My Lord and Spymaster

Twenty-five

DOYLE WAS EXACTLY WHERE HE WAS SUPPOSED to be, where she’d arranged to meet him. He was standing on the bridge, a fishing pole out over the canal. Jess stopped two feet away and set her basket on the footpath.

“Nice day for ducks, miss,” he said respectfully and pulled at his cap.

She grinned and leaned her elbows on the stone rail and looked down at the ducks so nobody could see her lips when she spoke. “Hello, Mr. Doyle. How’s the fishing?”

Doyle peered down into the water and twiddled with his line. “Good enough, me not having any particular need for fishes today. We got ourselves what you might call a special agreement, me and the fishes. I don’t put anything on the hook, and they don’t bite it.” He was frowning like he had bad news to deliver, but he didn’t spit it out. Instead he said, “You’re being followed. Four men.” He looked up the road, the way she’d come, then, casually, back along the canal. “British Service. They’re being sloppy.”

“They aren’t trying to hide. They’re intimidating me with their official demeanor. Makes me feel like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading a pack of rats around.” They were ugly ducks in the canal, patched up from a couple different lines of ancestry. When they saw her, they swam over quacking, raucous, milling around and nipping at each other. Cockney ducks. She’d brought bread. She started tossing bits at them.

“The Service put a couple of men to watching you, right from the first. Adrian wanted you safe.” Doyle twitched the fishing rod. “Safe as you could be, all considered.”

And that was the bad news. She thought it over, trying to decide how she felt about it, and tossed more bread into the water. Wherever it landed, the same ducks always got it. There was a lesson in that, she thought. “The men watching me . . . you were the first of them.”

“With orders to keep you safe. Give you the information what you asked for. Give you advice, if you’d take it.” He glanced at her, sharp, quick, humorous, tough. “Adrian told me to keep you outa trouble.” The scar on his cheek creased. “Not likely.”

She didn’t seem to feel anything. Not anger. Not betrayal. She’d got used to the world falling down around her ears. Maybe she didn’t have any more shock left in her.

Doyle was British Service. Adrian had sent him to her. To protect her.

She rolled it around in her mind, and nothing changed. He was still Doyle. If sea monsters climbed out of that canal, this minute, he’d put down the fishing rod and fight them off with his penknife, telling her to “hop it.” He’d do the same for the fishmonger’s daughter. Working for the Service was irrelevant to the likes of Mr. Doyle.

“Adrian wouldn’t just do it straightforward and have me followed. He has to be sneaky about it.”

“That’s him.”

Adrian, plotting and plotting to make sure she was safe. He’d sent the very best he had. She was sure of it. Doyle would be an important man in the British Service—he’d be general manager if he worked for Whitby’s. Adrian had set him to running errands for her.

And all of a sudden it was funny. She’d sent Doyle out to hire dozens of men to follow villains and break into offices all over London. He’d probably just set Service agents to doing it. This last month, she’d been funding British Service operations. “How long have you been British Service, Mr. Doyle?”

“All me life. Started telling lies to pretty girls like you when I was a nipper.”

She leaned out far and got rid of the last of her bread. “I never knew. Not the least niggle of a suspicion. Not once.”

“Well, I’m good, see. Around Meeks Street they call me Doyle, the Secret Shadow. I got me a reputation.”

She didn’t laugh. Or maybe a little.

He looked at her keenly, bushy eyebrows and lined face serious. “I have a daughter your age, Jess. She’s out in the wilds of Spain, last time I heard from her, making life difficult for the French. I hope somebody looks after her if she needs it. I was doing this for your father, as much as Adrian.”

Papa, being two pins in a paper with a man like Doyle, would agree. Knocked the legs out from under her being angry. “I am just replete to the gills with everybody taking care of me and figuring they have to lie to me three ways from Sunday to get it done.” She reached down to pick up her basket. “You know what this means, don’t you? Means I’m not going to pay you for last week. I’m damned if I’ll put a Service agent on the payroll.”

