D. Jackson - Thieftaker

“How is it that she’s still allowed to walk the streets of this city? Maybe if Sheriff Greenleaf had an ounce of courage he could find a way to keep the peace without relying on her kind.”

“I’m her kind,” Ethan said. “If Greenleaf had an ounce of courage, I might be out of a job.”

“You’d find another, and a better one at that.” She eyed his bruises again and her frown returned. “You’re lucky she didn’t kill you.”

“She doesn’t want me dead,” Ethan said between mouthfuls. “She as much as said so. She needs me to take jobs she can’t handle.”

“Ones that involve conjuring, you mean.”

“Aye. But it bothers her that this time being a conjurer got me a job on Beacon Street. She considers that her domain, and she wanted me to know it. She made her point and then she left.”

She took his hand. “She belongs in gaol rather than out on the streets.”

“I won’t argue.”

He took another spoonful of soup, and as he did the door to the tavern opened. Several men stepped inside, led by an imposing man with a large hook nose and hard pale eyes. He wore a white wig and a black hat, which he removed upon entering the tavern. Even from his table at the other side of the room, Ethan recognized him immediately; he and Kannice had been speaking of him mere seconds before.

“What now?” she muttered. Her gaze flicked in Diver’s direction.

Ethan, though, had a feeling that Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf hadn’t come looking for Diver. He recognized two of the men with Greenleaf as members of the night watch; he thought it likely that the third man was with the watch as well. The sheriff would have brought them along only if he expected trouble. And since he knew that Ethan was a convicted mutineer, Greenleaf would have wanted men at his back when he came to speak with him.

Ethan laid his spoon on the table and watched as Kannice stood and walked across the tavern to the doorway where the men were standing. She looked like a waif next to them, but that wasn’t likely to bother her.

“What can I do for you boys?” she asked in a cheery voice, stopping in front of the sheriff. “Are you hungry?”

Greenleaf hardly spared her a glance. “We’re looking for Ethan Kaille,” he said. “We know he’s here.”

Even in the dingy light of the tavern, Ethan saw the color drain from Kannice’s face. To her credit, she didn’t immediately glance his way, but neither did she manage to say anything.

“What do you need, Sheriff?” Ethan said, standing.

Greenleaf smiled thinly and stepped past Kannice. His men followed. “Good day, Mister Kaille,” he said, his voice echoing.

The sheriff wasn’t a bad sort. He didn’t like Ethan, and Ethan felt the same way about him. But the man had a nearly impossible job. As sheriff of Suffolk County he was expected to keep the peace throughout Boston and the surrounding countryside. But he had no soldiers, no guards, no militia. Even the men of the watch standing behind him answered to city authorities. He would have had to borrow them for this excursion.

Greenleaf stopped a few feet from the table and nodded in Ethan’s direction.

“He has a knife on his belt,” he said calmly to the men of the watch. “Take it from him.”

One of the men came up behind Ethan, a pistol in hand, while another stepped in front of him, also holding a gun, this one at waist level, so that its barrel pointed at Ethan’s gut. Ethan held up his hands, making it clear that he had no intention of resisting. The man behind him took his knife.

“Is that all you have?” Greenleaf asked.

“Yes, sir.”

The man in front of Ethan lowered his weapon. The one behind Ethan shoved him toward the door hard enough that Ethan stumbled and nearly fell to the floor. Instantly Diver was on his feet, his own blade in hand. Just as quickly, Greenleaf’s men rounded on him, all with their pistols held ready.

“Diver, no!” Ethan said quickly, even as Kannice also hissed a warning.

Seeing that he was outmanned, Diver tossed his knife onto the table and raised his hands as Ethan had done. One of the men knocked the blade out of Diver’s reach. When Diver started to lower his hands, the man hit him hard in the gut with the butt of his weapon. Diver doubled over, and the man drove his face into the table. Blood spurted from Diver’s nose and he dropped to the floor, hands clutched to his face.

“No!” Ethan cried, taking a step toward Diver. Another man blocked his way, his gun raised.

“Enough,” the sheriff said loudly.

Ethan stopped, raising his hands again in surrender. “There’s no need to involve him in this.”

Greenleaf glared down at Diver, a frown on his broad face. Kannice had rushed to Diver’s side with a cloth to stanch the bleeding.

“The pup involved himself,” the sheriff said.

“He’s young, and a fool. He wasn’t thinking. I’m the one you came for, and you’ve got me. Let’s leave it at that.”

Greenleaf eyed Diver for another moment before finally dismissing him with a shake of his head. “Fine,” he said to Ethan. “Come along, then. No more trouble.”

The man behind Ethan pushed him again, though with less force than before. Ethan glanced briefly at Kannice, who looked as frightened as he had ever seen her. He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but her expression didn’t change.

“Take care of him,” Ethan said. “I’ll come back as soon as they let me go.”

She nodded.

The man at his back pushed him again, not that it was necessary. Ethan reached the door and stepped out into the street.

“This way,” the sheriff said without looking back at him. And they began to march him toward Boston’s prison.

T he sheriff and his men were silent as they led him through the lanes. None of the men so much as looked at him, at least not that Ethan could see. They also didn’t shackle his wrists or ankles; he had feared that they might.

He tried to stay calm. He had done nothing wrong. Even if they put him in a prison cell, they couldn’t hold him for long. That’s what he told himself.

But still his limbs trembled, and he had broken out in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the hot August sun hanging over the city.

The last time men working for the British government had come for him, they had locked him away for more than thirteen years, first in a filthy cell in Charleston, then on a barely seaworthy ship bound for London and in a second filthy cell, and finally on the sugar plantation in Barbados. Just thinking of the island made the scars on his back itch with the memory of too many floggings. He had lived in a hovel with other prisoners: cutthroats, thieves, deserters. He labored in the cane fields from dawn to dusk, under a scorching sun and in air so damp he felt that he was drowning with every breath. At night, he slept on a vermin-infested pile of straw and covered himself with a threadbare, moth-eaten blanket.

He was allowed two meals each day: water, hardtack, and a morsel of cheese at midday, and much the same in the evening, with the occasional bit of rancid meat thrown in. Their one delicacy was a small piece of sweet, red fruit they were given every second or third day to keep scurvy at bay. The fruit was usually half rotted, but it was so much better than everything else they ate that it tasted ambrosial.

But even with this treat, Ethan recalled constantly being hungry. When it became more than he could bear, he ate roaches, beetles, and moths. Once he caught and killed a rat behind the hovel and ate it raw, but it made him violently ill and he never tried that again. He prayed for rainy days, not because they offered a respite from the labor-they didn’t-but because working in the rain was so much less onerous than working under the sun.