The Merchant and the Rogue, page 11
He looked up as she entered. A flirtatious smile spread across his face. “Miss O’Doyle. Have you come to purchase a waistcoat?”
“Wouldn’t I be quite the sight? Walking up and down the market cross while dressed in men’s clothing?”
The twinkle in his eye told her the possibility did not, in fact, horrify him. Why this brought her pleasure, she couldn’t say. Most any other man would have offered words, however hollow, of horror at the idea, accompanied by lofty praises of her femininity. He simply looked more roguish.
Her first impressions of him were proving accurate: he was a rogue, but not the threatening or dangerous variety. In fact, she found herself sorely tempted to smile along with him.
“I’ve come to ask you a question,” she said.
“As I’m not currently inundated with customers, this would be an excellent time to ask any and every question you might have.”
“You say that as if you hope my question will be something overbold.”
He shrugged elegantly and walked with careful and graceful strides to where she stood. He leaned a hand on the table, tipping his posture ever so slightly askew, granting him a casual connectedness to her that might’ve been a touch too familiar for an ordinary man. It seemed almost subdued for a rascal.
“What is your question, Miss Tallulah O’Doyle?” He even said her name in a way that was a touch scandalous. And, heaven help her, she liked it.
Forcing herself to focus on the business at hand, she asked, “Why is it that the squire has been permitted to mistreat so many for so long? Why has no one tried to stop him?”
His eyes narrowed, and his head tilted. “Why do you assume no one has ever tried?”
How had she come to that conclusion? “At my shop when the squire declared he meant to cheat me, not a single person looked surprised or outraged. And you said he’d done this before. I suppose I assumed it’d been ongoing long enough that it would’ve been stopped by now if enough effort had been made.”
Royston shrugged. His posture and expression remained quite casual for one discussing a tortured town. “Your assessment, then, is that Chippingwich hasn’t tried hard enough.”
“Or that even the best efforts haven’t managed the thing.”
“Well sorted,” he said.
She folded her arms, not in a show of defiance but in a match to his playful posture. “I believe you will find I’m terribly clever.”
“Are you?”
She took the slightest step closer to him, lowering her voice a bit. “Clever enough to know that you’re not telling me everything.”
The smile he offered was playful. Was he ever anything other than devil-may-care? He’d shown her concern in her shop while the squire was there, but that had been fleeting and not without a heavy hint of impishness.
He motioned her toward the table not too far distant. It was where he, no doubt, took orders from his customers and offered his customers’ companions a place to rest while they waited.
She took the seat he offered her. He sat beside her, sitting with as much swagger as he employed when on his feet. “What would you like to know? Your every wish is my cherished command.” Had her hand been within reach, he likely would have kissed it. The man never stopped flirting. Tallulah hoped he’d be serious long enough to explain a few things about Chippingwich.
“Am I the only one who finds the squire’s company . . . rattling?” She wasn’t explaining her feelings very well. “He makes me feel as though I’m about to crawl out of m’ skin.”
“I don’t know a soul who doesn’t find his presence uncomfortable,” Royston said.
“And not merely on account of his odor?”
That brought confusion to the man’s expression. “Does he smell strange to you?”
“Doesn’t he to you?”
Royston didn’t answer, but narrowed his gaze further, as if trying to make sense of her confusion. She didn’t dare ask if he heard noises when the squire was about. Tallulah did quite regularly. Mostly, it was a gurgling sound, but sometimes, though, she heard a distant, echoing laughter that sent chills down her spine.
“Someone has obviously tried to stop the squire, but hasn’t succeeded,” she said. “What was tried? And who did the trying?”
“I’ve been here two years now, and there’s only been one attempt I know of to thwart Mr. Carman,” he said. “His reign of terror was a well-known and well-established thing by the time I arrived.”
“And who was the person who stood up to him?”
“The man who owned the shop that you now claim as your own.”
A weight settled on her heart. Her shop had become available, she knew, not because the previous owner had grown too old for running it, nor because he had moved to a larger or different location. It had been available because it had been empty.
“Was his opposition to the squire the reason he lost his shop?”
“Not exactly.”
Not exactly. “What happened to him?”
Mr. Prescott released a breath before he answered. “No one knows.”
“He disappeared?”
A slow nod answered her quavering question.
Cheating the local merchants was not, then, the true threat they all faced. ’Twas little wonder Squire Carman held such power over them all.
“I’d not realized how difficult the situation was.”
“I did tell you that day in your shop that he’s believed to be violent.”
She rubbed at her forehead. “I didn’t take your warning entirely seriously.” She felt her cheeks flush at that admission. She did try not to judge people too quickly, yet she’d done precisely that with him. He seemed to be a rather shallow, swaggering blatherskite, so she’d assumed everything he said was somewhat empty.
The shop door opened, pulling both their eyes in that direction. Kirby Padmore, the proprietor of the local pub, shuffled inside, his expression as weary as ever yet still maintaining kindness and welcome. He was the reason his pub was so popular a destination.
Mr. Prescott rose and crossed to the new arrival, strutting as always. “How may I help you, Kirby?”
