BEING scared turned her muscles to water, but she was kneeling, so her legs didn’t give out. She wasn’t going to think about men and women she’d seen, kneeling like this, petitioning Lazarus. She wasn’t going to think what had happened to some of them. They’d been scared, too.
Lazarus finished talking to one bloke and sent him off. He motioned another over, ignoring her. That was fine. Likely he was deciding what the hell to do with her, now he’d got her. She didn’t want to hurry him while he was thinking that over.
Time passed. Word had gone out. Men trickled in, in twos and threes, and sat on the benches or stood along the wall. She knew most of them from when she was a kid. Friends, she would have called them.
These were Lazarus’s thieves. Some of them were clever with their fingers or specialists in cracking houses. Some were evil brutes who beat men senseless in alleys. They wore rags, or cheap flashy jackets, or dressed respectable as Quakers. One or two wore the fine clothes of gentlemen and brocade waistcoats.
They were clearing the room for what was coming. They kicked the whores awake and hustled them out. The rabble of little kids and pickpockets and sneak thieves got cuffed out the door, too. It was quiet, except for a low, gritty whisper that rose and fell in the room, like dirty waves breaking on pebbles. It was men left now, men and a few hard-eyed women. This was the Brotherhood. They’d come to see what Lazarus would do to her.
Lazarus finished conducting business and exchanged a word with Black John. He motioned, and the pregnant girl brought him a string bag of walnuts and scuttled back to the sofa.
It looked like Lazarus had finished mulling things over. The whispers died away. The room filled up with expectant silence. She knelt where she was and waited. For a while, Lazarus cracked walnuts, one against the other in his hand, and picked out the meat, and dropped the shells on the floor.
He said softly, “Do you happen to remember the penalty for deserting the Brotherhood, Jess?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“What is it?”
“Death.”
Mutters ran through the men watching. Lazarus cracked another nut. He had very strong hands.
She knew Lazarus as well as anyone. Once, she’d obeyed his orders, the way all these men did. She would have died for him, if he’d asked it. Ten years ago Papa came back from France and took her away. She hadn’t seen Lazarus since.
“Did you get tired of breathing?”
“No, Sir.” Life seemed very sweet, just at this moment, on any terms whatsoever. She’d seen a man executed for deserting. The Brotherhood had done it with knives and it had taken all night.
“Then explain why you’re here.”
Once, she’d sat behind him, where that boy was, and watched Lazarus amuse himself like this, tormenting people, a good few of whom ended up dead. “You know why, Sir. If anybody in this town knows what happened to Papa, you do.”
“You think I give a rat’s fart what happens to Josiah Whitby?”
“No, Sir,” she said quickly.
Lazarus got up and walked toward her. She heard his boots, going past, circling her. She’d forgotten what it was like, being afraid of Lazarus. Been years since she was scared of him.
“You turned out pretty.” He was standing behind her, talking quiet. “I wouldn’t have expected it. You were ugly as a monkey last time I saw you.”
Nothing to say to that. She swallowed and didn’t move.
“It took you a long time to find your way back. I guess you were busy making money in all those foreign places.”
She felt his hand on the bare skin of her neck, and she froze. Ice speared inside her, everywhere. He killed men this way, with his bare hands, with a sharp twist to the neck. She’d seen him do it a few times when he was making an example of men who peached to the law or fools who tried to cheat him. She’d watched them dragged in, pleading and explaining.
He played with them before he killed them. He let them beg. For her, he’d do it quick. No warning. With her he’d be merciful. It was faster than hanging, he told her once.
“You’ve been back in London a time or two, haven’t you?” His fingers touched the side of her jaw. She flinched. Terror squirmed in her belly like long, cold snakes.
“I been ’ere from time to time,” she said. “Everybody knows that.”
He was just stroking back some hair that had fallen loose, tucking it behind her ear. His hand dropped away. “You’ve gone soft, Jess. Soft skin. Soft clothes. Soft inside, too, I think. I hate to see that happen to you. You weren’t soft ten years ago.”
“I’m here. That’s not soft.” She concentrated on breathing. If she didn’t keep her mind on it, she’d probably stop.
“No, Jess. That’s stupid. You weren’t stupid ten years ago, either.” He stood, looking down at her. “You’re a rich woman, I hear.”
That was bad. Lazarus loathed the gentry. The blonde girl against the wall there, the pregnant one, was one of his toys. He kidnapped girls from rich homes, kept them a few months, and sold them back to their families. Evening the scales, he called it. Generally they went home pregnant.
“Bloody rich,” she said. “Scares me sometimes.”
He walked around her and finished up in front. “I never had one of my own people turn on me. Not one of my special ones. Only you.”
“Yes.” Nothing she could say.
“You were one of my favorites. The best I ever had in some ways.”
No excuses to give. Nothing.
“Now you’ve come waltzing back. You always did take chances with yourself. Never could break you of it. You’ll get yerself killed that way, sooner or later.”
She risked glancing up. He used to smile when he said that to her. “I been lucky. So far.” She got it out past the pain in her throat. It was the old answer, from when she was the only one who dared to joke with him.
Something glinted behind the opaque eyes. “One way you haven’t changed. You still have more backbone than brains.” He nudged her knee with the toe of his boot. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jess, get up off the floor. If I wanted to break your neck, I’d have done it years ago.”
He turned his back on her and stomped over to his chair and sat down heavy. He sounded bloody exasperated, just like the old days, back when she was Hand. The tight coil in her stomach loosened a notch, hearing him sound so familiar. When she struggled to her feet she was clumsy with it, her muscles cramped up like she’d been sitting there a week.
“Tell me what’s happened to Josiah. Report to me,” he snapped.
Lazarus used to send her out to follow men he pointed to and listen to everything they said. Used to send her into shops and houses he was planning to rob, telling her to list up what was in them worth stealing. She’d reported back a thousand times, standing in front of him, setting words out neat and organized the way he taught her. Felt strange, doing it again.
She stepped up close and spilled it out, talking low so no one heard but Black John and the Hand. She told him about Meeks Street. Cinq. The British Service. Reports from her agents. What she’d figured out so far. She knew what Lazarus would be interested in. She gave him facts. Speculation. Everything.
He always liked knowing more than anyone else. He collected secrets the way the other men collected silver and gold.
She talked till her voice hurt. Around her and behind her, the Brotherhood shuffled and spat and coughed. There was a clicking sound that might have been coins. The door opened and closed. A dozen gruff conversations filled the background. Nothing was going to happen till Lazarus finished talking to her.
Eventually he ran out of things to ask her and she ran out of things to say. She waited to see what he’d do to her. She kept her hands behind her back, grabbed into each other. Lazarus picked up a pair of walnuts in one hand and rolled them back and forth between his fingers, changing one over the other. “Why have you come to Lazarus, Jessamyn Whitby?”
That was the formal question. He asked it a dozen times a day. She could have been any petitioner. It was
