“Josiah dickers for goods. But it’s Jess who made them rich. When she was twelve, back in St. Petersburg, she used to hold forth at the breakfast table, laying down the law to Josiah how much he could bid for amber or sables. She’d sit there calculating the profit margin on smuggling across three borders, and I’d lean over and remind her to keep her braids out of the butter dish.”
“Her name’s not really Jess, is it? You called her something else.”
“Jessie. It’s Jessamyn really.”
Jessie. That was it. He remembered hiding in a pigeon loft near Boulogne, waiting for the smuggler’s boat to come at dawn, listening to Adrian talk about Jessie in St. Petersburg, who still wore pinafores and long braids and ran her father’s business like a top. “Somebody should get her out of England. There’s nothing she can do here but see her father die.”
“You underestimate her.” Adrian emptied his glass. “She’s going to find Cinq for me. I gave her the best reason in the world when I arrested Josiah.”
“You arrested Whitby because I gave you a mountain of overwhelming evidence.”
“I arrested Whitby so Colonel Reams of Military Intelligence wouldn’t get his grubby paws on him. I keep saying that, and nobody listens. Can I offer you some of this? It’s quite good.”
"You go ahead.”
“I’ve always admired your taste in brandy.” Careful as an apothecary, Adrian measured out another finger’s worth. “I cannot understand why a bright girl like Jess doesn’t see my logic for incarcerating her father. Bastian, why is my mad, brilliant Jess going through your pockets, at considerable discomfort and personal risk?”
“I don’t give a damn why—” He knew then, suddenly, what Jess Whitby had been up to. “Bloody hell. She wasn’t searching me. She was planting something. That’s it.” He grabbed his coat and dug his fingers into the corners of the pockets.
“I wondered if you’d think of that.”
“Next time, say it.” He checked the next pocket. “Something small. A scrap of a memorandum from the War Office. Something easy to overlook and damning.” There was nothing in the jacket. “They’re brilliant, all right. That’s how they get Whitby free. They make me the scapegoat. She drops one piece of paper in my pocket, and they get rid of the man who built the case against him.”
“How diabolically clever of her.”
“Go ahead and laugh. Your Josiah Whitby is a dung-eating pig who Cati"1esent his daughter to rub herself all over me. He doesn’t give a damn about her.” He dropped the coat. “I could have raped that girl against a wall instead of bargaining a price. It’s not here, whatever it was. It wasn’t in her clothes, either. I’d find it back on the ground in Katherine Lane if I went to check.”
“I doubt it. I wonder what was supposed to be in Cinq’s pockets tonight.” Adrian set the glass on the chart table, on a map of the south coast of England. “I will inquire, delicately, at the War Office if anything has gone missing lately.”
“Ask what you want. I need to clean up.”
Blood from the fight had dried on his skin. His clothes were sticky with it. Jess’s blood. And blood from the men he’d killed for her. He unbuttoned his waistcoat and tossed it in a corner—that was ruined—and eased his shirt off over his head, gritting his teeth. He’d gotten himself hit with a crowbar, protecting the girl.
“Need that strapped up?”
He rotated his shoulder, letting loose slashes of pain. “It’ll do.” The water in the bucket was still warm. He slopped it into the basin. The dried blood washed off, disconcertingly red, as if he were still bleeding. He took a towel from the floor, the one he’d used to dry her hair. It smelled like spices when he washed with it.
He poured the last clean water over his head, getting some of it in the basin, some on the floor.
Jess slept with her hand tucked at her cheek, like a child. The curl of her fingers was as beautiful as a seashell.
I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d known what she was. But, holy God, I would have wanted to.
He’d been gut-deep certain this woman belonged to him. He couldn’t remember the last time his instincts had betrayed him. “Your brilliant Jess is a fool if she thinks she can play that game with me. She has no idea the kind of man I am.”
“She has plans,” Adrian murmured. “What? Probably something that involves risking her neck. I’ve got the only man who can stop her locked up. Even Doyle can’t do it. How very much I wish she and I were on speaking terms.”
