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Lark halted and faced the doctor. If they put gloves on and stepped into a ring, Lark had no doubt he could take the man. Another memory surfaced with the idea, a day at Daventry Hall when all of Dav’s lost boy gang had taken turns sparring on a patch of lawn behind the house. “Expose me if you think there’s something to expose, but don’t injure Miss Bradish. You do not want to see her dismissed from Lady Melforth’s employ, I think.”

“Don’t think I can’t manage to expose you without harming our Viv.”

“Perhaps you can, Doctor, but remember she’s my Viv now, not yours.” Lark began walking again. He felt absurdly satisfied to lay claim to Vivian Bradish. The doctor didn’t move. Now, if Lark could only make it to the nearest cab stand without passing out.

*

The cab dropped Lark on Holborn at the top of Chancery Lane. From there he headed south, threading his way through dark turnings to the forgotten little court where he and Rook had shared rooms until the great October fire at Westminster Palace.

Lark let himself in to the once elegant house, divided long before Lark was born into separate dwellings for as many as fifty souls. Suddenly weak-kneed, he leaned heavily on the stair rail to pull himself up to their old rooms, now Rook’s domain. Wide stairs turned upward around a central well that by day let in hazy light. By night, the stairs were quite black, except for faint rays emitted from under and around doors that no longer fit snugly in their jambs. Lark could find his way as much by smell as by sight, by gin and ale, and fish and tar, and the fragrances of several occupations on the lower end of the wage scale. The smells seemed to mock him for the part of a gentleman that he’d been playing. Vivian Bradish might be a hired companion, but her genteel dependence on a rich lady, still left her many strata above Lark in the layers of London society.

It was quiet on the stairs. Few of Rook’s neighbors were at home as they had occupations better suited to darkness than daylight. Lark heard only the occasional muffled quarrel as he passed up the two flights and around the landing to the rooms at the front of the house overlooking the sad little court. Rook’s reeking boots covered in river muck sat in a tin tub outside their door. Rook hated to risk having his boots pinched, but their charwoman, Alice Povey, refused to have the boots inside.

In the common room when Lark entered, other smells reminded him that he’d left posh London far behind. The remains of Rook’s dinner, a fried bloater, a jacket potato, and ale, mingled with the scent of burned bread. In Lady Melforth’s house, no coarse kitchen smells reached the main rooms. The fragrant tea Lark drank in her dining room faced no competition from humbler scents.

“Where’d ye get to?” Rook grumbled from a chair by the fire. He held a long fork with a smoking hunk of bread on the end near the glowing coals.

“Henrietta Street.”

“Wot? Where? How’d ye end up there?” Rook had long abandoned the effort of speaking the way Daventry taught them.

“She shot me.” Lark wanted a bed and his old one would do. He wanted to shed his coat, tie, and ruined waistcoat. His wound burned, and his skin itched around the edges of the sticking plaster.

“Who?”

“The mark. She had a Toby under that cape of hers.” He wondered what she had done with the gun.

“A barker? Did she twig you?” Rook sat up straight, giving Lark a closer took.

“No. She was aiming for you. I got in the way.”

“Where’d she hit ye?”

“Right side. Can you help me out of my coat? The sawbones told me to have my valet change the dressing for me.”

“Valet. ’e thinks ye have a valet? You fooled ’em proper, did ye?”

“They think I’m Edward Larkin, a fine gentleman.” Lark grinned.

Rook snorted. “The more fool them, and I’m no valet, no servant neither.”

“Just help. I don’t want to undo the sawbones’s handiwork.”

Rook put aside the smoking piece of bread and pushed up out of his chair. Lark extended the arm on his unwounded side, and Rook pulled the sleeve until Lark could shrug out of his coat. At fifteen, when they’d left Daventry Hall, they’d been about the same size. Now at seven and twenty, Rook was a good four inches taller than Lark and much broader. He had a pleasant open face, which he concealed as much as possible behind a dark beard and heavy moustache.

Rook whistled at the sight of the bloodied waistcoat. “Why’d ye go t’ ’enrietta Street for a sawbones? Why not go t’ the casual ward?”

Lark did not want to explain his dislike for dirt and drunkenness. In Rook’s part of London, a man was hardly a man if he didn’t have beer on his breath and grime under his nails. Lark’s preference for soap and clean linens was an ironic holdover from their time with Daventry. He was having entirely too many thoughts of that time lately. Maybe the memories had clouded his judgment.

“The mark took me. I wanted to see what I could get out of … the adventure.” He needed to turn Rook’s thoughts elsewhere. “How much did you get from her purse?”

“Naught. She’s a minx. Had stones in ’er bag is all. The bag might fetch somethin’, but ye won’t be payin’ fer new threads with stones.”

Lark laughed. It was as he’d suspected. She had used the weighted bag as a decoy and kept her money elsewhere.

“Ye can laugh?” Rook protested. “I call it a bloody cheat. That skirt is dangerous.”

Lark nodded. Rook was right. The woman was dangerous, but the balance had shifted in his understanding of their situation. The wrong of shooting him far outweighed the wrong of taking a false purse. No wonder she had been willing to take him to her own fancy sawbones for medical help.