“Anything you want,” she snapped. “What’s the difference?”
De Loungville said, “You’ve caused us a great deal of difficulty, girl.” He motioned and Jadow brought over a small wooden stool, upon which de Loungville sat. “I’m tired. This has been a very long night and there are things about it I don’t like much. The thing I like the least is finding you have killed the man I was going to hang tomorrow. I don’t know what your cause with Tannerson was, child, but I needed him for a public hanging.” Glancing at the other men, who now leaned against the walls of the cell, he said, “We need someone to hang.”
Jadow said, “If we dress her up a bit in a man’s clothing, and cut her hair, maybe.”
If the threat reached the girl, it didn’t show in her reaction. She merely glared at the men, one at a time, as if silently marking their features for some future revenge. Finally she said, “He killed my sister.”
“Who was your sister?” asked de Loungville.
“She was a bar girl . . . a whore over at the Seven Flowers. Her name was Betsy.”
Roo blushed. Suddenly he could see the resemblance, though this girl was far prettier than her sister had been. But Roo had been intimate with Betsy and his reaction to this revelation was surprising. He felt embarrassed and didn’t want to let this girl know he had been the man her sister had been with when she had been killed.
“What’s your name?” de Loungville asked again.
“Katherine,” said a voice behind them, and Roo turned to see Lord James standing in the door to the cell. “Pickpocket.” He walked around de Loungville and studied the girl’s face. “They call you Kitty, don’t they?”
The girl nodded. She had been frightened by the others, for they were hard men, but they were commonly dressed. This man, however, was dressed like a noble and spoke as if he expected to be obeyed. He studied her face, then said, “I knew your grandmother.”
Kitty looked confused for a minute, then her eyes widened and she turned pale. “Gods and demons, you’re the bleeding Duke, ain’t you?”
James nodded and said to de Loungville, “How did you catch this little fish?”
De Loungville explained that one of his rear guard had spotted her coming down a drainpipe and had signaled they were being followed, and how the trap for her had been laid. “I just dropped Erik off in the shadows so he could grab her when she walked past him,” he finished. He stood and indicated the duke should take the stool.
James sat and calmly said, “You’d best tell me exactly what happened, girl.”
She told of discovering that Tannerson and his bashers had killed her sister, and of how she had arranged to lure him to a room. She had turned down the lamp and rested on the bed, and when Tannerson had entered he saw a pretty young girl and it wasn’t until he leaned over her and found her dagger entering his throat he suspected anything.
She had ducked out from under him as he had fallen on the bed, and she had tried to get as much blood off her body and hands as possible before she fled out the window.
Roo interrupted and said, “Did you take any gold from him?”
“He didn’t have a purse,” she said. “At least, I don’t think so; I didn’t stop to look.”
Roo swore. “Someone heard you leave, looked in, saw the blood, and took the gold.”
“What about the locked door?” asked de Loungville.
It was Duke James who said, “It’s a common thing to find that those latches aren’t as secure as you think if you know where to find the hidden trip. Probably one of the employees at the inn has your gold, Roo. They knew how to set the latch so it fell into place when they closed the door. If you’d been there five minutes earlier, you might have caught the thief in the act. Now we could tie the thief to a spit and roast him slowly, and we won’t find the gold.”
Roo swore again.
James sat back. “You’re something of a problem, Kitty. I had reached an accommodation with the Sagacious Man over the disposition of Tannerson and his companions, and you’ve managed to completely foul that up.” He rubbed his chin. “Well, your career with the Mockers is at an end.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, her voice made faint by fear.
“Give you a job,” he said, rising. To de Loungville he said. “We need female agents, Bobby. But keep her on a short leash for a while. If she proves untrustworthy, we can always kill her.”
He left the room and de Loungville motioned for the others to follow him. Coming up to Kitty, he reached out and took her chin in his hand. “You’re pretty enough under all that grime,” he said.
“Looking for some sport, then, are you?” she asked, a glint of defiance in her eyes.