“Save it. Listen.” Under the clank and rattle of the
Flighty
and the racket of rain hitting the deck, he heard wheels on the wharf. “Someone’s here.”
Adrian cocked his head. “That’ll be Doyle with the hackney. ” He studied the girl on the bed with a remote intensity. “You won’t ever forgive me for arresting Josiah, will you? I don’t generally betray my friends. But then, my dealings with you Whitbys have always been exceedingly complex.” He touched her cheek. Her head rolled to the side, completely lax. “Out of the hunt. She never did have a head for liquor.”
“A concussion is more to the point.”
“How right you are. Between the knock on her head and the potent powders of the East, she won’t even remember being here. When I take her away, she won’t remember you at all,
mon vieux
.”
Adrian always thought he was being subtle.
Jess Whitby had got herself wound up in his blanke C iniv>ts. Her leg was bare to the thigh, long, with a down of golden hair. Erotic images started rolling around his mind like badly stowed lumber.
He pulled on a clean shirt. The linen was salty from being washed at sea, a good, familiar smell. Nothing exotic and woman-scented. “Get her off my ship.”
“Oh, I will. I will. Carry her for me, will you? I threw my knee out, fighting.” Adrian wrapped the blanket around Jess with a proprietary air. “And no clothes at all. You are so . . . thorough. It always complicates matters when they don’t have any clothes.”
You’re not funny, Adrian.
“Where are you taking her?”
Adrian found her shoes. “I’m in the process of deciding that. Let’s proceed, shall we? I want her out of here before more gentlemen with knives show up.”
It was mostly blanket he felt when he picked her up. But a bundle of blankets wouldn’t have shaped itself to fit his arms or leaned, confident and accepting, against his shoulder. Her hair blew back in his face when he pushed through the companionway door and the outside cold rolled over them. He recognized the spice on her now. She smelled of cardamom.
She won’t remember me.
He wanted to shake her and wake her up and make her look at him so he’d be sure she wouldn’t forget him. He wanted to see her eyes dilated, huge and dark, with his image inside. Most of all, he wanted her gone.
The dock was empty. Adrian pulled his throwing knife and went first. They crossed the gangway and headed toward the coach that waited in the drizzle, side lamps lit. If Adrian’s knee was playing up on him, it didn’t show in the way he leaped up into the coach. He reached down impatiently. “I’ll take her from here. Hand her up to me.”
All he had to do was hoist her up and walk away. You abandon damaged ware. You mark it off the inventory, and toss it away, and forget it.
He couldn’t do it. Adrian, damn him, knew that.
It should have been awkward, climbing into the coach, carrying a girl snuggled against him. But she didn’t weigh much. He set her in his lap, wrapped in his coat, keeping her steady when the coach lurched forward. “What are you going to do with her?”
“If I said it’s not your concern . . . ?”
“Don’t try my patience.”
“I can’t take her to Meeks Street.” Adrian stretched his boots out casually across the strawed floor. “I might as well turn her over to the Foreign Office, neatly trussed. They’ve hatched several asinine schemes that involve her.”
Sebastian wasn’t going to ask why the Foreign Office wanted Jess Whitby.
“They don’t quite dare to arrest her openly—they are so very discreet, our diplomats—and I’ve been refusing to do it for them. I am unpopular with the Foreign Office at the moment. ” Adrian stashed the knife in his sleeve. “Colonel Reams at Military Intelligence is also full of plans for Jess. We’re agreed, are we not, that Colonel Reams will not get C wil Rhis hands on Jess?”
“Fine. Forget Meeks Street.” He already knew where they were going. He wondered how long it would take Adrian to admit it.
“There’s the hotel in Bloomsbury. That’s where the Whitbys live when they’re in London. I could take her there, I suppose.”
“So she can be kidnapped more conveniently.”
