The Queer Principles of Kit Webb

by Cat Sebastian

  “Or is it that you respect and admire my father so greatly, and were so grievously offended by my plan to rob him, that you simply had to hit me? That must be it,” Holland said, idly tapping one long index finger against his lower lip.

  “Shut up,” Kit growled, clenching his bruised knuckles into a fist.

  “Why, are you going to hit me again?” Holland asked, not seeming particularly worried about that prospect. “Because if you are, please get on with it. I’m expected at supper in an hour and it’ll take an age to cover what will surely be an impressive bruise. And if you aren’t going to hit me, will you kindly bugger off, as I believe is the custom in these situations? Not, I hasten to add, that I’ve ever been accosted in an alley or anywhere else before this evening, so my intelligence may be lacking. It’s mainly from the theater,” he added confidentially.

  “Do you ever shut up?” Kit asked, now fully exasperated.

  “I’m afraid not,” Holland said apologetically with a faint smile. He oughtn’t to have been able to smile. Kit hadn’t pulled that punch in the slightest and had aimed right at the sweet spot of Holland’s jaw. His jaw wasn’t nearly as red as it ought to have been, either. Even without powder, his skin was the sort of white that bruised instantly and reddened easily. If his jaw wasn’t as red as a beet, it could only mean that either Kit had aimed badly, which he hadn’t, or Holland had managed to dodge at the last instant, so Kit’s fist only landed a glancing blow.

  He grabbed Holland’s jaw and tilted it to the side so he could see the bruise. “You have good reflexes,” he said.

  “Why, thank you,” Holland said graciously. “The theater really didn’t prepare me for this in the least. I shall write a letter about the slanderous treatment of footpads and miscreants in modern drama.”

  “Are you able to get home safely?”

  “Am I— Yes, you lackwit, I can get home safely. You really are gallant. I wonder how much of the rest of that ballad is accurate.”

  That jolted Kit back to his senses. “Then get the hell out of here.”

  “Or what? You’ll give me another extremely mild bruise?” But Holland was already at the mouth of the alley. “Have a lovely evening. I’ll call on you later this week!” he shouted before disappearing around the corner.

  Kit leaned back against the damp stone of the nearest wall. The Duke of fucking Clare. It was that name, that man, and every man like him, who had led Kit to become what he had been. Rage at Clare had fueled a decade of retribution against his entire class. But Kit had never been able to lay hands on Clare himself. His outriders were too well armed, his journeys too unpredictable, and his path usually limited to well-traveled roads. More than once, Kit had thought Clare lived like a man in constant expectation of being attacked. And well might he be, if he made a practice of treating people as cruelly and needlessly as he had treated—

  But Kit could get him now. After nearly ten years, he could have his revenge. He’d have not only revenge, but the satisfaction of knowing that Clare’s own son had helped him get it. He’d have a chance to do one last job and with the only target he had ever really wanted.

  He pressed his palms against the stone wall behind him and pushed off. He made his way through streets lit only by a sliver of the moon and the candlelight flickering through the windows of the buildings lining the street.

  Kit had seen the Duke of Clare only once, when he had sentenced Jenny. At the time, Kit had thought he had the man’s appearance seared into his memory, but now he could hardly conjure up a picture of the man. When Holland had said who his father was, though, Kit had seen traces of the duke on his son’s face. They had the same cold eyes, the same aquiline nose, the same air of a man used to moving through a world without obstacles.

  Unchecked power gave a man a certain look; it set him apart from normal people. Something terrible was unleashed when a person knew that not only could he tear down homes, take away a family’s livelihood, and send people to the far corners of the earth, but he would be praised for it. There were rich men who didn’t use their money and power as cudgels, but they still always knew that they had a cudgel ready at hand. They got so used to it, they probably thought they were doing a grand thing by not wielding it.

  And Kit hated them all for it. People might say that what he really hated was the system that put too much power in too few hands. But Kit knew he also hated the men.

  That hatred had been the engine of his life for the better part of a decade, and at the center of it was the Duke of Clare.

  Led by instinct or old habit or just the darker recesses of his nature, Kit turned one corner, then another, until he found himself in the sort of neighborhood where every old lady sold gin out of her front window. He found one of these shops, knocked, paid his money, and before he could think better of it, had a tin cup in his hand. He knocked back its contents in a single gulp, the spirits burning their way down his throat and making his eyes water.

  “Blimey,” said the old woman. “Needed it, did you?” Her hair was white and thin, her back stooped, and her face deeply lined. She spoke with the blurred syllables of a woman with very few teeth. She reminded Kit of Jenny’s grandmother, and in the middle of a Saint Giles street he was assailed by the memory of a brace of pheasants roasting in the hearth of a crumbling cottage in Oxfordshire.

  He hated to think that far back, in the same way that he refused to go back to the little corner of Oxfordshire where he had been born and lived out the first eighteen years of his life. He didn’t want to think about that younger version of himself, and above all didn’t want to wonder what that younger man would think of his present-day self.

  The gin had already started to work its magic, and the memories came hard upon one another. He could see his father pulling pints and his mother polishing the brass fittings she was so proud of. He could all but smell the wood fire that burned bright all year round in the taproom.

