Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

She didn’t drop her hands away. She held on.

He must have seen the pleading in her eyes. He kissed her then, giving her what she’d wanted. When she kissed back, her lips and tongue scraped on that stubble of beard along his jaw. She got rubbed sensitive by it. He ran his tongue over her lips then, and there was hardly any skin between them. Just feelings brushing against each other.

She’d go upstairs with him in a few minutes and they’d make love. When they couldn’t stand this kissing anymore, they’d stop lying to each other and get into bed. That was where this was leading, and they both knew it.

“Ah, there you are.” Standish stood in the doorway, looking pleased to have found them.

The Captain’s mouth lifted from hers. “Yes. Here I am.”

“I wish you’d be more careful of the pots, Sebastian. That’s a Minoan dolphin beaker next to your elbow. Eunice says, will you please go get the midwife for . . . Dear me, I’ve forgotten her name.”

“Oh my God,” Sebastian said.

Had to happen sooner or later. “Flora. That’s her name. Lazarus must have really liked her. He cut this one close.”

DOYLE WAS EXACTLY WHERE HE WAS SUPPOSED to be, where she’d arranged to meet him. He was standing on the bridge, a fishing pole out over the canal. Jess stopped two feet away and set her basket on the footpath.

“Nice day for ducks, miss,” he said respectfully and pulled at his cap.

She grinned and leaned her elbows on the stone rail and looked down at the ducks so nobody could see her lips when she spoke. “Hello, Mr. Doyle. How’s the fishing?”

Doyle peered down into the water and twiddled with his line. “Good enough, me not having any particular need for fishes today. We got ourselves what you might call a special agreement, me and the fishes. I don’t put anything on the hook, and they don’t bite it.” He was frowning like he had bad news to deliver, but he didn’t spit it out. Instead he said, “You’re being followed. Four men.” He looked up the road, the way she’d come, then, casually, back along the canal. “British Service. They’re being sloppy.”

“They aren’t trying to hide. They’re intimidating me with their official demeanor. Makes me feel like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading a pack of rats around.” They were ugly ducks in the canal, patched up from a couple different lines of ancestry. When they saw her, they swam over quacking, raucous, milling around and nipping at each other. Cockney ducks. She’d brought bread. She started tossing bits at them.

“The Service put a couple of men to watching you, right from the first. Adrian wanted you safe.” Doyle twitched the fishing rod. “Safe as you could be, all considered.”

And that was the bad news. She thought it over, trying to decide how she felt about it, and tossed more bread into the water. Wherever it landed, the same ducks always got it. There was a lesson in that, she thought. “The men watching me . . . you were the first of them.”

“With orders to keep you safe. Give you the information what you asked for. Give you advice, if you’d take it.” He glanced at her, sharp, quick, humorous, tough. “Adrian told me to keep you outa trouble.” The scar on his cheek creased. “Not likely.”

She didn’t seem to feel anything. Not anger. Not betrayal. She’d got used to the world falling down around her ears. Maybe she didn’t have any more shock left in her.

Doyle was British Service. Adrian had sent him to her. To protect her.

She rolled it around in her mind, and nothing changed. He was still Doyle. If sea monsters climbed out of that canal, this minute, he’d put down the fishing rod and fight them off with his penknife, telling her to “hop it.” He’d do the same for the fishmonger’s daughter. Working for the Service was irrelevant to the likes of Mr. Doyle.

“Adrian wouldn’t just do it straightforward and have me followed. He has to be sneaky about it.”

“That’s him.”

Adrian, plotting and plotting to make sure she was safe. He’d sent the very best he had. She was sure of it. Doyle would be an important man in the British Service—he’d be general manager if he worked for Whitby’s. Adrian had set him to running errands for her.

And all of a sudden it was funny. She’d sent Doyle out to hire dozens of men to follow villains and break into offices all over London. He’d probably just set Service agents to doing it. This last month, she’d been funding British Service operations. “How long have you been British Service, Mr. Doyle?”

“All me life. Started telling lies to pretty girls like you when I was a nipper.”

She leaned out far and got rid of the last of her bread. “I never knew. Not the least niggle of a suspicion. Not once.”

