Five rounded the corner, and Daniel beamed. "You're a right prince."
"You owe me double," Five said, stripping out of the circus suit right there in the alley. "Turns out Lord Garfield is an ass… also an associate from Harrow. If word gets out that I was involved in any kind of courting rituals, there will be questions. I can't have questions, Daniel. I can't have inquiries made about my person. You know that."
"You did a good thing, mate," Daniel said, not bothering to correct Five's pronunciation of "arse" this time, his eyes misting as he stared into the tea shop where Lord Garfield had sat down with his 'friend's cousin', likely chatting about 'weather' and 'fashion' and other useless things. He didn't seem to have heard any of Five's tirade, or care about the risks Five had just taken. Harrow School for Boys had been a place for Duke's sons and local boys alike, and Five had bribed the Headmaster to keep quiet about his orphan status in the six months he'd attended, so he could blend in with the gentry and pretend to be 'one of the boys'. He got his completion papers as quickly as he could and then got out. Dealing with 'richer than thou's' like Garfield had stretched his patience too thin.
Speaking of the upper crust, Five wondered how Daniel would have known someone like Garfield in the first place, and what favors he'd garnered… or knowing Garfield… Maybe it was better that Five didn't know.
"Look at her," Daniel murmured, still staring across the street. Lady Burton looked pleased with her present company, smiling for the first time since Five had laid eyes on her. Her chaperone quietly sipped her tea and hid a small smile behind the cup and saucer. Daniel pulled another sack of coins from his jacket and handed them over to Five. "Utterly worth it. You're a decent chap, a regular out and outer, you know?"
"Don't let that get spread around the town either," Five said, taking the extra coins with no apology. "And don't be late tonight!" If the new job went well, it would repay Daniel tenfold in a night, and they'd both be fat as Christmas geese. Well, Daniel would. Five had a plan.
And apparently he also had some damage control to take care of. Meeting Garfield had given away Five's main place of residence, namely the city of Bath, something he had been careful to conceal. The problem with juggling too many secrets was that eventually one might pop up and trip him over by simply walking down the street.
He waved Daniel away, turned around, and almost ran headfirst into the mysterious boy he'd seen outside the coffeehouse an hour ago. They collided, almost knocking the sack out of his hand. The boy gasped, staring at him.
Nothing happened for a beat. Then the boy took off down the alley.
This time, Five ran after him.
"Wait!" he called, as he dodged a produce wagon and skipped along the gutters. The boy was fast on his feet, and Five had to push through vendor carts and an irate milkmaid to keep up.
Calling out again would only draw more attention to himself, so he lunged forward, propelling himself towards the boy, grabbing his arm and pulling them both onto a side street, away from the carriage traffic. In an instinctive move, Five pushed the boy up against the wall. The boy cried out, followed by a muffled squeak between pursed lips.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
The boy shook his head, the floppy cap falling over his eyes.
"Who sent you?" Five breathed into the boy's face. "What do you know?"
Wary eyes peered at him from under the cap. The face was softer up close, the cheekbones defined. The boy swallowed, and suddenly the dark complexion around his chin and neck appeared different somehow.
"There was a… gate," he said.
Anyone could have overheard Five talking to his client about the gate. But if this boy was eavesdropping, he had to find out why.
Five tore off the cap to get a better look at him, and any words that were forming in his throat dried up because an entire mop of hair came off with the cap, revealing an untidy pinned up pile of jet-black underneath. Long, dark strands escaped the messy bun. Suddenly the young, undefined face took on a much different appearance.
The person in front of him was decidedly un-boy-like without the cap, decidedly girl-like, perhaps the same age as Five himself appeared, dressed in boy's clothes, and also decidedly horrified at being discovered. She struggled even harder now, her slender brown fingers prying at Five's hand around her arm, while at the same time, reaching for the cap he held over her head.
"What game are you playing here?"
She blew a strand of loose hair out of her face and scowled up at him, fear being overrun with determination. "Let me go!"
"Not until you tell me who you are and why you've been following me."
Her eyes lost focus for a moment, and her grip softened around his fingers. Then she closed her eyes. Five braced himself for any kind of attack, mind control, ghosts, a tentacled monster appearing out of thin air. She sucked in a gasp of air and her eyes snapped open.
She fixed him with a glare. "You're not the only one who has secrets!"
Five dropped his hand away as if she had suddenly turned into hot coals. It didn't matter what she knew. What mattered was the fact that she knew anything at all about him, because he'd never seen this boy… this girl… this woman before, and that, in the interest of keeping himself alive, could get very dangerous very quickly. His mind raced with possible actions he could take, but before he could do anything, the girl had snatched her cap and fake hair and took off down the alley.
"Wait!" he called again. Five ran after her and was brought up short by a long parade of horse-drawns, followed by the impatient mail carriage ringing its self-important bell. Once the traffic cleared, Five started across the street and was brought up short once again, this time by indecision. The shop windows spread out before him like life-sized vignettes of activity. Lady Burton still enjoyed her company with Lord Garfield in the tea shop, the bored jeweler leaned against his workbench, the glove maker greeted an affluent customer whose hat tipped the little bell above the door into a jingle.
Where had she gone? Five's eyes darted to the bookseller's shop just in time to see the "CLOSED" sign flip over. He rushed over and tried the locked knob, then banged on the door out of spite. Heads turned at the disruption to their society-friendly morning, and Five sagged against the locked door.
He slunk back into the empty alley and waited for the people in the street to forget all about seeing him make a spectacle of himself. Which they would, in time. But he would have no opportunity for anonymous enterprises for the rest of the day. He'd have to wait until sundown to resume his business. The unfortunate run-in with the disappearing girl had swept all the productivity he had planned for the morning into the gutters.
Which meant that Five had all the time in the world to ponder why she had confronted him in the street about his secrets.