  He remembered another cottage, a cradle he had built with his own hands, a child wrapped in fresh linens—

  And he remembered how it felt after it was all gone.

  “You all right, dearie?” the old woman asked, and Kit had to be in a truly bad state when the purveyor of an illegal gin shop was worried about him.

  “It’s just been a while,” he said, handing her the empty cup through the window along with another coin for her to fill it again.

  Chapter 12

  Percy knew that vanity was not only a sin, but possibly his besetting sin. Or at least it had been before the revelations of the past month introduced him to the various temptations of theft, cruelty, and the general consignment of the entire fifth commandment to the midden pile. But he was vain, and he knew it, and he was not appearing in public with a bruise on his jaw.

  Still, he did not relish the prospect of pressing a raw piece of meat to any part of his person. Collins assured him that this was the received practice for treating new bruises, but that didn’t make it any less disgusting. Averting his eyes, he applied the slab of meat to his face. He breathed through his mouth to avoid gagging at the smell of fresh blood. His vision swam, the walls of his bedchamber seeming to dissolve before his eyes; the distant sounds of the household settling down for the night receded as if muffled by cotton wool, so at first he did not hear the tapping at his window.

  When the sound came a second time, he shakily got to his feet and pushed aside the curtain with the hand that was not holding the revolting meat. He expected to see a loose piece of ivy or a creeper that had come away from the trellis, or, at worst, an especially large moth.

  What he did not expect to see was Marian, three stories aboveground, her face a pale, almost spectral, oval against the darkness of the night. He managed not to jump, but only barely. She gestured impatiently for him to open the window. He gestured for her to move aside so he didn’t open the window directly into her face, causing her to plummet to her death. Finally, he managed to get the window open with one hand, and she stepped inside with an almost
acrobatic grace, as if she climbed in and out of windows every day of her life. Her dark hair was pulled into a long plait and she wore black silk knee breeches that he recognized as a pair that had gone missing from his wardrobe shortly after his return home.

  “Those are my breeches,” he said by way of greeting.

  “They’re your shirt and waistcoat, too. Pity your boots don’t fit.” She gestured to her feet, which were clad in black stockings and her own black dancing slippers.

  “A true shame that my wardrobe couldn’t supply all your needs for outfitting yourself as a housebreaker. To what do I owe the honor?”

  “You had a bruise on your face at supper,” she said. “I could hardly ask you about it in front of the duke.”

  He frowned, the movement tugging at the injury. Percy didn’t need to ask why Marian had sneaked in through his window instead of knocking at his door or approaching him in the drawing room. The duke was suspicious of all men Marian spoke to, even his own son, despite the fact that Percy had never in his life done anything to make anyone think he might be interested in going to bed with a woman. Indeed, during his teenage years, he had been something less than discreet, relying on his name and position to get him out of any trouble he might find himself in. There had been a few boys at school, then the village blacksmith and one of the grooms. And also one of Marian’s grooms. And also Marian’s brother.

  “How is Marcus these days?” Percy asked.

  She shot him an exasperated look. “Yes, I tiptoed along a ledge for twenty yards to gossip about Marcus. He’s still in France, trying to find Louise Thierry, or whatever that scribble in the parish register was meant to spell. More to the point, he’s trying to find out if she has a son.” Marian pressed her lips together. “We need to know who will be the next Duke of Clare.”

  For a moment, Percy was certain the wind outside stopped blowing, the fire in the hearth stopped crackling, and his own heart stopped beating. Until then, he had assumed that the title and estate would go to a third cousin, a cadet branch of the Talbot family to be sure, and hardly worthy of Percy’s notice, but respectable people. Percy was going to be disinherited, Percy’s mother’s memory and Marian would both be dishonored, and for that his father would pay, but at least Cheveril and the rest of the estate would go to someone who would look after it. The idea that instead it might fall into the hands of a French peasant, the son of some woman his father had taken to a foreign church and secretly wed, probably for no reason other than to smooth his path into her bed—Percy found himself choked with something horribly like grief.

  He was dimly aware of Marian speaking. Her lips were moving but he couldn’t make out what she said. Absently he let his hand drop from his face, the raw meat falling to the floor. When he looked at his hand, he saw smears of blood on his fingertips. Then things got hazy, a sort of mist descending on him, and the last thing he was sure of was that he was falling.

  When he came to, the first thing he was aware of was acute embarrassment. The second was that his head was in Marian’s lap, her fingers carding through his hair in a manner that was almost gentle and caring. This was so disconcerting that he sat bolt upright.

  “Easy,” Marian chided. “I caught you once. The next time you’re on your own.”

  “Entirely reasonable,” he managed, his tongue thick and lazy in his mouth.

  “I forgot how you used to do that,” Marian said. “Still do, I suppose. Remember when I fell from the apple tree and bloodied my nose? You were out for five full minutes. I thought you had died.”

  “You bled all over me!” Percy protested. At the time he had been entirely certain that passing out was the only reasonable course of action when someone had bled all over one’s waistcoat, and he still believed this to be the case.

  “I don’t know how you can play around with swords if you faint at the sight of blood.”

