It was, mercifully, a night full of jackassery throughout the gaming floors, which was standard fare during the High Season, and a perfect distraction during any visit where Vix had chosen Roland as her victim rather than someone more entertaining: namely, absolutely anyone else.
He was kept busy. He enjoyed his work. He especially enjoyed the skeptical smirks and looming postures of underestimation sizing up his lean build and gentle features as he approached, before a man who’d had too much to drink or a lifetime of picking on people smaller than him took a misguided lunge or swing.
He had learned where to hit and exactly how hard very young. First from the enforcers at the brothel where he’d been born and spent his childhood, then from the other boys when he’d started working as a linkboy. However, he’d really become a force to be reckoned with when he’d befriended Thaddeus Beck, whose father was a boxer by trade.
Tod himself had little interest in the fights, but Roland had sneaked off from his linkboy duties more than once to both watch and to beg to be taught. He had offered to assist the medic who patched up the fighters when he was still so young that his long, strawberry-blond hair and big turquoise eyes, paired with a voice that hadn’t yet dropped, had oft gotten him confused for a girl.
He’d learned a lot about how to hurt a man from watching that medic patch them back up.
He’d learned where the kidneys are. Where the air pipes run. How easy it is to break a nose. Where the skin is the thinnest.
You did not need to be built like a trebuchet to fling another person around like one. You just had to know where to put your leverage.
And, being small and pretty and working in the dark of night with all manner of gentlemen, Roland had found plenty of cause to use this knowledge from the first instant of coming into contact with it.
He had navigated those years of lighting paths for drunken rich men in the dark alleys of London, had dodged their grabbing hands and leering breath. And the one time he had been caught, the one time it had almost gone too far, there had been a large, strong boy in the shadows who’d stepped between Roland and the gentleman, and gotten a slash through his shoulder and a threat of imprisonment for his trouble.
Tod had been built like a bruiser before he’d stepped out of the nursery, but he’d never had the right temperament to embody that fate unless truly, irreconcilably pressed to violence. Thatfirst night, the night they’d met, was one of the few times Roland had ever seen it happen.
And he’d never forgotten that it had been on his behalf, on behalf of a stranger. He’d been a small boy with a pretty face that the others often resented for being chosen from the group to light a path home in exchange for a coin or two. He wouldn’t have held it against any other linkboy for simply letting it happen and feeling like it was the cost of success.
They’d taught the other boys what they could, after forging their friendship.
They’d protected when they could.
It was never enough.
And even after he’d been too tall, too strong, and too capable to need to earn his bread with a link torch, he’d kept an eye out for the patterns he knew all too well. Tod had, too.
Roland knew he intervened more often than a sensible man ought to. He suspected Tod did the same, though he knew the other man would never speak of it.
Today, he had about half a dozen former linkboys in his own employ as runners and for odd jobs, who worked between this club and the Becks’ other establishment a few blocks away, the Flaming Fox.
He called them his kits.
He paid them better than men in the dark ever would, and likely gave them better working experience besides. Only one had aged out since he’d started employing them, and he’d immediately replaced himself with a little brother.
London would never be short of kits, should Roland have need of them.
Perhaps they could help with whatever this trouble at the Clerkenwell Clinic was.
To his immense relief, Vix was gone by the time they closed up for the night, having likely returned home to her sweet little family at a respectable hour. He kept an eye on Tod as he assisted with stacking chairs and clearing rubbish from the floors, wondering just what had become of that cursed thimble while he was off being useful tonight.
They didn’t speak until the bartenders and coat girls and dealers and so on had left for the night, filing out together in groups for safety, with their own shared torches between them—a system Tod and Roland had insisted upon from the very first day of opening this establishment.
He sighed, bracing his freckled hands on either side of the bar, and stretched his shoulderblades and then his neck from side to side as Tod approached from the other end, this time pouring the glass of port himself and clicking it onto the polished wood between Roland’s fingers.
“There was some vandalism,” he said, by way of opening the conversation, “last night. It might have had to do with the clinic booting out an inspector with some not-so-lightly veiled threats of journalistic retribution if they continued to harass the establishment. Or it might have been brewing anyhow, with resentment for what the clinic stands for and the threat it poses to the established hierarchy of things. It is impossible to say.”
“Vandalism,” Roland repeated, looking up as he took the glass from the bar. “What did they do?”
“Tried to break the lock on the front door, from the look of it,” he answered, frowning. “Who knows what they would’ve gotten up to if they’d gained access. I suppose it’s a good thing we built high windows, because several were broken from hurled rocks, but none were low enough to climb through. There was also some graffiti on the wall. Some unkind observations about Miss Casper.”
Roland paused, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he clamped it. “What observations?” he managed to ask through his teeth.
Tod shifted his weight, frowning. “I’d rather not repeat them. Words pertaining to her sex and her particular complexion. I’m certain you can guess.”
Roland paused, looking down at the port, and then knocked it back in a thick, syrupy swig. He wished, just this once, that he favored something that burned a little when he drank. “A watch at night seems the first and most obvious thing,” he said after a moment. “Not an outright patrol. That would be too conspicuous. Some of the kits, perhaps.”
