The Gentleman Thief Read online

  THE GENTLEMAN THIEF

  by Kate Gragg

  © 2020 Distant Shore Publishing. All rights reserved. No portion of this book should be distributed or replicated in any form without the express permission of the publisher. This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales are entirely coincidental.

  Artwork by Katie Barrett

  Map by Ash Turner

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter One

  Here’s the only piece of advice I have about being eaten. Try, and I cannot stress this enough, to go in feet first. Sure, you’ll almost certainly lose your shoes, but you’ll have the advantage of keeping your hands free to grab onto the teeth or, in a pinch, the tongue, to keep yourself from getting swallowed further.

  Cave trolls don’t have teeth. I was in a pinch. I hadn’t even managed to follow my own advice, despite having the rare luck of getting advance warning that I would be on the menu today.

  The warning came like this:

  “I think I’m going to feed you to this troll, Joe,” Alphonse said.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t, Alphonse,” I said. I always try to be polite.

  “I acknowledge your feelings on this matter and register your dissent,” said Alphonse, who had been reading a lot of management books lately, “but nevertheless this is the course of action I feel I must undertake. You understand, right?”

  “Understanding is not agr— AGH!” I said. That was when the troll bit me, rolling me along his toothless gums like a cat caught between the oxcarts on a cobblestone street.

  Alphonse stepped a little closer to the troll, whose name was Clem, and explained to Clem that he should chew me slowly to make it hurt as much as possible. None of us have ever been entirely sure if Clem understands human speech, but any time Alphonse tells Clem to eat somebody he does it, and every time Alphonse told Clem not to eat somebody he almost always listened.

  “Oh, I hope I haven’t missed his spine breaking,” I heard Tosca say in her brandy-soaked drawl.

  Tosca was Alphonse’s right hand, his caser of joints, his fixer of races, his sharker of loans. Tosca didn’t like me. Unfortunately, as I was busy wrestling the troll’s tongue, I didn’t have a hand free to let her know the feeling was mutual.

  “Oh, hardly, we’re just getting started,” said Alphonse. I could tell by the splashing that he was settled back down into his favorite corner of the hot spring, the one that put his back to the wall and let him have a view of both entrances.

  You don’t often see Alphonse on dry land, what with his arthritic knees. I had found him in that very spot just this morning, back when I still thought I was having a lucky day.

  After poking around the flophouse where the crew mostly lived and the crooked roulette saloon Alphonse used as a counting-house, I got word that, as purses were fat and no jobs were on for the day, the Grand Street Larcenists were most likely to be found at their favorite off-duty haunt, the Penny Mines. Built atop a cave system carved out by a natural hot spring, the site had been a bathhouse since the days of marble columns and sculptures of ladies who were short on arms and even shorter on clothing. An earthquake having rearranged some plumbing way back when, anything you tossed into a city fountain had a funny way of popping up in the waters down there, which is how the place got its name. It was a great place for a hot soak and a stiff drink, if you could pay.

  I couldn’t. I was what you call a sootjack, or a coalcrow. That is to say, a chimneysweep with criminal ambitions. Any money I brought in legitimately went right back out again. I had to scrub all day and night just to cover the expenses they like to pile on the working stiffs of Cheapside, like my sweeper’s license, and rent on my brushes, and if anything was left over, a bite to eat and a place to sleep. I’d been doing it too long, grown too big for crooked little chimneys of the easy residential jobs, the steady money and uncomplaining clients.

  Sweepers who openly steal from their clients don’t get to keep those clients, so I’d ventured into a sideline many sootjacks do. I dealt information. The comings and goings of moneyed men, who just added a new treasure to their art collection, whose wife just ordered a set of fine gold tableware, who picked a fight with his bank and is storing his company’s payroll in the top left drawer of the desk in his study, right under the window that doesn’t latch properly.

  All this to say, they knew me here.

