Flynt knew he should call into Wood’s workshop again to convey his heartfelt apologies over keeping Jack from his employment for so long, and deliver a further promise to make financial amends for the lost time. The carpenter wouldn’t accept it but Flynt would still offer. He’d do it presently, he decided, and ordered a brandy. His muscles were stiff and sore following the encounter with John Duck, and his heart was bruised by Bess’s words. It was true that sometimes truth comes from the most unexpected source. The girl was sly, street-smart and, by necessity, self-interested, but that didn’t mean she could not assess him with accuracy. He was a dangerous man, he had long since not only accepted that but used it to his advantage. He could defend himself with ease and kill when he had to. He might regret it afterwards but didn’t hesitate when he felt it necessary. Her contention that he professed to labour on the side of the angels was also accurate, though Colonel Nathaniel Charters, like Lucifer, was more of a fallen one.
Where she was most painfully on target was when she said that he was bad luck for those close to him. He knew that to be true. He had lost friends, both those of long standing and those who might have become such. And he mourned them all, for he knew that, in some cases, if he had not been part of their lives then they might well have lived.
But he could not focus on that now. He had work to do. He drained the glass, picked up his hat and had just reached the door when a voice called to him from a table hidden deep in the shadows behind the door. ‘I never thought I’d see the day when a Scotch bastard like you would fail to pull a doxy.’
The voice was familiar but Flynt’s hand automatically rested on the handle of his cane as he strained in the darkness to see who sat at the table.
‘No need for alarm, Jonas,’ the man said, bringing his face into a beam of light from a high window. The man was handsome, his face smooth and youthful, even though he matched Flynt in years, but where Flynt kept his dark hair cropped close, his was long, blond and tied back. ‘Old friends have no need of weapons drawn, do they?’
The smile that spread Flynt’s lips was genuine but felt strange given his earlier brooding. ‘Gabriel Cain! I took you for dead.’
Cain rose and held out his hand, which Flynt grasped tightly. ‘Perhaps I am, perhaps we all are, and what we call life is merely hell, or at best purgatory. But that is a matter for the clerics to debate, not rogues like you and I. If this is life or the afterlife, then we must enjoy it while we can, eh?’
Cain settled back into the shadows and Flynt took the seat opposite, not caring if his back was exposed for he knew this man would protect it. He saw a bottle of brandy on the table and two glasses, one of which sat before Cain, half-filled. ‘It’s been what, four years, since I laid eyes upon you, Gabriel. Where have you been?’
‘Life grew a little too heated for me in London and I took myself to parts more rural until matters cooled sufficient that I could return.’
‘The law or an angry husband?’
Cain’s look was reproving. ‘I was too slippery for the law, Jonas, you know that.’
Flynt smiled. An inability to keep his breeches buttoned was ever his old friend’s downfall. That he had never contracted a dose of the flapdragon was thanks more to good fortune than care. ‘Four years,’ Flynt mused. ‘That husband’s anger must have been prodigious.’
‘Indeed it was, and he was a powerful man with equally powerful friends. I had to wait until he went to his reward before I felt it safe to return.’
‘And to reacquaint yourself with his widow?’
A wistful sigh. ‘Alas, she took my enforced absence as a reflection of my lack of affection for her rather than a means of self-preservation, so she has expressed little desire to enjoy any future congress. ’Tis a pity, for she is a fine-looking woman and her late lamented was as much use to her in the tup as a dog has for a side pocket, but there we have it. Anyway, there are other wives.’
‘And husbands.’
Cain laughed. ‘Always the way of it!’
‘How long have you been back?’
‘A few weeks.’
‘And we only now meet?’
That brought a shamed look. ‘I have felt it prudent to continue to lay low as much as possible until I sniffed the air a little. The old bastard may be gone but his friends remain. I did call at your old lodgings but you had moved.’
Flynt made a habit of moving as often as possible but leaving no forwarding address. His longest period in one place was in his current room within the Golden Cross coaching inn, where he was comfortable.
He asked, ‘And the air is now sweeter?’
Cain laughed. ‘As sweet as ever it is in this stinking cesspit of a city. But, by God, I missed its stench. And you, Jonas, I missed you.’ He lowered his voice a little. ‘Are you still active upon the heaths?’
They had both followed the highwayman life, working in tandem or singly. Flynt had preferred to work alone but he had met and liked Cain, who had proved to be a loyal, trustworthy man. For a thief.
‘That life became too hot for me, too,’ Flynt said, truthfully.
