Her illness had started late last year, with a week spent in bed after a terrible cold. Mrs. Bean recovered, but never truly becamebetter. The cough lingered, worsening over time. Fletcher often thought of it as the roots of a tree, that cough, stretching and growing into Mrs. Bean’s lungs until it would one day kill her. Blood now dotted the handkerchiefs she used and flecked her lips.
Theonlything that kept Lark from barging in to take over The Dancing Swan and murdering Mrs. Bean’s useless grandson was he wanted Bean’s Book.
Lark had a healthy, grudging respect for Mrs. Bean, but that wasn’t what kept him away. It was Grandmam’s book of secrets. Everyone wanted that damn book, circling The Dancing Swan like a band of sharks that smell blood in the water. Lark was only the worst of the group. He wouldn’t slit Fletcher’s throat because Mrs. Bean made it clear that a move on The Swan, or Fletcher and she’d burn the book, and no one, including Lark, knew where the bloody thing happened to be.
Don’t matter, Mrs. Bean. You’ll die one day.
Grandmam took his threat in stride. She had earned the respect of The Devil’s Acre, and she wasn’t about to back down. She’d once been a midwife and there was more than one woman in this rookery who’d given birth with Mrs. Bean at her side. Lark couldn’t afford to have anyone turn against him. There was also the matter of poison. Grandmam knew how to kill a man with just a few drops of her special tincture. Or render him unable to move his limbs or lips.
Lark never once had anything to eat or drink in the home of Delores Bean. Nor did he touch anything in this house, afraid of poison on a seat cushion.
“Well, best get back to it.” Ripps pointed to the seam in the wall barely visible a few feet away. The secret door linking thetwo halves of the house together. It could be barred from this side, but not from The Swan.
“Give Martha gin if she needs it.”
Nodding, Ripps pushed down on the lower corner of the crease in the wall. A snap sounded and the hidden door opened into a small room located just steps from the main parlor at The Swan.
Fletcher approached the parlor, hoping that Mrs. Bean had fallen asleep in her chair and he might just carry her up the stairs to bed. He peeked through the half-opened door and caught sight of her emaciated form in a chair, a pot of tea and bottle of brandy at her elbow. A handkerchief lay in her lap, flecked with blood.
“That you Fletch?” A shrewd, calculating pair of eyes riddled with pain, narrowed on him. “Where have you been?”
“Out,” he answered.
“We had a problem at The Swan.”
“Ripps told me. I’ll go next door in a bit and make sure all is well. Don’t worry.”
A flood of mixed emotions filled him at the sight of Delores Bean, his grandmam. Least, that’s who she claimed to be.Claimedbecause Fletcher was supposedly the son of Mrs. Bean’s dead daughter, Hannah. A woman that Mrs. Bean never spoke about and didn’t have so much as a miniature or a keepsake. Save Fletcher.
Because she hadn’t existed.Fletcher became surer of that by the day.
“Martha got the bad end of a fist,” she said as he walked towards her. “But she’s fine, except for a bit of weeping.”
“I’ll check on her later, Mrs. Bean.”
Grandmam insisted Fletcheralwaysaddress her as Mrs. Bean, whether or not others were present. She didn’t want herauthority to be undermined. She wasn’t soft. Nor someone’s gentle grandmother.
“Give her a bit of gin, but not enough so’s she can’t work.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Fletcher had watched Mrs. Bean kick a bleeding prostitute who was begging in the alley once. Stood silently as she took a cleaver and hacked off the finger of a boy who’d stolen from her to teach him a lesson. She was many things, his grandmam, but not gentle or soft. But she’d also found him a tutor, a disgraced, defrocked priest who loved gin more than God. Found a man who taught him how to use a pair of knives so Fletcher could protect himself. Showed him how to brew a poison fit to keep a man trapped in his own body but unable to move. Or kill him.
Delores Bean was full of contradictions. Raising a vicious killer and thief who also read Socrates was one of them.
“If that lordling shows his face again. You let Ripps handle him.” Her bleary gazed dipped to the tops of his boots where Fletcher had tucked his knives. “You don’t get involved. Hear me?”
“I’d rather run the card games at The Swan; you know that Mrs. Bean. Or charm the girls between patrons. I’ve spoken to Durmont—”
“Keeps raising his price. But there’s some that like that fancy French wine. You included.”
“I negotiated down the cost. The brandy is ordered. The gin I’ll be gettin’ from Lark as usual. Vulture will bring it by.”
“Stupid name,” she coughed.
All the members of Lark’s inner circle were named for birds. Fletcher hadn’t any idea why.
“The ledgers are balanced. I sent Mary to the market this morning.” Mary was the maid and cook for Mrs. Bean and The Swan. “Mind if I join you for a brandy?” Fletcher grabbed a glassthat looked clean enough, picked up the bottle of brandy, and poured out some of the amber liquid.
