Which showed even smart women could be fools. There wasn’t one of these laborers or clerks who hadn’t imagined pulling her skirts up and laying her back on one of these bales of cloth and having her. They were men, not capons. She was so protected by her father and Pitney and her warehouse managers that she didn’t even know.
So wise a Jess. So practical and clever, and so naïve. Fairly soon, he was going to seduce her.
She turned and walked up the stairs. Saffron today. He smelled it on her as she pushed past. That would be smuggled goods from the south of France. It sneaked up on him every time he got close to her, this knowledge he had of her, this intimacy he felt. He knew how she ran her business. How she estimated demurrage on contract goods. How much sugar she took in her tea.
He knew what she looked like with her clothes off. He knew that.
She shook herself, as if some of his hunger had brushed across her. “I need a cup of tea. Come up to my office, and I’ll fix you some of the black we bring in through Kyakhta, into Russia. I might even find a sweet bun for you. Must be my morning for being hospitable to the British Service. And I figger we’re about finished with the mauling-Jess-Whitby part of the day.”
I doubt that extremely. He followed her. “Jess.”
Impatiently, she waited at the landing for him to catch up.
He was level with her now. “You can do it, can’t you? When we have the list of secrets stolen, you can match it to the ships moving in the Channel.”
“Yes.” She didn’t move, but deep in her eyes, a part of her went distant from him, into some abstract place he couldn’t follow. That unique, ingenious mind of hers was plucking away at the problem. “I could do it with thirty dates. I could sort through every tub that floats in the Thames. Twenty dates would work if they’re stupid or have only the one ship.”
“You’ll find Cinq.”
“I have to, don’t I?” She looked haunted. She turned her back on him and started climbing again.
“I’ll help. You’ll trust me to help you.” At the change in his voice, she turned around, right into his arms. Nobody could see them here at the turn in the stairwell. “Think of this as one of my arguments.”
She fitted neatly up against the curve of the staircase. Her mouth tasted of surprise and honey and black tea from the hills of China. She put up no fight after the first quick intake of breath. God, but that felt good—feeling her not fight. She was ignorant and shocked for the first second. Then she was ignorant and willing. The edges of stubbornness softened.
“This isn’t convincing me,” she muttered, when he let her mouth free for a second.
“Then I’m not doing it right.” He stroked up and down her back. “Let’s try again.”
Tension and urgency pulsed in his groin. Demand and hunger. Oh, but he had endless desire for this woman. No point trying to fool himself about that. Evil or virtuous, good or bad, whatever she’d done, he was going to have Jess. She’d figure that out pretty soon.
He’d had years of experience caring for women and loving them. He knew how to control his own need. He put that knowledge to use, tempting Jess.
“I wish you’d stop this.” But she was holding on to him. Deliberately, he used his mouth to seduce. He felt her trying to think. He breathed into her ear and murmured. Nipped at her earlobe. Took her with little bites, suckling and tonguing all over her face. All of it was to distract her, to chain her to this moment and what he was doing to her. She never had a chance.
When she quivered in his hands, when he knew he had her, he brushed her nipples through the fabric of her dress. One rasp. Another. Scratching with his thumbnail. Gently. Gently. Already there was no shock left in her, no defense, just that cry and thrash. And another thrash and another, till her legs were open and she rubbed herself against his thigh.
His beautiful Jess. He’d toss her into the sky and let her soar. He’d give her joy, again and again, with his body. This was her first taste of it.
So he kissed her for a while. It was a fascination, to feel the vibrating begin in her, like an echo of his own feeling. He could almost reach into her and touch the butterfly of heat that fluttered so unwillingly into life and then spread its wings inside her and beat rhythmically.
He wished he could take her the whole way to the end. That would be something—Jess turned into pure sensation and burning under his hand.
But this wasn’t the time or place for it. Not here, in the heart of her own citadel. He wouldn’t take away her pride like that. So he only warmed her a little, to remind her there were other things to life besides worrying and risking her life and trading spices. He stayed at her lips and her breasts and took her no further than kisses would take her. Well, maybe he made a few excursions. He set his mouth on her at the base of her throat and sucked against her skin and made marks, two or three of them, so the men working here would know he’d been there and keep their distance.
Then he stopped and just held her, and let her come down slow. He’d raised only a small heat in her, so it shouldn’t be too hard. “Later. There’s more, later.”
She rubbed her lips on his jacket, trying to hold on to what he’d been making her feel. Then she breathed out and put her head down and let it all go. Some of that tension she carried around went, too.
She was going to remember this when she was in her office with her paperwork, when she sat across from him at dinner, when she lay in bed. She wouldn’t be able to keep herself from thinking about it.
He propped her against the handrail. If he’d let go, she would have tumbled down the damn stairs.
“That was a mistake.” She lifted her head, looking stunned. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t just do that with you. Mistake.
Mistake. Mistake.” She combed through her hair with her fingers, bringing a lot of it down around her face. It was late to worry about what her men thought, if they saw her now.
It was too complicated to find the words, so he just reached out and stilled her hands. “Let me. And no, that wasn’t a mistake. That was damned deliberate.” He guided strands of hair over her ears and tucked them in at the nape of her neck.
He traded artwork halfway round the world—statues from Greece, Byzantine Madonnas, old carved figures from the deserts of Egypt. Not just for profit. It was for the joy of it. For the length of a voyage, he could hold beauty in his hand and marvel. Touching Jess was laying claim to that kind of beauty, but warm and alive. She took his breath away.
“I liked that,” he told her. “So did you.”
“Get out of my warehouse.” But she didn’t have her breath back yet, and she didn’t stop him when he coiled up loose hair and curled it away among the braids.
“We’ll continue this another time.”
“Not this side of hell.”
“Be home in time to change for this Historical Society meeting tonight, or I’ll come get you. Are you steady enough to walk the rest of the way? Those clerks of yours are going to start wondering.”
“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.
Eighteen
Ludmill Street, Whitechapel
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.
“Jess, where did you get this?”
“Found it in a desk I was cracking,” she said promptly.
“Where else? None of my business, anyway. I can’t possibly translate these for you.”
“Not Arabic?”
“Not . . . seemly.”
“What?” First time in a while she’d been dumbfounded.
“I recognize this, of course. I was fortunate enough to come across a copy at Cambridge. It’s rather famous among Arabic scholars. I don’t believe it’s been translated into English. These are quotes from an ancient . . . erotic manual. Lyric, classical Arabic. Your first passage deals with the man discussing a certain activity. The second is a description of one of the physical attributes of a woman.”
“A dirty book.” In Arabic. She leaned back in the chair and laughed. Oh, but she’d fooled herself proper, hadn’t she?
Reverend Palmer shook his glasses at her in a minatory fashion. “I cannot imagine where you acquired this, and I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me. But it’s not the sort of thing you should be reading.”
“It’s Arabic, so I’m not likely to be reading it.” She had to wipe tears out of her eyes, from laughing so hard. “And here I thought it was some deep, dark secret. All that sneaking and prying to get me fambles on a dirty novel. Lord, I’ve outfoxed myself. That doesn’t happen to me often.”
My Lord and Spymaster Page 19
