Lady Whilton's Wedding by Barbara Metzger

Author:Barbara Metzger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Jake woke with a smile on his face. His pants were damp; his youth was coming back. No, he was just wet. He looked up through the holes in the cottage roof and saw stars. It wasn’t even raining. He remembered a tree falling on him, or near enough as made no difference, the way he felt. Those nimwit nevvies of his must have dragged him through a streambed before taking him home, if the abandoned shack could be so called. It was a wonder he didn’t catch his death from the dowsing, whatever the dunderheads had done to him. Then he sneezed, coughed, shivered, and stopped wondering.

One good thing about the country: when the furniture was gone, you could still find something to burn. Jake hobbled to the stack of kindling he’d made the boys find yesterday, and threw some on the crumbling stone hearth. The fireplace might give off more smoke than heat, but it was something. He hobbled back to his pile of wet blankets to drag them closer to the miserly flames. Damn if both his legs didn’t feel broke. One was wrapped in something, the other wasn’t, and his cloth-head kin were nowhere in sight. He coughed some more. The smoke was worse than usual.

When his eyes cleared, he spotted a bundle of something in the corner, so he lurched in that direction. His eyes filled with tears of joy—or smoke. The boys had managed to steal something after all. On their own, after years of his lessons and lectures, they’d made a haul. Not a big haul, true, and they might even now be rotting in gaol for their crimes, but they’d done just right: they’d brought the booty to Uncle Jake. They were finally as smart as the dog Sal.

The satchel was of good quality, he could tell even in the dim light. Leather, with brass catches. Someone would pay something for it. Next to it was a silver flask, engraved, but with no initials, thank goodness. It would fetch a handsome penny, too. Too bad it was empty. And too bad he wasn’t in London.

The rotten thing about the country was, there was so much of it, with nothing in between. Jake knew he couldn’t try fencing this stuff in the local village so close to the crime, even if there was a pawnshop, which he doubted, and the next town was a good five miles away. He couldn’t just walk to the corner and hail a hackney, either. In London he’d have traded these items for a heavy wet, a hearty meal, and a bit of jingle that could keep him till the next opportunity. Now all he could do was try to inhale fumes from the flask and keep looking.

Behind the suitcase was a cane, one whose carved bone handle Jake recognized well. He should. There was a matching indentation in his head. So his gang of geniuses had managed to lift that old bastard’s poke. Well, well, well.

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