“I can get one. But I need about half an hour.” I opened my mouth. “Don’t argue, Kit. It’ll save us time in the end. Then we’ll go to James’s. When did you last eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she retorted. “You’ll be no good to us if you can’t think. We need you to have your wits about you.”
It was almost a relief to hear her scold me.
She took me to a pub, sat me down, ordered a bowl of stew and some ale and said, “I’ll be back in half an hour, likely less. Don’t leave without me. I don’t know where James lives.”
I nodded. “All right.”
A family entered the pub and took seats at a table nearby. It was late, and my guess was they’d just arrived by train from somewhere and wanted supper before bed. Or perhaps they were waiting for someone to come. It was a mother, a father, a boy of about thirteen, and a daughter a few years younger, talking and joking together. The serving maid brought four bowls of beef stew and a loaf of bread. The father ate ravenously, and I guessed he was a dockworker, from the size of his shoulders, bulky as an ox’s, and the roughness of his hands. When the mother finished her stew, she began knitting by the table’s lamplight. The boy, with his brown hair flopping over his forehead in spears, was explaining something earnestly to his father. The girl lined up beads along the crack between the wood slats of the table, chattering to her mother, who paused in her knitting to look and admire.
Into my mind slipped a fragile trace of a memory, of me sitting beside my mother at our table. I’d been allowed to play with the buttons from her button box while she sewed. I placed the shining bits of shell into squares, grouping similar ones together. My mother was embroidering an apron with blue thread, and I must have asked her why, for I remember her words, in a voice that was mild, even indulgent:Well, there’s no harm in making it pretty.
Yes, therehadbeen moments when Ma showed me her better nature. It was Ma, after all, who had shown me how to sew with patience.
Why did I resist those memories?
Even as I wondered, the answer came: Because they showed me what might have been. I’d had it for a time, and I was keenly aware of the loss.
A sudden thickness formed in my throat and I choked it down with another bite of stew.
I’ve no use for people who feel sorry for themselves. But I couldn’t help wondering, what would Sarah’s and my lives have been like if my father had been like that man, if he’d never broken my mother’s heart? Or if my mother had always been like this one? What if there had been more kindness, more affection, more loyalty, more family feeling?
Then again, wouldn’t I have been different? I wouldn’t value those traits nearly so much if they’d been handed to me, regular each day as bread. Why would I?
But I’d done my best to give them to Sarah, as often as I could.
The thought of her in some dark hole, ill-fed and cold, made me push the stew away. I sent up a small silent prayer that she wouldn’t give up hope. Perhaps this was the silver lining of our parents’ failures. They had cemented Sarah and me together in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
I gulped the ale, feeling the cold of it down into my belly.
True to her word, Amelia reappeared in twenty-three minutes by the mantel clock, her gloved hands empty. I gave her a questioning look, and she tapped her pocket.
Together we made our way to James’s lodging house.
Mary had already told James enough that even before we reached the doorway, James had flung it open, and he stepped forward to pull me fiercely close. I clung to him for a moment, relieved that his feelings ran as deep as mine. He drew back and I saw the disbelief and anger hardening his face. “Is she bloody mad?” The skin around his eyes tightened, and he shook his head. “Kit, love.”
Over his shoulder, I saw Mary with surprise on her face, and I flushed and pulled back.
“I’m no ‘love,’” I said shortly. “I was afool, not to guess Maggie would use Sarah to force my hand.”
James stepped away from the threshold so Amelia and I could enter and shut the door behind us. When we had shrugged out of our coats, he said, “Start at the beginning.”
And so I did. With three pairs of eyes on me, I told the whole thing—beginning with Maggie asking me to assess Hatton Garden, the reason for marking this jeweler, and the dodge she’d drawn up, omitting only the fact that Tim Lowry might have been Mary’s father. There was no reason to share that here.
I concluded, “I made Maggie swear to give me Sarah when I brought her the three gems and the story broke in the papers—and I think she’ll keep that promise, even if I don’t use her dodge. My thought is, I need to get what she wants, without killing anybody, before Sunday.”
“Spike her gun,” Amelia said.
I nodded. “But I’ve no idea how.”
“That’s what delayed us.” Amelia unfolded the map and placed it on James’s wooden plank table. “I had to fetch this.”
James brought two lamps, resting them near the corners, and stood beside me. Opposite, Mary and Amelia bent over the map with us.
“I don’t know how you could get into Simonson’s off the street,” Mary said. “Cathy told me there was another theft in the Garden two nights ago. They’re keeping it out of the papers, but there’ll be even more constables now.”
