that Clare’s own son had helped him get it. He’d have a chance to do one last job and with the only target he had ever really wanted.
He pressed his palms against the stone wall behind him and pushed off. He made his way through streets lit only by a sliver of the moon and the candlelight flickering through the windows of the buildings lining the street.
Kit had seen the Duke of Clare only once, when he had sentenced Jenny. At the time, Kit had thought he had the man’s appearance seared into his memory, but now he could hardly conjure up a picture of the man. When Holland had said who his father was, though, Kit had seen traces of the duke on his son’s face. They had the same cold eyes, the same aquiline nose, the same air of a man used to moving through a world without obstacles.
Unchecked power gave a man a certain look; it set him apart from normal people. Something terrible was unleashed when a person knew that not only could he tear down homes, take away a family’s livelihood, and send people to the far corners of the earth, but he would be praised for it. There were rich men who didn’t use their money and power as cudgels, but they still always knew that they had a cudgel ready at hand. They got so used to it, they probably thought they were doing a grand thing by not wielding it.
And Kit hated them all for it. People might say that what he really hated was the system that put too much power in too few hands. But Kit knew he also hated the men.
That hatred had been the engine of his life for the better part of a decade, and at the center of it was the Duke of Clare.
Led by instinct or old habit or just the darker recesses of his nature, Kit turned one corner, then another, until he found himself in the sort of neighborhood where every old lady sold gin out of her front window. He found one of these shops, knocked, paid his money, and before he could think better of it, had a tin cup in his hand. He knocked back its contents in a single gulp, the spirits burning their way down his throat and making his eyes water.
“Blimey,” said the old woman. “Needed it, did you?” Her hair was white and thin, her back stooped, and her face deeply lined. She spoke with the blurred syllables of a woman with very few teeth. She reminded Kit of Jenny’s grandmother, and in the middle of a Saint Giles street he was assailed by the memory of a brace of pheasants roasting in the hearth of a crumbling cottage in Oxfordshire.
He hated to think that far back, in the same way that he refused to go back to the little corner of Oxfordshire where he had been born and lived out the first eighteen years of his life. He didn’t want to think about that younger version of himself, and above all didn’t want to wonder what that younger man would think of his present-day self.
The gin had already started to work its magic, and the memories came hard upon one another. He could see his father pulling pints and his mother polishing the brass fittings she was so proud of. He could all but smell the wood fire that burned bright all year round in the taproom.
He remembered another cottage, a cradle he had built with his own hands, a child wrapped in fresh linens—
And he remembered how it felt after it was all gone.
“You all right, dearie?” the old woman asked, and Kit had to be in a truly bad state when the purveyor of an illegal gin shop was worried about him.
“It’s just been a while,” he said, handing her the empty cup through the window along with another coin for her to fill it again.
Chapter 12
Percy knew that vanity was not only a sin, but possibly his besetting sin. Or at least it had been before the revelations of the past month introduced him to the various temptations of theft, cruelty, and the general consignment of the entire fifth commandment to the midden pile. But he was vain, and he knew it, and he was not appearing in public with a bruise on his jaw.
Still, he did not relish the prospect of pressing a raw piece of meat to any part of