Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

“Those clerks of mine have it figured out by now. They’re not fools.”

Grimly, she climbed ahead of him and swung around the iron ball that topped the staircase and stalked down the hall, snarling. A messenger boy took one look and hastily backed into the nearest doorway.

He watched her all the way into her office. When she strode down the center aisle of the clerks’ desks, every man was in place, quill raised, eyes on the paper in front of him, industrious.

JESS KNEW A DOZEN PEOPLE WHO SPOKE ARABIC, but only two who could read it. One was Papa, and she could hardly bring this question to Meeks Street, could she?

The other was the Reverend. She wanted to see him anyway, so it all worked out tidy. Life did that sometimes.

Ludmill Street was a bad, ugly place. The lane was barely wide enough for a cart to get through. Cobbles sloped steeply to a gully in the center, stinking and clogged with garbage. Not even grass could grow here, only lots and lots of people. Laundry hung crazily from lines out of every window, crisscrossing above her, blocking what sun made it past the roofline. The tenement windows were blind, dark squares with no glass in them, just boarded shutters that kept out thieves. One door stood crazily ajar, showing men and blowsy women sprawled on the floor in piles of straw. The sign outside read, “Gin. Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for three pence.”

The kids were out in force, filling the street, tumbling down the stairs, screaming. Mean, snapping mongrels these kids were. Curs on four legs ran among them and stopped to sniff at her skirts when she went past. She kept a rock in her hand to shy at any dog that took it into its head to bite. You did that where you were a stranger, in places like this. Some of the kids might have tried for her purse, if she’d been fool enough to carry one.

It had been different when she was a kid. Maybe she’d been tougher. She’d gone anywhere and never been afraid. The whole East End had been her playground, every dirty, rat-infested alley of it. Everybody knew her. There was a time she must have called half East London by name.

The Service had followed her in here. She got glimpses of them from time to time, being persistent behind her. Maybe they’d get their pockets picked. She hoped so. Her little contribution to the thieves of Ludmill street.

The soup kitchen was open, serving dinner. Jess put a limp in her step as she headed for it, walking like a tired little Covent Garden whore who’s back from a long, hard stroll and doesn’t want to discuss further business with anyone.

“Bad day, dearie?” the woman at the end of the line asked her.

She lifted a shoulder. “Bleeding ’orror what some men want.”

“Ain’t it the truth, luv. Ain’t it the truth.”

The meal today was cabbage soup with beans in it and hard brown bread. She let the man at the pot fill a wooden bowl for her and stuff bread into the soup. She sat down with the other women. They were joined soon enough by a family party, a woman who smelled of gin, with her baby and two boys.

“You gonna eat that?” the older boy demanded.

She looked at the soup and decided that, on the whole, no, she was not going to eat that. She shook her head, and he took the bowl, gobbling it down fast, not sharing with his brother.

She picked a little piece of bread into smaller and smaller pieces, thinking about the Reggio letter she’d found and about Sebastian. He can’t be Cinq. But she kept adding it up, and sometimes she thought he could be.

A man like Sebastian wouldn’t steal secrets for the money. It’d be politics and idealism and believing in the republic over there in France. Being drunk on fine words and the dreams. Ignoring the reality. Likely he caught all kinds of notions from his uncle and aunt, growing up. They were wild-eyed radicals, Eunice and Standish, but they were good people and harmless as mice, whatever nonsense they believed.

Sebastian wouldn’t be harmless. He’d never be just harmless.

She had friends in France who thought Napoleon turned a crank and the sun rose. Nothing wrong with that, she supposed, if you were French, but no way for an Englishman to think.

Sebastian would run for France, probably, when she laid information against him.

“Whotcher done wif yer ’ands.” The boy—he was seven or eight—had finished her soup and was looking at the little white scars on her hands. Those were the old rat bites she got when she fell, way back when. Most people didn’t notice. Sharp fellow. If she’d still been with Lazarus, she’d have marked the boy down as somebody to watch. He might make a Runner in a year or so.

“Ah,” she said. “Story behind that, there is.”

The other boy, the younger one, stopped tormenting his little sister and leaned forward to listen. “I was about yer age, I guess, out taking the air in St. James Park one day, sauntering like . . . when what does I see but as nice a pair of duck as I ever clapped oglers on, jest sitting there in this pond. Crying waste of a foine dinner, says I to meself. So I takes this bit of pannam I had in me pocket . . .”

