Chapter Eighteen

JAMES LIFTED A tea crate full of identical indigo-coloured books from a chair and set it on the floor next to a rocking horse. “Hiding away in a little room together wasn’t entirely what I had in mind,” he said. “Though I can’t say I’m not enjoying it. But do you ever sleep?” He dragged the chair across bare floorboards to the window.

Vince leaned against a wall and hid behind a mustard curtain, glancing down at the street below. “Don’t need much.”

“How can you be certain they’ll pick this shop?”

“Saw their conditions in Gull’s Reach,” Vince said. “Need provisions. Told them your lot were patrolling east and north of the town today. Best place to get flour this close to the Reach is that shop. Know how they think.”

James sat with his legs spread wide, a hand on each knee. “And you’re certain they won’t simply buy some?”

“Might do,” Vince said. “Either way, we’ll know they trust my information. Gunbrides haven’t set foot on this side of Bezzle Bridge since they took over the Reach. Know they’ll be lifted on sight.”

“Why wouldn’t they just wait until nightfall? They know my Sentinels can only patrol until sunset.”

“Lambshead needs to make a point,” Vince said. “Needs to demonstrate he’s not afraid of you.”

“A show of strength,” James said. “I suppose there’s little to be gained by besting the Watch.”

He’d hoped for some reaction from Vince, some bristling, some grunt, but Vince gave him none. Perhaps the big man had finally caught on to James’s ways. “How long will we have to wait? I should have brought a cushion.”

“Plenty of padding in your posterior as is,” Vince said.

James laughed and leaned forward. “Was that a joke? An actual joke from the lips of Invincible Knight?”

Vince’s face didn’t shift an inch. He slipped off his overcoat and flung it onto the bed.

“Whose house is this?” James asked.

“Mr Norton, Beadle for the Watch. Told him I needed to use it.”

James dropped his voice to a whisper. “He isn’t home, is he?”

Vince shook his head. “Told him I’d need a couple of hours. Don’t need Rabbit finding out we’re working together.”

“He reports to her?”

Vince shrugged. “Might do. Can’t take the chance.”

“Someone else you don’t trust.” He lifted one of the books from the nearest crate and paged through it, reading name after name. “These are the Watch records?”

“Mr Norton has them going back years.”

The crates were stacked high in rows two or three deep. “Decades, more like,” James said.

Vince rolled up the sleeves of his top shirt, revealing thick forearms painted in black, green, and blue ink, all under a dusting of white hair. On his left arm, a mermaid lay seductively on some rocks, on his right a merman did the same. A fin-backed sea serpent wound its way from his elbow to his wrist, its jaws wide and ready to strike.

Vince asked if during all his travels at sea James had ever seen a real mermaid. Stifling a little laugh, James said he hadn’t.

“Sailor showed me one,” Vince said, quite seriously. “Dead, though. Years back, it was. Having a drink with him in the Star We Sail By. Pulled out this little bundle from his coat. Opened it up and showed me her remains. Little dried up torso with a stiff fish tail.”

“And did he charge you to see the body, by any chance?”

“Only a halfpenny,” Vince said, frowning.

James smiled at him again. What Vince had actually seen was most likely the top half a monkey sewn to the bottom half of a fish. A trick played by sailors to earn themselves a little extra coin while in port. “I’ve never seen so many tattoos on a landlubber.”

“Like them,” Vince said.

“I can see that. Know many sailors who would take umbrage at you having an anchor.” James had noticed the anchor on Vince’s upper arm during their time in the cherry house.

“None who’ll say it to my face.”

“Not if they have any sense. Though I can’t say I’ve ever seen one quite like that, with the spindle in the crown.”

Vince touched his shoulder. “Dad’s symbol,” Vince said. And nothing more.

“Do the rest mean anything?”

“Some of them.” He pulled at the plunging collar of his shirt and tapped the octopus beneath. Its tentacles wriggled out, diving beneath the water and emerging to attack the ship above his other nipple. “Got the body done years back, when I started making headway in the town. Eight other people in my way, backalong. Eight gang leaders. Each time I got rid of one, I got a tentacle added. Thought it would take years to complete.”

“How long did it take?”

“An autumn.”

James laughed again. “So efficient, Mr Knight.”

“Not the word people normally use.”

