A Gift for Guile (The Thief-takers) (15 page)

Kissing Samuel in carriages and even bedchambers. Imagining she could hop in his lap and kiss him in his own parlor. It was reckless, even for her, and she wasn’t at all sure of her own motivations.

She liked Samuel. God help her, that was the only certainty she could claim. She liked Samuel Brass in a manner she’d never experienced with another man.

Was it love?

She believed in love. Not merely attraction or infatuation, but true romantic love. She’d always believed in it, even before she’d watched her sister hand her heart to Renderwell.

Believing in the existence of love, however, was quite a bit different than believing one might experience it for oneself.

She’d never hoped to fall in love. In the most fanciful moments of her early youth, she’d entertained a daydream or two of what it might be like to meet her fairy-tale prince, but they’d been only daydreams, like those of faraway lands she’d read about in books. Boston and China and the Himalayas. She knew they were real, just as she’d always known they were out of her reach.

Perhaps that was why it had been so easy for her to set the daydreams of her fairy-tale prince aside. What was the point of a dream without hope?

Or maybe it had been easy to set those dreams aside because she’d never been particularly interested in them.

Perhaps she was incapable of love. She’d long suspected that to be the case with her mother. The woman had been endlessly charming but devoid of all proper feeling, even for her own children. What if she had inherited some sort of moral deficiency…?

Esther acknowledged the fear and set it aside. Of course she was capable. She loved Peter and Lottie, and even their father at times, though he scarcely deserved it.

What if she was capable of love but incapable of recognizing that she was
in
love? To hear the poets and playwrights tell it, falling in love was like being struck by a thunderbolt, but Lottie had once said that she’d been in love with Renderwell for years without realizing how she felt. It seemed unlikely one could fail to notice being struck by lightning.

Esther certainly didn’t feel as if she’d been struck. Pricked perhaps, or nudged, or sideswiped, but not struck.

Then it probably wasn’t love. And, considering the lies she’d told, that was for the best.

She really wasn’t fairy-tale material.

Esther grew increasingly nervous as they made their way down Rostrime Lane. Samuel had offered to take her inside the first houses they visited that afternoon, but she’d declined. There was little point in asking questions to which she already knew the answer. She’d wait until they reached number twenty-three.

Surprise, and even a hint of relief, mingled with her nerves when that one house finally came into view. She pulled up her veil for a better view out the window. It didn’t look nearly as foreboding as she remembered. The result of seeing it in daylight, no doubt. Eleven years ago, she had come at night, and the street lamps had cast long, malevolent shadows over the brick and turned the portico pillars into a set of glowing fangs.

The old brick building looked rather cheerful now. The shutters had been painted a deep blue recently, the walk was swept clean, and there were vibrant pots of flowers on either side of the front door.

Still, when the carriage pulled up in front, her heart began to race, and her stomach rolled.

She hated this house. Cheerful or not, merely looking at it made her feel ashamed and afraid.

Samuel hopped out and held out his hand. “Will you join me?”

Yes. Say yes. Take his hand and go inside.
“I’ll wait, thank you.”

“Are you all right? You look a bit pale. Is it your throat? Are you—?”

“I’m perfectly well.” She was a perfect coward. “Go inside. There is nothing amiss with me, I assure you.”

“If you’re certain…” Clearly,
he
wasn’t certain. His keen eyes searched her face a moment longer before he reached out and carefully pulled down her veil. “We’ll take a rest after this house.”

Might as well, she thought. They likely wouldn’t need to go into the next house after Samuel spoke with the occupants of number twenty-three. “If you like. Go on, Samuel.”

A part of her hoped he would ignore her and hop back into the carriage. Maybe if he stalled a bit she would, in time, gather enough courage to join him.

It was too late. Samuel took one last look at her and closed the door. Moments later, he disappeared inside the house alone. There was nothing left for her to do but wait, and berate herself.

This is why she had come—to confront her past and atone for this mistake. She’d planned this for months. Yet here she was, hiding away in a carriage.

How could she hope to face her father if she couldn’t even face an old house he’d owned years ago?

“Coward,” she whispered into the empty carriage.

It didn’t disagree.

Sick at heart, she turned away from the window and waited for Samuel’s return.

Twenty minutes later, he climbed into the carriage looking rather pleased with himself. She lifted her veil and did her best to paste on an eager expression. Difficult, when she already knew what he was going to say. Mr. George Smith did not live at number twenty-three Rostrime Lane. He’d not lived there in over a decade.

“A Mr. George Smith lived here some ten or eleven years ago,” Samuel informed her, settling into his seat. “He wasn’t a grocer. He was in shipping.”

