Something that had been clenched inside his gut finally relaxed. The derelict man was a Linden. A guardian, if he had to guess.
Or an Ironwood trying to lure us out.
No—the past month had made him suspicious, perhaps beyond reason. An Ironwood would have confronted them directly. While his father’s family suffered from a drought of subtlety, they were gifted with a rare love of lethality. Still, he felt for the knife he’d slid into the inside pocket of his jacket all the same.
“Stay here,” Nicholas said.
But of course Sophia followed him on stumbling, drunken feet. The man still didn’t look up as Nicholas and Sophia sat down in his table’s empty chairs.
“Those are taken,” the man grunted out. “Waiting fer company.”
“I believe it’s already arrived, sir,” Nicholas said. “We seem to have a mutual friend.”
“Do we now?” The man turned his pewter pint around in his hands. Turned it again. And again. And again. Until, finally, Sophia’s hand shot out and slammed down over it, beating Nicholas to it by a sliver of a second.
“Test my patience further tonight,” she bit out. “I dare you.”
The man recoiled at her crisp tone, blinking as he looked at her face—her eye patch—closely. “That a costume you’ve got, luv, or just…”
Nicholas cleared his throat, drawing the man off that dangerous path. “We were waiting for…someone else.”
The man’s skin looked as if it had been left beside a fire to dry out for several hours too long. It was a familiar texture to Nicholas, one that marked years of working by or on the sea. The man’s green eyes flickered across the room as he reached up to tug his hat off and his wig forward.
The man confirmed it as he said, “Saw some…let’s say I saw some faces I usually try to keep clear of. Scouring the beaches and town real close and the like. Gives a man some second thoughts about helping a lady out.”
“Can’t be too careful,” Nicholas agreed. “Where is this lady?”
The man ignored him, continuing in his tetchy way: “Said there’d only be one of you. You seem to fit.” His gaze shifted toward Sophia. “Don’t know about this one here.”
Sophia narrowed her eye.
“She’s an associate of mine,” Nicholas said, trying to move the conversation along. He could understand the necessity of secrecy, but each second that passed without searching for the astrolabe was a second too long. “Are you to take us to this lady, then?”
The man took a deep drink of his pint, coughing as he shook his head. With one more furtive glance around, his hand disappeared into his cloak. Nicholas’s own fingers jabbed inside his jacket again, curling around the hilt of his blade.
But instead of a pistol or knife, the man pulled out a folded sheet of parchment and set it on the table. Nicholas glanced down at the red wax seal, the sigil of the Linden family stamped into it, then back up at the man. Sophia snatched it up, turning it over and shaking the folded parchment as if expecting poison to trickle out.
“Our…flower,” the man said, emphasizing the word, “had other business to attend to. And now I’ve repaid her favor, and I’ll be off to see to my own—”
“Favor?” Sophia repeated, the ale making her even more brazen than usual. “Aren’t you supposed to be a guardian?”
The man pushed himself back from the table. “Used to be, before another family killed nearly the whole lot of them. Now I do as I please. Which, in this moment, is leaving.”
Nicholas stood at the moment the Linden guardian did, dogging him through the thick crowds until he was close enough to grab his arm. “What other business did she have? We’ve been waiting for her—”
The guardian wrenched his arm out of Nicholas’s grip, bumping into the back of another tavern patron. Ale sloshed over the edge of the pint and onto Nicholas’s shoes. “Do I look like the sort Rose Linden would tell her bleeding secrets to?”
Actually, given his rumpled state and the rather impressive scarring around his neck, which could only have come from surviving a hanging, he seemed like the exact sort.
“Did she give you any other information?” Nicholas pressed, annoyed he had to raise his voice to be heard over the squealing fiddle and the boisterous laughter of the men and women around him. “Is she still on the island?”
“Are we not speaking English, lad?” the guardian continued. “Do I need to be giving it to you in French, or—?”
A feminine shriek broke through the loud roll of deeper male voices. Nicholas spun, searching out the table he’d just left, only to find a serving girl frantically trying to pick up the pieces of several broken glasses that had smashed across their table. Another small figure in a navy coat helped mop up the liquid as it rushed over the edge onto the floor.
“You—you cow!” Sophia shouted, snatching a rag out of the flustered serving girl’s hand to mop down her front.
“An accident—so sorry—stumbled—” The poor girl could barely get a word out.
“Are you blind?” Sophia continued. “I’m the one with one eye!”
“Best of luck with that one,” he heard the guardian say, but by the time Nicholas turned back, the man was on the other side of the tavern, and a sea of bodies had filled the space between them. The wind caught the door and slammed it open as the guardian disappeared into the night. The Three Crowns proprietor was forced to abandon a tray of drinks to bolt it shut before the rain flooded in.