Page 13 of The Magpie Lord
Crane frowned. “I hope you’re not here because of that. You owe me nothing.”
“No. I know.”
“So I ask again, Mr. Day, why are you here?”
“I’m here because I should be,” Stephen said. “It was rather childish of me to walk away in the first place. I dealt with the jack, so I have a feeling for the maker, and I know the Lychdale area. It’s obvious I should handle this.”
Crane was looking at him with a raised brow. “It must have become obvious fairly recently, since Mr. Fairley introduced himself as your replacement yesterday.”
“Ah.” Stephen gave an internal curse. “You met him.”
“I did, yes. I can’t honestly say he inspired me with confidence in the matter of murder, although I’m sure that if I wanted a practitioner that I could take to all the best society parties and be sure of his many close acquaintances...”
Stephen shut his eyes. “Yes, he does, um, feel the importance of birth and breeding quite strongly.”
“Frankly, I thought he was an oleaginous prick. I assume he has hidden talents.”
“I’m sure he does,” Stephen said, without conviction.
Even after the miraculous letter had arrived, he had not wanted to do this. If Hector and Quentin Vaudrey had been murdered, they should have justice, but it could be at someone else’s hands. Then he had learned that the hands would be Fairley’s, a soft self-indulgent parlour magician whose only qualification was his social connection, and Stephen’s vow had stuck in his throat like a fistful of brambles.
It had nothing to do with the mental image of Crane’s long-fingered hands and lean, muscular, tattooed body, or the laugh lines around those lazy, perceptive grey eyes. Those irritatingly persistent memories gave him the strongest possible reason to stay away. No, it was as simple as it always was: justice had to be done. And since he had no authority to select the practitioner to do it, he had to do the job himself or stay out of the whole business.
Crane was looking at him curiously. “So why did you send that obsequious twit in the first place?”
“I didn’t,” said Stephen, slightly too honestly. “He, ah, he proposed himself. Feeling an earl would require a practitioner of birth and breeding.” Stephen’s talents outstripped Fairley’s to an almost embarrassing degree, but he was the son of a provincial nobody who had died destitute; Fairley was the son of a baronet. Taking the job back had led to a heated exchange. He quoted, woodenly, “Nobility has a certainje ne sais quoithat demands the presence of a gentleman, not a hireling.”
The eighth Earl Crane lifted an aristocratic brow. “In my case, theje ne sais quoiincludes four years as a smuggler, two death sentences, and a decade as a Shanghai Joe, a dockfront trader. I hope you feel suitably elevated.”
Stephen tried to confront all of this at once. “Two death sentences? Really? I mean, you look very well, considering.”
Crane grinned. “One was in absentia. One wasn’t, and I spent three days in a condemned cell. I can’t recommend the experience.”
“And—did you say asmuggler?”
“That was what the death sentences were for.”
“What did you smuggle?” Stephen demanded, then caught himself. “Sorry, it’s none of my business.”
“Not at all,” Crane said politely. “Silks and tea, mostly. Medicines, on occasion. And we ran the guns for an uprising against a particularly noxious tax farmer, but that was a favour to a friend, really.”
“That’s very...” Stephen couldn’t think what it was. It occurred to him that if the man didn’t wear such staggeringly expensive suits, the tanned, mocking face and tattoos would make him look exactly like someone’s overheated fantasy of a smuggler in the exotic East. “Did your father know?”
“No idea.” Crane didn’t sound concerned. “He put me on a boat to China when I was seventeen, expressing the hope I’d die out there, and that was the last I ever heard from him. We didn’t get on, you know.”
“Yes. I heard.”
Crane shrugged. “He always disliked me, and I gave him plenty to dislike. He sent me off with no post, no acquaintances, no facility with the language, and no money, and I would undoubtedly have been dead within a year without Merrick, but as it happened, nothing could have suited me so well as Shanghai. It was five thousand miles away from Hector. So to answer your question as far as possible, I lived under my own name in China, I didn’t do so with any subtlety, and while I never communicated with him again, someone else doubtless did. In all honesty, I stopped caring a very long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Stephen said, unable to stop himself.
“What for?”
That your father was a swine. That my father’s dead. That you’re a Vaudrey.He grabbed for something that didn’t sound like pity. “I made the assumption you were like him. Them. That was unfair.”
“Understandable. A lot of people down in Lychdale make that assumption. Including, presumably, the jack’s maker.”
“We’ll see about that.”
