Page 88 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"Turns out I was right," Will added.

"One useful application does not constitute a victory."

"It sounds like a victory."

"It is not."

"It sounds exactly like one."

"Dawson."

"My lord."

"Say nothing."

"I wasn't planning to, my lord." A beat. The potatoes received further attention. "Though I confess it does sound rather like a victory."

The pair of them had plainly held a council of war while I slept, and signed terms I had not been invited to read.

"But it does occur to me, my lord," Dawson went on, abandoning the potatoes and turning, "that Master Will might be of some use. Not in a public house—I'd not take him over a threshold like that. On the street."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The crossing-sweepers. The news vendors. The errand boys. The children who see the whole of London pass under their noses and are themselves seen by no one." He nodded toward Will. "He is of an age with them, my lord. A grown man asking questions in Bloomsbury puts every mouth shut. A boy asking another boy is only a boy."

Before I could frame an answer, Will had one of his own. "Why shouldn't I help?"

"Because you are ten."

His brow drew down. "That's not a reason."

"It is an excellent reason."

"No, it isn't."

And the maddening thing was that, on this narrow point, he was not entirely wrong. I considered the matter properly, against my own strong inclination not to.

A ten-year-old boy in good wool and clean linen would draw the eye in every mean street in Bloomsbury, a sovereign dropped in a gutter. But a ten-year-old boy in patched Yorkshire homespun would do the opposite. He would vanish—not into danger, never that, I would see to that—but into the ordinary moving furniture of the city. One more ragged lad among the sweepers and the newsboys and the errand boys, beneath the notice of any man with a guilty conscience and a scarred face to hide.

I disliked the idea intensely. I disliked the logic of it a good deal less, which was precisely the trouble.

At length, I let out a breath—and knew the instant I had done it that I had erred, for the pair of them recognized the sound for what it was. Not consent. Surrender.

I had said no, and now, three minutes and one criminal partnership between my manservant and a ten-year-old later, no had somehow become yes. Not because I had been argued out of my objections, but because I had run out of better ones, and a boy who knew how to read a room full of strangers was worth more than a marquis who did not.

I told myself Dawson would keep him close. I told myself that Yorkshire had taught him the same lessons Bloomsbury would only ask him to apply to new faces. I told myself a great many reasonable things and none of them touched the plain fact underneath: I had just agreed to send a child hunting a man who pushed women beneath carriage wheels for a living. If anything happened to him, no amount of sound reasoning would matter to me at all.

"You do not leave Dawson's sight," I said.

Will sat up very straight.

"You do not follow anyone."

"Right."

"You do not set foot inside a single public house."

“I won’t.”