Page 3 of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb
He took one of her hands. Neither of them were particularly affectionate by nature, but she squeezed his hand with both of hers. It was the first time since returning to England that he had truly seen a trace of his childhood playmate. When he left for the Continent, she had still been barely out of pinafores, and now she was coiffed and powdered and the mother to his three-month-old sister; she had become as cold and shrewd as all the duchesses of Clare who had preceded her.
Sometimes he wondered exactly how his father had managed to convince Marian to marry him. The union had been presented to him as a fait accompli, the news arriving at Percy’s lodgings in Florence troublingly soon after the news of his mother’s death. It plainly wasn’t a love match. Marian remained tight-lipped on the subject, and Percy and his father were hardly on cordial enough terms for such a conversation.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, pitching his voice as gently as he could.
She shook her head, and before he could say anything else, Marian’s maid returned, and they let go of one another’s hands.
Chapter3
All sorts of people came to Kit’s. That was the point of the place, the point of coffeehouses in general. Ink-stained Grub Street hacks could get out of their cramped hired rooms, shopkeepers could pretend to be intellectuals, and well-shod gentlemen could get their hands dirty—but not too dirty.
What Kit sold was the fiction of democracy, accompanied by the aroma of coffee and tobacco and the company of a pretty serving girl. An afternoon in a coffeehouse was a chance for everyone to pretend the rules were less important than conversation. It was Twelfth Night, it was Carnival, but it took place in broad daylight, with everybody involved dead sober and wide-awake, with newspapers and hot drinks to lend everything the faint sheen of respectability.
Still, they didn’t get too many gentlemen like the one Kit noticed in the corner. He was wigged and powdered, a birthmark too dark to be real affixed above one lip. Even from across the room, Kit could tell that the man’s coat—wool of a violet so dark it was nearly blue, adorned with gold braid and brass buttons—must have cost a small fortune. The buttons alone would be worth nicking, as would the expanse of lace that spilled over theman’s wrists. He had one leg crossed over the other, revealing, beneath the hem of his violet knee breeches, thin stockings of the palest lavender, embellished with a pattern of white flowers that crept up the side of his calf. On his feet he wore shiny black shoes with silver buckles and a small but obvious heel. At his hip he wore one of those shiny, ornamental swords that gentlemen insisted on swanning about with.
The man didn’t have a newspaper open before him, nor a book, nor even a broadside. Apart from his cup of coffee—untouched, Kit noticed—his table was empty. Instead of sitting at the long table at the center of the room, which was where most unaccompanied patrons chose to sit, this man lounged at one of the smaller tables that lined the walls. It was off to the side but not in the shadows. It was almost as if he wanted to be looked at. It stood to reason, Kit supposed—one didn’t wear purple coats or high-heeled shoes if one wished to remain unobtrusive.
Odder still, the man wasn’t talking or reading or taking snuff. He wasn’t even drinking his coffee. Instead, he was doing one thing, and he was doing it incessantly—he was watching Kit.
“Don’t look now,” he murmured to Betty the next time she came out from the kitchen, “but the man at table four is up to something.”
She took her tray and made a circuit of the room, removing empty cups and exchanging remarks with a handful of regular patrons. “I could snatch his watch, his handkerchief, and his coin purse before he even reached the door,” she said when she returned. “Not that I will. Keep your hair on, I know the rules,” she added hastily and with audible regret. “My point is that the poor lamb’s about to have a very bad day. As soon as he steps onepretty foot outside, somebody’ll lighten his pockets. Maybe even before then, if I know Johnny Fowler.”
They both cast a sideways glance at Fowler, who was indeed watching the gentleman almost as intently—but more covertly—than the gentleman was watching Kit. Fowler’s mouth was practically watering. Kit sighed: he doubted Fowler would manage to wait until the gentleman crossed the threshold.
That was another thing coffeehouses were good for; an observant pickpocket could browse patrons for a likely target, follow them outside, and ply their craft. Hell, that was why Kit had thought to buy a coffeehouse in the first place—after spending hundreds of hours and countless pounds in such establishments, he figured he might as well try life on the opposite side of the till. And now it turned out operating a coffeehouse of his own was one of the few types of work—honest or otherwise—that he was fit for.