“I can see the sense of that. ’Ere now. Let me, miss.”

Anyone watching would have seen the amiable, rough-looking man set his fishing pole down on the stones and stoop to pick up the basket for the lady. He handed it to her and she thanked him very prettily. He raised his cap to her as she left.

SEBASTIAN followed her and watched her do it right before his eyes. Talking to Doyle on the bridge, she’d been every inch a respectable young matron on her way to market. By the time she turned down Brantel Street, he was following what was unmistakably a pert servant girl on orders from the cook to do the shopping and get back to the kitchen smart, if you please.

Hungerford Market fronted the river. The market men landed their wares at the stairs on the Thames and wheeled them up in barrows. It was ordinary, just fresh vegetables and plump geese laid out in rows. It was small, a mere long block with a market house. The Ashtons sent the cart to Covent Garden at dawn twice a week to do the main shopping. Hungerford Market was just for what they needed fresh each day.

They needed fish, evidently. Jess was eyeing a pile of mackerel laid out under the awnings on damp burlap. She’d given her basket to one of the market boys.

“I dunnoh,” she was saying. “I thought maybe a bit of haddock would go down nice.” Then she listened with patent disbelief to the claim that the haddock at the next stand had been lying there nigh onto three days, but this here mackerel were fresh caught this morning.

“I dunnoh.” Jess prodded a largish specimen. “Haddock’s cheaper, too.”

The conversation deteriorated into minutia of one and six for three medium mackerel or four bigger ones for two shillings, thr’pence. He propped himself on a stall heaped with cabbages and turnips and listened for ten long minutes while Jess resolutely reduced the price of two mackerel and five tiny, anonymous, silvery-gray fishes to two shillings, ha’penny. The market woman wrapped the fish in a broadsheet and stowed them in the basket with the satisfaction of a woman who’d been willing to go to two shillings even.

“Oysters,” Jess murmured to herself as he approached. “Hello, Sebastian, why are you following me?”

“I like following you.” The ragged boy carrying the basket, about half full of fish, eyed him balefully. Evidently Jess aroused protective instincts in his young breast. “Must you do the shopping? I haven’t checked lately, but we usually have half a dozen girls sitting around the kitchen doing nothing in particular. One of them could do this just as well.”

“If you will bring women home to pup in the guest bedroom, you must expect some disorder. Your cook is drunk. You’re having fish stew for dinner. It’s about the only thing I know how to make.”

“Anything is better than letting Aunt Eunice loose in the kitchen. Where to next?”

“Onions. No, not that kind.” She ignored the baskets they were passing. “Spring onions. Over with the greens. Why don’t you go . . .” she waved him away from the stall, “. . . look at things or something.”

So he wandered around. The ground was covered with floating feathers from the geese they were plucking upwind. The man selling dried fruit and nuts had some almonds, so he bought a handful, wrapped up in a twist of paper, and carried them around, eating as he went. He liked the look of the oranges, too. They were probably some of his. He whistled to the boy Jess had picked out and, when he trotted up, dropped the almonds on top of the oysters and started loading oranges in.

He kept a pair of oranges, one in each jacket pocket, and walked back to where Jess was, at long last, concluding the contract on a handful of spring onions and a tiny bunch of what looked like weeds. This involved counting out much very small change.

She peered in the basket. “Oranges. You know you already have a basket or two cluttering up your pantry. Or you don’t know, I guess. And almonds. Oh well, they don’t go bad. Take it to Kennett House, please. You know it?”

The boy indicated he did by rolling his eyes heavenwards and murmuring, “. . . where they keep all them doxies . . .” He grabbed the penny Sebastian offered and disappeared.

“He’s supposed to get a farthing piece,” Jess said.

“I’ve set him up for life then, haven’t I? Do you enjoy this sort of thing?”

“Buying fish? I do, actually. Most places I live they don’t even let me in the kitchen. It must be three years since I bought fish. I mean, one fish, not a boatload, dried.” She began threading her way briskly through the stalls, around piled vegetables and crates of live chickens and the baskets of fish that spilled out into the narrow walkways between the vendors. “You’ve ruined my reputation in there,” she said. “I’ll never be able to go back. You have them all convinced I’m your dolly mop.”

