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“I do, but I do feel badly about lying to my family.”
“That is the plight of an agent.”
“I know, but they are still under the impression I work as a Bow Street Runner.”
“It is for the best.”
“Is it?” Guy asked. “Because sometimes I question if that is true or not.”
Hawthorne bobbed his head. “Most people are not prepared to know the truth. They are content with what they think they know to be true.”
“I daresay you are underestimating my sister,” Guy said. “She is quite clever.”
“Most women are.”
“That is rather progressive of you to say.”
“It has been my experience that the weaker sex is not as weak as Society has deemed them.”
“I couldn’t agree more, but my poor sister spends her days tending to my sick mother.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” Hawthorne remarked. “Have you consulted with a doctor?”
“We have. However, I am of the belief that my mother hasn’t recovered yet because she is mourning the loss of my father so deeply.”
“It is hard to lose a loved one.”
“That it is, but we all lost my father that day.”
With a side glance at him, Hawthorne asked, “May I ask how you tracked down your father’s killer?”
“It was rather difficult.”
“I can imagine,” Hawthorne said. “Crime is rampant on the streets of London.”
Guy adjusted the reins in his hand. “After I left Cambridge to become a Bow Street Runner, I was given the most menial tasks. I was assigned to trail people or investigate servants stealing from their employers. It was tiresome and not at all what I’d signed up to do.”
“What did you do about it?”
“There was nothing that I could do,” he replied. “Every Bow Street Runner has to start at the bottom and work his way up. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t investigate my father’s murder on the side. So I spent every waking moment trying to trace his killer.”
“How long did that take?”
“It was more than three years before one of my informants mentioned a man bragging about robbing men along the stretch of road where my father died,” Guy shared. “Apparently, the man had been drunk and was sharing stories of his conquests at a tavern in the rookeries.”
Guy continued. “I went down to the tavern and waited for the man to make an appearance. It took me weeks before I finally met a man that fit my informant’s description.
“Once I saw him, I walked over to the table and bought him a drink,” Guy said. “We struck up a conversation, and it wasn’t long before the man was into his cups. He revealed that he had just robbed a man of his last coins, and that is when I noticed that he had some dried blood on his hands.”
“Did he kill the man?”
“I asked that man the same question, but he said he only stabbed him to get his attention,” Guy replied. “I had enough to arrest the man, but I still didn’t know if he had killed my father.” He frowned. “That is, until the man pulled out a pocket watch.”
“A pocket watch?”
“Yes. My grandfather had worked at a fancy manor and was gifted a pocket watch when he retired from service,” Guy explained. “It was a very distinctive watch, with an ornate design on the back.”
“What did you do?”
