He turned to me. “What am I being paid again, Ignace?”
I glared at him. As the wise man says: “Fun’s fun, but money’s money.”
“One penny, as you damned well know,” I snarled. “They scraped together a shilling and tuppence, but you made me give the rest back. Just needed the one penny, you said, to satisfy the requirements of professional ethics.”
“Why, yes, so I did,” rumbled the strangler. He turned back to the Baron. And then he grinned.
Even a man as stupid as the Baron finally figured it out at the end. An artist’s dream, that momentary tableau. The Great Hunter. Sans Beaters. Sans Bearers. Sans Guides. Sans Tout But the Beast.
He tried to scream for help, but he couldn’t get out a sound, even before The Thumbs closed around his throat. I’m not surprised, really. I’m sure it was Greyboar’s grin moving toward him. Must have been like staring into his own open grave.
* * *
Well, much to my surprise, the whole thing turned out to have quite a few bright spots. “Every storm drowns a few rats,” as the wise man says.
First of all, we got out of there without the slightest little ruckus. Always nice, a job that doesn’t require a messy getaway. I hear it was five hours before the butler got up enough nerve to peek into the Baron’s study, and by then we’d already knocked down eight pots of ale in The Sign of the Trough.
Then—lackeys babble, it’s the nature of the breed—the word got all around town, especially among the upper crust where most of our business comes from. Greyboar had set a new world record! The Baron’s neck was tied into a double sheepshank. Never been done before. Of course, I made sure the Records Committee got it into the books. But even before they made the official announcement, clients were pounding on our door. Displeasure of the Queen and the Ozarine be damned! Greyboar was back in fashion—big fashion. I even cranked our standard rate up to 1500 quid.
Then, what would you know but two weeks later I got a note from Jenny and Angela inviting me over for dinner. Quite a nice dinner, too, they must have scraped for a week to put it together. I offered to help pay for the food, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Wound up staying there quite a while. Well, the whole night, actually. It turned out they weren’t really all that rigid in their ways, so to speak, so maybe Greyboar was right about the moral advance of disorder (whatever that meant).
In fact, I found myself spending quite a bit of my time over there, in the days that followed. Well. Actually, to be honest, I found myself spending most of my time over there, when I wasn’t attending to business. To my astonishment, whole days would go by—two or three in a row, sometimes—where I didn’t even make a token appearance at The Trough. And when I did, more often that not, it was just to conduct a little bit of quick business. Then—off.
Of course, the proper Trough-men made a big deal over it. But I was impervious. Serene in my disregard. The sniggers were flat; the ridicule, limp; the derision, as hollow as an aching tooth.
Eat your hearts out, boys.
Yet, oddly, I didn’t boast. I just maintained a dignified silence. No way to explain it, really, that wouldn’t have gotten me into the soup with the Trough-men. Sure, and I was having fun. More fun than I’d ever had in my life, in fact. But—
The truth is, it was mainly the peace of mind. I found myself treasuring the moments when Jenny and Angela were asleep even more, in some ways, than the excitement when they were awake. Just listening to them breathe softly in the dark was a treasure I hoarded even more than I’d ever hoarded any coin. And me—a champion miser!
I think— I don’t know. Hard to explain. I think it was maybe that being around them made me feel like I might have felt if I hadn’t grown up to be me. Or something like that.