“Can I go, Dad?” Jem had a smaller bag on his shoulder and was pink with excitement, though trying very hard to be grown up and dignified about the job.
“Aye, of course.” Roger smiled at his son and swallowed all the words of warning and good advice that rose to his lips.
“Bonne chance, mes braves,” Fergus wished the boys gravely, and Roger stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, watching them stride firmly away, each with one arm wrapped protectively around his heavy bag to keep it from swinging. Jem, for all that he was taller than his cousin, was still a boy—but Germain seemed to have made one of those mysterious leaps by which children somehow alter themselves within the space of a night and rise up as a different version of themselves. The Germain of this morning was not grown up, but you could see the nascent young man beginning to emerge through his soft, fair skin.
Fergus sighed deeply, eyes fixed on his son as Germain disappeared around the corner.
“Good to have him back?” Roger asked.
“More than you can imagine,” Fergus said quietly. “Thank you for bringing him to us.”
Roger smiled, shrugging a little. Fergus smiled back, but then his gaze seemed to lengthen, looking over Roger’s shoulder. Roger turned to look, but the road was empty.
“When must you meet your inquisitors, mon frère?” he asked.
The word gave Roger a small qualm, but he didn’t think Fergus had used it in anything more than its most literal sense.
“Three o’clock,” he answered. “Is there something you’d like me to do in the meantime?”
Fergus looked him over carefully, but nodded, evidently finding his appearance in shirtsleeves, shabby waistcoat, and slightly worn breeches acceptable for whatever activity he had in mind.
“Come,” Fergus said, with a jerk of his head toward the distant water. “I may possibly have found milord’s guns. Bring a small amount of gold.”
He and Fergus had—with great care and a little help from Jem and Germain—decanted the sauerkraut into a variety of jars, bowls, and crocks in order to retrieve the gold—“Well, we dinna want to waste it, do we?” Marsali had said, reasonably—and hidden the gold in various places in the house. He stepped into the kitchen and abstracted a slip of gold from under a large and rather smelly cheese on top of the cupboard, hesitated for a moment, then took two more, just in case.
A BIG DANISH Indiaman was engulfing its cargo at the foot of Tradd Street as they passed. Boxes of salt fish, huge hogsheads of tobacco, bales of raw cotton, and the odd trunk, wheelbarrow, or coop of feather-scattering chickens in between, all lurched up the narrow gangway on the backs of sweating, half-naked men, to disappear into the black mouth of an open hatchway with the sporadic, gulping greed of a boa constrictor swallowing rats.
The sight of it made Roger want suddenly to duck out of sight and hide in the warehouse behind them. He remembered too well what it felt like to do that—over and over and over and over, hands blistered to bleeding, the skin flayed from your shoulders, muscles burning and the smell of dead fish and tobacco enough to make your head swim under the hot sun. And he remembered the sardonic eyes of Stephen Bonnet, watching him do it.
“Tote that barge, lift that bale—get a little drunk and you land in jail,” Roger remarked to Fergus, trying to make light of the memory. Fergus squinted at the heaving, staggering procession and shrugged.
“Only if you get caught.”
“Have you ever been caught?”
Fergus glanced casually at the hook he wore in replacement of his missing left hand.
“Not for stealing bales, non.”
“What about guns?”
“Not for stealing anything,” Fergus replied loftily. “Come, we want Prioleau’s Wharf; that’s where he berths.”
“He?” Roger asked, but Fergus was already halfway down the narrow street and he was compelled to walk fast to catch up.
Prioleau’s Wharf was a long, thin quay, and very busy, mostly with small boats tying up to unload fish—the city’s fish market was near at hand, and they were compelled to dodge small wagons and handcarts piled with gleaming silver bodies—some of them still flapping in a last desperate denial of death. The air was thick and humid, the smell of fresh fish and fish blood visceral and exciting, and Roger’s memories of the Gloriana’s and the Constance’s dank holds faded.
Fergus had dropped into a casual stroll and Roger did the same, looking to and fro—though he had no idea who or what they were looking for.