Somehow the way she asked this carried a lot of threat.
“I want to speak to the Jew,” repeated Ketch.
The woman turned her head to one side and rapped on the wooden wall behind her. She spoke into a small circular brass grille.
“Mr Sharp? A moment of your time, please.”
The dark lenses turned to look at him again. The silence was unbearable. He had to fill it.
“Man in The Three Cripples said as how the Jew would pay for screaming girls.”
The gold ring caught the lamplight as the black gloves flexed open and then clenched tight again, as if she were containing something.
“So you’ve come to sell a girl?”
“At the right price.”
Her smile was tight and showed no teeth. Her voice remained icily polite.
“There are those who would say any price is the wrong one. The good Mr Wilberforce’s bill abolished slavery nearly forty years ago, did it not?”
Ketch had set out on a simple errand: he had something to sell and had heard of a likely buyer. True, he’d felt a little like a Resurrection Man skulking through the fog with a girl on his shoulder, but she was no corpse and he was no body-snatcher. And now this woman was asking questions that were confusing that simple thing. When life was straightforward, Bill Ketch sailed through it on smooth waters. When it became complicated he became confused, and when he became confused, anger blew in like a storm, and when he became angry, fists and boots flew until the world was stomped flat and simple again.
“I don’t know nothing about a Wilberforce. I want to speak to the Jew,” he grunted.
“And why do you think the Jew wants a girl? By which I mean: what do you think the Jew wants to do with her?” she asked, the words as taut and measured as her smile.
“What he does is none of my business.”
He shrugged and hid his own bunched fists deep in the pockets of his coat.
Her words cracked sharply across the table like a whiplash.
“But what you think you are doing by selling this girl is mine. Answer the question!”
This abrupt change of tone stung him and made him bang the table and lurch towards her, face like a thundercloud.
“No man tells Bill Ketch what to do, and sure as hell’s hinges no damn woman does neither! I want to see the bloody Jew and by God—”
The wall next to her seemed to blur open and shut and a man burst through, slicing across the room so fast that he outpaced Ketch’s eyes, leaving a smear of midnight blue and flashing steel as he came straight over the table in a swirl of coat-tails that ended in a sudden and dangerous pricking sensation against his Adam’s apple.
The eyes that had added him up through the judas hole now stared into him across a gap bridged by eighteen inches of razor-sharp steel. The long blade was held at exactly the right pressure to stop him doing anything life-threatening, like moving. Indeed, just swallowing would seem to be an act of suicide.
“By any god, you shall not take one step further forward, Mr…”
The eyes swept over his face, searching, reading it.
“Mr Ketch, is it? Mr William Ketch…?”
He leaned in and Ketch, frozen, watched his nostrils flare as he appeared to smell him. The midnight blue that the man was dressed in seemed to absorb even more light than the woman’s black dress. He wore a knee-length riding coat cut tight to his body, beneath which was a double-breasted leather waistcoat of exactly the same hue, as were the shirt and tightly knotted silk stock he wore around his neck. The only break in the colour of his clothing was the brown of his soft leather riding boots.
His hair was also of the darkest brown, as were his thick and well-shaped eyebrows, and his eyes, when Ketch met them, were startlingly … unexpected.
Looking into them Ketch felt, for a moment, giddy and excited. The eyes were not just one brown, not even some of the browns: they were all the browns. It was as if he was looking into a swirl of autumn leaves tumbling happily in the golden sunlight of a blazing Indian summer.
One look into the tawny glamour in those eyes and Ketch forgot the blade at his throat.
One look into those eyes and the anger was gone and all was simple again.
One look into those eyes and Bill Ketch was confusingly and irrevocably in something as close to love as to make no difference.
The man must have seen this because the blade did something fast and complicated and disappeared beneath the skirts of his coat as he reached forward, gripped Ketch by both shoulders and pulled him close, sniffing him again and then raising an eyebrow in surprise, before pushing him back and smiling at him like an old friend.
“He is everything he appears to be, and no more,” he said over his shoulder.
The woman stepped forward.
“You are sure?”
“I thought I smelled something on the air as he knocked, but it didn’t come in with him. I may have been mistaken. The river is full of stink at high tide.”
“So you are sure?” she repeated.