“I’m in need of new shirtsleeves,” he said. “I’ve ruined my last.”
Mr. Prescott crossed to the ceiling-tall shelves along the back wall, shelves that held a tremendous amount of fabric, but he did not pull out a bolt. Instead, he reached behind one particularly wobbly pile and removed an already sewn shirt.
Kirby accepted it.
“What did he toss at you this time?” Royston asked.
“Guinness.”
Mr. Prescott looked to Tallulah. “I hope that doesn’t pain you too much, hearing of this senseless waste of a drink your country holds in such esteem.”
“I might be pained, were I not so confused.”
Kirby sighed. “The squire’s temper can run a touch hot. When he’s put out with me, he has a tendency to douse me with whatever happens to be in his glass.”
’Twasn’t difficult to imagine that scenario. “Does he grow ‘put out’ with you on account of you asking him to pay his bar tab?”
“That’s generally the trigger.”
A plague, indeed. “You must miss the years before he was the squire.”
“I’ve never known a time when he was not,” Kirby said.
The man was noticeably older than Mr. Carman. Kirby, like Mr. Prescott, must have come from elsewhere.
“How long have you been in Chippingwich?” she asked.
Kirby paid Mr. Prescott for the shirt that had been waiting for him, no doubt a longstanding arrangement between the men. “I’ve lived here all my life.” With that, he slipped from the shop.
All his life?
Kirby was seventy if he was a day. Mr. Carman didn’t look a day over forty, yet he’d been squire throughout Kirby’s memory.
How was that possible?
Brogan wasn’t sleeping. He’d spent the entire afternoon and a good bit of the evening with Vera. They’d passed two hours with Mr. Newport, talking about stories and life and any number of interesting topics. His daughter hadn’t returned while they were there, which was likely for the best. If she’d been there, Hollis would’ve been more likely to drop in as well.
After their long chat with Mr. Newport, Brogan and Vera had walked back to the shop. The distance took a full hour to cover, and it had been one of the best hours he’d passed in years. While he had kept to his false name and hadn’t talked at all about his work as a writer, he’d told her of growing up in Dublin, of coming to London with Móirín a few years back. He’d not told her why they’d come; that was a confession for another day.
Vera had talked of her childhood in Southwark and the printshop they’d had there. She’d told him of her mother, how she’d pined for Russia and had, in the end, decided England was no place for her and had left her husband and child behind to return home, how they’d abruptly sold the shop south of the Thames and had opened the one they were in now.
They had a surprising amount in common—similar interest in stories, in history, in people. Talking with her was easy, friendly, comforting.
Thus, he wasn’t sleeping. Thoughts of her spun in his mind. He would be at the shop again in the morning, but that felt too far away. He missed her, and he’d only just seen her. Lying atop his blanket, hands threaded behind his head, eyes on the dim ceiling above, Brogan felt a very pleased smile spread over his face. Vera Sorokina was turning him to mush, and he wasn’t the least unhappy about it.
The tiniest creak of the floorboards pulled his gaze to the doorway. Fletcher stood there, probably laughing at him; the light was far too dim to know for certain.
“Móirín let you in, did she?”
“Didn’t need to,” Fletcher said, keeping his voice low.
“You ‘let yourself in,’ then.”
“Needed to talk to you.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Ain’t that late, Brog.”
They were both keeping their voices low. Fletcher, despite his insistence the hour wasn’t so unreasonable, must’ve realized Móirín was asleep in her own room.
Brogan rolled off the bed. His feet protested the cold slap of the floor, but they’d adjust. He took hold of Fletcher’s arm and swung him about, setting him walking away from the bedchamber and toward the staircase.
They moved more or less silently down to the ground floor. Brogan wasn’t the least surprised Fletcher had managed to breech the house and navigate it undetected. All the Dreadfuls were stealthy, but Fletcher made most of the rest of them look like lumbering dullards.
“I have to say I’m a little disappointed,” Brogan said as they slipped into the front sitting room. “You gave yourself away with the angry floorboard. The Phantom Fox would never have been so careless.”
“Yes, well, unlike her, I am not a sneak thief by trade.”
The Phantom Fox—a London thief with a reputation for a shocking degree of stealth—was a friend of theirs. Brogan and Hollis, in fact, were the ones who had discovered her actual identity. The other Dreadfuls knew now who she was, though her identity remained a mystery to the rest of the world. Enough so that Vera had, unknowingly, spent hours at the Phantom Fox’s house talking with the thief’s father.
Brogan lit a small lamp and set it on the table, where he sat with Fletcher. “Now, what’s so urgent and secret that you’re needing to climb in through a levered window in the middle of the night?”
“This.” Fletcher pulled from his coat pocket a folded and sealed piece of parchment, more or less identical to the one he’d handed Brogan in the Quill and Ink weeks earlier. “I was told not to delay.”
“And, saints, you certainly didn’t.”
Fletcher tossed out one of his characteristic smirks.
Brogan flipped the note over and broke the wax seal. He unfolded the note.
