He grabbed Holland’s jaw and tilted it to the side so he could see the bruise. “You have good reflexes,” he said.
“Why, thank you,” Holland said graciously. “The theater really didn’t prepare me for this in the least. I shall write a letter about the slanderous treatment of footpads and miscreants in modern drama.”
“Are you able to get home safely?”
“Am I— Yes, you lackwit, I can get home safely. You really are gallant. I wonder how much of the rest of that ballad is accurate.”
That jolted Kit back to his senses. “Then get the hell out of here.”
“Or what? You’ll give me another extremely mild bruise?” But Holland was already at the mouth of the alley. “Have a lovely evening. I’ll call on you later this week!” he shouted before disappearing around the corner.
Kit leaned back against the damp stone of the nearest wall. The Duke of fucking Clare. It was that name, that man, and every man like him, who had led Kit to become what he had been. Rage at Clare had fueled a decade of retribution against his entire class. But Kit had never been able to lay hands on Clare himself. His outriders were too well armed, his journeys too unpredictable, and his path usually limited to well-traveled roads. More than once, Kit had thought Clare lived like a man in constant expectation of being attacked. And well might he be, if he made a practice of treating people as cruelly and needlessly as he had treated—
But Kit could get him now. After nearly ten years, he could have his revenge. He’d have not only revenge, but the satisfaction of knowing that Clare’s own son had helped him get it. He’d have a chance to do one last job and with the only target he had ever really wanted.
He pressed his palms against the stone wall behind him and pushed off. He made his way through streets lit only by a sliver of the moon and the candlelight flickering through the windows of the buildings lining the street.
Kit had seen the Duke of Clare only once, when he had sentenced Jenny. At the time, Kit had thought he had the man’s appearance seared into his memory, but now he could hardly conjure up a picture of the man. When Holland had said who his father was, though, Kit had seen traces of the duke on his son’s face. They had the same cold eyes, the same aquiline nose, the same air of a man used to moving through a world without obstacles.
Unchecked power gave a man a certain look; it set him apart from normal people. Something terrible was unleashed when a person knew that not only could he tear down homes, take away a family’s livelihood, and send people to the far corners of the earth, but he would be praised for it. There were rich men who didn’t use their money and power as cudgels, but they still always knew that they had a cudgel ready at hand. They got so used to it, they probably thought they were doing a grand thing by not wielding it.
And Kit hated them all for it. People might say that what he really hated was the system that put too much power in too few hands. But Kit knew he also hated the men.
That hatred had been the engine of his life for the better part of a decade, and at the center of it was the Duke of Clare.
Led by instinct or old habit or just the darker recesses of his nature, Kit turned one corner, then another, until he found himself in the sort of neighborhood where every old lady sold gin out of her front window. He found one of these shops, knocked, paid his money, and before he could think better of it, had a tin cup in his hand. He knocked back its contents in a single gulp, the spirits burning their way down his throat and making his eyes water.
“Blimey,” said the old woman. “Needed it, did you?” Her hair was white and thin, her back stooped, and her face deeply lined. She spoke with the blurred syllables of a woman with very few teeth. She reminded Kit of Jenny’s grandmother, and in the middle of a Saint Giles street he was assailed by the memory of a brace of pheasants roasting in the hearth of a crumbling cottage in Oxfordshire.
He hated to think that far back, in the same way that he refused to go back to the little corner of Oxfordshire where he had been born and lived out the first eighteen years of his life. He didn’t want to think about that younger version of himself, and above all didn’t want to wonder what that younger man would think of his present-day self.
The gin had already started to work its magic, and the memories came hard upon one another. He could see his father pulling pints and his mother polishing the brass fittings she was so proud of. He could all but smell the wood fire that burned bright all year round in the taproom.
He remembered another cottage, a cradle he had built with his own hands, a child wrapped in fresh linens—
And he remembered how it felt after it was all gone.
“You all right, dearie?” the old woman asked, and Kit had to be in a truly bad state when the purveyor of an illegal gin shop was worried about him.
“It’s just been a while,” he said, handing her the empty cup through the window along with another coin for her to fill it again.
Chapter 12
Percy knew that vanity was not only a sin, but possibly his besetting sin. Or at least it had been before the revelations of the past month introduced him to the various temptations of theft, cruelty, and the general consignment of the entire fifth commandment to the midden pile. But he was vain, and he knew it, and he was not appearing in public with a bruise on his jaw.
Still, he did not relish the prospect of pressing a raw piece of meat to any part of his person. Collins assured him that this was the received practice for treating new bruises, but that didn’t make it any less disgusting. Averting his eyes, he applied the slab of meat to his face. He breathed through his mouth to avoid gagging at the smell of fresh blood. His vision swam, the walls of his bedchamber seeming to dissolve before his eyes; the distant sounds of the household settling down for the night receded as if muffled by cotton wool, so at first he did not hear the tapping at his window.
When the sound came a second time, he shakily got to his feet and pushed aside the curtain with the hand that was not holding the revolting meat. He expected to see a loose piece of ivy or a creeper that had come away from the trellis, or, at worst, an especially large moth.
What he did not expect to see was Marian, three stories aboveground, her face a pale, almost spectral, oval against the darkness of the night. He managed not to jump, but only barely. She gestured impatiently for him to open the window. He gestured for her to move aside so he didn’t open the window directly into her face, causing her to plummet to her death. Finally, he managed to get the window open with one hand, and she stepped inside with an almost acrobatic grace, as if she climbed in and out of windows every day of her life. Her dark hair was pulled into a long plait and she wore black silk knee breeches that he recognized as a pair that had gone missing from his wardrobe shortly after his return home.
“Those are my breeches,” he said by way of greeting.
“They’re your shirt and waistcoat, too. Pity your boots don’t fit.” She gestured to her feet, which were clad in black stockings and her own black dancing slippers.
“A true shame that my wardrobe couldn’t supply all your needs for outfitting yourself as a housebreaker. To what do I owe the honor?”
“You had a bruise on your face at supper,” she said. “I could hardly ask you about it in front of the duke.”