“That’ll teach you to chatter broad Cockney to them.” Jess had dark circles under her eyes again. They’d both been up all the night. Flora’s baby, a boy, had been born with the sun. Healthy chap. Loud pair of lungs on him.

A little girl sat with her tattered skirts spread out, selling violets at the edge of the market. He flipped her a sixpence and picked a bunch and presented them to Jess. She slowed down after that. They walked along and she turned them in her hands and didn’t seem certain what to do with them.

“You didn’t need to give her sixpence,” she said at last. “Pointless, too. The old lady who runs her will just take it away from her.”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Thank you very much’ and hold them to your nose and smile. Hasn’t anyone ever given you violets before?”

They were out of the market, heading down one of the side streets that led to the river. She smelled the flowers. But it wasn’t a smile, more a considering and puzzled frown. “I don’t think anyone ever did give me violets.”

He thought about that bunch of dried flowers he’d found when he searched through her clothing. Daisies. Her angel-faced lover had given her summer flowers, all those years ago. They’d been nuzzling each other like puppies all through haymaking, he supposed.

She said, “I never sold flowers. Picking pockets was so much more profitable.”

“I have the most enlightening conversations with you. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know where you’re off to. I’m going to the office. I have a hundred and thirty cubic yards of empty cargo space for Boston next Wednesday and nothing bought for it.”

“What will you buy?” They were down to the quay. The street was broad and quiet here, with only a few passersby. Wind blew off the river and the poplars planted in a row beside the Thames turned silver green leaves back and forth. A barge glided steadily downriver. A waterman in a long, shallow black boat sculled across higher up, near Westminster Bridge. A calm, sunny day.

“That is the question, isn’t it? Tea, I think. I can trust myself to negotiate a deal in oolong. You cannot imagine how difficult it is to have my father locked up like this. I’m not a tenth the dealer he is. If he’d been buying those fish, we’d have got them for sixpence.”

She said this with perfect seriousness. The wall along the river was a broad, smooth stone ledge here. She ran the bunch of violets lightly along it, thinking about getting the fish a little cheaper or breaking into his office or buying a hundred thirty cubic yards of tea.

A pair of stone lions guarded the flight of steps down to the river. His Jess was absorbed, gazing up into the sky, a far-away expression on her face. Dozens of swallows wheeled and swooped above the river, riding the warm winds. He slowly edged her to the wall until she sat, practically in the lap of the nearest stone lion.

“Those aren’t sparrows, are they?” she said.

“Those are swallows, Jess.”

She was still being a servant girl or a pickpocket or some other Cockney thing inside. She sat on the ledge and drew her knees up close, letting her chin rest on the back of her forearm. This time, when she lifted the violets up and smelled them, her lips curved. “Swallows,” she said, memorizing. “What do you do with violets after someone gives them to you?”

He took the violets from her hands and slipped the string off the stems and let the flowers loose in her lap. “You enjoy them.”

She grinned at that, happy and relaxed for a change. That wouldn’t last long. Not with what they had to say to each other.

He pulled the oranges out of his pockets and tossed one to her. She caught it neatly and broke into it with her thumbnail and began to peel it, looking at him with her usual level regard.

“Do you know, you can do the same thing my father can. Bargain with people. Make them do what you want. I mean, look at me . . .” She held up her hands, with the orange and orange peel, and wordlessly indicated her lap, filled with violets. “I have three thousand and six things to do today and I’m already late. Why am I sitting here eating oranges with you?”

“No breakfast?”

She shook her head. “Sheer persuasiveness on your part.”

She was so beautiful sitting there. He’d have to be made out of stone like that lion behind her not to be aroused by her. She was taking such delight eating that orange. She’d picked up one of the violets and was staring into it. He could see her discovering all the separate streaks of color in the heart and the oblong dots there. If they’d been in the middle of a field somewhere, with all the time in the world, she’d have told him about it, as if it were the first time in history anyone had noticed what a violet looked like. He’d have showed her there were just as many things to discover in her own body as in the heart of any flower.

