And she was lost. She could feel the twist inside her as it happened. The stark, masculine beauty of his mouth reached out and grabbed at her chest. Her breath caught with a chirrup in her throat.
Lazily, he turned to her. “There’s a witch down in Portsmouth who keeps the wind in her sock. The sailors bribe her to give them good weather.”
There could have been a bell inside her that struck little soft chimes when he talked. Every feature of his face stood out exact and distinct, like he was the only thing lit up with the last of the day’s light. She wanted to move close and lick the corner of his mouth with her tongue. She wanted to suck on him there and taste him. The shudder that gripped her had nothing flowery and soft and girlish about it. It was a roar and a buzz and an ache between her legs, vulgar and explicit as hell.
She knew what it was to enjoy a man, flesh on flesh. She hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to kiss from lips to eyelids and along his ear, and down to his mouth again. She wanted to suck and lick everywhere on the Captain’s face till she knew him with her mouth. Till he was part of her.
She was so bloody unwise sometimes. It didn’t need Papa to tell her that. She was in Sebastian Kennett’s house, with what she’d call dire intent. He might be deadly and dangerous—beyond the obvious deadly and dangerous he wore like a jacket for everybody to see. He was no one she should be licking the cheekbones of.
She squirmed toward her side of the bench. “About Eunice. I wanted you to know. It wasn’t stupid, what she did.”
He eased her right back next to him, casually, without making a fuss about it. “No, she’s not stupid.”
That was from being at sea so much, that gesture. He was used to being where everything shifted around him all the time and needed to be nudged back where it belonged. She did that kind of thing herself. He was keeping her warm as the evening cooled down. Just that. She was the one with the vivid imagination. “Some people walk up to danger and pat it on the snout because they’re dead ignorant. Your aunt’s not like that. She knew what could happen to her when she stood in front of that girl. I didn’t expect to find a woman like her in a house in the West End.”
“You won’t find a woman like her anywhere.” The Captain ran his fingers in a smooth line on her arm, up and back, casual about it. He dragged every particle of her mind along with it.
I don’t want to like you, and I’m beginning to. I don’t want my body to go jumpy and soft where you’re touching. I don’t want to feel anything at all for you.
“I’ll tell you a story.” He shifted and tucked her head against his shoulder and pulled her in close, taking back the two inches she was absconding with. “Stop jumping around like a rabbit. Lean back and relax. I was seven. I was standing in mud, next to the Thames.”
“I’m not really—”
The muscles of his arm had gone unyielding, like tree roots or hawser rope. He was casually strong and immensely careful with her, and she wasn’t going to get loose easily. “Quiet, or I won’t tell you. You came to Katherine Lane because you want to know about me. This is your chance.”
“Are you leading up to something, holding on to me like this?”
“Maybe.”
“Because the last time we talked, you were going to wait till I ambled down to your bedroom one night. I think you called it inevitable.”
She didn’t recognize it just at once. That rumble in his chest was him laughing. “Give me some credit. Nothing’s going to happen on a hard bench in the night air. And I’m busy tonight.” Suddenly, startlingly, he put his lips to the top of her head and kissed her there, on the part of her hair. He was too fast to stop. Just there and gone before she could think.
“Look, Captain—”
“Damn, but I want you. I should be getting used to that. Now listen. This is interesting.” His deep voice flowed across her. “I was seven and it was in the winter. December. Maybe January. I don’t remember after all this time. The riverbank wasn’t frozen. It’s the worst time, when the bank isn’t iced hard and the mud seeps with water so cold it burns. You never get warm, not day or night. All the boys who are going to die, that’s when they do it. That and the spring.”
Unwillingly, she saw the picture he was painting. She remembered that kind of cold. The year Papa left for France and didn’t come back and there was no money at all, she’d been out in the cold at all hours, stealing a living. But even then, she hadn’t been a scavenger on the Thames, picking up what fell off the barges. A mudlark. Even at the worst, it hadn’t been that bad. I don’t want to feel sorry for the boy you were.
