My Lord and Spymaster

Five

JOSIAH WHITBY LAID COAL ON THE FIRE. A POOR-HEARTED, stinking fire coal made, but they didn’t put firewood in this study they’d set aside for him. You could scrape and strop a scrap of wood to make a weapon, if you were desperate and determined and didn’t have much else to do with your time. They didn’t underestimate their guests here at Meeks Street.

That was what Jess wouldn’t see. She’d never admit Josiah Whitby was a fine candidate to be this traitor. She’d never admit any possibility of it. The Service knew what kind of man he was. Jess had never seen it.

He was cold in the mornings, nowadays. A man got old without noticing it.

He didn’t concern himself greatly with his own hanging. He’d been in the East long enough to know a man couldn’t dodge his fate by so much as a hair. But he didn’t want to leave Jess alone. Not now, when Cinq was taking an interest in the Whitbys. Not in England, where the carrion crows were already circling.

So he worried. There wasn’t much else to do here. Oh, Jess brought him manifests and cargo lists to keep him occupied. A goolass, his Jessie. But the counting house was her bailiwick. He liked goods a man could hold in his hand and sell face-to-face. There was no savor to these numbers on paper.

Hurst—he called himself Adrian Hawkhurst these days—didn’t quite apologize for arresting him, but he felt badly about it. They both knew he’d been forced into it. The bars at the window kept Military Intelligence out as much as they kept him in. Without them, he’d be talking to Colonel Reams in a cellar in the Horse Guards. That was something else Jess wouldn’t see.

She’d do something daft, his Jess, she was so furious at Hawkhurst. His girl wasn’t made for anger. She didn’t know how to do it well.

Hawkhurst sent in the newspapers every morning. They were laid out on the desk right now: the Morning Chronicle, the Times, the London Gazette. Good as a coffee shop. In a while the boy would bring buns to eat and stay to chat and drink tea. The other men from the Service would drop by, in and out, all day. They didn’t leave him on his own to brood.

But Jess . . . He was damned uneasy. Jess was up to something.

She never could fool him. To give her credit, she didn’t try—not till now when he was caged up and couldn’t stop her. She brought him apples and sat talking about indigo and porcelains, and then she went out hunting spies. She had her nose to the ground, like that ferret of hers, chasing the biggest rat in London.

Unless he missed his guess, that was what Adrian Hawkhurst had been planning all along.