“Tell me why you went to see Lazarus.”

The brightness of her closed up, like a flower closing. Her mouth got obstinate. She was beautiful when she was soft, looking at flowers and smiling. He liked her like this, too. Mulish.

“What did you ask Lazarus for? You came all that way and you risked your neck. What was it?”

She didn’t want to say. At last, she shrugged. “Sailing dates. Lazarus keeps records of all that. Everybody who pays the pence gets writ down. It’s all there—names, ships, dates.”

Every ship, large and small, paid the pence to Lazarus, from the schooners anchored in the Pool of London to the coal barges in Stepney. “He keeps records?”

“Of course. He’d get stole blind otherwise. There’s just nobody honest.” She brooded on that. “I’m not saying he keeps banker’s records. Every couple of months they toss them in a back room. Some get lost. But he has accounts going back years.”

And that was the last, missing piece. Lazarus kept the records nobody else did, the listing of all the ships in London. Amazing. That was why she’d walked back into the padding ken and bargained with that monster. “Get word to Lazarus. Tell him to send them to the Admiralty tomorrow. You’ll find out for sure whether I’m Cinq, then.”

“Guess so.” Her eyes were gold, like old coins, when she looked at him.

“I wish you believed me today.”

“That’s the trouble. I do believe you.” An organ grinder a few streets away was endlessly repeating a short, discordant tune. Jess looked away and plucked at the fabric of her dress. “Feels like betraying Papa, when I trust you this much.” She still had a lapful of flowers, but it seemed she didn’t want them there any longer. She began picking them up and letting them fall, one by one, into the river. “I’ll know tomorrow, won’t I?”

They sat and watched the river about three barges’ worth, saying nothing. There was a coy, unreliable southwest wind winding past them and a high tide, just turning after the slack. Far downriver, near the Tower, amid a forest of tall masts, a square stern brig upped anchor and let the tide pick her up. They’d dropped the foresail to catch wind enough to maneuver. Without a glass it was too far away for him to read her name.

Jess broke the silence. “Lazarus would have found some way to keep me if you hadn’t come. I like to think he wouldn’t have, but . . .” She shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “He’s strong. And the old life tempts me. It wouldn’t have been easy to get away from him a second time. I owe you myself.”

“You wouldn’t have worked for him again, but you might have suffered for it. And I would have come to get you out. Jess, why did you sell yourself to Lazarus?”

“I wish I could figure out how your mind works. How did we start this?” She scrubbed a hand across her face, looking perplexed. “That was a long time ago. Let’s talk about something else.”

“You’re supposed to be grateful to me. Prove it. Tell me.”

She gave that little quirk upward at the side of her mouth. There wasn’t a more expressive face in London. “You’re doing it again, Sebastian . . . getting me to do things. Sometimes you sneak them out of me artful, and sometimes you just ask. I never know which it’s going to be.”

“This time it’s just asking. I’ll be artful later.”

“It’s all very sordid. You don’t want to hear about it.”

“If I didn’t want to hear, I wouldn’t ask.”

“Oh Lord, if you want to know . . .” Twenty feet away, a seagull swooped down and scooped up one of those violets floating out to sea. A second later it dropped the flower and flew off, looking disgruntled. Jess watched, while she mulled everything over and decided to tell him. “I was real young. Eight, I guess. My father went off to France and got himself arrested. We didn’t know that. We just knew he didn’t come back. I did my best, but the money ran out. My mother and I ended up . . . there.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, downriver, toward the worst of London’s slums. “There was a pimp who came to get my mother. I ended up killing him.”

This graceful girl in front of him, the reflective, intelligent face, the subtle, simple dress. He tried, but it was impossible to match her with any part of this—not with pimps, not with killing, not with Lazarus.

