Joanna Bourne - My Lord and Spymaster

“Here and there.” Whitby’s mouth set flat. He pushed back in his chair and opened a drawer in the desk. The cheap clay pipe he took out was white and new looking. “I know summat of your aunt, Lady Eunice. We met once—she won’t remember, but I do. She has a name in London. My Jess is safe with her.” The next drawer down, he found a tin of tobacco and shoved up the lid with his thumb. “Safe as she’s likely to be anywhere. What’s Jess to you?”

“She’s mine.” He sat in the chair by the desk and stretched his legs out.

The brown eyes went opaque. For an instant, Whitby looked every inch as dangerous as his reputation. Then it passed, and he was a tun-bellied old merchant in a striped waistcoat, filling his pipe. “Mr. Pitney tells me you claimed my girl in front of Lazarus. They’re saying you bought her.”

“So I did.” That was what he’d come to tell Whitby. To see the man’s face when he said it.

“I wouldn’t try enforcing that.” Whitby began packing the bowl of his pipe. Tobacco grains scattered across the papers on the desk. Whitby wasn’t as calm as he pretended. “Has claws, my Jess does. She thinks you’re the spy, Kennett.”

“She’s risked her life trying to prove you’re not. I hope it was worth it.”

The old man stood up. He wasn’t well. His clothes had been tailored for the man before he’d taken off a stone or two. But he moved like a piece of granite getting up and walking around. Heavy. Dangerous. Solid. Whitby didn’t bend to get a coal from the fire. He sat down on his haunches, like a man who’d grown up without much furniture.

He made a lengthy business about picking the coal up with a pair of thin sticks and lighting the pipe and getting it to draw. He glanced up. Whitby had Jess’s eyes—steady, brown, self-possessed, unafraid. It was disconcerting to see Jess’s eyes looking out at him from this man’s face.

“Maybe she’s risking her neck to prove it’s not you . Did you think of that, Kennett? We’re two men letting a woman do the dangerous work.” He pushed at his knees and stood. “I’m locked up in this cage. What’s your excuse?”

He pushed anger away. “A disinclination to clap the woman in irons. I doubt anything less would work.”

“Happen tha’s reet.” Whitby pulled the decanter from a nook in the bookcase and poured one glass. “They keep a damned mediocre port for me. I’d offer you some, but I doubt you’d drink with me.”

“You’re right about that.”

A chewing sound came from under the desk. It could have been rats, of course. “She’s left that goddamned rodent with you, hasn’t she?”

“Aye. Jess thinks I need the company. He steals things from the desk and gnaws them to bits. That’s a pencil he’s got hold of.” Whitby made a slow business of settling down at the desk again. “And nothing poisons the beggar. Now tell me without more rigmarole what you’re doing to my Jess. You’ve come a long way to see an old man if you’ve got nothing to do but brag you’ve debauched my girl.”

“The Neptune Dancer . My ship. I had friends aboard.”

“That’d be one of the ships sold out by our traitor. A Kennett ship.” Whitby sighed. “I’m sorry, man, but it’s nowt to do with me.”

“I traced two hundred pounds from the French Secret Police, to the go-between in Naples, and then to your London drawing account. You were paid by the French. There’s no doubt.”

“That’s to say, you have no doubt. Fair enough. Some of the evidence would convince me, if I didn’t know better.”

“You’re guilty as sin.”

The old man sucked on his pipe, looking thoughtful and absurdly ordinary. “Wish I’d had a few more minutes with Jess instead of a great hulking lout like you,” he said, at last. “Still, glad to have a look at you, I suppose.”

“I wanted to have a look at you, too.”

“Already had that, I should think.” Whitby poked his pipe toward a painted landscape that hung on the wall nearby. “Through yonder peep or t’other ones. I’m asking myself what Bastard Kennett is doing with my lass if he thinks I’m guilty of murder. I never heard you took revenge against women.”

“It’s nothing to do with Jess.”

“But she’s caught in the middle, isn’t she? You’re taking vengeance for an act of war, man, and that’s pure stupidity. The captain who sank your ship’s probably a likeable enough chap. You plan to gut him someday when this is all over?”

“Not him. Just Cinq.”

“More power to you, then, finding him. He might even be the villain you think he is.” Whitby took a drag on his pipe. “Or he could be an honest enough man, fighting for a cause he believes in.”

“I don’t care what he is.” Sebastian gripped the arms of the chair, feeling his breath wrench and haul inside his chest. This old man sat here puffing on his pipe, being philosophical. Fifty men on the Neptune Dancer had been robbed of all their years. They’d never be old. “In a few hours, Jess is going to give me Cinq’s name. If you’re Cinq, that’s the Furies’ own revenge. You’re going to die at the hands of your own daughter.”

He stood up. There was nothing he could say to Whitby. Nothing he could do to him. The man was twice his age and cornered up like a rat. “...and she’s going to have to live with killing you.”

“Kennett.”

He jerked around to face Whitby.

“There’s planted evidence aplenty.”

“Or proof.”

“You bought the girl. Now she’s your responsibility. If the evidence falls against me, I expect you to get her out of England. Get her safe. You owe her that much.”

Sebastian set his teeth. He nodded tightly.

“And don’t marry her. I don’t care what you feel for her. Don’t make her live with a man who hanged her father. She deserves better than that.”

What Jess deserved was a different father. “I hope you rot.” He banged on the door to be let out.

JESS WAS IN THE RAGGED GARDEN BEHIND THE Captain’s house, lying on her belly on a blanket on the ground, poking around in the grass. Eunice sent her here. She was supposed to be resting, getting ready for the work tonight.

Sun spilled down through the trees in thousands of shilling-sized drops on the grass. She picked a tiny plant with three leaves. She recognized it from the playing cards. “It’s a club.”

“It’s clover.” Claudia’s feet, in dark green leather slippers, were to her left, in the grass, an inch from touching her elbow.

“Clover.”

“It gets flowers on it. About this big.” When she looked up, Claudia was showing her with two fingers. “Purple. Shaped like balls. You are the most deplorably ignorant person I’ve ever met.”

“I just haven’t been in England much, mostly.” She tried to imagine purple flowers shaped like balls all over the grass and couldn’t. She would have noticed if something like that was going on, wouldn’t she? Life just got stranger and stranger the more you thought about it.

“You’ll get brown if you sit out in the sun,” Claudia said.

“I had a governess once who said things like that. I got brown in Egypt. Never got unbrown again, really. I didn’t care much at fourteen.” She thought for a bit. “Don’t care at twenty-one, either.”

“You’re showing your ankles.”

The pretty muslin print of her dress was kicked up to her knees. “Showing considerably more than my ankles.”

“I’d advise against attracting masculine attention in this house. But then, you consort with weasels, don’t you?” Claudia’s feet shifted. “Quentin’s waving at me from the window. I’m going inside.” And she swished away. Unaccountable woman, Claudia. She stood there for ten minutes, just heavy with something she wanted to say, and never did decide to say it.