My Lord and Spymaster

side of her office another window looked down into the warehouse below. Nothing moved at Whitby’s she didn’t know about. This was the heart of the kingdom.

She was in her office. She sagged at her desk like a jib sail with the wind spilled out. He headed for her, past rows of desks punctuated with quills and ink bottles.

She wasn’t entirely unprotected. The man with her—it was the Whitby London manager, Pitney—stopped rearranging the ferret cage and came around to the desk so his burly body partly shielded her from view, giving her some privacy. It looked like he was in the habit of taking care of her. A small point, but telling.

She wore sober dark green today. Her wheat-colored hair was pulled back ruthlessly from her face, leaving it ascetic and pure as a Byzantine icon. There wasn’t a way he’d seen her—not stark naked, not muffled head to foot—that she didn’t make him hungry for her. He took one look at her down the long stretch of the office and got stiff as a boy in his first brothel. Stupidest muscle in the body. Distracting as hell. He stopped, halfway down the room, and calculated costs of replacing rope on the Lively Dancer for a minute, till he’d put jack back in the box.

Coming closer, he could see she’d left the cups stacked up beside the brass samovar, cobalt blue, blood red, and canary yellow. On the shelves all around the room, the lines of ledgers showed gaps, like missing teeth. That was where the lads from the British Service had helped themselves to her account books.

She’d left her door a crack open and he could hear her talking. That was careless of her. Taking it slow, acting as if he belonged here, he came up close and stopped, still as a tree, and listened.

“I don’t even know what they’re looking for.” Jess sounded tired and subdued, not like herself. “They have enough proof to hang Papa three or four times over. They don’t need more.”

“Josiah’s a rich man. He’ll buy his way out. They won’t—”

“It’s not Papa they’re after.” When she lifted her head, her face looked fragile as blown glass. The bruise on her cheek stood out starkly. “It’s me. They want me to take the drop right next to Papa.”

“For God’s sake, Jessie.”

“It’s easier for them if I’m scared. They want me to panic and make mistakes.”

“I can have you offshore with the tide. You can wait this out in Amsterdam.”

“They aren’t going to let me go. They got men following me, making sure I don’t wriggle out of the net.” He saw the shrug, a quick rise and drop of her shoulders. Her voice dropped so low he could barely hear her. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t leave Papa. They should know that. Funny, in a way. I never thought the English would be so hungry to hang a woman.”

That was nonsense. He’d put a stop to her thinking like that.

“Nobody’s going to hang,” Pitney said. “Not you. Not Josiah. I swear it, Jess.”

“Maybe. Look at this.” She held her hand out, palm down, showing it to Pitney. “Shaking like an aspen. If Hawkhurst wants to break my nerve, he’s about done it. That’s the worst of having an old friend as an enemy. He knows me down to the hinges on my soul.”

“Northern Lass is still in the Thames, waiting for the tide. I’ll take you out the back way. Don’t pack. Don’t go back to the hotel. I’ll—”

“They say it doesn’t hurt much, if it’s done right.” She shook abruptly, like a cat touched by a drop of water. “I need the names of the ships that sailed yesterday, and everything that sails today and tomorrow. Everything, down to the coastal scows and the fishing boats. Get me a list.”

“I’ll send some boys out. Jess, we can’t find one ship out of—”

“We can. We have to.” Her voice was steady, her face grave and grimly intent. Even if he hadn’t seen proof after proof last night, he’d know she was hunting Cinq. “Did Northern Sun bring reports from France?”

“Two new ones. You’re in no shape to read them.”

He agreed with Pitney. She shouldn’t be working. She shouldn’t be out of bed. There was nothing holding her together but spit and stubbornness.

“I’m fine. Maybe Leveque pinned down the—” Then, between one second and the next, she knew he was there. Her chin lifted. Their eyes met through the glass. “Or maybe the Captain’ll join us instead of skulking around the doorsill. ”

Caught. He pushed the door open the rest of the way. “The Service isn’t trying to hang you.”

“I guess you’d know. How long have you been a jackal for the British Service, Captain?” Anger straightened her spine and ratcheted her voice tight.

“A few years. The Service knows me pretty well. If they were trying to hurt you, you wouldn’t be in my house. I don’t let anyone touch the people in my house.”

Pitney stomped over to put himself in front of Jess, legs braced. The tense, open right hand, held low, said he had a knife, probably in his boot top. It should have been ridiculous, a man that age squaring off against him. But it wasn’t. Anyone who came at Jess would have to kill that old man to get to her.

He wouldn’t like to face Pitney in a fight. “We need to talk, Jess. Call him off.”

She considered him levelly, then murmured to Pitney.

“I’ll be outside.” The old man walked past, stiff-legged, and hitched himself up on a desk in the clerks’ room, guarding Jess through the plate glass. Ready to charge.

There was no reason to repeat Jess’s carelessness. He pulled the door tight. Jess’s bulldog didn’t get to listen in.

She was wary and angry. She didn’t like being caught off guard this way. He was walking on her territory uninvited, and she resented it. She knew he’d pillaged through her papers. They were both angry, and he was going to give her orders she didn’t want to hear.

He circled in toward her, slow and indirect, taking the tour of her office. They both needed a minute to calm down.

Old cargoes hung in the air, the smells of raw wool, Russian tea, and spices. Under it was something musky, probably the stink of the ferret they’d found. A ball of twine sat on the shelf, scissors still thrust into the middle. Red leather chairs were pulled up to the long worktable, cluttered with files and papers.

He’d spent five hours here last night, sitting at her desk or standing over this table, going through her papers. Adrian was right—Jess ran this company. Her accounting system was an amazing machine of numbers, wheels within wheels, intricate as a snowflake. She gave orders to a man like Pitney, and they were obeyed. This big, central office was hers, even though the Whitbys might only be in England one month out of the year. This wasn’t the dollhouse of some favored daughter. Merchants worked here. They opened bolts of cloth on that long table and sifted handfuls of loose tea. Men rolled up their sleeves in this room and ran a trading company. A dozen men and one woman.

“He’d purely like to take a swing at you.” Jess looked small behind the big desk. None of it showed. Not the brilliant mind. Not the courage. “Pitney, being protective. I wish he wouldn’t do that. At his age, he should know better. You’d take him to pieces.”

“I don’t fight old men.”

“Prefer a challenge, do you? You can argue with me, then.” She shuffled papers, scowling at them, shimmering with anger. She was so damned lovely doing it. She must ambush every merchant who comes in here. They don’t know how to deal with her.

I do. He didn’t make a sound, walking the last of the way toward her. The Isfahan carpet was soft as moss on a forest floor. “I was going to tell you about it this morning, what we did here, but you took off at the crack of dawn. I didn’t want you to see this without any warning.”

“A warning? Well, that would have made it all right then. A warning. When we were talking in the garden last night, you were planning to break in here.” She glanced up long enough to see the answer in his face. “Must have been amusing as hell for you, sitting there, fooling me.”

“It wasn’t like—”

She slammed the drawer closed. “It was exactly like that. I see why you’re such a canny trader. You never said a word that wasn’t true, and all the time you were lying up a storm. You made me like you. That’s clever, doing that.”

He’d done more than make her like him, and they both knew it. He’d made her want him. He intended to keep doing that. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do, binding this woman to him.

He had other crimes to admit. He’d drag them all out and get it over with. “I was in your hotel in Bloomsbury