Page 103 of Thief Taker

“I know, and I miss that. But you know why I left.”

Hal contemplated him for a moment, then gestured for him to take a seat again. “Advice, then… Rowsley’s a notorious profligate: a weak and damaged man, easy prey for bastards like Marlborough.”

“You know Marlborough?”

“Aye, and something of the leary culls he’s mixed up with. He’s a sly-boots, Elias: beats his wife, assaults his servants. Murdered at least one man in England, no doubt plenty more on his plantations. And the law can’t touch him for none of it. Whereas your gent…?” Hal sat back in his chair. “Of the two, who’s more deserving of the gallows?”

The question wasn’t as easy as Hal thought. Elias set his hand on the pistol—the place where Kit’s hand had rested, a strange point of contact between them. “Kit broke the law,” he said. “Don’t matter that he never hurt nobody, nor that he only robbed those who had taken from his family. He broke the law and that’s that.”

“Is it?” Hal got to his feet, sauntered over to the mashing tub, trailing an elegant hand over the rim as he circled it. Elias could hardly see him in the shadows. “If you really believed that, why come here? You know my thoughts on the matter.” It was a good question. Elias licked his lips and didn’t answer. “I think you want me to remind you that the law is an ass,” Hal said. “I think you want me to tell you the names of a dozen good men who hanged for no worse than trying to fill their children’s bellies. I think you want me to tell you that their crimes don’t make them wrong: it makes the law wrong.”

“Maybe,” Elias said, marshalling the logic he’d clung to all these years. “But we can’t just choose the laws we obey, Hal. That’s the point.”

Hal laughed. “Why can’t we?”

“Because it would mean chaos! Have you forgotten the No Popery riots? I can’t just—It ain’t my job to decide what laws are right and wrong. I just catch those that break them.”

“Hmm,” Hal said, moving further around the tub and closer to the light again. “What about when you’re bending over and letting this gentleman in the back door? What about that law, Elias?”

“Christ, Hal.”

“It’s the truth ain’t it? If the law would hang you for loving a man as surely as it would for robbing him, how can you call either just?”

And how could he? He remembered Kit in his arms, that great sweep of feeling between them as they lay together, tangled and sated. That had felt right, better than anything he’d known. But the law would condemn them for it, hang them for it. He swallowed against a flutter of defiance, his hand still resting on Kit’s pistol. It grew warm under his touch. “What should I do, then?”

“I ain’t telling you what to do. You already know.” He held up a hand to forestall Elias’s protest. “Loosen your petticoats for once, Elias, and do what’s right.”

But that way lay chaos and disaster. That way left the man who’d taken Will’s life unpunished.

And that way lay Kit and justice—even if the law said otherwise.

Elias blew out a shivery breath and rose to his feet. “The one bastard in this sorry fiasco who deserves to feel the hand of the law is Marlborough, but the law ain’t never going to reach him.”

Hal’s lips parted in a smile, a bare gleam of teeth in the dark. “Not even if you had the evidence?” His gaze landed on the pistol beneath Elias’s fingers.

What he was suggesting wasn’t so different from Elias’s own thoughts. But could he do it? Could he see justice done outside the law—against the law?

Under his hand, Kit’s silver pistol gleamed in the candlelight, and he remembered threading his fingers through Kit’s hair and promising to help save his family.

How could he not do everything in his power to save the man himself?

Chapter 38

The dockside inn was foul. The stench of the Thames infiltrated everything, a miasma of diseased air. And the straw-stuffed mattress on the narrow bed sagged, damp and no doubt infested.

Kit didn’t care.

He just stared at the ceiling with unseeing eyes and waited. For Hartwell, for arrest—whichever came first. He didn’t care about that either.

From the street below, a dozen languages floated up through the glassless window of their room. A flap of sail canvas stirred in the wind whipping up from the estuary and Kit shivered. Perhaps he was cold. He hadn’t really noticed.

All he could think about was everything he’d lost. Everyone he’d failed. Ashbourne was gone, Charlotte and his father would be evicted from their home. James was in the clutches of Marlborough, lost to drink and gaming.

And Elias… That was the cruellest blow.

We were both playing our parts… Seems like neither of us was honest.

He’d been over and over it in his mind, but he couldn’t reconcile their passion with the hard words Elias had given him last night. Kit had felt that passion in every heated touch, in every shared smile, in every moment of peace between them. He had felt it in his soul.