The Danger of Desire (6 page)

He saw too bloody much, this cove. “I don’t strap for no one but myself.”

“Really? Very well. That leaves you free to come work for me.”

“You the law, then?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What’s ’at mean?”

“It means I work for the government. And I am in a position of authority. I can either treat you well, or treat you badly. It all depends. Upon you.”

She was about to refuse again and opened her mouth to do so, when he spoke.

“You think about it. Can you read?” He gave her back her hand, and then a card.

Meggs squinted at the small engraved piece of stationery as if she hadn’t a clue in the world. The flummery gave her a whisper of advantage. It was always helpful to get sharps to underestimate you, and she needed all the advantage she could get with this cove. “What’s it say?”

“It says I’m McAlden, and it has my direction. Number Eighteen Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah, up the river, innit? But I don’t care where you come from. I don’t work for no one.”

“But you’ll work for me.” He smiled and turned his face up to the watery wintry sunshine as if her will—her wishes—didn’t matter a plug farthing.

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, you will.” He leaned down close to her ear so she could feel him towering over her, and he spoke so very quietly, it whispered inside her. “I’ve got what you want.”

Meggs swallowed down the queer feeling fluttering inside in her chest. “And what do you think that is?”

“Amnesty. Freedom. If you steal for me, you can’t get arrested for it.”

Temporary freedom, that, not an amnesty. Still, it was something—they might be safe for a while, at least while her hand healed. If her hand healed. It was almost too good to be true. A hundred pounds would make their fortune.

“Can’t get nicked for it, no matter what? Even if I flub?”

“You can’t get nicked for it. But they’ll be no ‘flubbing.’ Do it right and we’ll pay you for your services.”

“ ’Oo’s ‘we.’ I don’t see no one else ’ere?”

He looked away from her a moment and moved his lower lip a little, as if he had to chew on the words before he spit them out. “We are the government. A private, anonymous part of the government.”

“Navy part of the government?”

His eyes, with their probing cold steel, sliced back to her. “Very good. How did you know that?”

She refrained from telling him the obvious—that she’d had it from the watchmaker’s clerk. “I got eyes. Come out of Spring Gardens back o’ the Admiralty, big man, all commanding. A gentleman but tanned like a navvy. So that’s what you are, navy. What does the navy want stolen it can’t get for itself?”

His eyes crinkled up a little at the corners, as if he might be thinking about being amused.

“You’re to be congratulated. And that’s a very good disguise, you know. I wouldn’t have realized you were a girl myself, except for the fact I was looking for you. A boy’s well enough, I suppose, but you’re more in the line of what I was looking for.”

“An’ what’s that?”

He did smile then, strangely pleased in the middle of a lumberyard. “Clever, quick, adaptable. Attractive. And female.” He flicked a glance down over her disguise before he looked back up at her. She felt as if he had seen straight through her clothes, as if he were the one having a vision of her standing in front of him, naked as God made her. “You. You’ve got spark.”

Meggs ducked around the parked dray and ran. But she held on to his card.

Trinity Street had little to recommend it. Squeezed in between Cheapside and the docks, the neighborhood and its residents were crooked, bawling, and abysmally dirty. It didn’t matter that it was home. Meggs knew it for what it was: the bare bones of existence, plain and simple. Trinity Street wasn’t living, it was merely existing.

She and Timmy had been rooming out of this particular house for nearly a month, and their one small room hadn’t improved at all upon closer acquaintance. The floor was bare and creaky, and it was covered with a dust so fine that sweeping seemed to do no good. The grate was filthy and would probably smoke incessantly when the cold drove them to spend precious money on a coal fire. The grime-coated garret window gave out only onto a view of other grime-covered, empty windows that stared back like blank, open eyes.

Meggs had spared tuppence for a candle, but now even that small light pierced her head like a pole-axe. The pain seemed to spread everywhere in her body until all she wanted to do was close her eyes, curl up into a ball, and rest.

But she needed to see to Timmy. Make sure he would be all right.

“Why?” he was demanding. “Why I gotta read? No one else does.”

“I do. And it’s important. You’ll need to know when we retire and move to our cottage. Don’t you remember?”

