Page 100 of Thief Taker

“It’s a graze.”

“It’s a ball wound and you know it.” He dropped into the room’s single chair, which creaked ominously under him. “And what about your father? Your sister? You’d leave them to Marlborough?”

Kit stared into the fire. There was no answer that didn’t hurt. “What choice do I have?” He flexed the fingers of his injured arm and it pulled all the way to his shoulder. “Cole knows me. If I were to be apprehended and stand trial… The public shame would be worse than anything Marlborough could do to them.”

Hartwell was quiet for a moment. Outside a cart rumbled past on the street below, the horse’s hooves loud on the uneven cobbles. “Cole,” he said at last. “What did he say to you?”

Kit didn’t reply.

“Kit.”

“He told me to run.” The words came out flat, scraped clean of feeling. “He gave me until dawn.”

Hartwell was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice had lost its usual dry edge. “And you believe he means to hunt you.”

The fire shifted, a log settling into ash and sparks rising.

“Elias Cole is good at his job. And he—” Kit’s throat closed. He waited for it to open again. “He won’t stop. He told me so himself. Whatever he felt—feels—it won’t make him less than what he is.” A breath. “I won’t ask it of him.”

Hartwell regarded him with an expression that was almost gentle, which was worse than anything else. Then he pushed himself to his feet. “I know a man in Wapping,” he said. “Ships out of the Pool of London. He’s done this before—moving people who need to be moved quietly. It’ll cost.”

“Can you trust him?”

“As much as I trust anyone.” Hartwell crossed to the door, then stopped with his hand on the latch. “I’ll go to him in the morning. We’ll need money for the passage. And for when we get there.”

“I have money.” Some. Enough, perhaps. The Wessex money, hidden in his room in Soho. The irony of that was not lost on him.

Hartwell nodded slowly. “I know people there still—not my brother. But men who would help us make our way.” A pause, weighted with everything he’d lost. “It would be something to go back.”

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“No,” Hartwell agreed. “I don’t.” He opened the door, letting in a draught of cold air from the passage. “Get some sleep, Kit. You look like death.”

The door closed. Kit sat alone in the dying firelight for a long time, not sleeping, listening to the night sounds of Marylebone—the distant bark of a dog, the creak of the building settling in the cold, the faint toll of a church bell marking some late hour he couldn’t be bothered to count.

He remembered Elias striding out of his house in Curzon Street, eyes bright with fury—and with something worse, something like pain. Kit felt the echo of it even now, like a bruise on the heart. And he remembered how Elias had told him to run, not a command but something closer to a plea, the word torn out of him against his better judgement. A man doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the right thing for the wrong ones. Kit was no longer sure which way round it was.

He shifted his injured arm carefully into his lap and sat in the cold and dark watching the dying fire until the sky outside the window began, almost imperceptibly, to lighten.

Chapter 37

Before dawn the next morning, Elias bent his steps towards Bow Street.

Groves would be pleased with what he carried tucked under his coat, pressed against his dead heart. Might forgive him the mistake he’d made, blind damned fool that he’d been.

It was dark, cloudy and moonless. A dangerous dark—for others. Woe betide any footpad who chanced his luck with Elias. He had his cudgel with him and would be happy to break a few heads, and unleash his grief and fury. He was spoiling for a fight.

He found himself in Bow Street far too soon. Tallow light spilled from the Bear, and even at this early hour the raucous sounds of business seeped around the doors and windows. Elias didn’t have the stomach for it; his wasn’t business to be conducted before an audience and in comfort. No, when you condemned a man you loved to hang, it should be done in a place as bleak as your own damned soul. So he passed the Bear and walked up towards the magistrate’s court beyond. Lamplight blazed above the entrance and Elias’s footsteps faltered. His hand slipped beneath his coat to the bundle he carried pressed against his chest.

For a heartbeat, he could feel Kit’s head resting right there instead. Feel the curve of his lips against his skin. Pain stopped him in his tracks, dead in the middle of the street. Someone knocked his shoulder, muttered an irritable apology that Elias barely heard.

Kit…

His throat was knotted, his guts too. He’d not slept since—He’d lost track. Not a wink since he’d learned the truth. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Kit hanging at Tyburn, legs twitching.

A rise of bile in his throat sent him stumbling for the nearest wall and he braced himself there, retching up nothing. His stomach had emptied hours ago, sour with angry guilt and grief.

Above him loomed the court, demanding his duty. Beneath his coat, the package burned a hole right through him. Elias hung pinioned between the two, unable to move. Or breathe.