Lost and Gone Forever by Alex Grecian Read Free Book Online Page A

four games to pay for a room in one of the houses across the bridge. When he lost, or when he couldn’t get anyone to play against him, he slept in nearby alleyways or on rooftops.
    But whether he was in a room or on a roof, he got little sleep. The rooftops were safer, but he tended to move a lot while dreaming and sometimes came perilously close to rolling off the edges of buildings. It was better when there was a skylight. The boxy frame of a skylight gave him something to anchor himself against. And it gave him a thrill to peek down inside businesses and warehouses. He often wondered about the businessmen who met in top-floor offices, wondered at how their lives had been arranged for them so that they never had to sleep out in the cold. He imagined they had all grown up with parents and families and opportunities that Ambrose would never know.
    He had been chased away from the roof of the East India Trading Company and so found himself in the alley behind Plumm’s. Two washerwomen passed Ambrose without seeing him in the shadows and entered the department store through a back door. Ambrose waited a few minutes, then tried turning the knob, but the door had been locked behind the women. Too bad. Finding an out-of-the-way corner in a storage room would have been ideal. Instead, he found an access ladder that was semi-concealed in a niche at the back of the building and climbed up. It was a new building, without the customary coat of grimy black soot that covered the bricks of more established stores in the neighborhood. Ambrose was able to hug close to the wall, out of sight of the alley below.
    He pulled himself over the edge of the roof and stepped out, testing the boards and shingles beneath him before putting his wholeweight on them. From his new vantage point above the fog he could see far in every direction, all the way past Drapers’ Gardens to the Thames in the south. He took a deep breath of the cool, clean air and smiled up at the stars. He tiptoed to the enormous domed skylight and peered down into a room below. It didn’t occur to him that he might be violating anyone’s privacy. Finding things was a big part of his job.
    In the room, oblivious to the boy on the roof, eight men sat around a scarred table and talked business. A ninth man, a large fellow wearing white gloves and tails, circulated a box of cigars, and each of the other men took a smoke. The man with the gloves punctured the tips of their cigars and made another circuit of the table, lighting them. The businessmen sent tendrils of smoke upward toward Ambrose, but their gazes did not follow the smoke. They talked together about the day’s business, about personnel and shelf space and displays. The man with the gloves took the box of cigars away and set it on a side table that already held four other boxes of cigars and cigarettes and pipe tobacco. There were larger boxes and crates stacked all round the room, marked with symbols that Ambrose could barely make out: alcohol, guns, ammunition, lamp oil, all the most valuable or dangerous goods that the store had to offer, kept on the top floor where they couldn’t be easily pilfered.
    If he could only find a way into that room, he could take away big handfuls of tobacco, boxes of it, all of it new, none of it found on the street and dried out and reused. It would cost Ambrose nothing, and it would be a boon to his employer.
    Reasonable Tobacco, indeed.
    He watched as the men smoked and talked for the better part of an hour, and his mind turned over ways to lower himself into theroom and get back out. It seemed impossible. Perhaps it would be better to follow the women through the back of the store one night and hide until the place was empty. But he didn’t think he could do that. The alley was too narrow for him to go unnoticed. Perhaps he could pay the women to look the other way or leave the door unlocked.
    His musings were interrupted when one of the men pushed back his chair, stubbed out his