‘We are all within a judge’s fart of Tyburn, my friend. So what dark arts do you engage in now? You didn’t return to the crack lay, did you?’
‘When I have to, but Old Tom Schofield’s death took the pleasure out of that.’ Old Tom had stumbled in the street and under the hooves and wheels of a delivery wagon. ‘I make a modest living turning a card and throwing a dice or two. I keep myself out of trouble when I can.’
Cain couldn’t conceal his disbelief. ‘You have turned square cove?’
Flynt smiled at his old friend’s reaction. ‘As much as a man such as I can be. But what of you?’
‘This and that, my friend. A job here, a job there. Always one step ahead of the magistrates of this fair land and at least two from the hangman. But we should have a drink together.’ He pushed the second glass towards Flynt and poured a measure. ‘Let us sit a while, and talk over old times, eh? That is, if you have the leisure in your busy life of turning cards and throwing dice.’
He could do nought until he received word from Bess, so dropped his hat on the table. ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’
Cain laughed. ‘It’s right glad I am to see you, you Scotch bastard.’
Flynt grinned, suddenly feeling lighter of heart than he had for months. ‘And I you, you cockney laggard.’
Cain raised his glass. ‘To good times and bad times.’
‘And those in between,’ Flynt said, then sipped at the spirit.
Even though he was pleased to be reunited with his old friend, Flynt still ensured that he did not imbibe overmuch. Gabriel Cain, however, was chirping merry by the time they had spent an afternoon reminiscing over old times, old robberies and old acquaintances, though Flynt knew that he had a prodigious capacity for liquor. The afternoon became evening and a meal was sought in the Black Lion, Drury Lane, Flynt prevailing upon Joseph Hines to grant them leave to use the private room upstairs, where they partook of seared steaks and potatoes. Once they had eaten, Cain lit himself a pipe and puffed smoke into the air in silence, his brow creased.
‘You seem pensive, Gabriel,’ Flynt observed.
‘No, just thinking,’ Cain replied.
Flynt smiled. ‘About?’
‘The names of taverns in this here city. This afternoon we were at the White Lion, here we be at the Black Lion. What is the fascination with lions in the minds of tavern keepers?’
‘They display a decided lack of originality, it has to be said.’
‘Then there’s the White Hart, the Four Swans, the Green Dragon – a mythological beast, to be sure, but still fauna. They seem obsessed with creatures.’
Flynt shrugged. ‘Signage, I would suggest. The beasts make for an eye-catching sign.’
Cain considered this while billowing tobacco fumes. ‘Aye, and some are so low that they might just do that, too.’ He began to laugh. ‘Do you remember that inn on the Hampstead road? The landlord thought we were flirting with the barmaid, who we took to be his daughter or niece…’
‘And it transpired she was his wife.’
‘The man was all of sixty years, if he was a day, and she was but twenty. And all we were doing was passing the time of day with the lass.’
‘Well, I was, but I had the feel that you were in earnest in your wooing.’
‘If yon regular customer had not tipped us the wink, I do believe that landlord would have utilised the fowling piece he kept behind the counter.’
‘Aye, a hasty retreat was called for.’
Cain’s mirth subsided and he fell silent again for a moment. ‘I visited again, when I returned from the country.’
‘You weren’t going to have another crack at the lass, surely!’
‘No, it was just a visit for an ale and perhaps a mutton pie. There was a new landlord, a new wife, older this time.’
‘Did the man sell up then?’
‘No, it seemed the lass was decided unhappy with her lot – her husband was prone to beating her – and she changed that circumstance by beating him to death with the stock of that fowling piece as he slept.’ Cain paused again to inspect the bowl of his pipe then proceeded to relight it. ‘Petty treason, they calls it, when a wife murders a husband. He deserved it but they hung her anyway. She was a fair-faced lass. Such a waste.’
The story cast a pall over the conversation. Flynt searched his memory to find the image of the young woman but found he could not. He recalled the incident but not her face and he wondered what that said about him. So many faces, so many stories, so many sad little deaths.
‘And what of your woman, Jonas? Did you return to her?’
He knew to whom Gabriel referred, for they had been close friends and he was one of the few who knew of her existence. Nevertheless, he felt the familiar sting as he recalled her face. ‘I did, just last year.’
‘And?’
‘And it was both painful and enlightening.’
