Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

She crawled to the edge to look over. Four stories down, hats and bonnets meandered along the pavement. No one looked up. They never did. Thieving was all about being in plain sight where folks never looked.

“Most jobs have a bad patch in them.” She said it soft, to the scratching of distant claws. “That was our bad patch. The rest’ll be easy.”

No answer, but she was sure the Kedger agreed.

Eaton’s roof was a lengthy business of up and down, up and down, over a row of dormers. Good British workmanship everywhere, with an Italian influence in the molding.

“If I get the Captain crossed off my list, I’ll clear out of his house.” There were lots of fancy handholds here. A fair treat to crawl across. “Before I wind up in his bed. I feel myself slipping in that direction. I’m not between the sheets yet, but I’m thinking about it more than I should be.”

Kedger trailed behind her, just out of sight.

Being righteously angry at the Captain didn’t make as much difference as you’d think.

She avoided some guttering. Nobody secured guttering the way they should.

The Kedger’s head popped up over the roofline. He poured toward her, carrying something in his mouth. She accepted a button. A little spit and a quick polish on her sleeve revealed it was brass. Amazing what Kedger came up with, even on a roof.

“You’re going to make us rich if you keep this up.” To please him, she dropped it in the sack. He sniffed after it a minute, then climbed up her arm to investigate her braids. Sniff . . . nibble . . . tug . . . tug.

“Anything in there I should know about?”

The Kedger responded with a comment on women who bounced ferrets around in burlap sacks.

“Sorry, mate. I’ll be more careful next time.”

He chirruped, still grumpy.

“Are you going to pull all my braids out, or just that one?”

He’d made his point. He took his place on her shoulder and dug his claws in, stretched up tall, and pointed his nose to the wind. South, he ordered.

“Fine with me. Let’s go visit Captain Kennett’s account books.”

Two floors down, Eaton’s clerks were emptying out of the main room, going to the tavern for lunch. She’d enter through the attic and slide right through an empty building. Lord, but she loved burgling.

IT WAS RAINING IN A SULKY, ENGLISH WAY WHEN she paid off the hackney driver. It wasn’t night yet, but windows glowed up and down Meeks Street. There’d be warm fires and bright lamps in all these big, comfortable houses and folks sitting over cups of tea. Cheery.

Meeks Street was a complacent row of stucco houses. They built walls around the gardens to keep the grass and trees from wandering. More trees, with small round leaves, grew in a thin line of garden that ran up the middle of the street. The air smelled wet and green.

Here she was. British Service Headquarters.

As soon as she turned in the gate, the dog started barking inside, deep as a bronze gong. No sneaking up on Number Seven.

It was a dry pain, knotted in her belly, how much she needed to be with Papa. When he was through yelling at her, they’d sit together and talk about Russian sable and brandy and the price of indigo and pretend to each other that everything was going to turn out fine.

The brass plate beside the door read “The Penumbral Walking Club.” The British Service, having their little joke.

Yanking the bellpull was one of those pro forma actions. They knew she was here. She could feel somebody watching her from the windows upstairs, from behind the curtains. They’d send Trevor to open the fool door when they felt so inclined.

She waited. The rain settled down to the task of making her miserable. She had time to renew her acquaintance with the green-painted front door and the bars on the windows. There were bars on every window in the house, upstairs and down. The old man who did the cooking in the kitchen downstairs kept a shotgun propped near the window where she could just see it. You’d have to get by him before you even tried for the windows. Then there was the dog. This had to be the least crackable house in London. Not an amazement, considering.

Papa was going to ask about her recent activities. If she didn’t tell him, he’d just ask Pitney. Peach on her in a minute, Pitney would.

The lock scraped and the door opened. But it wasn’t Trevor who’d come to let her in. It was the Captain. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

Some days it doesn’t shower luck down on you. She’d counted on having a little more time before she had to face him. “Good afternoon to you, too, Captain. Mucky weather we’re having.”

“You were on the bloody roof. Have you lost your mind?”

“There’s a school of thought that holds that opinion.” Somebody from Eaton had trotted over and told him his books had gone missing. He’d figured out she’d been on the roof. Canny as a parliament of owls, the Captain.

