After the Scandal (22 page)

Which was good, because they might find anything in that yard. Or nothing. And that was the way he liked it.

His sister liked to plan. She liked to be careful. She always cautioned him to look sharp.

He did look sharp—always. He couldn’t stop looking, even if he wanted to. Even if he wanted to go to a ball and
dance
, and not
see
everything, he couldn’t.

His sister would have also cautioned him to ask the Lark—to find out everything the urchin and the rest of the mudlarks who roamed the Thames’s muddy riverbed at will might know about goings-on down St. Catherine’s Dock. And he would ask—send a message though the network of eyes and ears he had positioned all over London—later. At the moment he needed to act.

He needed to act because he liked to work on the spur of the moment. He liked to ride by the seat of his pants and feel the reins in his hands. He liked to take a chance.

And he liked it best of all that Lady Claire Jellicoe was going to take that chance with him.

They arrived at Parson’s Stairs in less than half a minute. “Are you ready?” He nodded at her to make sure. “I’ll cover the street and you cover the river. Two ways in and three ways out of every hole. I’ll feel better knowing you’ll be here, floating just beyond the piers, if someone comes. Just don’t let anyone else near the boat.” He shoved a gun butt first into her hands. “Shoot to kill.”

After a horrified second, she pushed it back at him. “I couldn’t. You keep it. You’re better off with it, and I’m better off without it. I’ll have my hands full enough with the oars. I’ll row away if there’s trouble, and then come back. Just be as quick as you can.”

“I will.” But he didn’t like to leave her defenseless. He stripped off the pouch hanging from the string around his neck, and handed it to her in lieu of a weapon. “That’s yours if anything should happen. Any—” He didn’t know what else to say. He felt like a gravedigger—up to his arse in the business with nowhere to turn. “It’s yours.”

“All right.” She took the strange necklace, and looped it around her own neck, thankfully without asking for any further explanation. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Here we go.”

Tanner jumped out of the skiff as it scraped against the plankway, strode across the mud flat up onto the water stairs, and purposefully onto St. Catherine’s Lane. The entry gates to the brewery were directly across from Parson’s Stairs, and so there was plenty of custom and carts in the lane to cover his approach. He counted off the yards until he reached the gate below the shot tower.

He turned directly toward it and rattled the gate, as if he had regular business there, and was surprised to find it shut. If anyone were watching, they would see a normal, typical reaction from an honest businessman.

But he wasn’t an honest man. He was a thief who was drawn to the brassy new padlock that hung on a new iron chain, like a pennant advertising that there was something within worth stealing. Like a gilt-edged invitation.

An invitation he meant to accept.

He walked around the corner, and then ducked against the wall, hidden in the shadow, as he waited another few moments for any signs of interest or pursuit—there was still time to say he was lost, and walk away. There was still time to avoid any cur dog they might have left loose about the place. Better than any lock, a cur dog. Cur dogs had teeth that couldn’t be picked with a rake and file.

But they were careless, and had no dogs. There was nothing. The place was shut up as tight as a pensioner’s purse.

It was his sister who was a dab hand with a lock, but he was a rooftop man, and without so much as breaking into a sweat he found a handhold along the far corner of the shot tower, and scaled the rickety, uneven walls as easily as if he were walking down Bond Street.

Once on the roof, he paused again. Below him lay a small, deserted yard, no more than twenty square feet in area—crossable in a few strides—with open sheds arrayed on three sides of the tower. A hint of sulfur, a light tinge of the funk of heat and chemicals floated on the stale air, even though the works were cold, and all the fires put out. Or perhaps they had never been lit.

He stayed put for a long moment, keeping quiet and blending in with the shadow of the tower, listening hard for any noise. There was only the steady lap of the water against the piers below, and the hissing ejections of steam, and the clatter and chatter that came from the Goodwyn, Skinner, and Thornton brewery across St. Catherine’s Lane.

Tanner dropped silently to the dusty yard and went immediately into the tower building. The trapdoor was his first order of business—he needed to secure it should he need to make a speedy exit.