“You cannot imagine how much trouble I was in that night. He got the knife away from me and fell on the stupid thing, and I was covered with blood everywhere. He had about a million cousins. I was going to get me and Mama killed real, real bad.”

He could see her hands trembling where she had them fisted in her dress. “I knew Lazarus. Knew him face-to-face. I’d been picking pockets to feed us, and Lazarus made me pay the pence right into his hand. He does that with some of them he’s watching, though I didn’t know it then.” Her hands opened and closed again, clutching at the cotton of her skirt. “He was taking about everything I lifted, too, which isn’t like him. I don’t know what he thought we was living on.”

He snarled. He heard himself do it. She didn’t notice. She was a dozen years in the past.

“He wanted me to work for him. All the kids I knew dreamed about that—working for Lazarus. But I didn’t want any part of it. Every week, he kept talking about me being a Runner.” She sketched a motion in the air. “And I just danced away.”

Eight years old, and setting herself against Lazarus. She never had a chance.

“When I killed Lumpy—that was the pimp . . . Sebastian, do you know what it’s like when you look and look and the world has got so narrow there’s only one thing to do? I went to Lazarus for help. Only he wouldn’t let me just be a Runner. He said I had to take his shilling. He bought me. Bought my soul, he said.”

“You killed somebody for him?”

Unexpectedly, she grinned. “That was just him playing with you. He took Lumpy’s death. Made up some story and stuck a knife into the table, the way he does, and took the death as tribute. He never made me do things like that. Knew I was dead soft. Used to scold me for it.”

There was a scrap of orange peel on her skirt. She picked it off and flicked it over into the water. “I bought sausages with it. With the shilling he gave me. I was so bloody hungry.”

He thought about chopping Lazarus into fish bait. He’d use a dull knife.

“It was good with Lazarus, after I stopped fighting him.” Jess stared into the past. “That place behind Lazarus, where the boy was—that was mine. I was Hand. You don’t understand. That’s like being vizier or something. I could go anywhere. Do anything. It was wonderful.”

That, he could picture. Jess as a child, watchful and silent, sitting at the wall behind Lazarus, running his errands all over London. After she stopped fighting him, of course. What an absolute, bloody monster that man was.

“Hard for me at first,” she said. “Nobody’d ever run me before and I wasn’t used to it.”

Lazarus knew exactly how to control someone like Jess. He’d owned her soul, all right. “I can see it might be difficult.”

She looked at him then, really seeing him for the first time in a while. “It wasn’t like that—what you’re thinking. I was . . . special. He used to just laugh at me when I cheeked him. He’d do things for me, almost anything I asked. And when I fell, he kept them looking for me till they found me. And he came and got me out. Had ’em kidnap some nob doctor to set my arm. He sat up all night, talking to me, to keep me from knowing how much I hurt.”

The man had sent her scrambling across roofs. Lazarus should be divided into many, bloody pieces.

“I was with him three years. I would have died for him.”

It was a miracle she’d survived at all.

People strolled by along the river walk. Jess straightened her dress over her knees and kept her eyes down at the printed pattern in the cloth when she said the next thing. “I have a favor to ask, since we’re just sitting here and I’m already thirty foot deep in debt. I want to give you a shilling, in exchange for that one you gave Lazarus. I want to . . . buy myself back from you. I know it sounds stupid.”

It made her uncomfortable, him owning her soul. Good.

She said, “It’s just passing a shilling piece from hand to hand. Call it superstition.”

When he didn’t say a word, she glanced up and bit her lip, wondering what he was thinking about, probably. And there she was, leaned back on the stone lion, her skirts rucked halfway up. Any other woman in London would have realized how accessible she looked.

“Do you think I own you because of that shilling?” He leaned forward. Very gently, he ran the back of one finger in a smooth line down from her neck, across her bodice. He slowed when he got to her breast, but he didn’t stop. “If I own you, I can do this.”

She got quiet. She looked down to where his hand was, not quite believing what he was doing. “For God’s sake, Sebastian. We’re in the bloody street here.”

