My Lord and Spymaster

Twenty-six

FLORA’S BABY WAS FINE, BUT HE WAS STARTING to get hungry. They were getting a little goat’s milk down him in the kitchen, but Eunice wouldn’t let them get a wet nurse in. She just kept sending him back up to Flora, who left him in the cradle.

Flora wasn’t doing well at all. She’d been lying all day, staring, answering direct questions, but otherwise not saying much. She ignored the baby.

Eunice evidently thought Jess might help. Anyhow, she’d sent her up to sit with Flora as soon as she got home from the warehouse.

There was a chair by Flora’s bed. Jess sat there and put her feet up on the rung of the chair and looked out the window and tugged at a strand of hair. So many people were expecting her to find an answer tomorrow. Maybe she wouldn’t find anything. Maybe she wouldn’t like the answer she found. She closed her eyes, feeling hollow.

“You ran away from Lazarus. No one does that.” It was about the first thing Flora had said to anyone, just on her own.

“It’s complicated.” She went back to pulling hair through her fingers. She wasn’t feeling terribly talkative, herself, right then.

“I heard about you. From when you were Hand. Jess the Hand.”

She shrugged. The baby was making weak sounds in the cradle, like a kitten or something. They sounded like that the first couple weeks. “That was years back.”

“You tunneled into a bank once, and everybody almost drowned when it started to rain. They still laugh about that.”

“Always rains in this town. I’d go about it different if I was doing it now.” People had been patting the woman’s hand all day long and encouraging her to talk. Maybe a little quiet was what she needed.

Flora sat up in bed. She was older than Jess had thought. Twenty-six or twenty-eight. Eunice had put her in a huge white cotton nightgown that buttoned up the front with about sixty little buttons. Her hair was scraped hard back from her face, and she looked exhausted. But she was beautiful. Lazarus always picked pretty girls to play with.

“He was always telling Twist how you did everything better. He said you could plan a caper so it ran like a gold watch.”

“That’s just him talking. Me, he used to tell about this kid named Hawker. Before my time. Seemed Hawker could do anything but walk on water.”

Flora twisted her hands in the quilts. “They’re very kind here. But they don’t understand. I have done such things. You know the kind of things I had to do.”

“Nobody’ll know if you don’t tell them.”

“There are whole pieces of myself I can’t find anymore. I became . . . I cannot believe what I have become.”

“You get over some of it, I think. You don’t go back to what you were.”

“You understand, don’t you? The rest of them just say I can do whatever I want and not to worry. But you understand.” Flora lay down and looked at the ceiling again. “I can’t go home.”

“Up to you, really. You can be whatever you want to when you don’t have anything to lose.”

That made Flora look thoughtful. She wondered if she’d said the right thing, then decided in the long run it probably didn’t matter what she said. Flora would work it out for herself. Everybody did.

She sat beside Flora for a while, planning what she’d do tomorrow. She’d use the cargo manifests, if she had to. It depended how much information Sebastian had managed to find for her.

A maid pushed through the door, carrying a tray. It was fish stew. That meant it was time for her own lunch.

The baby was lying in the cradle, waving his hands around, looking fairly unhappy as she walked by. “Better make some arrangement for this one if you don’t want him. Another couple hours, and he’ll start getting scared, all alone, when it gets dark.” She thought that covered it.

Either that worked or something else did. Anyway, Flora fed the baby, and they fell asleep in bed together that night.