“Shipping?” She hadn’t expected that. She had a father in shipping. How strange and wonderful. “He must have owned the building in Spitalfields as we thought.”

Samuel signaled to the driver with a quick rap on the roof. “Doesn’t explain why he would address the letter from there.”

“He might have wished to keep his address from my mother.”

“And his child?”

“I said I was going to find my father. I didn’t say I was going to like him.” She shrugged and hoped it came off as careless. “Do they know where he might have gone?”

“The current occupants are a Mr. and Mrs. Thornhill. Mrs. Thornhill was out, but Mr. Thornhill claims they never met Mr. Smith. They learned of him from the previous owner of the property, a Mr. Brumly. He let the house to a number of individuals over the years, including your father. The Thornhills have no idea where that gentleman is to be found at present.”

“My father didn’t own the house?”

“No, in fact, he is remembered for having spent less than three months in residence. It was rumored that Mr. Smith suffered a sudden reversal of fortune.”

Guilt settled heavily in her stomach, making her queasy. What she had done all those years ago would not have caused a reversal of fortune, but it wouldn’t have helped either. “Might we find this Mr. Brumly?”

“We can try.” He frowned at her. “You still look pale.”

“Perhaps I do. Perhaps it is nervous excitement.” She tried to smile at him. “I suspect a cup of tea will set me to rights.”

An ocean of tea wouldn’t be sufficient. She knew it, and from the suspicious look on Samuel’s face, he knew it, too.

He kept his peace on the matter, however, saying nothing as they returned to his home and the chairs in the parlor.

For the space of an hour, Esther sipped hot tea liberally doused with milk and willed away the chill of old guilt. After the third cup, she was forced to accept that the tea was not going to help. Because it wasn’t
old
guilt that made her fingers want to shake every time she caught Samuel looking at her from across the room.

It was
new
guilt.

After all her pretty talk of changing, of becoming a better version of herself, she’d both taken the coward’s way out of a difficult situation and lied about it to the one person whose trust she desperately wanted to earn. She’d lied to the one man who deserved the truth.

She was failing. Failing Samuel, and failing herself.

She set her teacup down on its saucer so hard it was a wonder the fine china didn’t crack.

“I lied to you before,” she blurted out before she lost her small claim to courage. “I lied about how I learned Mr. Smith was my father, and why I want to find him.”

Samuel looked up from his paper, his expression unreadable. “I beg your pardon?”

“I lied to you. I shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry for it.”

His expression didn’t change as he carefully folded his paper and set it aside. “Would you care to elaborate?”

“I…um…” Her hands trembled as she set her cup and saucer on a small side table. “I don’t know where to start, really.”

“Try the beginning.”

Her nerves jumped at the first hint of anger in his voice.

This was a mistake. She should have kept her mouth shut. He was already angry with her. What if he
stayed
angry with her? What if he didn’t accept her apology? What if—?

“Esther.”

“Just a moment,” she snapped back. “This isn’t easy for me. Not with you looking at me like…” She wasn’t sure how to describe his current expression, so she just gestured toward his face and added, “That.”

“How am I meant to look at you? You tell me you’ve been lying to me since you came to London—”

“Not the entire time. Not about everything. Honestly.”
Honestly.
What a ridiculous word to use at the moment. “I’ve not been… That is… I don’t want you to think that I’ve been lying to you about anything other than this. I’ve not done anything or planned to do anything you might find objectionable.” She made a face at her choice of words. “Well, that’s not entirely true, is it? You object to most everything I want to do. What I’m trying to say is that I… I’ve not…”

Oh, why was this so hard?

“Tell me this,” Samuel said calmly. “Did you make the trip to London for any unlawful or immoral purpose?”

She wasn’t surprised that he asked, but it still hurt to hear the question. It hurt that he should
have
to ask. “No. I swear it.”

“I believe you,” he replied, so quickly and easily that she knew he hadn’t really considered it a possibility.

“If you didn’t think I had, why did you ask?”

“Do you feel better for having denied it?”

“I suppose.” Quite a bit, in fact. It was essentially the point she’d been trying to express in her inarticulate ramble.
Please don’t mistake my current dishonesty with the sort of dishonesty I displayed in the past.
It was an absurd request but one she felt compelled to make. “Thank you.”

“Sometimes it helps to acknowledge a sore spot before moving on.” He made a prompting motion with his hand. “If we could move on.”

“Right.” She cleared her throat and fixed her eyes on the carpet in front of her feet. “When I was seventeen, my father…that is, Will Walker, came to me with a plan to burglarize a house on Rostrime Lane.”

“I see.”

