Chapter 11 #2
Shouts of laughter from the group by the fire made us both look over. Caleb was juggling three raw potatoes, with Sid standing nearby, ready to pitch him two more.
James scanned his cards. “If she’s as clever as you say, Maggie’ll keep how she feels about your ma and you separate.” He paused. “You’re also the best thief she has. My guess is she knows it.”
“I hope so.” I didn’t mention the special dodge Maggie said she might have for me. I didn’t need James to warn me against it; I was doubly wary now, plenty for both of us.
James laid a card face down. “Three.” He laid down his melds and set the three of clubs to the side with his usual grin, reminding me to keep up the pretense of our game.
“Two,” I said, laying down my own cards and sitting back with a satisfied look.
“Ach, Kit, how do you do that?” he grumbled in protest, his head bowed over the table as he swept up the cards. His voice was low. “God’s sake, just be careful. I don’t want you or Sarah hurt.”
When he looked up, I raised my glass toward him. “Thanks.”
He pushed the deck across the table. “Your deal.”
Before I left the taproom that night, I edged into the circle of thieves by the hearth, the fire crackling and spitting with the damp descending the chimney.
Cathy stepped back to include me, and I joined the general laughter, listening to Caleb’s story about having stolen a horse from a gentleman’s carriage house for a ride.
Jake and Nick—Billy and Tommy’s best mates—were there, and my every nerve was attuned to their responses to me, to stories, to everything.
As usual, they paid me absolutely no attention at all, but I couldn’t measure if they were avoiding my gaze or careless of my presence.
After half an hour, sipping my ale slowly so it wouldn’t soften my mind, I left the circle, unable to reassure myself that Sarah was safe.
James, standing at the bar, caught my eye. He read my look and gave the barest nod—not even the usual small lift of his chin, more just his eyes lowering and returning to mine. He’d keep an ear to the ground.
That night, awake in my room with Mary asleep nearby, her breath barely audible, I stared into the darkness, picturing the day Maggie was caught.
Ma tagging Maggie, somehow drawing attention to her so the jeweler knew to summon the constable. Knowing if Maggie was caught and sentenced, she’d have at least seven years to get her hooks into whatever man stood between them.
This was all supposition, but knowing what I did of my ma, I could see it.
My feelings toward Ma were so tangled, they were like knots on badly done embroidery.
Try to take them out, and you’d rip the cloth for good.
My mother had told me many times how selfish I was, that I’d driven her to drink, and toward the end, that the silver lining in her dying was she’d never have to see me again.
Afterward, I told myself that Ma didn’t wholly mean it, that she was ill, her heart rotten with gin.
She drank to submerge the fear we both lived and breathed and slept and for Sarah’s sake tried to pretend wasn’t there, that we’d lose our two small rooms, that we’d starve on the street.
It tore at my ma the same way it tore at me. In this we were the same.
But it gave me little pleasure to think of my mother, as most of my memories were not happy ones.
Entering our rooms to find her snoring by the stove, a half-empty bottle standing upright on the floor, for even drunk, she’d be careful not to spill it.
Waking to the scrape of our door to hear her giggling, taking a man to her bed, just on the other side of a hung curtain.
Turning over in our bed to see Sarah’s eyes open, shining in the light coming between the broken shutters.
“I don’t like it,” Sarah would whimper. I’d hush her, and she’d roll toward me, her hands covering her ears, one side of her face pressed against the bed, while I covered her other hand with my own.
My mother didn’t have friends the way other women did.
The first time I went over to my friend Livvy’s house, her ma and her friends were laughing together over their cups at their corner table.
The sight made me stare, and when Livvy asked what was the matter, I made no reply.
But that afternoon altered the way I saw my family, trenching my heart with an uncomfortable sense of difference.
Later, I realized that Ma didn’t trust other women, though she never said why.
Now, I suspected that if she’d done this terrible thing to Maggie, she might imagine every woman capable of the same.
Restless, I turned from one side to the other, yanking the quilt.
As for James, his recent seriousness and kindness surprised me not a little.
At the Silver Plover and again tonight, his manner had revealed genuine concern, even real affection.
He said he didn’t want to see Sarah or me hurt, and I believed him, for what other reason could he have for warning me about Maggie?
I thought of how James had taken every precaution against anyone in the taproom knowing what we were saying. Likely he’d become more cautious and less trusting because of his time in prison. I could understand how that would change someone.
But James had served less than a year. Maggie had served many times that amount, in brutal and cruel conditions.
God only knew how it had changed her.