The lock on the trapdoor was iron—rusting, old, and forgotten. It took longer than he would have liked to pick it, but he was out of practice, and he wanted to make a clean pick, leave no indication—like a broken lock—that he’d been on the premises.

“Tanner?” The low whisper slid under the planks as he jimmied the rake in the lock.

“Here.” Stronger pressure against the rake finally yielded results, and the iron padlock clanked open. Tanner threw open the trapdoor to find Claire’s face floating like a small buoy just below.

He had never been so glad to see another person, if for no other reason than it was Claire, and she was there exactly as she had said she would be. He’d never had an accomplice, a partner, on his illicit and illegal adventures. Not since his sister.

And Lady Claire Jellicoe was not his sister. Not by any bloody means.

Tanner extended his arm, and without thinking she reached up to clasp his hand, and he hauled her straight up.

“Bloody—” She stifled the rest of her curse, and lowered her voice. “I thought I was supposed to stay with the boat?” she asked in a breathless whisper.

“You were. And you did so. Now, we’re on to part two—I need your help with the search.”

“My help?”

“Two eyes are better than one, and four eyes are far better than two.” He was bantering. Bantering with her in the middle of a bloody job. Clearly, he was the one who was mad. “Is the boat tied securely?” he whispered back.

“Yes.”

“Good girl.” He liked this whispering. A man had to be close to a girl to whisper.

“What are we looking for?”

He was too happy for caution; he steered her to the doorway of the tower. “Just look. But there’s only one thing worth looking at in the whole place. The shed with the new lock.”

He stood her in front of him, facing forward, so her back was flush against his chest. Her head just below his chin. Her question hummed through his torso. “How do you know it’s a new lock?”

“Look at it.” He brought his arm around to point the way across the small yard to the shed tight next to one of the small stone furnaces. “Shiny. Bright. New. When everything else is dusty and dilapidated. Look at all the other ovens. No ashes in the fit pits, no tongs, no buckets and ladles.”

“That one”—she pointed her chin toward the furnace next to the locked shed—“has been used. See the brick is blacked by the heat and charcoal of a more recent fire.”

“Well done, you.” His pleasure was a physical thing, stretching and rolling contentedly deep in his belly. “And look at that small stack of lead pigs, stamped
Mendip
for their place of origin, left in a haphazard heap against the shed.” He was thinking out loud, letting her into the halls of his rather encyclopedic brain. He took an audible sniff. “Can you detect the lingering poison vapors of lead and sulphur and arsenic in the air? It means they are smelting something. But judging from the dilapidated state of the tower, they aren’t making shot. And judging by the dead ash in the furnaces, they aren’t making much. Just enough. Just enough of the kind of work that turns an easy profit.”

Another check of the yard, and he whisked her across the small open space. “So the shiny, new padlock gleaming from its old, rusted hasp calls to us like a beacon. Like a broadsheet announcing something of much greater value than the surroundings is within.”

“What a strange way you have of seeing the world,” she murmured. “As if everything, each and every piece of existence, or dust, or could be catalogued and made useful.” They were so close, he could feel the shy fluttering of her breath against the side of his neck.

“Ah. But it can. Everything can be useful. Remember that, Claire.”

“I will. I won’t ever forget.”

He was too full of buzzing energy, too full of that unruly enthusiasm that gripped him in a job, and intoxicated by the pleasure of having her with him, to do much more than carrom onward. “The lock is good brass, but I could probably have the hasp off in a trice with a little pressure from a lever. But I want to leave no trace that we’ve been here, so we’ll have to clean pick the lock. A delicate job, that.”

“We? How could I possibly help you?”

“I thought you said you wanted to learn?” He was teasing her. Luring her deeper into his larcenous net.

“How to take care of myself,” she said carefully, as if she could not gauge his mood, “not how to pick locks.”

His mood was still too expansive to be daunted. “Well, you never know when you’ll need the skill. So pay heed.” He positioned her in front of him, so he had to reach his arms around her to work the lock. “This is the rake.” He held the slender piece of tooled steel up for a moment before he slid it into the lock. “Hold that there. Keep pressure on it. Strong. Yes.”