No doubt he did. She risked a glance at him and relaxed a little when she still saw neither anger nor judgment. “At the time, I thought it odd. He’d given up climbing in and out of windows years ago. Too much risk and not enough profit, he said. But he was adamant we should go through with the job, and I was eager to please.”

“He was your father.”

He offered that as a kind of excuse, and she wished she could accept it. Some mistakes, however, could never be excused. “I kept watch outside whilst he slipped inside and out again with a satchel full of trinkets. Candlesticks, silverware, that sort of thing. We pawned them that night.”

“Through Horatio Gage?”

The brutal gang leader she and her father had worked with during their last few years in London. Gage had been the one to turn a diamond theft into the kidnapping of a duchess and the one to shoot her father in the back. Gage and several of his gang members had eventually wound up on the gallows.

“Yes. Gage offered a third of their worth, six pounds. Father didn’t even bother haggling. He was in such a fine mood. I’d never seen him look so pleased with himself. So smug.” She could still see that bright, bright smile on his face. “He insisted we celebrate with drinks at the tavern.”

“Doesn’t sound like him.”

“No. I thought it strange, too.” Will Walker couldn’t hold his liquor, and he knew it. As a rule, he’d avoided all but the occasional glass of wine. “But, as I said, he was happy, and I was delighted to be a part of that happiness. Three drinks in, he handed me the six pounds, less the cost of our drinks, and told me it was my inheritance. Courtesy of my real father, Mr. George Smith of Rostrime Lane.”

Then he’d laughed and laughed while she’d sat there staring at her pieces of silver.

“I’m sorry,” Samuel said softly.

Though she didn’t want it, she picked up her cup again and sipped the last, cold bit of tea. “I stole from my own father.”

“Did you come to London to apologize?”

“I don’t know.” She stared at the soggy bits of tea leaves at the bottom of her cup. “I never spent what was left of the six pounds. It’s been sitting at the bottom of my hope chest for eleven years, waiting for me to… I don’t know. Make a decision, I suppose.” And she’d made a decision when she’d moved out of Greenly House. “I want to give it back. I want to give back every shilling I helped take from him.”

“I think that’s commendable.”

She managed a small smile at the encouragement but wondered if he’d feel the same once she finished. “Do you know the worst part?” she asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “I kept going. I hated Will Walker after that night, but I kept helping him. I helped him every time he asked.”

“He was your father,” he offered again.

“He was Lottie’s as well. She stopped.” There were times she wondered if Will Walker’s preference for Lottie’s company had less to do with parentage and more to do with the fact that Lottie was simply a better, more likable person.

“As I recall, your father had a different sort of relationship with your sister.”

“He adored her. Or gave a very good impression of it. Difficult to say with Will.” Nothing about Will Walker could be trusted. Charismatic, brilliant, and unpredictable, he’d been the center of their isolated world. The sun and moon revolved around that one man. With a single look, he could make a young girl feel like she was the most important thing in the universe. He could make her feel invisible and worthless just as easily.

She shook her head at the memory of how significant that one small man had been to her. “I told you I wasn’t angry about how things turned out all those years ago, and I’m not. But I was angry with you at first for inserting yourselves into our lives. I was angry because your presence diminished his. There you were, the three of you, so strong and righteous in your pursuit of justice.” The stuff of fairy tales. “And there was my father, sneaking about the shadows like a weasel. He was terribly small and petty by comparison. And that made me even smaller, my desperation to please him even more pathetic.”

“It was never pathetic.”

“It was. It
was
,” she repeated with more force before he could object again. “And eventually that might have been enough to turn me from the life he wanted me to lead, but he died before I drummed up the courage to tell him to go to the devil.” She let out a small sigh. “I lost the chance.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But that’s the problem,” she whispered. “I wasn’t. I wasn’t sorry he was dead, and I wasn’t sorry I’d lost the chance. I was relieved.” She set the cup down again and briefly pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “God help me, I was just so relieved to have the decision taken out of my hands. I was free of him, free of all of it, and I didn’t have to lift a finger to see it done.” She dropped her hands. “The decision was made for me. No courage required.”

“There’s no shame in experiencing a spot of luck.”

“It was the coward’s way out, even if it wasn’t of my own choosing. I didn’t want to be that girl again, and now I don’t want to be the woman who hides in the shadows and hopes all the hard decisions are made for her.”

“You’re not.”

She had been today. “I didn’t go in that house with you. I was supposed to go in. But I got so scared, and you were there. I let you do it for me.”

There was a pause before he said, “And?”

“What do you mean, ‘and?’” Wasn’t he listening? She’d been a coward.

His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “What’s wrong with letting a friend help?”

“It’s not help when it’s doing all of the work. Besides, it was important I do this for myself.”

“And so you would have done,” he replied with confidence. “Had I not been there.”