“It really is you,” came a throaty voice from the door. “I thought Flora had to be mistaken.”
“In the flesh,” he said, rising to his feet and turning to the door.
Scarlett crossed the room and took his hands, looking up into his face. “Twelve months, Kit.” He wondered if she could see the passage of time on his skin. He thought she might have new lines on her face, maybe another strand or two of gray hair among the auburn.
“The girl who answered the door,” he said. “Flora, I think you called her. Is she your sister?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Flatterer.”
“Daughter?”
“Clean living has made your mind go soft if you think I’ll admit to having a daughter old enough to own her keep.” Which, he noticed, was not a denial. “But what brings you here? I don’t dare hope it was for the pleasure of my company.”
“Intelligence,” he said.
“The usual arrangement, then?” She sat in one of the armchairs and gestured for Kit to do the same.
“Not exactly,” he said, sitting. In the past, she had worked as something of a scout for Kit and Rob. If one wanted to hold up a gentleman’s conveyance, one had to be sure the man carried enough on his person to make the job worthwhile. A highwayman also needed to know what roads the man was likely to travel, and when. Men, while in their cups and well satisfied, were liable to let this sort of information slip. Scarlett’s girls knew they’d be well compensated if they relayed useful details to their mistress.
“Pity,” she said. “I’ve a list as long as my arm of men I wouldn’t mind coming to harm.”
“Don’t we all,” Kit said.
“Sometimes when I hear about an especially bad one,” Scarlett said, “I think, Well, Rob would like to hear about that.”
Kit tamped down the swell of grief he felt at hearing Rob’s name. It felt unexpectedly fresh. He was used to grief, couldn’t even remember a time when he hadn’t been grieving somebody. But his parents’ deaths were half a lifetime ago, long enough for that wound to have long since scabbed over. And as for Jenny and—and everything that had followed from that, he had been too angry and tired and out of his mind with drink to remember now what it had felt like.
But he had grieved Rob while sober, and with plenty of time to go over the events of that last day again and again until the memory was frayed at the edges, blurry like a print in a book that had been handled too many times. He could hardly remember it without also seeing every moment he could have acted differently, turned back, picked a different mark, a different route, a different life entirely.
It wasn’t as if he and Rob had set out to become highwaymen, for God’s sake. Rob’s father had been a gardener at the manor; Kit’s parents owned a small tavern. They could each have followed in their fathers’ footsteps, and indeed they would have if it hadn’t been for the whims and caprices of the Duke of Clare.
“I should have visited you earlier,” Kit said, tearing his thoughts from events of a decade earlier and looking at the woman before him. It was a shabby thing to leave a woman alone with her grief.
A peal of laughter came from a room upstairs. Not that Scarlett was alone, of course. But a brothel keeper could hardly put on black crepe and draw the curtains.
“We’ve both been busy.” Scarlett glanced at his cane. “I heard you were injured but hoped it was a rumor.”
“If you heard the version of the tale that had me shot with a poisoned arrow in defense of Bonnie Prince Charlie, then I’m afraid it’s fiction. It was a very ordinary pistol and a very frightened coachman. But I didn’t come here to bore you with tales of my injuries. Somebody came to me for help,” he said. “A stranger.”
She raised her eyebrows. “After nearly a year, it’s a stranger who gets you to come to me? She must be pretty.”
“He,” Kit said absently, and Scarlett’s eyebrows rose even higher. “But no, that isn’t why I’m tempted.”
“Then why?” She toed off her slippers and stretched her legs toward the fire.
“Because,” he said carefully, “he knows who I am.” He had debated whether to tell her this. He didn’t want it to sound like an accusation. “He knows my name, and who I—who Rob and I, rather—used to be.” There were only a handful of people who knew enough to make the connection. He and Rob had been prudent about that, if about nothing else. And Scarlett was one of them.
He thought she’d protest her innocence, but instead she frowned. “That’s troubling. I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” he admitted. “I’d like to know how he found me. He wants me to do a job for him. Wants me to hold up”—he stopped himself before he could say his father—“some aristo. The job, to be frank, sounds like the sort of thing I’d have done in a heartbeat, but I’ve never worked on my own and now I couldn’t even if I wanted to.” He gestured vaguely at his leg and hoped she understood. “But I want to know who he is and why he came to me. It would help me put the matter to rest,” he said. “He says his name is Edward Percy.”
“Edward Percy,” she repeated. “I’ll find out whatever I can.”
He walked home and let himself into his dark shop, feeling something he told himself wasn’t anticipation.
Chapter 9
The girl entered Kit’s with the same air of bashful self-consciousness with which she had answered the door to the brothel a few days earlier. A hush fell over the coffeehouse at the sight of her, as not many women ventured into coffeehouses, and never alone unless they were selling their favors. Kit watched in amusement as his patrons tried to figure out if this pretty, meek girl could possibly be a prostitute.
“Mistress Flora,” Kit said when she approached the counter.
“Mr. Webb,” she answered, her cheeks flushing, and Kit longed to ask whether she was able to do that at will. “I have a message for you from my mistress.” From between the folds of her cloak, she withdrew a sealed letter and held it out to Kit in an immaculately gloved hand.
As Kit broke the seal, he could smell the scent of rosewater that always surrounded Scarlett, and he wondered if she deliberately scented her stationery or if it simply picked up the scent from being near her. He’d bet on the former: nothing Scarlett ever did was by accident. The missive was brief and direct.
“There is no Edward Percy,” the letter read. “Nobody by that name has attended any of the usual schools. No Edward Percy has ever been presented at court. No Edward Percy is known to any of the servants at any of the great houses. He could, of course, be the son of a merchant or some other personage who has taken to dressing like his betters, but in that case, I’d be even more certain to have heard about him. Yours, S.”
Kit frowned. He had hoped that Scarlett would have been able to tell him something that would lessen his curiosity, not stoke it even higher. Kit had always liked a riddle, a puzzle, a challenge. Even robbery—hell, especially robbery—had been a sort of puzzle. Does this baronet travel with a purse full of coin? Are his outriders armed? At what time would he be likely to reach that ever-so-convenient bend in the Brighton road? How many men would Kit need in order to see the job safely done? How should they get away once the job was over? Avoiding the hangman satisfied some part of Kit’s brain in the way unpicking a stubborn knot might. Now, a year after planning his last robbery, it occurred to Kit that some of the challenge may have come from how persistently drunk he had been in those days. It was more than possible that sober he’d need more than a simple holdup to occupy his mind. He might need more of a mystery.