“My basket was about half full of coal. I’d hit on a good spot—picked up a dozen pieces within a foot of each other—and I was looking around for more. A carriage pulled up on the road. A lady got out and began walking down the bank to the river. Mad thing to do. She had a wool cloak on. I remember thinking that if I were bigger I’d go knock her on the head and take that cloak from her. Not to sell. I’d keep it to roll myself up in and sleep warm. If I could have got away with it, I’d have killed her for one night of sleeping warm. That’s what I was.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. This close to him, she felt every breath moving in and out of him. Maybe he was thinking about what he could have become. She had thoughts like that herself, sometimes. “That was Eunice?”
“That was Eunice. She walked right out onto the mud flats, sinking in and getting filthy. She staggered her way up to me and said, ‘Are you Molly Kennett’s son?’ And I said, ‘What if I am?’ She said, ‘You’re to come with me. I’ve been looking for you for a long, long time.’ ”
The last sunlight had leached out of the sky and the strongest of the stars were showing through. He had his head back, looking at them. The profile of his face was like the outline of some mountain. Granite and cliffs. But he wasn’t rock hard inside. She would have been able to deal with him if he’d been simple and hard inside.
“The lady undid the tie on her cloak and took it off and put it around me. Then she just slopped her way back to the carriage in her wet dress, not even looking behind to make sure I followed.”
She’d known Kennett was abandoned by his father after his mother died. Thrown out like garbage. She hadn’t known the rest of it. That earl, the man who was his father, should have been knocked on the head and drowned, quiet like. “Why are you telling me this? It sounds private. You’re telling me because I helped Eunice?”
“Partly. And I owe you some secrets,” he opened and closed his fist, deliberately, watching himself do it, “in fair exchange.”
Fair exchange for what?
“And it’s a warning,” he said. “About me. About what I am.”
I watched you kill a man yesterday. You half killed another, just now. How many warnings do you think I need?
“I used to stand under the bridges, so hungry it clawed the side of my guts, and look up at their carriages driving by. All those fine, fat gentlemen. I hated them.” The grating sound she heard was his jaw clenching. “I stole from anyone weaker than me. I would have become a murderer in another five or six years.” The Captain’s face was all shadows. “That’s why I understand your father. We both grew up with that kind of hate. I know why he turned traitor.”
He thinks Papa would kill men for money. She pushed away from him and sat up straight. “You don’t know anything about my father. You don’t know the first thing. He’s—”
“Not guilty. You have to believe that because he’s your father. ” His eyes picked up some spark of lantern light in the kitchen and glittered. “I wonder what you’re willing to do to prove it.”
Whatever he was thinking, he was wrong. And it was probably insulting. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do. Not one thing. I already—”
“Later. We’ll finish this later. Come inside and eat.” He stood up and reached down to take both her hands and pull her to her feet. “We’ll have dinner and listen to Quentin explain why the perfect social order doesn’t coddle the poor.
Walk on the grass, unless you want me to carry you. This gravel will tear you to shreds if you walk around without shoes.”
Thirteen
Garnet Street, the Whitby Warehouse
“. . . ABOUT A DOZEN OF THEM. THEY CAME IN after midnight. They locked the guards in the high-value storage.” Pitney, sweating and frustrated, led the way down a row of oak barrels. Jess followed. “We didn’t know anything till the morning shift came on and found them. I sent you that note the minute I got here.”
“It’s not the guards’ fault. Not your fault either.”
“I’m supposed to be in charge here. God’s bleeding damn, Jessie.” Pitney slammed his fist down on a bale of broadloom cloth and stumped on with the familiar drag and thump. He’d taken a bullet in the knee, running Whitby cargo near Dieppe. It was old and accustomed, walking along with Pitney, limping and fuming, at her side.
Nothing had been disturbed on the open shelves of the main floor or in the transient racks next to the loading dock. This wasn’t thieves. This was His Majesty’s God-Save-the-King government. Hell of a thing when you couldn’t trust your own government. “Did they get into the safe?”