He told Gabriel about his return to Edinburgh after fifteen years, of finding that Cassie, his stepsister and the woman he loved above all others, had in the interim married his boyhood best friend. Flynt had run away as a callow youth with a mind set to find adventure, but found only blood, death and an affinity with both. On his return, he found they had thought him fallen in some foreign field. There was a child, a boy, and Cassie had told him that he was the fruit of the marital bed but he suspected otherwise. The lad appeared older than the twelve years she had claimed and Flynt was certain he saw his own features reflected in his.
Gabriel listened to the tale without interruption, puffing on the pipe. When Flynt fell silent, Gabriel removed the stem from between his teeth and tapped the residue of the tobacco onto his plate.
‘I know you well, Jonas, and I know you are not a man who finds revealing such personal details easy, and I am right honoured that you share them with me. You spoke of Cassie often, though that is something you may not realise, given your tendency to the taciturn. But here’s what I say: you cannot return to the past, for it is gone and lives only in memory – and often that memory is more sun-kissed than the reality ever was. You carry this love for Cassie like a burden and allow it to weigh you down. If love exists, it should never be a burden, it should be something in which we rejoice. Accept that it has gone and move on. There are other women, other loves, and you cannot allow what was to cast a cloud over what could be.’ He grinned. ‘Look at me. I love freely and expansively. Tall, short, full-figured, slender, I love them all when I am with them.’
‘And when you’re not with them?’
‘I’m looking ahead for the next one.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in love. I recall you being most adamant about that.’
‘I grow older and my views become less shrill. My view now is that belief in love is like belief in God: some have it, others don’t, and it is not my place to dispute another man’s beliefs.’ He hesitated, which was something Flynt had never before witnessed. ‘I will tell you something to which I have never admitted previous. I loved once, most deeply. Like you I was little more than a boy but old enough to know that my feelings for the girl were more than friendship.’
‘Who was she?’
Gabriel waved a hand. ‘Her name matters nothing now but she was beautiful, the daughter of a landowner in Surrey, not noble-born but squire by right of purchase. I was apprenticed to the groom of the estate, did I ever tell you that?’
Flynt shook his head. He knew Gabriel had hailed from the streets of St Giles originally, that like him had learned how to fight and kill in the army, but that was the extent of it. Neither of them had spoken much of the lives of the boys they once were.
‘Well, it was where I developed my love for the horses, both riding them and betting upon them. She and I, well, let us say that we discovered each other most fervently behind a haystack.’
The image of Cassie’s face, her head back, neck arched, as they writhed together on his narrow bed in Edinburgh came to Flynt’s mind. That was where they had discovered each other.
‘I thought then that she was the great love of my life,’ Gabriel said softly. ‘The difference in our stations seemed not to trouble her in the slightest and we continued to discover each other with considerable abandon. That girl had a disdain for decency that appealed to my burgeoning base nature most devoutly.’
Cassie again, her smooth skin, her soft lips, her breathy voice as she said his name…
He pulled himself from the memory to ask, ‘So what happened? Did her father end it?’
‘He did, but not through any certainty of purpose. He introduced her to some minor but near-impoverished noble, her dowry I believe was most attractive to his family, and she decided she’d discover him too, while still avowing love of me. The greatest truth you can tell another is that you love them. It is also the greatest lie. It was but two days before that she professed adoration and then dropped me like a handful of hot manure and married the fellow. I was devastated, of course, but I soon found solace in the arms of the wife of one of the estate tenants and she became the first to whom I uttered that greatest lie. I have repeated that lie many times since. Nevertheless, I do often think about that girl, and whether she found happiness. It be true that you never forget your first.’
He stopped talking, as if he had run out words, and his eyes lost focus for a moment as he gazed at something over Flynt’s shoulder. The memory of a face perhaps, or the echo of a voice. Flynt had adopted that look himself many times. He was unsure he could ever fully cast off this yearning for what was, because it had transformed into what might have been. It was the sense of loss with which he could not cope. Lost loves, lost friends, lost opportunities. And all because his need for adventure had proved greater than his need for Cassie.
Gabriel leaned forward as if sensing Flynt’s thoughts. ‘Let me speak plain, Jonas, as only old friends can. You did not love the woman, elsewise you would not have run off as you did. It is the idea of her that you love and that is the most insidious kind of torment.’ Then he smiled. ‘My point is this, never look back, for even the good memories can harbour pain. And there is an abundance of that in the present without inflicting further upon ourselves.’
He was roused from any further brooding on his faults by the landlord opening the door and admitting young Jack. The boy turned hesitant when he spied Cain sitting at the table. ‘Sorry it took so long, Mr Flynt, but I weren’t sure where you was.’