“’Member wot?”

“What it was like, before. Before we came to London.”

He thought about that for a moment before he shrugged. “It was green. And it smelled good.”

“Yes, it was very green. And it smelled very, very good.” A memory of baking bread filled her head, but she couldn’t conjure up the smell or the warmth. Not when icy rain pattered against the single, drafty window.

That was all she wanted—warmth and a home—a real home, not a drafty unfurnished room in a garret. And she wanted more for Timmy than being a sneak thief who was one false step away from the gallows every day. She had tried, really she had, but despite her best attempts, her brother was very nearly illiterate. He could read a little, of course, but all they ever had to read were street signs, shop names, and posted bills. Or, like this morning, the occasional scrounged newspaper that still stank of whatever fish it had been wrapping.

Even if they did manage to accumulate enough money to leave London before they got their necks stretched, what was he going to do with the rest of his life? He needed a real education, which she couldn’t give him. Her own formal education had been all too brief, and the past eight years had been devoted to an entirely different field of education—a School of Misfortune, if you will.

That man, the captain, had been educated, sharp or no. Meggs turned his card over in her fingers. No sharp ever had an engraved card. No sharp was ever a captain in the Royal Navy.

And she was sick, as sick as she had ever been. Her skin felt hot and tight, and her hand had settled into a dull, aching throb, except for when she moved it. Then, it shot lances of pain up her arm into her bruised elbow. Made it too hard to think straight.

“Meggs, you don’t look so good.”

“I know.” But she couldn’t just lie there on the cold floorboards and wish it all better, could she? She had to choose—between the bear and the bull—but she had to choose. She heaved herself vertical. “Timmy, you’ve got to listen to me. I’m going to go and see this cove.”

“What cove? I thought we weren’t gonna foyst for no one but ourselves?”

“You’re not going to have to foyst at all anymore. But you have to listen to me.”

“I like foysting. We’re good at it. We could do more housebreaking. I—”

“No. No more. Listen to me.” She grasped his arm, hard. “Give me your word.”

“Meggs!”

“Just listen. I’m going to go see this Captain McAlden, but you’re going to go to Levy’s in Threadneedle Street.”

“Why? I wanna go with you.”

“Listen! I need you to go to Levy’s to make sure the deal goes through. You’re to stay there until a deposit comes in for our account.”

He was predictably diverted by the mention of money. “How much?”

God, she hadn’t thought of that yet. Her head was pounding with the effort to hold on to one track of thought at a time. “Don’t know, but a lot. At least a hundred pounds.”

Timmy’s mouth rounded in astonishment. “Meggs”—his voice was going shaky with apprehension—“
what
are you gonna do?”

“I’m going to strike a bargain, that’s all. But you’re to stay there until the money comes in, all right? And wait for my word.” She was going to strike the bargain with the devil and then—
what
? She shut her eyes to keep the heavy pain in and think. Planning out a caper had always come easy-like, as simple as breathing. Why could she not plan her way out of this?

“Right. If for some reason I can’t send word, or ... Well then, you’re to take that money, that just came in, in cash as traveling money. But first you’re going to make sure you have a full accounting from Mr. Levy as to what’s in the accounts. It should be four hundred pounds at least, nearer to five with the special deposit that’s going to come in. Have you got that?” She ought to have the exact number. Hadn’t she just checked it yesterday? But the figures were swimming in her head.

Timmy nodded, but his eyes had begun to gloss. “Four hundred quid. Meggs, you’re starting to scare me.” He swiped at his nose with his dirty sleeve. But she couldn’t give in to him. She couldn’t.

“You have to listen to me. Get the accounting and all the information for Mr. Levy’s direction and then take the money that comes in, in cash. Got it?” And then where? An image of a huge house on Grosvenor Square ghosted into her mind, before she rejected it. No, he had to leave London. “Then, you’re to go north on the post, to Tissington. In Derbyshire. Do you remember?”

“Tissington.” He was crying now, fat tears plopping down his hollow cheeks. “But I want to stay with you.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m sick. We both know that. And if I can’t get better, then you have to go. There’s nothing left for us here. Not with my hand.”

