Page 47 of Go, Rogue

“Your brother is a handy man to have as a friend.”

Barclay, his fucking arsehole of a brother, wouldn’t thank him for keeping McGann alive, but McGann isn’t about to say that now. He sighs instead. He hates who he is and who his family is and the power they wield in the world. But if that power is the reason his heart is still beating, he’ll take it. Just this once.

“You’ve searched me and found nothing,” McGann says. “Because I’ve got nothing.”

He sends up a little prayer of gratitude to Elphame then, that he’s already seen his grandmother and given her the daguerreotype and the diary for safe keeping. “So, unless you plan to kill me anyway, you’d best let me go.”

The mustached man leans in close. “If I hear any inkling you have not been truthful, I will find you and I will kill you. Do you understand me?”

“Aye,” McGann says, already rising. “I do.”

Transatlantic Crossing, 1853

Four Years Later

McGann looks across the table at Catherine, hating what he’s just told her. He closes his eyes against his own words, not because he has any real moral objection to lying when he needs to to save his skin but because he doesn’t want to lie to her.

He doesn’t want to, but he just did anyway, omitting the conversation about his brother entirely from his story. And what’s worse—he’s about to lie again.

“So then,” he says, “I waited for my moment, and I clocked the bloke hard on the head. And then I snuck outside and did the same to the one who held the pistol. And then I made my way to the ship I’d secured passage on earlier that day, The Swiftsure. Dawn was already breaking, and I was due aboard at first light to go back to London. And there I stayed for the next four years.”

“And the key?” Catherine asks.

“The key fits a lockbox my grandmother gave to me. It was my mother’s and holds her few possessions. I put a few things in it as well, my diary from the time of the East India Company and a single daguerreotype I kept as my own insurance. I’d gotten it and a few others from a Scot I met in India. He’d been in America and worked with a bloke over there who made these kinds of pictures, portraits and the like, with their own darkroom they could move about. Took it outside even, from what he said. He’d brought the thing to India, and he’d some pictures of the governor general and the man’s military brass that were—hell, Menace, they were awful. Posing like hunters in front of the people they’d killed. Not just the insurrectionists, either, not that they’d think of themselves as such, but civilians too. Women and children.”

He shakes his head. “I’d like to say I’d never seen anything like it, but I’m a Highlander. I know well enough what the English are capable of.”

“Why did you keep it, Andrew? You must have known they’d come after you for it.”

“Aye. If they knew I’d done it, but I didn’t think they did. And even so, it was worth keeping. At least one of them, anyway.”

“It must be,” she says. “Or they wouldn’t have troubled themselves to come looking for it.”

“It makes a difference, what one sees with their own eyes instead of just hearing second-hand. It’s harder to brush a photograph under the rug than it is a story someone told you that they heard from someone else. With a photograph, you can see what the Company is doing around the world. You can see the consequences of it.”

She nods. “Where is the box now?”

“Where I left it in Jamaica, I hope. With my grandmother. I’ve no idea how they learned about it or even if it’s what they’re after.” He glances up at her, seeing the purple that lines the underside of her eyes and the sallowness of her white skin. “But I am sorry you were hurt because of it. And, in that light, you ought to sleep.”

“Can they open the box?” she asks, making no move to go to the bed, “without the key?”

“Nay. It’s a steel lockbox. Even if they knew what was in it, they’d not be able to open it without the key.”

“Is there a reason they’d wait until now to try and get it from you?”

“I’m sure there is one but hell if I know what it is.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense, Andrew—”

“Menace,” he cuts her off. “You need to rest.”

“I know,” she says. “I will, I promise. But, Andrew, you had that key with you the whole four years you were in London, did you not?”

He turns to look at her. “Aye.”

“And no one ever came looking for it then?”

He pauses. “Aye. Perhaps they did.”

There had been occasions when he’d come home exhausted from a long day of work and… not thought something was wrong, exactly. His feelings were never that clear. He’d just had an inkling, a whisper, that something was amiss when he’d opened the door to his rented flat. He’d never been able to put his finger on exactly what it was, and the few times he’d searched his rooms after, he’d come up with nothing. They looked exactly as he’d left them, so he’d stopped bothering.

And there had been a single incident as soon as he and Crawford opened the shipping offices. A break-in, nothing stolen or broken except the lock on the door. They’d chalked it up to a miscreant needing a place to lay his head at the time, but now… goddamn it.

“Well?” Catherine asks.

“Well, I’m the arse-end of stupid,” McGann says. “Now to bed.”