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“It was ’06. There were French agents in the émigré community acting against us. Our...man was about to expose an extremely dangerous enemy.”

Goldsworthy shook himself, and the faraway look disappeared.

“I could keep Pickersgill safe until we’re up and going again, sir, with a bit of blunt.”

Goldsworthy’s brows lifted, but he lumbered over to a cabinet piled high with rolled-up maps. With his broad back to Harry he opened the cabinet. Harry listened to the sound of a key turning, a metal lid opening, and the crackle of crisp paper. When Goldsworthy turned back, he offered Harry a sheaf of bank notes. “You’ll report to me here. Make sure no one sees you coming or going.”

It was a small victory. Harry kept his smile to himself and tucked the money in his pocket.

* * * *

With the spy club closed, Nate Wilde had found a room in the home of his friend and mentor Will Jones. For two weeks bells had rung in the grand house, but not for him. Every morning a tweenie laid his fire and a manservant brushed his coat. The butler said, “Very good, Mr. Wilde,” as he came and went. It was everything he wanted, but not the way he wanted it. He hardly knew himself in his borrowed dignities.

Each morning of the first week he’d read the papers over coffee he didn’t have to make and plates of eggs and bread he didn’t have to clear away. The papers were full of apprenticeships and bankruptcies and situations for clerks, but a desk was the death of a man. If a man sat behind a desk, the world went by beyond his reach. His hands grew soft and white, his shoulders hunched, his waistline grew, and his ambitions shrank. A desk was no way for a man to make his mark in the world.

In the second week, Nate tried going with Will to the meetings of the parliamentary committee drafting Peel’s act to make a London police force, but sitting in a room, listening to old men in wigs and whiskers argue about the difference between this word and that made him squirm. If he were a Member of Parliament, he’d drag the lot of them down to Bread Street to learn words they’d never heard before like clicks and dibs and lagging and what happened to a merchant’s goods when someone cried fat’s a running.

Today he’d left the parliamentary committee behind and headed out to confront London itself. Somewhere in the great sprawling city, a door would open for him. And when it did, he’d walk right in, and when he’d made his mark, he’d... But there was no use getting ahead of himself. Hours later his wanderings had led him nowhere but back to Bread Street where he’d been born.

The street had changed in seven years. Some of the old houses had been knocked down in the cleanup after the holding vats burst on the roof of Truman’s Brewery at the top of the street. The beer flood had killed six people and splintered plaster-and-lath buildings on the east side of the street.

Then Sir Xander Jones had come with his East London Gas Company and torn up the streets and laid the pipes and put up lamps. They glowed now in the gloom of a dark wet day. Maybe it was those lights, but Nate thought more of the buildings had doors than he remembered, and in some windows he saw the answering glow of real candles. In one window at Number Forty, curtains hung. Bread Street was putting on airs.

It still stank of beer and piss, fish and turned oil. At the foot of the street he turned up the black velvet collar of an old coat he’d picked up from Bowen, a used clothes dealer on Monmouth Street. The green coat, stained and frayed at the edges, with one remaining button, covered his finery sufficiently that he thought he could walk the length of the street without any of its residents deciding to take a cosh to his head and empty his pockets.

His pockets were empty, as a precaution. He’d worn his oldest boots. New boots would invite trouble. His gaze swept the street for idlers at the usual corners where a cosh man might lie in wait. Just before the open court where the street took a bend to the west, a woman sat hunched on a step under a ragged shawl with a babe in her lap and a pint pot between her hands. A word would pass from her to her man around the corner as Nate passed. The iron cosh would slide down the man’s sleeve into his hand, and the blow would descend before the woman stopped speaking.

Nate was an old hand at such lays. He could do the ambling shuffle that marked a man as a Bread Streeter, and snarl a greeting at the woman as savage as a punch. She lifted the pint pot and gave him a furtive glance.

Nate started walking, heading for the top of the street, where he could see the new vats at the brewery and the red brick corner of the school that had once belonged to Reverend Bredsell. He fingered the coins in his hand. He might get a bloater from the fish shop on the other side of the court for old times’ sake.

The woman with the babe in her lap took instant note of his movement. She set her pint pot down upon the curb with a clink.

“Watcher lookin’ fer, loovey?” she asked.

“A bloater’ll do me.”

“Yer a fine one, ain’tcha? Give a mite for the babe?” She extended a dirty open palm.

Nate ignored the woman’s hand, watching the corner beyond her. As he came abreast of her, he heard the shuffle of feet scurrying his way.

He tossed a coin in the air, setting it spinning toward the woman, and lunged forward. As a man rushed out of the shadows, cosh raised, Nate dropped to a crouch, one leg extended behind him. He swung his back leg at the charging man’s feet.

His attacker fell heavily, and Nate was up and on him, flipping the man onto his back and pounding the man’s cosh hand against the paving stones until the iron bar clattered against the stones, and Nate snatched it up and thrust it in his pocket.

He stared down into a thin white face pitted with pox scars in which a pale beard struggled to grow and the eyes bulged. The man’s chest heaved. He spat at Nate, and cried to the woman, “Do ’im, Biddy, ye useless female.”

Biddy picked up her pint pot, sloshing its contents, and held it away from her. “It’s a full pint, Tom. Ye never let me waste a pint.”

“Do ’im, or ye’ll feel my fist,” Tom snarled.

Biddy lifted the pint pot, only slightly hampered by the babe. Nate held up a coin to show her. “I’ll take that beer off ye, Biddy,” he told her. “Put it down easy.”

Biddy’s gaze shifted from Tom to Nate’s coin. The coin won. She lowered the pint pot to the cobbles. Nate tossed the coin into the middle of the street. Biddy scrambled after it and kept on scrambling into the court.

“Now, Tom,” said Nate. “Yer drink’s waiting for ye when we’re done.”

“I know you,” the fallen man said. “Yer that bleedin’ boy that brought down Bredsell.”