Page 46 of Go, Rogue

But what he says is, “Aye, the key.”

And then he tells her briefly about the East India Company and what he’d done there. How he’d burned that vessel in Kingston Harbour so the Company could collect the insurance on the ship and the goods he’d sold off. How he’d kept up his end of that bargain but they’d hired a man to jam a pistol into his side anyway.

“And then,” she asks when he finishes, “how did you escape?”

So he begins to tell her that, too.

Port of Kingston, Jamaica

September 1849

Four Years Ago

The man with the pistol in his side drags McGann to the cellar of a roadside inn on the outskirts of Kingston. He searches McGann and, finding no evidence on his person, shoves him down a short set of stairs to the cellar. A different man is seated at a table there, waiting.

“Well then, Mr. McGann.”

This man, the one at the table, is well-accented, unlike the other pistol-equipped one. Well-accented means well-bred and well-educated. Odd to find his kind here.

McGann can’t see much of him because it’s dark in the grim little cellar where they’ve brought him, but he can make out an arrogant, beaked nose and a ridiculous mustache. One that hangs down too low over the man’s upper lip such that McGann wonders if the arsehole regularly catches pieces of his breakfast in it. He hopes he does and that it’s bloody embarrassing.

“I do expect you to cooperate, Mr. McGann,” the mustache says.

“That’s Captain McGann.” He squares his shoulders against whatever’s coming next.

The floor beneath his stool is dirty and the little room stinks like garbage and stale, days-old ale. This is the kind of place you bring a man to kill him, not to negotiate with him.

So why the well-bred bloke then? The dim-witted one with the pistol can pull the trigger just as well as this one can.

“I believe you know the terms of the deal you struck with the governor general?” the mustached man says. “I should not think I’d need to repeat them.”

“Nay, laddie. Dunnae think you would.”

The mustache twitches and McGann smothers his own smile. He enjoys playing the blustery Scot when it suits him. It suits him now because he knows what men like this think of him: that he’s a bastard nobody from the wilds of Scotland. The kind of man no one will miss if they sink a bullet into his flesh and leave him here in this stinking cellar to die. Because he’s a nobody, and nobody misses nobodies.

“You were meant to provide proof,” the lips beneath the mustache say.

“I did do. Your proof just finished burning out in Kingston Harbour. The whole of Jamaica saw that ship go down. You’ll get your insurance money.”

“And we are just to believe that all of your…” he pauses and the mustache twitches again, “documentation went down with it?”

McGann only shrugs. “Don’t see how that’s provable.”

“We have a problem then, because the deal you struck was for proof and you have not provided any. You have not kept to the agreement.”

McGann leans forward, his bulk making the stool scrape across the floor. “I have done, but that’s of no consequence to you is it? I signed your papers that said I held your lot in the highest regard and that I’d never seen hide nor hair of wrongdoing from you. I collected all the evidence to the contrary, including my own records and photographs and I set them alight out there in the harbor, just as I said I would. You’ll get the money from that fire, and nothing I could say about you now would hold any weight without evidence. That was the deal and it’s done. All of it.”

The mustache leans back in his chair and McGann swears he looks nothing but pleased with himself at his next words. “You know better than most what the Company does to men who do not hold up their ends of bargains. I recall you had several daguerreotypes to remind you?”

McGann shifts his weight again so the stool creaks and groans in protest. He could attack, taking his chances that the mustache isn’t holding a pistol somewhere on his person. But those are not good chances.

And even if this one isn’t armed, the one that dragged him here certainly is. And although that man isn’t here in this cellar, he’s surely still about somewhere, ready and waiting to use that pistol.

“Why have you not shot me already then?” McGann asks.

“It’s funny,” the mustached man says, “that you wouldn’t remember your betters. But I remember. Perhaps that’s why I am your better. Or one of the reasons, anyway. I went to Eton with your brother, you know. Came home with him once on holiday, after your father passed. You were there, living in some little shanty on the outskirts of the property. It was kind of Barclay to put you up, but you’ve never even once thanked him, have you? For doing the right thing by you when he needn’t have done anything at all?”

“You haven’t shot me because of my brother?” McGann asks, incredulous.