He lowers his hands. “Do you want to get some food with me? Preferably after you put the knife away.”
Beatrix is dumbfounded. “You’re not turning me in?”
“What for?” the man asks. “You didn’t steal anything.”
“Not from you,” she mutters as she slips her knife back into her boot. She doesn’t know what to make of the man, but he doesn’t seem dangerous.
“So, food?” he asks hopefully.
She has suffered stranger company for the sake of a free meal. Maybe she will stuff herself with sixpence worth of food and drink to spite the man. “All right.”
The crowd shifts as it filters out of the theater. The man follows the stream of people. Beatrix falls into step beside him.
He glances down at her. “I’m Oliver, by the way.”
She clenches her jaw. She doesn’t want to know his name. His easy smile is making it hard enough to hold a grudge. “Beatrix.” She looks quickly away. She still catches the glint in his eyes.
Oliver stops outside the gates and glances around, as if he were searching for someone. Beatrix looks up at him expectantly. He runs a hand through his mop of dark hair. “I don’t know where to go.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“What gave it away?” he asks sheepishly.
They are standing on the wrong side of the Thames, for starters. The only way into London proper is to cross over the river on the stone bridge looming ahead of them.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?” he asks eagerly.
“There’s a market with loads of cookshops on the other side of the river,” Beatrix says. “It’s not far.”
She leads the way beneath the gatehouse and onto London Bridge. “Don’t look up,” she warns. The last thing she needs is for Oliver to lose his appetite—or his breakfast—over the spiked and tarred heads rotting in the sun above them. All that remains of England’s worst traitors.
His gaze strays upward. Beatrix shakes her head. She grabs his hand, and then she is staring into his bright eyes. Her heart skips a beat. “This way.”
Oliver’s grip tightens around her hand as she weaves through the crowds of people making their way into the city. He gawks as they pass the towering shops built right to the edge of the bridge, groceries and haberdasheries mostly, with houses stacked above them. Beatrix has never visited them. They are far too reputable for the likes of her.
She makes it halfway across the bridge before no amount of tugging will move Oliver along. His hand slips from her grasp. Ahead of them, a brightly painted, four-story plaster-and-timber building fills the entire width of the bridge. An arched tunnel through the middle lets travelers pass beneath it, as if some giant burrowing creature has hollowed it out. A square tower sits on each corner, topped with a dome shaped like an onion, and there are too many windowpanes to count. It stopped Beatrix in her tracks the first time she saw it, too.
“I wish my brother could see this,” Oliver says, taking in the odd building. “He’d love it. He always wanted to be an architect.”
“I’m sorry,” Beatrix says, because it seems like the polite thing for her to say.
Oliver laughs. “No, he’s not—he’s fine, just nowhere near here, and not an architect.” But Beatrix swears he sounds almost sad.
“The drawbridge tower used to be here,” she says. It has been gone more than twenty-five years now. She points to the elaborately carved building. “They brought this in from the Netherlands in pieces and put it together on the spot.”
Oliver looks at her like she’s grown another head.
“I swear it,” she says.
“No, I believe you,” he assures her. “I just didn’t expect a pickpocket to know so much history.”
She laughs. “It wasn’t that long ago.”
Oliver studies her face. “It must have been before your time, though.”
Beatrix blushes under his scrutiny. “London likes to talk.”