“Somebody I own doesn’t get to object to anything I do. Remember all those years in the East. Lots of women for sale in the East.” He slipped along, headed for the crinkle of her nipple. It rose up under the fabric as he approached. He didn’t touch, just circled round, softly, with the tip of his finger. She was lovely. “Generally they cost more.”

It would be interesting to see what she did. There was a good chance she’d break his nose and heave him in the river. She could do that, if she wanted.

She batted his hand away. “Stop this. Will you stop this? There must be fifty people can see you.”

“Nobody’s looking.” He didn’t give a damn who was looking. She’d run herself snug up to that stone lion. No retreat in that direction, unless it got up and walked off.

“This isn’t Paris. Nobody in this town makes love in the open but pigeons.” Her voice was all beautiful and tense with what he was doing to her. She clutched at his arm. No. Not fighting. Getting closer.

It seemed a good time to kiss her. As always, she was an intriguing combination of ignorance and some theoretical knowledge and a high level of native skill. After the first shudder, she just held on to him, getting softer and more willing every minute. With Jess you knew when she was willing, because you didn’t get your teeth knocked out.

She pulled away and licked her lips. Lovely lips, fuller than usual, from the kissing. “This is going to be a report on Adrian’s desk in an hour.”

“Should be more interesting than what he generally reads. Are you letting me do this because I bought you for a shilling, Jess? Is that why?”

Dazed eyes. Unfocused. Vulnerable. She put her hand up on his cheek, feeling the texture of him there. It was all new to her. She had no practice with the way a man feels. Her angel-faced martyr boy probably hadn’t even shaved yet.

“Forget the damned shilling,” she whispered.

Triumph streaked through him, stronger even than the lust that was running amok in his blood. Mine. Not bought or stolen or taken. Just mine from the beginning of time. Mine even before I met her.

He kissed her deep, entering in slow as if he were going into her another way. She didn’t recognize that yet. There was so much for her to learn. She vibrated under his hand everywhere he touched her. “Owning’s for objects. I don’t make love to objects.”

Her mind was taking its merchandise inside and closing down the stall. Only a few thoughts left. Jess, thinking, with all the force and calculation of her damnably cunning mind, was a formidable opponent. Jess, twitching each time he caressed that sweet nubbins on her breast, was just a woman. He liked dealing with her as just a woman, once in a while. It gave both of them a rest.

This wasn’t Paris. It wasn’t so usual to see a couple locked together like this in London town. They got stares and giggles from people walking by. And the hell with them. He kissed her a while, and it just got better and better.

Then they stopped kissing and sat there breathing deep at each other, and she outlined his lips with her fingertips. It was as if she were worshipping the flesh and bone of him.

“You picked a silly place for this, Sebastian.” He could see in her eyes she was letting herself fall in love with him. She was about three-quarters deep so far and sinking fast. He wondered if she knew. Almost too late for her to stop. It had been too late for him for a long time.

“This is a fine place.” His hand was on her thigh. She picked out soft fabric for her dresses. Like so much about her, you couldn’t tell how good it was till you looked at it closely. You didn’t know even then, unless you were canny as hell, the way she was. “Beautiful view, for one thing.”

She looked him full in the face. “I like it.” There was no man alive who deserved what was in her eyes, least of all him. But he’d take it all. This was Jess. He could no more let her go than he could stop from breathing.

He cupped the back of her head, into that hair all gold and brown, and fitted her close to him and held her strong and comforting till her body stopped quivering. The whole noisy world stretched out on every side, and he had the most important part of it right in his hands.

“Who do you belong to, Jess?” he asked, real quiet.

“I belong to myself.”

“Good. That’s a start. Do you have a shilling on you?”

She looked up at him. “Yes.”

“Hand it over.”

She fumbled in a pocket among the farthings and pence and picked one out. Not as new and shiny as the one he’d given for her, but a perfectly workable shilling.

“There,” he said. “You’ve bought your soul back. Take better care of it next time.” He tucked the shilling away safe in his watch pocket.

She said, “Don’t spend it all on sausages.”