Bugger that. It would have been nice to just do one last job. To once more see the look on a gentleman’s face when he realized there were some things out of his control, and to feel, however briefly, the dark satisfaction of revenge. He missed the rest of it, too—the thrill of making an escape, lying low, disposing of their haul.
“I see we’re back to sulking,” Betty said. “I hope you’re enjoying your penance, because I’m not.”
Kit let out a frustrated huff. “Only you, Betty, would see a man trying to do his best for once in his life and think there had to be some twisted explanation for it.”
“Only you, Christopher, would have his head so far up his arse to think that this”—she gestured around the shop with the rag—“was the first time you did your best.”
He pointedly ignored her and resumed tidying up the shop, all the while wondering how he had been brought to a point where he was so thoroughly bossed around by a woman ten years his junior, and also wondering how he’d even begin to get on without her.
After walking Betty home, his leg was in a right state. He turned down her mother’s invitation to stay for supper, then ignored her brother’s shouted invitation to meet at the corner tavern for a pint. Instead, he turned into a lane, as he always did, and leaned against the wall to rest. After a year of this routine, he thought there might be a Kit-shaped indentation in the bricks. He knocked his fist into the side of his right leg, which sometimes made his hip remember that it had a purpose. Gingerly he put some weight on it and, when he didn’t crumple to the ground, called it a success and returned to the street.
Sometimes on his way home he stopped at the baths and soaked his miserable leg, and sometimes he stopped at an eating house, and sometimes he ran into someone he knew and had a chat. Sometimes, when he was really in the mood for misery, he stopped by the stables where he put Bridget up and gave her an apple. But most of the time he went home, hauled himself up the stairs, and read by the light of a candle until he fell asleep.
At some point in the last year, Kit’s world had compressed to the span between his coffeehouse and Betty’s house, with increasingly infrequent forays into the wider world. After spending most of his adulthood stalking his quarry and running from the law, flying back and forth across the countryside as he saw fit, he felt every inch of his imprisonment.
Maybe Betty was right and he was punishing himself—for Rob’s death, for years of unrepentant theft, for not being able to thieve anymore. It didn’t make sense, but in Kit’s experience, not a lot of things that happened in a person’s mind really did. Maybe he was hobbling around one tiny corner of London because he wanted to feel like rubbish; if so, he was doing a fine job of it.
He tried to remember the last time he had gone anywhere outside his usual circuit—two weeks ago he visited the cobbler to have his boots mended, then returned a few days later to pick them up. Before that? In September he went to the apothecary when a spate of damp weather aggravated his leg and he needed a new tin of salve.
When he got home, he hauled himself up the stairs and collapsed into bed, not even bothering to take off his boots. The boots could wait until it hurt a little less to move. So could supper. So could everything that wasn’t staring at the ceiling and watching a spider weave a cobweb in the corner.
He wondered what Percy did of an evening. Surely, he didn’t mope around whatever fine house he lived in. Kit bet that Percy dressed even more absurdly than he did during the daytime, and then spent the night dancing and flirting with ladies. And probably doing a fair bit more than flirting with men. Those remarks he had made, those looks he had given Kit—they didn’t leave much room for doubt about Percy’s preferences. He didn’t make any kind of secret about it.
That thought was enough to ruin what had been shaping up to be a fine little fantasy. The only reason Percy was able to ogle other men in broad daylight without getting hit, arrested, or flat-out murdered was that he was rich. He wondered if rich men took their wigs off while fucking, and then got very annoyed with his prick for not finding wigs sufficiently unattractive. His prick didn’t understand anything. Bringing himself off to an aristocrat in a goddamn wig would be a humiliating end to a foul day.
He dragged himself out of bed, lest his thoughts and hands wander, and crossed the landing to his office to balance his books.
Chapter 7
Percy decided that it was high time to put the screws to the highwayman. It had been days since their last encounter, and besides, the errand would get him out of Clare House, fill a few hours, and bring his father one step closer to public ruination, so all in all, a morning well spent.
He took extra care with his toilette. It was a bleak and dismal day, so he chose yellow. It was not, he would concede, his best color, but one of the many advantages of beauty was that he could wear the ugliest conceivable color and still look better than almost everybody. He had Collins button him into his jonquil silk waistcoat and the saffron-colored coat that was positively stiff with gold embroidery. A lesser man might find yellow breeches to be a bridge too far, but Percy was not a lesser man.
He sailed into the coffeehouse with the maximum possible to-do only to find the place bursting with patrons. The weather was grim, so it stood to reason that these commoners would wish for a more hospitable environment than whatever hovels they undoubtedly hailed from. But he was disappointed to realize the table he occupied on his previous visits—at least those visits he had made as himself, rather than in his boring spy clothes—now seated four men in depressing black coats.
But he could hardly leave, not after sweeping into the place as he had done, so he settled himself at the end of a bench at the long central table, adjusting his coat around him. He could feel Webb’s gaze. He looked up, meeting the highwayman’s eye.
“You’ll be wanting coffee, then,” Webb grumbled.
“Yes, I am here for coffee,” Percy said. “How observant of you. No wonder this place is such a bustling success.”
Webb wordlessly plonked a cup of coffee onto the table, causing a not insubstantial quantity to spill over the rim of the cup. Percy ignored both the spill and the coffee.
“Good God, Kit,” said the man who sat beside Percy. “You’ll soak my book if you don’t mop that up. Give me a rag, why don’t you.” Then, turning to Percy, “The place goes to ruin without Betty here to see to things. Ruin, I tell you.”
“Ruin,” Percy agreed, and apparently that was all one needed to do at a place like this to begin a conversation, because then they were off. The man told him what a grave tragedy it would have been if Kit had managed to destroy his book when here he was, mere pages from the end. And that prompted Percy to confess that he hadn’t read the book.
“You must take it!” the man cried. His name was Harper, or Harmon, or possibly even Hardcastle. He spoke with a rustic accent that sounded like so much nonsense to Percy’s ears. Also, Percy did not much care what the fellow’s name was. “Here,” said Harper or whoever he was, pressing the book into Percy’s hands.
“I couldn’t possibly,” Percy said. If Percy wished to read this book about a Tom Jones, or some such common-sounding fellow, he would order a copy bound in the same green leather as the rest of his library. He would certainly not read a book that belonged to an utter stranger and which looked like it had been read by several people with hands in various stages of dirtiness. “I don’t wish to impose on your kindness.”