She went on from there for a bit. The woman fed herself and gave the baby a mouthful of the soup broth, letting it suck from the side of the bowl. Jess had both the boys giggling. “. . . set that bracket-faced she-duck a-squawking like a landlady come fer the rent. So anyways, I . . .”

The Reverend was walking the tables, talking to folks. He had a good crowd in here today, most of them getting ready for a night’s work of the illegal variety. He was heading her way, so she finished up, “. . . never did get holt o’ that bleeding bird. And that’s how I come by them scars. That was the day I near got meself nibbled to death by ducks.”

That set both boys off again, their mother, too, and some other folks who’d stopped to listen.

The Reverend came over to see what people were chuck-ling at. She never knew why, but he seemed startled to see her every time she showed up. You’d think he’d learn.

“Jess.” He sounded annoyed. “What are you doing here?”

She batted her eyes at him. “What, Rev’rend? Donn’cher like me no more? Yer said—”

“Into my office, if you please.” He took her elbow and pulled her away from the table.

“Keep yer truss on, guv’nor. Yer sure in a bleeding ’urry fer it, ain’tcher?”

She heard one man say to another as she walked by, “That’s Whitby’s daughter. They say she belongs to the Dead Man, she do . . .” So she supposed she wasn’t doing Reverend Palmer’s reputation much harm.

The Reverend clumped across his office. “Will you please not come here? It’s not safe.”

She took one of the straight-backed chairs. “I was thinking that, myself, as I came in. I’m going to have to be more careful.”

“I heard about your father. If there’s anything I can do . . . Well, of course, there is something I can do, and I’m doing it, but I very much doubt you’ve come here to hear about my prayers.” He had a pot of tea on his desk, nearly cold, already mixed up with milk and sugar in the pot. He poured her some, and she set it down to one side and didn’t drink any. She’d taken tea with the Reverend before.

“I’ll send somebody reliable with you to walk you out of this place.” He ran his hand through his lank, thin hair. “Though I don’t think anyone’s going to bother one of Eunice Ashton’s household. Or anyone claimed by Bastard Kennett. Or your father’s daughter, for that matter. But not everyone may recognize you. Now, what are you doing here?”

“I come for the food, of course. Must it be beans and cabbage? Are you determined the poor of London won’t sneak up on anybody?”

“Cheap and nourishing, just as you directed. Come to inspect the books, have you?”

“That’s what you have a Board of Governors for, to harass you about your bookkeeping. Oh, that reminds me. I’ve spent the last week making solicitors rich. There’s going to be a trust, starting a week from Tuesday, so you don’t have to be polite to me anymore. Or you can start being rude next Tuesday when the paperwork goes through.”

“A trust?”

“Nothing you have to worry about. The money comes in all the same. It just means it doesn’t come from Whitby’s. It gets managed by grim Quaker gentlemen from Hoare’s Bank. Isn’t that the devil of a name for a respectable bank? One of my clerks will send you a long, incomprehensible letter about this eventually. Ignore it, is my advice.”

“Is it a lot of money you’re giving away?”

“Middling. There’s not much else to do with it, past a certain point. It’s fun making it, though.”

This place, and twenty others like it across East London, would be protected if Whitby’s fell and the government confiscated everything. It was a cheerful thought, cheating His Majesty’s government to feed the scum of the earth. A chuckle in a dark world, charity was. “I came for help, actually.”

“Anything I can do.”

She grinned, flipped her skirts up to the knee, and pulled folded papers out of her garter. Didn’t shock the Reverend though. She’d never found anything that shocked the Reverend. “I got secrets. Seal of the confessional?”

“The Church of England doesn’t do that sort of thing, as you very well know. But if you’d like me to spit and cross my heart . . .”

“How about telling me what this says?” She handed over the bits of Arabic writing she’d copied from Sebastian’s desk.

The Reverend raised his eyebrow. “Of course. Just . . .” He patted around his coat and eventually found his glasses on the desk and put them on. “So. What have we here?” For a long time he studied the symbols she’d copied, turning page by page till he’d read the lot. He was frowning when he finished. He shuffled the pages into a pile and took off his glasses, closed them, and tapped them against the desk.