Joanna Bourne: My Lord and Spymaster

Always pleasant to work with a man with a sense of humor. She checked the Lane again. Still empty. “I need three minutes to dip his pockets. Buy me three minutes.”

That was long enough to find the packet, if Kennett had it on him. Let her get her hands on that, and there’d be no more calculations and lists and guesses. She’d know. I am so bloody tired of wrestling smoke.

On the other hand, smoke didn’t turn around and knife you when you picked its pocket. “He walks by here regular, late afternoon, going down to the ship. They’re off-loading wool goods and furniture and some fancy tilework from Italy he’s not paying duty on.”

“A smuggler. It just gets better and better. Anybody I know?”

She had to tell him sooner or later. “The ship’s the Flighty Dancer .”

“God’s . . . avenging . . . chickens.” He did some muttering she didn’t catch the gist of, clanking his lead bar against the brick wall now and then for emphasis. She was right. He didn’t like it. “That’s one of the Kennett Company ships. Tell me you ain’t going after Sebastian Kennett.”

“I wish I could say that, Mr. Doyle.”

Clank . Clank . Doyle’s lead pipe tapped on the wall of the alley. Clank . “You ever hear what Bastard Kennett does to thieves?”

“Rumors.” They said Kennett cut the fingers off a thief once, in Alexandria. Lopped ’em right off with one of the big knives he kept handy about his person. They told lots of stories. “Exaggeration, most likely.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it. If you want what he’s carrying, send me to get it.”

But Cinq could have anyone working for him. Even Doyle. That was why she was out in the rain, cold and wet and scared, doing this job with her own hands. “I can’t.”

Papa was locked up in that smug, escape-proof house in Meeks Street, waiting for the hangman. The real spy, the man the French called Cinq, was walking around London, free as a bird. He might be strolling down Katherine Lane right now.

I hope Kennett turns out to be Cinq. I hope he’s carrying the packet. Hope he doesn’t gut me like a halibut when he feels my fingers wriggling in his jacket.

Clank. “I ain’t going to talk you out of this, am I?”

“No.”

She didn’t have a choice. She’d tried bribes, threats, blackmail—all the old standbys. Nothing worked. Not with the British Intelligence Service. Not with Military Intelligence. Not with the Foreign Office or the Admiralty. Seemed like half the British government wanted Josiah Whitby behind bars.

Hell of a world when bribery doesn’t work.

Doyle studied her from under the brim of his hat. “You ain’t safe here, Miss Whitby, not being who you are. Not even with me. You go traipsing along the docks—”

“I’m careful.”

“—past a line of pimps who got an immediate use for a tasty chit like you. Now you want to go annoy Bastard Kennett. You run mad, or what?”

Not mad, exactly. Sometimes there weren’t any good choices.

Back when she was engaging in criminal acts with some regularity, she’d have called this a right pig of a caper. She didn’t know what she’d call it now. When she stopped talking flash there was a whole plethora of things she couldn’t even say anymore. “You don’t have to stay.”

Clank. “I earns that pittance yer paying me, Miss Whitby, in caseernitby, i you was wondering.”

“You do indeed, Mr. Doyle.” He was going to help her. All that low cunning on her side. The knot in her stomach loosened.

“I should jest slit me own throat and save Kennett the trouble.” Doyle scratched his thumb along the line of his scar. “Sad way fer a man of my abilities to end. When does he show up for this nonsense?”

“Half an hour maybe. If he’s coming.”

“Not long then.”

It seemed long. She leaned against the wall. In a third floor window, a candle flared into light. That would be one of the girls, working. A wood shutter creaked in the wind. Funny how dry her mouth was, what with all this wet everywhere.

“Doyle . . .”

“Hmm?”

“Stay a good long ways behind me. These knives Kennett’s so good with . . . He throws them.”

“So I hear. I ain’t fond of knives sticking in me gut.”

“Always felt that way myself.” At the corner, wind piled fog up in a stairwell, pushing it back every time it tried to escape. In a pub down the street they were singing a fair version of “Rule Britannia.” They were scum here on the Lane, but patriotic scum.

This was the worst part of a job . . . before it started.

“You do things you’re scared of much, Doyle?”

“Time to time. It don’t show, miss, you being nervous. Look cool as a clam, you do.”

“Thanks. All this water’d cool off a stove.” She wiped her share of London’s drizzle off her nose and stuck her head out to look down Katherine Lane.

A rude dog of a wind nosed up under her cloak and started her shaking. Just nerves. Even Kedger shook when he got nervous, him being a ferret and coming by it naturally. She’d be fine once she started moving. “I don’t like the waiting.”

“Me, I ain’t delighted with what happens when we stop waiting.”

She flexed her hands, pretending she was warming up, trying to fool herself that she was ready for this. A few hours’ practice hadn’t brought the old skills back. It’s going to be bloody embarrassing if this Captain Kennett catches me fingering in his pocket.

She heard them before she saw them.

Down the Lane, two men took shape in the fog. The big one on the right was upright but unsteady on his pins. The scrawny-looking cove on the left was holding them both up.

They were roaring drunk, which wasn’t an astonishment in this street. They were singing.

“. . . A pretty little oyster girl I chanced for to meet.

I lifted up her basket lid and boldly I did peek,

just to see if she haaaad any oysters.”

Doyle whistled a long, irritated breath out between his teeth. “That’s ’im. Kennett’s the big man on the right. Cup-shot, the both of them.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of his coat. “Just what I need. Drunks with knives.”

“If he’s drunk enough, he’ll probably miss.”

“There’s that.”

Under the wool of her cloak, where it didn’t show, she wrapped her arms tight around herself. She’d picked a thousand pockets. She’d be fine.

Kennett was, as they said, a sizable man. Tough-looking, too, for all he was silly with drink. Through the fog she could make out black hair and the lines of a dark, rawboned face. No hat. His coat was hanging open, which was a gilt-edged invitation to getting his pocket picked, if you asked her. She couldn’t see much of the bloke on the left with Kennett draped all over him. He was dark and wiry, and he had his head down, watching his footing.

Voices carried in the rain. She knew the song about the oyster girl. It warned a man not to trust a lass he met on the streets. Sadly true.

“Some days,” Doyle said, “life is just a bloody great old trial.”

“How right you are, Mr. Doyle.” She pushed wet hair out of her eyes and waited for the right minute to start yelling bloody murder.

SEBASTIAN KENNETT DIDN’T CONSIDER HIMSELF castaway drunk. He wasn’t precisely sober either, of course. There was a wide stretch of navigable ocean between drunk and dead sober. Fine sailing in those waters.

And wasn’t it a day for celebrating. Riley, his senior captain, master of the Lively Dancer , had come reeling into Eaton Expediters at noon, bringing a cask of French brandy and good news. Riley’s son had been born just as the man was setting anchor off Wapping at dawn. Fine brawling toasts everyone had drunk to young Thomas Francis Sebastian Riley. When they’d finished the brandy at the shipping office, they’d spilled into the tavern across the street—him and Riley and the shipping clerks and a dozen of his ships’ officers and some total strangers—and taken up drinking there. A noisy strong lad was Thomas Francis Sebastian Riley, according to Riley, who knew something about babies. Baby Thomas Francis would need all the bellowing lungs he could muster, poor mite, with six older sisters. Give him a few years, and he’d probably run away to sea.