Pitney’s bald, freckled scalp was turning red the way it did when he got agitated. “They picked the lock. It’s the German safe we got last year. It came with a sheaf of guarantees.”
“If you want to get into a safe, you’ll get into it. There’s always a way. Makes it kind of pointless, really.”
“MacLeish is counting out the money, but it’s all there. The banknotes weren’t even touched. Everything else . . . Jaysus, Jess, they tossed the jewelry in a pile on my desk, just heaped up.” He glared at the shelves they were passing. “The clerks are checking inventory in the main hall. Most of the small stuff is accounted for already. We should get a new safe.”
“Least of my worries, I expect. What else?”
“They broke a few locks in high value. Trunks and crates got crowbarred open, but it looks like they didn’t take anything. MacLeish is squawking like a wet hen, wishing something had walked off so he could complain. Whatever they wanted was in your office.”
“No surprise. I should have . . . Oh, devil and blast it. Kedger.” She took off at a run. Pitney struggled behind her, swinging his stiff leg, cursing.
The door to her office stood open. Kedger was safe. Snarling and unhappy with every inch of fur on end, but safe. They hadn’t touched him.
Thank God. She went to him and put her hands right down on the cage so he could sniff at her and know everything was fine.
“Bloody traps. We might as well not have any law in this country, the way they ignore it.” Kedger clung to the bars, upside down, furious, bristling, and red-eyed. “They scared Kedger. Sodding mudsuckers.”
“I didn’t let him out last night. He was . . .” Pitney absently picked at the bandage on his index finger, “. . . cross. Jess, your father don’t like you swearing.”
“What? Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Pitney. I’ll watch that.”
Kedger started up a long, impassioned aria about the previous evening, full of squeaks and snarls and threats of ferret vendetta.
“I couldn’t agree more, Kedge. All that and then some.” She slipped the bar and opened the cage door. He looped back and forth, wriggling under her fingers. “That’s my fine boy. Finest ferret in the city.”
She knew who’d invaded in her office in the dead of night. Mr. Bloody Adrian Hawkhurst of the bloody British Service and Captain Bloody Sebastian Kennett. They just waltzed across town and ambushed her guards and ransacked her office when the fancy struck. Pirate waters, she was in lately. Always something new and unpleasant on the horizon.
Kedger scrambled up her arm to cling to her shoulder and continue his complaints from there.
She found the soft place behind his ear and scratched it. “Sorry you didn’t get to bite anybody. My advice is, stick to rats. You take a chunk out of the British Service, it’s going to disagree with you, sooner or later.”
Pitney said, “This is why they came. They spent their time looking here.”
He was right. Her office had been searched to the bone, then put back to rights. More than put back. All her clutter was tidied up. Every pile of notes was lined up, square-cornered and exact. Next to the samovar, the six cups were stacked, upside down in a pyramid, nice as ninepence.
They’d made themselves cups of tea and cleaned up afterward. Neat bastards.
She picked up the top cup, the one painted with jasmine flowers. This was the one she always used. She ran her finger around the rim.
Pitney cleared his throat. “You sure it’s the British Service?”
“Who else?” She put the cup back. She’d leave them stacked this way for a while so she’d get angry every time she looked at them. “It’s Adrian Hawkhurst who did this with the cups. It’s Sebastian Kennett who left my papers shipshape and Bristol fashion.”
The Captain had said, “I owe you some secrets in fair exchange. ” He’d sat next to her on that bench last night and talked to her easy and friendly and thanked her for helping Eunice. He’d put his arm around her and kept her warm. All the time he was thinking how he’d break into her warehouse. It just didn’t pay to trust anybody, did it?
Kedger curled around her neck, touching up under her hair with cold little nosings. He knew how scared she was.
Pitney said, “Why, Jess? The Service don’t have to sneak around at night, wearing masks.”