  “Pheeeyeew, Joe, what have they got you scrubbing now?” said Errol, the counter clerk. He sold admission, rented towels, and was the man to see if you ever wanted help arranging company for your bath. Pay a little extra and they might even scrub your back for you.

  “This is very rarefied filth, pal,” I said, shaking my tunic and letting loose a cloud of shimmering purple dust that made us both sneeze. Only Errol sneezed just the once, while I kept going, sneezing until my lungs were empty.

  “You all right there, Joe?” he said.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. You know me. Healthy as a horsemeat sandwich,” I wheezed.

  “You know I never hear of a fellow who goes off to work in the alchemy district and doesn’t come down with something unnatural within the year,” Errol said, handing me a towel. I buried my face in it, smothering a deep, racking cough that covered the towel in multicolored spots. I tried to fold the towel in on itself to hide this, but the spots turned into multicolored beetles that fled in every direction.

  Errol looked at me flatly, his point made.

  “You heard of beetle flu?” I asked, thumping my chest. I cleared my throat and moved swiftly on. “Any chance you can put one on my tab today? I want to see if the old man’s in.”

  “On the house, mate,” he said. “Just be sure they change the water after you, yeah?”

  That was Errol’s little joke. They never changed the water.

  I stepped into one of the changing rooms, its slick tile walls decorated with lurid mosaics illustrating the kinds of services that used to be on offer here, presumably when it was much more expensive. Massages, boxing training, scraping the skin with sharpened oyster shells, whipping you with bundled reeds. None of it looked as relaxing as a good soak.

  I emptied my pockets and stashed their meager contents in one of the splintery cabinets lining the walls for exactly that purpose, then peeled off my clothing with relish. I wrapped my spotty towel around my waist, taking care not to let any strange residue touch my skin. I’d been polishing the inside of a big smelting furnace yesterday, in a workshop that made enchanted alloys of questionable legality. Whatever they were putting in there stained my fingernails green and settled in my lungs in a way I couldn’t manage to clear, no matter how hard I coughed.

  But that, as my dear dad used to say, is a problem for tomorrow’s me, and I haven’t even met that guy.

  I walked over to the laundry counter and deposited my sooty peelings into a basket. As soon as I rang the rusty bell, an ancient laundry steward appeared from somewhere down the winding back caverns. It was his lot in life to wash and fold the clientele’s clothes as they bathed, the one remaining amenity the bathhouse provided aside from h
ot water and the diverting pastime of fishing lost pennies out of the soaking tubs. You rarely ever found a larger coin in there. My theory was that management caught them all farther upstream but let the pennies through as a marketing gimmick.

  The laundry steward wheezed at me inquisitively.

  “Boil it all,” I told him.

  “Even the towel?” he said.

  “Especially that.”

  A stray beetle scuttled out of the basket and disappeared into some dark corner. We both ignored it.

  A hot soak, a cold shower, and a warm, dry, and most importantly spotless towel had me feeling quite a bit more like myself. The scrub-down had restored my skin to an approximation of its natural color, and I managed to get enough soot out of my hair for it to be recognizable as hair and not some kind of unfortunate fungal growth. I enjoyed getting civilized now and again.

  I put a spring in my step and legged it through the stone carved hallways down to the smallest, farthest, oldest room, the one with a wild hot spring bubbling straight out of the bare stone floor. The sides were worn smooth by centuries of bathers, but the near-boiling water kept things pretty clean. It was lately the fashion to crush up sprigs of rosemary and thyme and add them to the water, so things were smelling a bit soupy at the moment.

  I nodded to Clem, who was dozing with his rocky bulk blocking the entrance of the unrenovated side tunnel we all figured he lived in (nobody had ever been brave enough to venture in there and check) and dropped a crisp sheaf of paper next to Alphonse.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” Alphonse said, sinking deeper into the water and taking a long pull of his cigar.

