Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

The ferret stopped sniffing and clucking. Suddenly, it dropped to all fours and darted down the hall, making a dead set for Quentin. Quent slammed his door just in time.

“I wish he wouldn’t do that.” Jess shook in his hands and her skin was cold.

Quentin was probably leaned against his door, ear pressed to the wood, listening.

“I’m taking you up to bed. No. Hold your tongue. Or else shout real loud and wake Eunice up so we can discuss your visit to my study.” He pushed her down the hall in front of him. The ferret kept pace, slinking close to the wall.

“I don’t want to do this,” Jess whispered.

“I don’t give a damn what you want right now. Go. Upstairs. ”

He followed her, watching her heels swish in and out of her nightdress. Through that thin cotton she was wearing, he could see her legs outlined by the candlelight. When she twisted to look back at him, her breasts made beautiful shadows, swaying. The nipples were delicate pink, like dainty, round seashells. Yes. Pressed up against the embroidery on the bodice. There were his little friends.

He was going to want this woman when she was a wrinkled hag. Want her everywhere, every day, under every conceivable circumstances. Tonight, when she looked like this, she stunned him.

The ferret scuttled half a staircase ahead, then looped back to look, then ran ahead again, playing chaperone.

She stopped when they got to her door and set a hand out, braced on the doorframe. As if that would make a difference. She was prepared to dig her heels in and discuss this at length. Stiff, nervous, rebellious, she breathed out, “I don’t . . .”

“You don’t. Not tonight.” He’d made his point. “You’re going to trust me, one of these days. You’re going to trust me more than any evidence you think you’ve found. More than your own eyes.”

He gave her a little shove towards her room, sending her in there alone. “Put the bolt on. I won’t leave till I hear it click. And for God’s sake get some sleep.”

SHE didn’t sleep though. She looked at the plaster ceiling till she’d about memorized it, then decided that, no, she wasn’t going to sleep. She got up and took a pencil and paper and went over to the hearthrug.

Time to settle accounts.

The last thing she’d stole had been those jade figurines. There’d been twelve of them, slick to the hand and kind of glimmery green and heavy for their size. She’d had them on her when she fell. For all she knew they were still under the rubble of that old warehouse.

She wrote, “Twelve pieces of jade. White house on Slyte Street.” Carved jade from the Orient. She had no idea what that kind of thingumbob was worth. “Ask Kennett about value,” she wrote. She’d set Doyle to finding out who’d lived in that house, ten years ago.

I won’t believe some damn letter. Especially not a letter from that worm, Reggio.

Three days before the jade, she’d stolen banknotes and gold coins across town in Mercer Street. “Banknotes and guineas. Mercer Street.”

Even if I lie to Reams and get the list from him, that’s not the end of it.

Thirty gold guineas, more or less. Banknotes. She chewed on the pencil. A hundred pounds? She couldn’t just knock on the door and ask them, could she?

Wish I wasn’t such a bloody coward.

Better say a hundred and fifty to be safe. She should work out the interest, shouldn’t she? Because she wasn’t a thief anymore. The books have to balance. Debts must be paid. It was a good thing Whitby’s had lots of money.

SEBASTIAN FOUND HER ON THE LOADING DOCK, moodily watching Irishmen and blacks file past, wood frames on their backs, straps over their shoulders and across their foreheads. They were lugging sacks of rice from the warehouse out to the wagons. A cool wind nipped through the streets, but the stevedores hung their coats along the railing outside and worked in shirtsleeves.

Jess wasn’t checking inventory. She stared blankly as the men walked around her. He wasn’t the only one watching, wondering why she was there. Her floor manager kept an eye on her in between checking off cartloads.

Her color was better and the bruise under her eye was almost gone. She’d heal a damned sight faster if she didn’t spend her nights creeping around his house, breaking into his office. She’d gotten up at the crack of dawn and left for work before it got light. She’d done it to avoid him.

“You missed breakfast,” he said.

“I bought a bun at a shop.” She acted as if she’d been waiting all morning for him to show up. “I invested in hot cross buns all round, actually. One for me and a dozen for the bodyguards to share among them. And I sent the boy from the front desk to get coffee for everybody. Between you and the Service and Pitney, I’m putting together my own private army. The buns are a line item in the books under ‘military supplies, miscellaneous.’ ”

Light, easy words. But it wasn’t the contingent of guards that put that desolation in her eyes.

