the man near his feet. “What did I tell you, guv? Cruel.”
“Aye. Cruel, indeed.”
As Tristan jammed his hat back on he heard the door lock behind him.
Chapter Seven
The pub adjacent—which seemed to be called The Wolf And, Tristan noted—was comprised of four tables and eight chairs, all crammed chummily together in a place as snug as any animal den. The fire burned hot but not too smokily. Likely the place had been squatting on that corner of Lovell Street for at least a century.
Two men were having what appeared to be a profound, conspiratorial conversation over tankards of ale. Although he was aware that nearly anything seemed profound when one was drunk enough.
Behind the plain oak bar, the barmaid was, of all things, reading a book.
She looked up and smiled warmly.
“Well, good morning, sir.”
“Good morning. A half pint, if you would. How’s the light?”
“It’s piss, I fear. We’ll do better with the next batch. You’d be better off with the dark.”
“Thank you for your honesty.”
He took a seat in a battered chair that wobbled a bit.
The table before him looked pocked with knife stabs.
“Do you get much of a crowd in here?” he asked when she brought the ale over.
“I’m Frances, sir, but you can call me Fran. And oh, nay. I own the place outright—once belonged to me da, and his da before him—so I don’t need much of a crowd to keep it going and it suits me. Perhaps because there’s not much room to fight in here, sir. They wind up in the street straight away. More satisfying to crash about when you can knock things over and get other blokes involved, I expect.”
It was a hilarious summary and indictment of his gender.
“I suppose that’s true. One would think you’d get customers from the boardinghouse next door, however.”
She hesitated.
“One would think,” she said.
Cagily, he thought. And, oddly, a little wistfully.
“It is a boardinghouse, isn’t it?” He furrowed his brow innocently. “It isn’t immediately apparent from its name.”
One of the men at the table looked over at him alertly. “Oh, ye dinna want to go in there, guv.”
“Oh. Why is that?”
“It’s just the word out on the street, like. To keep clear of The Palace of Rogues.” He waved an arm, indicating the street, apparently. “Not a place you want to go into.”
“It’s called The Grand Palace on the Thames,” the barmaid said stoutly, and Captain Hardy said somewhat reflexively. After all, he’d been told the name three times, and he was not a slow learner.
One of the men at the tables snorted. “A sheep deans change its spots.”
So: drunk, then, judging by that scrambled metaphor.
“Any particular reason I ought to avoid it?” he asked them. “How long has it been open?”
“Just heard it said, is all. You can ask nearly anyone.” He swept an arm vaguely to indicate everyone, Tristan supposed. “Was a brothel nigh on a few decades ago, or so I’ve heard. Could be anything now, could it not? They hung that sign a fortnight ago, is all I know.”
“But it seems . . . benign.”
Tristan thought about the leaping fire, the lemon and linseed oil, a face illuminated with a pure and unguarded pleasure. All at once he found he didn’t want to drink his ale. He felt oddly as though he’d already drunk something pleasant and a little intoxicating, and he wanted the feeling to linger.
“It’s a lovely place,” Fran the barmaid insisted. “Was a right disaster before. Boarded up for years. Hasn’t been anything at all for over a decade, and I ought to know.”
“Looks deceive, guv,” the man who’d mixed his metaphors about sheep and spots said morosely.
“I suppose they sometimes do.”
Tristan knew better than to instigate a frivolous debate here at the docks.
But when he thought of the maid singing about her duties he thought, there was a person who was exactly who she was. He could not imagine her deceiving anyone. He slapped that thought dead as if it was a mosquito out for blood. He moved through life in a constant state of objective suspicion, of necessity.
“A friend of mine mentioned this pub, Frances,” he called to her. “Said it had a certain quiet charm.”
Her face lit up and he was glad he’d embellished his lie a little. “A friend of yours, guv?”
“Happened into it by accident. Derring.”
“The . . . Earl of Derring?”
He would have called her expression studied neutrality. He had the sense that she was judging him ever so slightly for calling the earl his