Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

of chemical devices this very day.”
    He slid a glance at her as he handed over a ha’penny for the pencil and put it in his pocket. “Don’t seem very smart to be tellin’ folk yer secrets.”
    “That was our agreement.”
    “Still. Folk’d pay big to know how to make them devices.”
    “Perhaps. Do you plan to sell that list to Billy Crumwell?”
    He stopped, his eyes wide, and his free hand slid under the hem of his ragged jacket, where he kept his knife on his belt. “I ent no turncoat,” he said in a low, dangerous tone.
    Claire hoped he could not see her pulse pounding in her throat, and busied herself dusting crumbs off her hands and face. “I did not say you were. It seemed an odd thing for you to say, that’s all.”
    “Tweren’t me I meant. You could sell that list easy.”
    “I have no desire to sell it.” She kept her voice admirably calm. “I would rather use it to better our circumstances. No, Willie, I’m afraid that if you have another sweet you will be sick. Perhaps you might look for something Rosie would enjoy.”
    “What’s the matter wiv our circumstances?” Jake demanded.
    “You must admit that rag-picking has its limits as a career,” she told him. “If you were to focus your talents on chemistry, you might go farther.”
    “How’m I to do that?”
    “I might be of some assistance.”
    “Yer gonna disappear as sudden as you came. I don’t know what yer playin’ at, lady, but you don’t belong wiv us.”
    Playing was the last word she would use to describe her situation. She swallowed the sharp retort on the tip of her tongue and said instead, “At the moment, our circumstances are remarkably similar. Rioters burned my house two days ago, Master Jake. It was in fleeing them that I came to your attention at the Aldgate station.”
    “What’d they do that for?”
    “They thought my father owed them money. Except that he is dead and unable to pay.” Jake snorted and Claire felt her cheeks cool with affront. “I find nothing amusing in that, sir.”
    “Oh, I do, lady. That’s ezackly how I came to be on the streets.”
    “Where is your mother, then?”
    “Dead.”
    “And you have no one?”
    “Just Snouts and Tigg and the others.”
    “But no family?”
    “Nope. You?”
    “My mother is in Cornwall. She may as well be at the ends of the earth.”
    “I’m goin’ t’the ends of the earth someday.”
    Unbidden, a smile tugged at her lips. “That’s an admirable ambition, Master Jake. Shall you explore the Amazon, do you think?”
    “Dunno. I’ll most likely be transported for thieving.”
    With a sigh, Claire turned her attention to the whereabouts of her younger charges. One thing at a time. He had not, after all, pulled the knife on her.
    Yet.

Chapter 22

    The moon was no more than a possibility above the rooftops and catwalks of the docks when Claire finished compounding the gaseous capsaicin devices. By the light of a single stubby candle, Jake had recorded the ingredients and the steps by which they went together in laborious capitals, which meant that Claire worked much more slowly than usual. If she had had her notebook to hand, she could have completed the task in a quarter of an hour, but she stood more to gain by encouraging Jake’s cooperation—not to mention the fact that here was an excellent opportunity for him to practice his letters and spelling.
    Snouts ranged from doorway to doorway, his eye on the cobbled street on one side, and the river on the other. “Come on,” he urged every five minutes. “They’ll be long away before we get there.”
    Claire was at least as impatient as he; she was only better at concealing it. “We are ready, Mr. McTavish.” She wrapped the vials carefully in what might once have been a tea towel before stowing them in her satchel. “Let’s be off.”
    Billy Crumwell and his gang, it turned out, were the lords of a squat in St. Giles Close, an address that sounded much more aristocratic than it was thanks to its proximity to the impoverished St. Giles Church. All the same, it possessed a stone foundation, sturdy walls, and even an empty space in the back that had once aspired to being a garden.
    “Does Billy Crumwell own this property?” Claire whispered to Snouts, crouching next to him in the shadows of the church’s graveyard.
    Snouts gave a snort, quickly muffled. “Don’t nobody own it but who c’n ’ang onto it. Billy knifed Spotted Dick Black to get it, after ’e’d been in ’is