A Thief Before Christmas by Jennifer McGowan Page A

not.” The rich, commanding voice was right at my side, and I felt the flush blaze up my cheekbone even as the young man who possessed it leaned past me to nudge a few of the larger bits of jewelry aside. “This is a better haul than I would have expected.”
    â€œMaster James, you should see what I found!” Tommy flung himself first at our troupe master’s knees, then grabbed his hand and gave it a hard tug. “I stole letters! And they . . .” He frowned, looking down at Agnes’s feet, but I was spared his discovery of the letters’ disappearance by James’s hearty laugh.
    â€œLeave off, Tommy-lad.” He chuckled easily, but his gaze was already finding mine. “We’ve a dealer in the dining hall, Meg, ready to buy some goods in exchange for Christmas cheer. But he’ll trade only with a woman. Says it’s safer.”
    Agnes snorted beside me. “Shows what ’e knows.”
    Still, I didn’t like the sound of this. “It’s too soon, too close,” I murmured, glancing toward the doorway as if I expected a brace of magistrates to bear down on us. Troupe Master James had done a fine job of guiding our loose collection of thieves and actors since my grandfather had passed in late summer, but he always seemed to go a step further than he needed to for safety. “How do you know he won’t turn us all in?”
    â€œI’ve worked with him before.” James also shifted his gaze to the door and so avoided my startled glance. “And the timing seems good to speed us on our way.”
    I nodded, but my attention had already returned to the pile of gold. We needed to be leaving this fine establishment soon; it was true enough. Eventually those lords and ladies who were now a little lighter in the purse would notice their misfortune, and when they did, we needed to be long gone from the Horse and Pony Inn, dispersed across the city and into the countryside, until we could regroup and move on to the next town. Pity, though. Leeds had been good to us. “What of Meredith and Matthias?”
    â€œThat’s the other reason we need to make the sale,” James said. “She’s nearly ready to have her babe, unless I miss my guess, and he’s useless with worry. There’s no telling when she’ll go, but I think it will be soon.” He scowled. “We can’t travel until she does.”
    â€œSo we need to get her a clean inn and food. Somewhere nicer than this place.” I scanned the pile in front of me. “Jewelry?”
    He shook his head. “Just the jewels themselves. Whatever we can knock out. The rest we’ll melt down when we have a chance. Always a market for pure gold.”
    Before us, Agnes was already sifting through the pile, her knife flashing in quick, efficient strokes, prying out the biggest stones from their settings in bracelets, rings, and necklaces. As she freed a gem, James would hold it up to the thin light streaming in through the window, make a calculation, and then hand the stone to me. From there, the pieces went into my bodice, waistband, and pouches, depending on their size and heft. With a dealer, you always started with a mid-grade stone, then moved up, then down, then up again, to keep the man engaged. “Will he buy the lot or is each piece subject to—”
    â€œQuiet.” James turned sharply to the doorway, his head tilted. I couldn’t hear as well as he could, but I knew what had caught him just the same. There was a sudden sense of wrongness to the building in which we stood, a change in the tenor of the crowd’s conversation below that made the fine hairs on my arms stand up.
    Magistrates had entered the main hall of the Horse and Pony Inn, even as, in the courtyard outside, the Golden Rose acting troupe thundered through the last remaining scenes of the play that had so distracted a score of cloth merchants and their woolen-headed