Flynt saw the question in Jack’s eyes. ‘All is well, Jack, you can speak freely in front of Gabriel. He is an old and trusted friend.’
The words sprang readily to his lips and surprised him. He had few real friends, and even fewer who he would trust with his life, but Gabriel Cain was such a person.
‘I has that address for you, I writ it down,’ said Jack, obviously still unsure. It spoke well of the boy that he remained cautious. He held out a slip of paper and Flynt glanced at the scrawl. The boy had his letters but his hand was far from perfect.
‘She hides in the Rookery?’
Jack nodded, his eyes again flitting to Cain, who asked, ‘Who hides in the Rookery?’
The Rookery was a ramshackle conglomeration of tenements, backyards and warren-like streets and alleyways. It was a place the lost, the lonely and the lawless used as refuge, hiding from life among the poor and the desperate.
‘A lady I must find,’ Flynt replied without hesitation. ‘She is in some peril.’
Cain was suddenly less drunk than before. It was something Flynt had seen him do many times. He might spend a night on the brandy but he could snap into sobriety in an instant when the need arose.
‘And you wish to save her from this peril?’
‘I do.’
‘Why? What is she to you?’
Flynt now hesitated. He trusted Gabriel but couldn’t tell him everything. ‘I’ve never met her, but I must find her and keep her safe, for she’s perhaps the conduit to a man I seek.’
‘You never change, Jonas, always there for a lady in distress, eh?’ Cain’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are working on something?’
‘I am.’ Flynt hoped he wouldn’t ask anything further.
Cain was silent as he processed this information. ‘And the doxy you spoke with today, and sent this young cove after, she is key to finding the lady.’ He wasn’t asking, he was stating it as fact. Gabriel Cain was always fleet of thought. He did have another query, however. ‘And who threatens her?’
Flynt again saw no reason to lie. ‘The Trasks.’
An eyebrow raised. ‘Good God, that brace of hellhounds should have been put down long ago. And is it safe to assume if they hunt this girl then they also seek this gentleman?’
Before Flynt could confirm that, Jack cleared his throat. ‘That’s another reason why I took so long, Mr Flynt. I weren’t the only one what was on Bess’s tail.’
‘Not the Trasks?’
‘No, spotted a cove as soon as I left you. Bess didn’t have no notion that he was at her back and he didn’t know I was at his. But he followed her from the White Lion to the Rookery.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Cove I knows, does some peaching when he can. I would hazard he sees a way of turning some coin. He’s a cunning rogue and his peepers is ever open for anything that might be traded to his advantage.’
Flynt put it all together. ‘The Trasks are none too subtle in their ways, so it’s an easy thing to assume that this fellow knows they are searching for Sal and perhaps knows that Bess is friendly with her. He could be keeping watch on her in case she knows where she is. I’d lay odds he’s already on his way to parlay that address for coin.’
Cain stood, picked up his hat and when Flynt had not moved, gave him an impatient stare. ‘So, do you intend to sit there and simply digest your meal or shall we go save this lady from whatever depredations the Trasks have in mind? I know that pair, as do you Jonas, and if they get to her first, they will not be gentle.’
‘I’ll be coming with you, Mr Flynt,’ Jack said.
Flynt stood. ‘No, you get home. This work is not for you.’
Jack was defiant. ‘Bess is my girl…’
‘You’re a flash lad, but this may turn bloody and you are not cut out for such activity. This is what I do.’ He jutted his chin towards Cain, standing at Jack’s side, and amended his statement. ‘This is what we do. We’ll look out for Bess, have no worries.’
Cain rubbed Jack’s mop of fair hair, an action not appreciated by the boy. ‘For luck,’ Cain explained.
‘How does messing up my strummel bring you luck?’
Cain laughed and flipped a coin with his thumb towards Jack before making his way to the door. ‘Who can say, Jack my lad? It certainly can’t hurt!’ He turned to watch Flynt pick up his coat and cane. ‘Like old times, Jonas, eh? Lock up your valuables, your homes, your wives, prime your pistols and sharpen your blades, for Cain and Flynt are together again!’
He laughed as he descended the stairs, leaving Jack’s expression puzzled. ‘Is he always like this?’
Flynt positioned his hat, pulled on his coat, and threw a coin he’d fished from his pocket to the boy, who caught it with ease. ‘You’ll grow used to him, Jack.’
Jack nodded his gratitude for the money but gave the empty doorway a careful look. ‘I ain’t so sure about that, Mr Flynt. You be careful with him. What Bess said about you? I feel that about your friend there. He ain’t right…’