“It’s some game they’re playing. The British Service against the Whitbys.” She put herself into her chair, the one Papa bought her in Milan, with the arms carved into lion heads. “Them against Military Intelligence. Them against the Foreign Office. They like their games.”
The wood on her desktop was smooth and cool. A big, rich desk. A merchant’s desk. So much work she’d done here. She’d felt important. These last years, she’d pretended to be more than a scruffy thief from Whitechapel. Hubris, the Greeks called it. Bad things happened to folks who engaged in hubris, according to her governess.
She never changed inside. She was still a thief. It was always just a matter of time till the beaks came for her. “We’re losing the game, in case you wondered.”
“They can’t—”
“They can do anything they damn well want to. Look at this.” Every drawer in her desk was open, just a crack, so they made a little set of steps. “They could pry these drawers out in two minutes. Instead they go picking the locks and take an hour over it. A mind like that just strikes fear into sensible people.”
Inside the drawers, everything was neat as a bishop’s wig. Nothing missing.
No. Take that back. One bit of inventory was unaccounted for. The sack of lemon drops she kept hid behind the cash-box was gone. They’d helped themselves. If that wasn’t rampant abuse of power, she didn’t know what was.
In the back of the bottom drawer was a bundle of dark clothes and a lumpy, black burlap bag. In a couple small ways, the lumps were shaped different than when she last handled it. They’d pawed through her old burgling bag. All these years, nobody touched her burgling tools but her. Nobody. “They’re making some point with all this. I hate it when people get subtle with me. I’m not good at subtle.”
Lately, life just teetered from disaster to disaster, didn’t it? Enough to make a clam dizzy.
She wished, right to the pit of her belly, that she was still a kid, out in a fishing smack with Pitney, pulling in bales of smuggled lace, keeping an eye out for the Customs. Someplace ordinary, doing something simple.
In the middle drawer, her correspondence was sorted out by size. “They got into the letters from France. That’s a dozen men they can send to the guillotine any Wednesday morning they’re feeling bored. I should have burned this lot as soon as I read it.”
“You couldn’t expect the Service to show up,” Pitney said.
“I should have. Lots of things I should have thought about. It’s never bad luck. Always bad decisions.” Lazarus told h
er that a hundred times. Too late, now, to remember. She started sorting the letters out, picking the ones that had men’s lives in them. “Will you shovel these into the stove for me? I held on to to them, thinking there might be something I missed. All I’ve done is put more necks on the chopping block.”
“I’ll do it.” Pitney took off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up.
Kedger slipped down to her desk and sniffed at the letters. He grabbed a quill and launched off and plopped to the floor with a little grunt. He didn’t make any sound on the rug, but she heard him skittering as soon as he hit the bare boards. He took the quill under the bookcase to devour it.
“It’s time for you to leave England.” Pitney rocked the cage back into place, one edge, then the other, bit by bit. He had practice moving awkward loads, all those years smuggling with Papa. “Time to cut anchor, Jess, and run.”
“It’s too late for that.”
THE porter at the front door of Whitby Trading offered him an errand boy as a guide, but Sebastian shook his head and walked by. He knew the way. He took the main staircase upward and walked a long corridor permeated with the smell of spices. On the right, arches gaped open to the lower floor, with ropes hanging and winches and a sheer fall to the receiving area twenty feet below. There were hundreds of yards of storage down there in the main warehouse, and this was only one of their buildings. Whitby’s was a huge operation.
Jess was the prize at the center of this maze. He passed empty rooms and an errand boy in a hurry. No one challenged him. Not a guard in sight, and the clerks were out on the main floor, checking inventory. Anyone could walk in, wrap a woman up in a rug, and make off with her. They didn’t protect Jess worth a damn in this place.
He didn’t keep a warehouse in London. His cargo sold out of rented space at the docks. His agent—Eaton Expediters—kept two desks for him and dealt with the customs paperwork and his invoices. Kennett Shipping was lean still and growing. Someday he’d have what Whitby had here.
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