  “I don’t play around with swords, and I’m entirely too skilled to let myself be cut to bits, thank you.”

  “Shut your eyes so I can wipe the blood from your hands and face,” she said, rising to her feet.

  He complied, hearing her soft footsteps cross the room, then the sound of water being poured from an ewer. She took his hand and briskly wiped each finger. “Now your face,” she said. He tilted his chin up, wincing only slightly as she passed the damp cloth over his jaw. “Now are you going to tell me who hurt you?”

  “It was your highwayman.”

  “Ah. I take it he won’t be lending us a helpful hand, then?”

  “Oh, he’ll be lending us a hand. I guarantee it. Marian, who is he? He did not react well to the sound of my father’s name.” Percy gestured at his bruise.

  “I imagine the country, if not the entire hemisphere, is filled with people who become consumed with a murderous rage when they hear of the Duke of Clare.”

  “True,” he said. But Marian’s response hadn’t really been an answer to the question he had asked. “Does this man have a special reason to hate the duke?”

  “You should ask him,” she said lightly.

  That still wasn’t a proper answer. He knew Marian well enough to understand he’d never get any information from her she didn’t choose to divulge, so he let the topic drop. Still, he had the uncomfortable sense that she was playing a deeper game than he was, and was playing for stakes he didn’t yet understand. “Who told you about him? When I left England, you certainly didn’t have any connections to London’s criminal demimonde.”

  Her jaw tightened. “A lot happened after you left.” She shook her head briskly, her eyes sparkling with what he at first thought were tears but then recognized as anger. Then she got to her feet, the bloody piece of meat in her hand.

  “What are you doing with that thing?” he asked.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  Before he could ask what she meant, she stepped out the window. He held his breath as she descended the trellis instead of edging along the ledge back to her room. When her feet hit the ground, the old hound who patrolled the gardens of Clare House came up to her. But before the dog could bark, Marian dropped the meat, then sprinted toward the gate.

  Chapter 13

  “You’re an idiot,” Betty said the next morning when Kit stumbled downstairs, his clothes rumpled and his face unshaven. “I can smell the gin on you from across the room. I hope your head hurts.”

  It did, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of his saying so. “Remember the man in the brightly colored coats?” he asked, the sound of his voice ricocheting off the insides of his skull like seeds in a dried-out gourd.

  “The one who stares at you all day?” She dragged a chair across the floor to the table where it belonged with more clatter than could possibly be necessary.

  “He’s the Duke of Clare’s son.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Well, bugger me.”

  “Hence, the gin.”

  “Fair,” she said, her expression softening marginally. For a moment he thought she was going to hug him or attempt to say something soothing, and he braced himself, but she recovered her senses and resumed rearranging the chairs.

  “He wants to hire me to rob his father. I’m going to agree.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, her lips pressed together into a tight line. “You really are a fucking idiot,” she finally said. “Go get yourself cleaned up and don’t show your face until you’ve eaten something.”

  Kit rinsed off at the pump, then carried an ewer of water upstairs to wash more thoroughly. He thought about shaving, even going so far as to pick up his razor and look meaningfully at it, before remembering that Betty wasn’t the boss of him or his incipient beard, and decided to leave well enough alone. He brushed his hair and made an attempt to smooth it into a queue before giving it up as a lost cause and letting it fall around his shoulders. He cast his linens into the pile of things to be sent to the laundry and dressed in a crisp clean shirt and a fresh pair of breeches. He was still buttoning his wais
tcoat when he went downstairs and emerged into the shop.

  “There you go,” Betty said. “It’s always easier to think like a reasonable person when you don’t look like something dragged in from a sewer.”

  “I’ve already made up my mind.”

  “Your mind is scrambled, then. Stop using it. Let me do the thinking for you. That’s why you keep me around, isn’t it? Listen to me, Kit. We both know you can’t run or ride fast enough to be safe during a robbery. You’ll put yourself and everyone you’re with at risk.”

  “I’ll figure out a way around that,” he said. “I have to.”

  “The feelings you have where Clare is concerned have no business in a robbery.”

  “He’s the whole reason I have any business doing robbery in the first place,” Kit said. “If it weren’t for him, I’d be—” He didn’t dare finish that thought, not after yesterday’s gin-fueled trip down memory lane. “I started all this because I wanted revenge.”

  “That’s because you were young and foolish and grieving your wife and child.”

  He held up his hand to stop her. “Hush.”

  “No, you hush. You got by on gin and luck. Now you’re older and you know better, and you have me to tell you what to do. I’ve seen what happens when people go into a robbery seeing red. They wind up losing their heads and taking stupid risks. I’m not putting my neck on the line just because you’re too angry to think straight.”

  Kit let out a breath. Betty was a fence, and came from a family of fences, and maybe because she dealt only with goods and coin, she didn’t understand anyone who approached life without the levelheadedness of an actuary. “Every job I’ve done, I’ve been angry.”

  “Bollocks. This job would be personal. Not to mention the fact that you shouldn’t want to ally yourself with the Duke of Clare’s son. You ought to know a trap when you see one. I won’t be a part of it.”