Page 49

Throwaway Son

Kit

Dawn came grey through the gaps in the boards. He sat in the tunnel with his back against the stone and his knife across his knees and waited.

The captain and his men should have been in position an hour ago, tucked into the second branch off the main passage, fifty yards from the orchard entrance, pressed against the old stonework in the dark. They were not. Kit had checked the branch twice. Empty. Cold. The draught moving through it carried nothing but rain and silence.

The ship may have been delayed. Intercepted. Wrecked. He had no way to check without leaving the tunnel and exposing the orchard entrance. He could not leave the tunnel.

He ran his thumb along the blade. He had sharpened it that morning on the whetstone in the stable, drawing the steel back and forth until it sang. A good knife, six inches, weighted for throwing but better in the hand. He had a second in his boot.

The pistol pressed against the small of his back beneath his waistband, the steel warm from his body. One shot. The fowling piece was upstairs in the coffin beside a woman he loved. He had a knife in his boot and a knife across his knees and ten men who were not coming.

He would proceed alone.

He had snuffed the lantern an hour ago. His eyes had adjusted. He could see the passage stretching ahead of him, the arched ceiling, the carved joints. Above him, through the floorboards, the house was silent. She was in the coffin. Still. Breathing shallow. Waiting.

The brand on his ribs throbbed. R.A. A fire in a barn. Reeve's men holding him down. The iron glowing orange in the dark. He had screamed. Reeve had watched him scream with patience, waiting for it to be done.

After that he was Kit. A set of tools. Something useful.

He heard them before he saw them.

Boots on packed earth. The scrape of shoulders against stone. More than three sets of lungs breathing in a passage built for monks and silence. They were coming from the orchard end. Moving slowly. No light, which meant they knew what they were doing.

The first shape materialised from the dark. Tall, broad, tattooed: the Māori warrior. He moved through the passage with his head slightly bowed. One hand on the knife at his belt. He said nothing. His body filled the corridor.

The second came behind him. Thin, angular, moving with the loose-limbed ease of a man who had spent his life in tight spaces. Spit. The Irishman. He had a pistol in his waistband and a blade in his hand and his eyes found Kit in the dark before the warrior's did.

"Well, well." Spit's voice was soft, lilting. "The prodigal tool, waitin' in the dark. Makes a man feel welcome."

Then Reeve.

He came third, as Kit knew he would. Shorter than the others. Compact. A working man's build gone soft around the middle but still solid in the shoulders. His hair was grey now and his face was weathered and sharp and without warmth.

Behind Reeve, a fourth figure. Smaller. Narrower in the shoulders. Moving with the stiff, mechanical gait of someone trying very hard to look like he belonged. A boy. Sixteen, perhaps seventeen. Armed with a pistol he held too high and too tight, the muzzle drifting. Kit looked at the boy and felt something cold settle in his stomach.

A replacement. Reeve had already assumed Kit might refuse. He had brought his next tool.

"There's my boy." Reeve's voice landed like a hand on the back of Kit's neck. Warm on the surface. Possessive beneath. "Look at you. Kept yourself fed, I see."

"She is upstairs," Kit said. "Drawing room."

Reeve held up a hand. "In a moment. Let me look at you." He stepped closer. Walked a slow circle around Kit, his boots scraping the stone, his eyes moving over him with an appraiser's patience. "Broader. Harder. The Linton household treated you well. Five women under one roof." He clicked his tongue. "I'd have gone mad."

Kit said nothing.

"You did that job in Deal for me. You remember Deal? Customs man with the bad leg. You were fifteen and you cried afterward and I told you the crying would stop and it did." He stopped in front of Kit. "It did, didn't it."

"It stopped."

"Good lad. And the watchman in Ramsgate. What was his name. Big man, hands like shovels. You took him in the dark and I didn't hear a sound. Fifteen stone and you put him down without a whisper. I was proud of you that night. Told the crew. He's mine, I said. I made him."

Kit's jaw tightened. Reeve saw it and smiled.

"Now then. The widow." He clasped his hands behind his back. "How did you manage it?"

"Poison. In her tea."