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Matthew reached into his coat and pulled out his card. “If you’re ever nearby,” he said as he tended it to him. The man took it. Their ways dictated he should give Matthew one of his own, but he did not. Instead, he merely muttered a goodbye and slunk out of the building.
Charlotte watched the door slam behind him.
“Strange fellow,” Matthew commented beside her. “Very strange indeed.”
“They’re all the same in this business, my lord.” They swiveled around in tandem to where the publisher was now speaking to them. “The price to pay for creativity, I suppose.”
There was an opportunity here, despite his beating her to the chase. She took it. “Has Mr. Huxley been in contact with you long?”
“A few weeks only, my lady,” he explained, filing Charlotte’s poem away. “He had a small lad drop off the first last year. I didn’t think much of it myself, but the Countess, Lady Singberry is on the board, and she was taken with his style.”
Matthew opened his mouth to speak, but Charlotte beat him to it. “Curious,” she breathed, then she turned to her brother. “I do think you were quite right. We should invite him to the house if he is so recently returned to London. I hate to think of him without company.”
Matthew nodded and smiled quite genuinely. He turned to the publisher. “You wouldn’t happen to have his address, would you?”
The man smiled, pulling out a small stack of cards from a set of wooden drawers behind him. He flicked through the lot of them until, at last, he wriggled free the one he had been looking for. He picked up his spectacles from where he had set them down after the poetry reading and intonated, “Walden Street, Whitechapel, London.”
Charlotte clapped her hands together. If the thief had thought to slip from her net forever, he had been sorely mistaken. She would make him rue the day he stole from her, one poem at a time.
She turned back to the publisher when he asked, with a smile, “Right, my lord, my lady. What can I do for the two of you today?”
Charlotte smiled right back and looked toward the street from the window. The man had done quite enough for her already.
—
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CHAPTEREIGHT
The Five Fields house stood tall, crooked, and yawning before Benjamin. It was a ramshackle place mostly built from brick, painted over with whitewash by its last set of tenants. An unseemly annex had been affixed to its right side, the roof of which had largely caved in. It sat at the very end of Walden Street, draped in near constant shadow; the wintry ivy which climbed up to the second story was as resilient in the face of darkness as its tenants.
It was hardly Kensington Palace, but it was home all the same. He didn’t bother knocking as he opened the black front door, carefully removing his jacket and affixing it to the coat rack. The small entrance hallway looked more like a crypt than the vestibule of any gentleman’s house—its floors, ceilings, and chandelier were greyed over with dust.
He pocketed his advance, moving it from his coat pocket to that of his trousers, and called out, “I’ve returned,” to the whistling of the wind. The silence didn’t break for his entrance, which meant most, if not all, of his friends were out. He could never know who was around, his fellow veterans coming and going at their leisure.
Steeling himself, he pushed open the swinging, squeaking door to his right, emerging into the dining room. It was empty, undisturbed. The green wallpaper had long faded, vibrant only where paintings had once been displayed, as if in a time-warp. There was a small mahogany table at the center of the room, atop which lay an earthenware saucer covered in ash and a set of bone dice—what remained of their night of Hazard three days past.
As he stepped back into the hallway, Benjamin noticed a flickering light in a room at the back of the house. The kitchen. His heart leaped in his chest. He followed the glimmer past the stairs, under the arch, and through the kitchen’s galley, much the moth to a flame, and tutted as he caught sight of Lamb laying in the corner of the scullery. The man was rolling his head back and forth, a brass pot in one hand and a fire poke in the other. His face was dappled pink by the kiss of a pub. He started as Benjamin leaned on the archway.
“Fletch! Oh, Fletch.” He sniffed, wiping the muck from his forehead. “I didn’t think you’d be back, not so soon. I didn’t think…” Lamb trailed off, his head knocking against the cupboard behind him. Where his eyes weren’t glossed over, Benjamin could see shame. “I was tryin’ to do you a gooden’, I was. I was tryin’ to make us a meal.” He let hang the pot, out of which rolled two sprouted potatoes.
“I take it your trip to the butcher was short-lived.” Benjamin’s voice was a little more authoritarian than he had meant it. He smothered the open flame of a candle with a lick of his fingers. “There is something to be said for your keeping me on my toes,” Lamb shot him a hopeful look, “But I rather hoped this time you’d actually make it to Culford & Sons without pissing it all away.”
