‘I was in no danger,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’
He frowned at her apparent ingratitude. ‘Law and order, miss. It’s our job. Can’t have thieves running all over, can we?’
‘But you could have caught him and locked him up.’
His face admitted no comprehension. ‘Saved ourselves the cost of a hanging, is all.’ He exchanged a glance with his fellow, eyes rolling, eyebrows raised. Practically written on his face was: These Marshwic women.
‘I shall have words with your master, the mayor!’ she snapped at them, a threat without any teeth whatsoever. ‘I shall go to his office right now.’ Her voice sounded thin and pathetic even in her own ears.
‘You’ll be waiting a while then, miss. His nibs is off somewhere on his own business. No idea when he’ll be back at his desk. Now, if that’s all, miss, we’d better find someone to come and clean up this mess.’
She watched as they sauntered off, almost barging into Poldry as he came wheezing along. For a moment an absolutely incandescent rage gripped her, not at them so much as at a world that she could not change or affect, strive as she might. ‘How could you, Alice?’ she hissed, knowing, as she spoke, that she was being bitterly unfair. ‘How could you go to Northway’s men?’
‘How could you just run off after him? I thought you were going to get . . . I don’t know what could have happened to you!’ Alice retorted hotly. ‘Emily, he was dangerous. He might have done anything.’
Anything was just about the last thing the deserter might have done, Emily considered hollowly. His options had been stripped away from him by degrees, until this – this miserable end – was all that was left for him.
She found that her heart was hammering away inside her, a belated response to all she had been through. She wanted to remonstrate with Alice some more, but she knew she would be in the wrong. Somehow, this time, Alice was the sensible one, even when she insisted that Poldry go and recover her purse because she did not want to be near the corpse.
And Mr Northway will hear all about this from his men, no doubt, when he’s back from whatever seedy dealings he’s engaged in. She could picture his amusement all too clearly.
By then, Alice was practically tugging at her sleeve, wanting to leave the body behind, wanting to leave this mean, poor neighbourhood. Wanting, most of all and of course, to commission a new dress. The entire interlude had been nothing to her but a minor obstacle, now circumvented.
The seamstress was lean, dark Mrs Shevarler, and in days of recent memory she had been somewhat aloof whenever Alice was about. The girl demanded the sort of attention due a princess, and the Marshwic money was frequently insufficient to actually purchase anything. Left to her own devices, Alice could waste the best part of a day with fruitless measurements and viewing swatches of fabric. Emily was almost hoping for that brusque manner but this time Mrs Shevarler seemed delighted to see the pair of them. She clucked and fussed over Alice, bustling around her shop with desperate cheer as if to make up for the staff that she was lacking. Alice, for her part, took the chance to turn the tables, making a great play of how dusty it all was, how small, how mean. Emily rolled her eyes. And yet the shop did have an uncared-for air about it, and she reckoned that business here had probably been worse than poor for a long time. Most of Mrs Shevarler’s clientele had eschewed their local estates, and for those who remained, fine tailoring was not a priority.
Alice’s standoffishness did not survive the first bolt of cloth, and Emily was soon trying hard to share her sister’s enthusiasm. She felt that Alice had the right idea, somehow, to simply take joy wherever she could, no matter how shallow it seemed. The mills of Emily’s mind continued inexorably, though, grinding over and over what had happened at the market, and all the frustrations of life.
Poldry had gone off to buy provisions, or at least to try. Even with money in hand, there was no guarantee of that, these days. The demands of the war and the feeding of the army took a toll of the harvests, while there were fewer hands to bring those harvests in. Emily