“It’s fifty goddamned feet up. One slip, and they’d have scraped you off the pavement into a bucket.”

“That’s a vivid bit of description. I put your books back before I left. Did they tell you?” When it started raining, she’d nipped back inside and dropped the ledgers off in a corner office, stacked on the desk in a neat tower. “Look, am I going to stand out in the rain till I get old and gray or what?”

He pulled her over the doorsill like he was taking in lobster pots. “You think this is funny? You think I’m not going to lock you up.”

“I don’t have any idea, actually. I’m disenchanted with locks, lately. Everybody ignores them.”

The front parlor at Meeks Street was formal and ugly and damp and stone cold, about as unwelcoming as it was humanly possible to make it. They did it on purpose. She pulled off her cloak. At least it wasn’t raining on her in here. They’d do that, too, if they could figure out how.

“Sit. Over. There.” The Captain clenched his teeth. If she was his cabin boy, she’d find herself something to do at the other end of the ship, right smart.

“I’m here to see my father, not you.”

“Do what I say and you’ll see him a lot quicker.”

The Captain was going to be a stone wall when it came to reasoned argument, so she went over and sat, tame and polite, in the chair he’d picked out for her and let him take her wet cloak and bonnet and throw them over the arm of the sofa.

He went down on one knee to toss coal on the stingy, midget fire in the grate and poke at it like a demon on duty in hell. Oh, he was in a champion snit, he was.

The fire, what there was of it, felt good on her face. “You were right about the weather, now that I think of it. You said it was going to rain today.”

“You could have killed yourself, getting to my damned account books. Don’t do that again. Don’t do anything like that again.”

So they weren’t going to talk about the weather. “Fine. Next time I’ll sneak in at night and tie up the guards and ransack the place. That’s the way it’s done. And I’ll steal the boiled sweets.”

The fire wasn’t going to get her warm, not if he poked at it till doomsday. She leaned her head against the back of the scratchy, red velvet chair and closed her eyes. She was always cold and tired these days, and she’d been up since dawn. The glow she’d brought back from milling Eaton’s had worn off. The joke didn’t seem funny anymore—just desperate and scary and moderately pointless. “You’d think it’d put a crimp in this rash of housebreaking we’ve been having, the amount of rain that falls in this town.”

“Don’t fall asleep on me.”

When she opened her eyes, sure enough, he was standing over her with his let’s-keelhaul-another-hapless-seaman expression, trying to intimidate her with his size and his muscles and being enraged. Old tricks, but they worked fine.

“You sneaked out the back of Whitby’s. You dodged the men I put there to take care of you. You crawled up Eaton’s like a damned monkey. You’re shivering. You’re filthy.” He reached out and found a spot of grime she hadn’t scrubbed off her cheek. “I could sink a barge in the circles under your eyes. You actually think I’m Cinq.”

“You could be.” She shouldn’t have said that, not straight out. She was too tired for this.

“You think I’m Cinq.” He grabbed the back of the chair she was sitting in. She jerked awake. “You think I’m a murderer and a traitor, and you don’t have sense enough to get out of my house.”

“Nodcock, that’s me. You would not believe how many people have pointed that out.”

That hatchet face was close, jaw clenched. If half the rumors were true, he’d flattened men with those efficient, sledgehammer fists in every port around the Mediterranean. The other thing they said about him was true, too. He was soft with women. He never thought of touching her when he was like this. In the years that lay between that boy in the cold mud of the Thames and the man he’d become, he’d changed into someone who couldn’t lay angry hands on a woman. The chair was having a hard time, though.

“Did you find anything, Miss Whitby? Did you find one solitary jot of proof worth risking your neck up among the chimney pots?” She had a furious, just fit to be tied, angry Captain here. “How is it you’ve survived in the world as long as you have?”

“One of life’s mysteries. I—”

“Did you find one word that says I’m a traitor? One syllable? One line in a ledger?”

Found out you’re making a roaring profit on Greek sponge. “I didn’t find anything marked ‘payment from the French Secret Police’ in among the red coral and carpets, if that’s what you’re asking. Nobody keeps illegal profit in their company accounts. You’d have to be naïve as a daffodil to go looking for it there.”