  Lisette, the crew’s second-story specialist, took a break from scraping the greasepaint off her skin with a dull knife and waded over to the dry patch of rock where I’d laid down my prize. Second story jobbers worked under cover of darkness, so the usual uniform was something dark and cut close to the body, with any exposed skin painted black. Very effective camouflage, but hell to wash off afterwards.

  She held my papers up to the smoky oil lamp hanging from the ceiling and squinted at them.

  “Did you pinch somebody’s mail?” Lisette asked.

  “No,” I said, trying to suppress my irritation. “It’s clearly my mail. My name is on it.”

  “Oh,” Lisette shrugged. “I can’t read. Gunth?”

  Gunther popped out of the water right under Lisette’s outstretched arm, nearly knocking the papers out of her hand and making my stomach do flips. I grabbed them from her and smoothed them out on a rock, trying to scrape off some of the black fingerprints.

  “What’s the kid here on about?” Gunther said, chewing on a chicken leg he, apparently, had there under the water with him. I had never really been clear on what Gunther contributed to the team.

  “He’s about to ask Alphonse for money,” Tosca said from her perch on the rock under the spray of water falling from the ceiling. It was less of a waterfall, more of a pipe leak, but the water pressure was good on sore muscles.

  “No, I’m here to give, not to take,” I said, and waited for the laughter to die down.

  The hilarity brought Alphonse out of his stupor enough to heave himself out of the water and pad over to me, his wet feet slapping on the rough stone floor.

  “Joe, how many years have you been sniffing around my crew?” Alphonse said.

  I shrugged.

  “More than a few,” Gunther intoned. Not being up to the intellectual strain of actual humor, Gunther instead liked to call out rhymes whenever he thought of one. Sometimes the only thing that will shut him up is an orange.

  “Since he was a little bitty pipsqueak,” Alphonse agreed. “Now he’s what, the world’s largest chimneysweep? You’re the only sootjack I ever seen that’s a full-grown man.”

  They all laughed again.

  “I like to think of it as staying power,” I said.

  “What do you got, Joe? Besides debts and a troublesome cough and a ring of soot around your neck that don’t wash off, what do you got for me?” Alphonse said, punctuating it with a jab of his cigar.

  “What I have,” I said, unfolding my sheaf of paper and holding it up to the light, “is an engraved invitation to the Duke’s palace.”

  “Starting straight at the top, eh Joe?” Alphonse laughed.

  “Why waste time?”

  “Most jobbers like to try their hand robbing someone who don’t have armies at their disposal to express their displeasure with. Why not knock over a few houses in Cheapside, see if that impresses me?”

  “Are you in the market for pewter candlesticks and secondhand wedding china? I don’t like to waste my time and I won’t waste yours.”

  “He’s too good to put in his time as a window-smasher, he means” sneered Tosca.

  “Yes,” I said simply, “I am.”

  “All right, fancy lad, show us what you’ve got then,” Alphonse said, lighting another cigar and sliding down until his jowls touched the steaming water. This was his listening pose.

  I laid it all out for him, thrilled to finally reveal the plan I’d been working on for weeks. The Duke’s daughter was getting married at long last, and his whole staff was busy preparing for the wedding. Too busy to clean the chimneys, which is why he was hiring outside help: me. Don’t ask how I arranged this. It took a lot of eavesdropping in coachmen’s taverns, some well-placed bribes, and tracking down the long-lost mother of a much better chimneysweep to invite him for a tearful reunion in some distant mud-farming village.

  “So what?” said Gunther. “What’s the Duke got up in his palace that we can’t lift offa any swell here in town?”

  “It’s his daughter’s wedding,” I said. I couldn’t believe this wasn’t obvious, even to Gunther.

  “Congratulations to the happy couple. And again, so?”

  “So there’s a dowry,” said Lisette with dawning realization.

  “The biggest dowry in a generation,” I said, “in cold hard cash, just sitting there in a palace full of people much too busy to worry about where the chimneysweep went.”

