Page 84 of Go, Rogue

Chapter

33

Bloody hell.

In the thin morning light, McGann can see his ankle is the awful blue-green color of the sky before the worst kind of storm. He’s been in this hole in the ground for two days, during which his ankle has swollen to three times its normal size. His thigh wound—on the same leg, thanks to that arsehole James—continues to deteriorate, and now his entire leg is mottled and throbbing and smelly and more likely to kill him than not.

It feels improbable that this is how he’ll go. That after everything he’s lived through, he’ll die in a root cellar surrounded by parsnips.

And that it’ll be Barclay, after all, who does him in—a man who, a month ago, he’d have wagered he’d never see again. All because Barclay wants the key. The key that Catherine has. The key McGann will make damn sure his brother never lays hands on.

Fuck.

“Good morning, brother.” Barclay’s face appears above the grate over his head. “How did you sleep?”

McGann tilts his chin up at an odd angle to better face his brother. “Your Grace,” he bites out.

Barclay smiles. “This truly doesn’t have to be as difficult as you’re making it.” He sets the lockbox down on top of the grate. “Produce the key and everyone walks away happy.”

“Are you really that short of funds?” McGann asks. “That you’d resort to this?”

Barclay sighs. “Just give me the key. This could have been so easy, and yet you’ve chosen to make it difficult.”

“I don’t have it,” McGann says.

“But you know where it is.”

McGann tries to clear his mind, but the hunger and pain and exhaustion make it hard to think straight. Should he say it’s back on The Elphame?

No.

That might make Barclay suspect Catherine—if James has told him about her. What about in Kent, with Crawford? Barclay wouldn’t hurt a marquess’s son.

Would he? Probably not.

But better not to take the risk.

“I lost it,” is what he finally says.

“I doubt that. And I should make it clear that there are two ways for this to end. One is that you die here, alone, in this cellar. You take your secrets with you, and I toss this box into the ocean. Everybody loses.”

“And the other way?” McGann asks.

“The other is that you hand over the key and I use the box to my own ends.”

“You mean you sell its contents to whomever wants them the most? Lucrative for you and for the East India Company too, I’ve no doubt.”

He pauses, his mind working furiously to form a plan. “If you’re trying to bid up the price, brother, there must be another buyer. Who?”

That’s ‘Your Grace’,” Barclay snaps, not answering the question.

“Alright, Your Grace,” McGann says. “Tell me why the Company wants it so badly now. Do you even know what’s in that box?”

He wonders if he should tell Barclay about the daguerreotype but thinks his brother must know the contents already—or he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to secure the damnable thing.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Barclay says. “It’s a matter for your betters.”

“Try me. I worked for the arseholes same as you do.”