“To wash all this damn sap off my hands,” I say, though it’s fairly transparent I’m storming off because of my sister.
I walk for a minute, directionless, my head fuzzy with anger and also a lot of wanting for a drink, before I realize I have no clue where I’m going and I’ve got to be able to find my way back to Percy and Felicity. I stop. A group of children skate by me, their hands linked and their hair flying behind them, angling toward a man setting up a projector for a magic lantern show. A woman outside a viciously green tent shouts in my direction, “Look into my eye for a sight of your own death! Only a sou for a glance!” A pair of acrobats balance on their hands over the edge of the pier, to applause from a sparse audience.
“Vos pieds sont douloureux,” someone says behind me, and I turn.
A wooden stand with a purple awning is set up against the edge of the pier, the word Apothicaire stenciled over a slop of red paint on the front. A man with coarse graying hair, a leather apron thrown over his patchy coat, is behind the counter, leaning against it on his elbows. Behind him, shelves are stuffed with an assortment of bottles and vials, labels peeling away like dead skin and the monikers of their tinctures sketched in spidery handwriting across them. A gallery of maladies.
“Pardon?” I say when I realize he’s addressing me. “Sorry?”
“Vos pieds. Your feet. You have sore feet.”
“How do you know that?”
“You’re walking on them strangely, like they’re hurting you. You need an ointment.”
“Bet you say that to everyone who passes.”
“I don’t always mean it. You—I’m worried for your feet.”
“I’m walking fine.”
“Then something else. You’re too stiff to be without pain. A mistake of the young, maybe? A venereal pox?”
“What? No. Definitely not that.”
He waggles a finger at me. “You’re not well. I can tell it.”
I try to edge away, but he keeps talking, his voice getting louder the farther I go, and I don’t want some randy medicine man shouting across the pier that I’ve got something festering on my bits, so I snap at him, more peevish than I intend, “I’m not unwell, I’m unhappy.”
He seems unmoved. “Is there much of a difference? I have tonics for your feet, and metrical charms my grandmothers can concoct for your ill humor.” He taps his finger at a row of witch bottles on a low shelf, their contents tarlike and frothing.
“Well, I’m not interested. Even if I had coins to spare, they wouldn’t be spent on you and your daft charms.” I start to walk away again before he can say anything more about whatever I’ve got wrong with my head or my feet or my bits, so hasty I sideswipe a cart of oranges behind me, sending a tower of them collapsing in all directions. The cart man starts to shout at me, and I’m so flustered that I immediately forget every word I know in French.
“Sorry,” I say in English. “Sorry. Désolé.” I start scooping oranges off the path before they get stepped on or kicked into the harbor. Two get away from me and plop into the water. I want to sit down where I stand and scream.
One of the oranges rolls down the planking, and a man stops it with the toe of his boot. I’m about to scramble forward and grab it when he reaches down and I catch the flash of a gold signet ring on his finger. The same ring the highwayman was wearing when he and his gang laid siege.
The highwaymen have found us. By some impossible coincidence, we’ve been Dick Turpined and then tracked down. Or perhaps there’s nothing coincidental about it—perhaps Felicity was right and they were looking for us after all. They’ve come for the box.
The man with the gold ring is moving to put the orange back on the cart from the other side, so I scramble out of the way before he can see me and hide in the only place available, which is behind the counter of the apothecary’s stall.
The apothecary doesn’t look down, but his lips pull into a taut smile. “Friends of yours?” he says, and though his eyes are elsewhere, it’s clear he’s addressing me.
“Please, don’t say anything to them,” I hiss.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he calls. “That’s quite a bruise, sir. How did you come by it?”
“That’s not your concern.” It’s the same voice from the forest, confirmed when the man’s fingers curl over the counter—that ring is unmistakable. He’s leaning over, squinting at the labels on the bottles as the apothecary runs his fingers over them. Don’t look down, I think. Dear God, please don’t look down.
“If I knew the cause, I could better treat it,” the apothecary says. “A bleeding beneath the skin takes a different salve than a slip and fall—”
“I was struck in the head with a fiddle case,” the highwayman snaps, his disdain palpable. “Does that help your diagnosis, mountebank?”
Definitely our assailants, unless there is a rash of tourists using instruments to fend off toby-gills of late.
“Where’d that boy go?” I hear the man with the orange cart shout. My heart’s really sitting on my lungs—it’s getting hard to breathe around it.
“The balm of Gilead, then, applied twice daily, will take down the swelling.” The apothecary almost trips over me as he turns back to the counter. The tin lands a little harder than is natural, but the highwayman must not notice. I hear the chink of coins on the counter, then the men’s boots as they retreat.
The apothecary keeps his face up, but after a moment says to me, “They’ve gone around back toward the city. You’d best go the other way if you’re avoiding them.”
I pull myself up with one hand on the shelves. The bottles tremble against each other. “Thank you.”
The apothecary shrugs. “They look fierce and you look helpless. Do you owe them money?”
“They think I owe them something.” I check to make certain the highwaymen are truly gone—the man with the orange cart has been blessedly distracted by the start of the magic lantern show—then bolt in the other direction, my shoes slapping the damp planking with an empty thwack.
Percy and Felicity are, thank God, right where I left them, still at the table with Percy’s fiddle between them. Somehow Felicity still has a bite of her gibassier left gummed to her thumb and she’s nibbling at it. Percy’s got his head in his hands and is massaging his temples. He doesn’t raise his head, even when I skid up beside them and proclaim, “They found us.”
“Who?” Felicity asks. “Mr. Lockwood?”
“No, the highwaymen. The men who attacked us. They’re here.”
“How do you know it’s them?”
“I saw them. One of them has this ring—I remember it.”
Felicity is already on her feet. “Do you think they’re looking for us?”
“Why else would they be here? You think the group of bandits who attacked us just happen to be strolling through a fair at the same time we are?”
“We need to go, we need to see if Lockwood’s arrived and find where our company is.”