“Poaching?” his lordship had asked the gamekeeper.
“He had nothing on him, my lord, no snares or slings, no bounty.”
“I just got lost,” Lucian had said.
The lordling had looked at him, astonished. “It speaks.” He had leaned closer. “Say, should I report you for poaching, and have you sent to the jail?”
“No, sir.”
“That would be no, my lord to you.”
Lucian had said nothing.
“Hold him.”
The gamekeeper, with some reluctance, had shoved his arms up behind his back and gripped him tight. Lucian hadn’t struggled; he had known what was coming but he hadn’t wanted to go to the jail. Rutland’s son had punched him in the mouth so hard he had heard the crack of his tooth inside his skull. He hadn’t felt the blows to his gut until he had come to, curled up and wheezing on the kitchen floor. The gamekeeper had given him a tea towel to mop up the blood, then he had marched him all the way to the gatehouse and told him not to lurk on his betters’ property. Back in London, Master Graham had been very disappointed in him for brawling and ruining his shirt and had told him to work at the back of the shop until he didn’t look a fright anymore. The cut on his lip hadn’t stayed closed, so the payment for the stitches had been taken out of his meager wages. Nothing could fix the broken tooth.
In the days after the beating, while he had swept the shop floors and carried antiques in and out the back entrance, his daydreams of revenge had morphed from a boy’s na?ve idea of justice to something more systemic and vast. He wouldn’t just kill Rutland—he would wound him in the only place that truly hurt a man: his coffers. It required him to become wealthy and powerful, too.
“How does a man become rich?” he had asked Graham when his mouth had healed.
“Well, he must be born rich,” Graham had replied, visibly puzzled by the question.
“And what if he isn’t?”
“Then he must employ other men and have them earn money for him, while he’s working on another enterprise, and so on,” Graham had explained.
Lucian had watched him suspiciously. “If you know all that, why are you doing this?” He had waved at the menagerie of frivolous, broken things crowding the room. Graham had shaken his head as though Lucian had said something stupid. He had run his age-speckled hand over the winged back of a French divan, as if to soothe the piece. “Why would I make money for the sake of money, if I can spend my life working with beauty? History? Things that require care?”
Lucian had thought Graham stupid then, at least on the matter of money. The next time he had been sent to fetch a damaged side table from a fancy house, he had stolen his first valuable. Then he had enrolled in evening and Sunday classes to improve his writing, arithmetic, and rhetoric. He began reading trade journals and the finance section in Graham’s newspaper, and Graham, delighted by his apprentice’s effort to better himself, had offered him the spare room above the shop for a shilling a week. This had saved Lucian time, and he soon learnt that time was money, too. Had Lord Percy not split his lip with his signet ring, he might’ve done something brash and ineffective instead of using his brains. No, he wouldn’t feed Lord Percy to the Thames. Yet.
“Lord Percy intends to bid for a majority share in that textile company that fell apart last month and is being set up anew, together with Rutland,” Aoife said. “Bragged about it to Susan when he was in his cups—an opportunity for easy profits. God knows he needs those.”
“Mill and Cloth, down in Bristol,” he said absently. “I believe their securities are traded through the Bristol stock market.”
Aoife shrugged. She only delivered the intelligence. “That a good thing?”
He smiled. “I know the secretary who gatekeeps the trading.”
She was smiling, too. “I s’pose Rutland and ol’ Percy won’t get their profitable shares, then. May I call my Susan back now?”
“By all means.”
“Good. Where are you taking her for the honeymoon?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Your wife.”
He finished his drink. “I won’t. I’ll be in Fife right after the wedding.”
“At the mine? Drummuir?”
“Aye.”
“What a rotten groom you are to not give her a honeymoon.”
He gave a shake. “She’ll be glad enough to be shot of me. She doesn’t favor my type, judging by her wish list.”