The Queer Principles of Kit Webb - Cat Sebastian Page 0,88
to strangers.”
“I only want you to be safe, and the more emotional a job is, the less likely it is to go off without a hitch. You lose your instinct to back off.”
Kit had the distinct impression that Rob was talking about himself. “Are you certain you don’t want to tell me what’s been bothering you?” Kit asked.
“Nothing’s bothering me,” Rob answered.
“I’m not going to pry, but we both know that you haven’t been yourself since you got back. And that’s fine. Obviously, whatever kept you away was serious enough to—well, serious enough to keep you away. But if you want to talk to someone, you know I won’t spill your secrets.” Kit swallowed, suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that he was losing the best friend he had ever had. “I never have, you know.”
“I do. I do know. But I can’t. Trust me when I say that it would complicate your life more than you can even imagine.”
“Even so, Rob. When haven’t we been willing to complicate our lives for one another? That’s how friendship works.” At least, Kit had thought so.
Chapter 41
The weather, Percy decided, was suspiciously fine. It was the sort of crisp and clear late autumn day that made summer seem a distant and slightly vulgar memory and the coming winter seem almost implausible. Hardly fifty miles outside London, the fog and smoke were nowhere to be seen in the Oxfordshire countryside.
Truly, Percy could not have chosen more pleasant weather for a highway robbery.
Before leaving, Kit had shown Percy a map, pointing with one callused index finger at a place between Tetsworth and an area simply marked “pasture.”
“See that bend in the road? There’ll be a copse of trees right there,” Kit had said, a glint of excitement in his eyes. “It’s not so different from the place I showed you in Hampstead. Be there at dusk.”
They traveled separately, Kit and the sharpshooter together in a stagecoach, Percy on horseback, and Rob by his own means.
Early in the morning, Percy dressed in his finest riding costume and told Collins not to wait up for him, hoping the valet would interpret this to mean Percy planned a spree of debauchery. Then he rode to an inn, bought a round of drinks for the patrons, loudly announced his plan to buy a hunting dog from a man in Kent whose dog had recently given birth to a litter of puppies. That accomplished, he got back on the road in the direction of Oxfordshire, changed into nondescript clothes and removed his wig, and arrived at the designated copse of trees well before dusk and with a horse who had a distinct air of being hard done by.
He had brought with him a loaf of bread and a flask of ale but was too nervous to do more than break off crumbs of crust and roll them between his fingers. He checked the position of the sun in the sky. It was not quite dusk, but it was close, and still there was no sign of Kit.
There was some shameful part of him that hoped Kit and the girl did not turn up. Then Percy wouldn’t have to go through with this.
There was an even more shameful part of him that desperately needed Kit to come, because otherwise Percy would know himself to be abandoned.
Right when he was about to give up deciding which hope was more shameful, he heard soft footsteps and turned to find Kit approaching him. With him was a slight figure in breeches and which Percy would not have guessed to be a girl if Kit hadn’t informed him beforehand.
Percy was certain he had schooled his face into something suitably bland but still Kit greeted him with a long look and a warm hand on his shoulder. Then Kit reached into the satchel that was slung over his shoulder and pulled out Percy’s black prizefighting leathers, which Percy had given him the previous day. “Change,” Kit said.
Percy, spurred more by the vestiges of some old and defunct sense of propriety than by any actual principles, opened his mouth to object on the grounds that a girl was mere yards away. But then he went behind a tree and did as he was told. He plaited his hair and tucked it into one of Kit’s decrepit tricorns, then took the false scar, which was still intact after he had peeled it off the last time, and stuck it to his face.