Donnelly,
Mr. Sorokin was confirmed to have been in a shadowy corner of London, visiting a place rumored to be a hiding place for questionable people. That he is likely also connected to the Russian ambassador’s troubles strengthens our suspicions regarding him. Learn what you can of where he goes when not at his shop. Worry inside the embassy is growing.
DM
Brogan’s heart dropped. “Sorokin’s acting suspicious.”
“Apparently.”
Mr. Sorokin was out and about often, but Vera had always said he was at the paper mill or seeking out new print orders. And the people he interacted with at the shop were customers and neighbors.
Brogan pushed out a breath and leaned back in his chair. “Would you think me a coward if I told you I’d rather not dig into any of this?”
“That’d depend on your reason.”
“A simple one,” Brogan said. “I don’t want to find out that Mr. Sorokin is a criminal or connected to anything that has to do with Four-Finger Mike or the Mastiff.”
“I didn’t realize you were so fond of Mr. Sorokin,” Fletcher said.
“I’m not.” Brogan didn’t dislike Vera’s father, but ’twasn’t him Brogan was most worried about.
“Ah,” Fletcher said with a nod. “But you have grown rather fond of his daughter.”
Brogan had no intention of denying it.
“I think you need to be ready for the possibility that Miss Vera might be involved in this as well.” Fletcher’s gaze was both sympathetic and unyielding.
“’Tis easier said than done, Fletch.”
“Difficulty don’t matter either direction. It has to be done. If she’s in this, and it proves something truly nefarious, you have to be prepared for that.”
’Twas a very real complication he’d not thought of while daydreaming in his bed and reminiscing fondly of the afternoon he’d spent with her. He’d been sent to the print shop to investigate. Instead, he’d begun losing his heart. He needed to regain his perspective and his distance. He needed to be ready, as Fletcher said, for whatever answers presented themselves.
He might be able to convince his mind to be, but his heart was a different story altogether.
Vera was as perplexed as a mare with a foal that won’t walk. Ganor was behaving oddly. He kept his own company, today—did his work in near silence. Something was clearly worrying him, but he seemed entirely unwilling to talk. And that was not at all like him.
“He’s grumpy,” Olly muttered, watching Ganor with frustration.
“Any inkling why?”
Olly shook his head. His brows pulled down a bit. “Ain’t like him though.”
“If you sort any of it, drop a word in my ear,” she said. “I miss the Mr. O’Donnell who makes us laugh.”
His mouth tipped a bit. “Do I make you laugh, too, Miss Vera?”
“Laugh? You ain’t nothing but trouble, boy.”
He laughed. Olly never failed to catch when she was teasing. “A spot of trouble ain’t a bad thing.”
“No, it ain’t.” She ruffled his hair.
“Mr. O’Donnell does that too,” Olly said as he smoothed his hair again. “You two’s strange.”
You two. She liked hearing them connected that way. The afternoon and evening she’d spent with Ganor had been wonderful. He was so easy to talk with and be with. They’d shared stories from their childhoods and thoughts on current matters in the country, what it was like to be an immigrant, how that varied when one had been in a country since childhood compared to arriving as an adult. She’d learned more of his sister and wanted to meet her. She’d told him a little more of her family history, though she’d veered clear of the Petrachevsky Circle. Even having to leave that out, she’d had a more personal interaction with him than she’d had with anyone in ages.
Papa stepped inside, interrupting her reverie.
“You’ve been away quite a spell,” she said.
“And well worth it, kotik. I’ve secured a new printing order. Our largest one ever.”
“What type of printing?”
“Any number of things.” Papa fussed with his beard, not looking directly at her.
“Such as?” She found it odd that he was being evasive about something he seemed so pleased about.
“The printing is my area, Vera.” His lips flattened in a gruff line.
His sharp tone drained every ounce of breath from her. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to . . . ” She wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence, not knowing what she’d done wrong.
“You ask too many questions,” he said through tight teeth.
She hadn’t a ready answer for that. He’d not ever griped this much about her being inquisitive. Why was he so guarded about this particular job?
Olly tugged at Papa’s coat. “What does kotik mean?”
“‘Kitten,’” Papa said. “I have called Vera that since she was younger than you are.”
“I like when you speak Russian,” Olly said, tossing his gap-toothed smile at them both.
“Russian is a beautiful and powerful language,” Papa said. “You would do well to learn it, malysh.”
“I want to learn,” Olly insisted.
“The first lesson”—Papa spoke somberly, but with a twinkle in his eyes that let Vera breathe again—“‘do svidaniya.’”
Olly popped a salute and tossed out an enthusiastic, “Do svidaniya,” earning him a nod of approval from Papa.
With a dip of his head, Papa said, “Do skorovo” and, pushing his spectacles back into place, moved with a broad stride to the back room.
“That weren’t the same words,” Olly said.
“No, they weren’t.”
His little forehead creased. “But what does it mean?”
“The words he taught you or the words he just said?”
“Both.” Olly tossed his hands in the air. “He didn’t tell me what either one meant.”
