her senses and resumed rearranging the chairs.
“He wants to hire me to rob his father. I’m going to agree.”
She stared at him for a long moment, her lips pressed together into a tight line. “You really are a fucking idiot,” she finally said. “Go get yourself cleaned up and don’t show your face until you’ve eaten something.”
Kit rinsed off at the pump, then carried an ewer of water upstairs to wash more thoroughly. He thought about shaving, even going so far as to pick up his razor and look meaningfully at it, before remembering that Betty wasn’t the boss of him or his incipient beard, and decided to leave well enough alone. He brushed his hair and made an attempt to smooth it into a queue before giving it up as a lost cause and letting it fall around his shoulders. He cast his linens into the pile of things to be sent to the laundry and dressed in a crisp clean shirt and a fresh pair of breeches. He was still buttoning his waistcoat when he went downstairs and emerged into the shop.
“There you go,” Betty said. “It’s always easier to think like a reasonable person when you don’t look like something dragged in from a sewer.”
“I’ve already made up my mind.”
“Your mind is scrambled, then. Stop using it. Let me do the thinking for you. That’s why you keep me around, isn’t it? Listen to me, Kit. We both know you can’t run or ride fast enough to be safe during a robbery. You’ll put yourself and everyone you’re with at risk.”
“I’ll figure out a way around that,” he said. “I have to.”
“The feelings you have where Clare is concerned have no business in a robbery.”
“He’s the whole reason I have any business doing robbery in the first place,” Kit said. “If it weren’t for him, I’d be—” He didn’t dare finish that thought, not after yesterday’s gin-fueled trip down memory lane. “I started all this because I wanted revenge.”
“That’s because you were young and foolish and grieving your wife and child.”
He held up his hand to stop her. “Hush.”
“No, you hush. You got by on gin and luck. Now you’re older and you know better, and you have me to tell you what to do. I’ve seen what happens when people go into a robbery seeing red. They wind up losing their heads and taking stupid risks. I’m not putting my neck on the line just because you’re too angry to think straight.”
Kit let out a breath. Betty was a fence, and came from a family of fences, and maybe because she dealt only with goods and coin, she didn’t understand anyone who approached life without the levelheadedness of an actuary. “Every job I’ve done, I’ve been angry.”
“Bollocks. This job would be personal. Not to mention the fact that you shouldn’t want to ally yourself with the Duke of Clare’s son. You ought to know a trap when you see one. I won’t be a part of it.”
“Then don’t.”
“Go to hell.” She closed her eyes and seemed to gather herself. “What good is revenge if he doesn’t know that you’re the one serving it to him? I know you, Kit, and you’ll want to let him know exactly which of his sins he’s paying for. And once he knows it was you, it’ll come back to you, here.” She gestured around the shop, as if he didn’t already know what was at stake. “And to me. And to my family. Unless you plan to kill him.” When Kit didn’t answer right away, she sucked in a breath. “Christ. Do you plan to kill him?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to kill him.” If anyone deserved a knife in the heart it was Clare, but Kit wouldn’t be the one to put it there. “As for the rest of it, I don’t need him to know who I am. It’s enough that I know.”
Betty looked at him long and searchingly. “Then you’ll do this sober, Christopher.” She crossed her arms, looking as displeased with him as she ever had, including during the ruby diadem incident.
“Yes, Elizabeth,” he said, trying to tease her back to their usual good relations. He needed her, not as a fence, certainly not as a serving girl, but as his friend. He had known her since she was a child, running around London in her brother’s clothes, delivering messages and arranging meetings for her father. She had arrived in his life when he thought