“Well, I’m good, see. Around Meeks Street they call me Doyle, the Secret Shadow. I got me a reputation.”

She didn’t laugh. Or maybe a little.

He looked at her keenly, bushy eyebrows and lined face serious. “I have a daughter your age, Jess. She’s out in the wilds of Spain, last time I heard from her, making life difficult for the French. I hope somebody looks after her if she needs it. I was doing this for your father, as much as Adrian.”

Papa, being two pins in a paper with a man like Doyle, would agree. Knocked the legs out from under her being angry. “I am just replete to the gills with everybody taking care of me and figuring they have to lie to me three ways from Sunday to get it done.” She reached down to pick up her basket. “You know what this means, don’t you? Means I’m not going to pay you for last week. I’m damned if I’ll put a Service agent on the payroll.”

“I can see the sense of that. ’Ere now. Let me, miss.”

Anyone watching would have seen the amiable, rough-looking man set his fishing pole down on the stones and stoop to pick up the basket for the lady. He handed it to her and she thanked him very prettily. He raised his cap to her as she left.

SEBASTIAN followed her and watched her do it right before his eyes. Talking to Doyle on the bridge, she’d been every inch a respectable young matron on her way to market. By the time she turned down Brantel Street, he was following what was unmistakably a pert servant girl on orders from the cook to do the shopping and get back to the kitchen smart, if you please.

Hungerford Market fronted the river. The market men landed their wares at the stairs on the Thames and wheeled them up in barrows. It was ordinary, just fresh vegetables and plump geese laid out in rows. It was small, a mere long block with a market house. The Ashtons sent the cart to Covent Garden at dawn twice a week to do the main shopping. Hungerford Market was just for what they needed fresh each day.

They needed fish, evidently. Jess was eyeing a pile of mackerel laid out under the awnings on damp burlap. She’d given her basket to one of the market boys.

“I dunnoh,” she was saying. “I thought maybe a bit of haddock would go down nice.” Then she listened with patent disbelief to the claim that the haddock at the next stand had been lying there nigh onto three days, but this here mackerel were fresh caught this morning.

“I dunnoh.” Jess prodded a largish specimen. “Haddock’s cheaper, too.”

The conversation deteriorated into minutia of one and six for three medium mackerel or four bigger ones for two shillings, thr’pence. He propped himself on a stall heaped with cabbages and turnips and listened for ten long minutes while Jess resolutely reduced the price of two mackerel and five tiny, anonymous, silvery-gray fishes to two shillings, ha’penny. The market woman wrapped the fish in a broadsheet and stowed them in the basket with the satisfaction of a woman who’d been willing to go to two shillings even.

“Oysters,” Jess murmured to herself as he approached. “Hello, Sebastian, why are you following me?”

“I like following you.” The ragged boy carrying the basket, about half full of fish, eyed him balefully. Evidently Jess aroused protective instincts in his young breast. “Must you do the shopping? I haven’t checked lately, but we usually have half a dozen girls sitting around the kitchen doing nothing in particular. One of them could do this just as well.”

“If you will bring women home to pup in the guest bedroom, you must expect some disorder. Your cook is drunk. You’re having fish stew for dinner. It’s about the only thing I know how to make.”

“Anything is better than letting Aunt Eunice loose in the kitchen. Where to next?”

“Onions. No, not that kind.” She ignored the baskets they were passing. “Spring onions. Over with the greens. Why don’t you go . . .” she waved him away from the stall, “. . . look at things or something.”

So he wandered around. The ground was covered with floating feathers from the geese they were plucking upwind. The man selling dried fruit and nuts had some almonds, so he bought a handful, wrapped up in a twist of paper, and carried them around, eating as he went. He liked the look of the oranges, too. They were probably some of his. He whistled to the boy Jess had picked out and, when he trotted up, dropped the almonds on top of the oysters and started loading oranges in.

He kept a pair of oranges, one in each jacket pocket, and walked back to where Jess was, at long last, concluding the contract on a handful of spring onions and a tiny bunch of what looked like weeds. This involved counting out much very small change.

She peered in the basket. “Oranges. You know you already have a basket or two cluttering up your pantry. Or you don’t know, I guess. And almonds. Oh well, they don’t go bad. Take it to Kennett House, please. You know it?”