With the Devil’s Welcome.






Chapter Six

Two nights later, as the last rays of the sun faded into darkness, the Bareknuckle Bastards picked through the dirty streets of the farthest reaches of Covent Garden, where the neighborhood known for taverns and theaters gave way to one known for crime and cruelty.

Covent Garden was a maze of narrow, labyrinthine streets, twisting and turning in upon themselves until an ignorant visitor was trapped in its spider’s web. A single wrong turn after leaving the theater could see a toff liberated of his purse and tossed into the gutter, or worse. The streets leading deep into the Garden’s rookery were not kind to visitors—especially proper gentlemen dressed in even more proper finery—but Devil and Whit weren’t proper and they weren’t gentlemen, and everyone there knew better than to cross the Bareknuckle Bastards, no matter what finery they wore.

What’s more, the brothers were revered in the neighborhood, having come up from the slums themselves, fighting and thieving and sleeping in filth with the best of them, and no one likes a rich man like a poor man with the same beginnings. It didn’t hurt that much of the Bastards’ business ran through this particular rookery—where strong men and smart women worked for them and good boys and clever girls kept watchful eye for anything out of sorts, reporting their findings for a fine gold crown.

A crown could feed a family for a month here, and the Bastards spent money in the muck like it was water, which made them—and their businesses—untouchable.

“Mr. Beast.” A little girl tugged on Whit’s trouser leg, using the name he used with all but his siblings. “It’s ’ere! When are we ’avin’ lemon ice ’gain?”

Whit stopped and crouched down, his voice rough from disuse and deep with the accent of their youth, which only ever came back here. “Listen ’ere, moppet. We don’ talk ’bout ice in the streets.”

The girl’s bright blue eyes went wide.

Whit ruffled her hair. “You keep our secrets, and you’ll get your lemon treats, don’t you worry.” A gap in the child’s smile showed that she’d lost a tooth recently. Whit directed her away. “Go find your mum. Tell ’er I’m comin’ for my wash after I finish at the warehouse.”

The girl was gone like a shot.

The brothers resumed their walk. “It’s good of you to give Mary your wash,” Devil said.

Whit grunted.

Theirs was one of the few rookeries in London that had fresh, communal water—because the Bareknuckle Bastards had made sure of it. They’d also made sure it had a surgeon and a priest, and a school where little ones could learn their letters before they had to take to the streets and find work. But the Bastards couldn’t give everything, and the poor who lived here were too proud to take it, anyway.

So the Bastards employed as many of them as they could—a collection of old and young, strong and smart, men and women from all over the world—Londoners and North Countrymen, Scots and Welsh, African, Indian, Spanish, American. If they made their way to Covent Garden and were able to work, the Bastards would provide it at one of their numerous businesses. Taverns and fight rings, butchers and pie shops, tanneries and dye shops and a half-dozen other jaunts, spread throughout the neighborhood.

If it wasn’t enough that Devil and Whit had come up in the muck of the place, the work they provided—for decent wages and under safe conditions—bought the loyalty of the rookery’s residents. That was something that other business owners had never understood about the slums, thinking they could hire in work while bellies in spitting distance starved. The warehouse on the far edge of the neighborhood now owned by the brothers had once been used to produce pitch, but had long been abandoned when the company that had built it discovered that the residents had no loyalty to them, and would steal anything that was left unguarded.

Not so when the business employed two hundred local men. Entering the building that now acted as the centralized warehouse for any number of the Bastards’ businesses, Devil nodded to a half-dozen men staggered throughout the dark interior, guarding crates of liquors and sweets, leathers and wool—if it was taxed by the Crown, the Bareknuckle Bastards sold it, and cheap.

And no one stole from them, for fear of the punishment promised by their name—one they’d been given decades earlier and stones lighter, when they’d fought with fists faster and stronger than they should have been to claim turf and show enemies no mercy.

Devil went to greet the strapping man who led the watch. “All right, John?”

“All right, sir.”

“Has the babe come?”