What are you thinking, Jess? What did you find in my office last night that sent you scampering out of my house this morning? “Interesting cargo?”

She looked at the rice as if she’d just noticed it. “Not particularly. Thirty tons of Carolina Gold, out of Charleston. The contract reads June, clear as day, but that still came as a surprise to some people. It’s been on my hands a week. The buyer is Bennet Brothers.”

“You’re a trusting soul.”

“Not really. I have their rice, after all, and I charge them penalties and stowage. Pure profit, since I had to inventory anyway. I wonder sometimes why God made so many idiots. I really do.”

“Letter of credit?”

“From Bennet Brothers? You have a sense of humor, Captain. Pound dealing only for Messieurs Bennet. I collected the last of the demurrage this morning, along with the usual bushel of whining. Now I’m getting their rice out of my warehouse before it attracts rats. I hate storing foodstuffs.”

Her warehouse was cleaner than his kitchen at home. Maybe he should put a woman in charge of his warehouse storage. “You run a tight ship.”

“No profit in being slovenly. There’s a whole long list of things I won’t keep in this warehouse at all.” Two men came out of the stacks, carrying a heavy trunk between them. She flattened to the wall to get out of the way. She still hadn’t looked directly at him. “We strip the burlaps off at the loading dock and shake out the vermin. You would not believe what travels with tea and silks.”

“I took at look at you yesterday, through the peep, when you were talking to your father. There’s a listening post, off to the side of the study.”

“I know about it. They watch us. There’s actors at Drury Lane who attract less of an audience.”

More laborers passed, carrying rice. “Let’s walk. I’m making MacLeish nervous, standing here watching his loading.”

One of the advantages of being so much taller than Jess was she couldn’t get ahead of him without actually breaking into a run. They covered half the length of her transient storage before that occurred to her. She pulled up beside a consignment lot of fifty wood boxes stenciled Pezzi Meccanici . . . Thessaloniki all over the sides. Machine parts for Thessalonica. That probably meant they were guns being smuggled into north Italy. God alone knew what the customs clerks made of the Whitby shipping documents.

“We had a little cobra bite one of the boys once.” She lifted a hanging slate.

You’re afraid I might just be like that cobra. He didn’t like to see her haunted and unsure. It didn’t suit her.

She picked at a splinter on the corner of the closest Thessalonica crate. “He lived—the boy who got bit—but he lost his foot. MacLeish trained him as a clerk. He’s in Sweden now. I know about the spy holes at Meeks Street. Why are you telling me this?”

Because she was his. Nothing and no one would keep her from him, not even the hurt he’d done her. “So we know where we stand. I don’t want lies between us.”

“Bit late for that.” She’d found another jagged piece of wood and started niggling away at it.

“I won’t spy on you again.”

“Forthright as a sunny day, that’s you.” She gave him a quick, searching, worried glance, then looked away.

“What did you find in my study?” Tell me, Jess. Stop brooding about it and tell me. “I went through it this morning, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t have shown you if you’d asked. Not a thing.” He let a minute pass with her not answering. “If I were Cinq and I thought you’d found something important, you wouldn’t have made it to work this morning, alive and free.” He watched her pull more splinters out of that crate. “You’re not good at being prudent. There’s no point in trying to start now. What did you find?”

“I’d have to be frothing mad to talk to you about it.” Belatedly, she tried some caution. “If I’d found anything at all, which I’m not saying I did. If it’s all the same with you, I’d rather get back to work. I’m busy this morning.”

She pulled away and took off, her long strides kicking her skirts in front of her. They turned corners at random, surprising men busy at inventory or restacking cargo. They passed a neat stack of boxes, huddled together, marked Fragile in five languages and slabs of white Carrara marble, stored at a slant, separated by blocks of pine. She saw none of it. She’d withdrawn wholly into herself, her face set and resolute, her eyes distant.

They ended up in the far corner where the staircase led to the upper floors. She stopped with her hand on the wood railing, muttering, “... if he lets me go. No guarantees of that.”