The Devil to Pay Read Online Free PDF

Saturdays, and Beefsteakers were few, as seating at the table was limited. Death, insanity, and insolvency were the prospective members’ only hopes. There had been, regrettably, a few of each. Over its hundred-year history, the club had been moved from pillar to post, and was presently housed in a room at the Lyceum near Covent Garden.
    The Black Angel had had no trouble at all finding the club’s entrance. Now she waited deep in the shadows across the street as the nightlife of Covent Garden began to flood forth. The market gardeners and costermongers had long since found their beds, and the pavements were now crowded with pleasure seekers headed for the coffeehouses and theaters. A laughing couple dressed in worn brown coats passed by her hiding place, their steps light, their shoes scuffing softly on the pavement.
    Just then, a brewer’s dray came clattering up from the Strand, and for a moment, she could see nothing. Then the dray rattled on, and in the jovial crowd now spilling from the Lyceum, she saw him. She was certain. The man’s height and breadth made him unmistakable. His hair was dark, chestnut, perhaps, and he appeared to be dressed in solid black.
    After a few moments of repartee and laughter, he and two companions stepped from the throng and into a pool of gaslight. For an instant, her heart stopped, and she feared she’d lost her mind entirely. The Marquess of Devellyn towered over his friends, and beneath his sweeping greatcoat, his shoulders looked as wide, and almost as thick, as a beer keg.
    But it wasn’t that which made her heart lurch. It was his eyes. They were flat and cold, like gray slate. And horribly cynical, too, as if he knew more than he wished of the world and how it worked. For an instant, she felt an odd sort of kinship with him, then ruthlessly shut it away. But his laughter, still ringing down the street, seemed a sham to her now.
    No crested carriage waited below the Lyceum. Instead, the three men set off, oddly enough, in the direction of Fleet Street. It was then that she began to worry just where her little lark might take her. But after a few minutes of brisk walking, the three men turned into the Cheshire Cheese, a tavern favored by the literati. She slid into the shadows of the alley for half an hour, then followed, but the rabbit warren of rooms filled with tables and benches made it impossible to see without being seen. No, this would not do. She circled through the crowded taproom and back into the street again, escaping with nothing worse than a drunken leer and a grope on the arse.
    An hour later, they came out again, their pace less brisk but their steps still steady. All around them, a thick evening fog was rolling up off the Thames, muting the clopping hooves and creaking carriage wheels which passed along the street, until they sounded distant and disembodied. She could smell the river now, mixed with the strange effluence which drifted up from the east. In the gloom, the marquess’s long, dark coat swirled eerily around his boots. He moved with an easy grace as the trio circled around St. Paul’s and into Cheapside.
    There, they went down a set of steep stairs beneath a tobacconist’s and into a pernicious, unmarked hell called Gallard’s. An unfortunate choice, for it was very private, and she knew no way in. Two hours later, just as she was longing for the warmth of her bed, her quarry came out and staggered off toward the even more dangerous environs of the East End. Devellyn, she decided, was either very bold or very stupid. She tucked her cloak close, felt for her knife, and kept to the shadows.
    At Queen Street, the men stopped to light cheroots, then turned toward the river. They crossed the Southwark Bridge on foot, conversing in the bold, carrying tones of men who’d had far too much to drink. She hung back lest she be seen. But it little mattered. She’d already guessed where they were headed.
    The Anchor was an old riverside inn frequented by