The Thief Taker by C.S. Quinn Page B

doctors. Perhaps they were backwards enough to visit a witch.
    Beside him he felt Oliver tense suddenly.
    ‘There are two vigilantes at the checkpoint,’ he hissed. ‘And one is looking straight at you.’
    Charlie looked up. His gaze met with a notorious hired thug. And as their eyes locked he knew they were here for him.
    His heart sank.
    Jack Tanner was the most brutal and determined tracker in the city. In an instant the many hiding places usually available to him evaporated. Jack would know them all.
    There was only one place in the City too dangerous for the men to follow him. Crossing himself Charlie leapt to his feet and set off at a run for Blackfriars slum.

Chapter Fourteen
     
    The knock sounded, and Antoinette trooped obediently downstairs to meet Thomas. For five years he had paid for her modest room in a good part of the city. In return she was available when he wanted to indulge his strange sexual demands.
    She caught sight of her reflection in the glass near the door. The once beautiful face had aged rapidly on its daily diet of London living, but she still commanded enough of her youthful looks to be attractive.
    Antoinette was a London cliché. She had been a country girl, come to the city to find maid’s work and fallen for the wiles of one of the many London madams who lay in wait for the stage-coaches arriving from the provinces.
    Now she was getting older and having failed to snare an aristocrat as a protector had settled for Thomas – a man of adequate if not illustrious means.
    Her dress was new, in the style of the King’s court favourites. Thomas didn’t visit often, so she felt she owed him a different outfit for each occasion. The red material made a reasonable show of being silk. It fanned out in a style which she knew Thomas liked to lift up and over her head during ‘The Act’ as she’d come to term it.
    She opened the door.
    To her dismay he had come in his plague-doctor disguise. It was a habit he’d grown a taste for recently. And there was something else. He carried a squawking bird in a cage. A raven.
    She felt a shudder, wondering what he had planned.
    Pushing the distaste away from her face, she gave what she hoped was a seductive smile, keeping her lips together to disguise her mottled teeth.
    ‘Come up.’ She took up her dress with one hand and, holding the candle in the other, made up the stairs. Behind her she heard him follow. She held her skirt up a little higher, so he could see flashes of the naked skin underneath as she ascended.
    Antoinette was no fool. She knew that to keep a man prepared to pay her rent required work. Particularly with one obliging enough to make rare visits. Some of her friends in the city were kept by young men who visited several times a day. For double the money they made she had her time mostly to herself.
    Besides Thomas’s occasional brutality it was an acceptable arrangement. But she didn’t want it to last forever.
    Without his knowledge she had taken on extra work at a gambling club. It was strictly against the rules of their arrangement. But in his line of work Thomas would never mix with the aristocratic high-rollers at Adders. She felt confident she would find another protector at the club.
    Only a few more months of deceit and she would be free.
    ‘I have poured you a cup of your favourite wine,’ she said, leading him into her single bedchamber where candles had been lit.
    Thomas grunted in reply. He placed the cage with the raven onto a table. Antoinette swallowed. Clearly he was eager to get down to things.
    It was easy to forget, in the weeks between visits, what happened when they came around again. And recently Thomas had started to frighten her more and more.
    Antoinette made herself a sudden promise, that this would be the last time she submitted herself to the ordeal. She would take a new protector, even if he paid less and visited more.
    She paused to take a much-needed swig of wine and then moved to the four-poster