had done it more than a century ago? He needed to open the case.
Quare could feel Master Magnus’s probing gaze. The master was studying him as intently as he was studying the watch … and with an identical purpose: to divine his secrets. He had said he trusted no one, suspected everyone, and just because Quare was no traitor did not mean he had no secrets he wished to hide.
Of course, Master Magnus had been correct in his suspicion that Quare had not been entirely forthcoming about his rooftop encounter with the woman – a woman whom, despite the master’s scorn, he still believed to have been the real Grimalkin and not an imposter.
After all, she had told him so.
She had regained consciousness while he was still marvelling at her unmasking. Master Magnus had asked if he had found her attractive, but the truth was that neither at the time nor later had he thought in such conventional terms. The woman was not beautiful but uncanny, her pale blonde hair seemingly spun out of moonlight, her skin like ivory, an exotic cast to her angled features – features streaked now with soot and grime and blood from where he had struck her – that provoked his fascination rather than his admiration. He saw a blend of races there but could not identify the mixture. She might have fallen from the moon, a handmaiden of Selene.
She didn’t make a sound. All at once the dark pools of her eyes opened, and she regarded him with frank but calm curiosity. Such self-possession threw Quare further off his mark. It was as if their positions had been reversed, and he was the one who had been surprised and rendered helpless, his secret exposed, his prize stolen, his honour – indeed, his very life – hanging by the thread of a stranger’s mercy. He felt interrogated by her stare and drew back, as if, bound though she was, she still constituted a danger. ‘I warn you,’ he said. ‘Do not cry out.’
She laughed softly … and, he thought, sadly; the sound sent a shiver down his spine. ‘I congratulate you, sir.’
‘What?’ Her voice made him think of fresh country breezes and springtime rain showers, as if he were back in his native Dorchester and not squatting upon a foul London rooftop. Her accent, like her features, was hard to place.
‘You have caught the great Grimalkin.’ She seemed to mock herself, and him. ‘Now, what will you do with her?’
Quare felt drunk, or under a spell. He swallowed and attempted to marshal his wits. ‘You are my prisoner, madam. I will ask the questions.’
She laughed again, but this time there was no sadness in it; eagerness, rather. ‘Ask, then. I am bound to answer.’
‘Are you really Grimalkin? A woman?’
‘Have I not said it? You are a spendthrift with your questions, man. That is one of your three gone already.’
‘Three? What folly is this?’
She grinned. ‘And there is question two, fled as quickly as a man’s life. But I shall answer, as I must. You have captured me, sir, knocked me out and restrained me as I lay senseless. Yet it is not these ropes that bind me. By ancient compact must I answer truthfully three questions put to me by any man who holds me in his power.’
‘You’re mad,’ he said.
‘Ask your third question, and you shall see my madness,’ she promised. And there was that in her voice and her dark eyes which made him shudder and draw back farther still.
‘I know not what tricks you have up your sleeve, nor do I care.’ Quare sheathed his dagger and drew his pistol, which he cocked and held at the ready. ‘Do not think your sex will save you. Believe me, I will not hesitate to fire.’
This seemed to recall the woman to the reality of her circumstances. Or perhaps it was the reassuring feel of the pistol grip in his hand that made him see her in a more realistic light. In any case, she no longer seemed so eerie. The wild provocation of her manner, which had puffed her up like the bristling fur of a cat seeking to warn off a larger enemy, fell away, revealing a bedraggled creature more to be pitied than feared, a young woman – certainly no older than he, and perhaps younger – who lay entirely at his mercy. ‘Don’t,’ she said, and shrank back against the filthy tiles of the roof. ‘I beg you …’
‘I won’t,