“But what’s he doing?” Kit asked. “The gentleman, not Fowler. Why is he here? Gentlemen usually come in groups of twos or threes, not on their own.”
“Maybe he’s looking to pick somebody else’s pocket,” Betty said.
“Maybe,” Kit mused. This man wouldn’t be the first thief who dressed as a gentleman in order to throw off suspicion. He wouldn’t even be the first thief to actuallybea gentleman. “But he’s only looking at me, not the room.”
“You sure you don’t know him?”
Kit raised his eyebrows at her. “I think I’d remember meeting the likes of that.”
He chanced another look at the man. Kit was good at remembering faces—he had to be, both in his present line of work and his former one. And he knew he had never seen that man before.Beneath the powder, the man’s face was unremarkable—straight nose, a jaw that was neither weak nor strong, eyes of some color that was neither dark nor light. His eyebrows were a pale wheat, meaning that the hair beneath his wig was likely even lighter. It was hard to tell, what with all the stuff he had on his face, but he was probably not an unpleasant-looking man. Maybe even handsome, in a bland sort of way.
With the powder, patch, and rouge, not to mention that very stupid wig and a frankly unethical quantity of purple silk, though, he was exquisite. There was, unfortunately, no other word that did the man justice. Kit found it hard to look away. Within an hour of the man’s arrival, he could have described the precise number and variation of flowers on the bastard’s stockings.
There was always the possibility that he knew who Kit was, but Kit had covered up his tracks pretty well. Only a handful of people knew Kit in both his identities, and nearly all of those were past confederates in whose interest it was that Kit never be exposed. Still, he had always suspected that revenge would come to find him one day, but he hadn’t expected it to arrive in a purple coat and with lavender ribbons in its wig.
But no, this man wasn’t looking at Kit with anything like malice. If anything, he looked... curious. Maybe even appreciative. Kit was just letting his imagination get the better of him.
So Kit ignored the man, or at least he tried to. He filled and refilled the kettles that hung over the hearth. The sun began to set behind the gray stone buildings across the street. The patrons at the long central table gradually filtered out and were replaced by new customers. Kit brewed pot after pot of coffee, and whenever he looked out of the corner of his eye, he saw dark velvet, a shiny shoe, and a pair of keen eyes.
His mind, he decided, had been finally driven over the brink by too much boredom, and now it looked for intrigue where in reality there was only a reasonably attractive man paying him too much attention.
Finally, Kit left Betty to manage the shop and stomped upstairs to punish himself by balancing the books.
He always left the door to his office not only unlocked but open. Across the landing, the door to his bedchamber was fastened by a heavy bolt, but he wanted Betty to be able to reach him—and his dagger, his pistol, and the rest of the modest arsenal he kept about his person—with a single shout. He also wanted to be able to hear the hum of voices from down below. He wanted to hear the clatter of cups, the sound of chair legs scraping across the wood floor, all almost loud enough to drown out the sounds of the street outside his window. Anything was better than silence.
And in through that unlocked door walked the powdered, beribboned gentleman.
Kit didn’t say anything, nor did he get to his feet. It would be not only useless, but an admission that he didn’t have the upper hand, if he asked what this man thought he was doing. Instead, he calmly rested his dagger on the table before him, his hand relaxed on the hilt. For some reason, the sight of this made the stranger break into a broad, slow smile, revealing a row of small white teeth that transformed what might have been a pleasant face into something altogether vulpine.
“Oh, marvelous,” the stranger said. “Really, well done. You are Kit Webb, are you not? Short for Christopher, middle name Richard, alias Gladhand Jack?” He pulled a chair out from the wall and brought it to face Kit’s desk, and then he sat, one legdelicately crossed over the other as he had done downstairs. That surprised Kit, even more than the fact that this man knew who Kit was. This man was rendering himself vulnerable, open to any attack Kit might choose to make, and surely he knew that Kit had every motive to attack him. “I’m Edward Percy.”
