Page 9 of The Queer Principles of Kit Webb
He knocked, and the door was opened by a girl Kit hadn’t seen before. She had red hair and beneath her powder he could see a smattering of freckles on her cheeks.
“Good evening,” she said in what sounded like it was supposed to be a seductive lilt but actually came out with a bit of a nervous stammer. Kit knew the girls who were truly nervous didn’t work the door. This one, with her half-concealed freckles and her shyness and the way she moved a hand to her chest as if in an arrested effort to tug her bodice higher, was there to appeal to the sort of man who wanted to take care of a girl. Scarlett knew what she was doing, and so did this girl. He’d bet that within six months she would be set up in a cozy house by some man who was set on rescuing her. And bully for her. Kit hoped she fleeced the fellow.
“Would you tell your mistress that Kit Webb is here to see her?”
She opened her eyes wide, and he couldn’t tell whether she recognized his name or whether she did that to all the men who called at the house. He took off his hat and she showed him through a series of rooms papered in shades of rose and ivory. They passed a salon in which a handful of men clustered around a woman who played a lively tune on the harpsichord, then a room in which men and women played cards, some of the women perched on the laps of their companions.
At the end of the corridor, the girl gestured to an empty parlor and instructed Kit to wait. He sat near the fire, gingerly lowering himself onto a delicate settee. The furniture on the ground floor of Scarlett’s establishment was all constructed along similar lines—chairs that seemed just a shade too fragile, tables that were maybe half an inch too low, all designed to make men feel like huge strangers in a feminine place. When Kit had first asked Scarlett about it, he had questioned her logic—wouldn’t it make more sense to fill the house with furniture built on a more masculine scale, so as to welcome paying customers? She had simply told him that the beds were sturdy and her pockets were full.
“It really is you,” came a throaty voice from the door. “I thought Flora had to be mistaken.”
“In the flesh,” he said, rising to his feet and turning to the door.
Scarlett crossed the room and took his hands, looking up into his face. “Twelve months, Kit.” He wondered if she could see the passage of time on his skin. He thought she might have new lines on her face, maybe another strand or two of gray hair among the auburn.
“The girl who answered the door,” he said. “Flora, I think you called her. Is she your sister?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Flatterer.”
“Daughter?”
“Clean living has made your mind go soft if you think I’ll admit to having a daughter old enough to own her keep.” Which, he noticed, was not a denial. “But what brings you here? I don’t dare hope it was for the pleasure of my company.”
“Intelligence,” he said.
“The usual arrangement, then?” She sat in one of the armchairs and gestured for Kit to do the same.
“Not exactly,” he said, sitting. In the past, she had worked as something of a scout for Kit and Rob. If one wanted to hold up a gentleman’s conveyance, one had to be sure the man carried enough on his person to make the job worthwhile. A highwayman also needed to know what roads the man was likely to travel, and when. Men, while in their cups and well satisfied, were liable to let this sort of information slip. Scarlett’s girls knew they’d be well compensated if they relayed useful details to their mistress.
“Pity,” she said. “I’ve a list as long as my arm of men I wouldn’t mind coming to harm.”
“Don’t we all,” Kit said.
“Sometimes when I hear about an especially bad one,” Scarlett said, “I think, Well, Rob would like to hear about that.”
Kit tamped down the swell of grief he felt at hearing Rob’s name. It felt unexpectedly fresh. He was used to grief, couldn’t even remember a time when he hadn’t been grieving somebody. But his parents’ deaths were half a lifetime ago, long enough for that wound to have long since scabbed over. And as for Jenny and—and everything that had followed from that, he had been too angry and tired and out of his mind with drink to remember now what it had felt like.
But he had grieved Rob while sober, and with plenty of time to go over the events of that last day again and again until the memory was frayed at the edges, blurry like a print in a book that had been handled too many times. He could hardly remember it without also seeing every moment he could have acted differently, turned back, picked a different mark, a different route, a different life entirely.
It wasn’t as if he and Rob had set out to become highwaymen, for God’s sake. Rob’s father had been a gardener at the manor; Kit’s parents owned a small tavern. They could each have followed in their fathers’ footsteps, and indeed they would have if it hadn’t been for the whims and caprices of the Duke of Clare.
“I should have visited you earlier,” Kit said, tearing his thoughts from events of a decade earlier and looking at the woman before him. It was a shabby thing to leave a woman alone with her grief.
A peal of laughter came from a room upstairs. Not that Scarlett was alone, of course. But a brothel keeper could hardly put on black crepe and draw the curtains.
“We’ve both been busy.” Scarlett glanced at his cane. “I heard you were injured but hoped it was a rumor.”
“If you heard the version of the tale that had me shot with a poisoned arrow in defense of Bonnie Prince Charlie, then I’m afraid it’s fiction. It was a very ordinary pistol and a very frightened coachman. But I didn’t come here to bore you with tales of my injuries. Somebody came to me for help,” he said. “A stranger.”
She raised her eyebrows. “After nearly a year, it’s a stranger who gets you to come to me? She must be pretty.”
“He,” Kit said absently, and Scarlett’s eyebrows rose even higher. “But no, that isn’t why I’m tempted.”
“Then why?” She toed off her slippers and stretched her legs toward the fire.
“Because,” he said carefully, “he knows who I am.” He had debated whether to tell her this. He didn’t want it to sound like an accusation. “He knows my name, and who I—who Rob and I, rather—used to be.” There were only a handful of people who knew enough to make the connection. He and Rob had been prudent about that, if about nothing else. And Scarlett was one of them.
He thought she’d protest her innocence, but instead she frowned. “That’s troubling. I don’t like it.”