  “You think you can do this job?” Alphonse said. I had him.

  “I know I can, boss.”

  “He’s not your boss,” Tosca sniped.

  “Maybe not. This job goes well, we’ll see,” Alphonse said. He turned to Tosca. “For now, you’re his boss.”

  Even the black look Tosca shot me couldn’t bring me down. I had my shot. I was in. If all went well, these would be the last chimneys I would ever sweep. Joe Thorne: Gentleman Thief. I could even print up business cards.

  Can you believe I even gave Clem a friendly pat on his boulder of a nose when I left? That’s loyalty for you.

  Chapter Two

  The Duke’s palace hovered over the western edge of the city, sitting on the highest hill with a series of gardens cascading down to the depths we mortals tread upon. The main building dated back to an era when towers were the fashionable thing, so it was positively bristling with them. Tall skinny ones with big balconies for making speeches from, short fat martial ones with no-nonsense crenellations along the roof and little slit windows for killing men without looking at them, and a few whimsical crooked ones that can’t have been useful for much more than decoration.

  It also had, I had learned during my sales campaign, no less than thirty-nine chimneys and a staff of hundreds to clean them, all of whom had now been diverted to erecting big tents and arranging flowers and polishing ceremonial trumpets and baking a massive cake that I had been instructed, upon pain of death, to not even think about tasting.

  My crew came in through the kitchens, carting our brushes and rags and pails in a wagon that I hoped would be big enough to hide all the dowry when we found it. Tosca and Gunther were there with me as assistant chimneysweeps, but Lisette had flatly refused once I brought up how everyone would have to rub some soot on their faces to look professional.

  “Absolutely not. I just spent an hour cleaning myself up and I’m not taking
another bath for a week,” she said.

  Alphonse grumbled a bit about that, but it was all for the best, since an all-adult sweeping crew would look suspicious anyway. We didn’t plan on cleaning any more chimneys than absolutely necessary, but for appearance’s sake I had recruited Dorinda, an urchin of my acquaintance who could slip through spots even a cat couldn’t get through.

  “Under no circumstances will you speak to any member of the household,” the head scullery maid intoned. “Under no circumstances will you make eye contact with any member of the household or draw attention to your presence in any way.”

  I elbowed Dorinda to make sure she was listening. She’d had her head on a swivel ever since we crossed through the palace gates and was watching the hustle and bustle of the kitchen in open-mouthed awe. I worried how she’d react once we got to the residential parts of the house, where there were sure to be any number of gold-trimmed gewgaws to tempt her. We couldn’t risk the big job by getting caught palming a jewel-encrusted inkwell or pilfering from a carelessly open coin purse, and Dorinda was the only young sweeper I thought had half a chance of controlling herself.

  After a final “Or else!” from the scullery maid, we divided up our brushes and split up to search the house. Thanks to an informative conversation with a very, very drunk plumber I met in a Cheapside tavern with rotting floorboards and a lunch menu that proudly advertised rat meat sandwiches (troubling, since the rule of thumb in Cheapside is that everything is worse than advertised, so when you order pigeon you get rat, meaning if you order rat you get…?), I happened to know that the Duke’s palace had no dungeons nor any basements of any kind, the foundation being built upon “the hardest, densest, cussedest bedrock granite I ever broke a chisel on,” per the plumber.

  I had Dorinda tackling the bedrooms where the fireplaces were smaller, but I doubted we’d find the dowry chest up there. Gold is heavy, and that’s a lot of stairs. I also doubted we’d find it in the service wing, where Gunther had been dispatched, because the Duke was a rich man and rich men don’t trust their servants. I was about to give him a good reason not to, anyway. No, I figured that a pile of gold that big was going to be somewhere the Duke could keep an eye on it personally, somewhere on display. Every single thing about this palace was about showing off, from the vaulted ceilings painted with leering cherubs to the vast windows looking out over the city, the better for looking down on the little people from.