“And now we introduce the pick, very carefully.” He inserted the second tool, and, leaning in to her, closed his eyes to better visualize the tiny metal serrations and tumblers within the mechanism. Feeling his way carefully. “My sister used to say that good locks are like old maiden aunties,” he mused. “They know how to keep secrets. But these aren’t good locks. They’re brassy bullyboys meant to serve as a warning—
I’m too secure; you’ll never get by me.
They’re obvious, and simple. And there.”

The lock fell open under the pressure.

Inside the shed was exactly what he wanted to find—a small working furnace with small lead blanks stacked by an anvil with a cut-out hole on its upper face.

“That space is for a coin die,” he explained, crouching down to examine the surface for any remnants of gold foil. “The dies are metal—usually brass—cylinders upon which the two different sides of the coins’ faces have been wrought. One goes here, in the anvil, and then the blank is inserted. This lead core”—he picked up one of the blanks—“around which the gold is fused. Fused hot, Elias Solomon said—hence the small furnace. Then the upper die is positioned over it, and struck with a hammer, and the hot coin is flipped into the bucket of water.”

He held out his fists to illustrate the process.

“There’s nothing in the buckets at all—not even water. And where are the incriminating dies?” She poked into the corners of the shed, toeing the dirt with her boot as if they might turn up.

There was nothing. Not so much as a strongbox for him work to show off his cracksman’s skills. “Maybe they are too valuable and too incriminating to leave about someplace as badly secured as this yard. Or maybe the owner of the dies doesn’t trust the owner of the yard and only supplied the dies when the work was being done and then took them back? That is a far more likely scenario.”

“Well, I must say I’m disappointed,” she admitted, with her delicate arms fisted on her hips. “Are you sure—”

Tanner didn’t hear the rest. Because he had heard a different sound, and was already shoving Claire out the door of the shed, slapping the lock against the hasp and slamming it shut, and bolting across the yard with her before he thought to explain. “Someone’s coming.”

Someone who wasn’t quite as stupid as Tanner would have liked, after all. They did have a cur dog—he could hear it thrashing and gnashing at the end of its leash as the animal was brought along St. Catherine’s Lane.

Claire was a clever girl who needed no further instruction. She grabbed up her skirts and ran like a hangman was after her with an empty noose. She was through the door of the shot tower and sliding across the plank floor and down through the trapdoor like a seasoned, lifelong crackswoman. And Tanner was right behind her, stopping only long enough to slap the iron lock onto the hasp and hope it looked bolted when he lowered the trapdoor.

Claire already had the line free, and Tanner sprang to the oars, pulling hard to take them out into the stream of the river, and away.

The tide was just beginning to flow, but it was enough to move them far enough off. He had the vessel turned into the steam of the river a hundred yards off the wharf when a face appeared at the broken widow of the shot tower.

He eased up at the oars, making it look as if he were just out for a Sunday sort of row. “Don’t look,” he instructed when Claire instinctively turned toward the shot tower. “Look at me. Look like we’re just out for a lark. Like we’ve a thousand better things on our minds than breaking into a lead yard. Look at me as if you—”

She came forward onto her knees, gripped her fist in his lapel, and pulled his lips to hers.

Chapter Fourteen

He knew what it was to be filled with the physical exhilaration of the chase, of success, and of the sheer bloody thrill of being alive. It was like an opiate in his blood, that elation, that slippery burst of joy at having done the illicit and survived to run and steal another day.

And he could see it, too, on her face, the giddy delight and shock and pleasure at the thought of what they had gotten away with. And she was turning that happy joy toward him, tilting the pale moon of her face up to his so that she could illuminate him with her joy.

It was heaven and hell, torture and bliss.

He closed his eyes. He closed his eyes and stopped looking. Stopped thinking. He gave in to the pleasure of having the sublime weight of Lady Claire Jellicoe nestled against him in the narrow, close confines of the boat, and slid down to his own knees, so the long length of his thigh was pressed to hers.

He wanted to touch her, to pull her tight against his chest, but she drew back, looking up at him with her wide blue eyes huge in her face, and he had to tell himself that this was all as new and faraway, as his sister used to say, as a West Indies island.