The Queer Principles of Kit Webb - Cat Sebastian Page 0,45
his arm.
Percy turned his head. “No,” he said, sounding surprised. “I’ve done some fencing, but I’ve never fought anyone with my hands. It always seemed a very common thing to do.”
Percy’s face was streaked with dirt, and he had blood on his upper lip. “You look like a proper ruffian right now, so I think you might have been right,” Kit observed.
“My valet will have fits,” Percy said.
Kit lay still for a moment, catching his breath and watching Percy. “My mother had a garden,” he said.
Percy turned toward Kit at this non sequitur, but didn’t say anything.
“She mostly grew herbs, but also the usual country flowers: foxglove, larkspur, you know. When they were first married, my father brought her cuttings from a rosebush.” The rosebush had been in Percy’s father’s rose garden, a fact Kit had forgotten but which now brought him up short. He was lying on the floor with the heir to the Duke of Clare, after tussling like a pair of schoolchildren.
“That’s not a very good story,” Percy remarked after Kit had gone silent. “The next time you choose to regale me with the tales of gardens or horticulture or mothers, or whatever you were doing, do strive to be more entertaining.”
Kit snorted. “She hated that rosebush. She had a garden filled with flowers that bloomed without any special treatment, but that rosebush needed careful pruning and daily watering. She had to put eggshells and iron nails in the soil. I used to hear her out in the garden, muttering under her breath at it. But every summer, the wretched thing bloomed. And every summer, she acted like she had personally brought those blossoms back from hell itself.” He swallowed. “That’s how I feel when I get my hands on a gentleman’s purse. When that purse goes from being theirs to not being theirs anymore, I feel like I’ve done something.”
He was speaking in the present tense, as if tomorrow he might get Bridget from the stables and hold up a traveling coach.
“When it goes from being theirs to being yours, you mean,” Percy said.
“Some of it, aye,” Kit said, gesturing at the building around them. “But my partner—”
“Fat Tom? Whistling Nell?”
Kit laughed. “No, my friend. Rob,” he said, immediately feeling the wrongness of speaking Rob’s name to this man. It felt like a betrayal to share Rob’s secret with a man Rob would have counted as an enemy. A man Kit, too, should have counted as an enemy, and indeed would have, if they hadn’t shared an even greater enemy. “He was also Gladhand Jack. Don’t trust everything you hear in a ballad.”
“Never tell me you didn’t hold up two carriages at once in Newcastle, and then escape from prison with your arms tied behind your back. I’m crushed.”
Kit snorted. “Rob took the money and gave it away. He was—good, I suppose. I stole because I wanted revenge and I liked adventure.” It was an oversimplification but not a lie—Kit had begun to steal because he couldn’t have revenge against the one man he wanted to punish, so he settled for spreading his revenge thin, across the entirety of the duke’s class. The Duke of Clare wasn’t the only landowner who destroyed lives; Kit would just have to take his revenge on the targets he had available to him. “But Rob stole because he wanted to do right.”
“He died?” Percy asked, his voice careful and quiet.
“A year ago.”
“Is that why you don’t do it anymore? I thought it was your leg, but is it because it doesn’t feel like you’d be doing right without him?”
The truth of that statement shot through Kit’s veins like ice. He felt like he had spent months trying to figure out what was wrong, what was missing in this new life he was trying to live. And this man had figured it out after hearing not three sentences about Rob.
If Rob had been alive, Kit would have figured out how to work around his bad leg. Even if he hadn’t been able to ever sit on a horse again, he’d have managed to do something. But without Rob, without Rob’s conviction that what they were doing was right and good, then Kit had nothing to spur him on but anger. Kit had found comfort in Rob’s unshakable, albeit lunatic, belief in the righteousness of what they were doing. Not being a madman, he hadn’t agreed himself, but Rob’s principles washed their actions of some of their less savory qualities.