The Spider's Touch Read Free Page B

to think that I have a gang of cutthroats at my beck and call.”
    Lade, their landlord at the Fox and Goose, deep in the Weald of Kent, was a Newgate gaolbird, who harboured highwaymen and dealt in smuggled goods, and had to be kept in his place. Neither St. Mars nor Tom had been able to discover whether he knew the identity of the mysterious Mr. Brown and his servant who had appeared over a month ago to take up residence at his inn. Clearly, he suspected St. Mars of something, but not, perhaps, of being the viscount charged with murdering his own father. At least, he had not “squeaked beef,” as he would have said, to get the reward of three hundred pounds that had been placed on St. Mars’s head. Instead, he eagerly pocketed the money St. Mars doled out to rent the Fox and Goose and its servants for his private use. And St. Mars had given Lade to understand that if he ever called down the law on his wealthy guest, then he would feel free to mention his host’s connections with smugglers and highwaymen.
    “I need you here, Tom,” St. Mars continued.  “I need you to keep an eye on my belongings, and to take care of Penny—” his beloved horse— “ and to let me know at once of any reason that I should come back.”
    “You do mean to come back, don’t you, sir? Before too long?”
    Tom had not liked the way St. Mars had hesitated over his reply. The despair that sometimes showed through his careful demeanour had betrayed itself for a moment. “I shall return when I cannot bear to stay away any longer, or when I am needed. For the last, I count on you to let me know. You should open any letter that comes for me. Is that understood?”
    “Yes, my lord, but—” Tom had found it difficult to shape the question he had wanted to ask, so he had ended with, “You won’t leave me here too long?”
    “If you find it too long, you must write to tell me. Address your letters to my steward, Monsieur Lavalle, at St. Mars. He will see that I get them.”
    And Tom had had to be content.
    * * * *
    Now nearly a month had gone by, and nary a word from his master had come. Tom had thrown himself into improving St. Mars’s quarters in this flea-ridden inn they’d been forced to call home. With a few discreet repairs—nothing too grand, which might have called the attention of the authorities to the house—some furniture ordered from tradesmen in Maidstone, and the hiring of a cook and laundress, he had made the place ready for St. Mars’s return. These lodgings were not so bad for a man like Tom who had slept most of his life over the stables, but they were a degradation compared to Rotherham Abbey and Hawkhurst House, two of the six important properties St. Mars should have inherited upon his father’s death.
    If there was one thing Tom had learned in his short time as groom to an outlaw, however, it was the need for secrecy. It was secrecy that kept him close to the inn with virtually nothing to do all day. He exercised Penny and Beau—the horse he had taken for himself from Lord Hawkhurst’s stables—along the footpaths and drovers’ trails throughout the Weald, memorizing their turns and twists, in case he and his master had to flee the King’s Messengers, and learning to think—if he only knew it—something like the highwayman’s accomplice he had become. But no two horses could occupy an experienced groom all of any day, and he found himself with far too much time to think about things that he would rather ignore.
    As he was doing this evening, as he brushed Penny down after a long, sweating ride. He caught himself ruminating about the woman who kept house for Lade. A pretty woman, turned harlot after going to gaol for being gulled by a thief. A warm, cheerful sort of female, skilled with a needle, who had spent hours happily working over the silks and satins they had bought for St. Mars.
    Katy still had to serve Lade’s customers in the taproom, where Tom took his meals now that St. Mars was gone. Tom