Bright white teeth flashed proudly against dark brown skin. “Last week. A boy. Strong as his da.”

The new father’s satisfied smile was sunlight in the dimly lit room, and Devil clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve no doubt about that. And your wife?”

“Healthy, thanks to God. Too good for me by half.”

Devil nodded and lowered his voice. “They all are, man. Better than the lot of us combined.”

He turned from the sound of John’s laughter to find Whit, now standing with Nik, the foreman of the warehouse, young—barely twenty—and with a head for organization that Devil had never met in another. Nik’s heavy coat, hat, and gloves hid most of her skin, and the dim light hid the rest, but she reached out a hand to greet Devil as he arrived.

“Where are we, Nik?” Devil asked.

The fair-haired Norwegian looked about and then waved them toward the far corner of the warehouse, where a guard reached down to open a door leading into the ground, revealing a great, black abyss below.

A thread of unease coursed through Devil, and he turned to his brother. “After you.”

Whit’s hand signal spoke more than words could, but he crouched low and dropped into the darkness without hesitation.

Devil went in next, reaching back up to accept an unlit lantern from Nik as she followed them in, looking up to the guard only to say, “Close it up.”

The guard did as he was instructed without hesitation, and Devil was certain that the blackness of the cavernous hole was rivaled only by that of death. He worked to keep his breath even. To not remember.

“Fuck.” Whit growled in the darkness. “Light.”

“You have it, Devil.” This, in Nik’s thick Scandinavian accent.

Christ. He’d forgotten he was holding it. He fumbled for the door of the lantern, the dark and his own unsettling emotions making it take longer than usual. But finally, he worked the flint and light came, blessed.

“Quickly, then.” Nik took the lantern from him and led the way. “We don’t want to make any more heat than necessary.”

The pitch-black holding area led to a long, narrow passageway. Devil followed Nik, and halfway down the corridor, the air began to grow crisp and cold. She turned and said, “Hats and coats, if you please.”

Devil closed his coat, buttoning it thoroughly as Whit did the same, pulling his hat low over his brow.

At the end of the corridor, Nik extracted a ring of iron keys and began to work on a long line of locks set against a heavy metal door. When they were all unlocked, she swung open the door and set to work on a second batch of locks—twelve in total. She turned back before opening the door. “We go in quickly. The longer we leave the door—”

Whit cut her off with a grunt.

“What my brother means to say,” Devil said, “is that we’ve been filling this hold for longer than you’ve been alive, Annika.” Her gaze narrowed in the lamplight at the use of her full name, but she opened the door. “Go on, then.”

Once inside, Nik slammed the door shut, and they were in darkness again, until she turned, lifting the light high to reveal the great, cavernous room, filled with blocks of ice.

“How much survived?”

“One hundred tons.”

Devil let out a low whistle. “We lost thirty-five percent?”

“It’s May,” Nik explained, pulling the wool scarf off the lower half of her face so she could be heard. “The ocean warms.”

“And the rest of the cargo?”

“All accounted for.” She extracted a bill of lading from her pocket. “Sixty-eight barrels brandy, forty-three casks American bourbon, twenty-four crates silk, twenty-four crates playing cards, sixteen cases dice. Also, a box of face powder and three crates of French wigs, which are not on the list and I’m going to ignore, other than to assume you want them delivered to the usual location.”

“Precisely,” Devil said. “No damage from the melt?”

“None. It was packed well on the other end.”

Whit grunted his approval.

“Thanks to you, Nik,” Devil said.

She did not hide her smile. “Norwegians like Norwegians.” She paused. “There is one thing.” Two sets of dark eyes found her face. “There was a watch on the docks.”

The brothers looked to each other. While no one would dare steal from the Bastards’ in the rookery, the brothers’ overland caravans had been compromised twice in the last two months, robbed at gunpoint once they’d left the safety of Covent Garden. It was part of the business, but Devil didn’t like the uptick in thievery. “What kind of watch?”

Nik tilted her head. “Can’t say for sure.”