Page 83 of A Deal With a Notorious Devil
Chapter Twenty Four
Chris had been wrong. Again. Thank God he’d had the foresight to send Phoebe away for her own protection; Scratch had emerged from within the house with a sort of casual air that suggested he’d had plenty of time to acquaint himself with it. Probably he’d been sneaking about within for quite a while.
“Ye look surprised,” Scratch said, his lips splitting into a macabre grin, revealing the fact that he possessed even fewer teeth than Chris had once known him to have. “Ye didn’t truly think I’d fall fer yer nasty little trick, now, did ye?”
“I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to come to my home,” Chris said. “You’re an opportunist. You always have been. Low-hanging fruit; that’s the first thing you taught me, after all.” Snatch the easiest purse to grab; don’t go digging in pockets if you don’t have to. Target the distracted merchants, the drunkards, the oblivious dandies.
Scratch shrugged. “Might’ve worked,” he said. “Except for the damned police. Gettin’ too bloody dangerous out there for us thieves these days.”
Hell. Thepolice. The Metropolitan Police Act had passed in June. Chris might’ve cared, had he any interest in parliamentary issues—but he had been relieved to find himself freed of politicalmachinations when he’d left spying behind. And he’d spent too much time secluded within the house just lately to give much notice to the police, who must have only recently begun patrolling the streets of London.
“You look well,” Chris said. “For a dead man.” Though truthfully, he’d seen dead men look better. Scratch had aged considerably, well beyond the decades that had passed since last they’d met. His face had tanned and weathered, deep grooves lining his cheeks. He looked at least seventy, though if Chris had had to guess, he’d have said he was closer to his mid-fifties. His once-black hair had gone slate grey, and his clothes—probably stolen off of a cadaver, by their condition—hung upon his thin, rangy frame. His hands were gnarled, still with those overlong fingernails that the children had dreaded finding their flesh. The right hand held a pistol. The left curled around the handle of an all too familiar cane.
“No thanks to ye, o’ course,” Scratch said. “I reckon ye owe me fer that. P’rhaps I’ll take this fancy house once I’ve killed ye.”
“No chance of that. In the event of my death, it goes to my wife.” Despite the weapon trained upon him, Chris could dredge up remarkably little fear for the threat. Scratch had seemed so much more imposing to the child he’d been, but perhaps that had simply been due to the terror he’d inflicted upon the children he’d held beneath his thumb. Probably, if he could goad Scratch into taking the sole shot his pistol could carry, then he could turn the tables—even with his bad knee. But keeping the man talking might provide an opening, an opportunity to act. “How the hell did you survive?” he asked. “I saw you go into the damned river.”
“Yepushedme into the river,” Scratch said, his lips turning into a scowl. “Rotten little bastard that ye were.”
“You couldn’t swim. I know you couldn’t swim.”
“Who’d be fool enough to want to swim in the Thames?”Scratch inquired. “Can’t swim proper-like,” he said. “But I float well enough when I gotta. And ye didn’t stick around to make certain I didn’t come up again, did ye, Chris? Just long enough to watch me go over. First murder, eh? Didn’t take so well as ye’d hoped?”
“I do find myself somewhat disappointed, in fact.” Probably, he thought, there had been some truth to those tales the children had told after all. The local legend; the bogeyman that had stalked the streets for months thereafter. “But you made yourself scarce,” he said.
“Ye couldn’t see yer own face, boy,” Scratch said. “But I did, afore I sank. Ain’t never seen such an evil look in me life. And ye were sneaky, canny—I knew ye’d get me if I came back. Might’ve been yer first go at murder, but there weren’t no hesitation in ye. Didn’t fancy watchin’ my back lest ye sink a dagger into it. Leastwise, until I could get ye by surprise myself.”
But he hadn’t. He’d abandoned his gang of child-thieves entirely; the sole source of his income. And it had been well over two decades since. “And you couldn’t do it before now?”
“Naw,” Scratch said with a sneer. “Fellow’s got ta eat, ye know. And it turns out my fingers weren’t so nimble as they ‘ad been. Got pinched fer nicking a bloke’s purse only a few months later. Got m’self transported. So I suppose I owe ye fer that as well. Fourteen years hard labor in Australia. And it took eight more to come up wiv the blunt to buy my passage back.”
That, coupled with the time each journey would have taken—Chris supposed Scratch had been back in England for a year, perhaps a little longer. He’d gotten a new name for himself, one that would not be well-known, and he’d transformed so much in that time, his face weathered from the hot Australian sun and his body changed by years of hard labor that it was unlikely that even Chris would have recognized him if they’d passed one another on the street.
He’d been meant to be dead, after all.
“Didn’t come home fer revenge,” Scratch said. “I thought surely ye’d ‘ave been caught and ‘anged years ago. Didn’t even know ye was still alive until a few months back, when ye got arrested fer treason. All o’ London were talkin’ about it. But ye got yerself out o’ that scrape, didn’t ye? And then ye started pickin’ off my children. Running the other kidsmen out of London or worse. Knew ye’d find me sooner or later.”
So he’d contrived to find Chris first. Perhaps revenge hadn’t been his aim—but he’d seized the opportunity that had presented itself. Low-hanging fruit indeed; an old enemy who hadn’t even known his nemesis had come back to haunt him. “So you had your men throw me into the Thames,” Chris said, with a nod to indicate the cane clutched in Scratch’s hand, which he could only have come into possession of if he’d been behind that little debacle.
“Thought it fittin’,” Scratch said.
“And you shot me?”
“Hell, no,” Scratch said. “I been transported once. Weren’t eager to risk ‘anging. I had one o’ the children do it. Easier fer one o’ them to slip away into a crowd. ‘Course, the little bugger could hardly hold the pistol upright. Cried somethin’ awful about it afterwards,” he added with an exasperated roll of his eyes.
A small blessing, Chris supposed. Probably he’d only survived because Scratch hadn’t wanted to risk doing the job himself.
“But he hit ye nonetheless. And do ye know what I thought when I learned o’ it? I was glad ye didn’t die,” Scratch said, with a malevolent smile of delight. “Because ye were sufferin’. And I thought—oh, I’d like to see that, I would. Where’s the fun in killin’ ye so quick? Ye tookdecadesfrom me.”
“But you do mean to kill me,” Chris said, striving to inject hisvoice with boredom. There was a stone in the grass just behind Scratch, dislodged from those which bordered Hieronymus’ pond. If he could just maneuver the man into taking a step back, he might well turn his ankle upon it and stumble.
“I do. But I mean to have me fun wiv ye first.”
“Bound to make a hell of a racket,” Chris said. “It’s a quiet street this time of night. Someone’s going to take notice.” He had a houseful of servants sleeping within, and while he could not guarantee they’d come to his aid, still it would be a risky move.
“But ye ain’t exactly well liked, now, are ye? I’ll wager no one would come runnin’ even if ye were to shout about it.” Scratch canted his head to the right, that terrible grin turning still uglier. “Ain’t foolish enough to do the job here, besides. Got a place all picked out already. Nice and private. And ye’re gonna come along real quiet-like to it.”
“That will not happen.”
