Page 11 of The Last Crimes of Peregrine Hind
A few hours later, Peregrine was eating lunch in his room and finishing his tallies when he heard another knock. It was Will again.
“Yes?” Peregrine asked as the thief stepped into his room.
“Alexander says he doesn’t like the beer we’ve served with his lunch and wants wine instead. Is that permissible?”
“Yes,” Peregrine said, his patience fraying a little. “That’s permissible.”
Not ten minutes later, Will was back. “Alexander says his wine is too sweet and he wants to know if we have a more mature vintage.”
Peregrine tossed his quill on the table in exasperation. “No. You may tell Lord Alexander that he’ll be drinking water from the trough if he has any more complaints about his beverages.”
Will looked at little surprised at Peregrine’s flare of temper—and Peregrine was surprised too. He never let his emotions creep toward the surface, even with his closest friends. Lyd, who still only knew the scantest details of why he wanted to kill Reginald Dartham, who had never seen him seethe in anger or weep in the dark—or even laugh.
It was safer that way, and better for all involved.
But with Alexander Dartham, Peregrine’s curated restraint unglued itself. His lapse in control last night, his irritation today . . .
The spoiled rake was taking Peregrine apart bit by bit. If only he’d stop being so here, so present, so impossible to ignore—but there was no ignoring Lord Alexander Dartham. There were those dark eyes and that full mouth, there was his unabashed vulnerability, the way he asked for things and tried for things.
There was his earnestness, equally unabashed, as if it had never occurred to him to lie, even about something as gravely important as escaping.
With a cautious nod, Will left to give Alexander his answer, and Peregrine scrubbed his hands over his face. He had to find more control when it came to Alexander Dartham. Otherwise, he’d be entirely undone by the time he received the ransom from the duke, and he didn’t know how he’d be able to do what he needed to do after?—
No. He wouldn’t think about that right now.
A hundred things could happen between now and then, and he needed to keep his focus on the duke instead.
Speaking of, he stood and left his cell in search of Lyd to see if there’d been any messages from Chagford. He found her in the sanctuary, her head bent over a note.
“News from Far Hope?” he asked, suddenly anxious about the answer. If it was news from Far Hope, if the duke was going to pay the ransom, then that meant Peregrine would have no more use for Alexander. It meant Alexander would become a liability rather than an asset and his death would become Peregrine’s best weapon for hurting the duke?—
His mind reared away from those thoughts like a shying horse, and he drew in a relieved breath when Lyd said, “Nothing from the duke yet. But our friend in Exeter sent this.” She waved the note, an avid glitter to her blue eyes. “The duchess is leaving for Far Hope. She hadn’t felt well enough to travel yesterday and that’s why she didn’t go with her husband or Sandy.”
“You want to intercept her,” Peregrine guessed.
“Yes,” Lyd said.
“To rob her?” Peregrine asked. There was no judgment in his tone, only curiosity. He was keeping a captive, after all, and planning that captive’s murder, so he hardly had a moral high ground here.
Nor did he want one.
Lyd’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know,” she admitted after a moment. “After everything she’s done to me, robbing doesn’t feel like enough.”
When he’d first met Lydia, she’d been pickpocketing in London, one in a thousand thieves struggling to survive. But when she’d made the mistake of pickpocketing him, she’d done it so adroitly and with so much fearlessness that Peregrine had been more impressed than annoyed. He’d offered her a job as a fellow knight of the road, and she’d accepted, with the caveat that any Dartham they came across would be hers.
He’d been astounded that someone else could hate that family as much as he, but after hearing Lyd’s story, he’d recognized a kindred spirit. A distant cousin of the duchess, she’d been shipped off to live with the duke and duchess after her parents had died of smallpox, and they’d attempted to marry her off at sixteen to a cruel man. When she’d refused, the duchess had locked Lyd in her room for weeks, keeping her a prisoner until Lyd managed to escape through a window. Lyd maintained that scraping out an existence as a thief—even as a woman alone, and in the rough crowds of London—had been infinitely preferable to marrying the person the duchess had chosen for her.
The duchess had been adamant about the match because the suitor in question would take Lyd without a dowry, which meant the dowry and the family property Lyd was supposed to bring to a future marriage would stay in the hands of the duke and duchess. That property included Lyd’s family home and her family land—the very place she’d grown up. A place she would never see again while it belonged to the Darthams.
“What she’s taken from you is something impossible to replace,” Peregrine said to Lyd now. “I understand why robbing her of some clothes or jewelry wouldn’t feel like enough.”
Lyd swore, looking out over their piles of fabric and silver goods. “Sometimes I want so much to hurt her,” she said after a minute. “But other times I don’t know what I’d do if I saw her again. If I’d have it in me to hurt her after all.”
“I understand,” Peregrine said. Lord Alexander Dartham was the still-living proof of that. “Do you know if she’s leaving today or tomorrow?”
Lyd shook her head.
“You may want to plan on watching the road for a day or two, then. Pack food and take Ned and the others. I’ll stay here with our prisoner.”