“I can’t imagine there was much left of them when you were done.”

Vince didn’t answer. He covered his chest. “Been staring at the rocking horse since you came in.”

“Have I?”

“Not sure it’ll hold your weight, to be honest.”

James faked a smirk. “They always remind me of my son.”

Vince finally turned his attention from the window. His brow furrowed, and his hands fell to his sides.

“Silly, really,” James said, ”but you know how sentimental sailors can be.”

Vince took another chair and put it by the window, close to James. He sat without saying a word.

“I was married once. A lifetime ago,” James said. “My husband and I took a home in a village in Scotland. A little cottage with trees and bushes, and a river at the end of the garden. We ended up adopting a child—a boy named Robert—from a family nearby. They had fallen ill and were unable to care for him. He was only a couple of weeks old when he came to live with us. We loved him immediately, of course. How could we not? His parents passed away shortly afterwards, and we raised him as our own.

“He grew to be a fine boy, with the blondest hair you’ve ever seen. He loved to be outside, made friends with everyone. My husband made a rocking horse for him, which he loved more than anything. He used to climb onto it every night before bedtime, and when he’d start to nod off, I’d carry him to his bed.

“One day, when he was five years old, he had two friends call on him. They played in the garden, as they’d done a hundred times before. He loved to climb trees, especially the one stretching out over the river. I had tied a rope to a branch and we used it to swing out over the water. I always took it down afterwards and hid it. But Robert must have known where I kept it because that day he and his friends put it back up without my knowing.

“I’d received a letter and was reading it in my kitchen when the two boys ran in, shouting. Robert had been swinging from the rope and gone into the freezing cold river. He’d been swept downstream. They couldn’t see him.”

Vince placed his hand on James’s knee.

“I went out with them to look,” James said. “We called after him. I found him caught in some reeds. I waded into the river to pull him out.” He rubbed his face and sat up straighter. “My father used to say calm seas carry no ships. To experience peaks and troughs is to know one is alive. I had never experienced a trough like it, before or since. It felt as though someone had pulled the heart from my chest and tossed it aside.”

James swallowed hard. “I’ve faced the Spanish armada, I’ve been caught in squalls I thought would never end, and I’ve stared down the barrels of more muskets than I care to count…but I’ve never been more frightened than I was that day.”

Vince didn’t speak but his expression had changed into something altogether new. His gaze soft but all-encompassing.

“It happened on Midwinter’s Eve,” James said. “There’s a special kind of cruelty in grieving while the rest of the world celebrates. Not long after, my husband and I parted ways for good, and I returned to sea.”

Vince squeezed James’s leg, just a little. Just enough.

James sniffed and wiped his face again, trying to smile. “Sorry, hah, sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Vince said. “Grief needs no apology.”

James took Vince’s hand. How warm it felt. How solid.

On the street below, people shouted. Four Gunbrides drew up to a shop in a horse and cart. They quickly drew their weapons and ran inside.

“This doesn’t feel right,” James said. “Just letting this happen.”

“Part of the plan,” Vince said.

“Do the shopkeepers know that?”

In a matter of minutes, the Gunbrides returned to the road and threw bags onto the cart before racing away.

“Now what?” James asked.

Vince gathered his overcoat from the bed. “Back to the Reach. Talk to Lambshead.”

James stepped closer to him. “I don’t like the thought of you going alone.”

Vince turned up the collar of his coat. “Worried about me?”

“A little bit. Perhaps. Your luck will run out eventually, you know.”

“Not luck. Know these people. How they think.”

James squinted at him. “You may know this lot intimately but not the next generation. Or the one after that. Sooner or later you’ll find yourself left behind. Ignorant of their ways. And then they’ll get the better of you. It is the nature of the young to sweep away the old. They can’t help it. They are the crashing waves, and you are but a shell on the sands.”

“Won’t come to that. Don’t plan to do this forever. Need to clean up the mess I made. Then it’s someone else’s problem.”

Vince slid his hand around James’s waist.

“We’re supposed to be working,” James said with a grin. He leaned in and kissed Vince on the lips. With his free hand, Vince cupped James’s crotch. James groaned and kissed him harder. Had they not been in someone else’s home, James would have pushed Vince onto the bed.

“When will I see you again?” James asked.