“Unfortunately, true.” Adrian lifted the leather curtain on the window. They were already away from the alleys and warehouses of the docks. Ahead, in the distance, a necklace of tiny bright dots marked Westminster Bridge. “I’m sending her home with you.”
It was the logical choice. “I don’t want her.”
He was cold, except where he was wrapped around the girl. He’d been in the Mediterranean too long. Jess would be cold, too, in this gray fog. He pulled his coat more tightly around her. Strange how distinctly he could feel her breathing.
So much bright, nonchalant courage in this small package. She let herself be her father’s tool for betraying England. God alone knew how much damage she’d done.
Adrian pretended to watch the street. “Eunice will coddle her cracked head, and that motley crew of pirates you call footmen can guard her. Even Military Intelligence won’t touch her if she’s under Eunice’s wing.” He let the curtain fall. “I need someone I can trust to take care of her. You’ll do.”
“Do you think I’ll change my mind about Whitby because you toss his nubile daughter in my lap?”
“Toss her in your lap? My dear Sebastian, I—”
“It’s not going to work.”
Five
Meeks Street
JOSIAH WHITBY LAID COAL ON THE FIRE. A POOR-HEARTED, stinking fire coal made, but they didn’t put firewood in this study they’d set aside for him. You could scrape and strop a scrap of wood to make a weapon, if you were desperate and determined and didn’t have much else to do with your time. They didn’t underestimate their guests here at Meeks Street.
That was what Jess wouldn’t see. She’d never admit Josiah Whitby was a fine candidate to be this traitor. She’d never admit any possibility of it. The Service knew what kind of man he was. Jess had never seen it.
He was cold in the mornings, nowadays. A man got old without noticing it.
He didn’t concern himself greatly with his own hanging. He’d been in the East long enough to know a man couldn’t dodge his fate by so much as a hair. But he didn’t want to leave Jess alone. Not now, when Cinq was taking an interest in the Whitbys. Not in England, where the carrion crows were already circling.
So he worried. There wasn’t much else to do here. Oh, Jess brought him manifests and cargo lists to keep him occupied. A goo F">Sd lass, his Jessie. But the counting house was her bailiwick. He liked goods a man could hold in his hand and sell face-to-face. There was no savor to these numbers on paper.
Hurst—he called himself Adrian Hawkhurst these days—didn’t quite apologize for arresting him, but he felt badly about it. They both knew he’d been forced into it. The bars at the window kept Military Intelligence out as much as they kept him in. Without them, he’d be talking to Colonel Reams in a cellar in the Horse Guards. That was something else Jess wouldn’t see.
She’d do something daft, his Jess, she was so furious at Hawkhurst. His girl wasn’t made for anger. She didn’t know how to do it well.
Hawkhurst sent in the newspapers every morning. They were laid out on the desk right now: the
Morning Chronicle
, the
Times
, the
London Gazette
. Good as a coffee shop. In a while the boy would bring buns to eat and stay to chat and drink tea. The other men from the Service would drop by, in and out, all day. They didn’t leave him on his own to brood.
But Jess . . . He was damned uneasy. Jess was up to something.
She never could fool him. To give her credit, she didn’t try—not till now when he was caged up and couldn’t stop her. She brought him apples and sat talking about indigo and porcelains, and then she went out hunting spies. She had her nose to the ground, like that ferret of hers, chasing the biggest rat in London.
Unless he missed his guess, that was what Adrian Hawkhurst had been planning all along.
Six
Mayfair
SHE WANTED TO STAY IN THE DREAM. THERE was nothing but pain out there, past the borders of the dream. In the dream, she was safe and warm.
The Captain lay beside her in the ship’s cabin. He had enchantment in his hands, the Captain did.
He said, “You’re worrying. I told you to stop that.” He stroked her hair and down her neck, down to the blanket. It was a Greek blanket, from Valletta.
There was something she should do. Something important . . . “I’m not thinking very well.”
“That’s the brandy. Almost guaranteed to stop you thinking sooner or later.”