry to hang a woman.”

That was nonsense. He’d put a stop to her thinking like that.

“Nobody’s going to hang,” Pitney said. “Not you. Not Josiah. I swear it, Jess.”

“Maybe. Look at this.” She held her hand out, palm down, showing it to Pitney. “Shaking like an aspen. If Hawkhurst wants to break my nerve, he’s about done it. That’s the worst of having an old friend as an enemy. He knows me down to the hinges on my soul.”

“Northern Lass is still in the Thames, waiting for the tide. I’ll take you out the back way. Don’t pack. Don’t go back to the hotel. I’ll—”

“They say it doesn’t hurt much, if it’s done right.” She shook abruptly, like a cat touched by a drop of water. “I need the names of the ships that sailed yesterday, and everything that sails today and tomorrow. Everything, down to the coastal scows and the fishing boats. Get me a list.”

“I’ll send some boys out. Jess, we can’t find one ship out of—”

“We can. We have to.” Her voice was steady, her face grave and grimly intent. Even if he hadn’t seen proof after proof last night, he’d know she was hunting Cinq. “Did Northern Sun bring reports from France?”

“Two new ones. You’re in no shape to read them.”

He agreed with Pitney. She shouldn’t be working. She shouldn’t be out of bed. There was nothing holding her together but spit and stubbornness.

“I’m fine. Maybe Leveque pinned down the—” Then, between one second and the next, she knew he was there. Her chin lifted. Their eyes met through the glass. “Or maybe the Captain’ll join us instead of skulking around the doorsill. ”

Caught. He pushed the door open the rest of the way. “The Service isn’t trying to hang you.”

“I guess you’d know. How long have you been a jackal for the British Service, Captain?” Anger straightened her spine and ratcheted her voice tight.

“A few years. The Service knows me pretty well. If they were trying to hurt you, you wouldn’t be in my house. I don’t let anyone touch the people in my house.”

Pitney stomped over to put himself in front of Jess, legs braced. The tense, open right hand, held low, said he had a knife, probably in his boot top. It should have been ridiculous, a man that age squaring off against him. But it wasn’t. Anyone who came at Jess would have to kill that old man to get to her.

He wouldn’t like to face Pitney in a fight. “We need to talk, Jess. Call him off.”