“Meggie.” He pitched himself at her, trying to hold on to her, but every bone in her body ached with protest. She pried him off.

“Go to Mr. Mackey, the steward at the hall. He’ll help you. And I’ll come find you in Tissington. I will. When I’m done here. I promise.” She shook him a little, a rough, desperate sort of love. “I need you to do this for me. I need to know you’ll be safe, do you understand?” She thumbed the tears off his face, and all she could think was, salty as they were, they were likely the only warm water they would have.

“All right, Meggs.” He wiped his nose and nodded. He knew their business as well as she. “I understand. Let’s get on with it.”

CHAPTER 5

I
t was a very, very long walk. And she was so very, very tired. Her head pounded and her hand felt as if it were on fire. She stopped to rest twice, and each time she’d been tempted to turn back, or not move at all. So in the end, she just kept herself moving south. Toward Chelsea.

The row of houses making up Cheyne Walk faced the riverfront, where the embankment was dotted with trees, post fences, and steps leading down to the water. The house at number eighteen looked plain, neat, and orderly. Nothing to mark it apart from its neat and orderly neighbors. Nothing to tell her what she’d find within. Houses were like that.

She’d stood like this, outside, looking up at fine houses before. Standing on the cold side of the door, wondering, praying she’d be admitted. She never had been.

But she couldn’t afford to wait another minute, dithering like a debutante on his doorstep. Himself might have already found someone else, and now that she’d warmed to the idea, well, she’d already counted the money, hadn’t she? Best to get on with it.

No matter her resolve, she still stood there, hidden in the shadow of a tree for a full ten minutes before she gathered up enough strength and nerve to do it. Then she took a deep breath, wiped her cold nose on her sleeve, and marched herself up the front steps of number eighteen. She had a job to do.

She hammered the knocker down twice. Hard. Decisive.

A strange little man, with a flattened nose and mashed-up ears that blossomed away from his skull like fairy leaves, answered the door. And promptly tried to shut it.

“Not hirin’.”

But Meggs had come too far to be turned back now. She summoned the last of her strength, got her foot in the door, darted under his arm and across the threshold by stomping wickedly on his instep. She’d slid well into the hallway, past the little table with the candle branch and the small silver plate, before he could recover himself enough to grab her coat up in a surprisingly tenacious grip.

“Whot in bloody blazes do ya think yer doin’?”

Irish and mean. That explained the fairy ears. She raised both her eyebrows and her chin. She wasn’t about to be intimidated by any Irishman, fairy or no.

“Come to see your gov’nor, the captain, haven’t I? Got ’is card, wot he give me.”

The fairy man swiped it out of her cold fingers and was displeased to discover it was authentic.

“Wait ’ere.” He moved across the hall to a door and cracked it open. “Boy to see you, sir. Got your card, ’e has. Probably stole it,” he finished, cutting a sharp, suspicious gaze back at her.

“A boy?”

Then the door was opened wide, and she could see Himself striding his uneven way across the deep, quiet rug with the singular concentration of a silent hawk swooping down on its prey. The ghost of a smile creased the edges of his mouth and lit the corners of his eyes before he hid whatever amusement he had not meant to share. She was struck again by the eerie, incandescent light of his ice blue eyes. Her stomach did a nasty little flip that made the floor tilt underfoot. Gave her the jim-jams bad, this one. Coming here was a mistake.

“Well, well. It seems good things do come to those who wait. Please, come in.”

He gestured toward two armchairs in front of the glowing hearth. Lord help her, but it was warm. She took a hesitant, half step forward, turning as she did so to check behind. The wiry fairy man stood across the door, his arms folded across his chest, glaring at her with a look as black and mean as a bog. Another mistake. Never box yourself in. Always have an escape planned. There were two windows in the side wall, but they were barred against burglars.

Now she was here, she would just have to face it. Face him. Brazen it out.

“Thank you, Jinks. I’ll see to our guest.” The captain held his arm out to show her farther into the room and closed the door behind her. “I’m impressed. Jinks clearly didn’t recognize you. I see you’ve decided to accept my offer.”