Read (A Charm of Magpies 1)The Magpie Lord for Free Online Page A

not a hireling.”
    The eighth Earl Crane lifted an aristocratic brow. “In my case, the je ne sais quoi includes four years as a smuggler, two death sentences, and a decade as a Shanghai Joe, a dockfront trader. I hope you feel suitably elevated.”
    Stephen tried to confront all of this at once. “Two death sentences? Really? I mean, you look very well, considering.”
    Crane grinned at him. “One was in absentia. One wasn’t, and I spent three days in a condemned cell. I can’t recommend the experience.”
    “And—did you say a smuggler ?”
    “That was what the death sentences were for.”
    “What did you smuggle?” Stephen demanded, then caught himself. “Sorry, it’s none of my business.”
    “Not at all,” Crane said politely. “Silks and tea, mostly. Medicines, on occasion. And we ran the guns for an uprising against a particularly noxious tax farmer, but that was a favour to a friend, really.”
    “That’s very…” Stephen couldn’t think what it was. It occurred to him that if the man didn’t wear such staggeringly expensive suits, the tanned, mocking face and tattoos would make him look exactly like someone’s overheated fantasy of a smuggler in the exotic East. “Did your father know?”
    “No idea.” Crane didn’t sound concerned. “He put me on a boat to China when I was seventeen, expressing the hope I’d die out there, and that was the last I ever heard from him. We didn’t get on, you know.”
    “Yes,” said Stephen. “I heard.”
    Crane shrugged. “He always disliked me, and I gave him plenty to dislike. He sent me off with no post, no acquaintances, no Chinese and no money, and I would undoubtedly have been dead within a year without Merrick, but as it happened, nothing could have suited me so well as Shanghai. It was five thousand miles away from Hector. So to answer your question as far as possible, I lived under my own name in China, I didn’t do so with any subtlety, and while I never communicated with him again, someone else doubtless did. In all honesty, I stopped caring a very long time ago.”
    “I’m sorry,” Stephen said involuntarily.
    “What for?”
    That your father was a swine. That my father’s dead. That you’re a Vaudrey. He grabbed for something that didn’t sound like pity. “I made the assumption you were like him. Them. That was unfair.”
    “Understandable. A lot of people down in Lychdale make that assumption. Including, presumably, the jack’s maker.”
    “We’ll see about that.”
    “Indeed. And I remain of the opinion that if this maker did remove my brother from the world, I’d rather shake his hand than press charges.”
    “You might feel that,” Stephen said. “And if he had shot him, I might agree with you. But if it was the jack, your brother and father were tortured to death, slowly, over months. And that kind of cruelty tends to be…habit-forming.”
    Crane’s eyebrows shot up. “You think the maker does this sort of thing regularly?”
    Stephen chose his words carefully. “They did a very cruel thing very competently, which suggests that they may have done such things before, or that they may find it easy to do such things again. In any case, it is not acceptable to continue down this path unchecked.”
    “I see. Well, you’re the expert. I’ll leave it to your judgement.”
    Stephen gave a tired half smile. “Yes. People generally do.”
     
     
    It was a slow train and a hot day, and Day fell asleep well before they reached Lychdale. Merrick returned to find his master contemplating the unconscious shaman.
    He looked very young, sleep smoothing out the worry lines round his eyes. He also looked very small and very thin. He resembled a schoolboy, not a magician or a protector.
    “That bloke needs a few square meals,” Merrick observed. “And a new suit. And about a week in bed.”
    “I was thinking along those lines myself,” Crane said.
    “I bet you were.”
    “Shut up. I’ve no idea how he can be that