Nowhere Man by Sheri Cobb South

Author:Sheri Cobb South
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regency, Victorian, Historical fantasy, Bow Street Runners, detective
Publisher: Sonatina Press
Published: 2020-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

9

In Which a Mother and Son Are Reunited

At last Miss Braunton drew back, citing the need to earn some coin to surrender to Mrs. Bleeker in the morning. Pickett was forced to let her go, although it went sorely against the grain to do so. As her slender form was swallowed up by the darkness, he recalled another young woman, one who had for several years been engaged in the same profession into which the duke’s niece had been forced. Lucy might be willing to put him up, but quite aside from a vague feeling that to seek Lucy out would be tantamount to betraying Julia (he suspected his assurances not to lay a hand on Lucy would not be at all what that determined young woman would want to hear) there was the fact that Lucy lived in Seven Dials. If he went in search of her, he might well be walking back into the arms of the mob eager to turn him in for the price on his head.

No, he decided, he dared not risk it, for more reasons than one. But there was another house in St. Giles, not quite so near to the Butterworth School, where he might try his luck. And while he wasn’t eager to throw himself upon the mercy of his “stepmother,” he need not see her at all; he knew very well how to slip in and out of the house through one of the upper-story windows, having spent his formative years doing exactly that.

Feeling rather better for having decided on a clear course of action, he walked on, keeping an eye out for any familiar landmark by which he might gain his bearings. He eventually found one in the form of a gin house well-known to the Bow Street Foot Patrol, and from this insalubrious location he had no difficulty in making his way to the ramshackle house where he’d once lived with his father and Moll.

He did not approach the front door, but turned into a twisting, narrow alley that gave access to the rear entrance. Here he startled a scrawny feral cat, which arched its back and hissed menacingly at the trespasser.

“Good kitty,” he lied reassuringly, although he made no attempt to stroke its fur, having no fancy to be scratched.

The cat blinked malevolently at him, but showed no inclination to pursue any more active form of combat. Pickett counted doors until he came to the one he wanted, then shinnied up the nearest rainspout, which creaked ominously beneath his weight. He recalled, belatedly, that he was fully ten years older than he had been the last time he had performed this particular maneuver, and the condition of the rainspout—almost certainly the same one that had been there ten years earlier, which had been far from new even then—would not have improved in the interim. But it held firm in spite of its protests, and soon Pickett drew abreast of the window that gave into the room which had been his bedchamber.

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