Page 1 of An Artful Dodge
Chapter 1
The Society for the Suppression of Vice would have you believe crime doesn’t pay.
It does, of course. Thieving especially.
One glance into our second-story practice room would convince anyone. Heaps of stolen finery from pocket watches and jeweled earrings to kid gloves and lace handkerchiefs littered a long wooden table. Around it, fourteen of us rehearsed our dodges upon each other.
“I felt that, Kit,” Mary said, and my fingers stilled on the necklace I was trying to lift.
“You didn’t,” I said, pulling back.
“I did,” she insisted, touching her nape below the chignon of fair hair. “Your fingers, here.”
“Try again,” Amelia said, looking over from instructing Bea on nicking a pocket watch one-handed. “Use the side of your thumb.”
Her tone was sharpish, without its usual good humor.
“What’s wrong with Amelia?” Mary kept her face toward the window and her voice low. “You don’t think it’s because I’m going back out today, do you?”
I felt her anxiousness, pin-sharp inside my own ribs.
“I doubt it,” I replied. “She’s riled over something. But likely it’s Harriet and Elsie.”
They’d both nearly been caught by constables the previous week, which is why the air in the room was subdued, and our practice more intent than usual. While we thieves shoved our fears down far enough to step over them, we also took a warning from anyone else’s narrow escape. This was later in summer than we usually changed over to doving, but we always shifted to the theaters and music halls during election season, when city officials needed the support of the West End shopkeepers and pushed the police to reallocate uniformed constables to Mayfair and Marylebone. After the votes were tallied and the officials safely in their seats, the coppers would slink back to their usual boroughs, and we’d return to the shops.
“Why don’t you have a go,” I said to Mary, over her shoulder. “Nicking a necklace is harder than pockets.”
“It’s because your hands are cold,” Mary said.
Because this wholeroomis cold, I thought. The bustling taproom on the ground floor of the Elephant and Castle Inn was warm, but the practice room was two full stories up, and the heat didn’t rise through the thick old plank floors. A coal fire burned in the potbellied black corner stove, and the room held the heat of us thieves, but the unseasonable chill this August afternoon shoved in around the leaded windowpanes.
I rubbed my palms together and blew on my fingertips.
From behind one of the reproductions of wood-and-glass store cabinets, Josie called out, a sly laugh edging her voice. “Robbie downstairs’ll warm ’em up for you, Kit!”
“Robbie downstairs is an eejit,” I replied in the same singsong, curling and straightening my fingers. “It’s not fair,” I said to Mary, as I jostled her elbow lightly and undid the clasp, taking care to drop the loose end on top of her collar instead of on bare skin. “You know I’m coming.”
“I’m playing fair, I promise,” she protested. “See? I’m looking out the window, letting myself be distracted like a lady watching a show. There’s Sophie, going into the bakery ... and Mr. Ardle heading toward his shop.”
I showed her the necklace. “There.”
Her blue eyes widened in approval. “Oh, that was bloody good.”
I grinned. “Your turn now.” I clasped the necklace around my own neck and turned to face the room.
Our chief concern today was with necklaces, bracelets, pocket watches, handkerchiefs, earrings, reticules, brooches, rings, cuff links, cameos, and pins—all objects easily nicked from the theater crowd and passed to the fences of Vine Street. We were in pairs, each working with our usual jenny, taking turns at playing the mark, as Amelia walked among us, showing us new ways to distract, directing our hands, reshaping the positions of our fingers. Fanny was showing her new jenny how to tuck a bracelet inside her hat brim. Another new girl watched carefully as Charlotte demonstrated how to palm an earring and slip it into her hairnet. They say there’s no honor among our sort, but there’s a certain thickness to us thieves.
On the other side of the room, in front of a large printed wall map of London with Amelia’s pins in it, Josie swung a silver-headed walking stick she’d nicked the day before. “Look at me, like one of the music hall toffs, singing about how the ladies love my big stick.” She swung her hips back and forth, drawling the words long, and her jenny, Bea, burst out laughing.
The necklace slid along my neck. “Felt that,” I said.
“Argh,” Mary said. “Aremyfingers cold?”
“No. The chain moved.” I tapped my collarbone. “Here.”
“Ah, right.”
Here we are again, I thought, recalling the first week we practiced our tooling in this room, slipping our hands into each other’s pockets, when I was fresh to all of it and Mary only a few months along. The difference now was we knew each other, down to a darted side-eye toward a plainclothesman, a long breath to sketch a warning, a shilling-thin shoulder lift when the dodge was done. It takes time to earn that sort of knowledge. We’d been each other’s regular jennies for almost four years, and I counted myself lucky Amelia had paired us early on. I wouldn’t have done so well with any of the others. Not that they weren’t good thieves, just not the sort I’d ever truly trust, the sort who’d play every card she had to be sure I got away.
