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us what exactly you were doing in that garbage heap, Miss
Smith,”
the brute said.
    “For your information, I was robbed. I was at the Bull’s Head Inn waiting for a coach…” She told them the whole story of how the beggar boy had snatched her money-purse.
    “What did this boy look like?” Nate asked, exchanging a dire look with his captain.
    “Brown eyes, thin, about nine years old.”
    “Eddie,” Blade muttered, shaking his head. “I’ll give him a wiggin‘ for this.”
    “You know that child?” she exclaimed.
    “Eddie the Knuckler,” Nate said with a low laugh. “He’s an orphan.”
    “Knuckler?”
    Blade merely humphed, looking quite perturbed by her story.
    “That’s a rookery term for a pickpocket,” Nate told her with a cheery wink.
    Just then, a male voice called down from somewhere above them in the darkness. “Who goes there?”
    Jacinda looked up, startled.
    “Stand down, Mikey; it’s us,” Nate called back, cupping his hands around his mouth.
    Spotting men with rifles posted on the roofs of the surrounding buildings, Jacinda glanced at Blade in alarm.
    “They’re just sentries,” he murmured.
    “Blade! Nate!” the man called excitedly from the roof. “Did you get O’Dell?”
    “No,” Blade yelled back in disgust.
    “Next time,” Nate assured him as they walked on, entering the heart of Blade’s rookery stronghold.
    Jacinda turned to him. “You really
are
at war, aren’t you?”
    He nodded grimly.
    “But why?”
    “Blade hates bullies of every stripe,” Nate said.
    “The Jackals have come onto my turf,” Blade murmured, keeping his implacable stare fixed down the dark street. “They’ve set fires, broken into shops, demanded protection money from the shopkeepers. They’ve beaten civilians in the streets and harmed some of our women. I have promised to drive them out of London.”
    “Promised whom?” she asked, rather humbled by the steely resolution carved into his profile.
    “Them.” As they turned the corner, he nodded toward a crowd of perhaps forty people milling about in the street in front of a gin shop.
    Some sort of rustic celebration appeared in progress, people standing around a blazing tar barrel, others cutting a reel to a rollicking tune on accordion accompanied by the shrill, fluid piping of a piccolo and the rousing beat of a bodhran. Bursts of laughter reached them over the music. She could smell a kettle of fish cooking. It was no doubt a rowdy, disreputable gathering, but it looked a hundred times gayer than Almack’s. As they went a little closer and the gang’s headquarters came more clearly into view, Jacinda paused, staring at it.
What a strange place
.
    By the gleam of colored fairy lights hung here and there, the outlaws’ hideaway seemed patched together with bits and scraps like a boys’ tree house. It leaned at an odd angle against the dark sky and rang with merriment and activity on this moonlit night. Under a smoking pepper-pot chimney and a crenellated roof, it was of brick, with three stories and a curious assortment of oddly placed windows: round, square, and rectangular. It had a mousetrap of elaborate gutters and winding rainspouts that emptied into big barrels here and there, while a small wooden windlass secured with ropes and pulleys hung down the front of the building. As she watched, a man on the roof used the contraption to hoist up a load of something from a plump woman in a mob cap on the ground.
    “Might as well face ‘em and get it over with,” Blade muttered. “Come on.”
    Falling under the mysterious enchantment of the place, Jacinda followed him.
    “It’s Blade!” someone yelled as they neared the festivities. “Blade! Nate!”
    Instantly, they were surrounded. People greeted Blade all around her, reaching out to touch him as though he were a good-luck talisman. They patted him on the back and eagerly shook his hand as he passed, as though he were their bold young king back from slaying the dragon; yet