watch.” He pulled it out and laid it next to the coins. “If you want my pocket picked, why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I’m not the one light-fingering about your person. Jess is. What else?”
“If this is one of your games, I’m going to wring your neck.” He turned out the pockets of his coat and added to the pile. “Jackknife. Key to the strongbox in my desk at home. House key. And now we strike gold—a letter from Cousin Penelope in Little Thrushing, Hants. She’s putting in roses. You’ll find that riveting.”
“Enormously. What’s the rest of that?”
He’d stuffed a few papers into his greatcoat at the last minute, leaving the shipping office. “Invoice for the sale of oranges. Receipt for 300 yards of rope. Copy of the waybill for some furniture I transshipped to Scotland.” He dropped them on the table. “That’s the lot. What’s going on? I want the short answer.”
“With Jess, alas, there are no short answers.” Adrian quested with a finger, turning papers over. “This is unpromising, isn’t it? What are you hoping to find in my friend’s pockets, Jess? He has captured your vagrant regard, and that I find very interesting indeed.”
“She’s not a pickpocket. Not your agent. Is she a whore?”
“Good heavens, no. Whatever gave you that idea?” Carrying his glass of brandy, Adrian picked his way around the cabin. “I’m sure there are dozens of respectable women walking Katherine Lane. You have crates stacked all over.” Three long, flat wooden boxes were lashed to the bulkhead. “I don’t call myself an expert, but I’m almost certain these belong in that big, damp pit you’ve got down below. The hold, you seafaring sorts call it.”
“It’s a Roman mural from some villa Napoleon sacked near Milan, headed to a collector in Hampstead. It’s worth the rest of the cargo put together. I’d sleep with it under my pillow if it would fit. Why is the Service watching Jess?”
“You probably have it listed on the manifest as ballast. The customs evasion practiced by the so-called respectable merchant community—”
“I don’t want to talk about customs evasion, Adrian.”
Adrian took another long swallow. Liquor never had any effect on him. Hard to know why he bothered. “Doyle tracked down one of the surviving Irishman. They hail, quite recently, from Dublin, where they are likely unlamented. They were hired from the dock two days ago with orders to kidnap Jess. Hired by—and I quote—‘a black-haired cove, all muffled up,’ which limits my search to half the male population of London. Sebastian . . . she’s Josiah Whitby’s daughter.”
It was like the long drop when the ship slides down the trough of a storm swell. Only he never hit bottom. He plummeted, feeling sick all the way down, endlessly.
“Jess . . . Whitby.”
“Yes.”
Josiah Whitby was Cinq, a murderer and a traitor. Nobody knew this better than Sebastian. He’d gathered the evidence that was going to hang the man.
Jess sighed and stirred. The curve of her shoulder emerged from the striped wool like the line of a wave coming to shore.
She was a woman of many small beauties. Cinq’s daughter was sleeping in his bed.
They called the traitor Cinq because he signed his messages with the sketch of a pair of dice, the fives uppermost. The offices in Whitehall were his private lending library. Somehow, he helped himself to secrets at the War Office and the Admiralty. Somehow, he slipped them out of England, past the British naval blockade, into France. Napoleon knew British plans before the British army in Spain did.
Two years ago, French frigates ambushed the
His ship. His men. All of them dead because Cinq gave her sailing plans to the French. The first mate of the
He’d been hunting Cinq for two long years. He’d found him and gathered the evidence that would send the man to hell. Josiah Whitby would die. The gallows was a quicker death than he’d given Sam Carter.
He walked over to look out at the Thames so he didn’t have to see Jess Whitby.
Adrian said, “Josiah isn’t guilty, you know.”
They’d argued about this endlessly. “He’s your friend.”
“Friendship has nothing to do with it.”
“It does. I’m sorry. That’s the whole point.” There was too much light in the cabin for him to see past the glass. He shaded a spot with his hand to look upriver. There were still ships moving out on the tide, even with the last light going. Not something he’d let one of his captains do. “You used to talk about a daughter, didn’t you? You knew her in Russia. That’s this girl.”
“She put together the company. That accounting system you like so much. That’s her work. When she was sixteen.”
“It’s . . . remarkable.” That splendid clockwork of numbers, precise and clever and subtle. It was impossible to believe a sixteen-year-old girl made that.
“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 sent 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
